Monday, November 23, 2009

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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An Ecosystem Is Born: LinkedIn Opens Up API

Posted: 23 Nov 2009 08:55 AM PST

As rumors continue to swirl around LinkedIn’s possible IPO, the professional social network is steadily adding useful features that help transcend the platform’s technology into other applications.

LinkedIn recently launched two-way integration with Twitter and also rolled out a plug-in to pull in your LinkedIn contacts within Microsoft Outlook. And today, LinkedIn is opening up its API to start letting developers make applications that tap into LinkedIn’s social network.

While LinkedIn is releasing 11 different APIs, they fall into three distinct categories. First, developers will be able to let users easily access their information, profiles, connections and messages via oAuth login. The second functionality is to give users the ability to make actionable decisions about information, but letting them message their LinkedIn contacts, post updates, accept contacts and more. And the third piece of the puzzle is search. So developers will now be able to embed LinkedIn search in other applications. The social network’s search engine was re-launched last year and has done over one billion queries in this year alone.

Over the past year, LinkedIn has made select business development partnerships with technology companies for integrations, such as IBM, Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Twitter. While these partnerships created additional channels for LinkedIn’s platform, the opening up of the social network’s API is no doubt going to expand its presence across the web, perhaps representing a new level of growth for the social network.

LinkedIn has already tested the API with several developers and applications are already going to be launching in the near future. Twitter, MySpace and Facebook client TweetDeck will be integrated with LinkedIn in its next version. From the client, you’ll be able to see a stream of updates from your contacts, view profiles of contacts and comment and message contacts directly from TweetDeck. Posterous, Box.net, and Ribbit will all launch LinkedIn integrations in the near future as well.

LinkedIn’s VP of search and platform products, Adam Nash, told me that over the past year, the network has received 4,000 requests from developers to integrate LinkedIn with their applications. Nash says that this is the first step for LinkedIn to become an open ecosystem and there are future plans for additional APIs to be released down the line.

50 million users strong, LinkedIn could expand its already powerful growth with development of third-party applications. It’s a no-brainer for LinkedIn to open up its API. As Twitter’s platform has shown, an open ecosystem produces innovative and sometimes, extremely popular, products around a product. And it doesn’t hurt to have a loyal developer community as well.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Plato’s Forms Gets Seed Money To Open Dialogue Between Bloggers And Companies

Posted: 23 Nov 2009 08:00 AM PST

Plato-raphael-main_FullAs a blogger, sometimes the most difficult part of writing a post is contacting the company it is about. First, you either have to search your contact list, or the web, to figure out who to reach out to. And then you might not get a response right away. And finally, if you do get a response, it may include misdirection or less information than you’d like. All of these things led to the idea for a new startup, Plato’s Forms.

To be clear, the communication problems run the other way too. Sometimes companies would love a better way to talk to journalists before they publish a story. Plato’s Forms would offer that communication pipeline. The idea is to make it easier for the two sides to communicate on any given story, so the correct information is shared with the readers.

And this communication isn’t meant to be necessarily be filtered through a PR agency (unless the company wants it that way), it’s more about direct interaction. This is meant to cut out all possible noise and just get to the signal of what trying to be communicated, in a timely manner.

Plato’s Forms would charge the companies a subscription fee to use this service, but it would be free to journalists. And this isn’t just meant for big enterprises, they envision that startups would use a tool like this as well.

Since the product won’t launch until next Spring, co-founders Darryl Siry and Ben Metcalfe didn’t have a demo to show just yet. But I’m told that the method of communication will not just be another email or IM tool. And the core of the product is the communication platform, so it will work with a number of different applications, presumably.

The company’s name is derived from the philosopher Plato’s Theory of Forms, Siry tells us. Basically, the thought is that humans can’t understand the true nature of things, but can only interpret it. And different humans have different interpretations. Plato’s Forms (the company) wants to get those more in sync.

Plato’s Forms has just closed a seed round of funding to the tune of $545,000 (but the note has been left open to accept up to $750,000). The round was led by a group of angels (including Sifry) and Zelkova VC.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Apple And Android Now Make Up 75 Percent Of U.S. Smartphone Web Traffic

Posted: 23 Nov 2009 07:49 AM PST

When it comes to the mobile Web, increasingly there are only two mobile platforms which matter: Apple and Android. According to AdMob’s October, 2009 mobile metrics report, the iPhone/iPod Touch and Android phones accounted for 75 percent of mobile Web traffic in the U.S., as measured by all the mobile ad requests it tracks. That number is up from a combined 65 percent in September, 2009.

The iPhone is miles ahead of everyone else, but Android is quickly rising as a strong second. While Android phones managed to increase their share from 17 percent in September, 2009 to 20 percent in October, 2009, the iPhone and iPod Touch gained even more, going from 48 percent to 55 percent share. Meanwhile, during that same month the Blackberry ’s mobile Web traffic share went down from 14 percent to 12 percent, and Palm’s webOS shrank from 10 percent to 5 percent (Ouch).

