The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Wowd Takes A Stab At Realtime Search With A Peer-To-Peer Approach
- Xsights – Use Your Cellphone To Turn Static Items Into Interactive Experiences
- Buddy Media Launches Integrated Facebook And Twitter Client For Brand Management
- Gadget-Picking Site Measy Goes Live
- Zoosk Hits 40 Million Members, Eyes $20 Million In Revenue This Year
- Live From Munich – Our Seminar And Meetup
- Real-time Tracking For Rockstars – Try Out MusicMetric On Us
- PeopleMaps Helps Graph Personal And Professional Connections
- Apple’s Sauce: $34 Billion In Cash, Stock Peaks, And Mysterious Shipping Anomalies
- Micro-blog About Your Love Life Much? Head Over To Relatious. Please.
- With Fresh Funding And A Hollywood PR Firm, Will Ad.ly Define Twitter Advertising?
- Apple Gets A Little More Serious About Using Twitter
- DropCam: A Fire-And-Forget Webcam Monitoring System From the Programmer of Xobni
- The New Twitter Hole That Probably Isn’t
- Android Avalanche: A Complete List Of The Android Phones So Far
- The Barnes & Noble Nook Reader To Be Revealed and Available Tomorrow for $259
- Jive Raises $12 Million For Social Enterprise Software
- IBM Upgrades Software To Manage Data Centers And Virtualization
- Kosmix Acquires Cruxlux, The Online Version Of ‘Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon’
- MOG Gives Lifetime Free Music Passes To All MOG Network Bloggers
- TechCrunch Dealmaker Rankings: The Top 25 Most Active VCs In The Third Quarter
- FriendFeed Not Dead, Just In A State Of “Chrysalis,” Says Co-founder
- Poll: One In Three Canadians Are Sane (Hand Shake Story)
- Apple On iPhone Competitors: They’re Still Catching Up To The First iPhone
- 2009 State Of The Blogosphere: The Full Video From BlogWorld
| Wowd Takes A Stab At Realtime Search With A Peer-To-Peer Approach Posted: 20 Oct 2009 07:55 AM PDT
A new realtime search engine called Wowd is launching publicly today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Founder and CTO Boris Agapiev gave the first public demonstration of Wowd at our Realtime Stream Crunchup last July (see video below). Wowd takes a very ambitious approach to search in that it is a peer-to-peer search engine. Users download a peer-to-per client and the index exists not on any central cluster of servers, but across all the user’s machines. Agapiev, who formerly founded the vertical search engine Vast, set out to conquer scaling issues in a new way and settled on a P2P approach. What makes Wowd a realtime search engine is that ranks sites based on how often and recently the Wowd community has visited that site. On Wowd, you vote with your mouse, so to speak. The search engine uses other more traditional ranking algorithms as well, but its main point of differentiation is the realtime clickstream data it gets from the peer-to-peer clients which it wants users to download. In theory, this will provide Wowd with your complete attention history if you allow it—every site you go to, not just the ones you click to from the search engine (in this regard, it is similar to what the Google toolbar records if you have the Web History feature enabled). As with any attention recorder, Wowd offers a full range of privacy settings so that you can share only what you wish, and it is all anonymized and Wowd doesn’t even know your IP address anyway. You can always see and search your entire Web history, which is helpful when you are trying to remember that obscure furniture site you saw last month. Nevertheless, this will be a big barrier for many consumers who might not feel comfortable sharing their surfing habits with an unknown startup. Simply asking people to download a client will be a barrier to adoption. But for those who do, they will be presented with a slightly different search experience. Results are ranked based on which sites are most popular with the Wowd community. Sites that have been visited recently get a stronger weighting. You can also switch to see the freshest results. The quality of the results depend on the Wowd community’s finding and visiting the best sites, but it is all based on passive activity. Wowd’s results supposedly won’t be as susceptible to SEO spam as other search engines. But if it becomes popular enough I’m sure spammers will try to game it by simply getting lots of people to download Wowd and visit their own sites continuously. Wowd obviously tries to monitor this type of behavior and weeds those clicks out from results. I’ve been testing Wowd for a coupel months, and the results are decent already with only a few thousand beta users. Now that Wowd is open to the public, the real test will begin. Realtime search is hot right now, with tons of startups (Collecta, OneRiot, Topsy) and as well as bigger companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google going after it. Below is a video of CTO Boris Agapiev’s demo at our Crunchup in July. It starts at the fourth dot along the timeline at around 29 minutes. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| Xsights – Use Your Cellphone To Turn Static Items Into Interactive Experiences Posted: 20 Oct 2009 07:27 AM PDT
