Saturday, October 24, 2009

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Got degree envy? No worries, you can still make it big.

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 07:00 AM PDT

Harvard Library

An Ivy League degree may get you a job as an investment banker or VC, but it won't increase your odds of becoming a successful entrepreneur.

So you couldn't get into Stanford, Berkeley or Harvard, huh? Don't sweat it. You can still make it big. Some people might believe that an Ivy League education provides a huge advantage in entrepreneurship. But after researching this over and over again, I've found no such correlation. To the contrary, it seems that those who are born without the silver spoons in their mouths are more motivated to succeed. And those who aren't members of elite alum societies develop the skills needed to hustle in the rough and tough business world. The Ivy-Leaguers may be able to get their buddies from Sequoia and Kleiner to return emails, but they aren't going to be any more successful at building companies.

With my affiliations at three of the greatest universities in the world (Harvard, Berkeley, and Duke), I know I'm going to take a lot of flak for this piece. It's not that I haven't been trying to find the good news. I've done three big research projects on entrepreneurship. Each of these reached the same conclusion about education and entrepreneurship: What makes entrepreneurs successful is the education, not the school. It's the same in India and China. India's IITs and China's Fudan University (their Ivy League schools) don't hold any monopoly on graduating tech stars.

In the first research project, we looked at the background of 317 immigrants who started tech companies. We were surprised to learn that Delhi University graduated twice as many Silicon Valley company founders as did IIT Delhi. And that both Osmania and Bombay University trumped nearly all of the IITs. China's Tianjin University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University graduated more founders than Fudan or Tsinghua.

These were immigrants, and we weren't sure if it would be the same with American schools. So we looked into the educational background of American tech company founders. We found that the 628 U.S.-born tech founders we surveyed received their education from 287 unique universities. Almost every major U.S. university was represented. The top ten institutions in this group accounted for only 19 percent of the entire sample. In other words, 81% of the tech company founders came from "regular" schools. To make my colleagues at Harvard feel better (and to keep my job), I'll acknowledge that the Ivies represented 8% of the sample even though those schools only graduate 1.6% of American students.

Then we broadened our research and looked into the backgrounds of the founders of 549 successful businesses across a set of high-growth industries. The proportion of Ivy-Leaguers was even smaller (about 6% of the sample). We also found that MBA's tended to start companies sooner after graduation (13 years) than bachelors degree holders (17 years). And both these groups were quicker to the startups than PhD's – who typically waited 21 years from the time they graduated to start their ventures. That's right, tech company founders aren't spring chickens. Also, we found that Computer Science/IT grads were faster than MBA's (13 years vs. 15 yrs) and the applied science majors (20 years).

The most interesting findings however were the difference between those who had college degrees and those who never even got a sheepskin. The average sales revenue of all startups in one of our samples was around $5.7 million, and these companies employed an average of forty-two workers. Startups established by tech founders with Ivy League degrees had average sales and employment of $6.7 million and fifty-five workers, respectively. The success of these two groups markedly contrasted with startups established by tech founders with only a high school degree. Those founders had average revenues and employees of $2.2 million and eighteen, respectively. (Sorry, Bill and Steve). In other words, it didn't matter so much if you graduated from an Ivy. What made the greatest difference was having a higher degree.

Company founders also value their education. In a paper which the Kauffman Foundation will release on Nov 17 (during Global Entrepreneurship Week), we report that 70.3% said their university education was important. Ivy League graduates valued their education even more, with 85.7% indicating this was important. Surprisingly only 18.8% believed that university or alumni networks were important. Of the Ivy graduates, 28.6% ranked these networks as important.

To be fair, an Ivy League education does provide other advantages. An Ivy degree makes it much easier to become an investment banker at Goldman Sachs (is that a positive these days?), a venture capitalist (most are elite school grads) or a powerful attorney. It probably makes it easier to become a professor, as well. And, as my research shows, it may confer a slight advantage to entrepreneurs. But not enough of an advantage to make any real difference in the equation. So, Mom and Dad, save your dollars. High school juniors, save your tears. Ivy Leaguers, check your ego at the door. What makes you good is what and how you learn, not the name on your framed diploma.Harvard

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

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From The 3G Industry Summit In Kunshan, China: 16 Demos From Chinese Mobile Startups

Posted: 24 Oct 2009 01:22 AM PDT

3g_industry_summit_kunshan
3g_industry_summit_kunshan_logoEarlier this week, I was in Kunshan, China, to attend the 3G Industry Summit [CN], a four-day event that has attracted a few dozen speakers and an audience of over 200 people, making it one of the biggest of its kind in this country. The annual event is organized by the Kunshan government and Mobile 2.0 Forum, a communication platform with more than 1,500 members, almost single-handedly run by industry veteran Leo Wang.

mobile_2_0_forum_chinaThe summit reassured me of one thing: The Chinese market for mobile hardware, software and contents is big already and it’s bound to become huge in the very near future.