On a global basis, the iPhone OS now accounts for 50 percent of all mobile traffic, up from 43 percent the month before. Android has an 11 percent global share, which makes it third globally after Nokia/Symbian’s 25 percent share. The U.S. makes up 49 percent of all the mobile Web traffic, according to AdMob’s stats. Thus strength in the U.S. translates to strength in the worldwide numbers.

As major new carriers come onboard, the numbers can shift dramatically. Since Verizon launched the Droid two weeks ago, that single device now makes up 24 percent of all Android mobile Web traffic. The HTC Dream, which is the oldest Android device, is the only one with more, at 36 percent of Android traffic. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Droid passes that within the next two weeks.

AdMob was recently acquired by Google for $750 million. Hopefully, it will continue to share this mobile market share data in the future.

CrunchBase Information
iPhone
Android
Information provided by CrunchBase

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MOG All Access Music Service: Watch The Video Now, Sign Up On December 2

Posted: 23 Nov 2009 06:55 AM PST

MOG has set a launch date for its All Access music streaming service: December 2. That’s when you’ll be able to sign up for the hands down best music streaming service on the web. If you’re willing to pay $5/month, that is.

Is it worth it? I’m definitely starting to think so. Partially because of the quality of the product (more on that below), and partially because the free streaming music business model seems to be falling apart. Spotify is delaying U.S. launch, MySpace may move to a subscription service, and the iMeem service, recently acquired by MySpace, may not even be around for much longer. By this time next year there may not be any legal free streaming services left.

But even with free streaming competitors, MOG may be worth it. I’ve been testing the service for a couple of weeks and it is a significantly better user experience than any other music service I’ve tried, including Spotify, MySpace Music and Pandora.

It’s just incredibly easy to search for and discover music, add it to playlists or your library, and start listening.

MOG has released a short video showing the full service (until now we’ve just had two teasers).

You can see from the video how easy it is to search for artists, albums or songs, and add them to your library or to playlists. Based on this alone MOG is better than MySpace Music, which continues to try to slow down users – the more songs they stream, the more MySpace has to pay. MOG doesn’t have that problem because they pay the labels a set fee per user every month.

But MOG also has another killer feature – MOG Radio. The video shows how it works. Type in any artist and start to listen to songs just from that artist. use the slider to add in more similar artists. Move it all the way to the right and you basically have Pandora. But the ability to just listen to music from one artist is a really compelling product. I’d consider paying $5/month just for this feature alone.

I also like MOG’s social features. You can search for playlists created by other users, or go to user profile pages to see what music they’ve been listening to. If you like their taste, you can follow them and get updates on new music they are playing.

You can see all of these features in the overview video embedded above. Watch that video and then decide: would you pay $5/month for MOG All Access? Let us know in the comments.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Monday Giveaway: Viper SmartStart iPhone Kit

Posted: 23 Nov 2009 06:36 AM PST

Using the Gas Cubby iPhone app to increase your fuel economy and keep your vehicle properly maintained can save you money and help the environment... but, if you've learned anything from CrunchGear, it's that saving money isn't much fun unless you can blow it on something cool and completely over the top. Well, one lucky CrunchGear reader gets to have their cake and eat it too. App Cubby, the developer of Gas Cubby, is giving away a Viper SmartStart kit to one lucky CrunchGear reader. If you own a car and an iPhone, surely you've heard about and have been lusting after Viper's new technology that allows you to lock/unlock, open the trunk, and even start your car right from your iPhone.

WinBuyer Secures $6.9M For App That Helps Online Retailers Make More Money

Posted: 23 Nov 2009 06:21 AM PST

WinBuyer has just announced that it has raised institutional funding for the first time, to the tune of $6.9 million, in a Series A round led by Pitango Venture Capital and joined by Giza Venture Capital.

The young Israeli company markets a so-called Onsite Comparative Pricing (OCP) application, which aims to help Internet retailers integrate comparison shopping elements straight into their own product pages.

The idea is that visitors of ecommerce websites would be less inclined to search the Web for more information and comparative pricing for products they intend to buy when the online retailer actually shows all that information on his own website prior to purchase, including pricing of and links to his competitors. Evidently, retailers can opt to show only information for merchants who sell the same product at a higher price point.

WinBuyer says this strategy helps lift sales because it removes the need for potential buyers to scour the net for more information, thus making the conversion process swifter. The company claims the OCP app also helps e-tailers keep customers coming back to them since it turns their product information pages into one-stop shops.

WinBuyer gets pricing and other information for products directly from hundreds of merchants and dozens of comparative shopping partners such as Shopping.com, Shopzilla and PriceGrabber.

Installation of the Javascript application is free and the tool includes a feature for AB testing, which enables online retailers to try out various integrations and custom placements on their websites before rolling it out in full. WinBuyer makes money from PPC revenue sharing.

Earlier this month, the company struck a partnership agreement with Overstock.com, which will integrate WinBuyer’s OCP application into their product detail pages (for an example page, go to this product page on the US site and look at the top right section).

