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- Smule creates its own “evil twin” company, Smort. They’ve got Zombies in Bikinis. From space.
- One Reason Why Facebook Wins
- The Shopping Spree Continues; Cisco Buys ScanSafe For $183 Million
- Rumor: Apple Has Been Talking To Australia About The Tablet
- Reality Digital Jumps Into The Online Video Platform Pool With Spotlight
- Ahead Of US Launch, Spotify’s Playlist Doesn’t Include Its CTO
- Global Phone Number Provider iNum Brings HD Voice Calling To Skype
- Live Gamer Looks To Capitalize On Virtual Goods Boom
- Similar Image Search Engine Gazopa Enters Open Beta
- Mobile Web Usage Keeps On Growing, And Growing, And Growing …
- Chrome, Not Chromium, For Mac Has That Solid Feel
- Founder Institute Expands To Seattle
- Amazon Launches Hosted MySQL Database Cloud Service
- Google Voice Can Now Take Control Of Your Mobile Voicemail
- Netpulse Raises $3.1 Million For Fitness Entertainment Technology
- What’s Black And White And Red All Over? Top Newspaper Circulation Numbers.
- Orkut Slows Hemorrhaging To Facebook By Making Friend Export Tool Nearly Useless
- The New Grooveshark: Faster, Prettier And Still Phenomenal
- oDesk’s oConomy Hits $100 Million
- Price Revealed For BBN Deal: $350 Million
- Google Custom Search Rolls Out Themes, Improved Support For Structured Data, And More
- Twitter And Y Combinator Team Up For Startup Stream Access
- Google Social Search: Twitter And FriendFeed Highlighted. What About Facebook?
- AOL Loses Its Chief Lifestreamer, David Liu
- Verizon: iDon’t Not Want The iPhone
| Smule creates its own “evil twin” company, Smort. They’ve got Zombies in Bikinis. From space. Posted: 27 Oct 2009 09:00 AM PDT  Pretend, for a moment, that you're one of the creative minds at the iPhone app development house, Smule; you and your team have had a series of back-to-back successes, and your audience has come to expect a certain things of you. They expect the utmost highest design quality, for it to be music-related, and -- perhaps worst of all -- some level of maturity. When expectations are high and narrow in focus, how are you supposed to unleash your creativity? If you're Smule, you go and establish a second company as your first company's evil twin. Then you release an application involving zombies in bikinis.   | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 27 Oct 2009 08:38 AM PDT
If you’re a computer science graduate a year out of college, there probably isn’t a celebrity you’d be more excited about knowing than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. So when he takes a minute to record a video with you to prove to your younger brother’s friends that you actually got a job at the company, it’s something you are pretty proud of. And the fact that Zuckerberg does this kind of thing is one of the reasons why Facebook wins. Watch the whole video with Dan Muriello here. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Shopping Spree Continues; Cisco Buys ScanSafe For $183 Million Posted: 27 Oct 2009 07:36 AM PDT
Cisco has added another company to its coffers with the acquisition of ScanSafe for $183 million. A few weeks ago, Cisco announced a $2.9 billion acquisition of mobile networking infrastructure provider Starent Networks, which followed the $3 billion acquisition of video video-conferencing company Tandberg in late September. ScanSafe provides software-as- a-service (SaaS) Web security solutions for large and small businesses. Tom Gillis, Ciscos’s VP and general manager of its security technology business unit, said in the release that the acquisition would help further Cisco’s vision “to build a borderless network security architecture that combines network and cloud-based services.” ScanSafe’s service will be integrated with Cisco’s AnyConnect VPN Client, a virtual private network (VPN) product to offer a cloud-security service. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2010. While Cisco has always implemented a strategy of acquisitions, the fact that it has opened up its purse strings three time in the past month is a good sign for tech M&A overall. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Rumor: Apple Has Been Talking To Australia About The Tablet Posted: 27 Oct 2009 06:56 AM PDT  "Media insiders" in Australia are reporting that Apple has approached them to produce content for a device "larger than the iPhone." The Sydney Morning Herald puts another shrimp on the barbie by saying: Apple has sent specifications of the device to Australian media companies in an effort to sound out whether they would be interested in delivering their content to the tablet. None would speak about the device on the record.This follows Bill Keller's offhand remark that the paper was working for content on an "Apple Slate." I call bull. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Reality Digital Jumps Into The Online Video Platform Pool With Spotlight Posted: 27 Oct 2009 06:10 AM PDT
