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- Microsoft, IBM And Yahoo Are Vying To Take Part In India’s Unique ID Project
- It’s All About The Data: Twitter Nabs Senior Scientist Utkarsh Srivastava From Yahoo
- Bob Muglia on Azure, Silverlight, and Realtime
- Metaio Launches junaio, Mixes Augmented Reality With Social Networking
- Paul Carr Debates Jeff Jarvis About So-Called Citizen Journalists
- Photo Tagger Alerts You When A Picture Of You Appears On Facebook, Tagged Or Not
- In Time For The Holiday Shopping Season, IBM Upgrades E-Commerce Software For Retailers
- First Look: Mobile Concepts For Mozilla’s Raindrop Platform
- While Rivals Jockey For Market Share, Apple Bathes In Profits
- F1 Racing Driver Barrichello Wins $500,000 Libel Suit Against Google
- Google Offers A 16 Terabyte Cloud Drive For $4,096 A Year
- Can Israel’s RankAbove Become Kenshoo’s Siamese Twin?
- Next Week: U.S. Senate Committee Hearing On Aggressive Internet Sales Tactics
- First Video Of City Of Eternals MMOG + 500 Invites
- Birdfeed Looks To Attract Tweets As The Go-To Twitter Geolocation App
- Move Aside, Vampire Wars. City Of Eternals Is A Real Game.
- PHP Founder Rasmus Lerdorf Leaves Yahoo
- Do You Have What It Takes To Give A Realtime Pitch?
- Google Latitude Now Tells You Where You’ve Been
- Google Expands Free Holiday WiFi Program To 47 Airports
- Antares: Friend of misleading singers, enemy of misleading apps
- MSN Video Is Now Bing Videos
- Google’s Go: A New Programming Language That’s Python Meets C++
- Hate It Or Love It, Twitter’s New Retweet Style Is Rolling Out
- Old Line Banker Puts $1 Million Into P2P Lender Prosper
| Microsoft, IBM And Yahoo Are Vying To Take Part In India’s Unique ID Project Posted: 11 Nov 2009 08:38 AM PST
It appears that both Yahoo and Microsoft are duking it out to help power the technology for India’s Unique Identification project. Spearheaded by Indian tech czar and Infosys co-chairman Naden Nilekani, the project aims to assign every Indian citizen with a unique identification number that will identify him or her, similar to a U.S. social security number. This is no small task considering India’s population of 1.2 billion citizens. It will involve a powerful technology to assign the numbers and a vast database to organize each unique ID. That’s where Microsoft and Yahoo come in. Earlier this year, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates expressed a strong interest in participating in the project, meeting Nilekani and assuring him that Microsoft would be able to assign the IDs swiftly. This week Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz lobbied India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to use Yahoo for the project, but Bartz says that there’s no commercial interest in the deal and Yahoo would help power the project on a non-profit basis. Bartz added that Yahoo would be the optimal choice because Yahoo has a major presence in India. The company claims that three out of four Indians access the Internet through Yahoo. While Yahoo is vastly popular in India thanks to sites like Yahoo Cricket that appeal to the population, its hold may be slipping. Gmail recently overtook Yahoo Mail as the most trafficked email site and Yahoo was forced to shut down its Indian social network SpotM a few months ago, as Google’s Orkut and Facebook emerge as the dominant social networks in India. It’s unclear if Microsoft has the same “non-profit” stance as Yahoo, but obviously both companies want a piece of a highly ambitious project that could be implemented in other emerging countries. And it looks like IBM is also throwing its hat into the ring as well, so it should be interesting to see which tech giant wins out. Photo credit/Flickr/Voobie Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors   |
| It’s All About The Data: Twitter Nabs Senior Scientist Utkarsh Srivastava From Yahoo Posted: 11 Nov 2009 08:07 AM PST
The latest person to jump ship is Utkarsh Srivastava, who has resigned from his position as Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research to join micro-sharing sensation Twitter. Louis Gray caught wind of the new hire at Twitter early, keeping tabs on the company’s own Twitter list of employees. Now Srivastava has confirmed the news by means of, evidently, a tweet. Srivastava, a Ph.D graduate in Computer Science from Stanford University, did brief research stints at Microsoft and IBM before joining the Yahoo! Research team now more than 3 years ago. During his tenure at the Internet giant, he became one of the original designers and developers of Pig, a high-level language for data processing over Hadoop. He is also one of the lead architects and developers of PNUTS, Yahoo!’s internal large-scale key-value store. Like Gray said, a ton of data flows in and out of Twitter on a daily basis, and it’s precisely that gigantic data set that gives Twitter a competitive advantage and turns it into a potential moneymaker (it’s what interests investors so much). Hence, it makes all the sense in the world for the company to recruit data management specialists, although it’s not clear if Srivastava was hired to streamline current Twitter projects or rather to develop new ones. Time will tell, 140 characters at a time.
