Tuesday, November 17, 2009

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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Seesmic To Launch Native Twitter Client For Windows

Posted: 17 Nov 2009 08:43 AM PST

Today brings good news for PC users everywhere. Seesmic is launching a native desktop client for Windows. Seesmic’s founder and CEO Loic Le Meur made the announcement today at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles. Le Meur says that providing a desktop client that was native for Windows was of huge importance because 80 percent of Seesmic users run their apps on a PC.

There are a few native Twitter clients out there to have been formatted for the Mac, such as Tweetie and Twitterfic. Windows users have previously limited options when it comes to native Twitter clients and are forced to either used web-based clients or use desktop clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop. These are both based Adobe's AIR platform, which is notorious for eating up memory and CPU cycles, along with weird window placement quirks.

Seesmic’s new desktop client will feature integration with just Twitter (Facebook will be added in the next few weeks) and will have much of the same functionality as the Adobe Air-powered client such as lists and multiple accounts, but it will be built on the .NET framework. This means the client will have a faster, better UI, lower memory consumption. Plus the client can take advantage of Windows7 modules such as location sensor, letting the user to post a location directly to Twitter.

The native Windows client will feature multi-language spell check, while the Air-powered Seesmic Desktop supports basic English. Another interesting feature of the client is a a plug-in architecture pretty much like on a browser, so Tweetmeme can write, for example, a plug-in that will give you how a tweet is spreading or the influence of a Twitter user. Because the Windows ecosystem, it will be much easier for developers to build plug-ins and add-ons off of the client. Le Meur says that building on Windows lets Seesmic offer this as a secure platform to developers, which is not possible or difficult on the Adobe Air or web-based platform.

There are other Twitter clients that have been developed for Windows, such as Sobees and Blu, but Seesmic will have the advantage of integration with Facebook and much more.

Seesmic has been in the news a lot lately thanks to the emergence of Twitter lists and geolocation. Seesmic rolled out support for the new Twitter Lists for its Desktop client and its web-based client was upgraded with both Lists functionality and geolocation.

To be honest, I was surprised to hear that 80 percent of Seesmic users use a PC. I guess in the Apple-centric world of Silicon Valley, it’s hard to believe that stat. Now, I’m eagerly waiting for Seesmic to unveil a native client for the Mac. Watch out Tweetie!

Disclaimer: Michael Arrington is an investor of Seesmic; I am not.

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This Microsoft Store Is Trying Too Hard

Posted: 17 Nov 2009 07:41 AM PST

This is embarrassing. Not only are the Microsoft Stores a clear copy of Apple Stores, but now the employees are trying to be spontaneous and stir up customer reactions with a weird bastardization of Improv Anywhere. See what I mean after the jump.

Operation Failure: Times Plans To Charge For One-Day Access To Online News

Posted: 17 Nov 2009 06:11 AM PST

Newspapers continue to struggle with finding an economically viable and sustainable business model for the production and distribution of news on the Web, and not a day passes without me reading about some idiotic statement about the future of online news or journalism made by someone in charge of something at one of the world’s beleaguered newspaper and/or magazine publishers.

Today we have James Harding, editor of News Corp-owned The Times, giving some insight into the publisher’s plans to generate revenue from the online edition of the paper to an audience of senior editors and executives at the Society of Editors conference in Essex, per PaidContent.

The plans? To charge for 24-hour access to the website of the daily newspaper in combination with a subscription-fee based model.

Seriously, Harding apparently said he believed charging for a full day’s access to online news you can – and will continue to be able to – essentially get for free elsewhere is a good idea. Pledging to “rewrite the economics of newspapers”, I can’t help but wonder how he wouldn’t expect such a stupid endeavor to rewrite nothing but the economics of The Times exclusively.

And not in a good way.

Paywall brouhaha aside, I figured everyone realized by now that people tend to cherry pick news content online based on their time and specific interests, and that there was quite some agreement around the fact that people vote with their wallets when given more individual choice (e.g. evolution of music album sales vs. single track sales). If you could choose between paying per single song stream rather than spend your money on 24-hour access to an entire album, which would it be?

Even if you still go out and buy the news as printed on actual paper and subsequently read every single article in it, how many people are like you, you reckon? And if you wanna read everything and everyone a daily newspaper has to offer anyway, why not just, erm, continue to buy the newspaper instead of paying for time-limited access to the digital version of it? Because the advertising alongside articles in the latter case is more interactive?

Despite clear indications of the contrary, Harding believes people will be prepared to pay for news, citing the 270 million books purchased annually in Britain as evidence of an "enormous appetite for the written word and for news". Except of course you usually pay for a book only once in your life and it (hopefully) stays relevant for the rest of it, while a newspaper by definition stops being a vehicle for actual news the very moment it gets printed.

At least Harding and I agree that micro-payments are not the way either – he claims newspapers should be “wary” of article-only economics because they could find themselves “writing a lot more about Britney Spears and a lot less about Tamils in northern Sri Lanka”.

An excerpt from the MediaGuardian article (see PC follow-up too):

"From spring of next year we will start charging for the digital edition of the Times. We're working on the exact pricing model, but we'd charge for a day's paper, for a 24-hour sign-up to the Times. We'll also establish a subscription price as well."

The paper's recent decision to end the free distribution of bulk copies was in line with this strategy, he said.

"We think it's good for us and good for business to stop encouraging the trickery and fakery of the ABCs. We want real sales to real customers – that's what our advertisers want too."

There’s not a doubt in my mind that that’s indeed what The Times wants and hopes for.

