The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Been Waiting For DotSpots? Come And Get It.
- Collecta Releases Its Real-Time Search API; OneRiot Responds With A Challenge
- Oracle To Sun Customers (And IBM): “We’re In It To Win It”
- BrowserMob Launches Monitoring Tool For Website Health
- TwitterCounter Wants To Count Dollars, Too
- RankSpeed’s Sentiment Search Engine Tracks Blogs And Twitter
- IMshopping Opens Twitter And Human Powered Shopping Search Engine To Retailers
- Data From Seedcamp Shows The Startup Trends In Europe
- Ondeego Launches AppCentral, A Mobile App Store For Enterprise Tools
- Facebook And StudiVZ Dispute Ends With Settlement
- RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win
- Bing Loves The Porn Hounds
- The SportsStream Comes To SBNation
- Is Facebook Preparing To Launch ‘Facebook Labs’ For Experimental Features?
- TweepML Gives You A Way To Make Your Own Twitter Suggested User List
- Somebody Has To Say It: It’s Time For iTunes Lite
- Facebook’s Experimental Desktop Notifications App For Mac Is Very, Very Slick
- Pandora Gets A Hole In The Head
- Oh Yeah. Remember the Palm Pixi? We Saw That, Too
- Hands-on With iTunes 9.0: Bright and Roomy
- Google Rolls Out The Mother Of All Updates: A Larger Search Box
- TechCrunch50: Dick Costolo, Satish Dharmaraj, Bradley Horowitz, George Zachary and Lior Zorea join Panel of Experts
- Google Preps To Turn On Chrome Extensions
- Hands-on with the new iPod nano
- Salesforce CEO Benioff: We Are Cloud Computing (and Twitter) Evangelists
| Been Waiting For DotSpots? Come And Get It. Posted: 10 Sep 2009 08:47 AM PDT
The service lets users annotate any part of a web page, from a single quote to the entire page, leave a comment and socialize it with friends. It’s like commenting on just a paragraph from a story or page instead of the whole thing, and users can add rich media to their comments as well. From our post on their demo:
There is also an overview video below – users can access the service via a browser plugin, and soon you’ll see publishers implement it directly on their sites. Thousands of people have been waiting a year to get in and use the service, but today TechCrunch readers can jump to the front of the line. The first 500 people to sign up at this link should get in immediately. And if you’re too late, don’t worry. The service should launch publicly soon. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||||
| Collecta Releases Its Real-Time Search API; OneRiot Responds With A Challenge Posted: 10 Sep 2009 08:41 AM PDT
It’s the battle of the real-time search APIs. This morning Collecta released an API in beta for developers who want to integrate real-time search results into their Web apps. To try to spark interest in the API, it has put up a ChallengePost offering a 15-inch Macbook Pro (retail value $1,699) to whoever comes up with the best mashup. Meanwhile, competitor OneRiot is trying to steal Collecta’s thunder with its own ChallengePost offering $1,500 to the developer that can come up with the best real-time visualization using its API, which it launched publicly back in July. The battle for the most developer buzz and engagement is worth more than $1,500 to each company. In fact, OneRiot’s early lead in real-time search is precisely because of the growing adoption of its API among other Websites, browser add-ons, and apps. Collecta’s API is a simple REST API that brings back 15 search results per query, with a limit of 5,000 queries per hour. It includes the most recent blog posts, news articles, comments, photos (from Flickr, TwitPic, and yFrog), and videos (from YouTube and Ustream). The API does not include Twitter results, although that is what dominates Collecta’s own real-time search engine. CEO Gerry Campbell says that since Twitter offers its own search API, developers are better off going directly to the source. But offering an API which offers all real-time results in one easy call would be preferable. OneRiot’s API, for instance, does include results influenced by Twitter. The unique thing about Collecta, however, is that it creates a continual XMPP stream for search results on its site. While it is not currently offering an XMPP API, Campbell says that the next version of the API will, which means that developers will be able to create apps with a steady stream of real-time results that just flow into their apps without any refresh. The real battle here is not for $1,500 or a Macbook. It is for which API will spur the most creative and useful apps. Let the battle begin. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| Oracle To Sun Customers (And IBM): “We’re In It To Win It” Posted: 10 Sep 2009 08:05 AM PDT Gotta love this advertisement from Oracle, directed at current Sun Microsystems customers (and now rival IBM), stating its intentions with SPARC and Solaris before the monster acquisition is even a done deal. It’s a full-page ad that appeared in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal today, and you can find it online on the Oracle website as well. However, as Matt Asay noted earlier, no mention of MySQL in the ad. (Thanks to @Toon for the tip)
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| BrowserMob Launches Monitoring Tool For Website Health Posted: 10 Sep 2009 08:03 AM PDT  TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| TwitterCounter Wants To Count Dollars, Too Posted: 10 Sep 2009 07:04 AM PDT
A decent amount of Twitter users regularly visit the TwitterCounter website to get statistics based on their account name – Compete pegs the number of monthly uniques at approx. 650,000 – and the team behind the service believes companies and organizations could well be willing to pay them a monthly fee for a premium service with more features and more detailed stats. In what the company dubbed the Premium Dashboard, paying customers are able to compare and track multiple accounts and obtain stats from over a year’s time rather than the maximum of 3 months non-paying visitors get to see. In addition, TwitterCounter ‘pro’ users gain the ability to export statistics in CSV format and enjoy their graphs in a larger format. Patrick De Laive from TwitterCounter tells us support for multiple account tracking and comparisons was an oft-requested feature and that the team, which is also behind a ‘MyBlogLog for Twitter’ service called TwitterRemote and events like The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam, is happy to finally be able to offer it. Not that the self-funded startup wasn’t already trying to monetize the web service: they also offer a way for users to gain more followers by ‘featuring’ them at a per-view rate (e.g. 100,000 views for $289). Pricing for the Premium Dashboard is based on the number of users you would like to track, starting at $25 per month for 5 users and up to $198 per month for 100 users. Call me crazy, but while pricing may sound steep I can actually see why companies – and particularly their PR and marketing departments – would be willing to cough that up for this type of service. Let Twitter work out how and if it will make money on their own in the meantime. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out I used to write for The Next Web blog)
