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- The RockMelt Mystery. Is it Just a Facebook Browser, Or Will It Break The Mold?
- Following The Tr.im Incident, 301works Is Ready To Insure Shortened URLs
- A Sad Day. Goodbye, Riya
- Use RECAP To Bypass Court Document PACER Paywall
- FatSecret Looks To Become A Central Hub For Nutrition Data With New API
- Long Journey For BubbleShare Ends In The Deadpool
- YC-Funded GraffitiGeo: Foursquare Meets Yelp, With A Dash Of Augmented Reality
- Desktop Factory Hits the Dead Pool
- I Can Now Make FriendFeed As Ugly As I Want
- Qik Finally Makes It To The App Store, Live Streaming Not Included
- SCVNGR Lets You Build Awesome Scavenger Hunts For Any Mobile Phone
- Not Bullshit: Penn & Teller Launching New Product At TechCrunch50
- CrashCorp Demos Augmented Reality iPhone Application
- Twitter Is Revamping Retweets, Launches A Retweet API
- That September Apple Tablet? More Like A 2010 Apple Tablet.
- Behind The Scenes At A RED-Powered, Heli-Mounted Music Video Shoot
- Dictionary.com Now A Giant Web Billboard. Your Ad Here.
- Rumors of the Apple Tablet Are Heating Up a Gadget-less Summer
- The Zune HD: September 15. Apple iPod Event: Likely September 8.
- Outlook to be Offered with Mac Office in 2010
- reMail 2.0 Nails Full-Text Search For The iPhone
- How Can Tech Companies Make Customer Service Scale?
- Will The Online Advertising Recovery Be Led By Retail And Mobile?
| The RockMelt Mystery. Is it Just a Facebook Browser, Or Will It Break The Mold? Posted: 14 Aug 2009 08:19 AM PDT
Marc Andreessen is backing a new browser company called RockMelt. Not much is known about RockMelt other than it is being designed by an all-star team (including software engineer Robert John Churchill from the Netscape days) and that it is tied into Facebook through Facebook Connect. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has a screenshot of the sign-in page and speculates that RockMelt is in fact a Facebook browser. Miguel Helft at the NYT leans in that direction as well. It kind of makes sense since Andreesen is on the board of Facebook, but I suspect it is only half the story. A Facebook browser, however, is a good metaphor for thinking about how browsers, in general, need to change. What would a Facebook browser look like? Well, to start with, you would be able to see updates from your friends on Facebook, share your own updates and media right from the browser, and perhaps IM with your friends through Facebook chat. While those set of features would be convenient, they are nothing revolutionary. Flock, which calls itself the social browser, already incorporates Facebook Connect (and Twitter and other social networks to boot), but it hasn’t taken off. And Facebook itself offers a toolbar for Firefox that lets you see notifications, search Facebook, and share links. There are plenty of other Firefox add-ons which incorporate Facebook features as well. But the Facebook connection may just be the starting point for a much more ambitious piece of software. Andreesen said as much to the NYT in an interview earlier this year, which Helft quotes from in his article:
What sorts of things is he talking about? Making the browser social appears to be at the top of the list. The first thing you do is connect to Facebook. But that could just be a building block for a social browser that handles Web apps in an entirely new way. The browser was built around the Web page metaphor, but increasingly the most interesting things happening on the Web do not necessarily exist on any one Web page. They exist in real time data streams (such as Facebook’s portable News Feed and Twitter) and in richer Webtop applications. A modern browser should be designed not only to surf the Web, but to manage your information streams and Web apps all in a seamless user interface. Whether or not RockMelt is tackling this broader challenge, I don’t know. But I hope it is because we need to move the ball forward with a radical, yet accessible, new approach. Radical, yet accessible—that is the challenge. It must be radical enough to open up new, more efficient, avenues of information discovery, creation, and interaction. It must be a communications platform as well as a browsing platform. The original browser model was one of consumption, of reading Web pages as if they were documents. Despite all the progress of the past decade, we are still stuck with that legacy to a large degree because it is built into our browsers. So what would a true social browser look like? Below is my own wish list of features (some of these are available as add-ons or in existing desktop clients, but there is an opportunity to unify them in one seamless experience):
That’s just off the top of my head. If you were redesigning the browser from scratch today, what would it look like? Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Following The Tr.im Incident, 301works Is Ready To Insure Shortened URLs Posted: 14 Aug 2009 08:00 AM PDT
