The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- “I Fell In Love At the Apple Store,” the Catchiest Apple Song You’ll Hear All Day
- Europe’s Livebookings Secures $16m From Wellington Partners
- Apple Shares App Store Stats: 85k Apps Available, 2 Billion Downloads So Far
- Confirmed: Dopplr Snapped Up By Nokia
- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer On “Moving The Needle”
- HulloMail Launches Visual Voicemail App For BlackBerry
- Twitter Unearths A Secret: Journalists Have Opinions
- With Google Places, Concerns Rise That Google Just Wants To Link To Its Own Content
- TechCrunch/CrunchGear Meetup In Taipei, October 5
- Hippo Hooray! Jackson Fish Market Launches Suite Of Charming iPhone Games For Toddlers
- Zoe Keating: Web Fame that Actually Translated to a Career
| “I Fell In Love At the Apple Store,” the Catchiest Apple Song You’ll Hear All Day Posted: 28 Sep 2009 06:48 AM PDT  Friends, it's been a long, hard weekend. You're back in your cubicle - or maybe you're just really, really hungry - but you guys have come out of the wringer and are ready for a breath of fresh air. And so we present a small man in glasses rapping about MacBooks and, more importantly, ladies. This is honestly surprisingly catchy and I like how they cut up the Mac boot-up tone. The band, FattySpins filmed live in the 5th Avenue Apple Store (here's them recording it to prove it wasn't green-screened) and it was written and mixed by Ray William Johnson. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Europe’s Livebookings Secures $16m From Wellington Partners Posted: 28 Sep 2009 06:22 AM PDT
It’s also clearly benefiting from credit-crunched restaurants now switching to online reservations to fill their tables, something Livebookings says has risen by 91% this summer compared to last, but there is plenty of growth left in the market. Only 7% of restaurants currently use online reservations, according to the company. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Apple Shares App Store Stats: 85k Apps Available, 2 Billion Downloads So Far Posted: 28 Sep 2009 06:11 AM PDT
In addition, the company revealed that the total number of apps in the store currently exceeds 85,000, and that they are now available to more than 50 million customers in 77 countries. AppleInsider does a fine job crunching the numbers. Most noteworthy fact is that the App Store hit 1 billion downloads on April 23 of this year and 1.5 billion last July, which means the rate of daily downloads is quickly accelerating. Anyone want to make a bet for when the number of downloads will top 3 billion? Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Confirmed: Dopplr Snapped Up By Nokia Posted: 28 Sep 2009 03:58 AM PDT  So finally the official word is in, with a very short blog post by CEO Marko Ahtisaari: Dopplr has been acquired by Nokia. Update: Nokia's press release Update 2: Dopplr angel investor Martin Varsavsky on the deal: 'Nokia as a force of good in the European start up scene' No word on price, but when Michael Arrington broke the news last week on TechCrunch, he wrote that Nokia had picked up the fledgling company for between €10 million and €15 million ($15 million – $22 million based on current exchange rates).TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer On “Moving The Needle” Posted: 28 Sep 2009 03:26 AM PDT
Now for the rest of that interview. The video was just a teaser. I spoke with Ballmer for another 50 minutes on the record, doing a deeper dive into five key areas of Microsoft’s product strategy: Big Opportunities, Operating Systems/Browsers, Mobile, Search and Developers. This post is about big opportunities at Microsoft beyond their dual cash cows of Windows and Office. Microsoft generates around $20 billion a year in pre-tax profit, and spends nearly $10 billion on research and development. When Microsoft thinks about increasing (or sustaining) those profits, they have to think big. And they have to think long term. Ballmer says he thinks about new business opportunities in three buckets: expanding current businesses (short run), building things from scratch (long run), and big aquisitions (short cuts). First Bucket (short term): The bulk of new business opportunities in the short term are going to come from things that Microsoft is already working on. Says Ballmer: “Most of what we’re going to move the needle in the next five years relative to 20 billion is going to come from things that we’re already in.” Second Bucket (long term): It just isn’t realistic, he says, to build new businesses from scratch to big profits (the kind that make a company the size of Microsoft blink) in five years or so. Ten years is a more appropriate horizon for new ideas: “You would be hard pressed to name a start-up company that generated an interesting amount of profit in five years relative to 20 billion. Even the most successful. Google in its first five years, Facebook in its five years.” Third Bucket (aquisition short cuts): Despite the fact that in the initial interview Ballmer said that total acquisitions of around 15 companies per year would remain roughly steady, he says not to expect any big “needle changing” acquisitions in the near future: “And the only other wild card you can weigh on top that, which we just don’t do much, is large acquisition. So, we have nothing to announce, there’s nothing we’re thinking about, so I’ll put the third bucket aside.” Ballmer also specifically highlighted seven businesses that he hopes to dramatically build and/or expand over the next few years: PC innovation, Communication/Productivity Tools, Phones, TV, Search, Enterprise Infrastructure and Servers. He also says to expect an explosion of application development over the next five years:
What about new technologies like Azure, Mesh, etc? Ballmer says they’re “dislocators to technology” that overlay all of these opportunities:
Ballmer also broke down that huge $9.5 billion/year Microsoft R&D budget. Just $250 million to 300 million per year is invested in pure research, he says. The bulk of it goes into Microsoft’s five key business areas. They have 5,000 people just researching search, for example. Health IT, robotics and energy also have a share of the budget:
Ballmer ends this portion of the interview by talking about Microsoft’s biggest single research focus – communications collaboration and productivity. He says “And you know, the biggest investment area for us is in communications collaboration and productivity. That would be the single biggest investment area for us.” The full transcript of this portion of the interview is below. Transcript: Mr. ARRINGTON: Last year you generated about $20 billion in pre tax profits. Mr. BALLMER: That’s right. Mr. ARRINGTON: It takes a lot to move a needle with Microsoft where you find new businesses in areas you want to expand. What are the new business opportunities that excite you? Mr. BALLMER: I want to start with my excitement about our existing opportunities. Mr. ARRINGTON: OK. Mr. BALLMER: I really do because, if you’re going to – if you want to move the needle for us, there’s two things we have to do. Most of what we’re going to move the needle in the next five years relative to 20 billion is going to come from things that we’re already in. Most of where we’re going to move the needle maybe five to 10 years from now is going to come from things that are new, that we have to go invest in from scratch. And the only other wild card you can weigh on top that, which we just don’t do much, is large acquisition. So, we have nothing to announce, there’s nothing we’re thinking about, so I’ll put the third bucket aside. But you would be hard pressed to name a start-up company that generated an interesting amount of profit in five years relative to 20 billion. Even the most successful. Google in its first five years, Facebook in its five years. So, there are things we have to be investing for kind of the five to 10 timeframe. But if you look at where things are going to happen and they’re interesting relative to 20 billion you’d mentioned, it’s not at our existing businesses. It’s going to come on innovation and growth in the PC market having the number of PCs that are sold continue to grow. That’s important. We can drive that. It’s going to come from innovation in the tools and technologies both at home and at work to help people communicate, collaborate, to be productive. It’s going to come from phones. It’s going to come from the intelligence that powers TVs. That could happen. It probably doesn’t explode unless we can manage to make the device that does that, the PC, that’s the way to get short-term explosion. We’re focused in on that. Search, we have real opportunity in search in the next five years. Biggest opportunity that we never talked about is enterprise infrastructure. Most of that goes to the database and mainframe vendors today who are in the business. We’ve got four billion revenues and yet we’re a small share player. Servers, there are going to be more new applications written in the next five years than any five-year period of time. I don’t list the cloud because the cloud has kind of overlaid all of those opportunities. We have opportunities by offering cloud infrastructure to enhance the margins we make in our server business, in our communications and collaboration and productivity business, and that’s where things like exchange online, SharePoint online, Windows Azure, they’re not really new value propositions, but they are new potential margin streams and dislocators to technology shifters and some of the existing kind of customer propositions that we invest in. So, I take a look and, I'd like to say we’ve got seven big opportunities and everyone of those seven opportunities is going to have to do its fair share to move the needle over the next five years on the 20 billion. We have some other things that in aggregate may not themselves be a large percentage of the 20. But those have to perform, and we’ve got to be investing in some things that can explode in years 5 to 10. I hope I answered your question. Mr. ARRINGTON: Oh, yeah, you did. Things sure have changed since your initial mission statement – the computer in every home, every desk running Microsoft software. You’ve moved way beyond that. Mr. BALLMER: Yes. Mr. ARRINGTON: Your R&D