The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- RiotFeeds Bundles Mundane-less Tweets To Give You The Best Relevant Links
- What If Comments Could Be Retweeted? TweetMeme Is Working On It.
- Thank You, Canon, For Dropping Out of the Megapixel Race
- AOL Thinks It Owns All Advertising Domains
- San Francisco Opens The City’s Data
- RateItAll Now Lets You Submit Reviews About Anything By E-mail
- The $44.5 Million Zyb Looks Like It Will Be ‘Vodafone People’
- iLike Also Had Offers From Facebook and Amazon
- What Are These Bars On My iPhone? Wait, You Mean AT&T Is Working?!
- TwitVid Launches First Twitter Video Application For The BlackBerry
- Yahoo BOSS Might Be Bigger Than Bing
- Let It Be…True. Beatles And iTunes Come Together Again In Rumors
- MySpace Disables Auto-Play Of Profile Songs To Get Streaming Costs Under Control
- YC-Funded Flightcaster Tells You When Your Flight Is Delayed Hours Before The Airline Will
- FriendFeed Cofounder Paul Buchheit Discusses Facebook Acquisition (video)
- Facebook 3.0 May Be The Most Useful App On The iPhone Yet
- Will Rosetta Stone’s Stumble Kill that IPO Momentum?
- Polyvore Looks Stylin’ In This New $5.6 Million Round Of Funding
- Android v. iPhone Religious Battle Rages Within TechCrunch
- Center’d Brings Its Local Discovery Engine To The iPhone
- 140 Characters? That’s A Lot Of Writing. Just Post A Picture On DailyBooth
- Ow.ly And Bit.ly Fastest, Most Reliable URL Shorteners. Tr.Im Comes Up . . . Short.
- Is Mint Going After Freshbooks? Its New Features Point In That Direction.
| RiotFeeds Bundles Mundane-less Tweets To Give You The Best Relevant Links Posted: 19 Aug 2009 09:00 AM PDT
The service basically hand curates tweets from the top sites in various categories on the web. The end result are feeds that just contain tweets with links from sites of the same ilk. For example, PulseonTech account features tweets with links to stories from TechCrunch, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb, Wired and others. The PulseonNews feed features the NYTimes, CNN, Fox News, and others. But those are obvious categories — there are also plenty of not-so-obvious ones, like my personal favorite, TightPantsPulse, with is all about hipsters. Here’s the description of that feed: “Links you probably won't be into from sites that don't even exist yet.” While each of these over 20 feeds are curated, they are also powered by OneRiot’s PulseRank technology, which it considers the “PageRank for the realtime web”. As we’ve written about before, OneRiot is a real-time search engine that is all about finding the most relevant links being shared on the various social sites in real-time. And by identifying the most popular and relevant shared links, it is able to build consumer friendly-fare like RiotFeeds. OneRiot envisions that RiotFeeds will be a good tool for novice users of Twitter to use to get to their favorite content easier without having to track down and follow each of the sites they care about most. While Twitter has a “Suggested User List”, it doesn’t currently offer bundle packages of people to follow depending on what you’re interested in, which is something that Google Reader, for example, has. OneRiot also hopes this project will shed more light on its APIs, which were recently opened to the public, so others can use the data they’re collecting.
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| What If Comments Could Be Retweeted? TweetMeme Is Working On It. Posted: 19 Aug 2009 09:00 AM PDT
Twitter and blogs are increasingly feeding into each other. A blog post can go viral if it gets retweeted enough time. But what if it was easy to retweet a comment? TweetMeme, which powers the retweet buttons increasingly found on blog posts (like this one), is working on bringing retweets to comments, at least to comments on its own site. But once it does that, blogs will be able to implement the system using TweetMeme’s APIs. In a post on the TweetMeme blog, founder Nick Halstead gives a preview of the commenting system he is getting ready to release On TweetMeme itself in the next few weeks. Right now, headlines such as this one show recent Tweets linking to the story. TweetMeme will be adding a commenting feature there as well. The goals of the system are:
Each comment will have its own retweet button, and visitors will be able to reorder comments by most retweeted first. In effect, it becomes a voting system for comments with each retweet acting as a vote (and you can only vote once). You can reply to a specific commenter both within comments and on Twitter simultaneously. Another nice feature is that short links get elongated back to the original in the comments, and if the link is to a photo or other media, you see a thumbnail image in the comment itself. While TweetMeme is doing this for itself, the functionality will be available through its APIs (the documentation is not there yet though). I’d love to see this implemented as a blog commenting system where each comment could be retweeted and comments can be reordered by the resulting votes.
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| Thank You, Canon, For Dropping Out of the Megapixel Race Posted: 19 Aug 2009 08:55 AM PDT  The average mom and pop have judged digital cameras by megapixels alone since the beginning of time. Most people think that more megapixels means a better picture. A lot of the time brand, lens, or sensor type doesn't factor into the buying decision and why should they? Manufacturers have long catered to this mentality by outing cameras that constantly have more megapixels than others. But today's announcement of the 10MP Canon G11 point and shoot camera, Canon has officially dropped out of the race. The predecessor to this camera, the G10, had a whopping 14.7MP on a small sensor. That's a lot. But the camera also had issues shooting above 800 ISO and in low light. This can partly be blamed on the over-packed sensor. But the new G11's 10MP sensor should resolve some of those complaints. However, the surprisingly low pixel count also caused us to dismiss an early leak. It's not like Canon to drop the megapixel count on one of its halo cameras. This is from the same company that stuffed 21MP into the EOS 5D Mark II and leapfrogged the 12.1MP Nikon D700. But finally the average consumer might start to understand that megapixels are not the sole factor in the quality of a camera. It might take some explaining from a salesmen, but they have been doing that for years.