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| RankSpeed’s Sentiment Search Engine Tracks Blogs And Twitter Posted: 10 Sep 2009 06:00 AM PDT  Detecting sentiment in content on the web, including Tweets and news articles is becoming an increasingly popular way of interpreting data. With that it mind, RankSpeed is launching a search tool that does a sentiment analysis of Tweets and blogs. RankSpeed lets you search for any keyword or tag on a website and attach a sentiment to the search. So you can use the emotional concepts of good, useful, easy, secure, and RankSpeed will then give you search results of blog posts that match the subject and sentiment. For each result, the engine computes the percentage of bloggers that have said a particular product or site is good or easy or useful. If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is. It’s a little easier to understand when you take a look at the site. You can also filter your search by blogs that are considered (by RankSpeed) to be more useful, easy and so on. A website is ranked as more useful than another if its name is more often associated with “useful”, “helpful” or other synonyms in blog posts and tweets. For example, I did a search for “good” Twitter Apps. The top result was Identi.ca, a microblogging site similar to Twitter. Hmmm, that’s not quite a perfect match for “good” Twitter Apps. But when you do a search for “popular” Twitter Apps, the top results include Tweetdeck, UberTwitter and other common Twitter apps. While RankSpeed says its search engine tracks 3 million websites and blogs, it’s obvious that the site’s technology is not perfect by any means. Another feature that is missing is the ability to see the “sources” (or blogs and Tweets) of the results. If I saw that Tweetdeck was rated as the most popular Twitter app in the search results, I probably would want to see who found it popular in order to validate the results. Although the site provides an interesting way to search blogs and Tweets for sentiment-driven keywords, it won’t replace Google anytime soon. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| IMshopping Opens Twitter And Human Powered Shopping Search Engine To Retailers Posted: 10 Sep 2009 05:00 AM PDT  IMshopping, a human- powered shopping search site and Twitter shopping service, is rolling out a new feature, Merchant Answers, that lets consumers ask shopping questions directly on retailers' sites via an embeddable chat widget. We reviewed IMshopping’s May launch here. IMshopping’s site is a shopping 411 service in which human guides on call respond to product questions and provide personalized recommendations for users about what product best suits their needs. IMshopping’s Merchant Answer’s feature is similar in functionality, except it is branded and specialized for a particular retailer’s site. As a consumer is shopping on an e-commerce site, he or she will see a “get assistance” or similarly worded button on the site. When consumers click on this, they will be led to a window where they can ask a shopping question specific to that site. The question is routed to human shopping guides for an answer. Guides can be employees of the retailer or can be from IMshopping’s community of trained shopping guides. Answers are given back to the consumer with links to the product in question. Shoppers are also shown recent questions asked by other users on the retailers page. Merchants can also use Twitter to help answer consumer questions. The merchant can link their Twitter account to their IMshopping account and once that is done, any Twitter user can send a message to the retailer’s account and the Tweet will automatically be answered by a shopping guide, with the answer sent back as a direct message. IMshopping hopes to fill the gap of personalized, detail-oriented service that e-commerce sites don't have, since these sites are focused less on answering technical questions about a product and more on price and reviews. IMshopping’s standalone site also leverages Twitter, so that users can directly ask questions by messaging @imshopping on Twitter and receive a direct message with the answer and product details. So how is IMshopping making money from this new venture? The site has implemented a monthly subscription pricing model based on the volume of questions asked. For $300 per month, a retailer can get 300 questions answered, which includes the payment for IMshopping’s guides. For $1000 per month, a retailer can have 2500 questions answered, with additional guides included. Twenty online retailers including BargainCell, AMB Furniture and Rainbow Appliance have already created shopping communities powered by IMshopping on their sites. Since the startup’s launch in May, the site has delivered 52,000 human recommendations via Twitter and web. But as we’ve said in the past, human search hasn’t been to successful in the past; as evidenced by ChaCha's former business model. While human assistance is definitely a powerful part of the shopping experience, many online retailer have online chat assistance to help with the process. IMshopping’s tool may resonate with smaller sites which have trouble doing this in-house but many major retailers already have this functionality. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| Data From Seedcamp Shows The Startup Trends In Europe Posted: 10 Sep 2009 04:20 AM PDT