This bares some resemblance to augmented reality applications for mobile phones, except that it’s not really real-time, since camera shots are analyzed in the background after saving photos to the phone. By pointing the phone camera to objects and saving shots to the program, users should be able to gain information such as directions, prices, videos clips, audio files but also purchasing opportunities, digital coupons, and more. At least, the technology seems interesting on paper. In reality, there’s a big caveat: all the associated content needs to be preset by third parties on beforehand. That means it currently doesn’t recognize stuff I tried to test the app, such as company logos (Sony), pictures of celebrities (Jennifer Connelly, Brad Pitt) and a couple of movie posters (easily identifiable ones like the ones for Batman and The Godfather). All I got was a cryptic error message because no one has associated the images with anything so far. It’s a far cry from what the demo and this video makes the mobile application look capable of. Xsights is looking to set up B2B partnerships with publishers, other content providers and advertisers to expand their database of recognizable items. Xsights is today also launching a user generated campaign for individual users, basically giving them the opportunity to add creative touches to their interactive experience by “attaching" video clips to invitations, greeting cards, photos or videos – making the associated interactive content personal. Xsights is giving 1,000 TechCrunch readers exclusive invites to be the first users to upload to the UGC Campaign. Just head on over here; only TechCrunch readers will be able to upload at this point. Additionally, users will now be able to watch trailers for new movies currently showing in local U.S. theaters by capturing an image of a movie poster with their camera phone. In contrast to my experience with random images, analyzing the posters listed here worked just fine. Xsights supports 3 ways of connections: Video Call (clientless), iPhone, BlackBerry, and selected J2ME handsets, and also works with MMS on all mobile handsets equipped with a camera. Try it out and let us know what you think.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Buddy Media Launches Integrated Facebook And Twitter Client For Brand Management Posted: 20 Oct 2009 07:00 AM PDT  As more brands look to Facebook and Twitter for a social media presence, the need for applications that make this presence simple grows. Buddy Media, a startup that develops applications for social networks, is hoping to attract the attention of brand marketers with its new all-in-one social media management system. Targeted towards advertisers and PR reps, the Buddy Media Platform helps create, manage and track social campaigns on Facebook and Twitter (the client will soon offer functionality for MySpace and other social networks). With regard to Facebook, the platform lets agencies create, manage and track Facebook Pages to drive and increase user and brand engagement. Users don’t need to have any prior HTML knowledge to create pages on Facebook and can create sleek and interactive pages fairly easily. And the pages themselves aren’t just advertisements; users can add a variety of apps to their pages such as polls, YouTube videos, coupons, slideshows and virtual gifts. The platform also lets you publish updates directly to a page’s wall. And the Buddy Media Platform lets agencies implement Facebook Connect on a brand’s site to tap into the social network’s graph. Buddy Media's Twitter Management System, which we wrote about here, lets marketers measure and identify Twitter trending topics around a particular brand, related topics and competitors. You can also track performance and trends for a brand and entire industry across Twitter with easy to view data on followers, mentions, and re-Tweets. Buddy Media’s tool will let you track volume and frequency of click-through rates in Twitter as well as monitor and analyze the sentiment of Tweets about a particular brand compared to competitors. Within the system you can create various profiles to manage several brands and different Twitter account and schedule Tweets to be published in advance of campaigns. And the system acts as a Twitter client itself, so you can have a centralized place to both Tweet and monitor and graph brands. The platform also offers other services that let advertisers and PR folks better monitor brand engagement, such as real-time analytics of campaigns and resources to help managers drive and track social actions and clicks. And Buddy Media's system offers real-time search capability, which can be especially useful to companies wanting to gain insight into the conversations about their businesses taking place on the social graph. Offering a comprehensive platform that serves as a one-stop-shop for brand managers to manage social media campaigns is a wise move for Buddy Media. There a few services that are providing similar services out there, such as PeopleBrowsr and CoTweet (which focuses on Twitter). But Buddy Media’s compelling Facebook features, such as the ability to make a visually appealing and interactive page, could be popular among brand managers that have little to no technical background.  Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Gadget-Picking Site Measy Goes Live Posted: 20 Oct 2009 06:50 AM PDT
As the holiday shopping season approaches many of us will be facing some very tough decisions: do we get the Asus netbook computer or the HP Mini, a Canon digital camera or a Nikon. A whole sub-industry has arisen to help consumers make those decisions with sites ranging from CNET to gdgt. Today, Measy enters the fray by trying to help you make that decision by asking you a series of questions about the gadget you want and then coming up with the top three choices based on your criteria. Launched in private beta in September, Measy’s site is now publicly available. It helps you make purchasing decisions about digital cameras, HDTVs, and netbooks by asking you about your needs and preferences. (”How important is travel?”; “How important is brand?”). It then scores each device on the traits important to you and delivers an overall score. The site only supports a handful of consumer electronics categories, but every month or so it will add a new category. Smartphones are next. With today’s launch, Measy also added information on the site about the best places to recycle electronic gadgets (which I never know how to find). Taking a decision-tree approach and then boiling down each attribute of a product to a score is one way to cut through the consumer-electronics clutter, but can you really trust it to come up with the best product for you? Give it a whirl and tell us what you think in comments.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Zoosk Hits 40 Million Members, Eyes $20 Million In Revenue This Year Posted: 20 Oct 2009 06:00 AM PDT