Perhaps you heard about 301works in one of our recent pieces about how Bit.ly was attempting to salvage the Tr.im wreckage. The idea was the 301works would be a centralized hub for all shortened URLs, not run by any one URL-shortener. Tr.im balked at the idea of joining, but plenty of others are, including Bit.ly, Awe.sm, Adjix, betaworks, Cligs, and URLizer. All of them are teaming up with Gnip to launch this project. One of the holdups in Tr.im’s participation was that it didn’t want one company ruling all of this data. And while Gnip will be handling it at first, to get the project off the ground, the plan is still to find a non-profit group to manage 301works. All the members are clear that they want this to be an open-source project that sets users’ minds at ease about using URL-shorteners. The service will launch sometime in the next few weeks, after the participating companies have a chance to tell their users that they will be backing up their links on 301works. While most are unlikely to have a problem with that, some might, so they’re giving them some time to opt-out. So how will 301works actually work? Well here are the key points for how companies will be able to back up their links:
All of this sounds great on paper, but the question of just how well this system works remains to be seen. Still, it’s promising that we’re seeing a bunch of companies take action on this so quickly after an incident that left a lot of people concerned about the future of URL-shorteners. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Posted: 14 Aug 2009 03:35 AM PDT
This was one of the original services that defined the early Web 2.0 movement. We first covered it, then known as Ojos, four years ago. The service changed its name to Riya before launching at a party, yes, in my back yard. Here’s our fist full overview of the Riya product, which helped users by auto-recognizing friends in photos and tagging them. The company came close to selling to Google, but the deal never closed. And eventually the company refocused its efforts on visual search ecommerce (and is still going strong at like.com). The email is below. Thanks for the tip, Orli.
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| Use RECAP To Bypass Court Document PACER Paywall Posted: 14 Aug 2009 02:10 AM PDT
The PACER service provides on-line access to U.S. Appellate, District, and Bankruptcy court records and documents. The fee to access PACER is $0.08 per page: “The per page charge applies to the number of pages that results from any search, including a search that yields no matches (one page for no matches.) The charge applies whether or not pages are printed, viewed, or downloaded.” For people who do a lot of legal research, those fees add up quickly. Enter RECAP, a Firefox add-on created by a group of people at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology. Install the add-on and any documents you access on PACER are automatically uploaded to an Internet Archive repository. These documents are then shared with other users when they do similar searches. See a video overview of how it all works here. The repository already has over one million documents available for free download. Is this legal? It sure is. The PACER site says “The information gathered from the PACER system is a matter of public record and may be reproduced without permission.” There’s no copyright on these documents. PACER also says “Any attempt to collect data from PACER in a manner which avoids billing is strictly prohibited and may result in criminal prosecution or civil action.” Technically, though, the data isn’t being collected from PACER by RECAP users, although they are using the site as a search engine of sorts. Harlan Yu, one of the creators, blogs about the project here. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| FatSecret Looks To Become A Central Hub For Nutrition Data With New API Posted: 14 Aug 2009 12:41 AM PDT
CEO Rodney Moses says that FatSecret is allowing developers to access the API for free, in the hopes of turning FatSecret into the reliable and accurate resource for nutritional information. He points out the fact that while there are plenty of diet sites on the web that contain nutrition info for various foods, much of the data is disjointed — there’s no established comprehensive source that people turn to first. FatSecret hopes to become the authoritative hub for this kind of information. The site has gathered its data from a number of publicly available resources like the USDA, and also has many user-submitted entries from users on its social network. Moses says that all of the data has been curated to ensure accuracy. The other component to the new API is a brand utility, which invites food and beverage brand owners to submit their nutrition facts into the system so that they can be retrieved using the FatSecret API. Moses says that the site itself is still growing steadily, with half a million monthly visitors and around double that number when including users who access the site through other means, like its mobile applications. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Long Journey For BubbleShare Ends In The Deadpool Posted: 13 Aug 2009 09:51 PM PDT
Canadian photo sharing startup BubbleShare will be shuttered on November 15, 2009. Users were notified via email and a notice on the site’s home page. The site, founded by Albert Lai, first launched in late 2005 and we immediately liked it: “Toronto-based online photo sharing BubbleShare is just wonderful, and ridiculously easy to use. Their interface team deserves a gold star or something…” Adding interface features like zoom just made it even more fun to use.