The data points are interesting because they show the trends in how tech companies are being formed from the primordial soup of Europe’s startup scene and which trends are emerging. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| Ondeego Launches AppCentral, A Mobile App Store For Enterprise Tools Posted: 10 Sep 2009 04:12 AM PDT
But finding enterprise-grade apps on these stores in between the plethora of games, music apps and general-purpose software programs for consumers that are crowding the platforms isn’t exactly a walk in the park. Enter AppCentral, a venture of San Francisco-based Ondeego, which is in essence an enterprise mobile app only store that will be launching today at GigaOM’s Mobilize09 event. The goal of the new app store? To address the needs of enterprise workers and their IT departments while at the same time attempting to create a vivid ecosystem of enterprise-focused mobile developers.
With AppCentral, the company hopes to change all that. Interestingly, AppCentral allows companies to manage third party and proprietary applications remotely while simultaneously securing data within them. Mobile apps can use Ondeego’s patent-pending ‘Securitization’ technology, enabling 3rd party application data to be remotely locked or wiped. AppCentral is platform agnostic, supporting applications for all major enterprise-grade smartphones, although Ondeego says it can’t support the iPhone yet due to ‘legal restrictions’. An app store reserved for enterprise mobile applications is certainly an intriguing idea, and Ondeego is tapping into a large, lucrative space that is poised for growth in the years to come. The question is if the mobile app market is mature enough – and IT departments willing enough – for the AppCentral to make waves short-term. My guess is Ondeego will get their fair share of direct competitors sooner rather than later, startups and giant corporations alike, and time will tell if they’ll be able to stand their ground. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| Facebook And StudiVZ Dispute Ends With Settlement Posted: 10 Sep 2009 02:40 AM PDT  Facebook and StudiVZ have reached a settlement in the alleged plagiarism case, with the German social network operator paying Zuckerberg and co an undisclosed sum as part of the deal. Both companies will be withdrawing their respective claims both in the United States and Germany and continue to operate their business as before (statement in German). StudiVZ and Facebook have agreed not to disclose any more details about the settlement.TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win Posted: 09 Sep 2009 09:37 PM PDT
Editor’s note: With all of the debate lately between RSSCloud versus PubSubHubbub, we wanted to hear from a developer who could actually tell us which one might be better and why. The following guest post is written by Josh Fraser, the co-founder of EventVue, who is an active contributor to PubSubHubbub in his free time. He has contributed several client libraries for PubSubHubbub including a WordPress plugin. Guess which side of the debate he falls on. In the past few months, a lot of attention has been given to the rise of the real-time web. The problem is that the web wasn’t designed with real-time in mind. There is a huge need for the tech community to get behind new protocols that will power this fundamental shift in how web applications work. Today I want to take a look at two of the leading protocols that enable real-time notifications on the web. While there are older protocols that enable real-time notifications like XEP-0060, PubSubHubbub (PuSH) and rssCloud are two new protocols which show a lot of promise of gaining adoption. Both PuSH and rssCloud address a fundamental flaw in the way web applications work today. Currently, getting updates on the web requires constant polling. Subscribers are forced to act like nagging children asking, “Are we there yet?” Subscribers must constantly ping the publisher to ask if there are new updates even if the answer is “no” 99% of the time. This is terribly inefficient, wastes resources, and makes it incredibly hard to find new content in as soon as it appears. Both protocols flip the current model on its head so that updates are event driven rather than request driven. By that I mean that both protocols eliminate the need for polling by essentially telling subscribers, “Don’t ask us if there’s anything new. We’ll tell you.” Dave Winer deserves the credit for coming up with the idea long before anyone else. In fact, the <cloud> element was added to the RSS 2.0 specification in 2001, but has only recently been revived (largely in response to the interest in PuSH). rssCloud made major progress this week with the announcement that WordPress was adding rssCloud support for all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.com. In contrast, PuSH is currently enabled for well over 100 million feeds with adopters including Friendfeed, Blogger, Google Reader, LiveJournal, Google Alerts and FeedBurner. I expect to see many more services adopt these new protocols soon. But if you find yourself confused about how they are different, you’re not alone. Conceptually, both protocols are very similar. Both add a simple declaration to a feed that tells a subscriber which hub/cloud has been delegated the responsibility of handling subscriptions. Both protocols have a centralized hub that notifies subscribers when new content is published. Both protocols are HTTP based. The subtle differences in implementation are important to understand, however. And in my opinion, PuSH is the better protocol for now. There are basically three things that make PuSH a more robust protocol: First, PuSH doesn’t just tell you that something changed, it actually sends you the new content (also known as a “fat ping.”) This is an important feature that is missing from rssCloud. Not only do fat pings make integration simpler for subscribers, they also eliminate the danger of inadvertent denial of service attacks as thousands of subscribers respond to the ping notification and request the updated feed at exactly the same time. This problem is well known in computer science and is often referred to as “the thundering herd problem.” While this would be relatively simple to fix in rssCloud, it has yet to be addressed. Second, PuSH allows variable callbacks (custom URL’s for where the notification is sent) which rssCloud does not. The rssCloud specification states “Notifications