The Latest from TechCrunch

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• BAM Investor’s Financial Model Tweets Out Predictions Of The Next Stock Market Crash
• TC50 DemoPit Watch: YourTour Debuts Online Personal Travel Agent Service
• Viral Loop: Using Facebook And The iPhone To Promote Something Called A ‘Book’
• WITTC50?: Will there be a TechCrunch50 next year? What Jason wants, Jason Getz
• Once Again, Facebook Owns ‘Talk Like A Pirate Day’ On The Web
• More Evidence That Apple Really Did Reject Google Voice
• U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra Visits Silicon Valley To Talk Tech And Innovation With The Woz

BAM Investor’s Financial Model Tweets Out Predictions Of The Next Stock Market Crash Posted: 20 Sep 2009 06:34 AM PDT The S&P 500 is up 58 percent from its lowest point last March, the worst of the economic recession seems to be behind us, and even perennial stock market bear Jim Grant is calling for a barn-burner of a recovery, yet predictions of the next stock-market crash are already here. And you can find them on Twitter. Individual traders love to talk stocks on Twitter so much that they have given rise to a whole offshoot service, StockTwits. In fact, some argue that Twitter is becoming a pump-and-dump playground. But it is really no different than the Internet stock boards of old, which mixed honest financial discussion with attempts to manipulate the market with misinformation. Either way, traders are flocking to Twitter because if there is one area where real-time information is really valuable, it is in trading stocks. The question is, who do you trust and who should you listen to? There are countless stocktwits who are now being joined by more professional prognosticators. One is BAM Investor, which markets its financial model to hedge funds. BAM stands for Behavioral Analysis Of Markets. It uses fractal theory (and the Fibonacci sequence!) to predict emotional mood swings in the market. About five days ago it predicted that the current stock market rally would crash by 50 percent. It also thinks that Crude Oil is heading down to $56/barrel. But it is bullish on natural gas, predicting a 400% “melt-up”. Why should anyone listen to these trading tweets? BAM Investor claims that its financial model predicted the crash of crude oil from $147 to $36, the rise in corn and wheat futures from their 2007 lows, and the 400 percent rally in shares of Ford from February to August, 2009. But as with any financial advice, investors should beware. BAM Investor is simply using Twitter to market its financial model, which you can subscribe to if you are a serious investor. The true test of a financial model is the consistency of its predictions and its accuracy over time. In other words, can you trust it? Is it right more often than it is wrong? It’s putting its predictions out there for anyone to follow and judge for themselves. If its predictions start making people money, you can expect its number of followers to grow, but that is also a function of press and marketing. What we really need is a service that keeps track of all of these public financial predictions and rates their accuracy so that the smart money can be separated from the twits. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

TC50 DemoPit Watch: YourTour Debuts Online Personal Travel Agent Service Posted: 20 Sep 2009 06:13 AM PDT One European company that picked the TechCrunch50 conference to launch a service was DemoPit participant deciZium, which launched its travel planning website YourTour in public beta and gave the audience a demo of its capabilities during the event's breaks. Granted, there are a lot of travel-related websites and applications out there which makes it quite difficult to come up with something unique in this space, but YourTour does have a number of interesting features that deserve a second look. In essence, the website offers personalized travel planning assistance based on one's wishes, preferences and limitations. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Viral Loop: Using Facebook And The iPhone To Promote Something Called A ‘Book’ Posted: 19 Sep 2009 05:45 PM PDT Writing a book in 2009 is a tricky thing to pull off. Never mind the research, the interviews, or the writing, but then you have to face facts: who reads in 2009? Unless you're Dan Brown or Stephen King or Glenn Beck, odds are your book, no matter how thorough or well-written, isn't exactly going to fly off the shelves. What will fly off the virtual shelves, though, is an iPhone App. You see where I'm headed. Adam Penenberg, who's a contributing writer over at Fast Company magazine (and an old professor of mine from back in my NYU days), has developed an iPhone and Facebook App called "Viral Loop" to help raise awareness of his latest book, Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves. Let's take a look. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