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| Bob Muglia on Azure, Silverlight, and Realtime Posted: 11 Nov 2009 08:04 AM PST  Earlier this summer I traveled to Redmond to meet with a number of Microsoft executives, including Bob Muglia, President of the Server and Tools Business. Muglia's group has grown rapidly to become the critical swing vote in Microsoft's transition to the cloud, now closing in on almost a third of the giant's overall revenue. And as Silverlight and realtime become the strategic heart of the integration of cloud and on-premise solutions, what Muglia had to say then will resonate much more clearly when he takes the stage next Tuesday with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie to open the PDC in Los Angeles. |
| Metaio Launches junaio, Mixes Augmented Reality With Social Networking Posted: 11 Nov 2009 07:49 AM PST  [Germany] Munich-based metaio, a developer of visual interaction software products, is today launching a consumer-oriented iPhone application (iTunes link) and complementary website that combines the fun and usefulness of augmented reality with social networking. The application, dubbed junaio, is billed by the company as the 'world's first augmented reality platform' but bears some resemblance to what other European startups like Layar and Wikitude have been putting out there lately. |
| Paul Carr Debates Jeff Jarvis About So-Called Citizen Journalists Posted: 11 Nov 2009 07:11 AM PST
TechCrunch columnist Paul Carr took to New York’s public radio station WNYC yesterday to discuss the pros and cons of citizen journalism in the context of breaking news. Carr was joined by host Brian Lehrer and journalist and academic Jeff Jarvis, a longtime advocate of citizen journalism. You may recall Paul’s controversial post last weekend which discussed the solider at Fort Hood who tweeted from inside the base during Thursday's massacre—including posting a Twitpic of a victim and inaccurate reports of the events that took place. Carr delved into the ethical issues regarding this example of citizen journalism gone bad and its greater implications. His column sparked a tsunami of further debate and commentary about both the good and evil of uses of social media. Carr and Jarvis battled heatedly over the journalistic virtue of witnesses reporting their real-time observations of news and whether the woman in question could be considered a “citizen journalist.” Jarvis came out swinging and it took Carr a while to start jabbing back, probably because the live interview was at an ungodly 6 AM in California, an hour which put our late-night thinker at a distinct and groggy disadvantage. But after a few swipes from Jarvis, Carr finally woke up and rallied. We think Carr won this one, but take a listen and tell us your thoughts!
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| Photo Tagger Alerts You When A Picture Of You Appears On Facebook, Tagged Or Not Posted: 11 Nov 2009 05:50 AM PST
The auto-tagging app was only available in private beta so far, but today the company is debuting the public version of Photo Tagger. It’s free of charge, and it’s awesome. Here’s how it works: after you install the app on Facebook, you can select any public album (either their own or from friends). Photo Tagger then scans the photos, batches subjects into groups using its facial recognition technology and suggests tags for faces it has identified as such. Confirmed tags are then pushed directly onto Facebook, mirroring the social network’s privacy settings, and the result is a custom album made up of tagged photos. You have to try it out to see how it works for you, but Face.com claims faces can be recognized regardless of facial expressions or the lighting, quality, backgrounds, angle and focus of the pictures. This turns Photo Tagger into quite an impressive social search engine for faces on Facebook, where millions of images are uploaded to albums every week. It also doubles as a handy notification tool, because it has a system in place dubbed Face Alerts that lets users know when pictures of them appear on Facebook, with or without tags. Face.com says the private alpha edition of Photo Tagger attracted over 30,000 users and identified 5 million faces on Facebook within three months. For an alternative, take a look at what Polar Rose is doing.
