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- It’s Not Easy Being Popular. 77 Percent Of Facebook Fan Pages Have Under 1,000 Fans
- eBay Maps Out Black Friday Online Transactions
- Winner’s Curse: Why Losing A B-School Biz Plan Competition Is Better Than Winning
- “Misunderstanding”: Twitter Japan Now Says There Won’t Be A Subscription Model
- Video Professor Tries To Bully Washington Post, Fails
- In The Age Of Realtime, Twitter Is Walter Cronkite
- Totsy Offers Deep Discounts For Moms, Partners With Genealogy App FamilyBuilder
- This week on TechCrunch: very bad things, irritable Germans, retro fall-outs and shopping til you drop
- Psystar Promised Investors Millions Of Sales By 2011
- This Is Why The Internet (And Twitter) Wins
- Shots Of Facebook’s Upcoming Redesign In The Wild, With A New Emphasis On Search
- Strange Bedfellows: eBay And Microsoft Team Up To Offer Daily Deals To IE8 Users
| It’s Not Easy Being Popular. 77 Percent Of Facebook Fan Pages Have Under 1,000 Fans Posted: 28 Nov 2009 08:00 AM PST  In this age of instant Internet celebrity, anyone can become famous for 15 seconds (to rework Andy Warhol’s oft-quoted maxim). But what does famous mean exactly when anyone can have a Facebook fan page—those public pages on Facebook set up by brands, media outlets, celebs, and wanna-be celebs. As it turns out, being popular is not as easy as it looks. A full 77 percent of Facebook fan pages have less than 1,000 fans, according to an upcoming report by Sysomos, a social media monitoring and analytics firm. Once a fan page is set up (here’s ours), anyone on Facebook can become your “fan,” which is like following someone on Twitter in that it doesn’t require a reciprocal friendship. Sysomos analyzed 600,000 fan pages on Facebook and came up with the distribution curve in the chart above. The vast bulk of fan pages have between 10 and 1,000 fans. Only 4 percent have more than 10,000 fans, and less than 1/20th of a percent have more than a million fans. It breaks down as follows:
The Internet has long been defining celebrity down, and now we know by how much (if you accept that Facebook, the world’s fourth most popular Website with more than 300 million members, is as good a proxy as there is for the Web as a whole). To be Facebook famous, all you need is a moderately popular fan page, with the biggest chunk of those pages (42 percent) having between 100 and 1,000 fans. Another 30 percent have between 10 and 100 fans. The categories Facebook fan pages fall into are remarkably evenly distributed. Celebrities, products, stores, restaurants, bars and clubs, websites, music, organizations, and non profits each make up between 6.9 percent and 7.5 percent of fan pages by category.
The biggest product page is Facebook’s own page, with 5.8 million fans (hey, is this rigged?), followed by Starbucks with 5.1 million (the page is filled with wall comments such as, “MMMMM Pumpkin Spice Latte!”). Sysomos drilled down further, looked at the 297 pages with more than one million fans, and properly categorized them—or at least tried. It turns out many of them (39.2 percent) are uncharacterizable such as “Nights Out With Friends.” But the rest can be broken down into music (16.7 percent), celebrities 16.0 (percent), products (11.9 percent), TV shows (8.5 percent), films (3.4 percent), and games (1.4 percent). And that’s just like it is in the real world. If you have more than a million fans, chances are you are either a rock star or an actor.