budget is $10 billion a year, roughly. Mr. BALLMER: Nine and a half. Mr. ARRINGTON: $9.5 billion…What do you spend that on? Mr. BALLMER: Well, if you look at the R&D budget itself, let me break it into four pieces: pure research, that was misreported I think in Business Week recently. But our pure research budget is about $250 to 300 million or something like that. We have what I call an incubations budget – incubations and explorations. These are things we’re not sure turn into products and don’t yet fit in any one of the existing business groups necessarily. Mostly managed by guys like Craig Mundie and Ray Ozzie. That’s another several hundreds of million dollars. We have new businesses, put health for example, we have a fairly significant investment in health IT. There’s some stuff going into robotics, energy. That would be another few hundred million. And then the bulk of our key money is going into our five big business groups that are investing in the kinds of stuff that we talked about. Just take search, order of magnitude, we have 5,000 people working in R&D and search order of magnitude. Five thousand people, you pay a person fully burdened let’s say 200,000 plus. That’s kind of what the tech industry looks like and you get a billion dollars to spend. But we got five of those things, and so – or bigger than a billion. Not many of them are too much smaller than a billion. You put them all together and then add to the first billion and a half I described and then say get the 9.5 billion bucks. So, the bulk, eight of the 9.5 is invested in the core businesses including the incubations that are going on inside the businesses. Mr. ARRINGTON: Ok. Mr. BALLMER: And you know, the biggest investment area for us is in communications collaboration and productivity. That would be the single biggest investment area for us. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| HulloMail Launches Visual Voicemail App For BlackBerry Posted: 28 Sep 2009 01:34 AM PDT  Voicemail. You hate it. We hate it. Damn near everyone hates it - at least, we all hate it in its current form. It's an antiquated system desperately hobbling on its last leg in an industry where technology moves forward at a nearly absurd rate. While our phones get bigger and better each and every month, our voicemail system has, for the most part, remained the same for over a decade. That's not to say there hasn't been progress. There certainly has - but it's isolated. A handful of smartphones (the iPhone, the Samsung Instinct, and a couple of BlackBerry handsets) have embraced visual voicemail, which does away with the archaic process of dialing in for your messages by bringing your messages to you. In 2008, YouMail rolled out an independent visual voicemail system aimed at smartphones that didn't have it out-of-the-box. This morning a competitor out of the UK, HulloMail, took a huge step forward with the launch of a native BlackBerry application. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Twitter Unearths A Secret: Journalists Have Opinions Posted: 28 Sep 2009 01:17 AM PDT
That’s an excerpt from The Washington Post’s new social media guidelines. PaidContent has the entire thing. You really should read it, because it’s a hoot. These guidelines came about because Raju Narisetti, a WaPo editor, had some tweets recently that revealed *gasp* that he had opinions about issues. When word leaked out that he had his own opinions and was sharing them on Twitter, apparently the WaPo top brass scrambled quickly to get this under control. That included Narisetti deleting his Twitter account. Pathetic. So pathetic, that I’m kind of shocked that The Washington Post’s Omblog was allowed to publish all the details. Obviously, WaPo is doing this to try and maintain what it perceives to be its journalistic integrity. That’s great. But as we’ve discussed recently, the idea that any kind of reporting lacks any kind of bias on some level is laughable. It’s fine if you want your organization to only present the facts with no opinions, but the notion that those reporters do not have their own opinions is absurd. WaPo can try to hide those opinions all they want, but they exist, regardless. Here’s another excerpt: “Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything—including photographs or video—that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility. This same caution should be used when joining, following or friending any person or organization online.” Basically, if you are a human being, you must not show yourself as such online. The whole thing is ridiculous, but my favorite bit is the last part. You can’t even friend or follow people known to be affiliated with some movement or cause, or presumably is even just a biased person. This has all come up before, and it will undoubtedly come up again. Twitter is just the latest and probably easiest ways for people to reveal that they have their own opinions online. But this is also related to the issue of Facebook pictures getting people fired or just not hired from jobs. It’s not that companies/employers are asking their underlings to stop having opinions, or stop having fun at