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| In Time For The Holiday Shopping Season, IBM Upgrades E-Commerce Software For Retailers Posted: 11 Nov 2009 04:25 AM PST
Tis’ the season for holiday shopping and many of the tech giants are already staking their claim in the e-commerce industry. Google recently launched Google Commerce, its hosted search offering for online retailers. Today, IBM is announcing a significant upgrade to WebSphere Commerce, Big Blue’s software platform framework for e-commerce. WebSphere Commerce is a integrated software package that handles online storefronts, merchandising, operational reports, shopping cart technology, search, payments, analytics and also provides developer tools. It operates the front and back end of e-commerce operations for Sears, Vineyard Vines, Staples and other retailers. The new version of the software now helps e-retailers create mobile-optimized sites that match the look and feel of retailer’s web sites. The software can create online stores accessible via mobile phones that let consumers browse, conduct side-by-side product comparisons, view store locations, check inventory availability and complete the purchase. Shoppers can even place orders online and pick up their merchandise at the closest store – which can be automatically mapped out for them on their mobile phone. Retailers will also be able to deliver personalized brand campaigns, coupons and promotions to a customer’s mobile device through text messages or e-mail. IBM highlights emerging markets, like China and India, as optimal regions where advanced e-commerce mobile sites will be popular among consumers. Big Blue says that because broadband access remains difficult in many areas, hand-held devices are often the only means of access to the Web. Thew new version of Websphere Commerce leverages social networks by bringing brand and product discussions that are taking place on external sites back to the retailer’s site. For example, a consumer’s product review or blog post with a link back to the retailers’ site can automatically be sent to Facebook or other social networking sites. IBM is also adding the capability of consumers to share ratings and reviews that include rich media content, like photo, video or audio files. IBM’s new software also provides intuitive marketing tools that will evaluate customer buying behaviors and respond by delivering targeted promotions or other content. For example, if an online buyer abandons a sale before checkout, a coupon or other incentive could be immediately forwarded to the shopper’s mobile device to help revive the transaction. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| First Look: Mobile Concepts For Mozilla’s Raindrop Platform Posted: 11 Nov 2009 03:28 AM PST
It’s been quiet at the Raindrop blog since the announcement, but people who are interested in the whole thing are advised to keep track of the Raindrop Design blog, where Canadian designer and Mozilla employee Andy Chung posts updates on concepts for layout and structure of the Raindrop project. Last night, Chung posted about some very initial ideas for how Raindrop could function as a mobile application, which GigaOm correctly identified as one of the most fertile grounds for this type of platform to thrive. Note that these are early concepts, so it’s just a way for Mozilla Labs to throw something out there and then iterate based on feedback from the designer and developer community. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see how Raindrop could potentially look like on mobile screens. What you see (from Flickr): a homepage with a summary and menu, what the ‘inflow’ of messages would look like on mobile, a rudimentary Twitter client, a mailing list messages inbox and finally a screen featuring notifications from around the web. (Thanks for the tip, Orli)
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| While Rivals Jockey For Market Share, Apple Bathes In Profits Posted: 11 Nov 2009 02:46 AM PST
I bring this up because today brought some very interesting numbers from the research firm, Strategy Analytics. According to them, Apple has surpassed Nokia as the most profitable phone maker in the world. I’ll throw some numbers at you in a second to show why this is really incredible, but the key takeaway is that this is why, at the end of the day, Apple wins. While the press and rivals obsess over market share, Apple quietly comes in and makes an insane amount of money. It’s the same in the computer industry. Small market share, huge amount of money. The most important thing for all of these are companies is the bottom line. Apple wins that battle. According to the report, Apple made $1.6 billion in operating profit off of the iPhone in Q3. Nokia, meanwhile, made $1.1 billion. Let’s put this in perspective. Recent numbers suggest Nokia controls roughly 35% of the worldwide handset market. Apple? About 2.5%. Not 25%. Two point five percent. Since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, just about everyone has been clamoring for more variety in Apple’s offering. People wanted iPhone minis, they wanted CDMA iPhones, etc. But Apple stuck to its guns and has basically sold one phone, which it could manufacture efficiently, when rivals like Nokia are busy peddling dozens. Sure, there are a few variations on the iPhone (included memory, and now the 3G/3GS), but basically, it’s one phone that is pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars of more profit than the market leader. To people who follow Apple closely, this should be absolutely no surprise. It’s the same thing it does in the computer industry. Despite having a much smaller market share than its rivals, it makes more money than most of them. The key, of course, is that Apple maintains its high profit margins, while the competitors shuffle to battle each other for market share. That’s not to say that Apple doesn’t care about market share for either its computers or the iPhone, it undoubtedly does. But it’s a secondary goal to running a successful business. A business which is now absolutely thriving in an awful worldwide economic environment.