Zoosk launched back in 2007, and has been showing some strong growth recently, particularly on social networks. Zoosk co-founders Alex Mehr and Shayan Zadeh say that the site differentiates itself from other dating sites like Match.com by tapping into your social graph. The site has a strong presence across social networks including Facebok, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and Friendster, and users can also sign in through the site’s web portal at Zoosk.com. And if that’s not enough, you can reach Zoosk through a desktop AIR client and a mobile app. To help build your Zoosk profile, you can import information from whichever social network you’re using Zoosk on. You can also tie it together with services like Last.fm and Netflix, to give potential matches an idea of your music and movie taste. The site itself has a friendly and not-overly-serious atmosphere. Mehr and Zadeh say that part of the site’s success has stemmed from the fact that many of its users are in the 25-35 year old demographic, with many members who aren’t neccesarily looking for a long-term serious relationship, which stands in contrast with more serious dating sites like eHarmony. In other words, a successful match on Zoosk may well result in a return visit from the user — a successful match on eHarmony might lead to that user getting hitched. To generate revenue, Zoosk offers a premium subscription model for $25 a month (you pay less if you buy multiple months of a time), or you can purchase features using the site’s virtual currency. Dubbed “Zoosk coins”, these can be used to either buy Facebook-like virtual gifts, or to buy premium features a la carte, like the ability to see if someone has read a message you’ve sent them. While much of the site’s traffic comes from the social networks, the site’s homepage tends to monetize more effectively, with around 50% of revenue coming from each. The site also earns money through advertising. For another service that combines dating with your social graph, check out Thread, which launched as part of Facebook’s fbFund over the summer.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Live From Munich – Our Seminar And Meetup Posted: 20 Oct 2009 05:25 AM PDT
We’ll be hearing startup pitches and speakers in this key German city in the European startup ecosystem, focusing on a number of current and relevant themes for the tech community here. The event is sold out. After the jump you’ll find the live stream (the event is in English) and a run down on the event and supporting sponsors. The Twitter hashtag is #tcm09. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Real-time Tracking For Rockstars – Try Out MusicMetric On Us Posted: 20 Oct 2009 04:25 AM PDT
The idea is that you can greatly reduce the number of false positives which you’d be likely to get if you just typed the band’s name into Google Trends, for example. Potential competitors would be Big Champagne or Next Big Sound though MusicMetric hope to differentiate themselves by using text-derived data to measure the public opinion of a band rather than relying on counting plays and hits alone. For TechCrunch readers we have 250 free 30-day subscription – more details after the jump. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| PeopleMaps Helps Graph Personal And Professional Connections Posted: 20 Oct 2009 03:55 AM PDT  Startup 7 Degrees is launching PeopleMaps, a social business application that aims to give professionals direct visibility into how they are connected to any person or company. Basically, PeopleMaps sifts through educational, social and business information to determine personal and professional relationships between people. PeopleMaps allows users to automatically search their personal contacts from Outlook, LinkedIn, Facebook, Gmail, and Yahoo, while simultaneously searching data from public Internet sources. The application’s graph engine then analyzes all of this data to determine "connection paths" to any person or company, which lets you see how you are connected to any person or company. PeopleMaps also pulls in bios of individuals (when they are public info). The application also offers a professional, paid edition that is optimized for sales professionals to create better leads. PeopleMaps is actually launching on Salesforce’s AppExhcange today and will be available to be incorporated into any Salesforce CRM. Similar to the free version, PeopleMaps will import contacts and then establish connections with leads, letting salespeople establish personal and professional connections with leads and potentially create more successful sales. The CRM-focused app will instantly analyze and ranks sales prospects based on the strength of personal and professional connections to people and companies. Sales managers can then assign each prospect or lead to the salesperson with the most relevant connections within the CRM itself. Sales teams can also access maps of each employee’s personal and professional relationships to tap into the collective network of an entire organization. While the professional edition is priced at $49 per user per month. Founded by for Yahoo Finance exec Tim Sheehan, PeopleMaps has received $1.2 million in seed funding from vSpring Capital and Parkview Ventures. PeopleMap’s graphs are similar in theory to the connections made by LinkedIn within the social network. The application is undoubtedly useful to visually determine your social connections, and is even more compelling when used in conjunction with a business software like Salesforce. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Apple’s Sauce: $34 Billion In Cash, Stock Peaks, And Mysterious Shipping Anomalies Posted: 20 Oct 2009 02:52 AM PDT