A couple of downsides from what I can gather: the app is only available for English-language sites at this moment, and since the application isn’t capable of showing comparative shipping and handling costs for every online retailer out there, savvy shoppers are still better off researching detailed pricing on other retailers’ website to make sure they’re getting the best bang for their buck.

CrunchBase Information
Pitango Venture Capital
Giza Venture Capital
Information provided by CrunchBase

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China Mobile starts selling Dell Mini 3i

Posted: 23 Nov 2009 06:14 AM PST

Dost thou desire an Android phone in Red Passion or Oiled Bronze? Begin thy journey, brave Sir Knight, to China where you will be able to purchase the Dell Mini 3i with 3.5-inch touchscreen for a few coins of the realm. The Mini 3i, as you'll recall, is Dell's first smartphone in almost half a decade and runs the Ophone platform, an Android-based system that will eventually brand most of China Mobile's phones.

Chrome OS And The Microsoft Squeeze

Posted: 23 Nov 2009 04:02 AM PST

mssqueeNow that we’ve all actually seen Chrome OS, the immediate reaction that most are jumping to is that it won’t be killing Windows anytime soon. Obviously. But that doesn’t mean it won’t hurt Microsoft, and apply long-term pressure to the dominant OS. In fact, Google’s positioning for Chrome OS reads like a page out of Apple’s playbook, only from the opposite direction.

Google is aiming Chrome OS right at the bottom of the market. That is to say, cheap computers, netbooks. Apple, of course, takes the opposite approach, targeting the high end of the market with their high-quality and high-margin machines. If Google is successful with its Chrome OS netbooks (let’s call them ChromeBooks), what we could see is the squeezing of Microsoft, an idea I first laid out a month ago. With attacks from the top and bottom, Windows will be relegated to the middle. And ultimately, if Google has its way, marginalized.

There are a number of problems with being in the middle. First and foremost, the middle is average, boring, bland, etc. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, unless you’re a company like Microsoft with an image problem. After years of taking hits, Microsoft is trying to revamp its image with expensive ads, new stores, and a new OS, among other things. But the middle is hard to sell. It’s neither the cheapest nor the best. It’s the thing people have to settle on.

Microsoft, of course, is also in the netbook space with Windows XP and now Windows 7. But after being a sector on fire for much of the year, signs point to a slowdown in sales. While you might think that would be bad news for both Microsoft and Google, Google’s ChromeBooks are really a new category altogether. As Google said during its event, they’re working with specific hardware manufacturers to make machines set to a certain standard. This means that they’ll have larger keyboards and trackpads than most netbooks, among other things. In other words, they’ll be better, from a hardware perspective, than most netbooks.

And they potentially serve a different purpose. A couple days ago, Daring Fireball wondered if the real key for Chrome OS (and netbooks) may be to serve as your secondary computer. But there’s really no need to wonder, Google’s VP of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, said as much during the Q&A session. “This will be a secondary device. It may be a primary device in terms of time spent on it, but we expect people to have other computers too,” he said when asked about more powerful editing software not being able to run on Chrome OS.

People aren’t buying $300 computers with the expectation of running Photoshop (which costs $700) on them. They are buying them mainly to get an extremely portable machine that can surf the web. Google’s promise with Chrome OS is the fastest way to do that.

And that’s what a lot of critics are missing (but we’ve been saying since July). Google isn’t trying to compete with a standard OS, they’re trying to help users realize that for the majority of computing they do, they don’t need one in the first place. Maybe you have a desktop computer at home for those few tasks that need dedicated native applications, and maybe that runs Windows or maybe that runs OS X. But maybe the machine that you use most of the time is your cheap, fast ChromeBook.

Though they get criticized a lot for not making a netbook, Apple also competes in this highly mobile space — their “netbook” is the iPhone. While unlike Chrome OS, the iPhone can run native applications, it speaks to a similar point: Increasingly, for most of your computing, you don’t need Windows.

The point is that consumer computing is shifting to a place where speed and mobility are paramount. The reason people are so excited about products like the CrunchPad and Apple’s tablet isn’t because they can run Photoshop — they can’t — it’s because they offer an easy way to use the Internet. Same thing with the iPhone. Same thing with Android phones. And it will be the same thing with Chrome OS and the ChromeBooks.

The difference is that these ChromeBooks will be the first devices that actually look like the traditional computers we’re used to. They will look like they could be Windows machines, but they won’t be. That’s a powerful stereotype to break. And if Google breaks that at the bottom of the market, with Apple continuing to break it at the top of the market, Microsoft will begin to feel squeezed.

CrunchBase Information
Google Chrome OS
Windows
Apple
Information provided by CrunchBase

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TechCrunch Homepage Design Gets Deconstructed By ZURB

Posted: 23 Nov 2009 03:59 AM PST

ZURB, a well-regarded interaction design and strategy firm in the San Francisco Bay Area that has in the past done work for eBay, Facebook, Yahoo, Zazzle and many other familiar names, regularly publishes insightful design deconstruction posts for homepages of some of the most popular websites on the net, using its very own Notable app (also see our review of the website feedback tool).