There’s even less doubt in my mind that this is not what readers want, though.

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CrunchBoard Jobs: TechCrunch, Eventbrite, Six Apart, and More!

Posted: 17 Nov 2009 06:10 AM PST

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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Bolstered By PayPal Partnership, Lottay Raises $475,000 From DFJ Frontier

Posted: 17 Nov 2009 06:10 AM PST

TechCrunch50 demopit startup Lottay, which lets you create an online gift that people can put money towards, has raised $475,000 in Series A funding from DFJ Frontier. The startup has also recruited former Evite exec Harry Lin as CEO.

Lottay, which uses PayPal’s newly released Adaptive Payments API, lets anyone create gift pages with detailed descriptions and pictures of a particular goal or gift and then friends can contribute to the site via PayPal.

The gift is sent instantly and securely, delivered as a surprise via email and Facebook. Givers can specify the gift they would like the money to buy – from a cup of coffee to a Caribbean cruise and beyond – while receivers are free to use the money to buy the intended gift or anything else they want.

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Come Up With Your Own Target Stock Price For Apple Or Google With Trefis

Posted: 17 Nov 2009 05:00 AM PST

Have you ever wanted to be a Wall Street analyst or come up with your own discounted cash flow model for a publicly traded company? Me neither, but I like the idea of tweaking a few variables in a company’s business model and seeing how that might change a its stock price. A new site launching today called Trefis lets you do just that.

Started by three engineers and math whizzes from MIT and Cornell (Manish Jhunjhunwala, Adam Donovan, and Cem Ozkaynak) who did time at McKinsey and UBS bank, Trefis breaks down a stock price by the contribution of a company’s major products and businesses. For instance, 51.3 percent of Apple’s stock price is attributed to the iPhone, 25.5 percent to the Macintosh, and only 7.7 percent to iTunes and iPhone apps. Don’t agree? You can change the underlying assumptions by simply dragging lines on charts forecasting the future price of the iPhone, its market share going out to 2016, and so forth.  Every time you change an assumption, the price target changes accordingly.

Underlying each stock price breakdown is a traditional discounted cash flow model created by Trefis.  At launch, the site has models for Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, HP, Netflix, Intel, the NEw York Times, and others.  You change the models ll you like by playing around with the underlying assumptions, then save and share your model.  The way the site is set up, you don’t need to create a model for every variable which might affect a stock.  If you have a strong opinion about the iPhone’s future market share and nothing else, you can just create a model about that component, along with comments explaining your reasoning.

There is a social element to Trefis in that you can follow other people, and they can follow you.  Over time, the founders of Trefis hope to be able to create a marketplace between investors and experts in particular fields, who might charge subscription fees for access to their models.

Trefis raised $550,000 in an angel round in November, 2008, during the depths of the financial crisis.  The roudn was led by Timothy Weller, CFO of Enernoc and former CFO of Akamai, Bob Johnson of the MIT corporation, and Semyon Dukach, former president of the MIT Blackjack team.

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Just The Facts: Factery Labs Trims The Web Down To The Important Bits

Posted: 17 Nov 2009 04:00 AM PST

When you go to search the web, is it because you want to read through a lengthy article related to a subject, or do you just want the facts that answer your question? Factery Labs, a new service that’s launching this morning, is hoping it’s the latter. Factery is a new search engine/API that uses advanced language processing to sift through content on the web to identify the most factual statements — in other words, it takes news articles and webpages and breaks them down into a handful of bulletpoints on the fly.

To give an idea of how Factery works, the company put together a simple search engine with a two-column view: one does a search for your query on Twitter and parses facts from any articles linked from those matches; the other column uses Yahoo’s BOSS engine to look at articles that are less time sensitive. In this context, Factery has its hits and misses. The site stumbled on “Danville, CA” (a city in the East Bay), yielding very few results for both Twitter and BOSS. Other times it fared very well: for “Arc de Triomphe” it generated quite a few interesting facts (you can see a few in the screenshot) though it sometime seemed to grab all of its Facts from either Wikipedia or Answers.com — it seems like it would have just been easier to read the Wikipedia article itself.

As for the Twitter integration, I found the results to be pretty poor for queries that weren’t about breaking news. The Arc de Triomphe example worked well for the Yahoo results, but the ‘facts’ from Twitter were useless, with non-sensical results like “The image is about 8×10″. But for queries related to breaking news it worked well. A search for “Leonid” (as in the meteor shower taking place this morning) showed very good results for both Twitter and Yahoo.

But the performance of this search engine isn’t especially important, because Factery isn’t setting out to be a search engine destination — at least, not yet. At this point the service is looking to offer its API to developers, which is where Factery’s real potential lies. One obvious use case is in Twitter clients. Any time someone shares a link on Twitter, there’s typically very little room for them to give it any context — oftentimes you’re left with a recommendation that you should check something out, with no idea if you’re really interested in the linked article. But if your Twitter client has Factery integrated, it can present a few bullets summarizing the article before you click it. One web client called Sobees already has it implemented, and the company says it is in talks with others. There are numerous other obvious uses for this on the web. For example, sites like Digg or Topsy could use this to do a better job describing linked articles to users.



Factery is making many of the same promises made by Powerset, the semantic search engine that was acquired by Microsoft in summer 2008. This is a tough problem, and at this point I’m not convinced Factery would garner much popularity as a standalone search engine for two reasons: for one, it isn’t consistent enough that I’d choose it over Google when I was in a bind. And two, the ‘fact engine’ idea is a big departure from the ‘link engines’ we’ve spent a decade using religiously, so it will take a while to get used to. That said, its future as an API looks bright, especially if it can land some of the bigger Twitter clients.