are sent to the IP address the request came from. You can not request notification on behalf of another server.” This is highly limiting since you cannot separate the servers which are handling subscriptions from the servers which are receiving the ping notifications. Third, PuSH has a more friendly policy for handling unsubscribes. In rssCloud, every feed is automatically unsubscribed after 25 hours. In PuSH, there is an explicit unsubscribe function with the option to automatically unsubscribe after a given amount of time. Again, this small detail matters a lot when you’re operating at scale. With rssCloud, RSS readers will be responsible for resubscribing millions of feeds every night – which is far less efficient than sending subscribe/unsubscribe requests only when something changes. This isn’t to say that there aren’t benefits to rssCloud. It is far easier to implement an RSS cloud than it is to implement a PuSH hub. By design, PuSH hubs are not simple to implement. There are other small differences, but these are the issues that matter most. Everything else boils down to semantics. I want to address a couple of misconceptions that are floating around about both protocols. For example, many people think that rssCloud is simply about building a distributed alternative to Twitter. This is largely due to Dave Winer’s stated goal for rssCloud to create “a loosely-coupled Twitter-like network of people and 140-character status messages.” While that is certainly an interesting use-case, it promotes a very narrow view of the protocol and what it enables. I think rssCloud has far more potential than Dave gives it credit for. The biggest misconception about PuSH is that it is somehow owned and controlled by Google. This simply isn’t true. Not only are there plenty of independent developers like me working on PuSH, there are also other PuSH hubs like SuperFeedr which aren’t controlled by Google. Brett Slatkin points out:
Overall, I believe that both PubSubHubbub and rssCloud represent a huge step forward for the web. While I personally believe that PuSH is a better choice, competition is always good and will make both protocols stronger. (Photo credit: Flickr/Libertinus) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| Posted: 09 Sep 2009 07:02 PM PDT
Bing is an excellent search engine. For one thing the surprising early reviews probably forced Yahoo’s hand as they entered into one of the dumber corporate transactions I’ve ever seen. So, kudos to Bing. Golf clap. Etc. But one thing about Bing really stands out – it may be the best porn search engine ever created (see Badda-Bing Indeed). In private conversations Microsoft employees always said that the porn search feature was an unintended byproduct of good video search. But we always wondered if that was true. Anyway, in May we noticed Bing ads on Google, which seemed a little ironic to us given how seriously the two companies compete with each other. But one thing we didn’t notice until now is that Bing is also advertising on Google for the query “pornography.” Which in our opinion removes all doubt about Bing’s intentions. There’s nothing wrong with being a good porn search engine, in our opinion. And why not go ahead and advertise it to the world. Discovered via a TechCrunch employee who has asked to remain anonymous. Update: From Microsoft: “Microsoft has not purchased the keyword ‘pornography,’ and this term has never been in our AdWords account. It is our policy on the Bing marketing team that we do not have any adult content as part of any of our keyword buys or other marketing campaigns. The keyword that seems to be triggering these results is ‘free videos.’ We are following up with Google to understand why this ad is showing up in these types of queries.” – Microsoft Spokesperson Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| The SportsStream Comes To SBNation Posted: 09 Sep 2009 06:55 PM PDT
This whole stream idea is starting to catch on. Even sports blog network SBNation is adopting what CEO Jim Bankoff calls StoryStreams for a new redesign it is launching tonight. A StoryStream is “the latest news feeds, Tweets, videos, comments that move a major sports story along,” says Bankoff. SBNation is a collection of 212 sports blogs across major sports like basketball, baseball, football, and hockey. So far it’s main site, SBNation.com, has been not much more than a glorified directory for all the blogs. But tonight it is changing to more of a true sports destination site in its own right with a small team of editors who cull the best stories from the 212 blogs, as well as articles, videos, and Tweets from elsewhere. Each different major sport will have its own aggregation page, and new items will stream in on a continual basis. But that’s not really the stream part. A big sports story, like basketball player Allen Iverson moving to the Memphis Grizzles (what is he thinking?), will sometimes show a number next to teh headline which indicates how many individual items are showing up about that one big story. If you click on one of those headlines, you come to a StoryStream page for that particular story, with blog posts, editor commentary, videos, Tweets, and so on about Iverson moving to Memphis or whatnot. Sports news is like financial (and tech) news in that it attracts sports junkies who like to constantly refresh their favorite sports site to see the latest scores or updates about their favorite teams and players. Why not just stream all of those stories to them so that they never leave? That is sort of the idea behind SBNation’s StoryStream, which I like to think of as more of a SportsStream. SBNation’s 212 blogs are already attracting a quickly growing audience. Bankoff says the network as a whole is up to 7.5 million unique visitors a month (Quantcast has 3.8 million). SBNation.com is a tiny part of that. Quantcast measures a tripling since April to 350,000 monthly U.S. uniques to SBNation.com,while comScore shows a similar trend (see chart below). Turning SBNation into a central sports hub should pump it up significantly and make it less puny. Adding more content and organized headlines on the main homepage and then keeping visitors longer with a constant barrage of headlines and links to the hottest sports stories should help move those numbers even higher on both the central site and the related blogs..