WITTC50?: Will there be a TechCrunch50 next year? What Jason wants, Jason Getz Posted: 19 Sep 2009 05:16 PM PDT So here we go then, the fourth and final part of my award-winning TechCrunch50 coverage; the all-important ’round-up’. This is where I ask appropriately round-uppy questions like “what did we learn this week?” “what were the highlights of the event?” and “is there any chance it will happen again next year, given that the whole spectacle climaxed with Arrington walking off stage as co-host Calacanis led the audience in some weird, embarrassing clapping game?” I’ll get to that last question in due course but first, given that the “what did we learn?” question has already been answered by Lacy and Arrington, let’s consider the highlights. As anyone who unfollowed me on Twitter this week will testify, I found an annoyingly large number of notable moments across the two days. My TC50 drinking game went splendidly, especially after Scoble handed the TechCrunch team a bottle of 18 year old whisky from the stage. Special thanks are owed to those contestants who went the extra mile to ensure that we got wasted in record time, particularly the founders of the The Whuffie Bank who not only wore identical shirts (swig!) but also identical jeans (swig!), shoes (swig!), ties (swig!), glasses (swig!) and faces (swig?!). By the end of the presentation I imagine anyone playing along was so paralytically drunk that The Whuffie Bank actually started to sound like a viable business. For my part, I lobbied passionately for the company to be awarded the grand prize on the condition that they agreed to take their prize money in Whuffies. And yet, despite my annoyingly persistent Twitter coverage, there remained a few special moments that were just too brilliant or too ridiculous to be explained in 140 characters. Moments which, at the time, made me think “I can’t possibly Twitter this”, but which – now that the dust has settled – make me think “screw it – they’re too good not to share.” Here, then, are my top five unTwittered moments from TechCrunch50 2009… Scoble’s on-stage work displacement At last year’s LeWeb in Paris, I called out Robert Scoble for playing Solitaire at the judges’ table during the start-up competition. Scooby took exception to my comments, arguing that as he wasn’t technically a judge, he was under no obligation to pay attention to the pitches. A fair point. For fun, then, when Scooby took to the stage as an expert during day two of TC50, I messaged him to see if he fancied a game of Twitter Hangman. To my surprise and delight, he did! I chose the word ‘WHUFFIE’, which took him six guesses to get, even though we playing the bulk of the game during the pitch of The Whuffie Bank. Neologised euphemisms, FTW During CitySourced’s presentation (which for my money was the most game-changing of the competition), founder Jason Kiesel proudly announced the company’s first paying customer: the city of San Jose. Unfortunately that pride, mixed perhaps with on-stage nerves, fried the syntax portion of Kiesel’s brain and he then went on to talk about investment from “the city of… er…. sorry… the company of Palm”. Like a couple of schoolkids, Lacy and I couldn’t help but snigger – for at least the next half hour – at how delightfully euphemistic the phrase ‘the company of Palm’ sounds. Viz… “Look at Kevin Rose’s face. He really loves these guys.”  “Yeah, I think he might be in the company of Palm.” (We’re really hoping the phrase catches on. Please do your bit to help.) Un incident diplomatique On Tuesday I wrote about my discomfort with the American flag proudly flying next to the judges table at an international start-up competition, and also about the website I built to monitor it: istheamericanflagstillthere.com. Since then, I’ve received some amazing hate mail from proud Americans, including one chap who seethed through patriotic teeth that if it weren’t for America helping us win World War II then I’d be writing on TechCrunch in German. Putting aside the logical inconsistencies of a contributor to an American website being forced to write in German were it not for America, I couldn’t help but imagine what the Internet would be like it the Nazis had won the war and we all had to speak German online. Twitter would need more than 140 characters, that’s for sure. Anyway, my favourite part of what some pundits are already calling ‘Flaggate’ came when I jokingly asked over Twitter if anyone had a giant French flag that I could fly on the other side of the stage. A freedom flag, if you like. My first surprise came when when, within minutes, Loic LeMeur forwarded me an email from someone offering to courier a gigantic flag to the venue. My second surprise came when I saw who had sent the mail. It was Pierre-François Mourier, the French Consul General in San Francsico – the highest ranking French diplomat in Northern California. I swear I’m not making this up… From: pfmxxxxx@xxxxx.com Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2009 23:51:44 +0000 Subject: Marseillaise and Star Spangled Banner To: Loic Le