Friday, October 16, 2009

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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Gawker CTO Launches SuperGlued iPhone App For Gawking At Rock Clubs

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 09:00 AM PDT

Next week, 1200 indie (and not-so-indie) rock bands will descend upon New York City for the annual CMJ Music Marathon. Keeping up with all the bands playing at bars and clubs across the city, and who is going to which shows, can be a daunting task even for the most dedicated hipsters. But not to fear, SuperGlued just launched a free iPhone app (iTunes link) with all the CMJ music show listings (and more) that lets you see Tweets about each show, Tweet out your own messages, and share pictures you take via the app.

The launch is timed for CMJ, but it works anywhere. The app pulls in show listings from Last.fm, Livenation, local show listings, and those added by members. The app lets you indicate that you are going to a particular show.

It also lets you gawk at other people at shows, by snapping pictures and sharing them through the app, or checking out Tweets about that show. It acts as a Twitter client as well, letting you Tweet to your friends whether or not a show is worth coming out to, or just to show your appreciation for a particularly rocking song. (The rock-show Tweet is the digital equivalent of holding up a lighter, I guess). Each Tweet is accompanied with a short link to that show’s listing page on SuperGlued , which also shows who else is going.

SuperGlued was founded by Rush Doshi, an ex-AOL product developer, and Tom Plunkett, who’s day job appropriately enough is as the CTO of Gawker. Perhaps that’s where the virtual voyeurism comes from.

On the one hand, it’s seems pretty silly to be looking down at your iPhone when you are at alive show instead of enjoying the band (unless the band sucks). On the other hand, it’s probably easier to have a conversation through Twitter than shouting over the amps.

The app works great for finding shows and seems to capture a pretty comprehensive set of listings. But the one thing it needs is better filters. For instance, it doesn’t let you see which shows near you have the most people going to them. Doshi says that is a feature they plan on adding in the future.

I like apps like SuperGlued because they try to do one thing well. You could just look at your normal Twitter stream for shows your friends are going to, but you’d probably only catch a few. SuperGlued shows you Tweets from everyone about a particular show or band. It’s an interest stream instead of a friend stream.

As realtime streams get more and more noisy, one way to cut down the noise is to use Twitter apps like SuperGlued that focus on a single topic or purpose. And it just so happens that SuperGlued is focused on finding you the right noise to enjoy, so to speak.

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Tinychat Gets A New Look, Adds Facebook Connect, Sees Early Traction

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 07:54 AM PDT

Tinychat, which started out as a simple IRC-style chatroom app to complement the quick-and-dirty conversations on platforms like Twitter, has been steadily building a solid browser-based communication platform that rivals some of the tools built by large corporations or venture-backed startups out there.

After adding essential features like video chat and screensharing options to the application back in May, Tinychat has recently leveraged P2P technology to enhance the service (see p2p.tinychat.com) and added embed capabilities that basically enable anyone with a website to integrate a robust, 100% peer-to-peer enabled video chat system by simply embedding some code and fiddling with some of the variables. (Skype, you listening?)

Tinychat has just been given a new lick of paint, with new controls and a slicker design that’s much more inviting. Also, you can now enter chatrooms and start conversations with multiple people – whether using text, video, audio or a combination thereof – by connecting to your Facebook or Twitter account, eliminating the need to register.

I think this service is awesome, and I consider it to be closest to being the “Skype for the web” (which someday, Skype will introduce, let there be no doubt) than anything else I’ve tried in the past. You go to the Tinychat website, pick a name for your conversation room at hand and bang, you get an instantly shareable, dedicated web-based chat location where you can initiate video or audio chats with decent quality, share your desktop view with others and soon also a way to exchange files from computer to computer.

I’m seemingly not the only one who digs it either. Here’s a quick and dirty comparison based on Compete traffic estimates for TokBox, which developed a similar application with $14 million in VC funding behind them, and Tinychat.com. Alexa shows even more growth for the bootstrapped initiative.

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No, That’s Not The Ice Cream Man. It’s The Google Trike Taking Street View Off-Road.

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 07:07 AM PDT

Google has been making Maps and Earth are a bit more social these days, letting users create 3D buildings and using crowdsourcing to help update changes in terrain and on roads. Now Google Street View is hoping to engage users by letting them suggest spots where the “Trike” should venture.

Google Street View’s Trike what Google uses when it can't drive a car through the area its visually mapping. Some Google employee actually rides this contraption to make sure Street View has visuals on hard-to-reach spots around the world. At Google’s Trike homepage, you can suggest spots where the Trike should go within six categories: parks and trails, university campuses, pedestrian malls (e.g., outdoor shopping areas, boardwalks), theme parks and zoos, landmarks and sports venues.

Google is letting users submit their votes over the next few weeks, and will choose a winner for each category for the Street View trike to visit. It’s certainly an interesting way to engage users with Street View, considering how popular the car sightings are. When Google opened up nominations in the U.K., Street View received more than 10,000 suggestions.

Personally, I think this is representative of Google wanting to have the best mapping data available, whether it be on Maps, Earth or Street View, and is now engaging U.S. users to help them get this. Google knows the power of crowdsourcing and using its loyal user base to help them improve and iterate their products.

Photo credit:Flickr/Current Events

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Sometrics Raises $4 Million For Social Analytics And Advertising Platform

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 04:07 AM PDT

LA-based Sometrics has secured a Series B round of venture capital, led by Walt Disney Company-affiliated Steamboat Ventures and joined by previous investors The Mail Room Fund and Greycroft Partners. In total, $4 million was injected into the fledgling company, we’ve learned.

That brings the total invested in the startup to $5.55 million. The first round was raised back in May 2008. It was the first investment made by The Mail Room Fund, a joint venture fund established by William Morris Agency, Accel Parners and Venrock.

Sometrics is one of many companies looking to optimize the way social networks, gaming platforms and virtual worlds are being monetized. The startup markets tools that allow publishers and brands to manage ad inventory across social web platforms, optimize campaigns through audience analysis and targeting, as well as gain ’social intelligence’ about the performance of those campaigns through detailed analytics.

The latter part is what the company started out with, by giving social app developers a way get an overview of the number of page views and unique visits, installs and uninstalls, age of users, gender of users, number of friends, location of users and more for their Facebook and MySpace apps.

The company has since diversified and broadened its offering, and now does a little bit of everything that publishers and advertisers can tap into to get more ROI from advertising campaigns on social gaming sites, community sites and from sales of virtual goods across the board. Sometrics appear to be gravitating towards a focus on game developers, particularly with their Virtual Currency Manager product. The startup already boasts a number of partnerships with players in the online gaming industry, such as Playdom and Outspark.

Virtual goods and social advertising are an interesting field that’s poised for growth, but there’s a lot of competition in the space, with companies like SocialMedia.com, OfferPal Media and Pubmatic offering services similar to what Sometrics markets. Maybe the pedigree of co-founder and CEO of Sometrics, Ian Swanson, can help the company stand out among them; Swanson used to run business development for AOL-owned Userplane and was an executive at Sprint before that.

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Videos: Google Wave Acts Out Pulp Fiction And Good Will Hunting

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 03:37 AM PDT

Everyone is still searching for what exactly Google Wave’s roll will be in the web going forward. We think it’s still too early to tell, but one man, Joe Sabia, has put together maybe the most impressive Wave demonstration yet. Is he doing something extremely useful? No. He’s using it to reenact scenes from Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting. The result is brilliant.