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Kodak Hooks Up With TweetPhoto For Realtime Photo Sharing Lovefest

Posted: 17 Nov 2009 03:05 AM PST

Imaging tech juggernaut Kodak is pretty keen on utilizing social media to connect with current and potential customers, boasting a presence on such sites as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.

The fact that it doesn’t own the @Kodak handle on Twitter hasn’t stopped them from being active on the popular micro-sharing service either, where marketers of the company and several employees from its international office locations share all sorts of Kodak related stuff with their followers.

Of course, it’s only natural for a company like Kodak to share pictures with the community, and if you look closely you’ll see most of the Kodak accounts on Twitter use TweetPhoto to do so (e.g. @JeffreyHayzlett, CMO of Kodak). That’s not a coincidence.

First launched back in April 2009, TweetPhoto has been steadily building out its service with multiple useful features and that has worked out well for the startup. According to Compete, TwitPic is still the leader of the pack, but the graph below shows TweetPhoto (blue line) is close to overtaking ImageShack’s Yfrog while TwitPic’s traffic appears to be in a downward trend for the past few months.

TweetPhoto is now the default photo sharing app on TweetDeck for iPhone, one of the most popular Twitter clients for the platform, and it is also integrated with many other mobile applications, including for Blackberry devices (already on Ubertwitter and coming later this week on SocialScope).

The service may look like a dog – a redesign is in the works – but they must clearly be doing something right.

Now the fledgling company is announcing that it has struck a partnership agreement with Kodak, under which the two companies intend to collaborate on initiatives focused around real-time photography and photo sharing on the web. Basically, that means they will be co-developing, testing and launching new products and services together, centered around the nature of the realtime web and image sharing.

The first lovechild of the two companies has already been born: meet the real-time Event Photo Stream, which essentially functions as an aggregator for both photos and tweets around a conversation using a given hashtag. The photo stream was originally released at the 140 Conference last month and will be demoed this week in Los Angeles at the Underground @ PDC event.

TweetPhoto has also let us know it has engaged in initial talks with angel and institutional investor about a potential seed funding round – the startup has been completely been bootstrapped to date.

Keep an eye on this one.

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With Klout Comes Influence: Measuring And Modifying List Authority on Twitter

Posted: 17 Nov 2009 03:05 AM PST

San Francisco-based Klout is no stranger to measuring influence on the Social Web. The company launched at SXSW Interactive 2009 to help Twitter users discover the voices that the world listens to (on Twitter anyway). Essentially, Klout measures influence at the topical level, sorting individuals who demonstrate the ability to drive action within respective social graphs when discussing particular subjects.

Today, Klout is announcing its most significant release to date. In addition to measuring authority on Twitter, the company is releasing a new, intelligent Twitter List engine that identifies and ranks the top 25 influencers for any topic of interest and produces a new, qualified, and ranked list as a result.

Measuring individual influence in Social Media is as coveted as it is elusive. While many tools claim to calculate authority, it is the definition of influence that requires clarification in order to grasp the relevance and differences of existing tools and services.

For the sake keeping this discussion on track, let's define influence. According to Merriam-Webster, influence is having the power or capacity to create an effect.

For example, here's list of the most influential people covering Zynga:

Prior to the official release of Lists, Twitter provided Klout with early access to its List APIs. As such, Klout was able to immediately address one of the early frustrations with Lists—the ability to modify a list started by someone else without having to recreate it. The new system now adds the means to introduce any list into Klout's analysis engine and instantly view the analytics of each person on each list. Users can then either follow that list as is or customize it using Klout's topical search and ranking feature to ensure that the list is inclusive of all necessary authorities.

Klout's ability to add context to a person's influence is critical for businesses that want to leverage influencers in spreading the word about their companies or products.

Klout's algorithm involves three sophisticated stages of semantic calculation. The first, described as "True Reach," measures influence between each and every relationship, evaluating the engaged audience versus total audience.

The service also employs a secondary metric known as "Amplification Probability," which documents the likelihood of a specific tweet spreading beyond the primary network through retweets as well as generating a response from the immediate audience. The service then examines the percentage of actual mentions or retweets shared by a particular audience as well as the percentage of the originating messages generated by a user's actions.

Finally, Klout factors the "Network Value," which measures the influence of those individuals who follow the original user and their propensity for sharing their content, which contributes to the first person’s overall authority.

In general, Klout's scores place a significant emphasis on the number of clicks a person drives through the links they share on Twitter, thus truly measuring actions associated with each update.

Twitter Lists impact not only influence, but also create an opportunity for a new layer of earned authority. Whether or not someone inspires measurable actions directly, the creation of highly accurate and meaningful lists is significant and also helpful to the Twitter community. The ability to identify and assemble proven authorities on relevant subjects allow followers to stay connected to verifiable and trustworthy sources and the voices, information and trends that in turn influence their activity. More importantly, Klout empowers followers to further modify lists to not only track activity, but also determine opportunities for future engagement and behavior tracking.

After all, influence is not in the eye of the beholder, it is in the ability to inspire action and also measure its effects.

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Droid Autofocus Fix Now Available: Clean The Lens

Posted: 17 Nov 2009 01:55 AM PST

One problem that has plagued a lot of Droid users is a malfunctioning autofocus. Take a close up picture of a barcode, or a high contrast image, or various other photo types, and the autofocus just doesn’t work properly. You can tell the phone has auto-focused when green frame lines are visible in the corners (another way is to view images after you’ve taken them and see if they are, cough, blurry).