Meur Dear Loic, I have just read Paul Carr’s tweet and I am ready to deliver a huuuuuge French flag as he requested to TechCrunch50, just tell me if I should put Paul’s name as recipient? And, of course: I don’t want this gesture to be interpreted as a manifestation of French imperialism in California! Best, Pfm Now, I’m sure we can all agree that à cheval donné on ne regarde pas le dents, but sadly before I could take M. Mourier up on his kind offer of manifesting French imperialism in California, Arrington removed the flag from the stage for a final time. C’est la vie; there’s always next year. Or is there….? Arrington vs Calacanis Internet Celebrity Death Match “Obviously it was all just a publicity stunt.” That’s generally the reaction I’ve heard from people who witnessed Arrington’s walking off stage at the end of the TC50 awards ceremony. And it’s an assumption that strikes me as odd, especially as on more than one occasion during the event, Michael made a point of removing his headset in protest at Jason continually talking over him. Likewise, Jason didn’t hold back from making snarky comments at Arrington’s expense, even going so far as to give an interview with Loren Feldman’s Shel Israel puppet in which he claimed that this would be the last ever TC50. Anyone who knows either Michael or Jason will tell you that they both have ridiculously strong ideas about how things should be done, and that neither has a functioning compromise chip. Why then should their falling out at the end of a stressful conference be a cynical stunt as opposed to, say, a perfectly logical outcome? Frankly it’s amazing they held it together that long. For those who didn’t stick around until the end of the event (for shame!), the final confrontation came when Arrington, irritated by what he called ‘the Jason Calacanis Conference’, chose to walk off the stage and leave Calacanis to present the final awards. In response, Jason lead the audience in a round of applause that was either intended to bring Michael back to the stage or to bring Tinkerbell back to life. I’m not sure which. Either way, the attempt was unsuccesful: Arrington had left the building. The question is, will they kiss and make up now that the stress has passed, or is this really the end of the most volitile on-stage partnership since that  tiger bit Roy’s neck? Yesterday, in an interview with VentureBeat, Jason said that next year’s event – and the partnership – is definitely still on.  And yet at dinner last night, Arrington refused to comment on the record. When I told him that his silence might be interpreted as a continuation of the spat, he simply smiled, shrugged his shoulders and poured himself another glass of Diet Coke. “You only tell me you love me when you’re drunk” Jason Calacanis and I have a fun history. As readers of my nobel-prize-winning book will know, we first met in London where I thought he was hitting on my ex-girlfriend. He wasn’t but that didn’t stop me retaliating by convincing a bartender to charge an entire bar-full of drinks to his Amex card. He later got his revenge at FOWA London where, after I’d arranged an impromptu all-day drinking party aboard the MySpace bus, he gleefully tweeted my drunken behavior to the entire world. So you can imagine my delight when right at the end of the final night after-party, fuelled by more than a few well-deserved Lemon Drops, Jason wrestled TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher’s phone from his hands and decided to drunk dial Arrington in an attempt at late-night reconciliation. The resulting Flipcam footage is below. Say what you like about Jason – including the fact that he seems to be turning into Leo Getz – but he certainly provides splendid entertainment…. The ending says it all. Watch this space, and roll on 2010. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Once Again, Facebook Owns ‘Talk Like A Pirate Day’ On The Web Posted: 19 Sep 2009 12:58 PM PDT Last year, Facebook rolled out a new “pirate” language on Talk Like A Pirate Day, it was quite funny. Naturally, it’s back again this year, and it’s maybe even more awesome. Most impressive is Facebook’s attention to detail (even the email and new desktop notifications are translated). Quite a bit has changed on Facebook over the past year, but it looks like they’ve been able covert all of it successfully over to pirate tongue. Oddly, the only thing that doesn’t look great in pirate-speak is the status update button, which is borked with code in place of the “o” in “to”. Last year, FriendFeed also participated in Talk Like A Pirate Day, but so far, nothing this year from them. Of course, they now work for Facebook, so perhaps they contributed there. Also, it appears that Google has yet to do anything on their homepage to mark the occasion, which is odd, since this type of day seems right up their alley. But Google Pirate is still alive and well from last year. Below find some screenshots of Facebook’s Pirate version. To use Facebook’s Pirate language yourself, click on the language link in the lower right hand corner of the main page (you can also change it in the settings section). Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