This is growing into quite a saturated field with players like Ooyala, Brightcove, MIG69 and Swarmcast fighting hard for pieces of the pie. Spotlight is an entirely SaaS-based platform that wants to make it easier for businesses to maintain a social network for video or channel campaigns, make money on their library of professional content via video advertising, distribute videos in playlists through a brand's library of content with a custom design that fits their brand specs, and more. In essence, the software is designed to allow businesses to create a micro-community around content and utilize a feedback mechanism which allows them to publish content across various destinations but see and evaluate that feedback in one centralized location. Pricing is unclear but it will be based on usage and consists of a monthly fee that includes storage and a bandwidth delivery fee. There’s a free 30-day trial for you to give it a spin. Update: pricing details came in: the monthly fee is set to $1,000, delivery fee is variable and based on usage (per GB) and 100 GB is included. Reality Digital is venture capital-backed; it has raised $8.3 million to date, most recently closing a $6.3 million Series B round back in March 2008. It has signed up an impressive roster of clients the past few years, including Nokia, MTV, Pepsi, NFL and Hyundai.
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| Ahead Of US Launch, Spotify’s Playlist Doesn’t Include Its CTO Posted: 27 Oct 2009 05:58 AM PDT
However, a Spotify spokesperson has told me that they’d “like to thank Andreas for all his brilliant work” and “everybody at Spotify wishes him well in the future as he seeks out new and, no doubt, extraordinarily complex challenges!” I’m sure this isn’t meant to sound back-handed but Ehn’s tweets paint a slightly less rosy picture. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Global Phone Number Provider iNum Brings HD Voice Calling To Skype Posted: 27 Oct 2009 05:01 AM PDT
Voxbone will be transcoding between Skype's wideband SILK codec and the HD codec G.722, with support for additional codes planned for the future. In the end, Voxbone says it wants to turn the technology into the sound quality standard for VoIP and “eventually all telephony”. For your background: iNum is short for “international Number”. Think of it as a geographically-independent phone number that lets you use the same number all around the word, instead of needing to switch to a new number from a new supplier in case you move to a new country or stay in one for a long period of time. Here’s a list of current providers. iNum makes use of the +883 global country code newly created by the ITU (International Telecommunication Union). The startup received a first allocation of 100 million numbers from the organization last year. Because iNum numbers can be dialed from PSTN phones (aka via the ‘plain old telephone system’) as well as IP endpoints, Voxbone's move enables conference calls with attendees on conventional phones, who will hear within the PSTN's audio constraints, and others with HD IP endpoints, who should enjoy a richer sound. Skype made its SILK super-wideband audio codec freely available last March. We should note there is some industry criticism around the concept of ‘HD calling’, which at times gets billed as a fancy new term that doesn’t describe anything earth-shatteringly new or innovative and something which there is no demand for. Any specialists who want to weigh in on this discussion? Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Live Gamer Looks To Capitalize On Virtual Goods Boom Posted: 27 Oct 2009 04:50 AM PDT
On the heels of its recent acquisitions of microtransaction platforms Twofish and N-Cash, Live Gamer, an online marketplace for players to trade and buy video game virtual goods, is seeing success in managing virtual economies for online games, virtual worlds and social networks. In conjunction with game makers, Live Gamer's platform lets online game players trade virtual goods they earn in games. The company is using Twofish and N-Cash’s micropayments technologies to power commerce in these gaming marketplaces. Gaming customers including Everyplay (Finland), friendscook, Fotochatter, Hangout, Hooked and Radius IM (United States), ph03nix (Canada) and GPM (Korea) are using Live Gamer’s virtual goods exchange to power an economy platform around their games. Live Gamer’s platform includes virtual currency and virtual item systems, inventory management, publisher-sponsored secondary market trading, analytics, fraud management and support features. Currently, Live Gamer has over 72 customers and supports over 56 million registered users across all of partner implementations, exceeding 3 million micro-transactions per month. Live Gamer co-founder and president Andrew Schneider said that the microtransaction and gaming industries are evolving at such a rapid pace, that the requirement for his company extends beyond just creating a safe e-commerce transaction. He says that with competition and innovation, virtual economies include a host of more robust and interactive features, including advanced merchadising of virtual goods. Schneider said that Live Gamer is also particularly excited about Apple’s recent ruling to allow in-app commerce for free apps. He see this as new and potentially huge dimension for microtransactions and payments to gain even more momentum in the space, and says that Live Gamer will definitely be trying to be a part of this opportunity in the future. Competitors to Live Gamer include PlaySpan (which also made a recent acquisition of a micropayments startup). Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Similar Image Search Engine Gazopa Enters Open Beta Posted: 27 Oct 2009 02:46 AM PDT