A lot of people have complained about the problem, even our own guys over at MobileCrunch: “The main issue is with the auto-focusing system, primarily because it just doesn't work.” Here’s a video of the problem. More complaints here.

Most users where hoping for a software upgrade in the near future that would fix the problem. But now some users are happily finding another, somewhat lower-tech fix – cleaning the lens with a soft cloth: “This works and sounds crazy. I just read that if you clean the camera lens really good with a soft cloth you will get the green focus. I’ll give anything a try so I did it. My camera now focus’s all the time. Green focus on all my shots. Supposedly there is a little bit of oily film over the lens and when wiped clean it fixes the issue. give it a shot and report here. I can tell you it worked lol…4 shots, all green….”

Everyone on the thread is responding that the “fix” is working (“I just cleaned mine and i got 6 for 6 green shots great find”). A few are saying that the problem went away on its own: “I noticed the camera working before out of nowhere too. Not to say a clean lens isn’t better, but they must’ve done something.”

The software has definitely not been upgraded on the phone. Our guess is those users who suddenly found their camera working properly have simply inserted and removed the phone from their pocket enough times that the thin film on the lens has now been removed.

Does it work for you? Let us know. My Droid never had autofocus problems to begin with.

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MySpace Close To Acquiring iMeem

Posted: 16 Nov 2009 11:56 PM PST

MySpace is in late stage negotiations to acquire music streaming service iMeem, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. MySpace is on a bit of an acquisition spree – they acquired iLike, another music service, three months ago.

The iMeem acquisition isn’t yet finalized, we’ve heard from sources, and awaits approval from various stakeholders.

We don’t know the price of the acquisition, but this isn’t going to be a big win for investors. iMeem has raised at least $25 million (that we’ve been able to track) plus at least another $10 million in debt. But the difficultly in making a free streaming music service work as a business model forced them to make some hard decisions. Earlier this year they renegotiated label contracts and recapitalized the company, bringing in $6 million in fresh capital.

iMeem found a way to survive a few more months. But now they’re under the financial gun again, we’ve heard, and investors aren’t willing to put more capital into the company. But MySpace is stepping in to acquire the company.

What’s in it for MySpace – the acquisition of a seasoned team with lots of experience in music. Plus the iMeem and SNOCAP intellectual property. It’s not clear if the iMeem brand will live on, but iMeem users will certainly be welcome at MySpace, I’m sure.

This is another blow for free streaming music lovers. iMeem and MySpace Music were among the last free streaming services in the U.S. And MySpace Music, we’ve heard, will soon be forced to turn to subscriptions to manage costs.

iMeem was founded six years ago by then 23 year old Dalton Caldwell The first product was social networking via a client application that included file sharing, status messages, etc. It morphed into a music streaming service over time. According to Comscore, iMeem had 16 million unique visitors worldwide in September.

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Hallmark Expands Presence On Facebook With SocialCalendar Partnership

Posted: 16 Nov 2009 11:55 PM PST

Facebook application SocialCalendar is currently the go-to calendar for users to manage their social lives on the network with over 13 million total installs and about 2 million monthly active users. Greetings card empire Hallmark is hoping to ride on SocialCalendar’s coattails with the relaunch of the app as Hallmark SocialCalendar. Hallmark has made a significant investment in SocialCalendar, says founder Raj Lalwani, but declined to disclose the financial details.

SocialCalendar lets you plan events among Facebook friends, get movie showtimes and integrate events into a public calendar. Users can also import and get email reminders about events, birthdays and anniversaries and lets users buy virtual good icons as presents for friends and to mark events on calendars.

The newly branded Hallmark Social Calendar is debuting with four new products: Hallmark Wall Wishes, online e-cards, virtual gifts and calendar icons. Hallmark Wall Wishes are bite-size animated designs that can be combined with a personalized message and posted on a friend's Facebook Wall. All of the products can be purchased with Facebook credits. Virtual gifts will cost $0.50 cents or five credits and Wall Wishes will be $1.00 or ten Facebook credits. SocialCalendar is also one of ten applications on the social network accepting Facebook Credits.

Lalwani says that currently, the partnership exists for the Facebook app but there will be future integration of SocialCalendar with Hallmark’s iPhone app and possibly the website. As more brands flock to Facebook for a presence in the social media world, Hallmark wants in as well. It’s a wise investment, considering that Hallmark, which has a limited presence on Facebook at the moment, doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Automatically, Hallmark now has a built in network of 2 million active users.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Hallmark ends up acquiring SocialCalendar in the near future. Forbes made a similar move with digital photo site FlipGloss, which the media empire ended up acquiring last week.

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Google Backs Out Of NewsHour Debate With Open Book Alliance, And I Don’t Blame Them

Posted: 16 Nov 2009 10:48 PM PST

There was lots of news late last week about a proposed modification to the Google Books settlement agreement. Today there was going to be more news – a televised debate about Google Books on Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour. But, alas, Google backed out.

The details are of the fight are subtle, but all the hubub centers around what’s broadly called orphan works – where it’s hard to figure out the author/rights holder of a given work. Depending on how broadly you define orphan works, they make up between 2 million and 8 million of the 15 million or so books that have been published in the U.S. And while this is the apparent battleground, the real fight is over the whole Google Books scheme.

Google says they’re saving humanity, or something close. Which is probably a stretch. Their opponents, fueled by donations from Google competitors (among others), says Google wants to “establish a monopoly over digital content access and distribution; usurp Congress's role in setting copyright policy; lock writers into their unsought registry, stripping them of their individual contract rights; put library budgets and patron privacy at risk; and establish a dangerous precedent by abusing the class action process.”