Apple now has $34 billion in cash in the bank. Apple watchers will also know that they have no debt. So what are they going to do with all this money? That’s $10 billion more than they had a year ago, and this past quarter alone, they added about $3 billion to the pile. Apple keeps saying that it will use the cash for “preservation of capital,” which is a fancy way of saying that they’ll be take little risk and keep it close. That’s more cash than Microsoft has, and for some comparison, $34 billion is $10 billion more than the overall market cap of Yahoo. It’s also about $1.5 billion more than the market cap of eBay, and $4 billion more than the market cap of Dell. It’s almost exactly the same as the market cap of News Corp. Apple’s stock could open tomorrow at or near its all-time high. Let me repeat that, all-time high. You probably haven’t heard that too often over the past year, but it’s true. Apple’s all-time high is $202.96 a share, which it reached on Dec. 27, 2007, nearly 2 years ago. Today, after earnings were released, the stock shot up over 7%, pushing it past $203 a share. It has since settled a bit lower, but it’s not out of the question that the stock could hit the mark again tomorrow during regular trading hours. Apple’s stock price has more than doubled over the past 7 months alone. Sales of the iPod touch were up 100% year over year. This is especially impressive considering two things. First, overall iPod sales were down, once again. Second, despite indications that they would, Apple did not add a camera to the iPod touch during that line’s refresh a few months ago. Instead, the iPod nano got the camera, but it would seem that the iPod touch is still the hot sibling in the family. OS X Snow Leopard came out of the gates twice as fast as OS X Leopard. This really shouldn’t be all that surprising, considering the upgrade costs just $30. Still, impressive. Half billion apps downloaded in the last quarter alone. We already knew the big 2 billion app download milestone was hit, but Apple clearly stated that a full half billion of those came just in the past three months. That’s huge. Portable sales were up 35% year over year. Apple didn’t want to seem to talk about its desktops at all when it came to the Mac business (which had its best quarter ever). Instead, it’s very clear that notebook sales are the driving force (nearly 3/4th of Mac sales now). Of course, some new iMacs, which may launch as soon as tomorrow, could help balance the sales a bit more. China is getting the iPhone on October 30, but Korea should get it this quarter as well. Obviously China is a huge key to the Apple’s plan for international success, but getting the iPhone in Korea won’t hurt either. Apple COO Tim Cook made a quick reference to the unlocked iPhone issue in Asia, and noted that the company is excited to finally be able to meet a demand that is clearly there. Apple has some new products coming that have relatively low margins and cost a lot on to ship in. The obvious guess here would be Apple’s tablet. But the latest rumors had the thing being announced in January, but not shipping until closer to mid 2010 — neither of which are fiscal year Q1 (which ends December 31). Instead, the lower margins could well be related to new iMacs and MacBooks that have been rumored to be cheaper. But the more interesting bit comes from Cook’s wording about why Apple spending more on shipping: “In general, we spend more in freight in Q1, but this increase is larger than usual. I’m sorry, I can’t be specific on the product, but it’s an abnormal sequential increase.” That would seem to suggest a new type of product outside the ones it already offers, like the iMac and MacBook, which it has, of course, shipped in the past. Could the tablet come early? It seems unlikely, but something is causing Apple to worry about out-of-the-ordinary shipping costs. Apple has until Q1 2011 to use the new accounting rules. The changes allow Apple to count money made of off its so-called "subscription" devices, the iPhone and the Apple TV, immediately, rather than spreading the money over a 2-year period. While they were approved in September, Apple is still debating on when to start using them, and will not for Q1 2010. Cook noted that Apple was “pleased” with this new rule. [photo: flickr/stu_spivak] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Micro-blog About Your Love Life Much? Head Over To Relatious. Please. Posted: 20 Oct 2009 02:51 AM PDT
In particular, the amount of coffees one has in the morning, what he or she is having for lunch, which airport terminal they’re currently waiting for a plane in and why their relationships are complicated are often of little interest to people following you on Twitter, besides maybe your parents. (Yes, I plead guilty too) But the latter category of tweets now at least have a dedicated home with the launch of Relatious, a micro-blogging community site for people who enjoy sharing every little detail about their love and/or sex lives. This excerpt from the news release captures the essence of the site:
So there you have it. It’s Twitter, but for relationship chatter, although I’m a bit unsure how to plan to stop people from talking about whatever they feel like. Oh, and messages can be 400 characters, not 140. Oh, and you can share information anonymously, which means the message will still appear in the public feed but without your account attached to it. Other than that it’s just like any basic social network, with the ability to comment on messages, ‘like’ them, assign categories to your own Relatious messages and share any public one with others on Twitter or Facebook. Little more to add about the service, except that it was built and funded by a team of entrepreneurs who’ve sold Internet startups in the past and asked to remain anonymous for now. One thing is sure: they’re funny. Just check the copy on the ‘About us’ page and the last e-mail address on that page to see what I mean.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| With Fresh Funding And A Hollywood PR Firm, Will Ad.ly Define Twitter Advertising? Posted: 20 Oct 2009 02:11 AM PDT
One of the companies that is dabbling with advertising on Twitter – even if Biz & co seem to be reluctant to do some serious testing of their own – is Ad.ly, an LA-based startup that launched about a month ago. In essence, Ad.ly aims to link up high-profile advertisers with celebrities on Twitter and distribute links to marketing campaigns through the celebs’ tweet streams with full disclosure. The model is pretty straightforward: the celebrity (or publisher) gets a lot of cash in return for a couple of messages that are under 140 characters, and Ad.ly takes its cut. As my colleague Leena Rao wrote upon Ad.ly’s launch:
That’s a lot of money for tweets, so time will tell if it’s a sustainable model, if celebrities keep signing up and using the service and if Ad.ly will be able to pay their promised dues. But some investors are bullish on the potential, at least. Yesterday, GRP Partners’ Mark Suster wrote an interesting blog post on the topic of VC seed funding. In the post, Suster reveals that GRP Partners, where he is a General Partner, has just closed a $500,000 seed round for Ad.ly and that he’d be interested in leading or joining follow-up VC financing rounds if the startup keeps performing well. A couple of weeks ago, Ad.ly even hired a West Hollywood PR and marketing firm called Entertainment Fusion Group to be its ‘Agency of Record’; EFG will help the fledgling company with public relations and talent procurement. Since it’s deeply embedded in the entertainment industry, the firm should help Ad.ly get some exposure within the circle of movie stars and other celebrities. So what gives? Has Ad.ly, with its focus on high-profile advertising partners and celeb Twitter users with a large number of followers, cracked the nut of Twitter advertising? Impossible to say without seeing some numbers, but it appears to be striking a chord or two. Not that Ad.ly is the only one trying to capitalize on Twitter’s growth and celebrities’ massive audience. SponsoredTweets (from IZEA) does much of the same, and then there’s ExecTweets, a cooperation between Microsoft and Federated Media. Others, like Be-A-Magpie and Twittad, have their sights set on the long tail of Twitter. Whether you think of it as stream pollution or an innovation social media monetization, Twitter advertising is here to stay, for better or worse. And you can rest assured many of these ad networks are going to run a profitable business way before Twitter does. The flip side of that coin is of course the fact that all of rely on the Twitter platform, so if they prosper or perish is partly Twitter’s call. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Apple Gets A Little More Serious About Using Twitter Posted: 20 Oct 2009 12:42 AM PDT
Back in March, the company started tweeting from its first official Twitter account, iTunesTrailers. They even went so far as to highlight the account on their Apple.com Trailers page. Thanks to the suggested users list, that account now has well over 1 million followers and they’re probably seeing a not entirely insignificant amount of traffic coming from there. And now they’ve added a few more accounts: These are all new accounts. A couple of them have just over 1,000 followers, but the other two have under 100, and haven’t tweeted yet. But it would seem that Apple wants to promote all of them now, as it has created a customized background for each account’s Twitter page, highlighting the other accounts (and its Facebook iTunes Fan Page, as well). One account you’ll notice that Apple does not have though, is twitter.com/apple. That account has one tweet, from March 16, which reads, “I love apples.” That hardly seems like something Apple the company would say, and the account points to a Gmail account in its profile, which would seem to suggest they may be interested in selling it. But with just one Tweet in 7 months, Twitter is probably within its rights to simply close the account and give it to Apple, if the company wanted it. (As a sidenote, there is also a Twitter account with the name “appleinc“, but it’s currently protected.) Obviously, Apple added a bit of social media to iTunes 9 recently, by including the ability to share items on both Facebook and Twitter. But the effort is half-hearted as best. It’s not like you can share what you’re listening to, just what you’re thinking about buying, or just bought. Apple has always marched to its own drumbeat, so it seems unlikely that we’ll see Apple corporate tweeting the way that people at Google, Yahoo, and even Microsoft do, but these new accounts could signify a slight thawing of the ice. After all, we do know that Apple does like Twitter.