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| AOL Thinks It Owns All Advertising Domains Posted: 19 Aug 2009 07:39 AM PDT
But first lawsuits first. Advertise.com, which was purchased by ABCsearch.com earlier this year and rebranded as such a few months ago, is a variation on AOL-owned Advertising.com, the beleaguered Internet company claims. In legalese, that translates as follows:
Update: looks like Advertise.com sued AOL first (August 17, 2009) A search of the USPTO database shows that AOL does in fact have three registered trademarks for Advertising.com, but all are design trademarks, which means they stand little chance of exercising trademark rights over something as generic as the domain name advertise.com. Granted, the logo looks vaguely similar, but ‘virtually identical and confusing’ it ain’t. Note that AOL doesn’t even effectively market Advertising.com as a business unit anymore - although it may soon recommence doing just that - and redirects the domain name to its Platform-A website instead (AOL rebranded it to the name of this whole-owned subsidiary in April last year and now prefers AOL Advertising as the overarching denominator). So why would anyone confuse Advertise.com for an AOL property? It just doesn’t make any sense to try and claim ownership over any domain name with a variation on the word ‘advertising’ in it. What’s next? Ads.com? Advertisement.com? In the court documents, embedded below, AOL even boasts the fact that Advertise.com has only about 25,000 unique visitors per month, so what’s really at stake here? The second case is even more bizarre: although often used in its communication, Ad.com is apparently not a trademark owned by AOL, although the company has filed an application for it in the past. But that domain name is actually owned by a Marcos Guillen, who recently sold it to Directi and Skenzo for $1.4 million. Well, almost sold it, because the deal fell through after all, according to industry watchers due to the fact that the mark has not yet acquired distinctiveness for any of the applicants - including AOL - following a recent examination. Guillen has now filed a lawsuit against Directi and Skenzo for backing out of its auction purchase of Ad.com, seeking $1.4 million, prejudgment interest, and/or damages according to proof. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| San Francisco Opens The City’s Data Posted: 19 Aug 2009 07:00 AM PDT
San Francisco has a long history of innovation. We are home to hundreds of technology companies that are changing the way the world operates from Twitter to WordPress to Kiva. In an effort to engage our highly skilled workforce we are launching DataSF.org, an initiative designed to increase access to city data. The new web site will provide a clearinghouse of structured, raw and machine-readable government data to the public in an easily downloadable format. For example, there will be updated crime incident data from the police department and restaurant inspection data from the Department of Public Health. The initial phase of the web site includes more than 100 datasets, from a range of city departments, including Police, Public Works, and the Municipal Transportation Agency. We imagine creative developers taking apartment listings and city crime data and mashing it up to help renters find their next home or an iPhone application that shows restaurant ratings based on health code violations. The idea behind the site is to open up San Francisco government and tap into the creative expertise of our greatest resource – our residents. We hope DataSF.org will create a torrent of innovation similar to when the developer community was given access to the platforms behind popular technologies and devices like Facebook and Apple’s iPhone. Our effort to improve access to city data has already led to the creation of new services never imagined within the walls of government. Earlier this summer, our Department of Environment released recycling data that was used by a third party to develop EcoFinder, an iPhone application that helps residents recycle based on their location. By bringing city data and communities together in one location, we hope to stimulate local industry, create jobs and highlight San Francisco's creative culture and attractiveness as a place to live and work. As we look to deepen and broaden citizen engagement we will face common challenges: resistance to change, political will, and sustaining data streams from government sources to name a few. Collaboration with citizens, non-profits, vendors, academia, and our peers in government will be critical to overcoming these barriers. It will also take leadership as we've seen from President Obama and his CIO, Vivek Kundra to establish our ideals and set forth a shared vision for a more transparent and open government. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| RateItAll Now Lets You Submit Reviews About Anything By E-mail Posted: 19 Aug 2009 06:09 AM PDT
Here’s how simple it is: without the need to sign up for the service on beforehand, you can send an e-mail to reviews@rateitall.com, putting whatever you’re posting a review of in the subject line and the star rating as the first line of the e-mail body. Then simply write your review under that first line, attach images if you’d like to include some and send away. It will be posted on the RateItAll website (example), automagically be assigned to the correct topic (which will also get its unique e-mail address) and you can always edit it afterwards if need be. If you’re interested in learning more about the company, check out our earlier review of RateItAll from the beginning of this year, when the startup revamped its website, released an API and showed us that it was getting traction, in part thanks to its policy of sharing advertising revenue with its reviewers. This appears to still be the case, judging from this Compete graph (Coburn says it actually understates RateItAll’s traffic and growth rate, which we believe to be true).