“I used Pulp Fiction to show features, usability, and overall functionality for an audience that has yet to see Google Wave.  It’s engaging and fun,” Sabia writes to us. And while he may not be doing something like working or using Wave to replace email, he is showing the potential of using a platform that is very dynamic.

More importantly, it’s hilarious. And it features two excellent scenes from two great movies, reenacted, in Wave. Watch below (obligatory NSFW warning).

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BYD’s Incredibly Sensible House of the Future

Posted: 16 Oct 2009 02:30 AM PDT

china-byd-house-smallSHENZHEN, CHINA– One of my very early posts for TechCrunch referenced the "futurism" of 1950s Americana, where companies like Monsanto and Disney played out dreamy visions of a new automated way of living that never quite came true. I'm writing this post from Shenzhen, in Southern China—a place whose jaw-droppingly impractical-yet-beautiful architecture and building-size LED-lit billboards make the city look like it could be the set for just that kind of dreamy science fiction megatropolis. (Example? The other night I had drinks outside the InterContinental's bar, which is shaped like a huge pirate ship.)

So imagine my expectations when I set out to see BYD's "Village of the Future." BYD—for those who don't know—is a Chinese powerhouse of battery innovation with more than 130,000 employees, roughly 10% of whom work in R&D. The company is a living, breathing reality check to Westerners who think Southern China is merely a hub for assembling the technology U.S. designs. My BYD guide told me that the company gets at least one member of Western media coming through the office a week, many of them shocked that a Chinese company could be so innovative.

In recent years, BYD's founder Wang Chuan-Fu has leveraged an un-sexy expertise in lithium electronics batteries into an electric car business.china-byd-car-small And, now, the company is harnessing that same technology to make solar panels that can efficiently store solar energy and manage it. It's impressive enough stuff that Warren Buffett paid $230 million for 10% of the company in 2008, spurring every major media organization to start taking BYD seriously. (According to a great article in Fortune, he wanted even more.)

But you want futurism? Go somewhere else. This house of tomorrow—totally powered by solar power and piped with recycled rain water—looks just like any suburban house in the world. (See picture above. Yep. That's it.) Turn on the tap and it's just like turning it on at home. The air conditioning sounds and feels like the AC in my hotel. The company uses the top of the concept house for executive meetings. The conference rooms only stand out in their unremarkableness.

And, while it may make for uninteresting photos, that's what makes BYD so impressive, and part of what would attract someone like Buffett to break the same cardinal rules of investing that convinced him to avoid the late 1990s dot com mania: Stay away from what you don't understand. When my guide was taking me through BYD's "museum" of its products, she waved her hnad dismissively at a sexy electric convertible, saying the ho-hum practical sedan was the company's best-seller. What sells in a country where millions are scrambling into the middle class is practicality, not sex appeal.

Similarly, BYD’s house of the future is steeped in practicality, not look-at-me tree hugging or science fiction. That's something that could actually make a difference for the solar industry and for smoggy, energy-guzzling China.

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Le Web 2009 Is Just Around The Corner. And Yes, I’m Going.

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 10:51 PM PDT

It’s that time of year again, when the brash culture of Silicon Valley crashes into the two hour lunch European startup crowd at the Le Web conference in Paris on December 9-10. It’s chaotic and sometimes combative, but it’s also one of the best startup events in the world. And this year TechCrunch Europe is partnering with Le Web to put on a 20-company startup competition.

Yes, I’ll be attending this year, despite the fact that the audience last year voted not to invite me back after my post criticizing European startup culture. Time heals all wounds, or something.

Organizers Geraldine and Loic Le Meur talk about the conference in the never ending video below. Get your tickets here. This event always sells out, so make your plans now.

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Digg Acquires Kevin Rose Side Project WeFollow

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 09:18 PM PDT

Digg founder Kevin Rose launched a side project called WeFollow, a Twitter directory, earlier this year. Twitter users can go to the site and add themselves under a specific category. Without much in the way of marketing, the site has grown to 654,000 Twitter users, all of which went to the site and added themselves. And now, someone with knowledge of the deal tells us, Rose has transferred WeFollow ownership to Digg.

This wasn’t exactly an acquisition, though, because Digg didn’t pay anything for the site. “The data became very useful for Digg,” says our source, and it was awkward keeping it outside of the company.

Digg has long been planning to launch a more real time version of the site, and we’ve speculated that Digg will soon surface new top stories based at least partially on stuff becoming popular on Twitter and other similar services. WeFollow gives Digg data on who the top Twitter users are for various categories.

WeFollow Relaunch:

WeFollow is also changing the way it ranks users. Currently it’s based only on total follower counts on Twitter. In the next day or so, though, WeFollow will change its algorithm and give more weight to users who tag themselves properly, and then have followers who have also tagged themselves similarly. For examply, if TechCrunch is tagged “startups” and a lot of people following TechCrunch have also tagged themselves startups, that gives a lot more weight to our account in that category. This goal is to reduce spam and give better data.

Below are screenshots of the new, yet to be launched service. The top shows the SEO tag by number of followers, the current way WeFollow ranks users. The bottom shows ranking by influence. Matt Cutts jumps to the top of the list, even though he’s only no. 8 in overall followers.


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When In Doubt Throw A Party, And Turn PR Up To 11

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 07:39 PM PDT

Something is up at MySpace. Everything was quiet for a long while as they went through executive turnover and mass layoffs. But suddenly they are back seeking the limelight.

CEO Owen Van Natta is making his first public interview next week at the Web 2.0 Summit. The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by the same parent company as MySpace (News Corp.) wrote a glowing if somewhat vague turnaround story on MySpace today titled “MySpace Tries to Recover Its Cool.” And, of course, MySpace is throwing a party. Van Natta sent an email to Silicon Valley tech and entertainment press inviting them to a “secret show” concert next week right after he’s interviewed, with the exact venue and band to be announced the day before.

Parties to cover bad (or vague) news aren’t a new thing for MySpace – they threw one earlier this year in Europe right as European operations were being decimated.

The odd WSJ article, which disclosed the sister-company conflict of interest nine paragraphs into the article, seems to be saying that MySpace will focus on social networking around content as a way to win. In a sentence that appears to be directly from a press release, the article says: “In a strategy shift, MySpace is striving to become an online hangout for people to connect with friends over entertainment content, whether it’s the new Pearl Jam album, blogs from celebrities like British pop singer Lily Allen or a karaoke contest for the Fox musical comedy “Glee.”" The article also quotes Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn: “This is not an all-things-for-everybody portal…This is a social entertainment experience.”

And those page view declines? The WSJ article notes that U.S. unique visitors are down 15% year over year. But the article doesn’t note the much more serious decline in page views. U.S. page views were nearly cut in half, from 40 billion to 22 billion per month from September 2008 to September 2009 (Comscore). Worldwide, page views dropped from 44 billion to 27 billion per month during that same period, a 39% drop. MySpace has lost 13 million unique monthly visitors since April alone, when Van Natta began his tenure.

And while the article says MySpace revenue will likely fall this year, they don’t mention the revenue cliff the company faces next June, when $300 million/year in Google welfare money dries up. At that point, there’s no way MySpace will continue to be profitable unless even more serious layoffs are made. I wonder if Van Natta will talk about that on stage next week. I’m guessing not.