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| Is Facebook Preparing To Launch ‘Facebook Labs’ For Experimental Features? Posted: 09 Sep 2009 06:19 PM PDT
At this point there are two possibilities: Facebook either has an internal directory of Facebook applications that are tested by employees and a bug let us access Desktop Notifications, or it’s preparing to give everyone the chance to try out these new experimental apps, while clearly specifying that they are an “experimental feature built by a Facebook engineer” so that it doesn’t have to worry about offering support for them. Given that the Desktop Notifications app has been public for a while now and Facebook hasn’t pulled it, I’m guessing the latter. This would be similar to a model that Google has adopted with Gmail Labs, which it launched last summer and has led to a number of useful features. And it’s a model that would be perfect for Facebook, which is well known for running marathon ‘hackathon’ sessions during which its engineers cook up new features over the course of a few all-nighters. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| TweepML Gives You A Way To Make Your Own Twitter Suggested User List Posted: 09 Sep 2009 06:06 PM PDT
Basically, if you’ve ever used an OPML file to bundle together feeds in your RSS reader, you’ll understand the concept immediately. TweepML takes a bunch of Twitter users that you choose, bundles them together, and allows you to share that bundle with whomever you choose. When the person on the receiving end loads up the bundle, they will be following all the people you suggested. A good use case for this is for individual blogs. Here’s TechCrunch’s TweepML, for example. If you click on that link, you’ll see a bunch of us TechCrunch writers are selected for you to follow. You can individually uncheck any of us as well. You then sign in with your Twitter credentials below that list and you will be following those users. Oddly, TweepML opts not to use Twitter’s popular OAuth authentication system and instead has you sign in on their own site. But it promises that once it follows the users you’ve selected, it “forgets your password forever.” Marcelo Calbucci, the man behind TweepML, has created a few other interesting bundles of Twitter users to follow, including U.S. Senators, and the Twitter’s employees TweepML, the service, is launching today with a couple partners, including Twitter grouping service Twibes and Twitter sound bite service Chir.ps. They also claim to have support from OneRiot, Gnip, Gist and others. It’s a good idea, executed in a simple enough manner that it could just work. TweepML, the format, promises to be extensible and open so others are free to use it as well. It’s based on simple XML, and Calbucci hopes that sites start making it a standard by implementing it and including .tml files on their servers for visitors to access.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| Somebody Has To Say It: It’s Time For iTunes Lite Posted: 09 Sep 2009 06:00 PM PDT
For years Apple has been adding to iTunes, and while some improvements have been welcome, many have simply added to the bloat. It’s time — way past time, really — for Apple to put out something lightweight and basic. I understand that iTunes is a wedge (and weapon) for Apple, and I don’t propose gutting it, but considering there are no credible alternatives to the program, it’s at the point where I feel Apple has stopped simply adding to the feature buffet, and has started force-feeding users.