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| The $44.5 Million Zyb Looks Like It Will Be ‘Vodafone People’ Posted: 19 Aug 2009 05:16 AM PDT
But we don’t think Vodafone wants us to know about it just yet. Although there’s a Twitter account with just over a hundred followers, nothing’s going on there and you won’t find much by Googling either. What’s clear, though, is that Vodafone is now aiming squarely at integrating social networks into its service in the UK and other territories. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| iLike Also Had Offers From Facebook and Amazon Posted: 19 Aug 2009 12:37 AM PDT
Much of that speculation is factually incorrect, we’ve confirmed from a source close the the deal. iLike, which has been profitable for over a year, had multiple offers to be acquired. Our source says that, in addition to MySpace’s offer, both Facebook and Amazon submitted bona fide written offers to buy the company. At least one other large company expressed interest to Allen & Company, iLike’s advisors to the deal. Activision Blizzard and Microsoft have been incorrectly rumored to have been seriously interested in the company, however. iLike ultimately chose MySpace based party on price, and partly on a fit with the buyer, sources say. Facebook was largely off the table due to building distrust between the companies. Also, multiple sources tell us that the deal negotiations with MySpace have been moving along quickly and are now virtually complete. There was no last minute canceled iLike board meeting (in fact no board meeting was scheduled), and no hiccups over tax issues on the deal. “People are literally making this drama up,” said one source. It’s also clear that the relatively low valuation that iLike commanded in this sale was due less to their performance and more to uncertainty created by Facebook over their future on the Facebook Platform. iLike is profitable and has 50+ million registered users. Unlike other music services they don’t have crushing streaming payments to make to labels because, well, they don’t stream music. They are certainly now in a position to stand on their own as a company over the long term. Except that ongoing uncertainty over Facebook’s intentions to compete with them directly as well as regular changes to the rules around Facebook Platform mean they could get cut off at any time. In other words, this is less about iLike’s financial and user growth and more about the value of users from Facebook Platform. Facebook seems unwilling to let Platform partners get too big. There continues to be no clear line as to where Facebook’s internal apps end and Platform begins. We continue to expect the deal to be closed and announced shortly. And we eagerly await Facebook’s response to their main competitor, MySpace, suddenly owning (the de facto) Facebook Music. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| What Are These Bars On My iPhone? Wait, You Mean AT&T Is Working?! Posted: 18 Aug 2009 11:38 PM PDT
But a few more days passed as people started telling me they were noticing the same thing. It would go in and out at certain times, but for the most part, AT&T’s network actually seemed to be working in the area. Were we all going crazy? No, says AT&T, who I contacted today to see what was going on that my service was actually working. “Improvements are underway,” is what I was told by a representative of the company after he asked around. “Most of this is 850 MHz spectrum being added.” That is inline with recent reports about upgrades for AT&T GSM network. But those upgrades were scheduled to start in Atlanta first. As I said, I’m in San Francisco. I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up (most of all mine), but it looks like AT&T may actually be taking the steps necessary to get its network working in the areas where service is particularly bad. I’m told that this upgrade process (at least in San Francisco) will be continuing over the coming weeks. When that’s complete, AT&T is offering to give us a walk through of the big changes they’re making to improve the network that we rip at just about every chance we get (which I think is fair, given what we pay for the service). I’m cautiously optimistic on this. Has anyone else been noticing better service on their iPhones or any other AT&T device? Let us know in the comments. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| TwitVid Launches First Twitter Video Application For The BlackBerry Posted: 18 Aug 2009 11:00 PM PDT
With the BlackBerry TwitVid application, TwitVid hopes to expand its overall market share for video sharing on Twitter. When atebits released Twitter for Mac, they partnered with ImageShack, the guys behind yFrog, to bring video recording integration into Tweetie. It doesn’t look like Tweetie will be adding Twitvid anytime soon, although the two are “in talks.” But TwitVid did announce two new partnerships with other mobile Twitter apps; one with UberTwitter, and the other with Twitterrific from The Icon Factory. With both applications, TwitVid is an option to upload video to Twitter. UberTwitter recently started putting advertising in its app, which was the most popular Blackberry application for Twitter, until its received quite the backlash from the community. A number of celebrities have also started using TwitVid as well, including Dane Cook, Mary J Blige, Ciara, Chris Daughtry, Baron Davis, Al Yankovic, David Blaine, Greg Grunberg, Stephen Fry and Dwight Howard, to name a few. Co-Founder and COO of TwitVid, Mo Al Adham, mentioned that over the past month, the number of videos uploaded to the site have increased more than 17x, and the number keeps growing. TwitVid hopes to become one of the main options for uploading video to Twitter.
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| Yahoo BOSS Might Be Bigger Than Bing Posted: 18 Aug 2009 08:17 PM PDT
One of the least appreciated, but smartest, moves Yahoo has made in the past year is to launch Yahoo BOSS, its open search APIs which lets developers create their own custom search engine using Yahoo’s algorithms. We use it to power search across the TechCrunch network. And we are not alone. It has become immensely popular. By last May, Yahoo BOSS was serving up 30 million search queries a day. You can see the rapid growth in search volume in the chart above, which comes from a Technology Review profile of Vik Singh, the 24-year-old engineer who was one of the main champions behind Yahoo BOSS. (He is one of Technology Review’s 2009 Innovators Under 35) At 30 million queries a day, that comes out to about 900 million queries a month, which would make Yahoo BOSS the fourth largest search engine in the U.S. with about a 6 percent share. That is just below the 9 percent share (and 1.2 billion queries a month) comScore estimates for Bing. But that is based on data from April. The chart is missing the last three months because Yahoo won’t update the numbers (I asked). Depending on the growth rate of Yahoo BOSS search queries since then, BOSS should now either be at par with Bing or even slightly larger. Between February, 2009 and April, 2009, search queries grew 50 percent (from 20 million a day to 30 million). Here are three different growth scenarios for the period May through July and the corresponding search volume numbers they would imply:
Remember, Bing was at an estimated 1.21 billion queries a month for the month of July. So BOSS might very well be as big as Bing. In fact, a couple months before the Bing-Yahoo deal, I kept hearing from people connected to Yahoo that BOSS on its own was bigger than Microsoft search. Now Microsoft owns BOSS as part of its deal to take over Yahoo’s search operations. On the day the deal was announced, Microsoft SVP Yusuf Mehdi told me that he wants to keep BOSS alive because “there is a lot of goodness there.” I’ll say. It adds about another six points to Bing’s overall search volume market share. (Click the market share table below to enlarge).