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The Churchill Club: A Conversation With Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 07:25 PM PDT

I’m here at the Palo Alto Research Center, where the Churchill Club is hosting an interview with Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer. Altimeter Group Founder Charlene Li is moderating the discussion. Below, I’ll be taking liveblogging my notes throughout the interview.

Q: What does Facebook mean to you personally? What are your favorite things to do? How much do you use it?
A: I use it a lot. Have used it since before I joined Facebook. Back in college I had a ‘little sis’ though a mentorship program (she was in elementary school). I couldn’t find her later on when I tried to find her. But earlier this year I got a message from a girl asking “Are you the Sheryl Sandberg”. And it was her. I’m on Facebook several times a day. It’s open all day. I stay in touch with the girls I grew up with, and the people I know now, through work and outside of work.

Q: Any favorite apps?
A: I’ve tried sowing a farm. It didn’t work for me… I got lazy and bought the stuff for $5. But there’s a lot of things that I’ve used. I’m pretty active on causes.

Q: Any feature you’ve really liked?
A: One of the things that’s helped me the most is the friend list, being able to segment your friends into lists is very helpful.

Q: What would you like to see personally that would make your experience better?
A: More applications that would integrate the things that I do every day.

Q: What do you see as new ways that people use Facebook?
A: There were two girls in Australia who got caught in a storm drain. They updated their Facebook status, and they got rescued. We are not emergency services.. I suggest you call 911. We see lots of use cases. People have found bone marrow transplants for their children. People have found long lost relatives. There’s lots of recruiting. We are trying to be a platform. We don’t pretend we should prescribe what people should share. We want to help people connect with who they want to connect with, and share with whomever they want to share.

Q: I’m getting so many invitations. What about Facebook burnout
A: it can get overwhelming. We offer lots of tools. I think people are uncomfortable with hitting ‘ignore’. I think it’s ok to hit Yes/No for things, to tell an application to stop sending you messages. My homepage on Facebook is now a very small group of my friends (segmented using friends lists).

Q: How do you see businesses using things like Facebook Pages?
A: Pages are for businesses the same way Profiles are for people. They are exploding. 10 million people fan pages every day. Starbucks has the number one fan page. 4.5 million today. Sprinkles, the cupcake store does a word of the day (get a free cupcake if you know it). People use pages to update, do special permissions. More of what you see is authentic communication. Papa John’s pizza — Papa John himself posts. He came to Facebook, took a picture with Mark. We’re seeing increasingly authentic engagement from people who run businesses.

Q: Lets talk about engagement in posting vs. dialog. Seems like companies just push, don’t talk back.
A: It’s a tool. Some people use better than others. The best use cases are companies that post frequently enough that there’s new info on the page, but not so that it’s too much. And they watch their page to see what people say. Virgin America asking people what their route should be.

Q: Do you think most of the advertisers get this.
A: I think some do. Some are coming along. They get it more than they used to. We were meeting with a CMO of a very important company that does lots of advertising. They asked about best practices. We said you should post frequently — you don’t just spend lots of time upfront. With us, spend half an hour a day, and do it frequently. He said, if we have a 12 day approval process to get something up online, is that a problem. We said it was. When I first took the job I was meting with a head of a movie studio. He said that it used to be, if you have a bad movie, you had that weekend with people seeing it — it wasn’t til the second weekend that they stopped. Now they find out it’s bad the same day, they don’t go to the second showing. I think their processes are changing. We’re working with almost all the top 100 advertisers in the country, and increasingly in the world.

Q: How on Earth do you measure this, to help them figure out what they’re getting?
A: We just announced a partnership with Nielsen — Polls. One example with Sony,a movie they were releasing.. We did studies of people who had seen the ad. If they had seen the ad they were 87% more likely to see the movie. It’s important that Nielsen is well respected and a third party.

Q: Are there some basic mistakes you see?
A: Businesses sometimes try too much. This is about very authentic communication. More and more, people are saying they want comments, so they we know about them and can address them. On the Internet, brands can’t perfetly control themselves, they have to work to create an authentic community.

Q: Is the real value the broad reach or the engagement?
A: I think it’s both. I think it’s unusual in the second category. There are other places you can get reach (Yahoo). We have engagement. We are by far the top place people spend the most amount of time on the web. The engagement is two way. When you buy ads on most parts of the web, it’s the same old communication style. Our ads are entirely different. You can engage with our ads. When the Internet came out, everyone thought it was going to change marketing. What happened is that people kept the one way communication (tv ad-> banner). Now you can do interactive ads.

Q: Give me an example? Lots of them operatite just like banner ads.
A: If you look at our homepage ads, you can leave comment, fan a page. When you take any of those actions, a lot of other ads are taking on those properties.

Q: Let’s talk about targeting. There’s so much data on Facebook. In terms of privacy how do you balance, avoid big brother feeling.
A: Privacy is never about balance. It’s an absolute. If you ask why is our usage exploding compared to everything else. We think it’s because we made it really safe. One of the things Mark said when I first met him. He told me how many people put their cell phone numbers on Facebook. Facebook is that safe. We take user privacy as the most important thing we do. We let advertisers target in a non-personally identifiable way.

Q: implications of revenue coming in. You just announced you’re cash-flow positive. You really sped things up. What happened?
A: We’re growing our users, and our ad products have improved tremendously. Our homepage ads with those engagement features are new and really working. Our adspace ads, the targeting is getting better, and people are using them more as they learn how to use them. We are trying to offer new kind of advertising in this market. And in this economy advertisers are looking for the most value.

Q: Social networks in general have reputation of ads not being that good. What was it about your ads that are so effective?
A: We think it’s interactivity and the ability to target. I don’t think people dislike ads, I think they dislike untargeted irrelevant ads.

Q:Want to talk about a new product Facebook Lite.
A: The Lite site is something I think says a lot about our approach to building products. Facebook is feature heavy. Can take a while to load we want to make it faster. If you are in a country with slow bandwidth, it is tough to use. We said we see ourselves as hacker culture — took a small team 4-5 people. Rather than take features out, we’ll rebuild it and only put features in. We made a whole new site. It’s not broadly used in the US. We’re seeing how this works. Adding features in as they get fast enough. Gives all of us a bar for how quickly things should load.

Q: Let’s talk about the culture. Describe the culture. How did you find yourself coming into this?
A: I think that’s Facebook’s strength. We’re a product driven company driven by extraordinary tech visionary. Mark has a very clear vision of what connectivity is, what a platform means, how a product should evolve to enable people to share. We say we want to be a great place for engineers to work, and sales, and biz dev. But we think that starts with being great place for engineers to work. We start from the product.

Q: What’s it like running a company full of engineers?
A: I sit in the middle of the engineering pit, with Mark. I think the fundamental thing you understand is that you don’t manage these people. Mark and I don’t run Facebook. We lead. But it’s run by the people who work there. We’re all aligned the culture of shipping products, getting them into the ecosystem.

Q: You talk a little bit about shocking people. You do things (news feed, other big new things) and get away with it. How do you check yourself if you’ve gone to far.
A: Mark would say the risk is we don’t do enough. The risk is that you have one big innovation, become risk averse and stop evolving. Our product looks very different than what it used to look like. With each opening up, because that’s what you see (college, open to the world, news feed, open to platform, opening to websites w/ Connect) all of these make it more open, all of these come with difficulties. What we’re trying to avoid getting scared and stopping putting out a better product. We know we watch usage. People protested news feed, but they used it more. We know we’re not doing the right thing when users/engagement stop growing.