And unlike on Twitter, where popularity is correlated with how many times you Tweet, Facebook fan pages tend to be updated only once every 16 days. And that’s really the big difference between Facebook fans and Twitter followers. On Twitter, you follow someone because you want to hear what they have to say. On Facebook, you fan them just to show your support of affinity. Too often, it’s a throwaway gesture. But then, fame is fleeting. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  |
| eBay Maps Out Black Friday Online Transactions Posted: 28 Nov 2009 07:53 AM PST  While Black Friday has long been a popular phenomenon for brick and mortar stores, the deal frenzy has been extending to e-retailers and online stores. Now, sales on the web are equally as lucrative as those in the stores. eBay is launching a campaign to capitalize on the holiday shopping season, called “12 Days Of Deals,” and has also rolled out a new Deal-focused iPhone app and partnered with Microsoft to offer deals directly from Internet Explorer 8. Today, the e-commerce giant is launching a interactive map that shows all of the transactions that took place on eBay on Black Friday. The map provides a visualization of all U.S.-based buyer and seller transactions that occurred on eBay on Black Friday. As the clock runs, points will appear on the map, representing the occurrence of buyer and seller transactions on eBay. eBay says the map visualization is based on raw data that includes eBay sales and purchases occurring in approximately 33,000 U.S. ZIP codes. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Winner’s Curse: Why Losing A B-School Biz Plan Competition Is Better Than Winning Posted: 28 Nov 2009 05:01 AM PST
One of the best things about being an academic is being able to mold young minds and guide them to success. When one of my students, Andrew Leblanc told me he was entering the Duke Startup Challenge Elevator Pitch Competition, I told him to come and see me and do a practice run. After all, I had judged several of these contests at Duke and other universities. I thought I knew what worked. After the eleventh iteration, Andrew got it right. He wasn't trying to pack his presentation with unnecessary details. He had slowed down his pitch, added a personal touch and was now exuding confidence. Andrew even researched the background of the judges and tailored his message to their interests. So after two hours of intense preparation, I had little doubt that Andrew would win. Andrew lost. I was surprised. But what I told him afterward is that it really doesn’t matter. Contrary to what the organizers of these competitions will tell you, university business plan contests don't produce winning companies. Yes, a number of companies have emerged from business plan bake-offs that have been moderate or small successes. But not a single home-run has emerged from this now-omnipresent practice. This is not to say that the contests are bad. Instead, they educate students in entrepreneurship and motivate them to come up with interesting ideas. But for all of you out there who think a biz plan victory is a ticket to the big time, think again. And for all the engineering students who think any outcome but victory is a waste of time, you also need to think again. Even though he lost, Andrew met a potential partner and also got to speak with Bill Maris of Google Ventures, a priceless encounter. (Bill promised to introduce Andrew to the Google Power Meter team. Don’t forget, Bill!). In fact, let me throw out a radical thought. I submit that losing in a business plan contest is actually more beneficial than winning. There is a growing body of research that children who are praised too early and too easily end up under-performing peers who are not praised but are told, in constructive terms, they can do better. This is one of the core tenets of Po Bronson’s new book on parenting, "Nurture Shock." Extending this to the realm of entrepreneurship might be a leap (and it could be great fodder for a future PhD dissertation). But to me the outcomes don’t lie. Business plan competitions don’t breed winning businesses. Rather than winning a beauty contest, building a business is a marathon that requires steady and constant effort, surmounting regular difficulties, and living through emotional peaks and valleys. The very roots of the current business plan craze go back to one of the periods that represents a low-point in sane business practices. The business plan competitions first started in the dotcom days. At that time, there was a frantic rush to start new companies. Entrepreneurs would create professional-looking, buzzword-laden business plans. Venture capitalists would then trip over each other to fund these plans, usually with way too much money. The prevailing theory was that a good business idea and enough money were enough to create the next hot IPO. B-schools readily jumped on the bandwagon and soon an arms race ensued to see which school could offer a bigger prize to winners. With the bursting of the dotcom bubble, the tech world was reminded that even a great idea funded by venture capital didn’t necessarily produce business success. In hindsight everyone saw that it took more than a good idea. It took a thorough understanding of the market, excellent management, and the ability to navigate rough waters to build a thriving enterprise. Some of the biggest dotcom winners came from me-too ideas that were executed better than the originals. Nor was this anomalous. Ask any seasoned entrepreneur in any industry, and he or she will likely tell you that his or her first business plan was probably the best work of fiction they ever created. A glimpse back through the big winners of the Dotcom Era also underscores the lack of impact business plan competitions actually