Some Kaboose assets, in turn, were acquired by Disney in April 2009 for $18.4 million. No word on why they’re shutting down, but this may have something to do with it. We’ll always have fond memories of BubbleShare, but it’s now in the TechCrunch DeadPool. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| YC-Funded GraffitiGeo: Foursquare Meets Yelp, With A Dash Of Augmented Reality Posted: 13 Aug 2009 09:22 PM PDT
At its core GraffitiGeo allows users to leave brief reviews of restaurants, or for those too lazy to do that, to simply leave a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ — it’s like a highly condensed version of Yelp, or a “Digg for the world”. These reviews and votes can be cast from the site’s iPhone app or from the service’s homepage. The homepage also features a stream of the latest comments to come in from other users, as well as a profile for each restaurant in the system that includes all of its votes and comments. There’s also a nifty feature that lets you view a heatmap of your current region, so you can quickly figure out the hot spots in town. The gameplay in GraffitiGeo is a bit more complex than that found in Foursquare, which gives you points for checking in but doesn’t really let you do anything with them. With GraffitiGeo, you earn points for every action you take, be it voting on a restaurant or leaving a brief comment. Once you’ve reached a certain point threshold, you can use those points to start a ‘mob’, which you can invite your friends to join. Mobs allow friends to pool their points, which can then be used to acquire territory, which corresponds to actual city blocks. Whenever someone votes on one of the restaurants on the block, the mob gets some street cred too. It’s definitely going to be confusing at first, but it also brings a team element to gameplay — something that Foursquare lacks. You can read more about the mob game here. GraffitiGeo is also working on a second related iPhone app that combines the site’s data with augmented reality — in effect, it turns your iPhone into a viewfinder for looking up restarurant info (see the video below for a demo). Just hold the iPhone as you would a camera and point it in the direction of the restaurant in question, and an overlay featuring GraffitiGeo comments will hover over it. It’s very cool (we’ve seen a number of other AR apps that are on the way), though we’ll have to wait a while longer to try it out. GraffitiGeo has some good ideas (especially with the AR app), but it still has its work cut out for it. For one, Yelp is going to prove a very tough competitor — it already has a vast amount of data, and while it may be annoying having to sift through long reviews at times, I don’t think people find it annoying enough to stop using that site. The startup also has some work to do on the iPhone app and the service’s homepage, both of which are functional but could still use some polish.
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| Desktop Factory Hits the Dead Pool Posted: 13 Aug 2009 08:09 PM PDT  Goodbye, Desktop Factory, we hardly knew ye. Desktop Factory was supposed to offer a sub-$5,000 desktop 3D printer. Alas, they are no more and they've sold their IP and assets to an unnamed buyer. But a funny thing happened as we launched our effort to sell Desktop Factory. We found interested parties who do understand the exciting potential for this breakthrough technology. We found companies that value the industry and can visualize the myriad applications for this affordable printer. Most important, we have found organizations that engage with customers and truly want to be a part of this next major wave in additive fabrication.
