The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- GeeksOnAPlane Gets Political in DC
- 12mail = 12seconds + Twitter + Facebook + iPhone
- LiveJournal Users Can Now Make Money With Google AdSense, If They Pay Up First
- Ad.ly Brings Sponsored Tweets From Celebrities
- Think Augmented Reality Is Cool? Layar Adds 3D Element To AR Browsing
- TechCrunch50 Winner RedBeacon Gets Some TV Love
- PBworks Adds Microblogging And Email Upload Features To Wikis
- Zong Launches Subscription Service For Mobile Payments
- Sony First Big Label To Try Amie Street Variable Music Pricing
- Microsoft Buys Interactive Supercomputing, Kills Its Product Line
- Can You Predict Twitter Trends? Use Your Skills For Virtual Cash With Pretweeting
- Web-Based Productivity Suite Zoho Launches Forum Tool Zoho Discussions
- Celebrity News Search Increase Propels Google News UK Traffic To Record High
- Most Valuable Global Brands Recovering Faster Than S&P 500
- Bing Keeps Pecking Away At Search Share And Making Gains
- Interview: A Conversation With Founder Larry Halff About the Relaunch of Ma.gnolia
- Do You Believe In Magic? Moonit Looks To The Stars For Relationship Advice
- Live From the New King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
- Brizzly: Faster, Better, More Open
- Foursquare Hasn’t Started Playing The Monetization Game Just Yet
- Rearden Commerce Raises Another $40 Million, Lays Off 18 Percent
- ThankfulFor: Share Your Gratitude With The World, 140 Characters At A Time
- Alice.com Raises $4 Million For Household Goods Shopping Platform
- Twitpocalypse Tomorrow
- Want Your iPhone To Sound Like A Hotel Lobby Designed By Philippe Starck? There’s An App for That.
| GeeksOnAPlane Gets Political in DC Posted: 22 Sep 2009 09:00 AM PDT
It would seem that tech startup culture – which extols the virtues of agility, cost-efficiency and risk-taking – should make strange bedfellow with the staid, inefficient, and downright corporate practice of federal governance that’s conducted from within the Beltway everyday. Many in the Valley also presume that their startup ecosystem would be best off if left alone by all three branches of government, lest they impinge on its ability to innovate and create vibrant new businesses. However, at a GovTech meeting attended by GeeksOnAPlane in Washington, DC on Friday, administration and state department officials insisted that a sea change of sorts is occurring within the federal government, one in which our public officials have begun embracing both Web 2.0 technology and the management methodologies that have made it possible. The message from officials was that the Obama administration in particular is dedicated to leveraging new information technology for increased transparency and responsiveness, with the goals of enabling citizens to learn more about their government and make their voices better heard. Andrew McLaughlin, the administration’s deputy CTO, talked about turning the government into a platform that enabled “services at the edge”, with Data.gov and Apps.gov as first draft efforts towards this end. Interest was also expressed in how the administration might adopt startup techniques to drive innovation in how it governs, with Director of Citizen Participation Katie Stanton declaring that government is at its own “pivot point”.
More generally, we heard about how the federal government possesses an interest in stimulating entrepreneurship – both domestically and abroad – for the purpose of creating jobs and furthering international peace efforts. Dave McClure spoke in support of a so-called Startup Visa that, while currently on the drawing board, would make it much easier for venture-backed entrepreneurs to relocate to the US and hire Americans at their new companies (an idea first proposed as a “Founder Visa” by Paul Graham this past April). Such legislative change would theoretically have immediate effects on the Valley’s ability to attract and retain talent from abroad. Esther Lee of the US Department of Commerce also noted that Obama made the support of entrepreneurship in Muslim countries an important part of his Cairo speech, reinforcing the notion that pro-small-business governance can produce both economic and national security. Startups would also do well to think of how government involvement in their businesses might actually benefit them. For one, the federal government (and more local governments around the country) can serve as customers that present opportunities to scale and generate evergreen revenues. Evan Cooke of Twilio, a San Francisco-based startup that provides easy-to-use telephony APIs for developers, learned firsthand about the government’s interest in licensing new technology. He was enthusiastically thrust a business card by an administration official even before he left the stage after giving a demo on how quickly the government could set up a flu hotline with his software. Tempering all of this optimism were remarks made by panelists at a Startup2Startup lunch at The Washington Post headquarters following the GovTech meeting. Errol Arkilic, program manager for the National Science Foundation, took care to remind us that the federal government is an animal with very different parts, some of which move quickly and adapt, and some of which move at snail’s pace and resist innovation. While the NSF dispenses grants within months, other departments are slowed by vested interests and imposing backlogs of records managed under legacy systems. And whereas Silicon Valley operates under a sense of urgency, DC often succumbs to inertia, especially since the government mainly responds to public entreaties instead of initiating change on its own. It’s because of these inherent traits that it has yet to be proven whether this new administration – or any other – can truly absorb cutting-edge technology and its entrepreneurial culture. Photos courtesy of Jen Consalvo Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   | ||||||||||||||||||||
| 12mail = 12seconds + Twitter + Facebook + iPhone Posted: 22 Sep 2009 08:58 AM PDT