Q: Talk about you say Facebook is trying to be as open as possible. Some criticisms are that it is a closed platform. Doesn’t have open standards, pretty locked down.
A: We want to make it open for everyone to share their information with who they want to share it with. We believe people own their data. We are a closed ecosystem — we don’t let people export their data, or let third parties do it. We do let users spread their data. You can share data with external app. We have to be tight in how we control the system to protect the privacy of our users.

Q: You say it’s for the users. People outside, everyone else. Says we’re all working together on open standards. And there’s Facebook over there. You say it’s privacy, but still, do you see these coming togehter.
A: We are making it more and more open. Facebook Connect lets you use your friends on other sites, it’s more open. Can go to ABC and take your Facebook identity with you. We have 15k Connect partners. When you talk about that competitve landscape, we are the only company among (Twitter, Microsoft google) that has privacy info to protect (my note: huh?).

Q: Talk about Google’s stealth social network. They have OpenID. define relationships through contact list, Google Talk list. Google calendar. I use Google Voice. They have sidewiki, that extends those features to any page. Different connect in that you have to get publisher to do it with that. Google can’t do a frontal assault on you, but they can come from the side.
A: Our fundamental view of the world is that the web is evolving. Goes from an anonymous identity on the web to your real identity. We think we’ve led that, but no surprise that other people are doing it, imitation highest form of flattery. We think it’s good taht there are other people evolving the social web. We believe that if we continue to iterate on the products, and stay ahead technologically, we can provide most value to users. Google has lots of different products you use that are only teid together through your Google login. We have a unified product and we’re spreading. In terms of what is the social web, we think we have the deepest understanding of it, and our product evolution shows that.

Q: Let’s talk about the future of the social web. In the future everything is much more social. We’re going to look back 5-10 years ago, and think remember when we had to go to Facebook to be social. What does it look like in the future.
A: I agree. We think people will increasingly be comfortable using their real identify. Experiences will be more personal and much faster. Think you’ll interact with Facebook rom a kiosk in the store, share it on Facebook from there. Can share from wherever you are.

Q: Twitter. Constant comparision. Do you use twitter?
A: I’ve tried it. I don’t use it very frequently. 2-3 tweets up ever. For me, I use it because I’m not trying to broadcast to the world. We think Twitter is important, a great product. We think world is moving towards realtime. Long time ago when we launched status updates people wondered why you would tell what you were doing. Now obvious. We think there will be many more products like this out there. We watch engagement. 40 million status updates a day on Facebook. We want that to continue to grow.

Q: Is twitter complimentary or competitive?
A: There are products out there by both companies that integrate. What I believe is that Twitter is part of the same movement we are part of. They have a different approach. Fundamentally based on anonymity and broadcasting. Ours is identity and sharing.

Q: Some people would say Facebook is chasing Twitter. (Public –> Private)
A: We watch how people use products on the web. Twitter did show there are people who want more open privacy settings. Was something we were working on, they showed people used it. Fundamentally we think there are going to be 3 other things like it. Like us, like it. Letting people share more information with each other.

Q: People haven’t been able to log in for a week and a half. Saying Facebook’s communication has been inadequate.
A: 150k accounts had an issue. Resolved in a week and a half> I think it was too slow. We’d like to do beter. The data was fully recovered, got them back up and running.

A: What google ads are. they’re direct response marketing. ou take people from awareness of your product down through purchase. What google does very well is the bottom part of the funnel where you know what you want, help you find it. It’s not demand generation, it’s demand fulfillment. Everyone needs to get customers. that’s why 90% of marketing is demand generation. We’re playing in that demand generation area. Top 90% of the funnel.

Q:Any secrets for helping expose brand to users on fb? I’m finding myself suggesting an ad buy to get people.
A: I think most people do start with something to push the product make people aware you’re there. You either have to get individuals to push to friends. Or do an ad buy. We see both work.

Q:I’m amazing by FB’s use in international world. There’s talk about next billion users being cell phones, bandwidth. Lots of people with only voice calls and SMS. Are these things you are looking at? What you have is not just a website, it’s social media. There’s other ways to express that.
A: We want everyone to use Facebook. We’re well aware there are ~1billion people without access to websites. We have increasing number of users who have only accessed fb from mobile phone.

Q: We’ve seen lots of people try to convert customers through wallets. Can you talk about FB wallet?
A: We believe in the platform we have. We don’t start with making money on the platform, we wanted power of having world develop for us. 250 apps with > 1 million users. Common question is how do you make money from this. People develop into our pages, we put ads on those pages. We aren’t in the wallet businesses.

Q: You have no future plans for payments?
A: We do have a credit system where you can use Facebook credits. we’re testing that with some devs. Something we’re interested in exploring, but it’s not why we did Platform.

Q: Seems like enterprise is a big market. Where are you in thinking about all these bad IT apps. FB would be a much better central piece.
A: Great question. Companies are doing this now that aren’t failing.

Q: Question about communication, skype.
A: We launched chat. Haven’t done calling or video. How we’ll prioritize is something we’ll do looking forward, no plan right now. We’re interested in communication that is many to many. When I publish something into the stream, the wall, sharing with many so less social. We could make more social by including more people. Not high on priority list, but we’d love to do it.

Q: What are challenges as COO with product so iterative?
A: One of challenges we face is that we’re moving fast. Was meeting with company we were thinking about deal with. Finally CEO of that company and I realized their team has 12 month roadmap/product cycle, we can’t tell you what our product will look like in six months.

Q: You want us to spend more time, but we really have finite amount of tiem to spend.
A: Time spent isn’t a core metric we’re focused on. We’re focused number of users, and engagement — how many people back once a day. We’re at 300 million users, 50% come back every day. Usually it’s early adopters who are most active. Now our newcomers are too. Also important metric is number of shares. We’re at 2 billion things shared per week.

Q: We’re FB devs. My question is authentic identity.. what do you do to authenticate not only identity but intent?
A: We authenticate you based on usage with your friends. We don’t look at what you post. If someone complains we do. Facebook only works if you are yourself. People ask how doy ou prevent against people who are fake on Facebook. I can go on. But then what, who am I going to connect with? Who is not going to hit ignore. Site is not useful if you’re not yourself.

Q: How does acquisition of FriendFeed factored in? Any future plans of acquisitions? How is founded team of FF integrated?
A: We’ve done two integration. Blake Ross’s company and FriendFeed. They’re small, they’re incredibly talented group of engineers. We are a culture of builders. This was a company in our ecosystem iterating the fastest. They were attracted for the same reason. They want to impact hundreds of millions people. People stood up and applauded as they walked around.