Most consumers obviously shouldn’t like the idea that a company is purposely charging more for its product to keep its margins high. But Apple has a winning proposition for that because it builds machines of such high quality that to many users it seems like they should cost more than they actually do. Or as Apple COO Tim Cook put it in a earnings call over the summer, "Our goal is not to build the most computers. It's to build the best." When you do that, apparently you can keep your margins high and in turn, make insane profits. The iPhone is a bit different because Apple has a partner that it has convinced to pay it an insane amount of money for each device sold and then subsidize the cost of it for consumers. Remember that when the iPhone first came out it was $600. That’s the price Apple clearly felt comfortable setting for it to maintain what it thought was a good margin. That price, of course, was ridiculous (though, admittedly, myself and plenty of others paid it). A few months later, Apple realized this too, and slashed a couple hundred dollars off the price, thus slashing it margins. But then they figured out a better way. Previously, they had been getting a cut of every monthly AT&T iPhone contract. But with the iPhone 3G, Apple decided to give all that money to AT&T in exchange for one upfront payment, and the promise that AT&T would subsidize the cost of the phone down to $199 (and $299). Jackpot. So basically, Apple is now making a huge margin on every iPhone sold, while AT&T more or less picks up the tab. (Don’t feel too bad for them, they still make plenty on those monthly contracts.) Now you see why Apple doesn’t mind that exclusive agreement even while us consumers bitch to no end? There are 1.6 billion reasons why they like that deal (okay, probably some smaller percentage of that, but still). And because Apple makes all of this money, they have money to pour into making that next great product. A product that will likely be high quality — and sell with a high margin. Hopefully some of that $34 billion in cash (with no debt) is being poured into finalizing the tablet as we speak. This influx of profit also allows Apple to take the plunge into new markets, like it did with the iPhone. Earlier today, blogger John Gruber recalled what former Palm CEO Ed Colligan said when he heard that computers makers like Apple could enter the phone market:
Not only did they walk in, they walked in, changed the landscape, and have what now appears to be the best business model industry-wide. Just as with the computer industry, while all its rivals were busy jockeying for market share, Apple secured the high ground and figured out the best way to bathe in profits. [images: Touchstone Pictures and flickr/jaci xiii] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| F1 Racing Driver Barrichello Wins $500,000 Libel Suit Against Google Posted: 11 Nov 2009 02:38 AM PST
The civil case, which was filed in July 2006, related to hundreds of fake profiles for Barrichello that were created on Orkut, some of which depicted him as a toy turtle – I kid you not. Earlier this week, Brazilian media published the outcome of the Sao Paulo court’s ruling, which ordered Google to compensate Barrichello half a million dollars in damages upfront and a daily fine of $590 until all the profile pages relating to the F1 driver were removed from the social network. Note: different media report different amounts. Google told local reporters that it will always remove illegal content from Orkut but does not feel responsible for all other content that appears on there, and they don’t expect to have to police negative commentary about celebrities. Google can still appeal the case in higher court. This isn’t the first time Google finds itself in Brazilian courts over Orkut. On August 22, 2006, a Brazilian Federal Judge ordered Google to release Orkut user's information of a list of about two dozen Brazilian nationals, believed to be using the social network to sell drugs and to be involved in child pornography. The judge ordered Google to pay $23,000 per day in fines until the information was turned over to the Brazilian government. Google back then stated that it would not release the information, on the grounds that the requested information is on Google servers in the U.S. and not in Brazil, and is therefore not subject to its national laws. For what it’s worth, multi-millionaire Barrichello was looking for ‘respect rather than money’, and that he would be donating the money awarded to him in court to his non-profit organization Barrichello Kanaan Foundation. On Monday, the F1 driver tweeted a quote from Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel (which I suspect was freely translated from his famous quote “There is no respect for others without humility in one’s self”). My guess is he simply doesn’t like turtles. (Via F1Planet)
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| Google Offers A 16 Terabyte Cloud Drive For $4,096 A Year Posted: 11 Nov 2009 12:33 AM PST