To refresh your memory, basically, the app allows you to send short videos to your friends in the same way that you might send them text messages. Once you download the app, you simply input your Twitter or Facebook (or both) credentials and you have access to your contact lists from those services. From there, if you want to send a message to someone you’re connected with on Twitter, simply enter in their name, record the video (or use a pre-recorded one) and it will send them a direct message with a link to the video. If you send a message to Facebook friends, it will post the video on their Wall. You can also mix and match contacts to send the videos to from within the app. And you can send the videos out publicly to all your Twitter followers. If your contacts also have the 12mail app, they can see the message right from within it on the iPhone. And it will send a Push Notification when new messages come in. 12mail is a big part of 12seconds’ new strategy to use existing social graphs (Twitter, Facebook) for its video platform, rather than trying to build out its own. That makes sense as obviously those are much, much larger than 12seconds. Interestingly, the app will also work with non-3GS iPhone (meaning ones without video recording capabilities) but it becomes a dumbed-down version of the app. Users of 12seconds’ first iPhone app will remember that it involved still pictures and audio; this dumbed-down version is basically the same. You can find the free app in the App Store here. Also kind of humorous is Apple’s list of warnings for the app: “Frequent/Intense Sexual Content Or Nudity,” “Frequent/Intense Realistic Violence,” etc. Apple clearly loves the possibilities of video messaging!
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| LiveJournal Users Can Now Make Money With Google AdSense, If They Pay Up First Posted: 22 Sep 2009 07:50 AM PDT
Important caveat: only users with paid accounts are eligible for the program. Here’s the deal: users who cough up between $5 for 2 months or $25 for 12 months of using LiveJournal, can add Google AdSense banners to their blog and keep 100% of the earnings (after Google takes their cut). They will be required to sign up for a Google AdSense account or associate an existing account to start earning revenue from displaying Google ads. Users who enter the program can control where ads appear and whether they're text, images, or both. What I fail to see how this deal benefits LiveJournal in any way, since they won’t be seeing a penny based on the current agreement. Perhaps it’s just a way for them to maintain its user base, considering the fact most popular blogging platforms already offer multiple ways for users to monetize their traffic. LiveJournal has a rich history when it comes to weblog publishing. First started more than 10 years ago (on April 15, 1999) by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities, its parent company Danga Interactive was acquired by Six Apart in January 2005. Less than two years later, Six Apart announced it was selling LiveJournal to SUP, a Russian media company that had been licensing the LiveJournal brand and software for use in Russia. Fitzpatrick moved on to join … Google, which may be part of the reason behind the LiveJournal/Google advertising deal. LiveJournal says it signed up over 22 million new users since its U.S. launch and has a worldwide monthly reach of 25 million users with approximately 7 million in Russia and 8 million in the U.S. Kind of funny to notice Fitzpatrick hasn’t yet entered the program to start monetizing his own LiveJournal blog. Or maybe he just doesn’t have a paid account?
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Ad.ly Brings Sponsored Tweets From Celebrities Posted: 22 Sep 2009 07:50 AM PDT
As Twitter continues to mull over how to make money, startups are looking to capitalize on the advertising potential of the microblogging platform. Media network Glam Media is going to be launching a Twitter ad network. And today, Ad.ly, an Los Angeles-based startup, is launching a Twitter-based advertising network to connect high-end brand advertisers with celebrity and high-profile Twitter users. The idea behind the startup is simple: advertisers can pick which celeb they want to Tweet about their product and once the celeb approves the Tweet, he or she will be paid handsomely by the advertisers. Basically, Ad.ly is the middleman between advertisers and the Twitterati. In fact, founder and CEO Sean Rad says that he wants Ad.ly to be the Federated Media for Twitter. Ad.ly’s platform is self-serve for both the Twitterati and the advertisers. So for example, an advertiser for Dell could choose which celeb or power-user to pitch their ad too and then submit a bid to a particular user. The celeb (or publisher) then approves or denies the request. Once the publisher approves the Tweet, the message is sent out via their account by Ad.ly. Each campaign requires the celeb to send out four Tweets over the course of a week. Here’s a sample Tweet that a celeb would send out. It’s important to note that each Tweet identifies Ad.ly and links to an online interactive campaign for a brand:  So how do advertisers know how well their campaign is doing on Twitter? Ad.ly features a customized dashboard that tracks click-through rates, retweets, and even the geographic location of users who retweet an ad. The startup is also in the process of launching a “machine learning client” product that would identify the makeup of a celeb’s user base and then match advertisers based on the target audience of a brand’s ad pitch. For example, the new technology will determine the breakdown of a celeb’s follower base by gender. Each publisher sets the price of a Tweet campaign but Ad.ly will give the publisher a pricing suggestion based on variety of metrics. Ad.ly’s proprietary algorithm evaluates follower counts, authority, quality of Tweets and will help determine the Twitter’s value. And when I say that celebs get paid “handsomely,” I mean it. If a celeb has above a million followers, each Tweet gets in the five figures, with multiple Tweets about a product netting the