Q: I want to talk a little bit about leadership. What has been secret to your success of being a leader?
A: I think I’m lucky. I’ve been lucky to have these opportunities. Fundamentally people who can be great leaders have some qualities: one is a real sense of humility, you don’t lead people by thinking you’re better than them. That sincerity can’t be faked. Mark has that. He has a deep sense of where he thinks the world is going, what he thinks we can add. The other thing that really matters is ability and willingness to communicate authentically. Kids say it like it is. They will learn not to do that, but there’s something endearing about it. I don’t subscribe to honesty for honesty’s sake. Find a way to communicate authentically. Be ok with saying I dont have the answer…



Q: Talk about Mark. What’s it like working with him?
A: You go work for someone who is quite young. Need a close partnership. We were explicit about how to do that, we spent a lot of time together before I joined. We agreed we were going to sit together. We do first meeting monday morning, and a meeting friday. Give feedback every week. More and more we can finish each other’s sentences. He’s someone I really learn from. He is good at asking, “why not?” Worst thing about working with him is he accidentally reminds me how old I am. I was saying I am going to my business school reunion, I was asking when his reunion would be.. He asked me when mid-life crises happen?

Q: How do you balance having two young kids, work/life challenge?
A: You’re very active too, you’re posting a lot and have kids. I think this is hugely important, I think we need to keep more people in the workforce. Most of the women from our class aren’t working. 15% of C level execs in the country are women. 10 years ago it was 7%. It’s not fast enough. I think not enough women are staying in the workforce. I’m passionate about telling women you can do both. I don’t say you can have it all. But I’m glad I get to work, and I’m glad I’m raising kids. I think we’ve made more progress in workplace than in the home. Women still working a lot in the home when husband/wife are both working. So it’s like they have two jobs.I think most important thing we can do is change the home, and that is really hard. We need to applaud men for taking care of kids and we don’t do that. We need to make it more part of women’s identity to work, and less for men.

Q: You used to have a big focus on apps. Now more on FB connect, FB Fund/FB Rev. Coming year how you will deal with third parties.
A: We’re very focused on everyone. We have platform where you can build, put apps on Facebook.com, or you can have your own website. We recognize there are people building for Facebook who don’t have website.

Q: You talk about the evolution of Twitter/Facebook. What is your view on traditional media in the next five years?
A: They provide editorially verified news. My fear about local news going out of business. Who is going to cover the school board? I’m a big believer in this. We have challenge of getting quality of information out of WSJ and provide to citizens. The ways in which it is monetized and written is going to be different.

Q: What kind of impact, 10-20 years, Facebook and all the people in this room will have. How will it be better? What do need to do?
A: I have a sense of gratitude that I get to work in Tech. I can write like 3 lines of code. I feel lucky to be sitting in this room, where there is so much history. My son thinks the world has Tivo, that it’s on demand everywhere. We’ve made his world that much more driven by him. The things we haven’t invented today, my kids aren’t going to understand the world without. They’re going to make it harder for the moral atrocities that go on today to continue.

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The In-App Purchase Shakeup Begins: Boxcar Goes Free!

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 05:59 PM PDT

Screen shot 2009-10-15 at 5.57.51 PMBoxcar is easily my favorite Push Notification app on the iPhone. It’s 1.0 version was great, and it’s recently approved 2.0 version is even better. Unfortunately, some users complained because it was $2.99 to buy, but used Apple in-app purchasing system to extend its features, charging $0.99 for additional ones. So developer Jonathan George is trying something new.

Following the announcement today that Apple would now allow in-app purchases for free apps (the feature was previously only available for paid apps), George has decided to make Boxcar completely free. With this free version, you will still get 1 free service (Twitter Stream Push Notifications, Twitter Search Push Notifications, Facebook Notifications, etc), and you will be saving the $3 that you can then use towards buying other services, which will now be $1.99 per service.

George has already made the change in iTunes, and the new free price just rolled live. It will be very interesting to see how this new pricing dynamic helps or hurts developers. From a piracy perspective, this seems like a good move. And certainly, there were no shortage of developers that wished they could charge nothing for the app up front, but then charge for features or upgrades later.

Of course, there’s always the fear of “bait & switch” scams when that happens, but I would bet Apple will be watching for those closely — as if the App Store approvers needed more to worry about.

Find Boxcar in the App Store here. Yes, for free.

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In-App Purchase In Free Apps: A Shot Across The Bow of iPhone Piracy?

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 04:23 PM PDT

bangbangship

Just hours ago, Apple made an announcement that has developers everywhere dancing down their collective, metaphorical street: In-App Purchase is now good to go in free applications. This, of course, comes just months after Apple essentially told a room full of journalists that such ideas were nonsense – that free apps should always remain absolutely free.

Still – hindsight is always 50/50, or whatever that saying is. There were really just too many advantages to allowing it to let it pass by any longer. Freemium applications! Upselling! It made In-App Purchases seem less tacky to the user! Hurray. But there’s one major factor that isn’t quite so obvious; one issue that this, to some limited extent, solves: piracy.

Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>

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Twitter Expands Lists Beta Testing. A Great New Feature.

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 03:39 PM PDT

-1

Twitter has rolled out its new Lists feature to a larger portion of its user base right now. The feature allows you to group users you follow together and then lets you share those for others to also follow.

Setting up a list is simple. Currently, the homepage features a Lists banner that allows you to start simply by clicking on the “Create a new list” button. Once you do this, an overlay appears and you just type in the list name (which Twitter then converts into a permalink along the lines of twitter.com/USERNAME/LISTNAME), and set the list to be public or private. This is obviously an important distinction as the public one, others will be able to see, while the private one will be for your eyes only.

On the right hand column of you Twitter.com homepage, you will see a new “lists” area under you bio. Clicking on this will take you to your list overview page where you can manage your own lists, as well as see other user’s public lists that you are a part of. Also, on user profile pages you will see that the users’ lists are now listed under the “Favorites” area in the right hand toolbar.

Clicking on any of these lists will take you to a stream of just the users followed by that list. Basically, this is a filter, if used the right way. This is something Twitter proper has long needed (though plenty of third party services like Brizzly have stepped in to offer it).

Unfortunately, adding people to your list is not as easy as it should be. The reason for this is that there is no user search functionality. Instead, you have to either go to your “following” page, or to that person’s profile to manually add them.

A number of third-party sites and services were granted early access to the Lists feature, and have been working with its API to integrate the functionality into their services.

Much has been made about Twitter’s Suggest User List (Disclosure: We’re on it) and how it wasn’t a fair method of user discovery. These lists will undoubtedly help alleviate a lot of that strain.

Update: Initially, I suggested this was a massive roll out, it is not. As project lead Nick Kallen says, it seems that just a lot of people I happen to know were added. My bad, sorry to excite everyone. The feature is very cool though.

Update 2: We’ve made a TechCrunch Team List if you want to follow that — which you should.

Update 3: Twitter also has a team list, which is following 108 people. That would seem to suggest that they may be over 100 employees already, which is more than they’ve stated recently. Actually, strike that, that list include non-employee contractors, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has just informed us.

twitlists2

Screen shot 2009-10-15 at 3.45.16 PM

twitlists222

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Schmidt: “Android Adoption Is About To Explode”

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 03:21 PM PDT

androidimage

During Google’s third quarter earnings conference call today, one message came out loud and clear: Google’s mobile strategy is starting to pay off. “Android adoption is about to explode,” declared CEO Eric Schmidt, explaining that all the “necessary conditions” are set for growth: There are now 12 Android phones out there (most recently the Motorola Cliq) across 32 carriers in 26 countries.

The whole Android strategy, of course, is to offer an low-cost, fully-featured, open-source OS and hand that to the cell phone manufacturers so that they can concentrate more on designing desirable hardware. And what does Google get out of all that? More mobile searches, which could be one of its biggest sources of growth in the coming years.