Results are mainly filtered through analyzing the color and shape of the object or person pictured. Upload a picture of a red car, for example, and Gazopa will find pictures of similar cars on the web – without you having to type any keywords (search via keywords is also possible though). Since September 2008, more than 40,000 users have tested the service, which entered open beta today. And Hitachi America, the company behind Gazopa, has used customer feedback to improve the quality of search results, tweak the site’s design and add a number of features in the past year. One of the most notable additions is the Gazopa iPhone app (iTunes link), which is pretty cool and lets you take and upload photos with your iPhone to quickly get similar images off the web. The app has all of the main features of the web version and is free. There’s also a new Gazopa Drawing Facebook application. Gazopa now allows users to browse through Flickr images and filter out those without a Creative Commons license. When you hover over a particular image, Gazopa will show you its size, how similar it is to the one the search is based upon, licensing details and a URL that will take you the picture’s Flickr page. Another new feature is the news tab under which users can find images related to the latest news. Those images can be filtered by time (uploaded within one month, a year etc.), shape and size. Granted these aren’t earth-shattering new features, but GazoPa has indexed over 60 million images so far that can be searched even if they have no or inaccurate meta data. The open beta version is still a bit buggy but more than OK for a test run. One major point that leaves room for improvement is that searching for inanimate objects with distinctive features seems to lead to significantly better results than searching for human beings that look similar. It would be nice if Gazopa could at least distinguish between men and women, for example, which isn’t always the case. Asked what differentiates his service from Google Labs’ similar search service, Gazopa project leader Hideki Kobayashi said that Google doesn’t let users find similar images of all images displayed and that uploading a picture by yourself isn’t possible. Gazopa also competes with “reverse image search engine” TinEye, which, however, doesn’t necessarily look for “similar” images but tries to find exact matches of pictures instead. Here’s a demo video for Gazopa’s open beta version: Screenshots:
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| Mobile Web Usage Keeps On Growing, And Growing, And Growing … Posted: 27 Oct 2009 01:33 AM PDT
Last month, more than 35.6 million people used Opera Mini (which is now serving over 500 million pageviews per day on average on a wide range of mobile devices), up 11.5% compared to August 2009 and more than 150% compared to September 2008. The Norway software developer also claims more than 2 petabytes of data is now processed by its servers on a monthly basis. That’d be 2,000 terabytes. Data traffic through Opera’s mobile browser — which compresses up to 90% of the data to save network bandwidth – rose 8.7% in September compared to August, the company said. In total, it gained about 4 million new Opera Mini users in that same period of time. Opera also said users in the top 10 countries (Russia, Indonesia, India, China, Ukraine, South Africa, United States, United Kingdom, Poland and Vietnam) save up to $672 million USD per month, or over $8.1 billion USD per year, thanks to the compression rate of 90% and the subsequent savings in mobile data charges from users’ operators. To calculate these numbers, which I question, Opera looked at the top operators in each country, determined how much they typically charge per MB of browsing, and averaged those figures together. The average cost of browsing in each country was then multiplied by the amount of traffic generated in each country, and the resulting totals were summed and compared to the totals for uncompressed data traffic. The big caveat: Opera’s survey only reflects metered rates (cost per MB) and not flat-rate subscription options, which skews the numbers in their favor. The fact that mobile web usage continues to surge is hardly surprising, but Opera’s monthly reports reflect the rate of increase quite nicely on a monthly basis. Here’s a graph that shows the evolution as measured by data consumption:
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| Chrome, Not Chromium, For Mac Has That Solid Feel Posted: 27 Oct 2009 01:18 AM PDT
