The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Alibaba Turns 10 – Aims To Create 100 Million Jobs, Employ 10 Million People
- Zune HD’s UI: The Full Tour
- TC50: The Video
- RedBeacon Wins The Top Prize At TechCrunch50 2009
- TC50: Demopit Winner Chyngle Creates In-Pocket Mobile Marketing Apps For Stadiums
- TC50 Backstage: Reid Hoffman on a LinkedIn IPO and What Startups May Beat Him Out
- TC50: Demopit Winner Socialwok Lays A Great Social Layer Over Google Apps
- TC50 Backstage: Why Dick Costolo Joined Twitter and the Magic Acquisition Number
- TC50: Meet The Whuffie, A New Currency That’s Based On Your Online Reputation
- TC50: Clixtr Launches Location-Aware Photo Sharing For The iPhone
- TC50: Simply Add A Social Network To Any Site With Stribe
- TC50: Radiusly Aims To Put Twitter In A More Professional Setting
- It’s Time For Donut! Android v1.6 Launched For Developers
- TC50: Lissn Is A Broader Twitter Meets A Simpler Google Wave
- TC50: Threadsy, A Communications Stream To Rule Them All
- TC50: Hark! Launches A Plugin To Bring Real-Time Sharing To Your Browser
- TC50: Twitter COO Dick Costolo Talks About His Newest “Challenge”
- TC50: CrowdFusion Merges The Best Features Of Blogs, Wikis, And More Into One Unified CMS
- TC50: Find The Perfect Scene, Every Time. AnyClip Is A Search Engine For Movie Clips
- TC50 Backstage: Well, Tell us How you REALLY Feel, Tim O’Reilly
- TC50: Perpetually.com Is A Time Machine For The Web
- TC50: Insttant Harnesses Twitter To Create A Real-Time News And Analysis Engine
- TC50: Thoora Brings The Day’s News Cycle Into Clouds Of Content
- WITTC50?: Courtesy of the red, white and blue? Let’s show some at TC50
- MySpace Has Built Its Own Recommendation Engine, And They’re Open-Sourcing It
| Alibaba Turns 10 – Aims To Create 100 Million Jobs, Employ 10 Million People Posted: 16 Sep 2009 01:00 AM PDT
George had the opportunity this weekend to attend Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group’s 10 year anniversary celebration, dubbed the “Alifest”. Alibaba is best known for its international B2B e-commerce and sourcing market place Alibaba.com, but also operates Taobao – the “eBay of China” and largest C2C Internet retail web site, Alimama – an online advertising exchange and affiliate network – as well as Alipay, China’s most popular third-party online payment system modelled after Paypal but offering additional features such as escrow services.
Alibaba’s chairman Jack Ma, a former English teacher, founded Alibaba in 1999 out of his Hangzhou apartment. Ten years later the company has grown to China’s second largest Internet company, after digital entertainment giant Tencent. His company Alibaba.com’s 2007 IPO on the Hong Kong stock exchange was the second largest Internet offering ever after Google’s debut on NASDAQ in 2004. Since 2005, Yahoo! is a strategic shareholder when it acquired 39% of Alibaba Group for US$ 1 billion. In return Alibaba operates the portal Yahoo! China, but the secondary role Yahoo! China plays for Alibaba became evident when Ma shared his vision for the next 10 years of Alibaba during this weekend’s press conference. This was once again underscored yesterday when Yahoo! sold $150 million worth of shares in Alibaba.com.
Jack’s dream is to focus on empowering and encouraging small and medium sized enterprises (SME’s) across the globe and it centers around 3 major goals for the next 10 years: Goal 1: 10 million people “work at” Alibaba By “working at” Jack symbolically referred to millions of SME entrepreneurs that will not literally be employed by Alibaba but are turned to “netrepeneurs” and independently utilize and work online with Alibabas trade platforms and software solutions: Alisoft was established in January 2007 and offers software as a service solutions for SME’s. In July 2009, Alisoft was merged with Alibaba Group R&D Institute to lay a solid technology foundation to further develop Alibaba Group’s businesses. At the same time Alibaba Group this weekend announced the establishment of a new subsidiary focusing on cloud computing. In the medium run, it is evident that Alibaba will strive to emerge as a leading software solution provider for SME’s, eventually competing with Western players such as Salesforce.com.