As usual, Paul Carr sorts it all out for us. And while the details of a legal settlement on how the rights around digitized copies of old printed books aren’t exactly riveting, the players involved sure do make it a lot of fun to watch.

…Because the Open Book Alliance isn’t led by just anyone. No, one of the guys in charge over there is Gary Reback (pictured above). The man who many credit with taking down Microsoft. I interviewed Reback a few months ago, and Google Books was one of the topics we discussed.

Reback was set to go on NewsHour to debate Google Books with the engineer that does most of the talking for Google – Dan Clancy. Both are quite able to defend their positions intelligently. Or at least, they would have. Clancy never showed up, leaving Reback at the studio, alone.

Why did Google back out? According to Reback, Google told the show that they didn’t want to put an engineer against a lawyer on TV: “They said I was a lawyer but Clancy was not, so the debate would be unfair.” Reback says that’s ridiculous. “Clancy goes around peddling his story and appearing on panels with lawyers all the time,” he said (which is true). Reback also notes that “Google has hundreds of lawyers, dozens of whom have worked on this. Surely, they could find a lawyer to debate if they were afraid to put Clancy up” (which is also true).

For their part, Google says they aren’t interested in debating the legal niceties of Google Books on broadcast television. Gabriel Stricker, head of search communications at Google, says that they were told Harvard profession Robert Darnton would be their opponent on the debate (his thoughts on Google Books are here, and wow he desperately needs an editor), and that Reback was added at the last minute. When they found out about the change, Stricker says, it was too late to find an appropriate Google attorney as a replacement.

Stricker says Google wants to have a “philosophical and ideological conversation about Google Books” in front of a mainstream TV audience, not a legal debate. And he adds “the fact that Gary finds it necessary to try to create conflict surrounding the existence of the conversation is exactly why we would prefer not to have a conversation with him.”

And I don’t blame him. Reback is the last person I’d want to debate anything with on TV.

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Google’s Sample Chrome Extensions Are Already Working

Posted: 16 Nov 2009 10:31 PM PST

Screen shot 2009-11-16 at 10.13.04 PMAs we noted last night, Google looks to be on the verge of unleashing Chrome extension support in a major way. Not only does the home tab page on the new builds of Chromium (and the dev builds of Chrome) feature not-yet-turned-on links to what looks to be an extensions gallery, but there are plenty of references (and pictures) in the Chromium boards as to what Google is planning with extension support. And actually, Google’s own sample extensions have already started working with builds of Chromium.

As you can see in the screenshot, both the Google Mail Checker and (Chromium) BuildBot Monitor are up and running in a new build of Chromium. In fact, they’re even working on the latest builds of the dev version of Chrome for Mac, which just got updated tonight as well (they weren’t working with the previous build). The one other sample extension, “Subscribe in Feed Reader” doesn’t appear to be working yet on Macs, but images posted earlier by Google Operating System indicate that this is working on Chromium builds for Windows. To find all of these sample extensions, go here.

Installing these extensions is a breeze. You click the “Install” link, the file downloads, you click to run it, it asks if you’re sure you want to install the extension, you say “yes”, and you’re done. There is no need to restart Chrome/Chromium, they work right away.

The Google Mail Checker is particularly useful since it is badged with a number to show you exactly how many unread Gmail messages you have without having to have it open. Clicking on the icon launches Gmail in a new tab. Likewise, the Chromium BuildBot lets you know if there’s a newer version to download.

Of course, there have been a number of unofficial Chrome extensions that have worked for a while with the browser (Xmarks has a good one, for example), but it’s good to see some real ones rolling out, even if they are just samples for now. More importantly, neither seem to slow down the browser at all, which has become a major problem with Firefox extensions. Hopefully they can keep it that way.

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Xobni Updates Its UI, Gains Monetizable Extensions

Posted: 16 Nov 2009 10:03 PM PST

-1Tonight, Xobni is selectively allowing users to download a new version of its client with a number of UI enhancements. This launch coincides with Xobni’s new Salesforce extension. This is notable because it marks the launch of premium extensions for the first time, that give the company a new potential revenue stream.

Here are a few of the bigger UI changes: As you can see in the screenshot, there’s a new set of horizontal tabs to better filter content. Xobni is also now surfacing links exchanged between contacts for the first time — previously, there was just a way to do this for files exchanged. Also new, the Twitter extension element now includes a direct message (DM) option. LinkedIn support has been improved, as has some of the analytics.

There are a half dozen or so other enhancements to the client such as extensions now being resizable, and better drag and drop support. There’s also finally a way for users to easily open a folder that emails reside in. Basically, if you’re addicted to Xobni, there’s a lot of little tweaks (and some bigger ones) to try out.

But again, the big news is that Xobni is opening premium extensions to users — and not just business users, all Xobni users. If Xobni is able to effectively convince users to buy these (as well as get more beyond just Salesforce), it could be a decent new revenue stream for the company. Back in July, the company introduced ‘Xobni Plus’, the premium version of their product. Revenue streams can be addicting when turned on, it seems.

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YouTube Direct Gives News Orgs A Way To Accept User-Submitted Videos

Posted: 16 Nov 2009 09:00 PM PST

Love it or hate it, there’s no doubt that “citizen journalism” — the trend where ‘regular people’ record video, snap photos, and tweet live from breaking news events —  is quickly gaining steam. One of the biggest catalysts for the trend has been YouTube, which gives people an easy way to upload and share the video footage they shoot from the heat of the action. And while we’ve seen some media sites, like CNN’s iReport, attempt to take advantage of this user submitted content, many news sites haven’t found a good way to integrate it. Today, YouTube is launching a new application that looks to make this easy for all media organizations. Dubbed YouTube Direct, the new open source application will allow news orgs to integrate a video upload tool directly into their sites, where they can accept and review user uploaded footage.