After taking a critical look at CNN.com, MSN.com and Twitter.com, the ZURB team has recently shined its light on TechCrunch.com. And we took notice.

The best way to check out what ZURB had to say about our homepage design – which has been live since Summer 2008 when we did a major redesign for the second time – is to visit this full-page screenshot, where you can hover over their notes to see what feedback the team had to give.

Apart from the visual aspect, the Notable page also allows you to check out the code, content and SEO elements of a website, and you can download the whole critique as a PDF straight from the app without the need to register.

Just for the record, we agree with nearly everything the ZURB team had to say about our homepage design, both the good and the bad. No design is perfect, but we like to think we’ve struck a good balance between making it as easy as possible for readers to check out our content, while giving advertisers valuable real estate that doesn’t interfere with the editorial.

We’re committed to making the experience even better, so note that we are currently working on an entirely new template and design for TechCrunch.

Stay tuned, and in the meantime, do let us know what you think about the current design.

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Web-Based Productivity Suite Zoho Launches Human Resources Application Zoho Recruit

Posted: 23 Nov 2009 03:55 AM PST

Web-based productivity suite Zoho is launching a new product today, Zoho Recruit. A niche product, Zoho Recruit, is an application designed to help HR Departments and staffing agencies management recruitment.

Zoho Recruit, which is an offshoot of Zoho People’s recruitment technology, is an Applicant Tracking System that helps staffing agencies and recruiting departments track job openings, resumes, candidates and contacts. The application will source candidates by gathering resumes from multiple sources on the web and includes a technology that will weed out the candidates.

The application will include a database that manages resumes and track potential candidates throughout the interviewing process. You can also schedule interviews, send automatic e-mail notifications and log candidate activities and notes.

Zoho Recruit will also power a platform to create and publish job openings. The app includes an activity stream to let users stay on tops of new within Zoho Recruit and is fully customizable. Zoho Recruit is based on a freemium model, with the more feature-rich platform priced at $12/per user/per month.

Zoho continues to innovate and iterate by launching new products and add-ons to its existing offerings. Most recently, the startup launched Zoho Discussions, a online forum tool for businesses. Over the past two years, Zohos has added support for Sharepoint, mobile, Google and Yahoo IDs and group sharing. Zoho knows that it will have to fight an uphill battle to keep users from flocking to Google Apps and soon Microsoft’s Web-based version of Microsoft 2010. Although Zoho ’s the underdog, the startup’s strategy may be paying off—the startup has reached 2 million users in just 4 years. And the startup is on Microsoft’s radar, with a Microsoft exec calling of Zoho as a competitor that offered “fake Office capabilities.”

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Facebook Soon To Enable You To Comment On Status Updates Via E-mail

Posted: 23 Nov 2009 02:21 AM PST

Annoyed because you have to leave your e-mail inbox every time you would like to respond to someone else’s Facebook status update? Good news: the social network is testing a brand new feature that will enable you to comment on threads by e-mail.

It appears as if the new feature is currently being tested only with a very small subset of users; we haven’t seen it at the bottom of any Facebook notification e-mails yet and there are only about 4 tweets from the past couple of days mentioning the new feature.

We asked the company about the apparent bucket test, and they’ve acknowledged that they’ve started roling out the feature again for a small percentage of users after running similar brief tests a couple of weeks ago and making some improvements.

Facebook hasn’t provided more information (e.g. how they plan to prevent autoresponder messages from being posted to Walls all the time) but said it was hoping to release the new feature to all of its users in the coming weeks.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Spotify Arrives On Nokia’s Symbian, Sony Ericsson And Samsung Platforms

Posted: 23 Nov 2009 01:29 AM PST

symbian4The much hyped music streaming service Spotify has extended its mobile reach significantly today with the release of an app for phones powered by the Nokia-led Symbian operating system.

This follows earlier clients for both iPhone and Android and means that the service will now be accessible on millions more handsets from Nokia, obviously, along with Sony Ericsson and Samsung which also support the platform.

Unfortunately, for once users in the U.S. will have to wait longer as Spotify has delayed the launch of it’s service there until the new year.

Phones powered by Symbian far outstrip the iPhone and Android (for now) in Europe where Spotify is currently available. Today’s release should see the company strike further carrier deals or at least extend their current offering with mobile network 3, leading to more ‘back door’ or ‘feels like free’ premium subscriptions.

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Phil Schiller Grants Interview About Apple’s App Store, Claims Devs Actually Like Approval Process

Posted: 23 Nov 2009 01:15 AM PST

Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing, is back on his one-man crusade to defend the App Store from the latest wave of criticism pointed in its direction.