Goal 2: 100 million new jobs created worldwide by Alibaba A megalomaniac target at first glance, this could very well become reality when considering Alibabas resources and Jack Ma’s obviously wide-reaching personal connections that became more apparent to me through the course of Alifest. In May 2007, Alibaba.com introduced the Ali-loan program offering financing to small Chinese businesses in partnership with leading Chinese banks. This model was now hinted to be extended across other countries in cooperation with Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen bank. The second corner stone to achieve this goal involves Alibabas training department, Ali-Institute that was upgraded this July to become a new profit-oriented business unit under Alibaba.com. During the cleverly staged Alifest program speakers such as Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus, former president Bill Clinton (both over video) and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz underpinned the importance of fostering SME development across developing nations and endorsed Alibabas global efforts. This is quite remarkably for a Chinese company. Provided, you still consider it as such: “In 10 years we wont make differences between local or international companies any more, but only between differences in integrity”, Jack Ma said during his speech this weekend. All points considered Alibaba is indeed in a powerful position to shape the worlds economy in the coming decade. Taking Alibabas already undisputed status among SME manufacturers in what is soon to become world’s largest economy, even the third proclaimed goal by Jack Ma can seem plausible: Goal 3: 1 billion people trading on Alibaba Group’s platforms The roadway to Alibabas most eager goal was visualized to us impressively when Alibaba.com’s CEO David Wei gave us an exclusive tour of his company’s new headquarters. (Which by the way also has a basketball court inaugurated by another of Jack Ma’s friends Kobe Bryant, who was also present in Hangzhou this weekend) David presented us Alibaba’s realtime trading statistics generated from the three pillars of its business: international trade, domestic Chinese wholesale and domestic Chinese retail. (the according graphs can be seen in the picture above from left to right). During the time of our visit last Friday evening at around 7pm Chinese time, 2.87 million concurrent users were active on Alibaba.com’s B2B portal. According to David the daily average concurrent user number is 4 million, around 10% of its 42.8 million worldwide registered users. The groups domestic C2C e-commerce marketplace Taobao holds around 78% of the online consumer market in China. As of mid-2009, it served 156 million registered users. Transaction volume on Taobao reached nearly US$ 11.8 billion in the first half of 2009, and by that exceeded the largest retailer in China in transaction volume during the same period. David continued to say that “Alibaba’s combined trading statistic give us 3-6 months lead time to predict Chinas domestic trade and export volumes”. These are without doubts immensely powerful insights to possibly the biggest driver of our current world economy. Not without reason, Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma was one of the first to recognize the economic downturn in February last year, when he predicted “a though (economic) winter is coming, dark clouds are forming and the thunder is coming closer” during the annual Alibaba all-employee conference. “Today, the darkest period for Chinese exporters is over”, Alibaba’s CEO David Wei confirmed to us. I asked David to tell us more about AliExpress – a new international wholesale platform for small-sum orders from its Alibaba.com database of Chinese manufacturers. He confirmed “the platform is still in beta but bound to launch in rather weeks than months from now”. The service offers minimum orders as low as 1 item, escrow payment and delivery with full tracking. Advertising “factory prices on even the smallest orders” the service is de facto a B2C marketplace just like Amazon and in part eBay that connects the Chinese manufacturers on Alibabas existing B2B portal Alibaba.com with the US consumer market. It will also be the first international roll out of Alibaba’s online payment and escrow system Alipay now competing with PayPal China in fight for Chinese SME merchants. Alipay currently facilitates about 4 million online payments worth up to US$100 million per day. It surpassed 200 million registered users in early July 2009.
With AliExpress the company for the first time attacks eBay directly in its home market. In China the US company already lost against Alibabas Taobao, giving up its domestic eBay platform and partially selling it to Chinese Internet group TOM Online in 2006. Not included in that sale, however was eBays and PayPals cross-boarder business of Chinese merchants selling to US consumers, that continues to be operated by PayPal China itself. This remaining eBay asset is now under serious threat, with Alibaba entering the B2C export business. The move nevertheless comes with many risks for Alibaba. Only in December last year, Alibaba’s competitor Global Sources Direct, a division of NASDAQ-listed online sourcing platform Global Sources, announced it would discontinue its wholesale services. The platform was established in 2005 as a joint venture between Global Sources and eBay. A major part of the failure was attributed to the fact, that in such a cross national market place setting, it is impossible for its operator to guarantee quality, availability and delivery times. Instead it has to rely on the goodwill of its merchants, which in a developing market like China is a huge challenge. It remains to be seen how Alibaba can solve this problem better than its competitors. Additionally to its international challenges Alibaba Group is under constant attack from rising Chinese rivals such as Baidu’s new C2C e-commerce platform Youa. Since the end of last year China’s number one search engine Baidu.com has blocked all Taobao merchants offers in its natural search results, leading to a huge loss of search volume. In retaliation Alibaba Group, previously one of the biggest ad spenders on Baidu, stopped all its PPC campaigns. In the "Art of War", Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu writes “concentrate your energy and hoard your strength”. However, Alibaba’s Jack Ma seems to ignore this advice by competing on multiple battlefields both at home and abroad, potentially stretching his company's resources too thin. Yet the man reinforced his modesty in yesterdays closing speech when he said “looking back we are now a big company, but looking ahead we are still a very small company”. Having seen Ma passionately in action this weekend, it is clear that he's lost none of the tireless energy that has made him successful, instead gaining in charisma and determination that will be necessary for the next 10 years ahead. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Posted: 16 Sep 2009 12:13 AM PDT  The Zune HD is upon us, and whether you love it or hate it, you have to admit that it is devilishly good-looking. I happen to think it's also a great media player, based on my day with it and on previous demos, but the final judgment will come in a day or two with the full review. In the meantime, I'm sure a lot of people have been waiting on a decent walkthrough of the Zune HD's interface. I've got just that for you, in HD no less, so click that play button and get an in-depth tour of the music and video navigation, browser, and marketplace.TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| Posted: 15 Sep 2009 09:58 PM PDT The conference is over, the winner has been announced (RedBeacon), and the drinking has begun. Thank you so much to all of the companies (both the finalists and in the Demopit), the sponsors, and the attendees who made this year’s TechCrunch50 possible. We’ve put up more than a hundred posts in the past two days, covering every single launch, and then some. So there’s a lot to absorb. But for now here’s a video that captures some of the spirit of the event. Video by Animoto. Song by Chamillionaire (who jumped in as a judge at the last minute). Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| RedBeacon Wins The Top Prize At TechCrunch50 2009 Posted: 15 Sep 2009 08:04 PM PDT
