The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- BlogTalkRadio Will Have A Huge Guest This Week: President Obama
- Breaking: MySpace Close To Acquiring iLike For $20 Million
- Zendesk Raises $6 Million In B Round, Benchmark’s Peter Fenton Joins Board
- Samsung Opens Up Their Cross-Platform Widget Interface To Developers
- First Pictures And Specs: Dell Unveils Its China-Only Android Phone “Mini 3i”
- CBS, Amazon Already Sniffing Around GDGT
- How To Test The Limits Of Your Privacy On SpinVox
- MySpace Gets More Pearl Jam Love: Exclusive Short Documentary Debut
- Wakoopa’s State Of The Apps Report: Don’t Hassle A Geek After 4pm
- Yahoo Veterans Launch Rocket Fuel, A “Hybrid” Ad Network
- Y Combinator Starts Seeding Ideas To Startups
- Firefox 3.5 Not Playing Nicely With Twitter
- The Media Bundle Is Dead, Long Live The News Aggregators
| BlogTalkRadio Will Have A Huge Guest This Week: President Obama Posted: 17 Aug 2009 08:30 AM PDT
President Obama will be making an appearance on a special program called “40 Minutes For Health Reform” which will stream live exclusively on BlogTalkRadio. Specifically, the President’s part will be the last 10 minutes of the show after he listens in on the first 30 minutes during which there will be a roundtable discussion about the topic with the leaders of the non-profit group, Faithful America. Faithful America are the ones that came up with the idea of doing a program on BlogTalkRadio, as they were looking for a platform to have moderated dialogue in a social media environment. The White House was open to the idea as they look to garner support for their health agenda. It’s a subject which has gathered quite a bit of controversy in the past few days, as there is talk that the administration may have to back away from some of its original plan. For many of its shows, BlogTalkRadio utilizes social media outreach via the normal channels: Twitter, Facebook, etc. But this program should spread faster than the others given that the President will be on it talking about something which is now somewhat controversial. Still, the administration hasn’t shied away from using these new forms of communication to get messages out even though things aren’t quite as controlled as they might be with the standard outlets. "I've been impressed by how President Obama has adopted innovative social-media technology during his campaign and into his administration," says Alan Levy, CEO of BlogTalkRadio. "We're honored that he has selected BlogTalkRadio as his newest requisite platform for communicating directly with the American people." The show will air live on Wednesday at 5 PM ET (2 PM PT) on both BlogTalkRadio’s program page found here, and on the Faith For Health site. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Breaking: MySpace Close To Acquiring iLike For $20 Million Posted: 17 Aug 2009 07:10 AM PDT
iLike, which launched in late 2006, is a social music recommendation service that now has more than 50 million registered users. It tracks what you listen to and like and gives you recommendations on new music based on that data as well as what your friends are listening to. It is the top music application on Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 and just about every other social network other than MySpace, which has MySpace Music. iLike also hosts band pages which are second in popularity only to MySpace Music. By acquiring iLike, MySpace solidifies their already leading position as the most popular online identity for bands. Last week iLike also launched their own music download store. Details are still flying in, but at first blush the deal is particularly interesting for two reasons. First, simply because iLike is so deeply integrated into the Facebook experience. Nearly 10 million Facebook users use the iLike application every month. And iLike has also been a key part of Facebook’s ongoing struggles with what-to-do-about-music. MySpace is now going to own this.