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| I Can Now Make FriendFeed As Ugly As I Want Posted: 13 Aug 2009 04:24 PM PDT
Despite being purchased by Facebook for close to $50 million earlier this week, FriendFeed is still rolling out new features. Today brings customizable themes, which allow you to tweak your template to make it as pretty or as ugly as you would like. Naturally, I’m going for ugly, as I stated my desire to mimic the excellent “Eggplant Orange Juice With Blood” theme I created for Gmail when that service launched customizable themes. So far, my best effort (below) is called “Dictionary.com Cheer Carrot Theme” after my new favorite website. To FriendFeed’s credit, they make it pretty hard to make a truly ugly design, like you can easily do on Gmail. One reason is that theren’t are as many variables to change the colors of. One interesting note about these themes is that by default, you will see other users’ themes when you click on their profiles. You will also see the themes that admin’s create in rooms that they manage. You can turn this off, and choose to only see your theme, in the settings.
And just for comparison sake, the old Gmail design I did:
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| Qik Finally Makes It To The App Store, Live Streaming Not Included Posted: 13 Aug 2009 04:23 PM PDT  I want live streaming video recording apps on the iPhone. You want live streaming video recording apps on the iPhone. Everyone wants live streaming video recording apps on the iPhone - except for Apple. Though such applications have been available through unofficial means for over a year now, Apple remains mum on the matter. There they sit in Apple's review queue, rotting away beneath an "In Review" label. Looking to find some way onto the platform, developers have begun to scale back their applications until they reach a point Apple is willing to greenlight. We saw it earlier this month with Ustream's streamless app, and now Qik has followed suit. Beginning today, Qik's own sans-streaming app is available for the iPhone 3GS.
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| SCVNGR Lets You Build Awesome Scavenger Hunts For Any Mobile Phone Posted: 13 Aug 2009 03:45 PM PDT
In conjunction with the news, the company is also announcing that it has closed a $750,000 funding round from Highland Capital. SCVNGR is still a very new company, making its debut last fall as part of the DreamIt Ventures incubator program. But it’s already seen use by over 300 universities, including Harvard and Princeton, as well as corporations, who have used the company’s enterprise-grade game builder for things like employee team building excercises and orientation events. It’s a fantastic idea for a number of reasons: games are easily deployable with little to no cost outside of licensing the platform, it works on any cell phone, and games can be tweaked with a minimal amount of effort. XPLR (pronounced ‘explorer’) is meant to serve as a more accessible framework to build these games. And, unlike the more robust SCVNGR builder, XPLR is free. It comes with a number of restictions: you’re limited by how many people can play the game simultaneously, you can’t tell which users have been playing (as you might want to in a commercial app), and the platform is only for non-commercial, non-institutional use. But if you wanted to set up a tour of your hometown, or perhaps a barcrawl for your friends to follow, this is exactly what you’d want to use. You can see a screenshot of the editor below. So how do the games actually work? If you’d like to try one out for yourself, there’s a free application for the iPhone that includes a training game, but here’s the gist of it: the service sends questions to the phone, oftentimes alongside a text, audio, or video clue to help figure out the answer. Once you think you’ve solved it, you type in your solution and if you’re right, you proceed to the next question. The system works fine as a basic puzzle game, but it’s far more engaging when it’s used for scavenger hunts, with questions that require you to actually walk to a certain landmark. For example, there are a number of SCVNGR missions set up for the city of Boston, which guide users through some of the city’s most well known landmarks. Here’s an example series of questions, taken from a Philadelphia tour:
SCVNGR offers apps for iPhone and Android, but they’re also playable on more basic phones too using SMS (just sent a special keyword to the company’s shortcode and the game will start sending you clues). That said, the smartphone experience is definitely better: some games include multimedia clues, and there are also special photo missions that ask users to submit pictures of themselves doing various tasks. These photos get uploaded to the site’s server, and whoever is running the mission can then distribute them as mementos later on. SCVNGR is really doing a great job with its service, and its impressive roster of customers is a testament to that. We’ll be keeping an eye on them in the future.