The 50 startup presentations are over, the judges votes are in, Michael and Jason chewed over the top contenders, and the winner of this year’s TechCrunch50 is RedBeacon. The startup aims to help consumers find local service providers such as plumbers, bakers, and contractors. As we described in our initial write-up:
The founders of RedBeacon—Ethan Anderson, Yaron Binur, and Aaron Lee—are former Google product managers and engineers. This year’s TechCrunch50 was much closer than in previous years, with the quality level of the companies being high across the board. The three runners up for the top TechCrunch50 prize are Threadsy, AnyClip, and CitySourced. The best presentation goes to iMo, and the best international goes to Trollim Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50: Demopit Winner Chyngle Creates In-Pocket Mobile Marketing Apps For Stadiums Posted: 15 Sep 2009 06:12 PM PDT
What if the next time you went to a football game, there was an iPhone app for that stadium that listed all the bathrooms nearest you, all the food stalls (with menus and the ability to order from your seat), a button to contact medical assistance, and the ability to find car pools back home? One of today’s Demopit winners at TechCrunch50 is Chyngle, has created a branded app for the University of Michigan which does just that. Chyngle’s branded apps use GPS to find out your location and discover services and people nearby. It shows them as red dots on a seating chart of the stadium. If you want to order a slice of pizza, you can send an SMS message to one of the pizza vendors and they will deliver it to your seat. CEO Todd Sullivan calls it “in-pocket marketing.” If you want to find tickets for sale by other fans or a ride home, the app lets you call them anonymously (the calls are routed through Chyngle). The company charges the venue a $2,000 a month for the app, and can create custom apps for any event location. During the Q&A, the judges suggest changing the name. “My second company was called Plaxo,” says Sean Parker, “people thought it was a dental problem.” They also suggested making it a free app and creating different ones for every big venue like Madison Square Gardens Todd Sullivan Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50 Backstage: Reid Hoffman on a LinkedIn IPO and What Startups May Beat Him Out Posted: 15 Sep 2009 06:12 PM PDT
So you don’t need a bunch of words from me, just go to the jump and watch our final backstage interview of the conference where Hoffman talks about whether LinkedIn will buy Xing and whether it’ll file to go public this year. Also, Hoffman names the three other tech companies he thinks can price pretty much whenever they want. (And lucky him, he’s an investor in two.) Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50: Demopit Winner Socialwok Lays A Great Social Layer Over Google Apps Posted: 15 Sep 2009 06:09 PM PDT
Right now, if you want to share a document via Google Docs, most people do it by emailing it to other users. The process to do this is very clunky — even though Google obviously runs not only Google Docs, but a hugely popular email service, Gmail. If you try to IM a document to someone, you either have to make it fully public, or put a persons email address in to make sure they’re on a safe list for that document. Socialwok simplifies all of this immensely because its a social network that wraps around these documents. But it’s not just Google Docs, it’s really a lot of Google Apps. You can see YouTube video, and Google Calendar events from Socialwok too. And Calendar integration is particularly nice because you can update and post items right from your stream. If you are a FriendFeed user, Socialwok will look very familiar — the UI is nearly identical. The difference is that rather than having YouTube videos, tweets, and the like in your stream, you have all the various kinds of Google documents. This even includes the still-in-beta-testing Google Wave.
You can leave comments on these items (or if it’s Google Wave, pull in the whole Wave), as well as easily share via the various social networks including Twitter, Facebook and yes, FriendFeed. There is also a Twitter-esque, “What are you doing now” box to input messages. Obviously, security has to be a concern here. Not all of your documents have to be shared with everyone in your Socialwok network. But there are groups you can create to limit document sharing. Socialwok has a mobile interface that is just as robust as the web interface. They built the mobile website relying heavily on HTML5, so it works as well as Gmail’s mobile web app works, we’re told. But what’s really great with Socialwok is that rather than having to sign up for yet another social network, you sign in to Socialwok simply by using your Google credentials (the ones tied to your Google Docs account). The company has been working pretty extensively with Google to get all of this working so seamlessly. Simply put, if Google doesn’t buy these guys, they should seriously consider emulating many of the things they are doing or at least heavily promoting what they’re doing. (If there isn’t enough Google tie-ins for you already, all of Socialwok runs on Google App Engine.) Until then, the business model for Socialwok is a freemium model. There will be a basic free version and paid subscriptions will get additional administrative features and dedicated support. Watch more in the demo video 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 |
| TC50 Backstage: Why Dick Costolo Joined Twitter and the Magic Acquisition Number Posted: 15 Sep 2009 06:01 PM PDT
So lucky for us that some of the most influential and interesting judges were left for the final panel. I caught up with one of my favorites, Dick Costolo, who most people know as the new COO of Twitter, others know as the former co-founder of Feedburner and far fewers know as a former improv comedian. Costolo and I talked about why he gave up a plush post-acquisition Chicago life to move to Silicon Valley and run the day-to-day Twitter operations, when it’s a good idea to hire your friends and when it isn’t, Twitter’s magic acquisition number, and why startup M&A is like teenage crushes. Also, Twitter CEO Evan Williams has been outspoken about not enjoying his time at Google after the Blogger acquisition. Others have cited that as a reason Twitter may not sell to Google in the future. I asked Costolo whether he had the same experience. Video is on the jump. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50: Meet The Whuffie, A New Currency That’s Based On Your Online Reputation Posted: 15 Sep 2009 05:41 PM PDT