Just a few stats about China’s online landscape:

  • world’s largest Internet population: 338 million Chinese are online (US: 220 million)
  • most cell phone users in the world (710 million)
  • China Mobile, the world’s biggest cell phone carrier, boasts nearly half a billion subscribers (the US as a whole has 271 million)
  • China’s telecommunications industry generated $210 billion in revenues between January and July 2009 alone
  • China’s mobile phone penetration rate currently stands at just 53.5% (USA: 88%), hinting at room for massive future growth

The smartphone market and 3G are still in their infancy though. Research firm BDA China says just 17.4 million smartphones were sold in China in 2008 (Nokia commands a 67% market share in this segment), with the total likely to hit 36 million units this year before growing to 56 million in 2010. The iPhone will be released in China next week. The number of China Mobile’s 3G subscribers (who use the company’s homegrown 3G standard) currently stands at just 1.33 million, but the country’s three biggest cell phone carriers (China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom) say they’re ready to invest $66 billion in China’s 3G networks over the next two years.

So the 3G Industry Summit in Kunshan probably couldn’t take place at a better time. The program also included a launch pad, which gave a total of 14 companies from China (two were from Japan) the chance to pitch their services onstage to over 200 top-level executives, VCs and entrepreneurs in the country’s mobile tech world.

Here’s a thumbnail sketch of all of these companies. The list is by no means representative of China’s mobile startup scene but should serve as a reasonably large and up-to-date cross section of the industry.

unoh_logoDemo 1:
UNOH
UNOH CEO Shintarou Yamada showed a mobile (and Japan-only) game his Tokyo-based 15-man team launched in May this year. Machitsuku is a geo-aware city-building simulation (the game’s title means “Build a city” in Japanese) with cute graphics, social elements, surprisingly deep gameplay and virtual items users have to pay for (the game itself is free). Yamada said the game will be provided to leading social networks like Mixi (background) and Mobage-town (background) soon, but I am hoping for an iPhone version.

urbian_logoDemo 2:
Urbian
Urbian develops mobile applications for enterprises, but the company also offers a slew of iPhone and Android apps for end consumers. At the summit, CEO Christopher Kahler, an Austrian based in Shanghai, demonstrated a nifty mobile learning application that will be soon launched in China, Japan, the Philippines and other territories (the China version alone will be used by 5,000 schools all over the country). The solution will be available for the iPhone, Android, Symbian and other platforms.

crossmo_logoDemo 3:
CrossMo
CrossMo intends to solve the fragmentation problem in the mobile space by offering an online data management and synchronization tool for cell phones that’s completely hardware agnostic. The service detects everything on your phone once you connect it to your PC via USB and backs up and synchronizes your ringtones, music files, address book etc. This works even after you replace your cell phone with another model.

CEO Lei Jia said 70% Chinese of consumers download contents from the web to their phone, not over the air. CrossMo looks like a very powerful tool and reminds me of DoubleTwist (concept-wise), so too bad it’s China-only.

mobimtech_logoDemo 4:
MobimTech
MobimTech CTO Yi Liang demonstrated imiChat, which seemed to be a very cool real-time video chatting solution. You can use it to video-chat from cell phone to cell phone but also from the fixed web to cell phones (voice- and text-chatting is also supported). imiChat is free and supports a number of cell phones. It uses GPRS/EDGE networks and doesn’t need to run on 3G (MobimTech actually sells this technology to 2.5G handset makers).

bokan_technologies_logoDemo 5:
BokanTech
BokanTech CEO Bo Wang presented iBokan, an iPhone app destination site that features an impressive number of hit apps. He highlighted mobile edutainment apps such as Cute Math (apparently the only app that was featured twice in the AppStore as “new and noteworthy”) and Jumbo Book (an interactive book series with 20 episodes so far). BokanTech also plans to soon release a service called Kukapp, which Wang described as “Google Analytics for iPhone and Ovi apps”.

navteq_logoDemo 6:
NavTeq China
Navteq China Director George Qie focused on how to create an ecosystem based on location-based services (LBS). His main point was that LBS can be used for many applications: navigation, social networking, games, productivity (workforce management, for example), commerce and security. Qie said this versatility is the reason why LBS can be used for the integration of applications of different nature and that the advent of 3G in China will fuel the growth of LBS developed in China.

soco_game_logoDemo 7:
SocoGame
SocoGame CEO Ye Shen said at $147 million in sales in 2008, the Chinese market for mobile games is still small but will likely balloon to almost $750 million in sales by 2011, with growth expected to accelerate significantly after that year. One major difference to the West: Chinese gamers usually expect a mobile game to be free, but they’re ready to pay later for virtual items, for example, forcing developers to come up with compelling games with long-time appeal.