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| Not Bullshit: Penn & Teller Launching New Product At TechCrunch50 Posted: 13 Aug 2009 02:50 PM PDT
And this year, I’m very proud to announce that Penn & Teller will be launching a new consumer tech product at TechCrunch50. The duo has worked together for 30 years, and in September they’ll be celebrating their fifth year as headliners in their own theater at the Rio All-suite Hotel & Casino, as well as two Emmy nominations for one of my favorite shows, their Showtime series "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" (I even embedded a clip of their show in this post about bottled water). Plus, Penn Jillette will be on stage showing their new product for the first time to the 2,000 or so people who will be at TechCrunch50. And I think you’re going to love it. That’s all we’re saying for now. Get your ticket here. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| CrashCorp Demos Augmented Reality iPhone Application Posted: 13 Aug 2009 02:37 PM PDT
After speaking to Galligan, he mentioned that CrashCorp is changing the direction of their company. He also notes:
One of these views might be something similar to the proof of concepts Galligan posted to his Flickr account, which are embedded below for your connivence. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Twitter Is Revamping Retweets, Launches A Retweet API Posted: 13 Aug 2009 02:07 PM PDT
From the looks of it, this could mean some pretty big changes on Twitter. As you can see in the mock-ups above and below, the retweet (written as “RT” in most tweets) is no longer a part of the actual tweet itself, but rather is a link below the tweet. While that certainly is a cleaner way of doing things, it will be interesting to see if this makes retweeting less or more enticing. And it could potentially help users find new people to follow (more on that below). But as co-founder Biz Stone notes on the Twitter blog, the current method of retweeting on twitter.com is a cumbersome process of copying and pasting. They want to change that. He calls this “Phase One” of “Project Retweet,” and notes that it is going out to developers first so they can be ready for the change, and indicates that it’s not quite ready for prime-time:
Stone notes that the new retweet look will launch to a limited group of users first for a set period of time so the team can test how it will work on the system. It will then get a wider roll-out in a few weeks. Writes Twitter developer Marcel Molina in the Twitter developer Google Group about the new API:
Below find some screenshot mockups of what this will look like.
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| That September Apple Tablet? More Like A 2010 Apple Tablet. Posted: 13 Aug 2009 01:52 PM PDT
And today brings more people backing that up. Sources tell The Loop that the tablet will definitely not be a part of the September event (which is likely to focus on music and the iPod, just like all other Apple September events do). Jim Dalrymple writes:
In linking to Dalrymple’s piece, Daring Fireball says basically the same thing, “I'm almost certain there's no tablet coming this year. It's a 2010 thing,” writes John Gruber, who also has a very good track record on these types of things. The point is that while all indications are that a tablet (or large-form iPod touch) is coming from Apple, 2010 seems like a much more likely launch window. Apple has spent the past couple of years doing smaller, more focused events centered around specific product categories. A September event with an Apple Tablet would simply overwhelm the other announcements they plant to make there, like the “Cocktail” project, iTunes 9 and entirely new iPod touches. Instead, I’d bet on Apple doing another special event in the first quarter of 2010, focused around this new device and maybe previewing the iPhone 4.0 SDK which this thing may have something to do with (just a guess there). Remember, Apple isn’t doing Macworld this year, so it doesn’t necessarily even have to be in January, but rather they’ll wait until they’ve perfected it. Whatever it is. [photo via Gizmodo] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Behind The Scenes At A RED-Powered, Heli-Mounted Music Video Shoot Posted: 13 Aug 2009 01:32 PM PDT  I recently had the pleasure to help out on a music video shoot here in the northwest, noteworthy not just because a great video resulted, but because we were shooting with two RED One cameras plus a custom RC helicopter for aerial shots. It was interesting being behind the scenes and I thought I'd share a little of the fun. The video itself, for Mt St Helens Vietnam Band's "Albatross, Albatross, Albatross," can be viewed in HD over at Vimeo. The opportunity to see a group of local freelancers and entrepreneurs coming together to make such an incredibly professional product was extremely valuable — technology has democratized and accelerated the independent film and music community to a degree I hadn't realized. I was brought on because I had access to some special locations (most of the aerial and forest shots are near some family property in the San Juans) and so I could shoot a little behind-the-scenes video of the production. More details, video, and production stills below the fold.