Google tonight announced that it was drastically slashing prices while at the same time offering more storage pricing options for users of its services. Specifically, while Gmail users currently get about 7 gigabytes for free and Picasa users get about 1 gigabyte for free, both can now upgrade to 20 GB for just $5 a year. Previously, it cost $20 to get just 10 GB of additional service. But what’s really pretty incredible is that Google has an option for you to buy up to 16 terabytes, yes, terabytes, of storage from them. As Google notes, that enough to store 8 million very high resolution photos. Considering that most consumers probably still have south of 500 gigabytes of storage in their home, that’s pretty massive. Of course, you’ll pay for it: 16 TB will set you back $4,096 a year. But if you do something that requires you to store 16 TB of photos, you can probably afford that. And there are varying storage levels at different price points leading up to that. 8 TB is $2,048 a year, 4 TB is $1,024, and so forth. These all represent significant price decreases from Google’s previous offerings, but it still would be cheaper to buy your own external drives. So why not do that? Well, Google offers the same levels of backup security that it ensures on all of its data currently. Plus, you won’t have to have dozens of drives sitting around. And since the data is all in the cloud, you’d be able to access it from anywhere, which Google highlights in its post. But there’s something key to remember: Google is only officially offering this storage for use with Gmail and Picasa. It’s not a complete online backup/storage system, which is what Google Drive (or Gdrive) has long been rumored to be. Of course, there are programs and workarounds that will more or less let you use it for that purpose, but Google is not yet sanctioning the use of its storage as your official cloud drive. Under Google’s system, 1 TB of storage will cost $256 a year and 400 GB is $100 a year. I don’t know about you, but if Apple offered something similar that would let me backup all my iTunes music and movies and allowed me to access them from anywhere, I would do it. [photo: flickr/vsz] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Can Israel’s RankAbove Become Kenshoo’s Siamese Twin? Posted: 11 Nov 2009 12:20 AM PST
Launched into beta, Drive provides a complete SEO management interface, handling everything from keyword research and on-page analysis, to link building and acquisition. The product begins by downloading and parsing the entire website on its servers, generating a complete analysis which is repeated upon site updates. Artificial intelligence and predictive modeling are used to determine how SEO changes will affect site pages—remember these can be in the millions—and keywords, which can reach up to the tens of thousands. The site which is automatically divided into sections by Drive, can now be inspected for all SEO issues, with granularity reaching all the way down to single pages and individual page elements. Drive also analyzes competitor sites in order to determine the difficulty of ranking for each keyword. There is no limit on the amount of keywords and Drive will even perform automated tail keyword discovery. Testing the impact of new keywords and other SEO tweaks and fixes on the site takes minutes—an obvious plus compared to pushing it out to production and waiting for the ‘Google Dance’. I’ve asked RankAbove to run an analysis on TechCrunch.com. Here are a few SEO basic issues it identified:
Unlike most startups that begin their business from scratch, RankAbove been running an SEO consultancy business for several years. This has had multiple benefits: First, the team was able to gain product/market-fit insights from real customers. Second, the company is in a position where it can now leverage existing relationships with agencies and online retailers to establish design and beta customers, one of which is 1-800-Flowers. Finally, a major upside is that the SEO consultancy business has allowed RankAbove to self-fund development, placing it in a better negotiation position with investors. I’m told by CEO Mayer Reich, that the company is in negotiation with several investors to complete a Round A in the neighborhood of $1.5M. I’ve been following RankAbove’s progress from the initial days of development and it’s one of the Israeli startups I’m most bullish about. Who knows, it might just be the next Kenshoo.
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| Next Week: U.S. Senate Committee Hearing On Aggressive Internet Sales Tactics Posted: 10 Nov 2009 10:41 PM PST
Next week the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation will hold a full committee hearing on Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and their Impact on American Consumers. This expands on a committee investigation into the marketing practices of a number of firms that supply these offers to partners. They could sell tickets to this thing. I’d pay good money to be there. Last week sixteen companies that conduct sales over the Internet were sent letters requesting information about their relationships with the three marketing companies being investigated by the panel – Vertrue, Webloyalty and Affinion. The companies that received letters: 1-800-FLOWERS.com, AirTran Holdings Inc. (AAI), Classmates Online Inc., Continental Airlines Inc. ( CAL), FTD, Fandango Inc., Hotwire Inc., Intelius Inc., MovieTickets.com Inc., Orbitz, Pizza Hut, priceline.com, Redcats USA, Shutterfly Inc. (SFLY), US Airways Group Inc. (LCC) and Vistaprint USA Inc. Adaptive Marketing, which works with Intelius, is a subsidiary of Vertrue. We outlined how these offers mislead consumers into agreeing to unwanted credit card subscriptions here. Immediately after an ecommerce transaction takes place, buyers are presented with an offer to take a survey and/or get a partial rebate on their purchase. If they click yes, their credit card information is transferred to the ecommerce company and the user begins a difficult-to-terminate subscription to a worthless service. Ecommerce sites that use these types of offers can get CPMs for the ads ranging from $2,000 – $2,500, say experts we’ve spoken with, and they make up a material percentage of revenue. Update: Here’s what these offers look like. Users are tricked into clicking yes and get nothing of value in return.