Shanghai-based SocoGame itself is a major player in China’s mobile gaming sector. The company produced more than 100 mobile games for a number of different markets so far, i.e. Monkey King (specifically designed for Asia) or Jewel Quest Deluxe (specifically designed for markets in North America and Europe).

leg3s_logoDemo 8:
LEG3s
LEG3s is an award-winning mobile job hunting service specifically targeted at China’s 200 million migrant workers. The service informs those people about open positions, salary levels, the current situation in the job market etc. in over 100 cities in China. LEG3s has so far attracted 3 million end users who have to pay reasonable fees and can access the service through low-end mobile phones (LEG3s is pre-installed on some of those). CEO Jason Liu expects the user base to grow to 5 million by year-end.

trustmobi_logoDemo 9:
TrustMobi
TrustMobi is a Beijing-based startup that operates in an often overlooked field: cell phone security. CEO Bing Song expects that the mobile web will grow significantly in the near future and that zombie computers might soon be joined by zombie cell phones. His company offers an integrated security solution that can handle file recovery, virus detection, firewalls for mobile emails, SMS and MMS protection, file encryption etc. for a number of different handsets. TrustMobi was responsible for mobile phone security during the Beijing Olympics last year.

apexone_logoDemo 10:
Apexone Microelectronics
I had trouble keeping up with this presentation due to the slides that were available only in Chinese and the deep technical details CEO James Gao presented on his company’s optical navigation solutions. Check out Apexone’s excellent English web site if you’re interested in this field.

playing_com_cn_logoDemo 11:
Playing.com.cn
This Tianjin-based company has so far developed over 50 smartphone games, which are being sold in more than 20 countries and regions. CEO Zhen Su demonstrated what he called a “convenience store for mobile apps”, consisting of an IM client, various games and a virtual pet simulation. The company provides an API for other game developers who can sell their content on Playing.com.cn’s web site.

mobile_trend_logoDemo 12:
MTrend Group
MTrend Group Founding Partner Mano Wang shared interesting information from a recent analysis on mobile web usage in China. Here are some findings from the mobile web user panel Wang quoted from:

  • 22.6% of China Mobile users born after 1990 used the mobile web in 2009 for the first time (this is vastly different from Japan, for example, where users start much earlier).
  • 63.9% of mobile gamers play between 10 and 30 minutes per day.
  • 57.1% of China Mobile subscribers say they’ve already read a newspaper on a mobile device.
  • 38.8% are starting to switch to non-pirated music on their cell phones. 13.2% listen to pirated music only, while 26.1% buy all the songs they store on their cell phones.
  • The three hottest mobile apps among Chinese university students using China Mobile are Mobile Baidu ( China’s largest search engine), Mobile QQ (China’s No. 1 social network) and 12530 (China Mobile’s music Wap portal).

Note: MTrend is China Mobile’s main brand for data monitoring so these data points aren’t representative for all of China.

Demo 13:
Panda LLC
Tokyo-based Panda is currently preparing a 3D treasure hunting game with very cool graphics designed specifically for smartphones, i.e. the iPhone. The two demo videos Panda Director Issei Matsui showed during the presentation were pretty cool. I’ll add them here once I get my hands on them.

motherapp_logo

Demo 14:
MotherAPP
Ex-Googler and CEO Ken Law said his Hong Kong-based company’s main mission is to solve the platform fragmentation problem in the mobile space for developers by offering three solutions: Generator lets you create native apps for the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and Blackberry simply through using MotherApp Language (a restricted set of HTML with special markups), which sounds like a powerful solution to me. MotherBlog converts a blog or your Twitter into a native iPhone app – without any coding. The company also supports other companies in making a given mobile app compatible with all major platforms (showcases), claiming tailor-made end-to-end development takes about 9 weeks.

hozom_logoDemo 15:
Hozom
Why trying to set up yet another mobile social network when you (kind of) carried one in your pocket all along? That’s what Hozom CEO Ziyang Liu asked himself and tries to add social components to a form of network you already have in your cell phone, namely the contact list. The idea is to connect entries in your phone’s address book with services like Twitter, QQ, IM etc. in addition to integrating social gaming and geo-location elements using your friends’ contact data. Another selling point is Hozom’s slick design and elegant UI.

motech_logoDemo 16:
MoTech
MoTech offers a mobile travel assistant for the millions of foreigners visiting China every year. The app comes with a set of around 1,000 different phrases the average tourist needs to feel comfortable in China (transportation, emergency situations, shopping etc.). Choose the sentence and let your mobile phone speak it out loud in Mandarin Chinese (the app also lists points of interests and the names of restaurants). In his presentation, Motech CEO Austin Xie also touched upon the slew of other interesting products and solutions for Non-Chinese speaking people his company provides.