celeb a six-figure reward (yes, for four Tweets!). Ad.ly takes a cut of what the celeb makes, but Rad wouldn’t reveal what the percentage is. This is an interesting idea and a potentially lucrative money maker if these numbers are correct but there are a few concerns I have. First, will a celeb’s Twitter “authority” be negatively impacted by the appearance of ads within his or her stream? The second issue I have is the whole idea that a celeb will be monetizing off of other people clicking in their Tweets. I’m not sure how followers will react to this, considering many of these celebs are raking in the money as it is. But Rad says that the ads won’t distort the quality of a celeb’s stream because the Tweets are spread out and sent every two days, and the ad campaigns that are promoted via Ad.ly’s platform are for high-end brands such as Dell, Maserati, and Hilton. He adds that ad-sponsored Tweets are clearly marked by Ad.ly so people can ignore those Tweets if they’d like. As for the monetization issue, Rad says that celebs can opt to donate any proceeds they receive from the campaign to a charity of their choice. For the launch, Rad has accumulated an impressive list of high-profile celebs who are willing to participate in the network. Celebs include Kim Kardashian, Brooke Burke, Nicole Richie, Brody Jenner, Dr. Drew and Samantha Ronson. Ad.ly has recently raised a Series A round of funding from GRP Partners but Rad declined to reveal the amount of funding. Ad.ly faces competition from fellow Twitter ad networks Magpie and Twittad.   Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Think Augmented Reality Is Cool? Layar Adds 3D Element To AR Browsing Posted: 22 Sep 2009 07:11 AM PDT  Layar, one of the first companies to start popularizing the concept of augmented reality browsing using modern day's mobile phone cameras, is today announcing the addition of 3D capabilities to its AR browser platform for Android and will be demoing the experience starting tomorrow at the Picnic Conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. With 3D, third-party developers can now tag real-life objects with three-dimensional text, place 3D objects on top of real-world space and create multi-sensory experiences.TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| TechCrunch50 Winner RedBeacon Gets Some TV Love Posted: 22 Sep 2009 06:29 AM PDT
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| PBworks Adds Microblogging And Email Upload Features To Wikis Posted: 22 Sep 2009 06:00 AM PDT
The new user profiles in PBworks allow organizations to specify which fields to include (e.g. office location, department, relevant skills and experience, etc., converting a company’s PBworks Network into a searchable personnel roster. Now, user profiles automatically include a list of the users contributions such as edits and file uploads, as well as tasks each user is working on. PBworks is also going more social with the release of real-time, Twitter-style microblogging to facilitate unstructured collaboration such as brainstorming and discussions. Along with real-time updates, PBworks has added email upload support, so authorized users can add wiki pages and upload files simply by sending an email to that wiki. The “Social Collaboration Update” as PBworks is calling it, is available today for all Project Edition and Legal Edition customers. PBworks is based in San Mateo, Calif., and has raised $2.45 million in venture funding to date. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Zong Launches Subscription Service For Mobile Payments Posted: 22 Sep 2009 05:55 AM PDT
Over the past year, we’ve written frequently about mobile payments startups and the potential future of this technology. Rivals Zong and Boku both offer essentially the same service—the ability to make a payment for a micro-transactions via your mobile phone. And both companies have been growing steadily, with Boku making acquisitions and expanding internationally and Zong picking up traction via a partnership with Facebook. Today, Zong is upping the ante by offering a subscription service, which lets Zong customers to extend a recurring bill-to-mobile option of up to $9.99 a month. Basically, Zong users can now charge a flat-rate for multiple purchases instead of the existing pay-as-you go model. Zong says that the subscription feature is initially launching in photo and video sharing site Photobucket and OMGPOP, a real-time social gaming platform. The advantage for Zong’s users is that each time they want to make a mobile payment for a transaction, they won;t have to re-enter their financial info. The monthly membership fee will appear as a line item on the user's monthly mobile phone bill. Currently, the feature is only available for U.S.-based mobile users but will soon expand its subscription service to customers in Europe, Canada and Australia. As we’ve written in the past, Boku, Zong and other mobile payments platforms face high fees that mobile carriers charge to the payment systems (which are then passed on to the consumer), creating a potential obstacle in the business model. The subscription option is an interesting alternative that could lower fees for the end users. Plus, David Marcus, CEO of Zong, told me earlier this month that many U.S. and European carriers that Zong works with are contemplating reducing these fees by building large-scale models to process payments that would in turn lessen the pressure on the mobile payments startups as well as the applications and social networks using the systems. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Sony First Big Label To Try Amie Street Variable Music Pricing Posted: 22 Sep 2009 04:56 AM PDT