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| Let It Be…True. Beatles And iTunes Come Together Again In Rumors Posted: 18 Aug 2009 07:37 PM PDT
So anyway, every year there are rumors of The Beatles coming to iTunes. The rumors seem to start from just about everywhere: From Steve Jobs’ love of The Beatles, to EMI removing DRM on music, to the settlement of lawsuits with Apple Corp, to the appearance of Beatles’ album covers on Apple event promotions. There have even been quotes from Paul McCartney saying he thought such a deal would happen soon. The only problem is that it never ends up happening. But this year could actually be different. Well, maybe. First of all, The Beatles are definitely releasing their music in video game form for a new Rock Band game. That’s a first for them, branching out of traditional music distribution. This game is launching on 9/9/09, which happens to be the same day as the rumored next Apple event. That, in and of itself, doesn’t really mean much, but there are reports today that on the same day, The Beatles are releasing their entire catalog, digitally re-mastered for the first time, on CD, as Cult of Mac points out. Wait, CD? People still buy those? Yes, they do, though they’re increasingly going digital and choosing iTunes as their store. So it stands to reason that EMI and Apple Corps (the corporation that handles The Beatles’ affairs, not to be confused with the other Apple we’re talking about here) have looked at the numbers and seen the trends, and realize that if they really want the catalog to explode in sales, they’re going to have to release it online, and preferably through iTunes. But there’s more. In the press release for The Beatles re-mastered release there’s this nugget:
What does that sound like? It sounds like the perfect type of album for Apple to try out its new “Cocktail” music format, also set to be unveiled at the September event. While not all the details are known about Cocktail, it is believe that it’s a format that places emphasis on album purchases by giving downloaders all types of goodies like, yes, artwork, booklets, liner notes, photos and films. The press release says nothing of online versions of the albums, but it’s entirely possible that those are being kept as a surprise, and possibly even for Apple’s event. Or maybe not. But at the very least, you know that while the engineers were remastering the recordings, they were thinking about how the catalog would be dispersed over the web eventually too. It’s not a matter of “if”, but a question of “when”. And 9/9/09 sounds like the perfect date for a full-on assault of Beatles music on the masses. This is of course all just speculation, that history suggests will be wrong. But if we find out that the Apple event is at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco on 9/9/09, and that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr both happen to be in town…I’m just saying. And how would that be for a Steve Jobs return to the limelight after months away on medical leave? Boom! Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| MySpace Disables Auto-Play Of Profile Songs To Get Streaming Costs Under Control Posted: 18 Aug 2009 06:44 PM PDT
But all that popularity comes at a price - billions of free streaming songs are costing MySpace up to $10 million a month in streaming fees, says a source, and the joint venture may lose $20 million or more this year. To minimize those losses, MySpace has made a big change to its product - songs no longer auto-play when you visit a MySpace user profile. Autoplays accounted for a billion or more song streams per month, and were costing MySpace a significant amount of money. Turning off that hose is a cost saving maneuver. This also has the benefit, sources say, of improving the user experience and providing labels with better listening data. Personally, I’ve always disliked the autoplay feature on MySpace, although execs there tended to defend it as one of the distinguishing features of the service. Users can still opt-in to autoplay songs. The product continues to improve (and the iLike acquisition should accelerate that improvement). Another key advantage MySpace Music has over competitors - their ability to lock up lots of exclusive content for users. And the service is definitely growing. In July we reported that traffic grew tenfold over the nine months since launch: niques have grown 190% since launch in September 2008 and 1017%. It has grown 4.2 million unique monthly visitors to 12.1 million since launch. It is now solidly in the no. 2 position behind AOL Music, and growing fast. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| YC-Funded Flightcaster Tells You When Your Flight Is Delayed Hours Before The Airline Will Posted: 18 Aug 2009 05:35 PM PDT
So how is that possible? Given how poor the ‘On Time’ indicator can be, it should come as little surprise that the airlines often know your flight will be delayed long before they tell you. In fact, they have an incentive to keep you waiting as long as possible, otherwise they’ll have to manage the logistics of rebooking more people on other flights. Flightcaster taps into a variety of data sources to try to uncover the truth. The service keeps track of FAA alerts, weather, network congestion, historical trends, and other factors, which are all run through an algorithm to provide an estimate of how likely it is that a given flight will be delayed. When it makes its guess, it provides you with a percentage chance, along with the reasons it thinks the flight will be delayed (for example, it might say that there is a 90% chance of a 2 hour delay because your plane is still sitting 200 miles away at another airport). With that knowledge, you can attempt to book another flight hours before everyone else does (Domestic only for now — international support is planned for a future release). This could be a godsend for businesses travelers, but I wonder what casual travelers will do when they hear a flight is possibly delayed. Say, for example, you saw that your flight had an 80% chance of being delayed by two hours because of poor weather. What then? It would be foolish to plan on arriving at the airport two hours late — the odds may be in your favor, but if you get unlucky, you could stand to lose quite a bit (especially if your ticket is non-refundable). That said, if you’re the sort of person comfortable with rebooking flights, as most business travelers are, then the app could be very, very useful. Flightcaster allows you to check flights statuses on its website, and also offers applications for the iPhone and BlackBerry which normally run $10 each (in honor of the site’s launch both apps are currently only $5 apiece). Beyond the smartphone apps, Flightcaster also plans to generate revenue by offering corporate customers a dashboard from which they can monitor the flight status of multiple employees, which would allow companies to coordinate around delays.