had. Amazon, Google, Ebay, Yahoo—none of them won a business plan contest. In fact, not a single home run from that era won a business plan contest. And one of the biggest successes of its time, Akamai Technologies, actually lost the M.I.T. $100K contest. After the great Internet Bubble burst, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs quickly adapted to the new reality and went back to basics. But no one told the b-schools. From Silicon Valley to Research Triangle Park to New Delhi and Shanghai, new contests are still sprouting. Only now, the prizes have gotten bigger and the competitions more serious. Yet real successes remains non-existent. (If I’m wrong in five years on this, then call me out). But failure is no surprise for these b-school business launches Without a solid understanding of market needs and real-world validation of their ideas, few young entrepreneurs can achieve their business-plan projections. The hottest startup methodologies of today, built around ideas fostered by Y-Combinator and TechStars emphasize giving startups almost no money and encouraging them to get a product to market as quickly as possible in order to get real world validation. This is almost the exact opposite of the current business school competition ecosystem, where market validation is non-existent. So realistically, few of the business school plan entrants can even understand whether their business plans even make sense. Business plan judges, for their part, are equally in the dark most times. Andrew’s plan involved utilities and power management, a topic I know virtually nothing about. B-school contest judges are usually generalists who have only superficial insights into the internal dynamics of the industries at which these plans are aimed. It would seem, then, that the insights of long-time experts in those industries would likely be far more valuable to a prospective entrepreneur. Again, I am not at all saying that business school plans are inherently bad. To the contrary, Andrew learned an enormous amount about starting a business, the importance of understanding markets, utility and power management technologies, and team building. His plan to build software that would allow residents of college dorms to track their power usage through a visual interface and more easily understand the direct impact of their behaviors on electricity consumption was not a bad idea. In fact, it was a good enough idea that many others are currently attempting similar types of systems for various social settings and environments. My colleague, Lesa Mitchell at the Kauffman Foundation believes that these contests foster collaboration between business school students and engineers or scientists. This, she says, teaches valuable lessons about launching businesses to both potential inventors and would-be CEOs alike. Finally, let’s not confuse failure to execute or unrealistic plan expectations with bad ideas. Young CEOs going into industries they barely know armed with b-school plan competition money are like lambs to the slaughter. But the core idea behind their plan may be quite innovative and powerful. My takeaway from all this? If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, don’t win a business plan competition. If you do win, your first act might be to hire a CEO with industry experience. And win or lose, the most valuable lessons you’ll learn will come more from playing the game than from coming up with the best plan. Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| “Misunderstanding”: Twitter Japan Now Says There Won’t Be A Subscription Model Posted: 28 Nov 2009 04:14 AM PST
Well, please forget it, this won’t happen. Just a few minutes ago, Digital Garage (the company responsible for Twitter operations in Japan), issued a press release (English PDF, Japanese PDF) stating there won’t be any fee-based services of any kind on the site and that Twitter in Japan will remain completely free for the foreseeable future. There’s also a blog post by the Twitter Japan team (who just copied and pasted the press release text, providing no further explanation). Digital Garage says the media reports on their plans to monetize Twitter are based on a “misunderstood presentation by a DG subsidiary, DG Mobile”. So what happened? Kenichi Sugi, not really a nobody but DG Mobile’s COO, delivered a presentation [JP] during a mobile tech conference in Tokyo where he talked about the future of the digital content business. IT Media, one of Japan’s most biggest online media companies, reported in Japanese (quoted in Robin’s article yesterday). The report was later picked up by Japanese media (i.e. Slashdot Japan) as well, as it laid out all the details of the plan: launch in January 2010, monthly fees ranging from $1.16 to $11.60, pay-per-tweet micropayment option, 30% cut for Digital Garage, celebrities as likely candidates to draw paying followers, etc. So first the company gets into such details and now says it’s all just a misunderstanding? Or is it the (mostly negative) initial reactions by Japan’s Twitter users that triggered this development? Whatever the reason, the payment model is scrapped for now. (We reached out to Digital Garage for a comment.) Asiajin is providing additional background on the relationship between Twitter Inc. and their partner in Tokyo. On a side note, it would have been interesting to see if paid accounts worked as a way for Twitter to monetize the service in the world’s third largest Internet market. The concept has proven to be successful in similar fashion elsewhere in Asia. Filipinos, for example, can subscribe to their favorite celebrity’s “lifestream” via SMS (not using Twitter but a service called KText). Every time the celebrity in question writes a message to his fans, all subscribers get billed a certain amount and pay via their cell phones. Some celebrities have tens of thousands of subscribers and share the revenue with KText (thanks @mikewalsh for the pointer). This is something Digital Garage had in mind for Japan, too. A comeback of their idea to monetize Twitter isn’t impossible, at least in some places in Asia. Here’s Digital Garage’s press release in full (”Recent Press Coverage about Twitter Service in Japan”):