Big labels have mostly shied away from Amie Street, although they’ve had success with independent labels, and there are more than 1.5 millions songs on the site. Today, though, the company is announcing their first deal with a major label, Sony. New and catalog songs will be available at set prices of $.69, $.99 and $1.29 per song. That isn’t Amie Street’s normal model, but at least it shows that Sony is willing to experiment with variable pricing. Perhaps in time they’ll be willing to move to a purer model. Some of the more popular Sony artists are listed here. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Microsoft Buys Interactive Supercomputing, Kills Its Product Line Posted: 22 Sep 2009 04:50 AM PDT  peHUB yesterday caught wind of Microsoft's supposed acquisition of Interactive Supercomputing, a company specialized in bringing the power of parallel computing to desktops, but was declined an official comment to the news following a request for confirmation. Redmond has this morning officially announced the acquisition by means of a blog post on the Windows Server Division Weblog and an information website, detailing that it has picked up the technology assets of ISC and that the latter's employees - including CEO Bill Blake - will be joining the Microsoft team at the New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge, MA. Microsoft says it will not continue developing Star-P (ISC's flagship product) beyond version 2.8 which was released earlier this year, and that version 2.9 that was released to a few customers in Beta will not be released for production use by customers. Active Star-P customers who are using earlier versions of Star P were granted the right to upgrade to 2.8 by ISC prior to the close of the transaction. Microsoft did not acquire the customer contracts between ISC and their customers but says it will provide technical support to active customers through the longer of their existing support contracts or 12/31/2010.TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Can You Predict Twitter Trends? Use Your Skills For Virtual Cash With Pretweeting Posted: 22 Sep 2009 04:18 AM PDT
Here’s how it works: you sign up through Twitter (using OAuth) and get $5,000 virtual USD to spend on bundles of shares (or 10,000 ’slots’) for words that you think will soon become hot on Twitter. The most likely to become widely used are the most expensive words to buy (e.g. ‘the’ will cost you $44.9 per share, ‘you’ $25.57 and so on) so before you get sucked in you might want to compare the value of words on Twitter before purchasing using this widget. There’s a leaderboard on the site that identifies the most prolific ‘pretweeters’ and you can tap into the NYTimes’ TimesWire if you’re having trouble finding words that could propel you to the top of that list. A couple things you need to know about the game: there is a 5% fee for each sale, the minimum purchase price for any word is $0.05 and only tweets in the United States are counted. I enjoyed playing around with the virtual stock game a lot, but I don’t like the fact that the box for auto-tweeting was hardly visible and ticked off by default, resulting in a couple of unwanted tweets inserted in my Twitter stream. Other than that, good fun ($1.45). (Hat tip to eHub)
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Web-Based Productivity Suite Zoho Launches Forum Tool Zoho Discussions Posted: 22 Sep 2009 03:30 AM PDT
Web-based productivity suite Zoho is launching a brand new product today called Zoho Discussions. Zoho lets any business, individual or organization create public or private support forums where employees or customers can share comments around a particular discussion topic. We have a special offer for TechCrunch readers; the first 25 readers (who are paid Zoho users) to email techcrunch@zohodiscussions.com will be able to use the product for free for up to 6 months. I had the opportunity to test out Zoho Discussions and it’s both remarkably easy for anyone to set up and filled with useful features. With the new product you can create a platform for discussion forums, similar to Google Groups. The differentiating factor is that your forums can be customized and branded to adopt the look and feel of your site. Zoho even lets you pick out a domain name that coincides with your site. Plus, Zoho Discussions can be integrated with many of Zoho’s other productivity applications. Similar to any forum, Zoho Discussion lets users create threads based on a particular topic. In terms of features, Zoho has focused in creating plenty of social tools to make the discussions more interactive and engaging. For example, users can vote on comments within a forum, indicating whether they “Like” a particular comment or forum. Aside from posting in the forums, users can interact in real-time through the built-in chat feature. Within the forum, users can create a profile, follow other users, bookmark particular threads and send private messages to administrators and users. On the administrator side, you can make announcements, make particular threads more “sticky,” assign different users as moderators, remove inappropriate content and more. Plus, users and moderators can embed images and most types of files into threads as well. Like all of Zoho’s products, Zoho Discussion has a freemium model, with additional features like more storage, number of forums, number of moderators priced at $25 and $75 per month. Zoho’s Evangelist, Raju Vegesna, told me that Zoho Discussions is designed to fulfill two kinds of purposes. The first is to serve as way for businesses to host a discussion forum to communicate with customers. The second purpose of the product is to be an internal platform for discussion within a business, in which case the product will be private. This product seems to be representative of Zoho’s strategy to continue to innovate and iterate by launching new products and add-ons to its existing offerings. It’s almost reminiscent of Salesforce.com’s strategy. Over the past two years, Zohos has added support for Sharepoint, mobile, Google and Yahoo IDs and group sharing. Perhaps Zoho knows that it will have to fight a battle to keep users from flocking to Google Apps and soon Microsoft’s Web-based version of Microsoft 2010. But Zoho’s strategy may be sound—the startup has reached 2 million users in just 4 years.  Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Celebrity News Search Increase Propels Google News UK Traffic To Record High Posted: 22 Sep 2009 02:39 AM PDT  Last March, Hitwise highlighted how Google News UK picks up more traffic from searches for celebrities than any other type of news, ensuring that the news search engine largely remains the greater source of traffic for News and Media websites. Now Hitwise has released some stats that clearly depict this trend, with thanks to the uptick of news related to a variety of celebrities that took the Internet by storm the past week. According to Hitwise, Google News UK was the second biggest recipient of searches by UK-based Internet users for 'patrick swayze' and 'kanye west' (picking up 8.25% and 8.26% of traffic respectively), third for 'katie price' (9.29%) and fourth for 'keith floyd' (5.28%). As a result, visits to the regional news search engine increased a whopping 71% last week, with the site's ranking reaching the one of 28th most popular overall (up from 46th the previous week). In other words: last week was Google News UK's busiest ever, and they have celebrities to thank for it.TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Most Valuable Global Brands Recovering Faster Than S&P 500 Posted: 22 Sep 2009 12:48 AM PDT
The analysis shows the top 100 brands, which Millward Brown refers to as the BrandZ Portfolio and includes many technology companies like Apple, Vodafone, Microsoft, Nokia, BlackBerry, Intel and others, are recovering from the recession at a faster pace than the market. As the chart above shows, the most valuable global brands have been outperforming the S&P 500 for a number of years now but show a much faster recovery from the recession than the market in recent months. The BrandZ Portfolio is now worth 28% more than the S&P 500, and it has returned to profit (+5.6%) ahead of the market. I’m just happy to see both lines on the chart are showing an uptick in the first place. For your reference: the BrandZ study, commissioned by Millward Brown Optimor owner WPP , measures the brand equity of thousands of global "consumer facing" and B2B brands, and including over 1 million consumers from more than 20 countries. The ranking is calculated using a methodology called "Economic Use", taking into account the role that brands play in purchase decisions and identifying what proportion of the business value can be attributed purely to the brand. Besides inputs from the BrandZ study, the ranking uses financial data from Bloomberg and market and product data from Datamonitor. The ranking takes into account regional variations since even for truly global brands measures of brand contribution might differ substantially across countries. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Bing Keeps Pecking Away At Search Share And Making Gains Posted: 21 Sep 2009 07:27 PM PDT
Every month since its launch, Microsoft’s Bing search engine keeps taking a little bit of market share. In August, Bing gained 0.4 percent to end the month with 9.3 percent of search query volumes in the U.S., according to comScore’s Qsearch estimates. Meanwhile, Google’s share came down 0.1 percent to 64.6 percent and Yahoo/s remained flat at 19.3 percent. In other words, Bing showed the only significant gain, while everyone else stayed relatively flat. That $100 million marketing campaign must be working, or maybe it’s the improvements Bing is making to the search experience, or maybe it’s both. Whatever it is, it is translating into nearly a half-point market share gain every month for the past three months. Bing is up a total of 1.3 percent from its launch at the end of May. Yahoo, however, is down 0.8 percent in that same period, so the combined gain is only half a point. But Yahoo has stabilized its share, and if Bing can continue to nibble away at the same rate, Google will have to start to actually worry. In August, it grew faster than Google for the first time, with a 31.9 percent annual increase in search queries compared to 21.6 percent growth for Google and 16.8 percent for Yahoo. How long can Bing keep it up? U.S. Core Search Share, August 2009 (Source: comScore qSearch)
(Table below via JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan)
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Interview: A Conversation With Founder Larry Halff About the Relaunch of Ma.gnolia Posted: 21 Sep 2009 07:21 PM PDT  Many of you may remember Ma.gnolia—the nifty social bookmarking tool that unfortunately imploded at the beginning of this year. Founded by Larry Halff almost 4 years ago, the site had a different aesthetic and attitude toward sharing information. It was one of the more community-minded tools I remember from that era, offering features like the ability to "thank" the sharer of a useful link, for example. It also possessed clean design and careful site organization. In my opinion, its take on sharing data really differentiated it. Like many great things, Ma.gnolia didn't start out to be big, but rather started out to be good—and it was. And, as is often the case with things that are good, Ma.gnolia become big by virtue of that goodness. Ironically, even though the membership of the service reached hundreds of thousands of account holders and tens of thousands of regular users, the infrastructure supporting the site was still incredibly small. It was run almost solely by Larry and the hardware and bandwidth he could support by himself. Unfortunately, there were some technical limitations to the honorable yet fragile DIY set-up running behind the scenes that ultimately led to the site's premature demise. I was really bummed to watch the VOD-cast explaining the catastrophic nature of the data loss back in February and have thought about the site often, since that time. I was able to catch up with Larry a while back and talk with him, not about what went wrong with Ma.gnolia 1.0 but rather what is in store for Ma.gnolia 2.0, if anything, and also pick his brain about the future of social bookmarking. If you were a fan of Ma.gnolia in the past, you will be happy to know that it is scheduled to relaunch September 22, by invite only. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Do You Believe In Magic? Moonit Looks To The Stars For Relationship Advice Posted: 21 Sep 2009 06:30 PM PDT