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Sean Parker’s Rise of Facebook And Twitter, Fall Of Google Presentation (Full Slide Deck)

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 05:40 PM PDT

campusYesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit, Founder’s Fund managing partner Sean Parker gave a provocative presentation entitled “The New Era Of The Network Service.” In it, he argues that so-called “network services” like Facebook (which he helped start) and Twitter will soon dominate the web, rather than “information services” like Google and Yahoo.

It’s a very interesting idea, to say the least, and obviously you’re interested in it, as about 200 of you commented on it yesterday. So we’ve obtained Parker’s full slide deck from his presentation. Find the full presentation embedded below, definitely worth the read.

SP_Web2.0_FINAL_AsGiven

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SGN’s CEO Talks About F.A.S.T. Going Free And The Realities Of A Changing App Store

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 04:05 PM PDT

Last week Apple surprised the iPhone’s developer community with the annoucement that it was finally allowing free apps to offer in-app purchases. The move will likely lead to a fundamental shift in the way developers conduct businesss on the App Store (we’ve already begun to see some changes). I sat down with SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar to talk about the annoucement’s effect on SGN’s upcoming games, as well as its impact on the market in general.

Pishevar says that he was estactic when he heard the news — he almost immediately recorded a video sharing his elation that he sent to all of SGN’s 100+ employees worldwide. He explains that this is really the announcement that he’s been waiting for, but that he had no expectation that Apple might do it so soon. Now the company is working at a brisk pace to take advantage of the change: it will soon be releasing a new free version of its smash hit game F.A.S.T., which has done over $1.8 million in sales before Apple’s cut. The new version of F.A.S.T. will feature an extensive array of virtual goods, which users will be able to purchase once they’ve downloaded the core game, which will be free. I also suspect that many (if not all) of SGN’s games will be released for free from here on out.



After discussing the impact on SGN’s apps, the conversation turned toward how this will impact developers in general. The App Store is going to see some major changes, and some of those won’t necessarily be for the better. For one, it will become even harder for premium applications to get noticed — before now they only had to compete against other ‘paid’ apps for a chance to appear on the Top Apps list. Now many of them will be migrating to the much more crowded ‘free’ section, which means they’ll be facing off with the vast array of ‘fun’ apps that are so enticing for impulse downloads. There’s also the possibility that the store will become flooded with applications that you can download for free, but really offer nothing of value until you start paying for features, despite what users may have been led to believe (a so-called ‘bait and switch’).

Pishevar agrees that the new market may pose a challenge to new developers, who may have trouble getting noticed and establishing trust with users. But he says that the development houses that can establish a relationship with users will be able to rise to the top, even more so than before. That scenario would obviously put SGN, which has millions of installs across all of its games, in a good position.

But Pishevar emphasized that SGN isn’t going to be content to simply rest on its laurels and exploit its large audience by rehashing games that have already been successful (he notes that the the highly derivative nature of many games on Facebook was one of the reasons SGN decided to shift over to the iPhone). Instead, he says he wants to push the limits of the iPhone, and eventually other mobile platforms. And to prove that wasn’t just marketing talk, he gave me a sneak peek at some of the projects that SGN has in the works. I’m sworn to secrecy on those for now, but suffice to say, SGN has some seriously cool things in the pipeline right now that really will take mobile gaming to the next level.



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Carl Icahn Says His Work Is Done, Resigns From Yahoo’s Board

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 03:07 PM PDT

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is resigning from Yahoo’s board of directors. According to MarketWatch, he said “there was not a need at this time for an activist investor” at Yahoo anymore and that he’d rather focus on other companies. The subtext there being that either A) he feels that his work is done and he can move on now that the search deal with Microsoft is moving towards government approval, or B) he can make more money by trying to control some other company.

Icahn wrestled his way onto Yahoo’s board last year when Jerry Yang was still CEO. Initially, he wanted to try to revive Microsoft’s interest in acquiring Yahoo outright, but when it became clear Microsoft didn’t want to do that deal anymore, he supported the search deal as the best way to move forward.

It’s hard to determine whether Icahn is throwing in the towel on Bartz or this is actually a vote of confidence. If he really believes in where Bartz can take the company after the search deal is done, then you’d think he’d keep his board seat to have a stronger influence on the company’s direction. But Icahn has always been a transaction-oriented investor. He tries to push companies to do things that will move the stock in a big way, and then he takes his profits and he leaves.

More likely than not, Icahn doesn’t see another big shift he can push the company to take that will affect the stock in any major way. And with the stock price moving in the right direction, he probably doesn’t see the need to keep shaking the boat. It is much easier for him to just keep selling his shares (he sold almost $180 million worth in August alone) and move on. With the stock trading at $17, some of Icahn’s shares are still underwater, but he also bought a bunch at $10 last November. At this point, he’ll probably be happy just to get all of his initial investment back, which he is still far from doing.