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| FriendFeed Cofounder Paul Buchheit Discusses Facebook Acquisition (video) Posted: 18 Aug 2009 03:55 PM PDT Robert Scoble and I ran into freshly-acquired FriendFeed cofounder Paul Buchheit at a brunch on Sunday. I pulled out my trusty Android myTouch and with his permission asked him a few questions about the sale to Facebook a week ago. Apologies for the audio quality - Powerset’s Barney Pell, BillShrink’s Peter Pham and others were chatting loudly nearby (which led to a side discussion with Pell on the exact price Microsoft paid for Powerset in 2008). A full transcript of the interview is below. A few interesting details came out of the interview with Buchheit. First, the deal was actually signed on Sunday evening (August 9), and these pictures were in fact taken that evening, he says. Buchheit also says that the WSJ got the price wrong, but won’t give more details. Paul Buchheit: “The more people say about the deal, the more wrong they are. There's a lot of inaccurate things being reported…There have been a lot of details and for some reason, the more details there are the further they get from the truth.” On whether FriendFeed will live on as an independent product: Michael Arrington: Back to FriendFeed, everyone's kind of reporting to different groups. This tells me that FriendFeed's disappearing in a year. Is it going to stay on as its own brand, its own product, can users stay secure that FriendFeed's going to be around? Robert Scoble: He promised me it would be up for at least a month. (laughs) Paul Buchheit: It will evolve over time. On nonexistent rumors that FriendFeed had threatened to sue Facebook over copying of features: Michael Arrington: What about the rumors that you had threatened or had actually sued facebook, and that's what lead to this acquisition over them stealing all of your ideas. Paul Buchheit: No, I've never even heard that rumor. Michael Arrington: I just made that up right now Buchheit also talked about FriendFeed’s habit of inventing features before anyone else, and dealing with the copying from Twitter and Facebook. He also says that the day the deal was announced was FriendFeed’s “biggest growth day ever.” The full transcript: Michael Arrington This is Mike Arrington, I'm here with Paul Buchheit, Co-founder and CEO of Friend Feed, and as always Robert Scoble. Robert Scoble: Number one user of FriendFeed. (inaudible) MA: How many follower people do you have on FriendFeed? RS: 47,000 MA: 47,000. Wow, I have 0. RS: I know, you deleted your account. MA: Well, temporarily, but now they won't turn it back on. So Paul, it's been a week since the announcement, and you actually signed it about a week ago, the FriendFeed acquisition. Paul Buchheit: Yeah, Sunday night. MA: Now you guys haven't commented on the purchase price but the Wall St. Journal came out and said 50. Without commenting specifically on the numbers, was that incorrect? I've got an indication there was something wrong with that. PB: Yeah, I obviously can't really comment on the details. The more people say about the deal, the more wrong they are. There's a lot of inaccurate things being reported. MA: Is it materially inaccurate? The number was significantly different? PB: I don't want to comment on that. There have been a lot of details and for some reason, the more details there are the further they get from the truth. MA: This is something I asked you guys about the other night, you guys are all reporting into products or into engineering Mike, what's the deal… MA: (turns to Barney Pell) How much did Powerset really sell for? Barney Pell: God, I mean it sold for…I didn't buy a car, put it that way. MA: It was 100 million, 85 million? BP: I don't remember (laughter) RS: That's called entrepreneur PR 101, "I don't remember" MA: Back to FriendFeed, everyone's kind of reporting to different groups. This tells me that FriendFeed's disappearing in a year. Is it going to stay on as its own brand, its own product, can users stay secure that FriendFeed's going to be around? PB: (inaudible)…We're not going to switch it off or anything like that. The exact form it will take two years from now, I can't really say, but I couldn't really say that before (inaudible) products do evolve (inaudible) We all like the product, we all use it, and none of us want to see it disappear. We're going to make sure it's taken care of. MA: You're not going to answer that question at all. RS: He promised me it would be up for at least a month. (laughs) PB: It will evolve over time. MA: What about the rumors that you had threatened or had actually sued facebook, and that's what lead to this acquisition over them stealing all of your ideas. PB: No, I've never even heard that rumor. MA: I just made that up right now. RS: The new journalism, make shit up as you ask the founder about it. PB: I actually like when people copy my ideas because I just like to see things out there. I mean, to me… MA: Well you say that now after you got bought, but you weren't saying that in January, were you? PB: Yeah I like to see my ideas. That's part of what makes this whole thing fun is that we've been able to have some impact. And obviously I want wherever I'm working on to be successful, and I also like that the things we do have a broader effect…(inaudible) One of the things I thought was great about email was not only did we make this really great email product for the many millions of people who were using it, but we also impacted the community through everyone else in the world who uses email (inaudible) crazy expectations Yahoo had encountered by rewriting their whole thing, and giving people much more storage. RS: Were you always bugged when I came in the office and said, "you're the facebook R&D department?" PB: Yeah, we just make things first, it's just a fact. RS: So are you now the official R&D department? PB: We're part of it (inaudible) I don't think there's an official department, it's all of engineering. MA: What was usage growth last week when the announcement came? PB: It was pretty good. MA: Your best day ever right? PB: The biggest growth day ever. RS: How come Demi Moore joined, right after PB: I don't know, I'll ask her next time. (inaudible) MA: So were there