parties, they just want to make sure it’s hidden from the public. It’s basically “don’t ask, don’t tell” applied in a different sector. Again, it’s certainly reasonable to ask journalists to remove their opinions from pieces if that’s the kind of news you’re aiming for. But when you start getting into what they say on their personal online accounts, public or not, things get awfully murky. How deep does that rabbit hole go? Maybe those journalists should also refrain from stating their opinions at dinner parties. Maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to laugh at Michael Moore’s new movie when it comes out. Actually, they probably shouldn’t even be allowed to see it. They should also be careful of any movies in their queue on Netflix. And any books they buy on Amazon. And any music on iTunes. Hell, they should really just disconnect their computers from the Internet. And maybe stop leaving the office. Also, they should probably just stop having opinions. [photo: flickr/robnas monster] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| With Google Places, Concerns Rise That Google Just Wants To Link To Its Own Content Posted: 27 Sep 2009 08:19 PM PDT
One of the original goals of Google has always been to help people find the information they are looking for and get out of the way as fast as possible. It was a point of pride, and in fact a design principle, to get people off the search results page to other places on the Internet. Yahoo was the site that tried to keep you from ever leaving, Google was the opposite. Well, it was easier to send people away when Google was just a search engine. Now it has apps and Gmail and Google Maps and Google Books, and a lot of other reasons to stick around on Google itself. But there is still a clear demarcation between its content/communication sites and search. At least there was until late last week when it launched Google Places on Google Maps. Google Places is a local search page for restaurants and other local businesses that brings together the address, phone number, Website, maps, description, directions, photos and reviews all on one page. When you click on a pin for a local business or place of interest on Google Maps a bubble will open up, and if you click “more info” sometimes it will take you to the Google Places page. So far, so good. Google Places is simply making Google Maps better, right? The concerns arise, however, back on Google’s main search page, where Google is indexing these Places pages. Since Google controls its own search index, it can push Google Places more prominently if it so desires. There isn’t a heck of a lot of evidence that Google is doing this yet, but the mere fact that Google is indexing these Places pages has the SEO world in a tizzy. And Google is indexing them, despite assurances to the contrary. If you do a search for the Burdick Chocolate Cafe in Boston, for instance, the Google Places page is the sixth result, above results from Yelp, Yahoo Travel, and New York Times Travel. This wouldn’t be so bad if Google wasn’t already linking to itself in the top “one Box” result, which shows a detail from Google Maps. So within the top ten results, two of them link back to Google content. Your chances of clicking on a Google page for this particular search are pretty high. Google isn’t sending you away anywhere. And if you do go to the Google Places page for Burdick Chocolate, it is made up of rehashed content from other sites: snippet descriptions from InsiderPages, Judy’s Book, a menu link from AllMenus, photos from CityGuide and Yelp, and reviews from Igougo and CitySearch. On the right is a small Google Map and below that are Google search ads. It’s actually a pretty useful page, and there is certainly value in aggregating all of this information in one place. Google might even license the data, which would mitigate any protests that it is “stealing” the content like we see with Google News. But nobody really cares about that. The real issue is whether or not Google is going to favor its own pages in its index when it comes to local search. SInce Google’s algorithm is a black box, there is no way to know one way or another. But the question is out there. Maybe the Google Places page for Burdick Chocolate ranks highly only because Google used it as an example in its pre-briefings and a lot of bloggers subsequently linked to it. The point, though, is that these Google Places are getting into Google’s index. (Tartine Bakery is another example). Even if they make it onto the first page of Google search results for legitimate reasons, their very presence goes against the fundamental principle that Google’s main purpose is to link out to the best information on the Web, not to hoard the links for itself. We know what will happen if it keeps going down this path. It will turn into Yahoo. Update: It appears that Google is now taking steps to remove Places pages from its organic results. It’s added a “Disallow: /places/” tag to the robots.txt for Google maps. (The robots.txt tells Google’s search engine how to treat the content on a site, and a disallow tag instructs it not to crawl indicated portions of a site).