Already, Google is teasing at what may be in store. During the call, Google executive mentioned at least three times that mobile searches on Google were up 30 percent from the second quarter. Of course, they wouldn’t say how many total mobile searches there were or what percentage of all searches they represent (probably still a very small subset), but they are very bullish about the company’s mobile prospects.

In response to a question about how material mobile searches are to Google, CFO Patrick Pichette replied:

Again, we don’t give the detail numbers. On a quarter over quarter basis, mobile searches grew 30% on Google. It tells you something about the mobile space, the smartphones, and how they are transformative. They are basically transforming how people live on a mobile basis. If we move forward the adoption of these mobile phones by lowering the cost because it is open source, think of how many searches [that will produce].

The way he put it, by making Android open source, Google is hoping to accelerate the adoption of Web-capable smartphones and get everyone searching on them. Given that most analysts expect more than 70 percent of mobile advertising to be search, you can see why Google’s CFO can’t wait to get as many search-friendly Android phones into consumers hands as possible.

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Want Into The Clicker Beta? We Can Do That For You.

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 03:20 PM PDT


There was more than one attendee at TechCrunch50 last month that thought stealth startup Clicker deserved to win the top prize. The company has created a video search engine that really helps users find the content they’re looking for – full episodes of TV shows online – quickly. All the mess associated with most video searches on other sites is removed. Our full writeup, including a video of their on stage demo, is here: TC50: Clicker Wants To Be TV Guide For The Web.

Clicker has started to send out a few invitations to people who’ve signed up on their home page. Those lucky people who’ve gotten in have five invitations to give to their friends.

But what if you don’t have a friend who’s already in,? We’re here to help. Just be one of the first 1,000 people to sign up at tinyurl.com/TC-Clicker and you’ll get instant access.

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YouTube Monetizing Over A Billion Video Views A Week

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 03:11 PM PDT

make-money-youtubeYouTube is on the path to profitability in the “not-too-distant future,” Google reiterated today during its third quarter earnings call. And while that may sounds all well and good, they actually had some more specific impressive numbers to back it up.

One is that YouTube is now monetizing over a billion video views a week. Last week, YouTube announced that it was serving over 1 billion video views a day, so if you do the math there, it means that YouTube is monetizing one every seven video views.

The company also noted that 90% of the top 50 advertisers according to AdAge have now run ads on YouTube. And of its homepage ad inventory, 90% of it sold out for the quarter in the U.S., with lower, but still impressive sale rates for the rest of the world. Google also noted that YouTube was just starting to unleash its pre-roll inventory and let its salesforce have a go at selling that to advertisers, which should bring in more money.

And with Warner Music Group back in the mix, they now have the four major music labels playing ball again. As a one-stop shop for many music videos, YouTube will also be able to sell ads against those, as well as make some money off of affiliate sales from iTunes and Amazon’s MP3 store.

Earlier this month, CNET uncovered that Google CEO Eric Schmidt admitted under oath that the company paid a $1 billion premium when it bought YouTube in 2006 (for $1.65 billion). The thought was always that the site was growing so quickly that they would scoop it up and figure out how to monetize it later. It would appear that they’re getting close to doing just that — albeit three years later.

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Apple Announces In-App Purchases For Free iPhone Applications

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 02:13 PM PDT

Apple has just announced that it will now support in-app purchasing for free applications on the App Store. This is absolutely huge news for developers, and will likely lead to a fundamental shift in the way applications are marketed and priced. It's hard to overstate just how much this will change the App Store.

Up until now developers of premium applications have faced a major problem: they had no way to offer a feature-restricted version of an application for free that users could pay to unlock if they liked what they saw — a model that's quite common on desktop software. This led to the creation of the so-called 'Lite' versions of applications, which generally offer a reduced featureset, but require users to download an entirely new application to access more features, which obviously isn't ideal. Now, they won't face this hurdle. They'll be able to ditch the Lite version entirely, switch their currently premium app over to free (which will lead to more impulse downloads), and give users the chance to upgrade their featureset down the road.

This will also have a massive impact on free games that thrive on the sales of virtual goods, like Tapulous and Zynga. Up until now Tapulous has been unable to sell new songs through its flagship applications Tap Tap Revenge 1 and 2, because these are both free. In order to take advantage of the in-app purchase feature that Apple launched earlier this summer, Tapulous was forced to launch TTR3 as a 99 cent application. The app has still done extremely well, leading the Top Grossing charts for days, but it would have almost certainly gotten even more downloads had it been free.

Likewise, games like Zynga's Mafia Wars and SGN's Mafia: Respect and Retaliation have had to offer Lite version of their games, not necessarily because they wanted to restrict features to users, but because they had to charge something so that users could purchase virtual goods down the line. It looks like Zynga and others won’t be able to use virtual currency, which Apple has basically forbidden. However, don’t be surprised if they offer “packs” of upgrades that you can buy.

There have been various rumors as to why Apple restricted in-app purchases in free games to begin with. Some have speculated that Apple is concerned this will lead to many free apps that tempt users to download them and then do essentially nothing until you pay to unlock them, which is still a valid concern. Others believe it has to do Apple’s payment system, which may lack credit card information for users who only download free applications.

Here are some guidelines Apple is giving to developers for their integration of in-app purchases into free games:

1.1 You may use the In App Purchase API only to enable end users to purchase content, functionality, or services that You make available for use within Your Application (e.g. digital books, additional game levels, access to a turn-by-turn map service). You may not use the In App Purchase API to offer goods or services to be used outside of Your Application.

On Currency: 2.1 You may not use the In App Purchase API to enable an end user to set up a pre-paid account to be used for subsequent purchases of content, functionality, or services, or otherwise create balances or credits that end users can redeem or use to make purchases at a later time.

-No virtual currency

2.3 Content and services may be offered through the In App Purchase API on a subscription basis (e.g., subscriptions to a magazine, comic series, or financial reporting service); however, rentals of content, services or functionality through the In App Purchase API are not allowed (e.g., use of a particular game item or digital book for a pre-determined, limited period of time).

Note: This means that content owners won’t be able to let their content expire. This probably won’t be welcome news to many of them.

Updating with more

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Google Brings Back The Growth In The Third Quarter. (Live Notes)

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 01:23 PM PDT

After two quarters of flat sales, Google announced a resumption of growth in the third quarter, with revenues up 7 percent to $5.95 billion. Net income was up 27 percent to $1,64 billion, or $5.13 EPS, which was above consensus.

Google generated $1.8 billion for AdSense partner sites, or 30 percent of revenues. Paid clicks on AdSense ads were up 14 percent annually and up 4 percent from the second quarter, but the cost per click (or how much Google and AdSense publishers make from each of those clicks) was down 6 percent annually and 5 percent sequentially.

The earnings call is about to start. My live notes below:

Ooh, something new, they are going to let the people on the call vote for the best questions.

CEO Eric Schmidt: We believe the worst of the recession is behind us. We now have the business confidence to invest in the next stage of innovation.

Mobile, 30% growth quarter over quarter. Android now 12 devices in 26 countries, 32 carriers.

1M publishers using AdSense. Integrated DoubleClick into the exchange.

enterprise business, not only accelerating, but some customers, Genentech, Motorola, etc, very string feedback.

In 10% areas where we think it is very promising. We will focus more on strategic acquisitions. We are open for business.