At first I was perplexed — clearly the site had done some analysis of our social graphs to generate these results. But I hadn’t entered my credentials for Facebook Connect, and it didn’t seem like it was looking at my Twitter or LinkedIn accounts either. Eyebrows raised, I asked the founder for an explanation. Moonit’s secret? The “science” of astrology. Here’s how the site explains it:
Now, let me be perfectly clear: I don’t pay attention to horoscopes at all, and think astrology has about as much basis in science as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I would never use these tests for anything other than my own amusement. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of people out there who do play close attention to this stuff — to discount it entirely simply because it’s based on what many would call a pseudoscience or superstition would be to miss a significant market opportunity. And even if you believe that they’re totally bogus, the tests can still be entertaining. Moonit’s core functionality stems from its compatibility tests, which include exams for personal relationships, friendships, or professional compatibility. I’m not going to get into the astrology behind them since I don’t understand it in the slightest, but Moonit does feature things like Facebook Connect and Twitter integration, so you can easily pull in your friend lists and syndicate your results. There’s also a section that saves your past results, which you can track over time. Aside from these compatibility tests, it seems like the site is placing a heavy emphasis on catering to a young crowd that’s interested in relationship advice and celebrity gossip. Moonit offers a blog called ‘The Stars’ that includes recent celebrity news and another called ‘The Couch’ where you can ask the Moonit community a question (most of which seem to be related to personal advice and dating issues). Moonit could easily crash and burn over the next few months — there are countless other astrology-related sites on the web, and it’s sort of difficult to prove that Moonit’s algorithms are more accurate than its competitors’ given that they’re all based on celestial bodies. That said, Moonit does look nice, and it doesn’t seem to be taking itself too seriously — if it can figure out the right mix of astrology and pop culture, I could see it gaining some traction in the teen and young adult crowd.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Live From the New King Abdullah University of Science and Technology Posted: 21 Sep 2009 06:16 PM PDT
KAUST was brought about, rather obviously, by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Says the king:
The university, as the name implies, is science-focused. It offers degrees in nine fields of study:
As a well-funded, brand-new university, there’s a lot of top-notch tech here. From a nanofabriacation lab with a Level 100 clean room (no more than 100 particles per square foot), to a room filled with ten Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectrometers, to Shaheen, the fastest supercomputer in the Middle East, the facilities at KAUST are a researcher’s dream. I plan to dig into more, but here’s two quick overviews of things I found remarkably impressive: Shaheen, and the CORNEA immersive virtual reality facility. Shaheen The room in which Shaheen lives is pretty bland, and doesn’t make for very good photography. But here’s a photo, nonetheless: We weren’t permitted inside because it’s operated inside a clean room environment. Aside from the fact that KAUST has been a construction site until just recently, there’s also serious concern about the effects of salt from the Red Sea coming into the room, so the project coordinators are playing it safe by restricting access and strictly controlling the environment. CORNEA
Two things set KAUST’s CAVE apart from all the rest. First, it has the world’s highest resolution at 100 million pixels, and second, it has a phenomenal audio system inside the room. Speakers placed in the room pick up sounds and project them back in any of a number of programmable acoustic configurations. So if you’re walking through a visualization of an actual cave, your voice will echo and reverberate. This is actually amazingly hard to describe in text, and even harder to capture on video. Here’s a quick video I took while inside CORNEA: When the audio is on, you really do feel like you’re in a larger space. Then when the audio is muted, you feel like you’re in any other room in the world. It’s very impressive what a dramatic effect sound has on our sense of sight. If you guys have any techie questions for the KAUST staff or faculty, leave ‘em in the comments and I’ll do my best to get them answered! Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Brizzly: Faster, Better, More Open Posted: 21 Sep 2009 04:22 PM PDT Brizzly, the web-based Twitter client that was first unveiled at our Real-Time Stream Crunchup in July, continues to roll out the improvements. After allowing users to upload and host their own pictures on its servers a few weeks ago, last week saw them give the service a significant speed boost, which also brought stream auto-updating. Today, the service rolled out the ability to send invites to other friends. If you haven’t tried out Brizzly yet, you really need to. It’s a great way to use Twitter from the web thanks to its inline images and videos, new reply and message indicators, and most importantly, the ability to group the people you follow. You can also mute people in your main feed if they’re at a conference, or doing something for a set period of time that you really don’t care about. I’ve gushed previously about the grouping feature, but the auto-updating is really nice as well. Rather than having to reload the page each time to see if there are new tweets from the people you follow (as you must on Twitter), Brizzly will pull in news ones automatically every so often. Long time users of Twitter will remember that it used to automatically pull in new updates back in the day (the feature was killed off to reduce server strain). This is also standard on FriendFeed (though Brizzly is not working quite that fast yet). Brizzly also recently updated it own tutorial video to walk new users through some of the features. Find it below. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Foursquare Hasn’t Started Playing The Monetization Game Just Yet Posted: 21 Sep 2009 03:47 PM PDT