The new tool will allow news organizations to screen video uploads as they come in, and use the best clips for their broadcasts and on their websites. Of course, news organizations will still be responsible for actually curating the content to ensure that it’s accurate, which is a task that will require additional manpower for the more popular news sites. All video content uploaded through these tools will be available on YouTube proper as well.

My biggest concern with this kind of reporting is always credibility — oftentimes you’ll come across videos on YouTube that seem like they’re relevant to breaking news, but are unable to determine who uploaded the clip. Fortunately, as an open source tool YouTube Direct allows organizations to customize their submission process. Hopefully the more credible ones will require (or at least encourage) uploaders to leave their contact information, so that fact checkers can follow up on their video reports to ensure their validity.

News organizations aren’t the only sites looking to accept user generated videos, either — YouTube Direct will work that any site that wants to upload video content, so we should probably expect to see some more creative uses in the future.

The feature is not live quite yet, but should be up by tomorrow morning.

Update: You can see an example implementation at 7NEWS of Boston (scroll towards the bottom of the page).
Image by quinn.anya

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Google Sites Become Prettier With Templates

Posted: 16 Nov 2009 08:56 PM PST

Google Sites, which launched a little under two years ago, have given businesses and consumers a way to quickly build their own websites with no HTML knowledge required, making it relatively easy for anyone without a technical background to build a simple website. Now, Google is making it infinitely easier for anyone to create sleek, attractive websites with new feature Templates.

For those that aren’t familiar with this product, Sites is the reincarnation of Jotspot, which Google acquired back in 2006 (though the two products look totally different). The product is Google’s easy-to-use website and wiki builder that’s widely used by businesses, though there’s a consumer option available.

Google Sites now has a fully stocked gallery of public templates that can be used by both consumers and businesses. Google has also created templates that are targeted for business use. Templates let you quickly start a new site with pre-built content, embedded gadgets, page payouts, navigation links, theming and more. And Businesses using Google Apps will also have a private area where employees can share proprietary site templates, which can be made via Sites’ recently launched API, with coworkers. This is actually useful to organizations, such as the Boy Scouts of America, which wants to share templates for chapters over the nation to launch as their platform.

Sites will be free for all Google Apps customers (both paid and free) as well as for consumers. While Sites’ templates can be easily used for collaborative workspaces like employee intranets, project tracking sites, team sites and employee profile pages.

Though templates isn’t a monumental additions to Google Sites, it is a complimentary, easy-to-use and free feature that’s included in Google Apps. The tie-in between the two only reinforces the strategy Google has of continuing to make Google Apps more appealing to businesses to perhaps take a significant bite out of Microsoft’s market share.

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Adobe Releases Flash Player 10.1 And AIR 2.0 – Both Include Multi-touch Support

Posted: 16 Nov 2009 07:55 PM PST

A mere week after Adobe Systems reported that it would be shedding nearly 700 employees or 9% of its total worldwide workforce, the company is releasing two highly anticipated new products that have been in the works for a while: Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0.

Both of the products are being released with a ‘beta’ label at the same time for all 3 major operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux) and x86-based netbooks, and are available now via Adobe Labs.

Update: sorry, we unintentionally – no, really – jumped the gun on this one. The links to the products are now live: Flash Player and AIR.

People who were still hoping for a beta release of the new Flash Player for mobile will be somewhat disappointed by the fact that they’ll have to exercise even more patience.

But first things first.

Both the new Flash Player for desktop browsers and the latest iteration of the rather popular cross-platform runtime environment for desktop apps were announced in the beginning of October and previewed at the recent Adobe MAX 2009 event (see video below). That means there aren’t too many surprises left with regards to what the upgraded versions bring, so we’ll just give you a quick run-down.

Both Adobe AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1:

- boast support for multi-touch and gestures (yes, you’d need a machine with a touch screen)
- include a global error handler, which enables devs to write a single handler to process all runtime errors
- (finally) support local microphone access, so you’ll no longer need to first pass through a server in order to record audio locally on both Flash Platform runtimes

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 now also leverages hardware decoding of H.264 video on Windows PCs, netbooks and mobile devices.

Want all that goodness on your mobile phone, too? Hold your horses: while a public beta of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for Palm webOS is expected later this year, Google Android support is expected no sooner than early 2010, and support for Blackberry smartphones will likely take even more time to be added.

Also new in Adobe AIR 2.0 and worthy of a mention:

- Native process API: enables apps to communicate with native applications on local machines
- Mass storage device detection: plug in your Flip camera or that USB stick you got as a gift at the last conference you attended, and AIR 2 applications will be able to detect them
- Open document API: with it, AIR apps can ‘ask’ the OS what the default application is associated with files and function accordingly
- Improved socket support: think AIR-powered local servers and P2P apps
- Speedier WebKit: updated version that includes a faster JavaScript engine and new HTML5/CSS3 capabilities

(Original image via Ryan Stewart)

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Bing Captures Almost 10 Percent Search Share In U.S.

Posted: 16 Nov 2009 07:37 PM PST

Remember all that talk about Bing starting to fizzle in September? Well it didn’t happen, and now October numbers and Bing gained another half a point to reach 9.9 percent market share of U.S. searches, according to comScore’s qSearch service. Five months after launch, Bing has steadily gained two points of market share.