This time, Apple is having to battle the news of Facebook’s all-star developer Joe Hewitt quitting the platform, more high profile app rejections, and the rise of Android as an increasingly viable alternative to the iPhone. Schiller has granted BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl what the publication says is his first “wide-ranging interview on the matter”. Unfortunately, Schiller doesn’t really say anything to quell the growing unrest in the developer community — instead, he’s offered some finely-tuned PR-speak that will placate the vast majority of iPhone users, who are only vaguely aware of the App Store controversies and just need a reminder that Apple is still one of the good guys. But it may only make developers angrier.

The article kicks off with quotes from Hewitt’s recent denunciation of the App Store’s approval process, which he says sets a “horrible precedent for other software platforms” (an assertion I wholeheartedly agree with). The article then transitions into Schiller’s response to the complaints that are frequently levied against the App Store.

None of Schiller’s defenses for the approval process are surprising: he says that Apple has built a store that people can trust, and that between the downloading, billing, and transfering to the phone “it all just works.” Schiller also points out the App Store’s ability to offer parental controls because screeners can categorize apps into different age ratings. Of course, he doesn’t mention that Apple also likes keeping control over the platform because it lets them block anything that could potentially compete with its own products.

As he’s done before, Schiller did admit to some of the App Store’s faults. Hesseldahl asked about the recent Rogue Amoeba debacle, which saw the popular Mac developer’s app rejected because it used some icons that Apple objected to for clearly ridiculous reasons apparently having to do with copyright. Schiller didn’t comment on that case in particular, but addressed some of Apple’s issues with copyright: “We need to delineate something that might confuse the customer and be an inappropriate use of a trademark from something that’s just referring to a product for the sake of compatibility… We’re trying to learn and expand the rules to make it fair for everyone”. The article then notes that Rogue Amoeba will be resubmitting its application with its original icons, presumably with the understanding that it will be approved.

But to developers who have been dealing with the frustrations of Apple’s platform for many months, none of this is particularly novel or encouraging. Schiller has previously stepped in to fix highly publicized App Store blunders, but nothing changes for the vast majority of developers. Likewise, Schiller has previously said that Apple is working on improving the App Store’s submission process, and while I honestly do think they’re making some improvements, their lack of transparency makes it nearly impossible to tell how much progress has been made. And the steady stream of App Store horror stories isn’t showing any signs of letting up.

Even worse, Schiller implies in the interview that developers actually like the approval process:

Most are approved and some are sent back to the developer. In about 90% of those cases, Apple requests technical fixes—usually for bugs in the software or because something doesn’t work as expected, Schiller says. Developers are generally glad to have this safety net because usually Apple’s review process finds problems they actually want to fix, he says.

This is a laughable statement. Developers may like the concept of having an external QA safety net that helps catch bugs, but not one that’s incredibly inconsistent and penalizes them with extended delays and notoriously bad communication.

Schiller’s interview highlights how badly Apple is underestimating the negative impact the App Store is having on its reputation in the developer community, as Paul Graham recently detailed. Apple may not care about losing a handful of developers to Android, but their shortsighted strategy of answering developer complaints with PR spin rather than transparency and action may hurt them in the long run.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Textbook Rental Market Heats Up: BookRenter Raises $6M Series A

Posted: 22 Nov 2009 10:52 PM PST

Earlier this month college textbook rental company Chegg raised $112M as part of a combined Series D and debt round, bringing the total raised by the company to a massive $144M. Competitor BookRenter will tomorrow announce a Series A round of $6M, raised from Storm Ventures and Adams Capital Management. BookRenter has only raised a fraction of the capital of their competitor Chegg, but the company claims that it is growing at over 300 percent, year-over-year. The companies are loading their war-chests to fight over a fiercely competitive college textbook rental market.

Both Chegg and BookRenter work on a similar principal – students are able to save money by loaning textbooks for a fixed duration, usually a semester, and end up spending only the fraction of the cost of outright purchases. Textbooks are expensive, and often have a limited lifespan – these attributes, combined with a market of poor students looking to save a few dollars, have resulted in the textbook rental market exploding in recent years.

BookRenter claims a competitive advantage over Chegg and others by offering more flexible loan schedules and faster delivery (they offer next-day delivery on many titles, and use UPS). The system is simple: a student searches for a book on the website using a title or ISBN, and places an order by selecting a rental period and delivery option. The book(s) are delivered complete with return UPS labels for easy shipping.

BookRenter was founded in 2008, and is based in Campbell, California. The new round of funding to be announced tomorrow is the first significant round of financing that the company has raised. There are not many points in the market where BookRenter is able to squeeze out significant differentiation – for college students, it comes down to size of catalog, delivery speed and price. Chegg has raised enough capital to fund a large-scale, low-margin market grab. Despite being a recent entrant in the market and having a very significant and heavily-capitalized competitor in Chegg, BookRenter has managed to sprout up and see strong growth. One of these companies is likely to become the Netflix of textbook rentals.

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Bing Tries To Buy The News

Posted: 22 Nov 2009 09:29 PM PST

payoffcash

Rupert Murdoch is pointing a gun to Google’s head, and Microsoft is helping him pull back the trigger. For the past few weeks, Murdoch and his officers at News Corp. have been very vocal about their distaste for Google and their desire to lead other media companies in a boycott of sorts.