(Photo by Sam Lustgarten)

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The ‘I Automatically Hate The New Facebook Home Page’ Group Gets Some Big Support

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 02:49 PM PDT

Screen shot 2009-10-23 at 2.31.48 PM

It’s inevitable: With Facebook change, comes Facebook backlash.

Today’s introduction of the new-style News Feed on Facebook has been garnering quite a bit of positive buzz. But this is Facebook we’re talking about. Anytime they change anything, the backlash starts quickly. Sometime’s it’s justified, but quite often it’s users overreacting from the natural human feeling to dislike change.

Not surprisingly, there are already plenty of Facebook groups against new changes. But hands down the best is “I AUTOMATICALLY HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK HOME PAGE,” which of course, pokes fun at what I’m talking about. But the best part? Facebook employees like Ivan Kirigin and Ari Steinberg have already joined it. More notable, so has Mark Zuckerberg.

Here’s the group’s description:

I HATE CHANGE AND EVERYTHING ASSOCIATED WITH IT

I WANT EVERYTHING TO REMAIN STATIC THROUGHOUT MY ENTIRE LIFE

I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I WANT FROM THINGS I CANNOT CONTROL

BY LOGICAL DEDUCTION I AUTOMATICALLY OPPOSE THE NEW FACEBOOK STREAMING HOME PAGE

IF I HAVE TO EXPLAIN THIS GROUP IT IS NO LONGER FUNNY

It would seem that the group is hardly new, one news post is from March of this year. But newly acquired employee Paul Buchheit shared a nice little screenshot on FriendFeed (his service which Facebook bought) today revealing Zuckerberg and company joining it.

The group has some 3,000+ members. Some don’t seem to understand that it’s a joke. Brilliant.

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App Store Hypocrisy Update: “Asian Boobs” Fine, Top Seller. Satirical App, Banned.

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 02:15 PM PDT

IMG_0624Remember, earlier this month when we wrote about the upskirt app that Apple deemed kosher, while at the same time banning a satirical Someecards app from the App Store? Yeah, we may have found an even better example of Apple’s hilarious hypocrisy.

Truth is, it wasn’t hard to find. The app called “Asian Boobs” is a top seller right now in the App Store. So what is it? Well, the title says it all: It’s an app that features the breasts of Asian women. Lots of them. Over 2,500 of them. And actually you can double that, for each breast in each picture. That’s a lot of boobs.

The description of the $0.99 app is also classy:

Photos of sexy asian girls with BIG BOOBS, 100+ galleries and 2500+ photos, updated regularly. Japanese girls, Korean girls, Chinese girls, Taiwanese girls, models, stewardesses, nurses, school girls, teachers, bikini girls, sexy girls and more.

Glad they squeezed the all-important “sexy girls” in there.

Again, to be clear: I’m all for Apple allowing apps like this in the App Store assuming they’re appropriately labels as 17+ (which this one is). The girls aren’t nude (Apple still doesn’t allow those except when it accidentally does), but the boobage is everywhere — as are the ass shots and crotch shots. Pure iPhone fun.

The problem is that Apple is rejecting apps, like Someecards, which are also labeled 17+ — for satire. Apple didn’t seem to like that the app poked fun at public figures like Roman Polanski and yes, Hitler.

It’s just beyond ridiculous that upskirt apps and apps dedicated to boobs are fine, but satire is not. Maybe the majority of app testers are grumpy but creepy old men, I don’t know.

Find Asian Boobs here for $0.99. Find Someecards app nowhere. Because Apple is ridiculous with these rules.

IMG_0626 IMG_0625

IMG_0623 Screen-shot-2009-10-07-at-11.09.20-AM

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Love Vibes iPhone App Ranks How Awesome You Are.. In Bed.

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 02:05 PM PDT

Screen shot 2009-10-23 at [ October 23 ] 1.23.00 PM Much like everyone thinks they’re the best driver in the world, everyone thinks they’re great in the sack. Maybe you’ve got the Kama Sutra down like the back of your partner’s… hand; maybe you’ve used that internet connection to amass a few external drives full of “training material”. Whatever arts you’re trained in, the question has almost undoubtedly popped into your head during the heat of the moment: “Am I good at this the best lover in the world?”

Well, friends, to fall back on an almost-stale cliche that I promise we’ll use only a few dozen more times: there’s an app for that.

Read the rest of this post on MobileCrunch >>

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Google Maps Improves The Ability To See Where The Streets Have No Name

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 01:00 PM PDT

Screen shot 2009-10-23 at 12.58.38 PMSince its inception, Google Maps has always rolling out little tweaks and new features that are useful. But today comes the first large-scale overhaul of the look and feel of the service in quite a while. But you may not even notice it.