The startup is hoping to promote change in the web by rewarding users with a positive impact on the web with this karma-like digital currency. The service will monitor your activity across various websites, including things like comments, posts, and more. When you complete positive actions, you gain Whuffies, and you lose them when you do something that the organization deems to be detrimental. The company hopes that as we use the web more and more in our day-to-day life this positivity will extend beyond the web. To get started you enter your username on Twitter (Facebook support will be coming). The site displays how many Whuffies you have, along with a graph of your progress over time. The site ranks its users by Whuffies, in the hopes of helping surface the top users in different fields. The algorithm takes into account ‘public endorsements’, or the number of times a user’s tweets are retweeted, or a Facebook post is Liked. It also takes into account who is making the endorsement, and the content in the messages that are being posted. You can make offers to other users using Whuffies as payment (for example, I could ask someone to help me draw a logo, offering 100 Whuffies as payment). The company says it was inspired by the Creative Common nonprofit model. The name comes from Cory Doctorow’s book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Q&A with panelists Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker, Mike Schroepfer, Chamillionaire, and Robert Scoble: Images Video:
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50: Clixtr Launches Location-Aware Photo Sharing For The iPhone Posted: 15 Sep 2009 05:26 PM PDT
Clixtr’s service is primarily designed for concerts, weddings, and other major events where lots of people are taking lots of photos, with no good way to aggregate them all together. The service revolves around an iPhone application that uses the smartphone’s integrated camera, data connection, and GPS to faciliate quick photo uploads to a shared album. Using it is simple: take a photo, and upload it to Clixtr. If the app detects that you’re near where a lot of other people are uploading media, it will group them into an album. You can browse these albums directly from the iPhone app in a stream view. You can also use an ‘explore’ function, which uses the phone’s GPS to locate any events that are going on at any nearby events. To create an event, you simply enter a descriptive name, and then invite friends who are nearby to view and participate in the album. Of course, photo sharing sites have been around for ages. But few of them are really based around location — instead, you usually have to create an album and manually invite each of your friends. If you don’t have someone’s contact information they’re out of luck, and the whole process can be time consuming and tedious. Q&A with panelists Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker, Mike Schroepfer, and Robert Scoble: Michael Arrington: full disclosure for MS, at some point, you will have location. MS: It’s something we’d like to do… RS: My phone doesn’t let you do anything while it uploads the photo. But it’s a nice install. Don’t have to do signup. Q: How does it make money RH: I think doing local photo could be good. I would up incentive for participation. One thing that could be distinctive for when Facebook app starts doing their own. If all my friends are already on graph A (Facebook), that’s hard. You’ll need to up level of incentive to participate. Video:
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50: Simply Add A Social Network To Any Site With Stribe Posted: 15 Sep 2009 05:15 PM PDT
The service, opening to the public today at Techcrunch50, provides a free and easy way to place a social networking layer over any site. This layer exists on your site in the form of a bar at the bottom of the page. This is not unlike the Meebo chat bar that you may have seen on this site and others recently. But Meebo was really only about chat (and sharing), Stribe wants this bar to be a full-fledged social network on your site, including members, comments, and yes, chat. Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect offer some of this functionality, but again, that’s not actually your social network, it’s Google or Facebook’s social layer laid on top of your site. As such, neither of those are very customizable, at all. Stribe is completely customizable if you know what you’re doing (or have a developer who does). Maybe you don’t want the bar at the bottom of the site — you can move it. Maybe you don’t want it to be the default black — you can change it. But if you just want the defaults, it’s as easy as installing one bit of JavaScript code onto your site to get it working. People who register to be a member of your site by way of Stribe also become members of the larger Stribe community. This means that if you have a friend who is a member of another Stribe-powered network, you can still chat with them even when you’re on different sites. Stribe will run on the “freemium” model, offering much of their service for free, but charging a fee to those customers who are of a certain size (according to site traffic). That will range from $10 to $50 a month to use Stribe to create a social network for your site. CEO Kamel Zeroual and CTO Gael Delalleau presented at the conference today. Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased) The experts: Robert Scoble, Sean Parker, Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Mike Schroepfer, Chamillionaire MS: No integration with any social network there now? Was that intentional? KZ: The point is that you just need to control and see what is going on, on YOUR website. DC: 37Signals says that sometimes products do too much, you should do less. With many product, you can do too many things, and it becomes difficult to figure out what to use it for. KZ: The low-hanging fruit is the community, but we’re trying to reach out to different markets. C: Are you saying, if I’m Walgreens, this will turn it into a social network? This is different from Twitter, you are just at a site and you want to interact. KZ: That’s exactly the point, man. RS: Enterprises already have tools like this thought. What makes this different? KZ: There are a lot of sites that don’t want to use someone else to become a social network. Images: Video: Other Coverage
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50: Radiusly Aims To Put Twitter In A More Professional Setting Posted: 15 Sep 2009 05:04 PM PDT