Murdoch keeps threatening to stop letting Google index the WSJ.com and his other media sites, and wants other news sites to join him in this self-imposed silence. The folks at Microsoft’s Bing think this is a great idea. Not only that, but the FT reports that Microsoft is in fact in discussions with News Corp. and other publishers about the possibility of paying them to remove their sites from Google’s search index. This report comes on the heels of a meeting in Europe where Bing dangled the prospect of premium spots in search results to publishers and outright money for search R&D.

Microsoft is not afraid to buy search market share, which is what it’s doing with the Yahoo search deal and even its Cashback program. But with these latest talks, it is literally trying to buy the news, or at least exclusive access to the news.

Bing can’t buy all the news, it can only buy certain brands. If Bing can somehow become the only place you can find news results and working links to the Wall Street Journal and other top papers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times, for instance, that would be a big reason to switch for a lot of folks. But it’s not clear how much Bing would have to pay the news companies of the world for them to give up all the traffic Google sends them in return for a fraction of that traffic and some cash.

Even Google couldn’t afford to strike such deals. Says Murdoch, of Google, “If they were to pay everybody for everything they took from every newspaper in the world, and every magazine, they wouldn’t have any profits left.”

In order to actually make a dent in Google’s market share, Bing would have to pay such exorbitant sums to so many different news companies that it would be difficult to recoup its investment. Bing certainly get some marketing buzz out of any such move, but that’s about it.

The big problem with a search engine trying to buy market share by buying parts of the news is that information spreads so quickly these days, exclusives last about 30 seconds. That information will end up on a site that is indexed by Google. Or the same news will be broken by someone else on the Web before the WSJ.com even gets to it.

Exclusive indexing goes against the Web’s inherent openness. Companies that try to curtail that openness don’t last long on the Web.

Image via PhotoXpress.

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Backstage Footage With Twitter COO Dick Costolo

Posted: 22 Nov 2009 08:46 PM PST

We had a great interview with Twitter COO Dick Costolo at the Real-Time CrunchUp on Friday. Costolo always gives the audience a few good nuggets of news and handles the more difficult questions with ease. He’s a pro.

After the conference I reviewed some of the backstage footage we shot of Costolo before he went on stage for the formal interview. We ask lots of great questions – about Twitter’s revenue, business model, details of the search deals, chances of getting bought next year, and the lovely bathrooms they have at the office. He manages to entertain the entire TechCrunch editorial staff while revealing absolutely nothing. We even slip in a question about Feedburner (Costolo cofounded the company and sold it to Google in 2007) at the end, but sadly we ran out of tape before he answered.

One thing Costolo does clear up – even though I’ve known him for five years now, I apparently have been mispronouncing his name the whole time.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Roku Announces Roku Channel Store, Adds Facebook and Pandora (And Maybe Porn!)

Posted: 22 Nov 2009 05:59 PM PST

Your Roku box just got a whole lot more interesting. Roku, if you remember, makes the Roku player, a small device that sits next to your TV and plays Netflix, Amazon Video, and MLB selections. Roku has just added ten new channels to that line-up and built a fascinating platform for adding more down the line. The current channels will include: blip.tv, Facebook Photos, Flickr, FrameChannel, Mediafly, MobileTribe, Motionbox, Pandora, Revision3 and TWiT. More channels will be available here shortly.

CrunchGear Week in Review: New Milkman Edition

Posted: 22 Nov 2009 01:00 PM PST

Sunday Giveaway: A Movie Wedge For You, A Movie Wedge For Me!

Posted: 22 Nov 2009 11:54 AM PST

If you ever sit next to me on a plane you will notice that I have a small ritual that I prepare every time I reach cruising altitude. I begin by pulling out my iPod touch and then my Movie Wedge. The Movie Wedge is a little bean bag with a lip for holding up MP3 and video players. That's it. It's amazingly great. We talked about the Movie Wedge a while back and we're happy to report that they've decided to give us 10 to give away to all and sundry.

NSFW: Give me ad-free conversations, or give me death (please RT)

Posted: 22 Nov 2009 10:00 AM PST

sliimyYesterday I spent the day at TechCrunch’s ‘Real Time Crunch-up’. This despite having no idea what a ‘Crunch-up’ actually is.

The important thing is that Erick had asked me to help moderate his panel about marketing within ‘real-time streams’, which is a subject close to my heart. So close in fact, that had he asked me to help moderate a panel about child rape and its place in the public school system I couldn’t have been keener to weigh in.

I’ll get back to my own contribution in a moment, but first, as a courtesy to my paymasters, I should probably relate a few of my  ‘key learnings’ from the event.

1) There is such a thing as a ‘key learning’, a phrase which I heard at least three times during the day, and which I gather is what an ‘opinion’ becomes when spoken by an idiot.