The reason is that almost all of the changes are very subtle. And unless you spend hours looking at Google Maps everyday, you probably aren’t going to realize when a road outline has been toned down, for example. But looking at the side-by-side images, it’s clear to see that the new look is much nice. Gone is much of the clutter cause by darkened street outlines.

In Google’s own words, from their post:

Today’s changes are intended to keep the same information-rich map while making it easier to pick out the information that is most useful.  The changes affect both the ‘Map’ and ‘Hybrid’ styles, and include numerous refinements to color, density, typography, and road styling worldwide. For example, in map view, local and arterial roads have been narrowed at medium zooms to improve legibility, and the overall colours have been optimized to be easier on the eye and conflict less with other things (such as traffic, transit lines and search results) that we overlay onto the map.  Hybrid roads have gained a crisp outline to make them easier to follow, and the overall look is now closer to an augmented satellite view instead of a simple overlay.

Again, subtle, but much better. (Click on the images below to see more clearly.)

versa4 versa7

And just for the hell of it, I’ll embed one of the best music videos ever made.

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CrunchBoard Jobs: Yelp, Edelman, Scribd and More!

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 12:00 PM PDT

If you're on the hunt for a new job, check out our CrunchBoard. We've added nearly 50 new jobs from leading internet businesses in the last two weeks, including two jobs here at TechCrunch. Here's a quick sample:

Also, don’t forget that we’re looking for an Account Executive and CrunchBase interns here at TechCrunch!

For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard.

Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard.

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Judge Rejects Power.com’s Countersuit Against Facebook

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 11:57 AM PDT

A judge in the Northern California District Court has thrown out the countersuit Power.com levied against Facebook over the summer. Power.com filed its countersuit in July, alledging that, among other things, Facebook is unlawfully withholding the data that users own (as stated in Facebook's own ToS) and is stifling competition by refusing to allow third party services.

Power.com is a service that allows users to aggregate all of their social network activity into a central hub, and has done so through methods that Facebook says violate its terms of use. Facebook filed suit against the company at the beginning of this year for scraping data and storing user credentials. A week later there were reports that the two parties were near a settlement, but that clearly didn’t happen.

The judge attributes the dismissal to a lack of concrete complaints and factual allegations in Power.com’s countersuit. We’ve embedded the full document below.

Update:
Power.com has given us the following statement, saying that they will continue the case after fine tuning their arguments:

Earlier in the case Judge Fogel granted Power’s motion to require Facebook to provide a more detailed pleading of its claims. Yesterday’s order essentially does the same thing with respect to Power’s counterclaims and affirmative defenses. The Court determined that Power’s pleading did not provide enough detail with respect to the fair use defense and other affirmative defenses, and also with respect to the counterclaims under the unfair competition laws. The Court gave Power 30 days, until November 21, 2009, to re-plead their defenses and counterclaims with more detail. Power intends to do so.

This is a routine type of order that often occurs in the early stages of litigation, where the parties dispute the sufficiency of the pleadings in terms of the level of factual detail that is provided. Power is confident that it will be able to amend its pleading within 30 days to satisfy the Court’s concerns.

Power's Answer and Counter-Complaint contains a seven and a half page "Introduction and Background" narrative untethered to any specific claim. The claims themselves each consist of a conclusory recitation of the applicable legal standard and a general "reference [to] all allegations of all prior paragraphs as though fully set forth herein." Facebook argues persuasively that this form of pleading does not enable the Court to surmise which facts in the introductory narrative support which claims, if in fact they do. Moreover, antitrust claims require a "higher degree of particularity in the pleadings."


Power.com_Dismissal

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A Couple iPhone Apps Named “Twitter” Are Tricking Users

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 11:46 AM PDT

tweetnoSo, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but these iPhone app things are a pretty big deal. With the iPhone continuing to sell in record numbers, more and more new users are exploring the App Store everyday to find the apps they want. One of the most popular type of apps are Twitter apps. And the obvious way to find those is to type “Twitter” into the iTunes search box. This query brings up a couple apps called “Twitter.” The only problem? They are in no way official Twitter apps, as the name might imply. And one of them isn’t even actually called that.

Over the past couple of weeks, we must have been pinged a couple dozen times from people pointing this out. Some of those people were unfortunately tricked into buying these apps, which are not free. Looking at the top paid apps list in the social networking area of the App Store, sure enough, both the app called “Twitter” and the one called “Twitter Pro” are top sellers, at #5 and #9 respectively.

Undoubtedly, Twitter, the actual company, would have every right to ask Apple to remove these apps, or force them to change their names. But it would seem they haven’t done that yet. So these apps go right on tricking people, and presumably infringing on Twitter’s name. And that’s too bad.