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| Dictionary.com Now A Giant Web Billboard. Your Ad Here. Posted: 13 Aug 2009 01:05 PM PDT
There are ads, and the there are ADS. Dictionary.com now features the latter, in what I can only describe as the most in-your-face advertisement I have ever seen on the web. About the only thing that could catch your eye more is if its next ad is for a porn or dead kittens. Very clearly, the washing detergent Cheer is now sponsoring Dictionary.com’s homepage, but I’ve never seen a site with an ad so big that I’m not sure there’s actually a service being offered at all. Bing features huge pictures on its site too, but they’re tasteful images that provide a nice backdrop, this is just God-awful. And worse, the entire thing is clickable, to take you to Cheer’s page. This make the huge ads that MySpace and IMDb run (shown below), look tasteful. And it almost makes me forgive ESPN.com for its greedy advertising practices — almost. And yes, it’s kind of like Pandora, but you listen to Pandora, you don’t have to look at it. I know times are tough, and everyone including us needs to sell ads to make the business work, but come on. At what point do you stop being a service and start being a billboard? Luckily, if you are actually able to find the text input box to look up a word, the resulting page doesn’t feature the same ad backdrop. Unfortunately to do this initial search, you have to visit the page. Which I probably won’t be doing anymore.
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| Rumors of the Apple Tablet Are Heating Up a Gadget-less Summer Posted: 13 Aug 2009 12:17 PM PDT  It's nice that the Apple Tablet - we're calling it the Tapplet - rumors are circulating. August is a horrible time for tech. There's not much out there right now, just a few headsets and some early back-to-school stuff. The retail refresh hasn't hit - that comes in about October - and the Interwebs are quiet. It's great to have a little bit of frisson in our lives, something to put on our Christmas lists. With that we present today's Tapplet rumors. First, we have rumor of a September 8event at Apple HQ for music devices. This is Apple's traditional time for releasing new music gear. It's just before back-to-school and it gives them a little time to get stuff into the retail space by October, just when kids are starting to break the iPods they got last year. So what could it be? Could it be a new iPod? iPods with cameras? Or it might be...
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| The Zune HD: September 15. Apple iPod Event: Likely September 8. Posted: 13 Aug 2009 11:22 AM PDT
Microsoft’s new device sounds great: OLED screen, HD radio, HD video (720p) outputs, powerful Tegra chip, and most importantly a iPod-beating price of $219.99 for the 16 GB variety, and just $289.99 for the 32 GB version. That latter is a $110 savings over the comparable iPod touch, which the Zune HD clearly targets. And now it has a very real release date: About a month from now, September 15. Are the planets aligning for a hit version of the Zune, finally? Not so fast. Apple typically takes the first week of September to hold a press event to show off its new iPods. Last year, the event was on Tuesday, September 9. This year, that same second Tuesday is on September 8. Music industry sources tell MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka that Apple is going to hold an event the week of September 7. Bingo. So yes, it looks very likely that Apple will hold its next iPod press event one week before the launch of the new Zune. And what does that likely mean? Aside from Apple likely talking about the “Cocktail” music format project it has been working on, and quite possibly a new social iTunes 9, also very likely to drop are the new iPod touches. Yes, the device the Zune HD is competing against. Uh oh. Why uh oh? Well because while the Zune HD looks good compared to the current iPod touch, the new versions will certain be seeing some upgrades. What are the two most likely upgrades? A camera, which the Zune HD doesn’t have. And a price drop. Again, uh oh. It’s not clear if Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has some inside information here or if he’s just making a prediction, but what he writes today certainly sounds like it could be the case for the new iPod touches:
That would make the Zune HD 32 GB only $10 cheaper than the comprable iPod touch. And again, with no camera, and no apps (at least not yet anyway). The Zune HD could still very well hold an edge with an OLED screen (it’s not clear if a new iPod touch would feature that) and the HD-outputs, but would that really be enough to dethrone the dominant player in the market? Look, the Zune HD does sound very nice, and I’ve said as much many times. But the overall idea of the Zune is still a bit odd to me. It’s Microsoft burning money to compete in a market (MP3 players) that is slowly fading away. Now, there is undoubtedly a plan to get apps on it eventually, and I’m sure games, to turn it into more than an MP3 player. But right now, there is basically no mention of any of that by Microsoft. So that means that when it does happen, it will likely be months from now. And even with those, the bigger question remains: What’s the end game here for Microsoft, which makes its money off of Windows and Office?. My point is that Microsoft has spent the entire lifespan of the Zune chasing Apple’s tail, for what? The first hard drive-based Zunes came years after the iPod, and didn’t sell well. Then it released a Flash memory version well after the first flash iPods, and that too didn’t sell well. Now it has an iPod touch competitor 2 years after the iPod touch was released. On paper, it sounds promising right now, but come September 8, it’s likely to be one-upped by Apple yet again. It’s not hard to see how this plays out, sometime next year we’ll hear about a new Zune HD that has a camera and has app support. The question is will the Zune HD have made any headway into Apple’s market by then? That is far from a certainty, despite the nice-looking new device. What I’d really like to know is who plans these events for Microsoft? How on Earth didn’t they not realize that Apple has an iPod event pretty much every year now in the first few days of September? I’m sure it would have been a big pain in the ass, but why not put everything you have into ramping up production earlier and getting it to market before Apple can respond? Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Outlook to be Offered with Mac Office in 2010 Posted: 13 Aug 2009 11:08 AM PDT  One major obstacle to use of Macs in the enterprise has always been the absence of Outlook. Sure Macs have Entourage, but the program just doesn't cut it for business users entrenched in the ways of Outlook. Those set on using a Mac have often resorted to partitioning their hard drives or installing programs like Outlook2Mac to access the program. Soon such tactics will no longer be necessary, as Microsoft has announced the availability of Outlook in the next version of Mac Office. The change will likely be implemented in the new version of Office that is set for release in time for the holidays in 2010. In the mean time, those using Entourage 2008 Web Services Edition will enjoy steps Microsoft has takent towards making the experience more Outlook-like. The release comes as part of a new business edition of Mac Office designed to provide Mac users with better connection to Microsoft Exchange Server, and improved compatibility across platforms. Microsoft's Mac unit is also building the Outlook software from the ground up to ensure compatibility with Mac's backup and hard-drive search features.