While recent Chromium builds have been a little shaky with a mixture of UI failures, bugs, and a nasty habit of “Chromium Helper” (the name of separate tab processes in Chromium) eating up your CPU, Chrome itself feels much more stable. It would seem that at some point recently, Google flipped the switch to push Chromium 4.0 releases into the Chrome for Mac developer channel. These don’t come daily like the Chromium builds, but only seem to pop up as an upgrade option when a stable build is found on the Chromium path. For example, right now, Chrome for Mac is 4.0.223.11 whereas Chromium for Mac is currently 4.0.226.0. This is great because it allows you to skip the bad builds of Chromium, and only get the ones that are ready for primetime. It also allows you to skip digging through the Chromium web file structure to find the latest build as Chrome for Mac now updates for you with the click of a button. The differences between the latest builds of Chromium and these developer builds of Chrome seem unnoticeable at this point. That’s what stopped me from using the developer builds of Chrome previously, they were far behind Chromium. That’s no longer the case. And, besides being more stable, the Chrome builds offer some additional perks, such as being able to import bookmarks, something which the Chromium builds turned off months ago for some unknown reason. (To be clear, this only works when you first load up Chrome. The Bookmark Manager itself still does not work yet.) I’ve been using the developer build of Chrome for a solid week now. It has even auto-updated once. Are there crashes? Sure, sometimes. Are there bugs? Of course. But overall, none are keeping me from doing anything I normally do on the web as a relatively heavy surfer. I’ve kept the browser open for days in some cases, and it has remained stable without sucking up too many system resources. And I’ve been sure to try and use it as often as I can with more JavaScript-heavy sites like Facebook, Gmail, Digg, and others. For the most part, it seems to handle them all well. Chrome Themes are visible from the Thumbnails page (in the lower right corner) just as they are in the Windows versions of Chrome. And yes, they all work, even if some are ugly (and some clash with Chrome for Mac folder icons in the bookmark bar). Sadly, bookmark syncing doesn’t appear to yet work even though it too is shown on the Thumbnail page. Printing does work though. Chrome for Mac is still not quite as fast as it is on Windows, but it already seems comprable in speed to both Safari and what is still my browser of choice (mostly for its speed), Camino. Those of you who have been doing the daily downloads of Chromium (maybe using our tool) should consider switching over to this developer build of Chrome. At this point it seems to have all the pluses without the minuses. Plus, it auto-updates for you, so you can remain on the cutting edge of Chrome. Google has publicly said that it wants to have a version of Chrome for Mac out before the end of the year. A few weeks ago, seeing where the Chromium builds were heading, I would have thought that would be impossible. But the Chrome developer channels offers new hope. We could be nearing beta. You can find the developer build of Chrome for Mac here. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Founder Institute Expands To Seattle Posted: 27 Oct 2009 12:01 AM PDT
Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institute is steadily expanding, with a new outpost opening up in Seattle. The startup incubator, which just completed its first successful “semester” in Silicon Valley, recently announced expansions to both Washington DC and San Diego, California. The program was first announced in March 2009. It is a semester-based startup camp for very, very early-stage entrepreneurs and students who have basic ideas for potential startups but have not yet founded a company. 198 founders applied to the program. 79 were accepted, and 66 graduated. 31 companies have been incorporated by these founders so far, and a handful have actually launched (including Skimble and Molo Rewards). The Seattle session will be headed up by Chris Early, former general manager of Windows Gaming Technology at Microsoft. The Institute already has a number of experienced local and remote CEO Mentors, including Derrick Morton, CEO of Floplay; Bryan Starbuck, CEO of TalentSpring; David Kidder, CEO of Clickable.com; and Bryan Thatcher, CEO of Empressr. Candidates for the program can apply here. There is also an informational event about the Founders Institute in Seattle behing held on November 2. More information here. The San Diego and Washington DC programs are already picking up speed, with approximately 150 Founders who have applied to participate in the sessions since the two locations launched. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Amazon Launches Hosted MySQL Database Cloud Service Posted: 26 Oct 2009 10:57 PM PDT
Unlike completely elastic hosted DB services, which abstract a large-scale cluster into a shared environment for customers, the Amazon model is to step up or down through tiers of service based on requirements. The tiers of service (with names that seem to be inspired by a fast food restaurant menu) and pricing are:
You also have to provision a set amount of storage, which is charged at $0.10 per GB-month (pre-provisioning means that you can run out of disk space, it wont grow out). Requests are charged at an additional $0.10 per million requests. Backups are available (full, snapshots etc.) and backup space equivelant to the provisioned storage space is available for free. Additional space is $0.15 per month. Data transfer is charged at the standard AWS rates, with no charge for data transfers between AWS services (ie. if you have your web server at one host, and the DB with AWS, you will be charged for all the traffic between the web server and the DB). AWS offer a large range of services, and full RDBMS hosting seemed like an obvious service to offer. AWS has the existing SimpleDB service, which is a key-value based data store. My initial take on the new RDS service is that it seems that it involves pre-defined and pre-configured EC2 instances with MySQL running. This makes the task of creating and starting new DB instances easier, but does not mean that your resource allocation will automatically grow and scale with resource requirements. There are existing third-party services, such as Fathom, that are built on AWS and use EC2 to create and manage DB instances. Your application will have to recognize that more resources are required, and make the appropriate API calls to either step up or down along the tiers of instances available. RDS, like most AWS services, provides building blocks for developers to use. Update: Amazon has now officially announced the service on the AWS blog. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Google Voice Can Now Take Control Of Your Mobile Voicemail Posted: 26 Oct 2009 09:00 PM PDT
I solved the problem by simply porting my mobile number away from AT&T over to Google Voice, a feature that Google says will be launched more broadly eventually. Others solve the problem via the Google Voice application on various phones. But even then, if someone calls your old mobile number and leaves a message, you have to deal with it separately. Not any more. Tonight Google is launching a third option, a new feature that allows mobile users to move their voicemail away from their carrier and over to Google Voice. The benefits: your mobile voicemails go into your Google Voice inbox along with other voicemails and text messages, plus you can create custom greetings for callers and your voicemails are all automatically transcribed (sometimes hilariously). There are a few steps that have to be completed that vary based on the carrier and phone that you use. But if you are really trying to move over to Google Voice, it’s worth it. When it’s all set up, voicemail messages from people who call your mobile number (not your Google Voice number) will be taken over by Google Voice. That makes them much easier to listen to, or read. And yes, it even works on the iPhone. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Netpulse Raises $3.1 Million For Fitness Entertainment Technology Posted: 26 Oct 2009 08:53 PM PDT
Netpulse, an interactive media platform for fitness equipment, has secured $3.1 million in Series A funding led by Javelin Venture Partners with DFJ Frontier participating. The company says it will use the investment to further development of its interactive entertainment platform, which is specifically designed for integration into fitness equipment and screens cardiovascular machines like treadmills and elliptical machines. While many gyms and fitness equipment include screens to watch TV nowadays, Netpulse’s technology gives users access to live HD television, a touch screen, on-demand videos and music, and provides iPod/ iPhone connectivity, and personalized workout data. Netpulse’s screen has not yet been launched in fitness centers and will be rolled out various gyms later this year. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| What’s Black And White And Red All Over? Top Newspaper Circulation Numbers. Posted: 26 Oct 2009 06:18 PM PDT
And it’s not like WSJ is growing like gangbusters, it grew 0.61% in the last six months. Also a good list is the top 10 gainers in circulation, only because it looks like they could barely find 10 papers in the entire country with positive gains. Almost all of the ones on this list are smaller papers, with Women’s Wear Daily coming in as the number two gainer over the timeframe. Below, find a chart of top 10 circulated paper’s “growth” over the past 6 months. Below that find the raw data for the Top 25 papers.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL — 2,024,269 — 0.61% DAILY NEWS (NEW YORK) — 544,167 — (-13.98%) NEWSDAY — 357,124 — (-5.40%) The PLAIN DEALER, CLEVELAND — 271,180 — (-11.24%) SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE — 251,782 — (-25.82%) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Orkut Slows Hemorrhaging To Facebook By Making Friend Export Tool Nearly Useless Posted: 26 Oct 2009 05:17 PM PDT
In other words, now when you export your list of friends from Orkut, all you’ll get is a list of their names, location, birthday, gender, and links to the Orkut profiles. Which means it’s basically useless. Facebook can’t use the data to invite your friends, and you can’t use the data to actually contact and share with your friends, which is the whole point of a social graph. We reached out to Google about the issue, and a Google spokesperson gave us this statement:
Google is right in that this isn’t a standard feature on most social networks, but most social networks aren’t busy touting things like the Data Liberation Front and reaping all the positive press associated with it. And if this is really a privacy issue, it doesn’t make sense that Google would let you export Email data through Google Contacts but not Orkut itself. Spammers looking to figure out how to harvest Email addresses will doubtless figure out the process. Of course, Orkut users looking to make the jump to Facebook probably won’t.  Vasconcellos also points out that Orkut’s tool is unncessarily hard to use, and he’s absolutely right. When I went to test out the friend exporter, I was fairly certain that it simply wasn’t working at all. That’s because every time you click on the ‘Export Contacts’ button the site kicks you back out to your homepage, and only shows the “take your contacts with you” section below the fold. It took me way too long to figure this out (I even tested the feature out in two different browsers). And I doubt most people will put in that much effort. It’s understandable why Orkut would want to handicap the feature and make it hard to use, but Google can’t have it both ways: it’s either open, or it isn’t. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The New Grooveshark: Faster, Prettier And Still Phenomenal Posted: 26 Oct 2009 05:05 PM PDT
In case you’re not familiar with Grooveshark: it’s a great web-based music search, play and management tool that’s been around since April last year. You can use the app to instantly look for, share and listen to music, and there’s the quintessential social component that allows you to interact with people from its community and discover new music from others' choices. With the new look, Grooveshark’s design is now more desktop client-like (think Spotify, Deezer or Imeem), which in my opinion is a good thing. The overall design and the new navigation bar on the side make for a much smoother user experience, and you can switch themes to make the app fit your mood or resize the menus to fit your screen. But the back-end tweaks that have increased the speed of the application are what’s making me seriously considering switching to Grooveshark for most of my online music needs. Playback between tunes is now seamless, with no more lag in between tracks when you’ve added multiple ones to a playlist. Switching between menu items and tabs is as fast as I consider possible inside a browser. In short: great new design combined with an excellent user experience. Grooveshark is still struggling to get all major music industry players involved for the ‘legalization’ of its vast content library, which is in large part put together by avid users uploading music files straight from their hard drives. So far, the only one it has signed up is EMI and that was after the company sued Grooveshark over copyright infringement.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| oDesk’s oConomy Hits $100 Million Posted: 26 Oct 2009 03:48 PM PDT
Startup oDesk received rave reviews at this years TechCrunch50 conference thanks to its innovative workplace platform. The startup was voted as demopit winner with the launch of a new iPhone application that allows project administrators to monitor the work stream of their team members while they're on the go. Today, oDesk’s “oConomy” meter, which is the amount of money that is earned from workers on oDesk, hit $100 million. The oConomy showcases data from the work activity of 350,000+ oDesk users in over 150 countries. oDesk has been around for a while, offering a "marketplace for talent" that makes it easy to hire workers remotely. The company currently has over 340,000 providers, with 12,200+ jobs that are open. oDesk has also launched an API Center to encourage developers to create custom workspaces around oDesk tools. The API allows for users to log-in from outside of oDesk's applications, the ability to search oDesk's provider data and profiles, and lets users retrieve snapshots of worker activities. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Price Revealed For BBN Deal: $350 Million Posted: 26 Oct 2009 03:35 PM PDT
In September, defense contractor Raytheon announced an agreement to purchase R&D innovator BBN Technologies, but didn’t say for how much. Today, the deal closed and the price came out. It is $350 million. Investors Accel Partners and General Catalyst Partners, who co-led a management buyout in 2004, made out very nicely. Accel says that its cut was more than $100 million, which suggests it owned about a third of the company. (BBN was one of Accel partner Jim Breyer’s investments). Presumably, General Catalyst owned another third. The deal turned out to be more than a ten-bagger. VC firms don’t normally invest in buyouts, but BBN has an unusually rich collection of intellectual property that goes way back to the end of WWII. As I described in my initial post: BBN is a storied technology R&D powerhouse. Started in 1948 by a group of MIT professors, it invented many of the technologies of the early Internet, including packet switching (1969), the first network email (1971), the first router (1976). It also came up with the @ sign, but much of its work is for the military, which is why Raytheon snapped it up. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Google Custom Search Rolls Out Themes, Improved Support For Structured Data, And More Posted: 26 Oct 2009 03:31 PM PDT