At least one of these apps doesn’t seem that bad either. I downloaded the one called “Twitter” to test it out. It’s not great, but it’s not half bad either. It’s kind of like a Google Reader for tweets, where you can mark all as read. Still, it’s not on the playing field with the best Twitter apps: Tweetie 2, Echofon (which presumably changed its name from TwitterFon because it didn’t want to make Twitter upset), and Birdfeed.

Just to be clear: The app listed as “Twitter” is actually called “TwitBird.” But not only is it listed as Twitter in the App Store, it’s listed as that when you install it on your iPhone. Humorously, even the TwitBird name will likely raise concerns from another group: Leo Laporte’s TWiT, which has the rights to that name.

Meanwhile, the app known as “Twitter Pro” is really called that, and by all indications seems to be a bad app. For that reason, and the shady naming techniques, I’m not going to link to either of these. But if you want to find them, just do a search in the App Store, both will come up in the immediate results.

Screen shot 2009-10-23 at 11.38.58 AM

Screen shot 2009-10-23 at 11.38.27 AM

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The Japanese Android Market Gets Its First Paid Apps

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 11:44 AM PDT

The first Android-powered phone launched in Japan last June. Users were able to access free apps on the Android Market, with paid apps to become available at a later point. Paid apps for U.S. users came to the market in February. Now it appears that paid apps have finally come to Japan.

As we wrote in May, the country's largest telecommunications company, NTT, has picked up the rights to distribute the first mobile phone that uses the Android OS in Japan. The first paid apps hit the Android Market today for Japanese users. The apps are listed on the Japanese version of AndroLib, which lists applications and games for Android for various countries.

Android stands to be a huge deal in Japan, and we hear that 25 to 30 percent of AndroLib’s visitors are from Japan, which could make the availability of paid apps in Japan a large market opportunity for developers. Of course, the Android market generally pales in comparison to that of the iPhone ecosystem, but it’s safe to say that the Google-OS-powered phone is growing in use.

Thanks to AndroLib for the tip.

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Facebook Merges ‘Highlights’ Back Into Your News Feed

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 10:34 AM PDT

Facebook has just announced that it is beginning to roll out a modified version of its homepage that incorporates the ‘Highlights’ section into the News Feed. You’ll now be able to jump between two different versions of the feed: the Live Feed, which displays your friends’ updates in real-time, and the News Feed, which displays the top items your friends have posted over the last few days (these generally are the most commented on/Liked stories).

The new design is a compromise between the ‘old’ News Feed, which used algorithms to present stories Facebook thought you’d find interesting, and the feed Facebook rolled out back in March that consisted of a Twitter-like stream of recent updates. Since this year’s redesign Facebook has used the ‘Highlights’ section at the right hand side of the screen to present items you may have missed, but this was never an ideal solution: for one, you couldn’t see your friends’ comments on these posts, and the small space afforded to Highlights made it easy to pass over.

Today’s change will make the Highlights section redundant, so it will be removed (everything below it will also be shifted higher on the page, which means the ‘Birthdays’ and ‘Events’ sections will no longer be buried). Facebook’s post also notes that the News Feed will include more events, including when your friends become fans of Pages, add friends, or RSVP to an event.

The change has been a long time coming — reports about the merging of Highlights back into the feed emerged as far back as June.

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New Video Discovery Site Promises To Make a Rippol In The Stream (1,000 Beta Invites)

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 09:45 AM PDT

The last thing the world needs is another video site, right? Well, that’s not stopping Aaron Crayford, who convinced a bunch of his supercomputer engineer buddies to put together Rippol, a video discovery site that blends hardcore machine learning with social streams. Rippol (not to be confused with rrripple, the media sharing site) is coming out of stealth today into private beta. Be one of the first 1,000 people to try it by signing up here. (If you don’t get an invite, the site will be launching publicly in a month at our next Realtime Crunchup).

Rippol is still in raw form (the UI needs more polish, not all the buttons work the way they should), but it is experimenting with some powerful ideas in online video. You can sign in with Facebook Connect, or create your own account (it will also support Twitter and Gmail sign-ins soon). Once you have friends on the system, it lets you discover new videos through your friends. The homepage is an activity stream of the videos you and your friends have watched, favorited, rated, and reviewed. And a global stream in the left column shows what the broader Rippol community is watching. Links to any video can also be shared on Facebook or Tweeted out.

You can click on any video mentioned in the stream to watch it, and chat with friends via Facebook Chat, which pops up from the bottom left of the browser window. Displaying videos as a realtime stream of information is a discovery mechanism that we are beginning to see in cutting-edge video sites like Magma (our review). And I suspect it will become adopted more broadly.

However, Rippol doesn’t rely solely on your friends’ activities to help you find interesting videos. The site is also a standalone video discovery engine in its own right. You can watch about 500,000 videos right now in the Rippol player, which can be detached like a chat box and moved around in front of the screen, while you search for more videos, check out your stream or chat with friends.