Second, it’s MySpace, not the MySpace Music joint venture with the music labels, that is acquiring iLike. We’ll have more to say on this shortly. We’re hearing that a key driver of the deal is the iLike team, particularly founders Ali Partovi, Hadi Partovi and Nat Brown, and the underlying technology. Competitor Last.fm was acquired by CBS in 2007 for $280 million. June 2009 Comscore stats show Last.fm with 12.9 million monthly unique visitors. iLike had just 3 million monthly unique visitors, but that doesn’t take into account the massive usage of the service on social networks. The company has raised a total of $16.5 million from the founders, Scott Banister, Bob Pittman, Vinod Khosla and Ticketmaster to date. But their last round of funding was in 2006, where Ticketmaster put the bulk of the capital in via a third round of financing that valued the company at a whopping $53.2 million. In Q4 2008 Ticketmaster wrote down a number of their venture investments, including a $5.8 million charge for iLike. Internally, they valued that $13.3 million investment at just $7.5 million. Last month we reported that iLike was considering a new round of financing that would cash TicketMaster out of the company. Neither MySpace nor iLike would comment on this story. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Zendesk Raises $6 Million In B Round, Benchmark’s Peter Fenton Joins Board Posted: 17 Aug 2009 07:01 AM PDT
Benchmark Capital is investing in Danish startup Zendesk, and led a $6 million B round of funding. Benchmark’s rock star partner Peter Fenton is joining the board. Zendesk just raised money in May in an A round from Charles River Partners, which also participated in this latest funding. The company offers Web-based help desk services for companies to offer support to their customers. It is an online ticketing system for customer support, which is free for under 50 customers but then ramps up in price depending on how many support agents a company needs. Corporate customers include Rackspace, Condé Nast, Twitter, MSNBC and Scribd. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Samsung Opens Up Their Cross-Platform Widget Interface To Developers Posted: 17 Aug 2009 04:00 AM PDT  We'll probably have some more details on this later today, but we're able to spill some of it now seeing as much of it just went live on Samsung's own site. If you haven't been keeping up with all the latest in Samsung news, here's what you need to know: Samsung's got a widget interface called TouchWiz, which they've been rolling out across their touchscreen phones since around June of last year. You've got a drawer containing some widgets, and four flickable pages to toss these widgets onto. So far, they've got it up and running on Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Samsung's own proprietary OS. TouchWiz looks and behaves more or less identically on all of these platforms, providing some degree of uniform user experience across vastly different interfaces. We haven't been huge fans of TouchWiz thus far, largely because of its lack of expandability. Each TouchWiz-enabled device came with 10-15 widgets, and that was that. If you wanted to download more, you were out of luck. If you wanted to make your own, that was just too bad. That's all about to change.
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| First Pictures And Specs: Dell Unveils Its China-Only Android Phone “Mini 3i” Posted: 17 Aug 2009 03:30 AM PDT  We first broke the news about Dell releasing a smartphone exclusively for the Chinese market eight days ago. Some pieces of information on the so-called Mini 3i leaked a few days after, and today the Android device finally saw the light of day during a China Mobile event in Beijing (China Mobile is the world's biggest phone carrier and distributes the phone in that country).
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| CBS, Amazon Already Sniffing Around GDGT Posted: 17 Aug 2009 02:29 AM PDT
One of our reliable sources told us today that they had reason to believe both CBS/CNET and Amazon were considering acquiring the company. After some digging, we’ve confirmed that CBS has considered investing in GDGT and that their subsidiary CNET has ongoing partnership discussions, but isn’t considering an acquisition right now. Amazon, though, is more interesting. They’ve been doing quiet background due diligence on GDGT’s founders and developers, we’ve heard, which is an indication that they may be interested in buying. Amazon has experimented with pure content sites the last few years, launching a bunch of blogs and even buying UK-based DPReview, a camera review blog, in 2007. Content, particularly reviews, are great for SEO and cross promotion. And to Amazon’s credit, they haven’t defiled DPReview much at all. …and GDGT is certainly off to an amazing start. They had a massive 4.7 million pageview traffic day back in June, before they launched the main site. Compete shows a nice spike in U.S. visitors, without the usual post launch sag (yet). GDGT was founded by former Engadget editors-in-chief Peter Rojas and Ryan Block. Last summer we broke the news about the new venture. The company has raised around half a million dollars in an angel round led by True Ventures and Betaworks, plus a number of angel investors. GDGT declined to comment on this story. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| How To Test The Limits Of Your Privacy On SpinVox Posted: 17 Aug 2009 02:26 AM PDT