CFO Patrick Pichette: headcount was slightly down, revenues up, TAC was 27% of revenues.

free cash flow $2.5B

Nikesh Arora, president global sales: Strength in Brazil. mentions renewed deal with eBay, including eBay.com.

YouTube: 90% of the top 50 AdAge advertisers have run ads on YouTube. (Palm, McDonalds). deals with all 4 record labels, deal with Channel 4 in the UK. expect premium inventory to drive monetization.

New ad exchange opens up ad ecosystem. 24 (?) of the 25 largest ad networks are already on the exchange

Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP Product Management: focusing on local, ads can go to “Place pages” have 50M of them for small and mid-sized businesses. can also have phone numbers go through Google Voice.

We see users come to us with harder queries, so adding more pays for them to work with results. Launched more search options. [by time, commercial sites, etc).

Display business is going very well, but still very inefficient. Something lie 25% of all inventory goes unsold, which is why we launched DoubleClick ad network.

big bets on making the Web better, launched new version of Chrome, Chrome Frame, speeds up the Web.

Q&A

Q: What are goals for Doubelclick ad exchange?

Jonathan Rosenberg: We think we are making great progress with fixing the very fractured ad ecosystem. We still have to make it easier for advertiser to place ads across a wider variety of websites.

Nikesh Arora: Over half of the largest ad networks are already using the new ad exchange.

Q: how did F/X imoact cost per click?

A: Paid click remained helathy with 14% growth. On CPC, year over year, Euro had an 8% difference, so these numbers are material, they will drive quite a but of impact. We have healthy growth in international markets, which are lower CPC.

Q: Is Google going to do large acquisitions or small technology buys?

Schmidt: We historically have done acquisitions one a month or so, typically not very expensive, they bring some specific technology. A type of vertical search or sorting ads. Android, similarly. There is no particular rhyme or reason. It is a function of teh individuals. We are certainly looking for larger acquisitions, but would need a rationale, revenue accelerator or user base. YouTube and Doubleclick will be immensely succeful, but those will be rare.

Q: Gmail outages?

Jonathan: We are making sure that does not happen again. It was not afunction of any underinvestment in server capacity or anything like that.

Q: Capex is down 70%. are you underspending?

Patrick: In the previous quarter I warned that if you took a ruler and went down it would look like we would hit zero, that is not happening, we are investing ahead of what we think our needs are going to be. Capex is going to be lumpy.

Schmidt: I would like to be spending more in this area because that CApex spendingcreates opportunities for futre growth. The decrease in Capex you've seen has been because of improvements, mostly in software. Also Moore's law improvements with multi-core architectures. We need fewer CPUs to get same levels of performance,mostly in data centers. It was more atransition from one architecture to another than a change in strategic directions.

Q: Are you seeing better conversion rates?

Nikesh: We don't comment specifically. But consumers cat rationally, when prices are down they buy. On the consumer side we are seeing rational behavior. On the advertising side, big advertisers are jumping back in, while smaller ones have not yet. But overall conversion rates are holding up.

Q: How is Android and Chrome going?

Jonathan: Look at growth in devices carriers, countries. the strategy of delivering a modern OS seems to be working. Chrome OS is going very well. We are going ti deliver on the goals of speed, simplicity and security.

Schmidt: Android adoption is about to explode. You have all the necessary conditions.. a critcial period. With Chrome OS, he internal demos we have seen indicate it is a material improvement in platforms. It is not quiet done. We hope to get another version out this year.

Q: update on Youtube path to profitability? Can you break out revenues?

Patrick: In general we are really pleased about YouTube's performance. Completely in line with where we discussed, on its path to profitability in the not-too-distant future. We are monetizing more than a billion video views every week on YouTube.

Nikesh: we have been pretty much been able to sell homepage ads across the world, 90% of US homepage ads were sold out in the quarter. Beginning to unleash pre-roll inventory to let our slaesforce sell it. We are creating more inventory for our ad salesforce to be able to sell ads against [music labels, partnerships, etc].

Q: international revenue is accelerating. which reasons are driving the acceleration?

Nikesh: Strength across various markets. Brazil has been strong. no slowdown in Asia pacific, China has down well. Northern Europe

Q: How do you define investing heavily in the future, capex, hadcount?

Schmidt: It depends. If we see a product succeeding we invest more to accelerate it. If we see a product not do well we starve it until we know what we did wrong.

We are short key technical talent to achieve some of these initiatives. (i.e always looking for good engineers).

Q: How material are mobile searches?

Patrick: Again, we don’t give the detail numbers. On a quarter over quarter basis, mobile searches grew 30% on Google. It tells you something about the mobile space, the smartphones, and how they are transformative. They are basically transforming how people live on a mobile basis. If we move forward the adoption of these mobile phones by lowering the cost because it is open source, think of how many searches [that will produce].

Q: Will spending as a percentage of revenues go up again?

Patrick: Now it is time to go back to what we do best: innovate, invest, invent the future.

Q: Are you pulling out of some site acquisition deals?

Patrick: We are not pulling out of any deals. Each one is negotiated separately.

Q: how rapidly do yu expect headcount to grow over next 2 years?

Patrick: If you think about everything we had lived through the past year, it would have been great to have been able to keep hiring sooner. It is not about the headcount, it is about finding the best minds. As we find them, we hire them. You have to find the right Googler.

Schmidt: I think we do recruiting well. We will grow at whatever rate we can. We have the confidence to go back to do the things we do well.

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GoAnimate’s Character Builder Lets You Draw Yourself Into Cartoons. And It Has Spock.

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 01:18 PM PDT

Ever wanted to hang out with Spock, Steve Jobs, and the cast of Street Fighter? Here’s your chance. GoAnimate, a web app that lets you generate fully animated cartoons where you can make animated characters act out whatever you’d like, has launched a new character builder that will let you integrate yourself, your friends, or celebrities into your movies.

Using the character builder should be pretty easy for anyone who has ever built a Mii on Nintendo’s Wii console or used one of the other similar avatar builders scattered across the web. To get started, you can choose from one of a few dozen pre-generated characters, many of which are not-so-mysteriously named things like “Steve J.” or “Bill G.”, or you can start from scratch. Then you work through a variety of physical attributes, including hair, face shape, eyes and eyebrows, and more. Depending on how accurate you want to be the process can take anywhere from 2 minutes to 20.




To be honest, I had some trouble figuring out how to use some of the app’s features — some of the UI design is a little confusing. But once I had it figured out, I found GoAnimate to be quite fun. I spent more time than I’d care to admit playing around with the character builder, building what is proabably an overly flattering version of myself (the pale guy in the picture below talking with Spock). The rest of the characters came from the library of templates created by GoAnimate’s designers — they’re supposed to be Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and my boss, Michael Arrington (I find the resemblance to be pretty bad on that one, but there are plenty of characters that do fit their celebrity counterparts). Oh, and we’re all on the USS Enterprise.

Once you’ve created your characters and placed them in your virtual set, you can choose from a variety of facial expressions and actions that each character can perform. You can also make them move around, be it by walking, running, or sliding. The animations all look smooth, and you can put everything together using the timeline at the bottom of the screen. You can also incorporate images and sound effects, as well. The process isn’t as intuitive as I’d like, but it doesn’t take too long to get the hang of it.