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TechCrunch/CrunchGear Meetup In Taipei, October 5 Posted: 27 Sep 2009 07:37 PM PDT
Here are the details (in Chinese):
Please send an email to service [AT] chiliconsulting.com if you’d like to sponsor the event. Do the same if you have something cool and “made in Taiwan” to pitch (i.e. mobile tech, a web service, gadget etc.). Use the hashtag "#tctaipei" when twittering. We hope everyone has a great night and are looking forward to seeing you all on October 5 in Taipei! Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Hippo Hooray! Jackson Fish Market Launches Suite Of Charming iPhone Games For Toddlers Posted: 27 Sep 2009 06:16 PM PDT
Be warned: if you’re over the age of seven, these probably won’t have much appeal. But for their target age range they’re sure to be a hit. Gameplay is very basic, consisting primarily of a child’s voice commanding you to “touch red” or “touch the letter ‘R’” depending on which game you’re playing. If you choose the right answer, you’re rewarded with the announcer saying things like “Super cool!” and “Great Job!” Get enough right, and you’re treated to a Hippo Hooray fireworks show. The apps are all well done, with very nice original artwork and an intuitive design. For those that haven’t been keeping up with the nifty products to come from the studio: Jackson Fish Market was founded back in late 2006 by a small team of ex-Microsoft employees who set out develop “Handcrafted Software Experiences” (the studio’s name was inspired by co-founder Hillel Cooperman’s grandfather’s fish store). Along with the core principles that drove that fish store, the company also drew inspiration from 37signals. Other Jackson Fish Market products include They’re Beautiful!, Tafiti, and Invitastic. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Zoe Keating: Web Fame that Actually Translated to a Career Posted: 27 Sep 2009 11:17 AM PDT
Think of all the online fame that's been created in the last few years amid this hype of the Web democratizing celebrity. Now try to name how many of them crossed over to mainstream popularity. Tila Tequila got an MTV show and a record deal. LonelyGirl15 is on ABC Family's Greek. And…the list dwindles from there. Amanda Congdon's "talks" with HBO never seemed to materialize. Kudos to Julia Allison for snagging a Wired cover and starting a lifecasting site, Nonsociety, but that Bravo pilot never saw the light of day and even Gawker doesn't cover her much anymore. (She may consider that a blessing.) The people who get the most press for using social media are still, well, the real celebrities like Oprah and Ashton Kutcher. It's enough to make you a cynic that celebrity isn't really getting democratized at all—it's just getting fragmented into slivers of micro-fame. And the truth is so far micro-fame doesn't pay. Enter an unlikely Internet fame winner: Zoe Keating. Keating is an avant garde cellist and that is her day job. She has no label. No agents. Nothing. Just 1,081,522 Twitter followers (and counting), the number one spot on iTunes classical music list, YouTube videos of her performances and a Web site. Keating was on NBC's Press:Here along with Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren this week. While Westergren left the music world to start a tech company, Keating left a high-paying tech job to become a full time cellist. Her music has been featured in film scores and commercials, but she makes the bulk of her income from iTunes. And because she doesn't have any "people," she gets to keep every dime. It's an interesting flip from the mainstream model where studios make money off music sales and artists only make money when they tour. Keating also doesn't have the normal hang-ups of a prima donna musician. I asked her if she had the usual anti-corporate bias against her music being used to advertise products and she looked at me like I was mental. (See the clip below. The entire show is available here.) In short, she gets that the model for musicians is thoroughly broken and she revels in it. I asked if she would take a huge record deal if it came to her now and she said “no” before I could finish the question. “I would definitely do it myself because I don’t want to compromise,” she said. This is all the more impressive when you consider she's a classical musician—not exactly a category that flies off the shelves. Or is that part of why it worked? You don't exactly see classical musicians on MTV's Cribs squandering multi-million signing bonuses. So someone like Keating would have to find another way to make a living making music. Keating says she spends 50% of her time managing and promoting her music and 50% actually making music. She also emphasized this was a long struggle to get to this point. Lesson to would be fame seekers: It's not really a new world when it comes to celebrity. There are no shortcuts. It’s still talent, perseverance and hard work. Even the speed and reach of the Net can't create lasting value and income overnight. [PHOTO CREDIT: Jeffrey Rusch.] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
Last week we 
“All Washington Post journalists relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens. Post journalists must recognize that any content associated with them in an online social network is, for practical purposes, the equivalent of what appears beneath their bylines in the newspaper or on our website.”
The iPhone is quickly establishing itself as one of the hottest gaming platforms around, and that doesn’t just extend to games for teens and adults — it’s also a great device for toddlers, provided you have someone around to make sure they don’t start throwing the iPhone or dipping it in apple juice. One company that’s proving this is 
Just like Web 2.0 start-ups have been spending much of 2009 trying to figure out how to turn users and community into revenues, so too have the last few years’ crop of Internet celebrities been trying to figure out how to make a business out of those over-used buzz words "their personal brands."| You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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