And it is keeping the pressure on, with deals to index realtime data streams from both Twitter and Facebook (Google also has a deal with Twitter, but not Facebook), a deal with Wolfram Alpha for nutrition and diet data, and the constant rollout of new features such as better video search.

The biggest loser in the search wars, however, continues to be Yahoo as it awaits approval to hand over search to Bing.  In a single month, Yahoo’s U.S. search share dropped 0.8 percent to 18 percent, and is down 3 percent since the beginning of the year.  Meanwhile, Google seems unfazed, gaining another half point itself in October to finish with 65.4 percent share.

Bing’s progress is encouraging (someone needs to compete with Google in search), but so far all Bing has shown is that it can take share away from its future partner Yahoo. Bing has yet to put a ding in Google’s share.  Perhaps it needs to do something radical, like cut deals with major news and media sites for exclusive rights to index their content.  Otherwise it will just keep eating away at Yahoo’s slice of pie, which it’s already been promised anyway.

U.S. Core Search Share, September 2009 (Source: comScore qSearch)

Google 65.4% +0.5% m/m +2.4% ytd
Yahoo 18.0% -0.8% m/m -3.0% ytd
Microsoft 9.9% +0.5% m/m +1.4% ytd
Ask 3.9% 0.0% m/m +0.2% ytd
AOL 2.9% -0.1% m/m -1.0% ytd

(Table below via JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan. Click to enlarge.)

searchshareoct09

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Lost My Phone, Give Me Your Number!! Groups On Facebook Are A Spammer’s Paradise

Posted: 16 Nov 2009 07:34 PM PST

“LOST MY PHONE!!! GIVE ME YOUR DIGITS!”

Sound familiar? For years, many people who have recently lost their phones have turned to Facebook to reunite with their friends. But rather than use the site’s integrated phone directory (which is probably more comprehensive than you think) they take a different approach: a new Facebook group declaring that their address book is gone for good. These groups often wind up with over a dozen phone numbers from friends who leave their numbers on the group’s wall. Turns out, that’s often a bad idea — in some cases it’s incredibly easy for spammers to harvest these phone numbers from Facebook. All it takes is a little Google trickery.

Earlier today we received a tip showing just how easy this ‘hack’ was to execute, yielding many thousands (perhaps even millions) of phone numbers. I quickly alerted Facebook to the issue, hoping that they might do something to somehow fix it before I wrote anything. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen — Facebook’s view is that users shouldn’t be using these groups (at least not public ones) to share their phone numbers. And Google has cached many of these numbers, so it’s unlikely they could do much anyway. From a Facebook spokesman:

We certainly agree that people should be careful when posting their phone number to any public forum (and if they do decide to do it, they should probably delete the number once it's been used for the intended purpose).

The trick itself is very simple, yielding hundreds of thousands of Facebook groups, many of which have multiple phone numbers listed that are tied to each user’s real name. We’re not going to actually include the directions (giving spammers a slightly more difficult hurdle), but here’s what a page of results on Google looks like:



It’s also possible to do a query with similar results on Facebook itself, so this isn’t solely a problem with search engines. And this isn’t tied to spammers alone either — it’s easy to tweak the ‘hack’ to look for an individual’s phone number.

The issue here is that people are sharing private data in groups that have been marked public, rather than private groups that can only be viewed by group members. Facebook has obviously noticed that this is a trend, because if you try to create a group and include certain keywords (like “phone number”) the site will actually recommend that you use the Facebook phone number directory instead. But there are plenty of people who still do it anyway.

Thing is, the problem doesn’t just lie with user error — Facebook deserves some of the blame. When you create a group, you are presented with three options: ‘Open’, ‘Closed’, and ‘Secret’. People generally choose the first setting for these phone groups, because it means they don’t have to manually invite or approve every friend they have. Here’s how Facebook describes the ‘Open’ setting:

In this case it isn’t clear what exactly anyone really means. Are groups only exposed to other Facebook users? Or do search engines have access to the data too? Obviously, it’s the latter. Perhaps more important: the language doesn’t do anything to convey that sharing this information with the world might be a dumb idea. Thankfully, Facebook is planning to make this more clear:

While there are some differences between this information being available through a Facebook search by any of our 300 million users and a search on Google, the more important issue here is that users are choosing to create open groups for this purpose…. We're working on language changes that will hopefully make it even more clear how large an audience this is. In the meantime, we fully support you educating your readers on this point.

This all ties back to my concerns over the looming Facebook Privacy Fiasco that will strike once Facebook eventually flips the switch on its privacy overhaul and begins encouraging users to share their information with the world (don’t remember that? It was announced way back in July and is apparently still in the works). The fact of the matter is that Facebook has established trust with millions of users who believe it has at least some degree of privacy. Any time Facebook invites users to share information with the world, it needs to make it abundantly (perhaps even annoyingly) clear what implications that could have.

Thanks to Eric Fulton for the tip

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The Arms Race Between Teenagers And Parents Continues

Posted: 16 Nov 2009 07:12 PM PST

Back when I was a teenager my parents had a simple rule – I had to be home by midnight. There was a doozie of an exception, though. If I was drinking they didn’t want me to drive, so all I had to do was call home, tell them I was drinking and I could stay over at a friend’s house.