other potential acquirers, were you talking to others or was this really Facebook … PB: We had interest from pretty much everyone for quite a while. MA: Even Twitter? PB: I don't want to be specific about anything, all the companies involved have confidentiality… RS: Is there something you wish you had done differently (inaudible) PB: That's a really interesting question…nothing comes to mind but with reflection, I'm sure I can think of something. MA: How long before you leave and start your next thing? PB: Hopefully not for a long time. MA: Till you vest? (laughter) PB: No but seriously, part of what makes it really exciting is because facebook is at this really interesting point in history. It's at this point where it's almost inevitably (inaudible) successful…(inaudible) that's pretty exciting. MA: So you won the top most promising startup of 2008 at the Crunchies earlier this year. Do you think that was the main driver of the acquisition? PB: (laughs) I have to assume it was…the gorilla was in the term sheet in fact. MA: Oh really? PB: No (laughs) MA: Alright, I'll let you go back to the party, thanks very much. 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| Facebook 3.0 May Be The Most Useful App On The iPhone Yet Posted: 18 Aug 2009 03:49 PM PDT
This new version simply improves upon the old one in just about every way imaginable. Not only does it have a wide range of new options and features, many of which we went over previously, but it’s actually faster. And the design is rather brilliant. Built by Facebook engineer Joe Hewitt, the app manages to maintain the good practices found in many iPhone apps, while at the same time creating its own unique look and feel. Features Nowhere is this new look more evident than on the new Facebook home screen. It’s sort of like the iPhone main screen, but with a different, distinctive design. The large buttons are easy to hit, and best of all, you can add people’s profiles and pages as icons as well, to provide shortcuts to your favorites. The main screen that you were probably used to from the old app now resides in the upper left corner of the main screen, as the “News Feed.” It largely looks the same but the ability to “like” items has been added to the ability to comment on them. You can also now easily take and post videos if you have an iPhone 3GS. Hitting the “News Feed” button in the upper right hand corner, allows you to sort this feed by the various filters you’ve set up. The “Profile” area is the next button on the main screen. The overall look and feel have been updated, and now also include the “like” and “comment” elements on the Wall. You can also now see your profile pictures.
The “Inbox” is the next main area, and it now features not only new messages, but updates from your groups, and sent messages. But the best thing about this feature is how fast messages load. It’s leaps and bounds better than trying to load messages on the regular Facebook, and I think from now on I’ll simply use the app to respond to any emails I get through it. The “Chat” and “Requests” areas remain largely the same, though both have been cleaned up. The big new feature of this app has to be “Events”. The lack of a way to even see events in the previous version of the app was a major complaint against it — it had people using the web interface to log-in specifically to find events. Now, not only can you see them in the app, you can see details like the address of the event and host of it. And you can RSVP, and you can see who else is attending. With so many Facebook users now using its events feature for social gatherings, it simply made no sense not to have this in there. The Events area also features a “Birthdays” tab to specifically see which of your friends’ birthday is coming up. The “Photos” area now allows you to create new photo albums, and it is significantly easier and more obvious as to how to tag someone in a picture. And at last, Facebook photos allow you to take advantage of the iPhone’s multi-touch to pinch zoom in and out of pictures. The last main page element is “Notes,” which is new. You can see, edit and create new notes from here, just in case your Status Updates don’t give you enough room for all you want to say. Below the main elements is the “Notifications” area that seems to update in near real-time when someone comments or “likes” one of your items or an item you’ve commented on. What’s Missing
When we asked him about any new features for that build, Hewitt said he wasn’t ready to comment on specifics yet. But it’s probably a good bet that Push Notifications will be one of them. And earlier today, he also noted that there will be a landscape mode in 3.1. And he’s also noted that videos recorded on the iPhone 3GS don’t yet play in the app because Facebook doesn’t encode them in an iPhone-compatible way. That should change soon too. The bigger omission, as I see it, is the lack of a robust search tool. Facebook recently rolled out the upgraded search functionality on its site, but on the iPhone searching is limited to profiles and pages. Basically, it’s useless, as you can get much of this information from the Friends area. If Facebook is serious about search, it needs to make basically everything that gets updated on the site (allowed for by individual’s privacy settings, of course) searchable on its mobile app in real-time. That would be a killer feature. Overall Overall, the Facebook 3.0 iPhone app is a huge step forward as a social tool. In fact, in terms of the data it lets you access, it’s hard to argue that any app is more robust. It’s now basically a way to keep track of and remark about what your friends are up to, an always up-to-date contact list, a picture and video sharer, an inbox, an IM client, and a event coordinator, all tied to over 250 million social users. With the additions of Push Notifications and a better search tool, it will be nearly perfect. And all of these new features wrapped into an app that is even zippier, makes this a great (and free) upgrade. Update: Hewitt has just let us know about another really nice feature. If you tap the Facebook logo, you’ll automatically go back to the main home screen. Tap it again and you’ll return to where you just were. Subtle, but nice feature.