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| reMail 2.0 Nails Full-Text Search For The iPhone Posted: 13 Aug 2009 11:01 AM PDT
The last version of reMail relied on the company’s optimized servers, which were much more efficient at running search queries than most Email providers. However, that technique came with one caveat: it required users to hand over their login credentials. I pointed this out last time I wrote about the company, figuring that most people probably wouldn’t mind too much, but CEO Gabor Cselle says that it was a surprisingly common complaint — people are just unwilling to hand over that login data (which is probably a good thing). Fortunately, reMail 2.0 does away with this problem. The new version of reMail downloads the entire contents of your Mailbox — every single message — onto your iPhone, which it then stores locally. That may sound undesirable for those of us with large Email boxes that are many gigabytes large, but the reMail team has done an excellent job at compressing data for its search index: Cselle says that they’ve managed to squeeze 100,000 Emails into 500 megabytes (most Email accounts are only a fraction of that size). To get started, you’ll have to download your entire mailbox to your phone which will take some time (Cselle recommends setting the phone to Wi-Fi and leaving it over night), but the service will pick up where it left off if you have to have to cut it off mid-way through the download process. Searching itself works exactly as you’d hope, showing results only a second or two after you’ve typed a query, with matching words highlighted. Of course, the iPhone 3.0 software update finally introduced Email search to the iPhone, which may lead some people to wonder why reMail is even necessary. Cselle points out a few major benefits: for one, reMail’s search is around five times faster than the iPhone’s, and it searches full-text (the iPhone only searches headers). And reMail retains its full functionally offline, while the iPhone’s search often requires a data connection to search older messages. As I’ve written before CEO Gabor Cselle is a guy who really knows Email. Here’s a brief bio of Cselle from our last post:
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| How Can Tech Companies Make Customer Service Scale? Posted: 13 Aug 2009 09:24 AM PDT
In 1901 a Swedish immigrant to America called Johan Nordstrom founded the Nordstrom department store. In 1975, by now a national chain, a Nordstrom customer walked into one of their stores to return a set of tyres he'd bought. The salesperson gladly took back the set of car tyres and gave the customer a refund. Nothing weird about that, right? Except Nordstrom has never sold tyres. Many of you may have heard this story before; it's one of many legendary tales of great customer service from Nordstrom and best of all it's true. According to a chap called Efraim Turban "Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation." Like us all I have copious tales of despair dealing with corporate giants. I'd say the worst offenders used to be banks, but in today's world of mobile everything, the mobile network operators have definitely claimed that crown. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Will The Online Advertising Recovery Be Led By Retail And Mobile? Posted: 13 Aug 2009 09:22 AM PDT
We’ve seen two quarters of declines in online advertising revenues, but signs of a recovery, or at least a reset, are beginning to show. In a note today explaining why he is bullish on Google, Citi Internet analyst Mark Mahaney makes the case for cautious optimism. He predicts stability in search advertising revenues, a significant increase in spending by retail advertisers in both search and display ads, and major growth in mobile ad revenues. While it is “too early to call the quarter,” his checks with search engine marketing firms suggest that overall spending and cost-per-clicks will at least be in line with the second quarter. On top of that pillar, there is the “snowballing momentum” for mobile search ads. He writes:
That is off a small base, but growth is always good. With all of the new Web phones from the iPhone and Android to the Palm Pre and Blackberry, the Summer of Smartphone Love seems to be paying off. Finally, Mahaney sees movement in spending budgets among ecommerce companies. In contrast to 3 percent annual growth in marketing spends among these retailers in the first half of the year, he expects them to ramp up online advertising spending by 20 percent in the second half of the year as they gear up for the holiday season. But will growth in mobile and retail be enough to move the needle for the entire industry? Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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Perhaps you’ve been following the Tr.im fiasco. If not, basically the URL shortening service 
Facial recognition service 
If the RIAA can’t stop music sharing, the U.S. government is going to have an even harder time trying to stop the sharing of federal court documents hidden behind a paywall. Those documents aren’t protected by copyright law.
In early 2007 the company was 
One of the big problems with starting a new service that relies on user submitted data is getting people to actually use it — nobody is going to routinely boot up your app if they don’t have an incentive to do so. One way to tackle this problem is by working the service into a game, which is a technique that seems to be working quite well for 
When FriendFeed 
For many people, the term “Scavenger Hunt” conjures childhood memories of running around the neighborhood on a quest for knickknacks like thimbles and socks — an experience that loses its luster beyond the age of ten or so. But as it turns out, they’re big businesses: major corporations and universities have successfully used more elaborate scavenger hunts as team building exercises, and a well-designed course can be extremely fun. 
We guard the final 50 new products and startups that launch at 
And the ramifications of this are potentially even larger. With the new method, all of your friends will see the original tweet you’re retweeting in their timeline (unless they have this option turned off). So if I’m not following 
At this point, it seems like people are just 
A lot of people
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