I just prefer apps that do one or two things, and do them well — surely I’m not the only one. I play movies in MPlayerOSX or VLC and organize them myself, as I know many people do. Even if I did use Twitter, I wouldn’t want to tweet what I’m listening to or buying; LastFM works fine for that and already has a client or is embeddable in many services. Same for liking things on Facebook. And App management? I don’t have an iPhone or an iPod, why would I want my media player to include support? You can hide some of it, but far from all of it, and it disturbs me that it’s always lurking there, just underneath the surface. Waiting. Songbird is out there, I guess (I should switch), but it still emulates iTunes shamelessly and adds yet more features I don’t want in a music player, plus a browser. I already have a browser, guys. Use that one for your fun rich content. What else is there? Audion, abandoned these five years? Cog, abandoned a year and a half? Banshee and Vox, for six months? I’ve seen forums where people recommend running Winamp in a virtual machine to save RAM! We’re in a gilded cage, fellow Mac users, and unlike the iPhone’s gated and patrolled garden of mobile delights, it’s not one you should be satisfied with. Many Mac users chime in angrily whenever I have the nerve to mention bloat in a precious, perfect Apple product. Is it really such a stretch of the imagination to believe that some people might just want to play their music, or perhaps organize and browse it differently from how iTunes lets you? I think for every person who is excited to let Genius pick their party’s music, there is someone who can’t stand how playlists work. And for every person who likes the way iTunes organizes albums and tracks, there’s someone for whom its method of displaying their collection is frustrating and backwards. For instance:
What’s wrong with this picture? It’s janky as hell is what, and this kind of weirdo sorting issue is far from rare. To say nothing of the many other annoyances I find in this monstrosity of a media player. So what are people for whom iTunes isn’t right supposed to do? For years now, the answer from Apple and OS X developers has been “just deal with it.” Meanwhile, among the several options I have to me on XP (and 7) are very competent free and/or open-source alternatives to Microsoft’s iTunes-equivalent, Windows Media Player — which isn’t as bad as everyone says, but lord it ain’t good. Take a look at the features available in Winamp. Now observe the following screen:
Why don’t I have one of those for iTunes? Does Apple not trust me when I say that I’ll never use Genius or Facebook integration? Do they not have the ability to decouple these decadent sidecar-apps from the fundamental functionality of their media player? It’s a fail one way or the other. At the risk of getting too general in my criticism, the lack of a variety in certain kinds of software is one of the unanswerable complaints against OS X. There are dozens of programs on my PC that have no equivalent (or only a weak one) on a Mac, and rarely because, as is often said, the functionality is duplicated in the OS or what have you. If I weren’t away from my desktop, I’d list ‘em off for you. But this iTunes thing is symptomatic of that larger problem. With no alternatives, Apple’s option becomes more and more entrenched, and as it becomes entrenched, it spreads its tentacles hideously, and results in things like the present iTunes (and to a lesser extent, iMovie, iPhoto, and others). After today’s shenanigans, the program is fatter and more tentacular than ever. In the end, it seems to me that it would be so easy for Apple to make a smaller media player that they must have made a choice not to do so. Considering there are no other options, that’s a decision that is, to users like me, very damaging. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to change, since it clearly hasn’t been damaging to their business. Looks like it’ll continue to be their way or the highway, except without the highway. It’s not spoiled to want what I’ve had for years on the platform Apple disparages as unusable. I think what I’m asking is reasonable enough, though I have no expectation that the way of the world should be suspended for my convenience. Here’s what I’d like:
What do you think? Is that really such a crime? Update: It’s not a fix for the bloat and so on, but for a clean UI like the one I chopped together above, it’s as easy as context-clicking on a playlist and opening it in a new menu. If you make a smart list that’s your entire library, that can be your only window. Better than nothing! Thanks, Tim F! Update update: Son of a… you can’t delete things or rearrange tracks. Why would you want to though, right? Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| Facebook’s Experimental Desktop Notifications App For Mac Is Very, Very Slick Posted: 09 Sep 2009 05:49 PM PDT  The application is native, which means it doesn’t have any of the CPU usage issues or quirks of Adobe AIR. Using the app is very straightforward: as new messages, notifications, and wall posts come in, you’ll see a Growl-like notification box slide into view. Even better for avid sharers, the application features a universal hotkey for sending out a new status update, though this doesn’t seem to have support for all of Facebook Publisher’s functionality (sharing photos, etc.). You’ll also quickly find that aside from updating your status, most of the functions featured in the app (like composing a new message or viewing your News Feed) are really just links to the Facebook website — you can’t do much from within the app itself. That said, if you’re just looking for a way to bring your Facebook notifications to your desktop, this is a perfect solution. Of course, this isn’t the first application that brings Facebook to your desktop — a number of third party apps like Amigo, Seesmic and TweetDeck offer some of the same functionality (and more). And Facebook has built its own AIR app that lets you view your News Feed and post status updates. Thanks to Gambit for the tip.  Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| Pandora Gets A Hole In The Head Posted: 09 Sep 2009 04:17 PM PDT