2) Gabe Rivera from TechMeme loves bookmarks. How else to explain his glee when he discovered that each of the four million free copies of Marc Benioff’s ‘Salesforce.com Playbook‘ scattered about the conference contained a little strip of cardboard sponsored by Amazon. “Cool. I can use these for my other books,” he exclaimed, removing each bookmark and pocketing it before carefully placing the books back on the table.

3) Even with a back-cover quote from Neil Young, you apparently can’t give away Marc Benioff’s ‘Salesforce.com Playbook‘. At the start of the day, there were towering piles of the thing on every surface – one free for every attendee. By the end of the day: towering piles of the thing on every surface, ready to be returned to the publisher. Perhaps Benioff should have taken a leaf out of his own playbook: Play #42 reads “Don’t Dis Your Product With A Discount”, with Benioff explaining that “I wouldn’t even give my own grandmother a discount.”  Yet apparently he wouldn’t think twice about giving the whole book away to a room full of the only people who are likely to actually buy the thing. (My book didn’t win its Congressional Medal Of Honor by being given away free).

4) At TechCrunch conferences, even the food is patriotic. After the American flag next to the judges table debacle at TechCrunch50, I was worried that Arrington might shy away from overt displays of Americanness at future events. Not so – inside the meal box provided to each attendee was a disposable handwipe, packaged inside a little stars and stripes pouch. To reaffirm my love of this country, I stuck one of the pouches to the front of the podium on the stage.

5) Dogs frighten room service waiters, but love Gabe Rivera from Techmeme.

And so to my panel – and to be honest, I was a little anxious at the thought of it given that my fellow participants were Erick and five marketing experts – Sean Rad of Ad.ly, Ryan Amos of DailyBooth, Jesse Engle of CoTweet, Philip Nelson of NewTek and Robin Bechtel who acts as ‘digital agent’ to Britney Spears amongst others.

Erick was on my side, of course, but even he and I have a checkered history, due in large part to the fact that I keep finding excuses to bring up his Last.fm story. Keen to smooth things over beforehand, I went via CBS’s San Francisco HQ on my way to the conference and picked up a Last.fm tshirt for him. You know, as a peace offering. He didn’t wear it, but I know he appreciated the gesture. (”You fucker,” he said, which I gather is New York for “thank you.”)

Even with Erick placated, I was still terrified by the marketers. I’m an editorial person and so these are not My People – in fact I’m obliged to close my ears whenever the subject of monetizing my words is raised. What I do is Good and Pure; what they do is Bad and Dirty.

Worse still, these weren’t even the usual kind of marketers – people who sell banners and display ads and the like – but rather a new breed who made their living by trying to slip commercial messages into our every day interactions. Take Bechtel – her most recent professional triumph was convincing a gaggle of Perez’ Hilton’s celebrity friends – Lady Gaga, Katy Perry et al – to promote a new Warner recording artist by Tweeting the words “Who is Sliimy?” to their armies of followers. Sure enough, within a few hours, the question made it to the top of the trending topics list, presumably resulting in a whole load of record sales for Sliimy. To Bechtel this is a great result, whereas to my mind the idea of one Warner artist whoring and shilling for another that they hadn’t even heard of is just about the most hideous abuse of fandom since Jordy Chandler.

(Sliimy, by the way, is pronounced ‘Slimmy’ rather than the more appropriate ‘Slimy’. Also, he’s French, famous, and entirely irrelevant to the wider digital conversation. I expect he’ll be at Le Web.)

And then there was Ad.ly’s Sean Rad. If you’re not familiar with Ad.ly’s product, then put a pencil between your teeth and read this profile of them by the NYT’s Brad Stone. I quote… “Tuesday was another typical day for John Chow, blogger and Internet entrepreneur in Vancouver, British Columbia. Mr. Chow treated his 50,000 Twitter followers to a photograph of his lunch (barbecued chicken and French fries), discussed the weather in Vancouver and linked to a new post on his Internet business blog. Then he earned $200 by telling his fans where they could buy M&M's with customized faces, messages and colors.”

Get thee behind me, Ad.ly.

During the panel, Rad explained more about his business and his view that Twitter streams should be seen as ‘real pieces of content’ that should therefore be ‘monetized’. In response to Erick’s suggestion that people might not welcome this ‘monetization’ of their conversations, he responded that many of the company’s advertitweets included an appeal for followers to ‘please retweet’ the ads posted in their friends’ streams. According to Rad, thousands of people did precisely that, proving that people were embracing the ads. I politely disagreed, pointing out that people – by and large – are fucking idiots who will retweet anything if you tell them to. A couple of weeks ago, as a comment against the ridiculousness of those who beg their followers to ‘please RT’ the most mundane of messages, I twittered the message “I’m going for lunch. Please RT!”

People did.

And yet, despite the jovial back-and-forth – at one point I accidentally called Rad a dick – we actually managed to end the session with something approaching a consensus. The trigger for this consensus was Erick inviting Robert Scoble to come on stage and explain his vision of the future of monetized twittering.