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| Will Rosetta Stone’s Stumble Kill that IPO Momentum? Posted: 18 Aug 2009 03:08 PM PDT
That plan– announced just last week– was suddenly scrapped this week when the company announced its third quarter profits will be some ten cents less per share than expected. The company cited higher than expected sales, marketing and development costs. Note that this isn’t economy related. The sales didn’t fall off– expenses just weren’t managed well. CFO Brian Helman referred to a pretty big screw up from the marketing department in Rosetta Stone’s press release:
In other words, the business is fine. The management team just looks like a bunch of clowns now. I’m assuming the VCs are annoyed and so are Rosetta Stone’s bankers. William Blair & Co. publicly lashed out about the incident to a Wall Street Journal reporter, saying it reflected poorly on Rosetta Stone and the bank that was going to lead the follow-on round. This is bad news for more than just Rosetta Stone. It’s possible the deal sours the budding resurgence in sub-$500 million market cap companies too. As we wrote about last week, a small initial float of shares can help a new IPO’s stock hold up well, but it also means VCs and insiders can’t easily sell without crashing the stock. In the case of Rosetta Stone the float was about 11 million shares, with insiders and investors holding the balance of the roughly 20 million shares outstanding. Liquidity was already going to be tough given a thin average trading volume of 328,000 or so per day. Thanks to this snafu, Norwest Equity Partners and ABS Ventures won’t be getting any liquidity from the company anytime soon. And with how few analysts follow small-cap public companies these days, investors may walk away from Rosetta Stone and never remember to return. It’s a shame. I’m a huge fan of Rosetta Stone’s products, as I’m currently using them to learn Mandarin and Portuguese. The software has an impressive user interface that makes the drudgery of learning a new language actually feel more like playing a game. I can actually lose myself for hours on Rosetta Stone, invariably leading to an angry email from Arrington asking where some post is. When you find yourself suddenly speaking and understanding a new language, it’s that special kind of high-tech magic. Over the last few months, I’ve been testing out the hosted version of Rosetta Stone, which had some annoying microphone glitches a few months ago, but has worked brilliantly since I downloaded a newer version. Perhaps the management team needs its own upgrade. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Polyvore Looks Stylin’ In This New $5.6 Million Round Of Funding Posted: 18 Aug 2009 02:10 PM PDT
The service, which just crossed 4 million unique visitors and 150 million pageviews a month, allows web shoppers to pull their favorite items any online store and mix and match to create personalized outfits online. Users can then share their creations with friends, and, most importantly, anyone can then buy the items shown. This social side of shopping has users engaged. The average visitor spends 10 minutes on the site each time they log on, we’re told. The new $5.6 million Series B round is led by Matrix Partners, alongside previous investors Benchmark Capital and Harrison Metal Capital. Previously, the site had raised $2.5 million from Benchmark, Harrison Metal, Reid Hoffman, and Nirav Tolia. Polyvore launched in 2007, founded by a bunch of ex-Yahoo employees. Since then, it has expanded the team with some talent from the likes of Google and Intuit. The plan for this new money is to further expand the engineering and sales teams, and to promote growth. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Android v. iPhone Religious Battle Rages Within TechCrunch Posted: 18 Aug 2009 01:58 PM PDT
A thread from earlier today is below. Read from the bottom up - the post I refer to, which basically describes MG perfectly, is here:
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| Center’d Brings Its Local Discovery Engine To The iPhone Posted: 18 Aug 2009 12:58 PM PDT
Center’d competes with sites like Yelp and CitySearch, but instead of simply offering text reviews, the service scours the web for reviews and descriptions and performs semantic analysis on them, allowing you to perform more detailed searches than you could on other sites. In my testing I found the app’s manual search mode, which lets you search by keywords, to be pretty hit-or-miss. During one search for “large portions” Center’d pulled up a list of matching restaurants, but the app didn’t do a good job explaining why it thought they had large portions (you’d expect it to display any relevant text in its database, but it didn’t). In fact, when I looked through the details of the top hit for “large portions”, that restaurant’s top keyword was “small plates”. Go figure. Search leaves something to be desired, but that doesn’t mean the app isn’t worth checking out. Its City Guides functionality, which lets you search using a number of pre-set filters, is actually quite helpful. To use it, you first choose a description of what you’re looking for (options include things like ‘Kid-friendly’, ‘Romantic’, and ‘Outdoors’). Then you choose the type of venue you’re looking for, be it a restaurant, event, shopping or attraction. The app pulls up a list of matches, and for the most part I found these to be pretty accurate — a search for kid-friendly restaurants in Palo Alto pulled up local favorite ‘The Creamery’ as the top result, and the app also made it easy to pull up a list of local bars with outdoor patios. Aside from the iPhone app, Center’d is seeing strong growth, though its traffic is still pretty modest. Since April the service has doubled its traffic.  Also worth checking out is Yelp’s new iPhone application, which includes deals from local merchants. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| 140 Characters? That’s A Lot Of Writing. Just Post A Picture On DailyBooth Posted: 18 Aug 2009 12:54 PM PDT
What is it? It’s a Twitter-like quick message service, only the main form of communication is pictures. You can send pictures of anything you want, though most users tend to send images of themselves, photo booth-style, and attach messages to them. The result is a crazy amount of interaction in the community. And interestingly enough, unlike Twitter, it seems to be a hotbed for teenage activity. While there have been no shortage of startups that have launched picture services for Twitter, the Y Combinator-backed DailyBooth is a little different in that it tries to stand on its own by emphasizing its own social stream (though there is Twitter tie-in as well). In that regard it’s more like Radar than TwitPic or some of the other standard Twitter photo services. But Radar places an emphasis on cameraphone pictures, as I said, DailyBooth seems to be populated more by photos of people taking pictures of themselves, sitting at their computers. Though you can upload pictures from a mobile device as well. And DailyBooth’s growth has been pretty amazing. As you can see in the chart below, since its launch in January, DailyBooth has grown to over 3 million unique visitors a month. And they have a growth rate now of about 35% a month, which means they should easily hit 4 million uniques this month, founder Jon Wheatley tells us.