You can imagine that my parents pretty much thought I was an alcoholic in high school since twice a week like clockwork I called home at 11:45 pm to let them know I was too drunk to drive home and would be staying the night at wherever. Most of the time I wasn’t actually drinking, but who wants to go home at midnight? One time I remember calling home from Las Vegas (a four hour drive from Huntington Beach where I lived) to let them know I had had a couple of beers and would be staying at my friend John’s house down the street until morning (oh, right, like there’s anything you can do about it now, Mom).

Today things are different, though. And seeing iPhone apps like iCurfew just makes me shudder. Kids are still going to stay out late and not tell their parents what they’re up to. They just have to get way more creative about it, I guess. Because iCurfew tells your parents exactly where you’ve been and where you are now. You can send messages back and forth along with a handy Google map showing where the little troublemaker is right at that moment (probably outside a 7-11, trying to get someone to buy them beer).

Any kid worth his salt will try to figure out a way around this. My thought is to pay off someone to hold onto your phone and hang out at the movie theater messaging nice things to your parents while you are off doing God knows what. But I’m sure some enterprising young hacker to be can come up with a much more elegant solution.

But they better hurry, because adding a breathalyzer to this thing is probably next.

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Twitter UK Users Get Something No One Else Has: MMS Support

Posted: 16 Nov 2009 06:19 PM PST

Picture 3(2)Since Twitter’s inception, SMS (text messages) has been an important and popular way to use the service. For a while last year, it looked like that functionality was slowly going extinct as at one point, only the U.S. and India still had it enabled due to carrier fees. But this year, behind Twitter’s head of mobile, Kevin Thau, SMS has come back with a vengeance, restoring it in places like the UK, and striking new deals in India and Indonesia. And today brings the first of a new type of mobile deal: MMS support for Twitter in the UK.

The deal, announced on the Twitter blog by Thau, allows Orange UK Twitter users to send picture messages to a number (86444) to be posted to their tweet streams. The reason this works is because Orange UK runs a photo site called Snapshot, which will host the pictures and tweet out a link to them automatically.

Twitter notes that it is not charging anything extra for this service, and it should work just like SMS does — which is to say that standard carrier rates still apply for these messages. Still, it’s a pretty sweet deal to bring something new to UK Twitter users first. Hopefully something like this can be worked out in the rest of the world too, but seeing as it took AT&T several months to get MMS just working on the iPhone, I wouldn’t count on it.

It’s also worth noting that non-Orange UK customers can still use SMS for Twitter through Vodafone, O2, and, of course, Orange.

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RockYou Raises A Whopper – $50 Million In Venture Capital

Posted: 16 Nov 2009 05:48 PM PST

Social Network application developer and advertising platform RockYou has raised a whopping $50 million in a Series D round of financing from existing investor Softbank, we’ve confirmed with the company. RockYou, which launched in November 2005, has now raised $119 million in capital and has revenues rumored in the $30 million to $40 million/year range.

The company continues to develop and acquire social networking applications, but a big part of their business is serving advertising to their own as well as third party apps. And they are now taking a deep dive into the rather sensitive area of in-game offers. Last week the company spoke publicly about Scamville, saying that they would only offer Facebook compliant offers. When asked what types of offers that includes, the company said they’re looking at paying users to watch and respond to videos (like clips from upcoming movies), and getting them engaged with nonprofit groups like ASPCA and UNICEF.

There are 213 million monthly users of apps that RockYou owns directly or has advertising relationships with, says the company. And tomorrow they’ll launch a new virtual goods application on MySpace, called Gifts By RockYou, that lets users buy gifts for friends.

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Word Of The Year: An Unreliable Yet Fascinating Barometer Of Tech

Posted: 16 Nov 2009 05:30 PM PST

The New Oxford English Dictionary has announced that 2009's Word of the Year is unfriend. While it is perhaps not used as broadly as the newly-verbed friend, the latter is already in the dictionary, so they can't very well call it new. The best they can do is run with unfriend, which implies and extends the other. A worthy choice, I think, with "currency and potential longevity," as Oxford's Senior Lexicographer puts it. It set me thinking, though: how prescient have Word of the Year choices been? Have they infallibly documented the rise of tech in mainstream language and culture? —or are they a dusty collection of buzzwords, a history of folly and haste? And really, which of those is the truer depiction of the world of technology? I examined Oxford's WotY lists going back as far as their blog documents them, and consulted a few other word-tracking sources. Unsurprisingly, the popularity and continued pertinence of new words have been as unpredictable as the technologies they describe. Still, the world from a dictionary's perspective makes for a unique retrospective.

Twitter Finally Enables People Search For Third-Party Apps

Posted: 16 Nov 2009 05:09 PM PST

Screen shot 2009-11-16 at 5.10.40 PMPerhaps the most annoying thing about Twitter as a platform is that it’s nearly impossible to find people you may know through third party apps. Essentially, you have to know their Twitter handle already to find them, or rely on some other more convoluted method rather than just say, looking them up by name. Soon, that won’t be an issue any more.

As Twitter has posted in its Twitter API Announcements Google Group today, there is now a new Find People API. This will extend the “Find People” capabilities that exist on Twitter.com to third-party developers. Presumably, as with Find People on the site, you’ll be able to search by first names, last names, businesses, and brands, on top of usernames.

Seeing as most activity still comes through Twitter’s APIs, this is potentially big news as the service tries to get back on track in terms of growth after flatlining the past few months. Plus, as Twitter extends business and brand functionality in an attempt to monetize, this new search ability will also be key.

You can find out more about the Find People API here. As Twitter co-founder Evan Williams tweeted a few minutes ago, “Oh good, a find people API: http://bit.ly/dDvy8 If you wondered why you can’t search for people from Twitter apps, this was the missing link.” Indeed.

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