[via Ian Dodsworth] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| DropCam: A Fire-And-Forget Webcam Monitoring System From the Programmer of Xobni Posted: 19 Oct 2009 10:47 PM PDT  Welcome to the era of completely computer-less webcams. We tried the Avaak Vue a few weeks ago with mixed results but this new system, called Dropcam, looks more useful for homes and small businesses. The kit allows for multiple cameras to be connected to the Internet via wired Ethernet or WiFi. You simply set it up, plug it in, and start streaming. The system records video at 320x240 pixels at 15 frames/sec. The cameras weigh 3 ounces and are about an inch thick. |
| The New Twitter Hole That Probably Isn’t Posted: 19 Oct 2009 10:29 PM PDT
What, you say? Those sound like some bizarre things for a seasoned politician to be tweeting about? Yeah, I had the same thought. So I did a bit more digging, and as it turns out those tweets didn’t come from Bill Clinton at all, at least not the real one. Instead, they came from someone who was masquerading as Bill Clinton at some time in the past, when they were cached by Google. But now they can all be found under the Twitter account NotBillClinton. Here’s the full text of those tweets:
Not so damning after all. As for the other accounts mentioned in the Times article, I suspect that Google is displaying tweets from them, but only messages that were sent before they were made private. For some more evidence, I reached out to Britekite’s Jonathon Linner (who is mentioned in the LA Times post), who says that he did in fact change his account to private only in the last month or so. The fact that these messages are all cached still poses a problem — make the mistake of setting your account public for a while and you may have no way to ever pull that data back in — but it doesn’t look like Google has special access to these tweets. We’ve reached out to Twitter to confirm that Google does not actually have these so-called keys to the city. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Android Avalanche: A Complete List Of The Android Phones So Far Posted: 19 Oct 2009 10:07 PM PDT
Our bet is that the upcoming Motorola Droid will be the breakout winner from this batch of phones. But here’s the complete list of officially announced Android phones, as well as stuff that’s just rumored at this point. Bookmark this post, and keep a lookout for updates. Here are the Android contenders: HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1
HTC Magic/T-Mobile MyTouch 3G
HTC Hero/T-Mobile G2 Touch/Sprint HTC Hero
Huawei U8230/ Pulse
Samsung Galaxy
HTC Tattoo
Motorola CLIQ
Motorola Droid
Samsung Moment/InstinctQ
Motorola Heron/Iron Man
Acer A1/Liquid
Samsung Behold 2
ARCHOS Phone Tablet
Dell mini i3
Lenovo O1
LG Etna
HTC Lancaster
Sony Ericsson Xperia X3
Motorola Calgary
Philips V808
HTC Click
Samsung Bigfoot
HTC Dragon
Samsung Galaxy Lite/Samsung Spica
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| The Barnes & Noble Nook Reader To Be Revealed and Available Tomorrow for $259 Posted: 19 Oct 2009 09:37 PM PDT  That's no fun. Barnes & Noble was probably expecting to get all the attention tomorrow with its fancy-pants press conference, but the Wall Street Journal had to go ruin all the fun by letting the Nook ebook reader out of the bag today. Yeah, that's the name. Nook. |
| Jive Raises $12 Million For Social Enterprise Software Posted: 19 Oct 2009 08:50 PM PDT
Jive, the maker of a all-in-one social enterprise software, has raised $12 million in Series B funding from Sequoia Capital. Jive previously raised $15 million in Series A funding from Sequoia in August of 2007. Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, Jive combines computing with social collaboration. Its suite of applications help businesses collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, and social networking features and more. Jive says it will will use the funding for product development, to “expand its partner ecosystem,” and grow its sales and customer support teams. The company, which is profitable, recently launched integration with Microsoft SharePoint, letting Jive users easily access data and content from the CMS into Jive's software. Last year, the startup released new versions of its Clearspace software in April and acquired Jotlet. This year, the software company integrated Jive’s software into a complete package and also recently incoroprated social media monitoring into its platform. Jive’s competitors include NewsGator and Socialtext. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| IBM Upgrades Software To Manage Data Centers And Virtualization Posted: 19 Oct 2009 08:45 PM PDT  IBM is enhancing its VMControl software for managing data centers to give enterprise users a single point of control across multiple types of IT systems and virtualization technologies. Combined with IBM's Tivoli software, VMControl allows for combinations of physical and virtual IBM servers to be managed as a single entity, called "system pooling." IBM says this approach optimizes virtualization by helping corporate data centers simplify management functions and better share and prioritize use of critical resources such as CPU, memory and storage. Having centralized control over virtualized environments lets companies manage large amounts of information and processing resources and then parcel them out to applications when and where they're needed. |