Scooby’s vision is the ‘Super Tweet‘, a taggable, more contextual tweet that would enable advertisers to serve commercial messages based on what people were already talking about. Critically, these messages would appear in a separate panel in the Twitter client, rather than invading the stream itself. It’s a vision that seemed at odds with that of Twitter’s COO Dick Costollo who, speaking earlier in the conference, hinted that the company’s upcoming ad strategy might blur the old church and state lines. "We want to do something that's organic and in the flow of the way people already use Twitter” he said, “and not Here's the tweets and here are the ads.'"

Scoble argued that “you can display ads in the Twitter client but you don’t fuck with editorial” – and as such his idea seemed totally fine to me – why shouldn’t Starbucks deliver ads to people who tweet about going for coffee, as long as those ads appear in a clearly demarked window? And, hell, why not go one stage further: perhaps some of that revenue could get kicked back to the people making the tweets – the “content creators”? That would certainly be better than sponsored tweets.

It’s a testament to Scoble’s vision, and the marketers’ passion that I left the stage agreeing that, even if we disagree on format – there was nothing inherently wrong with monetizing the Twitter stream through targeted advertising. To his credit, Rad even offered to share with me some of their raw numbers so I could see how people interacted with the various commercial messages generated through Ad.ly.

I’d say my feeling of agreement lasted about ten minutes before it was replaced with one of searing outrage.

What the hell was I thinking? Nothing wrong with monetizing the Twitter stream through targeted advertising? There’s everything wrong with it. And here’s why…

A tweet isn’t a “piece of content”. It isn’t editorial. No matter whether we’re talking about what we’re having for lunch or suggesting a new movie or sharing a piece of news, what we’re really doing is having a good old-fashioned conversation. Following people on Twitter is like organising the world’s largest cocktail party – we’ve decided who’s opinions we trust, and we’ve invited them to come into our homes and talk to us about things they are genuinely interested in. The moment people start screwing around with that principle, the whole system collapses.

Just look at the conceptual abortion that is the new retweet functionality: everyone in their right mind hates it, but few of us can quite explain why. Let me try. When someone retweeted under the old system, it was the equivalent of standing at the cocktail party and saying to our friends “oh, Dave said something interesting the other day…” and then going on to quote Dave, along with our own comments on what Dave had to say. The quoting of Dave was contextual and appropriate.

By contrast, the new retweet function is the equivalent of us snapping our fingers and making Dave himself suddenly appear in the middle of the party. And, then, without so much as an introduction, Dave starts talking. No context, no invitation – just some crazy dude called Dave talking at us, at our own party.

Adding sponsored tweets will have an even more poisonous effect on the party. There we are, listening to a friend talking about the weather or sports and suddenly – boom – he’s trying to sell us a personalised pack of M&Ms. It doesn’t matter if he explains that he’s been paid by the company to promote their products – the fact is, there’s some dickhead at a party trying to sell us M&Ms. He’s even more unwelcome than Dave.

One of the most popular ideas amongst social marketers is the idea that we will listen to commercial endorsements from our friends because we trust them. Thus, by putting brands into our friends’ mouths, we will somehow trust those brands more by extension. Not for the first time, the marketers have got it backwards. The reason we trust our friends so strongly is precisely because we know that their opinions are not commercially motivated. The moment that ceases to be the case – or we even suspect that it has ceased to be the case – the bond of trust between friends is destroyed. The cocktail party is ruined, society crumbles, the apes take over the world.

Separating the ads from the conversation might be a less egregious solution but it doesn’t alter the fact that our words are triggering the appearance of commercial messages on the walls of a party. Inevitably marketers will try to further affect these messages by paying commission to popular tweeters, and the less principled of our friends will sign up to whichever ad networks provide the best incentives for monetizing their updates. From then on they’ll be constantly wondering if there’s a way to wedge in a brand, or a product that could bring them a few cents into their tweets. Even if they think they’re just making pocket money from the things they’d talk about anyway, their conversations will become inevitably altered by the presence of commercial influences.

Meantime, the anti-commercial-minded amongst us will resist this new development by avoiding using certain brand names in our conversations, knowing that they are simply giving an excuse for those brands to make money from our friends. Instead of Starbucks and McDonalds, we’ll be sure to criticize S*arbucks and McD%nalds so as to deprive them of the click-throughs. And yet by the simple conscious act of avoiding commercial pressures, we’re forced to consider them – and so the spontaneity and purity of the conversation is destroyed. Either way, the cocktail party is ruined, society crumbles, the apes take over the world.

Our blogs are already affiliated-linked up to the eyeballs, our TV shows are product-placed to hell, radio has succumbed to payola, even our schools are brought to you by the letters COCA COL and A. Human conversation is the last area of communication to hold out against the relentless march of commercialisation and it’s our duty, as humans, to make sure it stays that way. So, screw consensus. And shame on me for starting to lean towards it yesterday. Give me ad-free conversation, or give me death.

(Please retweet.)

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