While there is a Foursquare For Business section on the site now, there is no monetization plan for any of these deals yet. “[We're] really just focusing on getting the product working properly (crashes / UX etc). [It's] worth noting that we don’t want to shoehorn biz stuff in at the last min, which is why we’re trying to get local merchants involved now. Even if all the deals are freebees,” Crowley wrote to us in an email. That being said, obviously, Foursquare eventually hopes these types of deals (dubbed “Mayor Deals”) become a business of some kind. But having just raised its first seed round of funding, and only having been in existence for a few months, Foursquare has some time. And it seems smart to do this type of stuff the right way, rather than just “shoehorning” it in, as Crowley put it. Crowley also says that they’ve been adding a good number of these specials recently. And they finally have a tool that makes it easy to do so. So we should be seeing more such deals in the future both on the mobile apps, and the website. You can see the current list of deals on the right hand column of this page. As you can see, most are in California or New York, which is where the service is most popular right now. When Foursquare does decide to attempt to monetize such deals, it’s unlikely to be quite as straightforward as simply flipping a switch and accepting money to show coupons. For example, if there are tangible incentives to be a mayor of an establishment, this is likely to encourage cheating. Foursquare has been working on ways to combat that, but depending on how good the deals are (a free beer sounds pretty good to me), it will undoubtedly be a challenge. There’s also the issue of price. How much do you charge a business to show these deals? Certainly it’s in the a local businesses interest to have these types of deals as it will probably drive more traffic to their establishments, but Foursquare would also already be getting a bump from the fact that the deals also entice users to use Foursquare. Such deals would likely have to happen on a massive scale for Foursquare to make significant money. And if/how quickly that happens will be a testament to the power of local and location services overall. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Rearden Commerce Raises Another $40 Million, Lays Off 18 Percent Posted: 21 Sep 2009 03:18 PM PDT
Rearden Commerce, the under-the-radar automated online assistant that helps people organize travel needs and other services, has raised another $40 million in a Series F funding from JPMorgan Chase. This latest round brings Rearden’s total funding up to $240 million since the company’s launch in 2000. JPMorgan Chase is a marketing partner and a pre-existing investor. Greg O’Hara and Rick Smith, both general partners from One Equity Partners, JPMorgan Chase’s private equity fund, will be joining Rearden’s board, although the funding comes from Chase Capital Partners. Unfortunately, the funding is bittersweet for the company because it coincides with a round of layoffs. Rearden let go roughly 60 employees from a staff of 335 employees (or 18 percent), following a round of layoffs last November of around 10 percent (or 40 employees) of the company’s staff. At this point, with so much capital invested in the company, the best hope for Rearden investors to see a returns is if it goes public. Rearden is hoping for an IPO, but before it files it wants to hit profitability, and therefore it is cutting its way there. Public investors are going to want to see evidence of sustainable profits and clear revenue growth. Investors generally prefer companies that are hiring to keep up with growth than cutting back to hit their numbers. Rearden is better known in the corporate world, offering its services to more than 5,000 corporations, up from 1,700 in May, 2008, with over 2 million individual employees using the service. American Express resells the service to its business customers. Last year, Chase also signed on as a reseller and marketing partner, offering the Rearden’s personal web concierge service to its bank cardholders. Rearden offers enterprises an automated personal assistant that helps their employees organize any sort of travel-related task. They can set their profile up with the types of restaurants they like, whether they like aisle or window seats, and their preferred car provider, and Rearden will book all aspects of their trip for them. Rearden also launched a mobile version of its service that will sync up with their calendar, message them with alerts and allows them to make changes to their itineraries and bookings. The service also keeps track of reward miles and points from airlines, hotels, and rental cars, and lets employees use those points to book additional travel and other services. The service will even keep track of travel credits and apply them to future trips. The company had a banner year in 2008, raising $100 million in funding, growing the company’s client and user base and expanding into the mobile space. The site also acquired Global Ground Automation to assist with limousine and other ground transportation reservations, and ExpenseWire to simplify expense reporting for users. Rearden is still planning to target consumers directly, after promising to roll out a consumer-facing service for the past few years. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| ThankfulFor: Share Your Gratitude With The World, 140 Characters At A Time Posted: 21 Sep 2009 02:04 PM PDT