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| Video Professor Tries To Bully Washington Post, Fails Posted: 28 Nov 2009 01:35 AM PST
Essentially Video Professor is arguing that they didn’t have the chance to respond to our post before we published, and that in general we aren’t behaving very journalistically. One of my favorite habits of journalists is that they refuse to state an opinion. Instead, they find a source to say whatever it is they want said and then quote them. And when I say “favorite,” what I really mean is that I hate it. The story the journalist writes has the look of objectivity but really it’s just the same as if the journalist wrote what she or he meant, directly, in the first place. A gold star journalist will then find a “balancing” quote from someone else, often the person or entity being attacked. “When did you stop beating your wife,” etc. I prefer to just skip all that nonsense and get right to the meat of a matter. And most of my favorite bloggers do the same. None of us have the audacity to think that we are your only news source. You can find other opinions elsewhere, and judge them on their merits, too. The Video Professor Scam Video Professor was a side note in our original Scamville post, just one of a bunch of scams that were making their way into social games on Facebook and MySpace. But now we’re focused on them like a laser. Video Professor is unlike mobile scams which look to get a relatively small $10 – $20/month subscription on your mobile bill and hope you never notice. They go for the big kill: $190 – $290 charged to your credit card on time. I haven’t found the Video Professor scam on Facebook social games since the Scamville posts, but the site is still live, and there are still lot of links from Google and Facebook (they still advertise directly on Facebook). What you see when you first hit the site depends on how you got there – directly or via an advertising partner. The least scammy version is what you see if you go to videoprofessor.com directly. On the home page in very small font is a statement that you are going to be charged $290 if you engage in a transaction with them. But that’s the only on-screen disclosure you’ll see. Click on a product and go to the next page and you are told you get lots of stuff for free, all you have to do is pay up to a $10 shipping charge. You choose your product and you’re on to the checkout page. Nothing is stated about the $290 charge. After that you are on the final checkout page, showing a total price of $4.56. There’s no fine print, just two links on the page to pages with hugely long agreements with text hidden in the middle of it all that you are actually being sent tons of products and you’ll be charged $290 for them all if you don’t cancel in ten days. Needless to say, people who get this stuff either don’t read fine print and are charged, or try to return it. There are hundreds of user complaints about refunds not being paid. 271 complaints to be exact, on RipoffReport alone. I’ve put the purchase flow at the bottom of this post. Remember that this is the least scammy version I’ve found (here’s how they lured people in from Facebook a couple of weeks ago). For users who hit the site via Facebook, Google or other advertisments, it’s even scammier. Is This A Scam? You’re damn right it’s a scam. Users are obviously being tricked into buying something they don’t understand and wouldn’t want even if they did understand the details. The company says they comply with federal and state laws. But they continually refine the landing and checkout pages to comply with the bare minimum of legal requirements while maximizing ROI. Jump to 3:15 of this video for a description of how services like these trick users into buying useless products. Here’s an easy way to determine if something is a scam – would users pay for it if they knew exactly what they were buying? In Video Professor’s case, the answer is no, and the company has to resort to tricking the user into paying nearly $300 for a bunch of CDs. Our governments should be protecting us from this nonsense, but they can’t or won’t. I’m be damned if I’ll stop writing about it, though. Here’s what people have to say about video professor. See this article and comments, as well as Amazon and epinions reviews. And to the people behind these companies – how do you sleep at night knowing that you are nothing but a deadweight loss to society, taking money from people who aren’t Internet savvy enough to know they’re being scammed? When you’re 80 and look back at what you’ve done with your life, is this really what you want to have spent your time doing? History Of Threats I’m not surprised that Video Professor is going to so much effort to shut me up – this is how they do business. Video Professor has gone after people who’ve criticized the company. Some of the links in this article pointing to other criticisms are now dead links – victims of litigation? When Video Professor sent me an email after my post arguing that they weren’t a scam, I replied “It’s a huge fucking scam. And you know it.” Which pretty much summed up my position on the matter. Here’s the letter they sent to the Washington Post. Note that they argue that they simply want to tell their side. I argue that their website tells their side of the story:
The Washington Post’s response? In a nutshell, “you’ll have to discuss directly with the editors at TechCrunch.”