But unlike Facebook and LinkedIn which exist as two totally separate networks, Radiusly wants to integrate its service with Twitter. Users will be able to publish an update they leave on Radiusly to Twitter (and Facebook, as well). But the key selling-point is that in the Radiusly environment you can also do much more, such as have a professional profile, resume, sample works, and photos. Ideally, a Radiusly users would be someone who loves the concept of Twitter, but wants to be able to maintain their work-related tweets in a separate environment, where they could also share other professional information. As more and more companies wake up to the idea of using Twitter as a means of communication, a service like this could be compelling to them. Of course, there is a lot of competition out there for the business Twitter market. Aside from startups like CoTweet, (TechCrunch50-alum) Yammer, and Blellow, Radiusly could be looking at both LinkedIn and Twitter itself making more moves into this arena shortly. We already know that Twitter is gearing up some professional tools for businesses to use, but whether those will be things similar to what Radiusly offers, no one is sure yet. Meanwhile, if LinkedIn wanted to, it could easily make itself Twitter-centric. It doesn’t appear that they are going to do that, but you never know. Radiusly plans to using a subscription/freemium model, offering some services for free, while charging a subscription fee for others. There will also be sponsored search listings, job listings, and banner ads to bring in revenue. CEO Chris Sel and VP of Business Development Adarsh Pallian presented it today at the conference. Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased) The experts: Robert Scoble, Sean Parker, Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Mike Schroepfer, Chamillionaire RS: I think you’re aiming at the right target, but you hit the wall. Brands tell me they won’t want to advertise on Twitter. You’re just not there yet, I’m not sure why. Q: Reid your thoughts? RH: In a rare position, I agree with much of what Robert was saying. The real key is how do you exchange information on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, not that they need a new way to search for some of this. DC: I agree with Robert and Reid, I don’t really get why I would go there. I kept trying to figure it out, to be fair when Twitter first launched I didn’t get it either, now I work there. C: I gotta be Simon Cowell too. I can’t see why someone would need this. Images: Video: Other Coverage:
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| It’s Time For Donut! Android v1.6 Launched For Developers Posted: 15 Sep 2009 05:01 PM PDT  Starting to feel like Android's "Cupcake" update (v1.5) from May is getting a bit stale? Google's got a new treat for you. They've just launched version 1.6 (which, under Google's pastry-oriented naming scheme, is known as "Donut") of Android to developers, which packs a hefty handful of new features and polishes up much of what was already there. The bit that plays best to our geeky-blogger side (rather than our geeky-consumer side) is whats been added for the sake of lineup expandability. Namely, we're talking about CDMA support - which, while not immediately awesome, opens the doors to Android handsets on the likes of Verizon, Sprint, and Virgin Mobile. Beyond that, they've also bumped the supported resolutions list to include screens all the way up to 800x480 - in other words, Android can now push much prettier images to higher-end screens.TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50: Lissn Is A Broader Twitter Meets A Simpler Google Wave Posted: 15 Sep 2009 04:51 PM PDT
If you’ve seen the video demos or had a chance to use Google Wave at all, Lissn may seem familiar — it has the same type of real-time conversation aspect. The difference, of course, is that this is the main function of Lissn, while Wave is trying to be a lot of different things wrapped into one. Lissn is all about having conversations with people, and allows others to watch, and join in as they’d like. And because anyone can join in on these conversation threads, Lissn can tell what the most popular topics being talked about are. And it highlights those for other users to see, and lets them get involved in the conversations too. You also have friends on the service, and you can see what conversations your friends are engaged in, and can decide whether or not you want to join them too. Lissn also automatically translates conversations in your native language, using Google Translate. There is also a location-based element to the service. Using your IP address (or manually putting in a city) you can see the conversations happening around that area. Another service that has similar conversation capabilities is FriendFeed. Of course, the future outlook for that service is murky since Facebook recently acquired them. And FriendFeed also had many more features such as aggregation of social data, Lissn is just about conversations, keeping it simple. As for a business model, Lissn will show ads based on keywords within conversations, just like Google does in Gmail. Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased) The experts: Robert Scoble, Sean Parker, Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Mike Schroepfer, Chamillionaire Q: Dick, you’re working for Twitter now, what do you think? DC: I like it but on the business side, Google Ads isn’t going to work. Random conversations are hard to monetize. But I like the idea of sponsored conversations. This is kind of like Twitter meets Get Satisfaction. RS: Conversations are interesting, but I’m not sure I see enough that pulls me in here. Why would I leave Twitter to come here. MA: Twitter is all about short conversations, this takes that idea and extends it to longer conversations. RS: So why is this different from FriendFeed and soon Facebook? DC: I’ll answer this, and I want shares in the company (kidding). The answer there is the local conversation. People looking for a good pizza place in Noe Valley, etc. This is an interesting vehicle, for I want to ask questions in a local context. MS: I think there is a big separation between big conversations and the local conversations. You need to think about how to separate those out. The local conversation has to be colored by your social network, I think. It’s about your friends. RS: That was a huge problem with FriendFeed too. With too many people participating, there’s just too much. C: Right, how many people can have a conversation? Like a trending conversation on Twitter, you can go back so far, to so many message. MA: Yeah, it’s mostly about live conversations. But it’s also interesting to just listen, especially what celebrities have to say. Myke Armstrong showed off the demo of listen today at the conference. Video: Other Coverage:
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50: Threadsy, A Communications Stream To Rule Them All Posted: 15 Sep 2009 04:38 PM PDT
Launching its large beta today at TechCrunch50 as a free web app, Threadsy wants to take all of your online communication and shove it into a single service. All of the messages directed at you (email and Twitter @replies, for exmaple) will be put into a single stream of message, called the “inbound” column. Meanwhile, all of the activity streams that you simply follow (Twitter, Facebook, etc), will be put into a single activity stream, the “unbound” stream. The result is one service to rule them all. The great thing about this is that you no longer have to sign into multiple accounts while remembering who is trying to communicate with you. Everyone also has a profile on Threadsy which shows all the social networks you reside on. While the thought of putting all of your communication in one place is nice, quantity will obviously be an issue. But Threadsy is more than just communication aggregation, it also promises to provide deep context about the people you are communicating with, so you can filter and manage the stream. You can also filter by the type of service (for example, only seeing tweets or Facebook messages). In terms of monetization, like a lot of other communication platforms, Threadsy will show contextual advertisements. But the service says that unlike something like Gmail, it won’t always show them, and instead will only do so when it could actually help the user. Threadsy currently looks at over 40 social sites on the web to get this information. CEO Rob Goldman and VP of Engineering Udi Nir demoed the app today at the event.
Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased) The experts: Robert Scoble, Sean Parker, Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Mike Schroepfer, Chamillionaire RS: I think this is great for me. But are there enough people who will care about this? But I want it right now! RG: That’s a great point, we followed FriendFeed closely, but we’re trying to pull all the information that’s required. DC: This is the PIMP problem (personal information management). I like that this tackles that aspect of day to day problems. RH: It’s a good communications platform but Google has tried this before. It’s a tough challenge. SP: It’s beautifully built, but this is a huge challenge. But this looks very good and clean. I’m not a user of something like this, because this is more for power-users, and I don’t think all inboxes are created equal. A Facebook message is lighter than a regular email, and Twitter even less. RS: How do you make money off the stream? RG: We think current webmail misses the mark by focusing on low value ads across all message. We only want to focus on 2, 3, or 4 percent of your messages. RS: What about hooking up with Tumblr or Posterous for curation? RG: It’s exciting to see what people do with this. MA: So FriendFeed is dead to your Robert, is this it? RS: Maybe. C: It definitely depends on how it feels when you try it out. I feel like I’m cheating on my MySpace, so I think this is brilliant. How safe is this though? Everyone could get everything if they got into your account. Video: Other Coverage:
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50: Hark! Launches A Plugin To Bring Real-Time Sharing To Your Browser Posted: 15 Sep 2009 04:12 PM PDT
The company says that there are plenty of link sharing apps, but when it comes to sharing a link from a webpage, there isn’t really a good way to do it — Emailing, Twitter, and other services can be a hassle. Hark’s plugin sits at the bottom of your screen, with a handful of buttons for sharing and a chat window that slides out of the bar. When you want to flag something as interesting, you can send out a ‘flare’, which immediately sends out a small notice to the rest of your friends that have the plugin installed. The plugin allows you to see which of your friends are online, and (depending on their settings) display which pages they’re currently browsing, so you can strike up a conversation. You can also see which other users are browsing the same page as you, and can look at their history of Flares to see if you might have something in common. Q&A with panelists Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker, Mike Schroepfer, and Robert Scoble: Images: Video: Other Coverage:
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50: Twitter COO Dick Costolo Talks About His Newest “Challenge” Posted: 15 Sep 2009 04:02 PM PDT
During a break at TechCrunch50, Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington drilled new Twitter COO Dick Costolo on his new job, why he took the position and what he’s working on. Costolo, who is an early Twitter investor, said he was thinking of maybe starting his own new company, but decided instead to join Twitter because of its incredible momentum:
Twitter’s definitely growing fast. When Michael asked him “If you were forced to trade off between growth and stability, what would you choose?” he dodged:
Costolo was tight lipped about what he’s going to actually be working on, saying:
Costolo, who joined Twitter after working at Google and founded RSS service Feedburner, sold the company to Google for $100 million in 2007 and recently left Google for greener pastures. If Costolo wants challenge, he’s come to the right place. As we wrote in our post reporting on his move, Costolo is someone who has actual experience building scalable infrastructures, which Twitter needs. The company hasn't launched any memorable new features, while fellow social network Facebook continues to innovate. And there’s the ongoing revenue challenge that Twitter faces. Perhaps once he figures out his dental plan and fills out his tax forms, Costolo will look to launch a few features and perhaps help Twitter figure out their downtime problem. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50: CrowdFusion Merges The Best Features Of Blogs, Wikis, And More Into One Unified CMS Posted: 15 Sep 2009 03:40 PM PDT
To help give an idea of exactly what Crowd Fusion can do, the startup walked us through the process of creating a blog post. First, the CMS can present a writer with stories they might want to cover: the platform has an integrated feed reader, which can intelligently determine when there’s a breaking story that your site has yet to write about. The CMS can then facilitate actually writing the post by importing excerpts into your new posts (with links to the original articles). It can also suggest related blog posts for you to include at the bottom of your post (you can simply drag and drop to rearrange or remove the stories). Say a gadget blog wanted to write about a new phone that had just come out (today’s demo featured our super-secret iPhone Killer, the CrunchPhone). Because the CMS can integrate the site’s gadget database directly into the CMS, adding a new product is simple — you can add it to your database using a small widget on the same page that you’re writing your blog post in, without having to leave the page. And because the blog system is integrated with the product database, you can generate intuitive tables comparing multiple existing phones against the new one. CrowdFusion has a plugin architecture so it’s extensible. The company is open-sourcing the CrowdFusion platform, and will be releasing it in public beta today. Q&A with panelists Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker, Mike Schroepfer, and Robert Scoble: Videos: Other Coverage
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50: Find The Perfect Scene, Every Time. AnyClip Is A Search Engine For Movie Clips Posted: 15 Sep 2009 03:26 PM PDT
Whether you want to poke fun at something, embellish a love note, or just prove a point, there’s probably a movie scene out there that can help you do it. People reference scenes all the time in their daily lives, and on the web it’s not uncommon for a blogger to accentuate their post with a particularly relevant clip. But for their popularity, there still isn’t an established site that’s known as the place to find a movie clip — YouTube and Hulu are always worth a shot, but they can be very hit or miss. AnyClip, a new startup that’s launching today at TechCrunch 50, wants to be the solution, with a searchable database of movie scenes. There are, of course, other places to look for movie clips on the web. But these all have their faults: YouTube is riddled with content that may be somehow related to the scene you’re looking for, but acted out by people who most definitely aren’t the original actors. All of Hulu’s content is licensed straight from content owners so you don’t have to worry about issues with user-generated clip, but their library is still quite limited. To help make the search engine as accurate and thorough as possible, AnyClip draws its data from a number of sources: first, it has compiled publically available data on the web and associated it with each film. The site has also created a Mechanical Turk-style operation, with a team of humans inputting meta data for each film (workers are contributing from all over the world, with most of them coming from the US and Israel). On average, each film in the database has 500 tags. The site is also launching a public API, which will allow developers to query its database of movie clips from their applications. SP: The content deals are really hard. A: Everyone has an emphasis on long from, but nobody is paying attention to the short formats. As a result you can acquire content for less than you would elsewhere. Jason Calacanis: If not all the studios sign up. What do you think you can do with fair use? Could you do 15 seconds of content? Images: Videos: Other Coverage:
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50 Backstage: Well, Tell us How you REALLY Feel, Tim O’Reilly Posted: 15 Sep 2009 03:15 PM PDT
O’Reilly is a consummate thought leader in the Valley so the interview is interesting for anyone. But if you’re planning on actually pitching O’Reilly on anything this is required viewing. Oh, he also explains what he and the Cookie Monster have in common. Video is on the jump. (Sorry for the abrupt edits. Trying to keep these interviews on the short-side.) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50: Perpetually.com Is A Time Machine For The Web Posted: 15 Sep 2009 03:10 PM PDT
The company says that every year, 5-8% of ‘bookmarked’ content vanishes from the web as pages are modified and removed. Perpetually helps solve this problem by recording a history of every change on your site. And Perpetually doesn’t just keep a copy of this content in an ugly search engine archive — you can actually view the content in context, as it originally appeared on the site. You can even select a specific portion of a site that you’d like to focus on and scroll through its history in-line with the rest of the page. The interface is very slick, and is reminiscent of what you’ll find with Apple’s Time Machine backup software. You can also browse through a visual history of your website using an interface that’s similar to Apple’s Cover Flow feature. To get started, companies just have to tell the Perpetually.com service to start monitoring their sites, and the service will do the rest. There’s no software or plugins to install. At this point the service doesn’t allow you to index content behind a password wall, though it sounds like this may be available in the future. Customers can elect to keep their records totally private, for peace of mind. However, users can also use the software to monitor changes on publicly available sites. Of course, there are already some well-established efforts to create a historical record of the web, like the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine. But these have their limitations: for one, it’s not really feasible for services like this to track every change on a site, as the processing and space costs would be extreme. The company already has some impressive clients, including the design team over at The Wall Street Journal. Q&A with panelists Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker, Mike Schroepfer, and Robert Scoble: RH: it would be valuable to create configured accounts. The freemium could be try it for two weeks then pay. It’s better to let users test something out before paying. SP: you are going to need the benefits of the freemium model. A: Freemium is not what we have today. RS: The business challenge will be convincing the New York Times to use this. RS: How does the customers ad dollars get protecting (the publisher). Jason: HAve you considered making this a tool that the NYTimes can make public on their site that lets people see past homepages. A; Its up to the publisher to do that. We are open to that. Images: Videos: Other Coverage
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50: Insttant Harnesses Twitter To Create A Real-Time News And Analysis Engine Posted: 15 Sep 2009 02:55 PM PDT
The site features an analytics platform that can perform semantic analysis on Tweets as they come in — in other words, it can tell what a tweet is talking about, and if it has a positive or negative sentiment. The site can also identify links and media that are rapidly rising in popularity, and displays headlines in real-time as they come in. For Tweets with media, the site allows users to view photos and play videos inline. The top of the site features a list of headlines, detailing some top trends being seen on Twitter (for example, it could say that 77% of the tweets about the movie Extract are positive). If you’re interested about a certain topic or person, you can run a search for them and the site will present a list of top headlines related to that query, along with quick stats about the keyword’s appearances. If you run a search on a user, you can see what other users they’re related to and how much influence they have. To help further refine searches Insttant can filter by location, so you can hone in on tweets that most relevant to you. Q&A with panelists Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker, Mike Schroepfer, and Robert Scoble: Video: Other Coverage:
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| TC50: Thoora Brings The Day’s News Cycle Into Clouds Of Content Posted: 15 Sep 2009 02:44 PM PDT
The site offers an automated system that aggregates news stories from blogs, traditional media, and tweets, and groups them into “story clouds”. But rather than pay attention to a news site’s authority, Thoora is concerned with how interesting and unique a post is — this isn’t just about the top 100 blogs on the web. The company says that it will find blog posts about a breaking news story, even if nobody else has linked to them (provided they’re interesting, of course). You can easily see how many total blogs and news stories have been published about a story, as well as interesting stats like when the story first broke and how popular it is on Twitter. Users can browse through the site by category (the site includes sections on Entertainment, Businesses, Lifestyle, and more) as well as a section that features recently controversial content. The system is also built to handle the real-time web. As bloggers, Twitter users, and other news sites jump on to a breaking story, Thoora will let you watch as new posts come in. Q&A with panelists Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker, Mike Schroepfer, and Robert Scoble: Video: Other Coverage:
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| WITTC50?: Courtesy of the red, white and blue? Let’s show some at TC50 Posted: 15 Sep 2009 02:36 PM PDT