Popular music service Pandora is a huge hit on the iPhone, and they were one of the first Palm Pre apps available as well. But when it comes to Android, the company has at best always been “meh.” In July 2008 Pandora CTO Tom Conrad said “I need Android like I need a hole in the head,” adding “the last thing from a technology standpoint that i need is another OS platform that sits on top of buggy firmware.” The relevant video clip is here (skip to the 55 second mark). “We’re going to put your face next to that quote when you launch an Android app,” I said at the time (check!). Conrad later clarified his position. Anyway, back to reality, Pandora has now launched an Android application, and it’s pretty darn cool. Unlike the new Facebook for Android, it doesn’t skimp on features. In fact, it’s the first mobile Pandora application that integrates with the built in music player so that you can create stations from the artists and songs in your local collection. It also integrates with the Android home screen widget system. So overall I give the product an A, and I give Tom Conrad an A+ for creating drama around an otherwise less interesting launch. Well done.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| Oh Yeah. Remember the Palm Pixi? We Saw That, Too Posted: 09 Sep 2009 03:09 PM PDT  You get the feeling that Palm had something to hide today. On the surface that makes no sense, considering it officially announced the Pixi, the company's second webOS-based phone, this morning. (The company's first webOS phone, the Pre, launched to much fanfare last May, owing to an almost Bill Goldberg winning streak-like level of hype.) But as you're already aware, Apple had an announcement or two of its own today, including the inclusion of a digital camera on the iPod nano. It's unfortunate, but Apple events are really the black holes of this industry: on Apple event days, no other tech news can escape out into the wild. That is to say, unless your company name is Apple, Inc., you'd be better served laying low for the day, and make any announcements later in the week.TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| Hands-on With iTunes 9.0: Bright and Roomy Posted: 09 Sep 2009 02:52 PM PDT  Once upon a time you dressed so fine, went out to the record store, and bought your albums. Those days are no more, although iTunes wants you to think otherwise. That's why they added a few new features to add a little bit of that old record store attitude to the boring process of downloading tunes. Introducing iTunes 9.0 - it's bright, it's shiny, and it's kind-of-sort-of new. The first thing you'll notice about the new iTunes is the clarity of the new user interface. First, everything is white. The backgrounds are bright and clear and the new iTunes Store carries this UI aesthetic into the shopping experience. The icons are cheery and a little more "open" and friendly. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| Google Rolls Out The Mother Of All Updates: A Larger Search Box Posted: 09 Sep 2009 02:36 PM PDT
Today, while using the Safari browser, we noticed that the search box has been made bigger, and the buttons made square. We’re not the only ones who have noticed the change. It may seem like a trivial update, but remember, this is Google, millions of people use it every day to do searches, and a UI change, however small, is not trivial. Notice how big the input box now is compared to the Google logo (below). Also remember that Google goes over data for every little change it does to determine if the change is worth it. It would seem that this is what it’s doing now, as plenty of others are not seeing the change yet. Anyone else noticing this change in any browser besides Safari? Update: Additional reports say they are seeing it in some versions of Firefox too. Update 2: No less than Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, has just posted on the matter. Says Mayer:
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| Posted: 09 Sep 2009 02:19 PM PDT
TechCrunch50 is less than a week away, and we’re putting the final touches on what will be a jam-packed two days of startup launches, hallway pitches, and new ideas. We’re proud to announce new Twitter COO and FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo, RedPoint Ventures partner and Zimbra founder Satish Dharmaraj, Google’s social apps guru Bradley Horowitz, Charles River Ventures partner George Zachary and Perkins Cole attorney Lior Zorea will be rounding out our on-stage Panel of Experts at TechCrunch50. They'll judge the fifty startups that will launch in front of a crowd of 2,000 or so eager attendees. Each startup will present in front of a panel of successful entrepreneurs, VCs, and industry experts. In addition to these latest additions, we’ve already announced experts Marc Andreessen, Roelof Botha, Ron Conway, Don Dodge, Paul Graham, Jason Hirschhorn, Reid Hoffman, Tony Hsieh, Marissa Mayer, Tim O'Reilly, Sean Parker, Kevin Rose, Mike Schroepfer, Robert Scoble, and Yossi Vardi. Two days, 50 launches, I can’t wait. The startups are already being put through their paces in rehearsals at a secret location (okay, it’s Sequoia’s offices). Each one will be a surpirse, of course, but there will also be some special announcements scattered throughout the two days by AOL, Microsoft, and Google, as well as a Facebook Developer Garage. We just posted the official conference agenda, found here. The 50 presenting companies won't be released until the day of the conference, and there are other details we’re just not going to tell you quite yet, but the agenda should provide an idea of what we have in store. More conference info is available over on the TC50 conference website. The event will be held at the San Francisco Design Center, a huge and beautiful venue where nearly 2,000 participants roamed last year. There are still some tickets for the event, which can be purchased here courtesy of Eventbrite. And if you’re interested in demoing your product, we can even squeeze in a few more DemoPit and Exhibitor tables (e-mail us for details). More on the TechCrunch50 blog.