| Kosmix Acquires Cruxlux, The Online Version Of ‘Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon’ Posted: 19 Oct 2009 07:33 PM PDT
If you’re a fan of the classic game ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon‘, you’ll love the Cruxlux engine. The company has built algorithms that will automatically figure out how various people, places, things, and topics are related through a handful of steps, using sources across the web. Say, for example, I wanted to see how TechCrunch is connected to President Obama: the site first says that TechCrunch was founded by Michael Arrington, who is connected to Stanford Law School (he went there). That in turn is connected to Harvard Law School (they both use non-letter grading systems). Which brings us to Harvard Law School, which Barack Obama attended. With each step, the site has a ‘how’ feature that tells you how the subjects are related. Cruxlux has been in private beta until now, allowing you to type in any two topics to see how they’re related, and I’ve had quite a bit of fun playing around with it. Unfortunately, it isn’t going to be opening up to the general public, at least not in its current form. Instead, the service will soon be integrated with Koxmix, helping surface new connections as you browse through the site’s topics pages. And really, the integration makes perfect sense. In its current form Cruxlux seems best for entertainment, not research — how often would you really take the time to plug in two topics to see their connections? Now that the relationship engine will be integrated with Kosmix, it will be much more useful, because they’ll be shown alongside every topic. Cruxlux was founded in 2007 by Guha Jayachandran and Curtis Spencer, who met while they were students at Stanford. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| MOG Gives Lifetime Free Music Passes To All MOG Network Bloggers Posted: 19 Oct 2009 06:05 PM PDT
“Will MOG's user experience be so compelling that users will pay $60/year for something they can get free elsewhere?” I wrote. We’ll see as more details of the service comes out, but MOG seems pretty bullish on the quality of the user experience. So bullish, in fact, that CEO David Hyman is convinced I’ll change my mind once I see it. One group of bloggers won’t need to make that critical pay/no pay decision, though – MOG network bloggers. The 800 or so third party music bloggers (up from 300 earlier this year) that are part of the MOG network are being given free lifetime passes to the new service. The email below was sent to MOG network bloggers and forwarded to us. We asked MOG if the deal will apply to new third party bloggers as well, and they say it will. So if you have a music blog and want free music for life, here’s your chance. Just note that MOG has to approve all blogs before they get into the network, so it has to be the real thing. The email is below:
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| TechCrunch Dealmaker Rankings: The Top 25 Most Active VCs In The Third Quarter Posted: 19 Oct 2009 03:51 PM PDT  In the third quarter of 2009, we saw a slight rebound in venture funding from earlier in the year. But which venture capital firms were the most active in the quarter? One of my favorite new tables in our latest TechCrunch Trends report, which is based on company data we collect in CrunchBase, is the ranking of the most active venture capital firms. We've reproduced that ranking below in two interactive tables which show the top 25 most active VC firms in both the third quarter of 2009 and the most active year-to-date. (You can see a list of the top 100 most-active VC firms in the quarter ). The rankings are based on the number of deals each firm participated in during each time period. Draper Fisher Jurvetson tops both lists, with 17 deals in the third quarter, and 34 year to date. Then it was followed, for the quarter, by Sequoia (12 deals), Kleiner Perkins (11 deals), NEA (9 deals), and Benchmark (8 deals). The top ten for the year-to-date rankings show many of the same firms, although they move around a little. |
| FriendFeed Not Dead, Just In A State Of “Chrysalis,” Says Co-founder Posted: 19 Oct 2009 03:38 PM PDT
Naturally, in a FriendFeed posted item, here’s what he had to say:
But, this still seems to speak to very much what I was talking about this weekend. FriendFeed, as we knew it, is over. “FriendFeed goodness to the larger world,” would seem to imply either some more open-sourcing like they did with Tornado by way of Facebook. Or, a bigger movement of the FriendFeed technology over to Facebook itself. Further open-sourcing FriendFeed and/or its APIs is great and all, but I fear things will get messy for end-users without a single product to focus on. Certainly, that will be useful for some people, and undoubtedly some services, but I have a hard time believing it will be able to fully replace the way I used FriendFeed, as a crowd-sourced pusher of information in real-time. Facebook obviously has the size to provide that, but I still worry that it’s too big for the rapid pace of innovation we were seeing with FriendFeed to continue. I do hope the team is able to improve some of the areas that Facebook is lacking in, such as sharing speed, filters, and content discovery. But it won’t be the same. And that’s fine, as Buchheit notes, “transformation is not the end.” But it’s hard to watch a service you relied heavily upon change drastically. Maybe the result will be a butterfly, but I didn’t consider FriendFeed to be a caterpillar before. [photo: flickr/kiwinz] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Poll: One In Three Canadians Are Sane (Hand Shake Story) Posted: 19 Oct 2009 03:37 PM PDT
But they also say the enemy of your enemy is your friend. And so, by that crazy logic, I am now friends with Canada. Or at least, one in three Canadians. Because they’ve joined us, CNN, the Dalai Lama, the Obamas, the Boston Globe and some random town in Germany in our fight against the dreaded, disease spreading hand shake. From The Globe And Mail, which writes that one in three Canadians won’t shake hands due to flu concerns:
Ridiculous? A little. But people keep sending these articles in, so we keep posting them. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Apple On iPhone Competitors: They’re Still Catching Up To The First iPhone Posted: 19 Oct 2009 02:56 PM PDT
Yes, Apple views the smartphone market as still being behind the first phone they released over two years ago. “We’ve moved beyond that,” Cook noted. Certainly, compared to some smartphones out there, the first iPhone still compares very well. The iPhone 3G compares even better — as we’ve written before, it’s kind of like James Bond, while a lot of others at the same price are Joe Schmoe. But to say the original iPhone is ahead of phones like the Palm Pre and the myTouch 3G seems a bit disingenuous. That said, the iPhone 3GS is, in my view, still absolutely ahead of the competiton, including the aforementioned phones. By many accounts, the upcoming Verizon Droid phone could be first real challenger to the current leading iPhone. Verizon obviously feels the same way, given its advertising campaign. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| 2009 State Of The Blogosphere: The Full Video From BlogWorld Posted: 19 Oct 2009 02:41 PM PDT
We posted the full powerpoint presentation from that talk. And now we have the 47 minute video of his presentation as well. The video is below, along with the original powerpoint presentation: Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
A real-time trend-tracking platform that trawls the web using semantic analysis to make sure that all hits for a band’s name are contextually correct. That’s the pitch of 
The big, obvious take away from 
I follow a lot of people on 
I’m still not sure if the 
While the various forms of social media are becoming increasingly important to brands, Apple is one company that hasn’t exactly rushed to get involved. Sure, they have a few accounts here and there, but they’re not exactly Google, with 
Earlier this evening the LA Times Tech Blog ran a 
Google CEO 
Status: G1 launched October 22nd, 2008. Available internationally.
Status: HTC Magic Launched May 1, 2009; MyTouch 3G launched July 8, 2009. Available through T-Mobile and Vodafone
Status: HTC Hero Launched July 24th for Orange UK. T-Mobile G2 Touch Launched July 29th.
Status: Available in T-Mobile UK
Status: Launched in July; Available on European Carriers
Status: Launched October 8th on Vodaphone
Status: Available October 19th, 2009 on T-Mobile and Orange UK
Status: Rumored to be available October 31st on Verizon
Status: Available November 1st from Sprint
Status: Rumored to be available in November from AT&T
Status: Rumored to be launched in November
Status: Rumored to be available during Holidays 2009
Status: Rumored to be available in January
Status: Upcoming on China Mobile
Status: Upcoming on China Mobile
Status: Upcoming on Vodafone
Status: Rumored on AT&T (possibly canceled)
Status: Rumored
Status: Rumored on Verizon
Status: Rumored
Status: Rumored
Status: Rumored on T-Mobile USA
Status: Rumored on T-Mobile USA
Status: Rumored
This weekend, a number of people had 
They say going to war without Canada is like going deer hunting without an accordion (ok, they actually 
During 
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