More Evidence That Apple Really Did Reject Google Voice Posted: 19 Sep 2009 12:28 PM PDT At this point there shouldn’t be any doubt in anyone’s mind that Apple’s response to the FCC over its ban of Google Voice was rife with half-truths and some complete falsehoods. One claim that’s entered the limelight again is Apple’s statement that it hadn’t actually rejected Google Voice, but that it was still “pondering” it. Yesterday Google released its full, unedited response to the FCC inquiry, and the newly revealed content directly contradicts Apple’s statement multiple times, explicitly stating that the application was rejected. Apple struck back with a statement that it didn’t agree with Google and that “Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google”. We’ve heard that Google actually has a screenshot displaying its rejection notice, but we may not even need that to show (once again) that Apple isn’t being honest. In its letter to the FCC Apple says that “contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it”. It then goes on to describe its issues with Google Voice, which include fears of confusing users and replacing the iPhone’s core functionality (for a moment let’s ignore the fact that Apple’s description is totally disingenuous). Apple closes out this description with “The following applications also fall into this category”, and then lists the three third party Google Voice apps that were yanked from the App Store. Presumably the applications in “this category” are all being pondered over too, and have not been rejected, right? But that’s simply not the case. Riverturn Inc, the developer behind the VoiceCentral application that was listed in Apple’s FCC response, has sent us a screenshot of its ‘rejection’ status that is quite clear. Of course, this is all semantic hairsplitting — a neverending “pondering” status is exactly the same thing as a rejection — and Apple isn’t fooling anyone with it. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra Visits Silicon Valley To Talk Tech And Innovation With The Woz Posted: 19 Sep 2009 11:57 AM PDT Today, Aneesh Chopra, US Chief Technology Officer and Associate Director for Technology for the White House, spoke at a forum held by TiE, an entrepreneurship organization based in Silicon Valley. Chopra was joined by a panel of Silicon Valley execs and VCs, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Chopra made his debut to Silicon Valley a few weeks ago at the Churchill Club, addressing the future of innovation and Federal investments in technology. Chopra outlined the Federal government’s technology agenda, calling attention to the challenges the government faces. He says that in terms of innovation, the U.S. has a lot of room for improvement. The government recently did a survey of where countries rank as innovators over the past decade. The U.S. ranked dead last in the rate at which innovation sped up over the past ten years, according to Chopra’s data. In the area of e-government options, the U.S. ranked last as well. The role of the US CTO is to invest in innovation, including smart and secure infrastructure (i.e. cybersecurity, broadband access), and increase R&D collaboration by focusing on university and entrepreneurship for new product developments. The Federal government spends $150 billion on research dollars in universities—Chopra wants to make sure these investments are efficient. Chopra says that post-doctoral fellows are particularly useful to helping with innovation and suggests that businesses begin fellowship opportunities for innovation. He is also promoting innovation around other priorities in the government’s agenda, such as health care, education and the smart grid. Heath care IT is an issue that’ particularly high on the agenda, with Chopra working to implement regulatory framework, open data standards, and an ecosystem for continued product innovation in the space. The smart grid is also a concern for the US CTO, and is helping accelerate energy efficiency initiatives and ensure that cybersecurity is at a high level. And one of Chopra’s primary roles is to develop an open government initiative, which will implement government platforms that will be transparent and collaborative (i.e. Data.gov). For example, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service launched a new customer service that lets applicants get updates on the status of applications online and via e-mail and text messages. Steve Wozniak thinks that its important to harvest intelligence; he suggests that the government should do this via games. The Woz also highlighted the importance of cyber security and technology in education, concluding that “education is being shafted.” Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

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