Great partners make great conferences We’re really lucky to have the corporate support of some of the best names in the business. Sequoia Capital, Charles River Ventures and Perkins Coie all returned quickly to support us for the third year in a row. Google, Founders Fund, Microsoft and MySpace are back for their second year of partnership, and this year Bing, Facebook and Redpoint Ventures stepped forward as first-time partners.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| Google Preps To Turn On Chrome Extensions Posted: 09 Sep 2009 02:08 PM PDT
Of course, as extension support was largely hidden before, there aren’t many extensions you can use yet with Chrome. But Google has complied a list of a few examples here. These include simple things like a Gmail inbox checker, and an auto-subscribe in Google Reader button for URLs. Google says this is the first step in its “launch process” for the feature in Chrome proper. Of course, it’s worth noting that regular (non-dev) Chrome users are stuck in version 2.x while the dev releases are in 4.x now, as ReadWriteWeb pointed out yesterday. So it’s not clear if extensions will be in Chrome 3.0, whenever that becomes official (it’s available in the beta channel right now). Google also notes that it has enlisted some help to get extensions up to speed on the Mac and Linux builds of Chrome. In the latest builds of Chromium for Mac, extension support is not highlighted, but you can get to it by putting “chrome://extensions/” in the URL box. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| Hands-on with the new iPod nano Posted: 09 Sep 2009 12:56 PM PDT  We just got our hands on the new iPod nano. As you can probably tell from the shots, it's a nearly inch-for-inch match with the last generation. That said, the new colors are absolutely gorgeous. Even in the fairly dim demo room, the colors popped. We didn't get to spend very much time with the camera, but the camera quality seemed on par with that of the iPhone and significantly better than what we would have expected.TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||
| Salesforce CEO Benioff: We Are Cloud Computing (and Twitter) Evangelists Posted: 09 Sep 2009 12:35 PM PDT
While August and early September tends to be slow in the Valley, Salesforce.com has had a quite a big month. The CRM vendor posted strong earnings for the second quarter of 2009; just announced a new version of their fastest growing product, Service Cloud 2; rolled out a lightweight contact manager for small businesses; and opened up its Force.com platform to outside vendors. Today, Salesforce.com CEO and Founder Marc Benioff is taking the stage at an event in San Francisco to announce more news and speak about the company’s strategy, the Service Cloud 2 and the power of Twitter. Here are my notes from his presentation: Benioff says that the Service Cloud has had “spectacular performance” in a difficult economy, which is one of the reasons Salesforce is focusing on continuous improvement. Benioff says that Salesforce is the “cloud computing evangelist” as the company tries to push for platforms and applications in the cloud. Benioff draws special attention to the SMBs as clients, which can run on the same software and platforms as large companies. Benioff highlights the real-time cloud, saying that applications and platforms need to deliver this value. Real-time is crucial to Salesforce’s offerings and Benioff emphasizes that real-time is the future of the company’s products. Addressing the capabilities of the Service Cloud, Benioff says that call center technology is outdated and can’t leverage the power of Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. According to Benioff, the customer can save “millions of dollars” by using the service cloud and its “next-generation” innovations. Benioff really focused on the power of Twitter in the CRM, saying the microblogging network has “incredible capabilities” around the world. Twitter in itself, he says, is a tremendous knowledge base. Jason Goldman, a board member of Twitter, says that the Service Cloud 2 is taking conversations that take place on Twitter to another level. He says that the platform is one of the best examples he’s seen of using Twitter to help businesses. Goldman emphasizes that Twitter is imperative to businesses in many ways, especially given its real-time nature. Building Twitter into building processes is what makes the Service Cloud 2 a powerful platform, says Goldman. As I wrote yesterday, Salesforce is making an interesting play in the cloud, almost making the transition between the enterprise and the social web seamless. The Service Cloud 2’s integration with Facebook, Twitter, Google and the consumer internet is made possible because it is a cloud-based platform and Salesforce isn’t letting anyone forget this. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
When 
Mobile applications targeting enterprise customers most certainly have their place in platform-agnostic app stores like 
Ondeego claims the enterprise market has been largely left out of the massive adoption of mobile applications for three reasons: employees are not able to effectively source applications they need without long purchasing and procurement cycles, IT departments have a hard time managing these applications across multiple platforms appropriately, and third party developers do not have the tools to make their applications enterprise-ready and sell them. 
A few minutes ago we published a post about Facebook’s new 
Twitter’s Suggested User List is the source of much controversy. But the rationale behind it is sound, even if the execution isn’t: It’s a way to bundle users that may be interesting to follow together. A new service called 
On my PC I use Winamp — have for years, love it. I understand I can’t have a carbon copy, if you will, on OS X, but at the very least give me a program that isn’t 80% features I will never use.
“I need Android like I need a hole in the head.” – 
Google is continually 
Good news for those Firefox users who really want to switch to Chrome but fear living a day without extensions, that day is here. Or, at least, near. Google today 
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