Meet ThankfulFor, a new micromessaging site that is a “personal gratitude journal” which invites people to share the things they’re most thankful for in the form of 140 character long messages. It may sound like a strange idea, but apparently the practice of sharing your gratitude really can help improve your outlook on life (it’s a sort of reminder that things might not be so bad for you after all). Using the site is simple: you enter up to 140 characters highlighting whatever it is you’re thankful for, and the service will send the message to your ‘journal’, which is effectively an archive of your thoughts. You can elect to keep this private or to share your messages with the world (the site lets you syndicate your messages to Twitter, with Facebook support coming soon). The site features a section where you can browse a public timeline of the most recent ThankfulFor messages which is surprisingly uplifting (you may also find some amusing and odd messages, like the person who was ‘thankfulfor’ Global Warming and Ricky Gervais). ThankfulFor may not be an especially robust service, but in the last few months we’ve seen plenty of basic sites featuring personal micromessages take off (fmylife and texts from last night come to mind). These sites have played off our shared awkward situations, and it’s not hard to imagine seeing a site with a more positive message like ThankfulFor gaining some traction. At this point the site is still in early stages so it’s not very feature-rich. But the site’s FAQ indicates that there’s more on the way, including support for photos and an iPhone application. The project comes from Shiny Heart Ventures – a small firm that consists of Frank Gruber and Jen Consalvo.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Alice.com Raises $4 Million For Household Goods Shopping Platform Posted: 21 Sep 2009 12:16 PM PDT
Alice.com, the retail platform for household goods, has raised $4 million in a Series B round according to an SEC filing. According to the filing, the company is trying to raise an additional $2 million in this round. The startup had previously raised $4.3 million in Series A funding from Kengonsa Capital Partners and DaneVest Capital in November of 2008. Launched in June, Alice.com is an open platform for consumer packaged goods manufacturers, like Procter & Gamble, to sell directly to consumers instead of going through retail channels like Target or Wal-Mart. On the consumer side, Alice.com lets users create a profile of their household (i.e. how many adults, kids, babies) and then the site will keep track of items and reminds users with emails when they are running low and need to reorder. Each shipment is bundled together in a single 'Alice' box, delivered directly to the consumer's door, with no shipping costs. As we wrote in our review, we think Alice.com has potential to take off thanks to competitive pricing, an well-understood business model (the site makes money via advertising) and experienced entrepreneurs at the helm of the startup. Co-founders and serial entrepreneurs Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire have managed to sell three companies in the past +10 years, most recently flipping social shopping service Jellyfish to Microsoft (which it later used to create Live Search Cashback). Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 21 Sep 2009 11:57 AM PDT
I could go into what the Twitpocalypse is for the fifth time, but if you really want to know, just read our previous posts. Or read what developer Ryan Sarver has to say:
Basically, the tweet ID (an ID number given to every tweet sent out) will hit the 32-bit unsigned integer limit tomorrow. That will cause any third party Twitter apps not coded for 64-bit to start doing odd things, and potentially fail. The Twitpocalypse will not affect twitter.com at all. Also note that the official Twitpocalypse counter is still off by a few days. Again, that’s because Twitter is manually triggering this event early to be able to better deal with the event. Sarver notes that his team will be available in IRC for third-party devs that need help. Hopefully, most of your favorite third-party Twitter apps learned from the first Twitpocalypse and updated their code to 64-bit, so there shouldn’t be too many issues. The horror… Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Want Your iPhone To Sound Like A Hotel Lobby Designed By Philippe Starck? There’s An App for That. Posted: 21 Sep 2009 11:45 AM PDT
We’ve seen free iPhone apps, $1,000 iPhone apps, promotional apps, pointless apps, and offensive apps. Now we have the high-concept app. This is a little like conceptual art, except that it doesn’t quite rise to that level. One example of a concept app that just hit the iTunes Store is 24 Hours: The Starck Mix (iTunes link). It is a 24-hour soundtrack streamed to your iPhone, meant to be an audio tribute to French designer Philippe Starck. In fact, it sounds like something you might hear in the lobby of one of the trendy boutique hotels he’s helped to design, like the Clift in San Francisco or the Hudson Hotel in New York City. The Starck Mix, which is free, will only be available for 30 days. The app shows the time, and streams ambient music and sounds, using whatever time it is where you are to determine the point in the sound loop to start streaming. There is also a Web version of the app. The app is a collaboration between Soundwalk, a New York City company which specializes in creative audio walking tours, and mobile ad agency Clicmobile. It was created for an upcoming arts festival in Paris. I’ve been listening to the track all afternoon, and I now I really need a colorful drink that ends in “-tini.” Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
At our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp in July, 
It’s notoriously hard for bloggers with a limited audience to monetize the traffic generated by the content they self-publish, and 
If you’re into both virtual stock markets and 
Slightly off-topic, but likely worth a look to anyone with a vested interest in how the global economy fares (which means pretty much everyone reading this blog): 
There’s 
You may recall that a couple of weeks ago, we were 
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