We last covered GoAnimate back in Feburary, when the site announced it had gotten the rights to include Star Trek (it also has Street Fighter and a few other franchises).


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IBM Q3 Profits Rise 14 Percent

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 01:17 PM PDT

IBM is reporting a 14 percent growth in year over year net income, posting a third-quarter profit of $3.2 billion, or $2.40 a share, on revenue of $23.6 billion. IBM has been shifting its focus towards software and services from hardware and it appears to be paying off. Chairman, president and CEO, Samuel Palmisano said in a statement that IBM’s “strategic shift to higher-value businesses” contributed to the growth and the company saw “improved revenue trends in business and share gains in software and hardware."

IBM expects increased full-year 2009 earnings of at least $9.85 per share compared with its previous expectation of at least $9.70 per share. IBM CFO Mark Loughridge said in the earnings call that revenue was boosted by increased sales of software and services. He added that IBM gained share in software areas, specifically mentioning competitor Oracle.

IBM says the company is continuing to invest in R&D in cloud computing and business analytics, which seems to be the future for Big Blue. The company recently acquired data analytics company SPSS. Loughridge called specific attention to IBM’s reach in the health care space, particularly with regard to the electronic medical records. The services segment as a whole drove an eleven percent increase in pre-tax profits. IBM signed $6.7 billion in the outsourcing segment of the business.

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Want To Get In On The Novafora-Transmeta Fire Sale?

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 12:57 PM PDT

Novafora, which acquired low power chip company Transmeta in late 2008, is out of business. And all that Transmeta x86 code morphing source code, build servers, documentation and prototypes are for sale. There are some complications to the deal, but this is a potential opportunity for a large chip company to get their hands on some key emulation technology.

All the details are at novafora-transmeta.com (but note you have to register on the site and agree to an NDA to get access to the information. Bids for the technology must be received by October 30, 2009.

Disclosure – Keith Teare, who has been part of TechCrunch since the beginning, is aiding Novafora in the transaction. TechCrunch has no direct financial interest in any of this. We’re just hoping the technology finds a useful home.

From the site:

Highlights
For Sale by 30 October 2009

This site is under development. Final content may not be in place until the week of the bidding. Please return and check for changes. If you intend bidding please contact us to enable your due diligence.

All assets of:

Novafora Inc
Transmeta LLC
To include:

All Novafora and Transmeta Assets.
All future revenues from Transmeta Licenses owned by Novafora Inc. Last quarter revenues of $415,000
All Transmeta file-servers, build servers, prototype hardware, source code and documentation.
Assignment of all Novafora Inc patent filings related to the "Spika" chip
All servers, source code, tools ("reggen" and "publish") and documentation to Novafora's "Spika" Chip
Assignment of all Novafora Inc patent filings related to the Video Genome Project
All servers, source code (unfinished) and documentation to Novafora's Video Genome Project
In all of these cases a buyer will need to determine the extent to which they are able to use the assets described. Read this site carefully as there are clearly legal constraints covering many items. And do not rely on this site to determine usability. Take your own legal and tax advice.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Announcing The Realtime Board And Our Next CrunchUp on November 20

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 12:43 PM PDT

One of the benefits of covering new technology and startups on a daily basis is that you can see trends as they begin to swell and repeat themselves. One shift we’ve been keeping a very close eye on is the rise of realtime streams, and how they are fundamentally altering the way we communicate and interact with one another.

We are not the only ones who think this is a big deal. Back in July, TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I organized a Realtime Stream CrunchUp. It was the first major realtime conference (there are a bunch of them now), and the response was overwhelming. It attracted 650 people and ended up as a launchpad for about 20 new realtime products, from Seesmic’s Web client to Pubsubhubbub (PuSH) to Brizzly (read more here).

A lot has happened since then: Facebook bought FriendFeed, Twitter raised $100 million, Google Wave launched in private beta. So Steve and I thought it would be a good time for another Realtime CrunchUp. The next one will be an all-day-event on November 20 in San Francisco. I don’t want to give away too many details just yet, but mark your calendars, and we’ll start to release tickets next week.

For our first event we simply wanted to establish that the realtime phenomenon is in fact real and spreading widely beyond just Twitter. There is no question about that now. The next Realtime CrunchUp will take a deeper dive into where these streams are taking us. But here is what I’m really excited about. To help us think through these issues and guide us as we put together the themes, panels and people for our November Realtime CrunchUp, we have assembled a Realtime Board. These are all heavy-hitters making big bets on realtime. The inaugural members of the board are:

Marc Benioff, CEO and founder Salesforce
John Borthwick, founder/investor betaworks
Paul Buchheit, founder FriendFeed
Lili Cheng, GM of FUSE Labs, Microsoft
Ron Conway, angel investor
Chris Cox, VP of Product, Facebook

Borthwick and Conway are the preeminent investors in realtime startups today. Benioff is leading the charge to bring realtime social streams into the enterprise. Cox oversees all products at Facebook and is responsible for its heavy emphasis on the stream. He was also instrumental in the recent $50 million purchase of FriendFeed, which Buchheit co-founded. (Buchheit also started Gmail when he was at Google). Cheng was recently named the general manager of Microsoft’s new Future Social Experiences Lab under chief software archietct Ray Ozzie. And that’s just the Bs and Cs. We are tremendously honored to have such a distinguished group give us their time and energy to help shape the realtime debate.

If you want to launch a realtime product at the CrunchUp or have an eye-opening demo, please contact us at realtime [at] techcrunch [dot] com.

The CrunchUp also gives us a great sponsorship platform for start-ups and brands to reach both conference and networking attendees. Please contact Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.

Stay tuned for more details soon!

(Photo by Marc Salsberry)

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Amazon Makes Brick And Mortar Stores More Irrelevant With Same Day Shipping

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 12:40 PM PDT

Wow. Amazon.com is now offering same day shipping – same day shipping -- in seven major cities across the U.S. with more on the way in the near future. If you live in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Las Vegas, or Seattle then you're already in one of the same day delivery zones.

Microsoft: Do The Right Thing And Give Xbox 360 Gamerooms To Four Hospitals

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 12:28 PM PDT

Did you know Microsoft has teamed up with the Children's Miracle Network to install three fully-equipped Xbox 360 gamerooms at three lucky hospitals? These hospitals will be chosen by an online vote that started weeks ago and is set to wrap up just before Midnight tomorrow. Currently there are four hospitals racing for the three spots: University of Iowa Children's Hospital, Arkansas Children's Hospital, Hurley Medical Center, and Blair E. Batson Hospital for Children at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. You have to admit that it's a pretty rad promotion aimed at helping sick kids. These gamerooms are valued at $10,000 apiece and Microsoft is donating three of them. Plus, each time you vote for a hospital (and you can do it up to 10 times a day), you're entered into a drawing to win an Xbox 360 yourself. Major props on the contest, Microsoft, but how about stepping up and donating just one more gameroom?

Breaking: A Six-Year-Old Is Trapped In A Homemade Helium Balloon Over Denver

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 12:27 PM PDT

Father-son projects are quite the American tradition. Everything from pine-box derby racers, to bike repairs, to experimental aircraft it seems. Wait what? The Denver Channel reports that 12:35 pm MDT today, authorities were tracking a 6-year-old boy at about 8,000 feet over Fort Collins, Colorado. Apparently the boy and his father had been building a "flying saucer covered in foil and filled with helium" for quite a while now.
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