The next major annoucement is improved support for structured data in search results. Custom Search can take advantage of formats including RDFa, PageMaps, and Microformats. You’ll now be able to incorporate thumbnails and specific actions — say, purchasing an item directly from a result — using this metadata. There’s also support for structured search, which allows users to finetune their queries using tags (for example, I could restrict my search to a specific author, assuming the site I was searching had a metatag that specified who wrote their articles).  Finally, today Custom Search is also rolling out a new set of customizable templates, which let users easily specify how their search results should appear on the page with respect to both layout and theme. There’s also a feature that will allow site owners to automatically redirect mobile users to a site that’s been optomized for smartphones. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Twitter And Y Combinator Team Up For Startup Stream Access Posted: 26 Oct 2009 02:33 PM PDT
The idea led Graham to delay the application deadline for YC Winter 2010 startups for two days, so they could release two new Requests For Startups (RFS), YC’s recently announced program that gives applicants basic big picture ideas from which to form startups around. One of these new RFSes is obviously to build something on top of Twitter. Here’s the description:
Twitter hasn’t specified exactly what type of access to its stream YC startups will get (there are a number of levels with various call rate limits). But the assumption is that these startups will get the type of access that Twitter gives to its preferred third-party developers. And the access to the Twitter team may be even more vital. Twitter is in the process of rolling out several new APIs for new features it is working on like Lists, Retweets, and Geolocation. Having face time with Twitter’s team for these types of things could certainly help YC startup build some great tools on top of the platform. On the flip-side, Twitter will see a group of hand-selected startups that at the very least have interesting ideas for what to do with the platform. Alongside the new Twitter RFS, Y Combinator is also announcing a RFS for live video. This is the result of a similar partnership (as the Twitter one) with Justin.TV that will give YC startups that work on this RFS the best access to Justin.TV’s stream, as well as access to the company’s founders and engineers. The new Winter 2010 deadline for YC will be October 28 at 10 pm Pacific. [photo: flickr/JChetan] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Google Social Search: Twitter And FriendFeed Highlighted. What About Facebook? Posted: 26 Oct 2009 12:54 PM PDT
Social Search essentially pulls in information from social networks to augment Google search results. But a major question is: What social networks get pulled it? While the experiment isn’t quite live yet, it would seem that from the video below made by Google’s Matt Cutts, Social Search, at least at first, will be able to include results from Twitter, FriendFeed, Picasa, Blogger, and Google Reader. The last three are obvious since Google owns all of those. Twitter seems obvious too because of the new Google/Twitter search deal. FriendFeed is an interesting one though since Facebook bought that service in August. As expected, it doesn’t appear that Facebook data will play a big role in Social Search (if any), as Google and Facebook continue their social profile stand-off. Cutts makes it clear that public data is the key to all of this, and Facebook doesn’t exactly have the most public information. That’s too bad since Facebook is, after all, the largest social network. Cutts explains that the idea behind all of this is to utilize your “social circle.” The key to populating this social circle is your Google Public Profile. On this profile, the different social networking profiles you list yourself as being a member of will be a signal to Google to scour those networks for social data to serve up in its new results. Interestingly, in the second video below, explaining how Google Social Search works, a Facebook profile appears in the lists of profiles. But again, in all the experiments, no data from Facebook seems to show up. For its social circle, Google is going deeper as well. For example, if you follow 100 people on Twitter, Google will look at their public updates when you search for things, but it will also look at the friends or your friends for even more data. This is similar to what FriendFeed has done in the past to help surface other information that may be relevant to you. Google calls this your “extended social circle.” Google also uses your Gmail chat buddies to build out your social circle. When it’s live, you’ll be able to find Social Search here on Google’s Experimental search page. Update: And now it’s live. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| AOL Loses Its Chief Lifestreamer, David Liu Posted: 26 Oct 2009 12:27 PM PDT