Rippoldiagramlarge

Rippol ingests videos from other sites like Hulu and YouTube and then it runs them through its “Butterfly Network” (see diagram at right, click for larger image). Here is where the machine learning comes in. The Butterfly Network looks at all of your video-related activities in the site, those of your friends, and those of people in your demographic. All of the videos on the site have particularly good metadata (titles, genres, actors, descriptions), which lets Rippol take advantage of data-mining techniques to recommend videos for you. It creates a genre cloud for different categories of videos (TV Shows, Movies, Sports, News),and then generates a list of videos for each genre tag you click on.

Depending on what genre of videos you are looking for, Rippol’s realtime ranking servers shows you videos associated with ones you’ve watched or liked in the past, your friends have watched or liked, and people in your demographic have watched or liked. If you click on comedies and martial arts videos, those will rank higher for you in the future.

Since Rippol has all the realtime stream data as well, the video results are skewed towards what people are watching right now. Your own actions impact the rankings the most, followed by those of your friends, followed by those of people in your age and gender group. And if you are a 45-year-old male who tends to watch videos more like a 25-year-old male, it adjusts the demo it associates with your actual watching habits.

The system is supposed to get smarter the more you use it, and the more your friends use it. So it’s hard to evaluate how effective it will be right now with only a handful of users, but it is a promising approach. Soon users will be able to suggest videos to add to the site. (Crayford says he’s come up with a novel way to filter out inappropriate videos from the broader community by taking into account what is acceptable to different social groups).

Crayford’s last company, Vusion, specialized in high-definition video streaming over the Web. It’s patents, intellectual property, and other assets were acquired by the Clarendon Foundation in June, 2009. Craydon learned from that experience that advanced technology can only take you so far, and this time around he is trying to create a complete consumer experience rather than just an enabling technology. Rippol is completely bootstrapped so far.

Screenshots:

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Hold’em Or Fold’em? Looks Like Playfish Is Still In Play

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 09:38 AM PDT

Last week we reported the rumors that VC-backed Playfish, the social games startup which has had phenomenal growth, was in the process of being acquired by games giant Electronic Arts for $250 million. However, nothing was confirmed at the time, and despite several press reports to that effect none of the companies involved has made a sound. And most observers were startled as Playfish had not looked like it wanted an early exit by any stretch.

In fact, we’ve learned that Playfish is still in play, and in all likelihood EA leaked the $250 million figure as a negotiating tactic. Our sources say that Playfish is holding out for another offer, somewhere between $350m at the low end and $500m at the top end, either from EA or another suitor. Independently, Inside Social Games has uncovered similar chatter.

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Microsoft Reports Pre-Windows 7 Declines For Revenues And Profits. No More Excuses.

Posted: 23 Oct 2009 06:44 AM PDT


FY10 Q1 Slides Flattened

Microsoft announced another down quarter this morning. Revenues in the September quarter were down 14 percent to $12.92 billion, and net profits declined even further to $3.57 billion, or $0.40 a share. The consensus estimate was $0.32, so Wall Street is happy and the shares are rallying (up 10 percent in early-morning trading).

Investors will forgive the poor performance coming out of the recession (are we out of that yet?), because they hope that yesterday’s launch of Windows 7 will bring back the shine to the stock. If you look at revenues for the Windows business, it certainly looks like both businesses and consumers have been delaying purchases and upgrades in anticipation of the new operating system. The Windows business saw revenues decline by 37 percent, or $1.7 billion, from last year, to $2.6 billion. The closely-related Business division, which includes Office, was down $500 million in revenues, to $4.4 billion.

Microsoft needs to revive these franchises with Windows 7 at a time when it is increasingly under attack by cloud-based productivity apps from Google and others. But Windows 7 should give Microsoft some cover as corporations go through their robotic upgrade exercises. The company recorded $1.5 billion in deferral revenue associated with Windows 7, which pretty much covers the gap from last year.

The two businesses which held steady in terms of revenue were Servers and Tools ($3.4 billion) and Entertainment ($1.9 billion). Microsoft sold 2.1 million Xboxes in the quarter, and is no selling an average of 8.7 games per console, more than any other videogame console. Profits nearly doubled to $312 million, and Xbox Live revenues grew more than 50 percent, although Microsoft does not specify the absolute number.

Looking at Microsoft’s online business, once again the loss in that business ($480 million) was almost the same as its revenues ($490 million), which implies that it is actually losing twice as much as it is bringing in. We saw the same trend last quarter, as Microsoft continues to invest heavily in this business via Bing and other products. Online advertising revenues were down 3 percent (at least that was better than Yahoo’s 12 percent decline), and search ads from Bing saw a “mid single digit” increase.

Below is a table breaking down Microsoft’s revenues by operating division (click to enlarge):

MSFT 3Q revs

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