One reason for this growth has to be the active community. I uploaded one picture last night around 2 AM, just my standard profile icon, and it almost immediately got 8 comments even though no one was explicitly following me. This morning, my inbox was bombarded by notifications from DailyBooth, new pictures notifications, new follower notifications, recent activity on my pictures, etc. Sure, that was a little annoying (you can change the email alerts in your settings), but also nice to see such a new community with that kind of activity. Y Combinator’s Paul Graham says that at one point they had considered a name change for DailyBooth, but then realized just how engaged the community already was with the service (the picture at the top is just one example), and that a name change may have caused a revolt. The service recently added a bunch of new features including the ability to send DailyBooth images to many of the major social networks. And you can automatically set your latest DailyBooth picture to be your MySpace or Facebook profile picture. I often find myself clicking on pictures posted to Twitter even if I don’t really know the person. And one of the main features I’ve liked of FriendFeed and now newer services like Brizzly is that they put pictures sent to Twitter inline, so you don’t have to click anywhere to see them. DailyBooth takes that one step farther and makes it all about the pictures. And it does so in a simpler and more social atmosphere than a site like Flickr. The results seem to speak for themselves in their growth.
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| Ow.ly And Bit.ly Fastest, Most Reliable URL Shorteners. Tr.Im Comes Up . . . Short. Posted: 18 Aug 2009 12:01 PM PDT
When it comes to shortening links, the brevity of the URL is not the only factor you should consider. Speed and reliability are also important. After all, the main purpose of URL shortening services such as bit.ly and TinyURL are to redirect you back to the original (long) link someone shortened in the first place. You want the redirect to be fast and reliable. The rise of Twitter and its character constraints has made URL shortening services popular. But which one is the best? Royal Pingdom decided to conduct a test over the past 30 days to put nine of URL shortening services through the paces. Overall, Ow.ly and Bit.ly came out on top, while Tr.im came in dead last (no wonder nobody would buy it). Pingdom tested two things: the average time it took each service to load a page (overhead) and its uptime. The fastest service was actually Is.gd (with an average load time of 163 milliseconds), followed by bit.ly (261 milliseconds) and ow.ly (289 milliseconds). Tr.im was the third slowest after Cli.gs and Snip.url. But when it comes to reliability, Tr.im had nearly twice the estimated yearly downtime as the next worse service (Twurl). Even with nearly 80 hours of estimated annual downtime, Tr.im still had 99.10 percent reliability. Ow.ly, however, had 100% uptime, and bit.ly came in second with 99.98 percent. (Is.gd came in fifth).
When both the reliability and speed rankings are combined, ow.ly and bit.ly tie for first place overall, followed by Is.gd and Su.pr. Here is the complete ranking (the scores are the rankings for each test added together): Overall Ranking
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Is Mint Going After Freshbooks? Its New Features Point In That Direction. Posted: 18 Aug 2009 11:18 AM PDT
Personal finance tracking site Mint.com added a bunch of new budgeting and trending features today. Mint presents consumers with a financial dashboard based on spending and income data from their bank, credit card, and other financial accounts. It expanded its charts to include spending over time, income history, asset allocation, and net worth over time. You can now plan for irregular expenses such as property taxes, auto insurance, or vacations. Budgeted items can be rolled over into the next month if they haven’t been used up, and Mint now figures out your income based on your paycheck. It takes all of this data and projects your savings or shortfall over time. All of these new features will be appreciated by Mint’s 1.4 million registered (and 550,000 active) users, but they also point to a new direction for the site: bookkeeping for small businesses. Mint now has pretty robust reporting for personal expenses, income, and savings. These same tools could very easily be tweaked to help small businesses track costs, revenues, and profits. All Mint needs to do is change the names of the categories, and add an invoicing feature to go after basic accounting sites like FreshBooks or Outright, which are in turn going after Intuit’s more fully-featured QuickBooks. For entrepreneurs with limited time on their hands, the ability to track both personal and business finances in one place would have obvious appeal.
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There’s no shortage of people who use their Twitter accounts for both personal and business use. That includes plenty of bloggers who send out links to all their articles along with their more mundane updates throughout the day. Some people love this, others hate it, as they just want the links. And while some sites, like 
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Private companies mulling the big move to the Nasdaq should take a look at Rosetta Stone's
In a world where print media is collapsing, it would seem that fashion magazines could easily make a case for why they’ll still exist in the future. As great as their content may or may not be, a large part of their success is about seeing the pictures of the hot new fashions. But there’s an online site that arguably does that better too, 
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It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Translated into this Twitter world we now live in, that’s like, thousands of characters. Thousands easily beats 140, so the people constantly complaining about Twitter’s brevity need to check out 
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