AOL is losing another longtime executive, David Liu. He is the senior vice president in charge of Global Messaging, which includes AIM, ICQ, and AOL’s more recent Lifestreaming products. Liu spearheaded the transformation of AIM into a lifestreaming client that mixes private and public messages from Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. When CEO Tim Armstrong was looking for someone to head up AOL’s overall Internet and mobile communications, which also includes email, Liu was the strongest internal candidate. But Armstrong decided to go outside the company and hired Brad Garlinghouse, who used to be in charge of all of Yahoo’s communications products. That, coupled with AOL’s shift towards becoming a content company, convinced Liu it was time to move on. This morning he sent out an email announcing his departure in about a month from now. Liu is already being pulled into the startup world as an angel investor (in SimpleGeo). He’s also been talking to VC and private equity firms about joining as a partner focusing on realtime startups. In the early part of this decade, when many people inside AOL were still fighting the open Web, Liu launched the first AOL.com portal and grew it to 50 million users. He also relaunched the AOL Toolbar. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Verizon: iDon’t Not Want The iPhone Posted: 26 Oct 2009 12:26 PM PDT
When asked about a possible partnership with Apple in the future with the iPhone, Seidenberg had this to say, “We obviously would be interested at any point in the future that they would be interested in having us as a partner. … This is a decision that is exclusively in Apple’s court.” Judging from the first Verizon commercial about the Droid project, it would seem that they clearly believe it is better than the iPhone. But if Verizon is so confident in this new device, why would they put themselves through the hassle of dealing with Apple to get what they view to be an inferior device? Because they don’t actually think that. The first sentence of Seindenberg’s remarks today reads like pandering. The second sentence sounds like Verizon’s way of telling their customers, “we’re doing all we can to get the iPhone.” The latter also confirms what everyone already knew: That Apple and Verizon are talking. But should we believe that it’s entirely up to Apple if they wants to launch on iPhone on Verizon? Probably not. As the largest carrier in the U.S., Verizon still has some cards it can play against Apple, and you can be sure they’re doing just that. If I had to guess, I would bet that Verizon and Apple are arguing over things ranging from revenue sharing for the App Store to something silly like Verizon demanding their branding be more visible on the device. Apple, probably not too hot on the idea of rolling out a CDMA iPhone when Verizon is working to roll out its LTE network, probably doesn’t mind stalling and sticking firm in its ground to get the same sort of deals it gets from AT&T. But Verizon, again, as the nation’s largest carrier, probably knows that without exclusivity, Apple has less of a power-play to make some of those demands. In the coming months, Verizon will continue to play its cards by rolling out better devices on its huge and largely reliable (compared to AT&T anyway) network. They’ll launch the Droid devices, and roll out the Palm Pre. They’ll do more ad campaigns like “iDon’t” and “There’s a map for that.” Meanwhile, Apple will either re-up its AT&T exclusivity (set to end next year) for some insane deal, possibly extending it for a year — or they’ll spread the wealth a bit more by rolling the iPhone out to that other U.S. GSM carrier, T-Mobile. Both would put more pressure on Verizon. What we have is a stand-off. Leverage is the weapon. But let’s be clear: Not even Verizon views Droid as an iPhone killer. And that’s because it’s not. Instead, it’s likely to be the best device running Android yet — until the next best one comes out in a few weeks or months. Android is all about being everywhere. Again, that’s why it’s a Windows Mobile and Symbian killer, not an iPhone killer. And Verizon knows it, despite their ads. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
Streaming music startup 
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Orkut continues to undermine Google's 
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Google has just announced the release of a handful of major new features for its Google Custom Search products, including a new set of themes, improved use of rich snippets in custom search, and a new Wikipedia search. The announcements aren’t especially related, but they’ll be welcome news to the millions of sites that have deployed Custom Search.
This past weekend, Twitter co-founders 
Last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google’s 
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