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| First Video Of City Of Eternals MMOG + 500 Invites Posted: 10 Nov 2009 10:13 PM PST Earlier this evening we broke the news on the upcoming launch of City Of Eternals, the first Flash MMOG from Ohai. I have the rough footage above of in game play, and will add a proper screencast shortly (update – better video has now been added at top). This is a World of Warcraft style MMOG that’s free to play and Flash based. It’s also integrated with Facebook Connect to allow easy signup and, more importantly, you can play with your friends and see the real identity of other players. Ohai is letting 500 TechCrunch readers in now, just email techcrunch@cityofeternals.com, and the first 500 people will get an invitation via email. You’ll also get 100 Ohais, the in game currency. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Birdfeed Looks To Attract Tweets As The Go-To Twitter Geolocation App Posted: 10 Nov 2009 07:59 PM PST
Now, to be clear, as we previewed last month, the upcoming version of Tweetie, 2.1, will also support Twitter’s new geolocation feature. But the new version of Birdfeed, 1.2, does it in a way that highlights it much more. And in fact, when Twitter geolocation support finally does roll out (it’s due very soon, we hear), Birdfeed has a good shot to be the go-to app for it at launch. So what’s so good about it? Well, unlike Tweetie 2.1, which forces you to click into a menu system to get at the geolocation feature, Birdfeed puts it front and center at the top of every tweet composition screen. If you opt-in to using the feature (and it’s important to note that Twitter geolocation is opt-in), you can choose to either tweet with your location sent out each time, or use it on a tweet-by-tweet basis. If you choose the latter, you’ll see a bar along the top that reads, “Add a location to this tweet”. Clicking on that with start a “Determining location” function, and in a few seconds, you’ll have your location pinned to the top of that tweet under which you’ll write the actual tweet. Simple. Currently, there isn’t any granular support to pick and choose how much or little detail of your location to show (what city you’re in versus what block you’re on, for example), but I suspect that may be something coming from Twitter’s end once geolocation launches. On tweets sent out with this geolocation data, you’ll see a hyperlinked location beneath the timestamp on the tweet’s landing page. Oddly, there is no obvious way to tell which tweets are geotagged and which are not from the main stream, currently. If you click on this location on the tweet screen, you’ll be taken to that location on a map and show a marker with that Twitter user’s name and their tweet on top of a Google Map. Birdfeed 1.2 was submitted to the App Store for approval 2 days ago, developer Buzz Andersen tells us. He remains committed to improving the application going forward, but notes that it has been slow going because he has other projects he’s currently working on as well. Still, Birdfeed is just as solid as it was several months ago and now with great geolocation implementation, could well see a spike in usage from the LBS lovers. Watch for it in the App Store sometime in the next couple of weeks.
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| Move Aside, Vampire Wars. City Of Eternals Is A Real Game. Posted: 10 Nov 2009 07:10 PM PST
Now they’re ready to launch their first game, City Of Eternals. The timing is perfect – the vampire themed game will attract the Twilight-crazy crowd of teenage girls and the boys that follow them around. Move aside, Vampire Wars. City of Eternals is a real game. This is a game that’s easy to begin playing. You log in via Facebook Connect or Twitter and you’re playing. No account creation. No need to even tell you you’re male or female – it already knows. And since every player is logging in via Facebook or Twitter, there is also a real human being to look at behind the avatar. You can click on the player icon and see a picture and the first name of the player, and message them if their privacy rules allow it. That will let users build real friendships, says founder and CEO Susan Wu. And those friendships are one thing that Ohai hopes will keep people playing over the long term. They want their users to engage with the game like World Of Warcraft aficionados do – every day for years and years.
Game play is a hybrid between familiar client-based MMOGs and more recent social games on facebook like Vampire Wars and FarmVille. Players perform missions and fight to gain experience and other assets, and they can buy virtual goods to make the game more fun. This is a strictly cash economy, says Wu. No ScamVille offers will be put in front of users. Another feature of the game is that it’s embeddable anywhere since it’s built on Flash. You can play it on the City of Eternals website, or the soon to launch Facebook app page, or we could embed it here on TechCrunch. When you play you’ll have the same experience. And you’re friends will be right there with you. They even have an iPhone version that they are testing internally, says VP Engineering Don Neufeld. It won’t be exactly the same experience as the Flash version, but people will be able to play the game and interact with friends. The game is built on a backend platform that the company will reuse for future titles. They use their own API to move data to the front end user interface, so developers could theoretically build versions of the game for Silverlight, Android, etc. Up next we’ll have a video and 500 invitation to give away so you can start playing immediately. In the meantime, here are some screenshots: Update: video and invitations to the service.