But that’s not really the problem. After all, Google knows a lot more about me than that and I’m sure my ISP and the government do too. My concern is that I believe the majority of my messages were listened to by a person I don’t know in another country. That’s the point at which SpinVox may be falling foul of UK and European data regulations, and it’s the weak link in the privacy chain. So it’s time to find out if SpinVox is being honest enough with its customers about the proportion of messages that are read by humans - and also about how much of those messages are seen by call centre staff. Here’s how: Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| MySpace Gets More Pearl Jam Love: Exclusive Short Documentary Debut Posted: 17 Aug 2009 02:16 AM PDT
How do I know? Because a few more songs have just been unveiled by way of the new short documentary about the making of Backspacer, that debuted tonight exclusively on MySpace once again. Check the video out below. It features the new songs “Got Some” and “Just Breathe” on top of the first single off of the album, “The Fixer.” As a bonus, there’s some nice footage of the band doing some axe throwing. Pearl Jam’s new album will be out in about a month. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Wakoopa’s State Of The Apps Report: Don’t Hassle A Geek After 4pm Posted: 17 Aug 2009 02:15 AM PDT
The report is based on 110K users of which 88% are male, although female users account for half of the top users. So what’s new? Well, Firefox has clearly won the browser war in this group with 55% of users. It is the most popular browser across all platforms. Facebook is the dominant web site with 17.9% of usage time followed by Gmail at 10.5%. Interestingly, although Twitter usage is growing steadily it still only accounts for 4.32% of usage time even though 25% of Wakoopa users are on Twitter - too busy developing to hang our on Twitter? Speaking of which, we get a window into the lives of how developers work, which may well interest a few startups trying to motivate their teams after 4pm. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Yahoo Veterans Launch Rocket Fuel, A “Hybrid” Ad Network Posted: 16 Aug 2009 11:13 PM PDT
A team of Yahoo veterans who built its behavioral targeting advertising technology are publicly launching a hybrid ad network today called Rocket Fuel, which they’ve tested over the past year with major brands including Nike, Dell, Microsoft, and American Express. Despite keeping quiet, Rocket Fuel’s ad network reaches 40 million people and shows them about 100 million ads per month. CEO George John calls Rocket Fuel a “hybrid ad network” because it combines all sorts of targeting data (social, behavioral, contextual, geographical, search) to figure out what works best at any particular moment. “We saw how important it was to let the data tell you which ad to show,” says John, who came from Yahoo along with president Richard Frankel and CTO Abhinav Gupta. Rocket Fuel’s algorithm considers everything from a consumer’s online behavior and location to the time of day and what particular ad was shown. If people who listen to electronica music are more likely to click on an ad than those who listen to jazz, or people who log in from work respond better than people from home, Rocket Fuel tries to ferret out those details and feed them back into the mechanics of the ad campaign. John explains: We let the data tell us what works and what is important. Instead of inflicting on customers thousands of targeting options, we figure out which options are working well and move inventory in that way. Sounds simple enough, but apparently this is not the way most ad targeting is done. Instead, advertisers and ad agencies typically are given a confusing array of targeting options and are left to their own devices to sort through them all. Rocket Fuel is automating that testing process and speeding up the feedback loop so that advertisers can hone in on whatever combination of targeting is working at that second. But does the world really need another advertising network, hybrid or otherwise? If Rocket Fuel can deliver better advertising campaign ROIs, advertisers will give it a shot. That’s all that matters. If it can’t, it won’t make it off the launchpad. The companyl raised $6.8 million in a series A round a year ago from Mohr Davidow, Labrador Ventures, and individual angel investors. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Y Combinator Starts Seeding Ideas To Startups Posted: 16 Aug 2009 02:12 PM PDT
Now, to be clear, Y Combinator will not be forgoing its usual method of combing over any and all startup pitches outside of the ones they lay out. “We don’t expect responses to RFSes will ever be more than a fraction of the applications we accept. We wouldn’t want them to be. Most good ideas should be ones that surprise us, not ones we’re waiting for,” Paul Graham writes on the site today. The hope is that this will help guide some new startups without solid ideas in the direction of something that is missing in the market. Or encourage ones that already have a similar idea to apply. Y Combinator’s RFSes won’t describe exactly what Y Combinator is looking for, but rather will give a general idea, with the hopes that the startups can come up with even better plans than Y Combinator is thinking of, Graham says. So what is the first RFS? Well, it’s something near and dear to our hearts: The Future Of Journalism. Y Combinator is wondering what the online content sites will look like in the future when print publications are gone. Certainly some, like TechCrunch, have gotten large enough to support themselves now, but most content sites are still built on the notion of content first, monetization later. Y Combinator notes that in the heyday of print media, the approach was often the opposite, there was a business plan in place before the launch. It believes that approach can still work, and has laid out a rough outline of what it’s looking for from startups that want to do this:
This RFS is just the first of 3 to 5 that Y Combinator hopes to get out there before the October 26 Winter 2010 class application deadline, Graham tells us. Startups applying specifically for these RFS ideas will be able to indicate that on their applications. Graham notes that Y Combinator has sort of passively given ideas to startups in the past, like this, but thinks this new explicit call will lead to some interesting things. We asked Graham if this new approach means these types of startups will get different financial deals from Y Combinator. “Not significantly,” Graham says. “Execution matters so much more than the idea that even if we supplied the entire idea we wouldn’t be entitled to more than 10% of the company,” he notes. On his post he gives a bit more:
[photo: flickr/eran finkle] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Firefox 3.5 Not Playing Nicely With Twitter Posted: 16 Aug 2009 11:01 AM PDT
Twitter knows about the issue and says they’re working on it. And the odd thing is that the issue seems to come and go. The worst part about this is that Twitter was actively promoting Firefox 3.5 downloads in July, and a lot of Twitter users are probably using it. This version of Firefox alone has around 4.5% market share already. My apologies to Power Twitter, I originally (privately) accused them for the problems, and it looks like I was wrong.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| The Media Bundle Is Dead, Long Live The News Aggregators Posted: 16 Aug 2009 09:41 AM PDT
Here we go again. The newspaper industry is blaming online news aggregators for its dwindling profits and inability to adapt to a world of links and truly-free flowing information. (They like it when information flows freely into their pages, but not so much when it flows out). On Thursday, paidContent ran an essay by media consultant Arnon Mishkin called “The Fallacy Of The Link Economy” which was misguided on so many levels. Mishkin’s main argument is that:
It is not really clear whom he is calling an aggregator—actual news aggregators like Yahoo News, Google News, Digg, Techmeme and the Huffington Post, or anyone who links to a news story. After all, he equates the entire web to the blogosphere, which says more about his parochial industry view than about the web. In his mind, the web is the enemy and links are bad. What really seems to concern him, however, are news aggregation sites. They threaten newspapers because they are emerging as the new front page which people skim every morning for headlines instead of going to any single newspaper site. Mishkin argues:
Set aside for a second that ads on news aggregation sites are usually worth a lot less than ads on original content sites and thus they are not capturing the same value. More to the point, when I first read this my immediate response was that the value of news sites does not come from getting people to skim headlines, but to actually click through and read the actual stories. The newspaper industry wants to go back to the world before the Web, when each newspaper was a small media bundle packed with stories, 80 percent of which sucked. But it didn’t matter because you’d gladly pay a dollar to read the one or two stories that caught your eye on the front page, hoping there would be more inside. Well, guess what? The media bundle is dead. News sites can no longer capture reader’s attention with 20 percent news, and 80 percent suck. Each story stands on its own in a world of atomized content where readers can come from anywhere on the Web, not just the front page. Now in addition to the front page, there are a million side doors. Reader lock-in is gone. The sooner newspapers get used to that concept, the sooner they can start to adapt and survive. Which brings us back to the value of news aggregators. The newspaper industry is looking for someone to blame. Usually, it’s Google, but really anyone on the Web will do. Rather than blame the aggregators, news site should take advantage of them. On the Web, every side door can be a front page, whether it is Google News or search or Digg or Twitter or a feed reader or My Yahoo. I’ve said this before about Google, but it applies to any site that links to the news:
And if a news site or a blog can say enough interesting things enough times that news aggregators (or other sites) keep linking to them, then they can build up their brand and reader loyalty. Maybe readers will click on those links if they see it is coming from a trusted source, and then maybe some of those will start coming to the news site itself on a regular basis. But that loyalty must be earned every day, story by story, post by post. The more front pages (or side pages) which point to a news site’s stories, the more chances it has to gain that loyalty. But the days of the media bundle when readers got all of the day’s news from one site are long gone. So too are gone the cushy days when newspapers could count “casual browsers” as real readers and sell them to advertisers. Newspapers had better get used to a world where links exist and can whisk readers away as quickly as they bring them. Those who don’t will learn that trying to recreate the past is a sure a path to an early grave. (Flickr Photo: John Vachon/Library of Congress) Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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MySpace is close to acquiring popular social music service 
Having witnessed 
Last month, our post about 
Firefox 3.5, which we’ve 
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