Thank Calacanis, then, for The American flag. TechCrunch50 may be organised and sponsored by Americans but one of the best things about it is that it attracts start-ups from around the globe. To my right, there’s a chap speaking in German to his colleague, yesterday an Indian startup – iMo – was the darling of the day, and half of my friends from London seem to have made the journey across the Atlantic so they don’t miss out on the fun. Each year there’s the inevitable criticism – even from conference judges like Yossi Vardi – that the event is weighted too heavily towards Silicon Valley. But, by and large, that geographical bias is just a natural result of the fact that Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of potential applicants, and also that it’s easier and cheaper to get the Caltrain from Palo Alto to get to the conference than it is to fly in from London, Lisbon or Bangalore. You could equally say that Le Web has a French bias or that DLD has a German bias. And yet. And yet… What kind of message does it send that first thing a non-US entrepreneur sees when they arrive at the conference is a gigantic American flag on the main stage? Moreover, what does it say to non-US startups who are lucky enough to be pitching that the flag is positioned right next to the judges’ desk? I mentioned this to Arrington yesterday and he agreed with me, without hesitation. More accurately he said “at least we’re not starting with the national anthem like last year.” Ok, so it took him until the very end of the day for it to be moved from the stage, and that was only after I’d build a site called ‘Istheamericanflagstillthere.com‘ – but at least it had been moved. This morning, though, the flag was back. For an hour. And then it was removed again. It was only then I realised what was going on. Jason Calacanis kindly came over to explain. “This is America, buddy – the flag stays”. Sure enough, he’d dispatched a poor staffer to replace it. I don’t know what to say, really. I love America. I left my home country to move here so I could visit and write about conferences such as TechCrunch50. Many of the thousands of people in this hall feel the same way. We have no issue with American patriotism, or with the flag being flown in schools, public buildings and private homes. It’s your country, and we don’t have to be here. But, you know what? It’s just not appropriate to fly the Stars and Stripes on stage at a global conference. It smacks of arrogance, xenophobia and ignorance. The same arrogance, xenophobia and ignorance that lead to right-wing commentators forcing (then) Senator Obama to wear a flag pin, lest he be considered a terrorist sympathiser.
Oh! Hey! What’s this? As I write these words, Arrington has just walked on to the stage, picked up the flag and carried it away. Good. It’s the right call, not for reasons of nationalism or patriotism, but simply as a gesture of openness and respect for those visiting from overseas. Two traits that, since the country’s inception, the majority of Americans have held dear. And I’m pretty sure the German guy sitting next to me, the Indian guy behind me and, yeah, the majority of Americans in the rest of room would agree with me. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
| MySpace Has Built Its Own Recommendation Engine, And They’re Open-Sourcing It Posted: 15 Sep 2009 02:29 PM PDT
Called Qizmt, this internally-developed framework was created by the Data Mining team at MySpace. You can see it in action right now with the “People You May Know” feature. But soon, MySpace plans to roll it out to other areas of the site for recommendations soon. More importantly, MySpace plans to open-source the technology for anyone to use. They made the announcement today at the Computerworld Conference in Chicago. From a technical perspective, MySpace explains it as such:
MySpace says it has published the code for Qizmt today. They also note that they have recently open-sourced MSFast, a service they built to help developers track page load performance. Rival Facebook has been doing a bit of its own open-sourcing recently. Last week, they opened up Tornado, the platform that help to power FriendFeed, which they recently acquired. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco |
This is a guest post by Shanghai-based entrepreneur George Godula. His company 
Here’s the thing I love about Reid Hoffman. There’s no “We-don’t-comment-on-rumors-and-speculation” BS with him. You ask him a question and he gives you an answer.
Google Docs has changed the landscape of computing office suites. By moving everything to the cloud, accessing documents is easier now than it ever has been. But unlike a lot of the other things Google is working on, Google Docs isn’t particularly social. 
It’s 5 p.m. and we’re in the homestretch! The experts and the Twitterers seem to be less impressed with the companies this afternoon than the ones this morning. That or we’re all just getting tired after 40-something demos.
The idea of adding a social network to any site is a compelling one. Currently, most sites do this by creating their own networks using service like Facebook Groups and Ning. But those obviously aren’t actually your own site, they are other sites set up under your site’s name. 
While Facebook continues to grow, and some companies are getting more comfortable with using it for things like Pages, LinkedIn still fills the gap for users who want a more professional setting for social networking. A new service launching in public beta today at 
A lot of people use Twitter to have conversations with others, but that’s not really what it was built for. Initially, Twitter was just supposed to be a place to update what you are doing; the @reply only came around because people started using it to direct a conversation at another user. Now conversations are one of the most interesting things about Twitter, and a new startup launching in private beta today at 
Email. Twitter. Instant Messaging. Facebook. Those are just four of the most popular ways to communicate online. And actually, the average 23-year-old has 6 different accounts that they check for messages each day. Maintaining and keeping up with that is either basically impossible, or flat-out impossible. That’s where 
Conference organizer, publisher and investor Tim O’Reilly doesn’t mince words. In this video he talks candidly about 
Day two of TechCrunch 50, and the 
If any American in the hall is so insecure in their patriotism that they need a flag in their line of sight at all times, then I humbly suggest they invest in a flag pin or an ‘America: Love it or leave it’ t-shirt. It’s not like they cost much (thanks China!). Hell, you can even strap a handgun to your thigh and listen to a Toby Keith album on your iPod during the foreign pitches if you like. But please – and I implore you this as someone who loves America so much that I moved here – don’t let your personal politics turn a brilliantly welcoming and positive conference into something else. Something that is starting to resemble a grandstanding game of capture the flag.
As social networks continue to grow in size, recommendation engines are becoming a more vital part to each of them. So vital, in fact, that MySpace has built its own.| 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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