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| PHP Founder Rasmus Lerdorf Leaves Yahoo Posted: 10 Nov 2009 06:50 PM PST
PHP was developed further and commercialized by Zend, but Lerdorf has maintained an ongoing involvement with the open source project. Lerdorf has worked at a number of companies since first developing PHP, but has spent a large part of his professional career with Yahoo and he had a strong association with the company. Lerdorf is one of a number of star engineers and developers who have left Yahoo in recent times, and the stable of notable and high-profile engineers at the company has whittled out. Lerdorf has been more recently noted for his blog posts, such as his outline on his philosophy to developing PHP applications: The no-framework PHP framework. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Do You Have What It Takes To Give A Realtime Pitch? Posted: 10 Nov 2009 06:12 PM PST
As we’ve been putting together our Realtime CrunchUp for November 20, one thing is becoming abundantly clear: there are dozens of startups out there all preparing to launch amazing new realtime products. We’d like to give them all a spot on stage to give the audience a demo, but we can’t because we also have to make room for a full agenda interviews, panels, and roundtables. We’ve lined up great speakers from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Foursquare, Seesmic, Brizzly, Threadsy, Accel, Charles River Ventures, and more. We’ve even got the Hollywood agent behind Britney Spears’ digital strategy (see below). So here’s what we are going to do. At the event, we will pick two entrepreneurs from the audience to give on-the-spot demos. If you think you’ve got what it takes to deliver a Realtime Pitch at the CrunchUp, when you buy your ticket opt in to the Realtime Pitch. Be prepared because you might be called onstage. That’s real audience participation. We wouldn’t try this sort of thing with just any crowd, but judging from the caliber of the attendees last time, any one of them could have been on stage. Well, nearly any one of them (which is why we’ve set up the opt-in). If you’ve already bought a ticket and want to opt in, log into Eventbrite and change your preferences or email us and we’ll do it for you. It’s always a good idea to keep everyone on their toes at these events. There will be plenty to discuss as we dig deep into specific real-time catalysts, such as mobility, geolocation, communications collaboration, stream filtering, media streams, and investment strategies. Please join us and members of our Realtime Board Friday, November 20, 2009 InterContinental Hotel GET CRUNCHUP TICKETS NOW, courtesy of Eventbrite SPONSORSHIPS PRESS CRUNCHUP AGENDA 9:00 – 9:30 AM From RSS To Realtime: A Conversation With Twitter COO Dick Costolo 9:30 – 11:00 AM Roundtable: Filtering The Stream. Getting Rid of the Noise. Facebook, VP of Product Chris Cox 11:00 – 11:15 AM Break 11:15 – 11:45 AM The Social Enterprise: A Conversation With Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff 11:45 – 12:30 PM Where Is The Stream Going? Tomorrow's Killer Apps (Demos) Hot Potato (event streams, launch) 12:30 – 2:00 PM Lunch 2:00 – 2:45 PM Where Is The Stream Going? Tomorrow's Killer Apps (Demos) PlyMedia (new product launch) 2:45 – 3:30 PM Media Streams: Are These The Ultimate Marketing Vehicles? 3:30 – 3:45 Break 3:45 – 4:30 Geo Streams: We Know Where You Are, Right Now 4:30 – 5:00 Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus 5:00 – 5:45 PM Where The Realtime Rubber Meets The Road: When Does The Serious Money Come In? Angel investor, Ron Conway 5:45 – 7:30 PM Realtime After Party Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Google Latitude Now Tells You Where You’ve Been Posted: 10 Nov 2009 04:41 PM PST
Don’t you sometimes wish you had a map of every place you’ve ever been? Well, if the concept of such detailed self-tracking doesn’t creep you out, you can now do that with Google Latitude, the mobile app that lets you broadcast your location to your friends. Google Latitude just turned on Location History as a new feature in Google Latitude. Whenever Google Latitude is on, it records your location, and you can go back to see where you’ve been. To mitigate some of the obvious privacy issues this brings up, only you can see your location history, not your friends. And you can delete any location from your history, like that Dunkin Donuts you tried to stick up last night when you had the munchies. Another new feature is location alerts. You can now get an alert anytime a friend of yours who allows you to see their location on Google Latitude is nearby. To cut down on constant alerts every time you go to the office or home, it tries to learn where you go every day, and only gives you an alert when you are in a place it deems to be “unusual.” In order for the alerts to work, your location history needs to be enabled, so the two features go hand in hand. Geo streams such as the ones produced by Google Latitude are becoming increasingly common. In fact, we are devoting an entire panel to Geo Stream sat eour Realtime CrunchUp on November 20. Steve Lee, the group product manager for Google Latitude, will be on that panel. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Google Expands Free Holiday WiFi Program To 47 Airports Posted: 10 Nov 2009 04:37 PM PST  Well, the spirit of giving arrived a little early this year! For my birthday last month, Google announced it was partnering to offer free Wi-Fi on all Virgin America flights until January 15th. Great, thanks Google, now I have to check the feeds even while flying at 500MPH. But I guess that just wasn't enough kindness to satisfy the Goog. They've just announced that they're going to be extending the free Wi-Fi to 47 entire airports. And not only that, but there's a raft of giveaways, charity matching, and other nonsense in the bargain as well. I'm starting to think that it's not "Don't be evil" so much as "Give away enough stuff that people forget about the evil." Maybe that's disingenuous. In fact, I'm sure it is. Oh well, 'tis the season for moral ambiguity. |
| Antares: Friend of misleading singers, enemy of misleading apps Posted: 10 Nov 2009 04:10 PM PST
Why? Well, it turns out that the term “Auto-Tune” — which due to the recent spike in usage in pop music has come to be misused almost as often as the term “photoshop” — is trademarked by Antares. In a cease and desist letter, Antares claims that “Steamboat’s use of ‘AutoTuner’ is virtually identical to Antares’ AUTO-TUNE(R) mark, simply adding an ‘r’ at the end of the mark and removing a hyphen, and is used in connection with a software program that is directly competitive and functionally identical to Antares’ AUTO-TUNE(R) product.” Read the rest of this post at MobileCrunch >> Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Posted: 10 Nov 2009 03:28 PM PST
Capitalizing on the Bing brand, Microsoft is consolidating MSN Video into Bing Videos. If you go to video.msn.com it redirects to Bing Video. The new video search destination lets you both search for videos on the Web and watch them within the Bing player. The main video page is set up to help you browse and discover videos, with featured videos in a large player across the top and tabbed categories below that including editorial picks, viral clips, “Last Night on TV”, and the “Best of Bing.” A lot of this looks like a direct port from MSN Video. there is still even a tab called “Most Watched On MSN Video.” They might want to change that now. Bing Video brings in videos from YouTube, Hulu, ABC and more, and directly hosts 900 TV shows. When you search for a show like True Blood, you get Bing’s familiar guided navigation on the left, which lets you narrow down your search by season, episodes, trailers, length, and format. The Bing video player also has a lights-out mode. You kind of get the feeling that Bing doesn’t want you to leave. Of course, neither does Yahoo Video, Google Video, Blinkx, or most other video search engines these days. But Bing Videos is such a better brand. What MSN property will be subsumed into Bing next? Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Google’s Go: A New Programming Language That’s Python Meets C++ Posted: 10 Nov 2009 03:00 PM PST
Here’s how Google describes Go in its blog post:
For more details check out Golang.org. To get things started the right way, here’s Go’s rendition of Hello World!:
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Hate It Or Love It, Twitter’s New Retweet Style Is Rolling Out Posted: 10 Nov 2009 02:56 PM PST
So what’s the verdict? Some people love it, some people hate it. It is definitely a significant change to the way people are accustomed to using Twitter, so it will undoubtedly take some time for most users to get used to. Some may call this “Facebook Syndrome” (users always complain when Facebook changes something, even if it’s for the better), I call it “human nature” (people generally dislike change). If you do happen to have it now, here’s a few interesting notes about the new feature (at least on twitter.com):
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Old Line Banker Puts $1 Million Into P2P Lender Prosper Posted: 10 Nov 2009 02:55 PM PST
Prosper.com, a popular peer-to-peer lending marketplace in the U.S., has received a $1 million infusion from Nigel Morris, co-founder of Capital One, via his venture capital firm QED Investors. This brings the company’s total funding to over $41 million from Accel Partners, DAG Ventures, Fidelity Ventures and Benchmark Capital, among other investors. Prosper pioneered the idea of concept of people-to-people lending in the U.S with its launch in 2006. Unfortunately, the startup hit a rough patch last year when the SEC stopped all lending on the platform because the company didn’t register as a seller of securities. With the new climate of heightened regulatory oversight in light of the financial meltdown, the SEC is being more judicious about overseeing financial institutions. The startup was able to re-launch its site over the summer after the SEC gave Prosper the OK to facilitate peer-to-peer lending. Prosper became the first and thus only Internet auction-based P2P loans platform to have its registration statement declared effective by the SEC. Prosper is currently available for lenders in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
Yahoo seems 
Israeli facial recognition tech startup 
A couple of weeks ago, 
Market share is probably the easiest and most often used point of comparison between competing products. It makes sense: If something has a large share of the market, it’s probably doing well. But that doesn’t always mean that it’s doing better than something with less market share, especially from a business perspective.
If Apple wanted to boost its computer market share, it could do so in a heartbeat simply by slashing into its margins and chopping hundreds of dollars off its machines. That’s why those “I’m A PC” shopping commercials this summer were humorous. They’re attacking Apple for not competing in segments (low cost PCs) that it has absolutely no desire to compete in. Would those commercials be effective if Apple chose to sell a $500 MacBook? No, because 
Well, it’s not the mythical Google Drive, but it’s close. For a price. And assuming you only want to store pictures and emails.
A newly launched SEO platform called ‘Drive’ by Jerusalem-based 
The types of marketing offers (we refer to them more descriptively as scams) that have plagued 
Back in June, we wrote about Birdfeed, an iPhone Twitter application that 
We first 
So far it’s working. 10,000 private beta testers have been playing for two months now, and are averaging ten logins and 65 minutes of playing per day. “People are in love with the game,” said Wu.
Here’s a bit of App Store drama for you: Antares Audio Tech, the company that built the underlying technology licensed for the popular “
Big news for developers out there: Google has just announced the release of a new, open sourced programming language called Go. The company says that Go is experimental, and that it combines the performance and security benefits associated with using a compiled language like C++ with the speed of a dynamic language like Python. Go’s official mascot is Gordon the gopher, seen here.
Yes, Twitter is in the process of rolling out its new Retweet functionality to a more users, the service 
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