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| In The Age Of Realtime, Twitter Is Walter Cronkite Posted: 27 Nov 2009 06:43 PM PST
Thankfully, we have not yet had a tragedy of that magnitude in the age of the realtime web. But we will. It’s just a matter of time. If it were to happen today, most people would still turn to their TV sets to get the most up-to-date information on such an event. We saw that on September 11, 2001. But a large number of people would also now turn to the web. And there they would likely find the information they were looking for faster than those watching on television. We’ve seen it time and time again recently. Earthquakes, the massive San Diego fires, the shootings in Mumbai, the situation in Iran, and even Michael Jackson’s death. The realtime web beat the mainstream media easily to each of these stories. And this disparity will only increase going forward. We’re entering a new age of realtime information. Some people don’t like that because they fear inaccurate reports. They’ll cite the Balloon Boy example as how things get out of control on services like Twitter. Well you know where the Balloon Boy reports were way more out of control? On CNN and the other cable news channels. And you know where I first heard sound arguments that there is no way that balloon could hold a full-grown child? Twitter. Those same people seem to want to believe that the mainstream media does all kinds of fact-checking before rushing to the air. That’s why it took them 45 minutes longer today to get to the Tiger Woods car accident story, they conclude. But let’s revisit what CNN posted those 45 minutes later:
That’s it. If it took them 45 minutes to figure that much out and get it up, they’re in more trouble than I imagine. Others will say that CNN took the time to make sure they only wrote “injured” rather than “in serious condition,” as the first reports indicated. But that’s not true either. Watch this video for proof of that. Those people seem to believe that BNO News, which was the first source of the story for many of us, simply pulled the “serious condition” statement out of thin air. That’s not the case. How do I know? Because I had Michael van Poppel, who is behind BNO News, send me the report that he based his information on (pasted below). The key part to look at is obviously where it says “Injuries: Serious.”
This is the release directly from the Florida Highway Patrol. BNO News labeled it correctly as a “report.” This is journalism. Just because BNO News got to it and posted it some 45 minutes before CNN doesn’t mean they pulled it out of nowhere based on nothing or hearsay. This is the information from the police report. It turns out that Tiger Woods is okay. And that’s great. But you know where I also heard that first? Twitter. That’s the point. This is the realtime information cycle. We get delivered news, the story unfolds a bit (as it did when various local reports of the incident starting popping up on Twitter and Google, again, way before CNN), it unfolds a bit more, and if we keep watching the full story is revealed — right before our eyes. You have to be smart enough not to take everything as absolute fact, and to have your own filters for information, but this is the way going forward. And it’s captivating, to say the least. Some will say they don’t mind waiting an extra hour to get just the facts. That’s fine. But that’s not really true. It may be true for a relatively small incident like a minor car crash, but imagine if a national (or worldwide) catastrophe happened. Do you honestly believe that any one of those people would be content to sit back and wait for the 100% fact-checked version of the story? No. Not one of them would. The same was true back in 1963. Watch the entire Cronkite broadcast below. You’ll notice he says things like, “their [the President and Texas Governor Connally] condition is as yet unknown.” The report than switches over to KLRD in Texas where they note, “as you can imagine, there are many stories that are coming in now as to the actual condition of the President. One is that he is dead.” That was not known as the time, and was not known until much later in the broadcast. Did anyone care that they were stating unconfirmed things on the air? No. In fact, had they not, everyone would have turned to another channel. The point is that people want this information. Should a disclaimer be included that it’s just a report or unconfirmed? Of course, but it was today, just as it was back in 1963. The difference is that had the Kennedy assassination happened today, it would not have taken 38 minutes from the time of President Kennedy being declared dead to the time Cronkite broke the news on the air. Actually, it may have. But it would have been reported on services like Twitter much sooner. Had it played out that way, where do you think people would turn the next time there was an event unfolding in realtime? I understand that a lot of people view Twitter as stupid, and certainly not worth $1 billion dollars. But step back for a second and look at it this way: For much of this argument, I’m just using “Twitter” the way my colleague Steve Gillmor uses it, which is to say, as a word not tied to one brand but meaning the “realtime web.” It doesn’t matter what method we use for this realtime information dissemination, what matters is that it is happening. And this is the future. That said, there is no denying that right now, Twitter, the brand, is the winning channel for this new type of news consumption. It’s the Walter Cronkite for realtime information. And when the next major event happens, an increasing number of us will be huddled around our computer screens, watching. And even more the time after that… And that’s the way it is. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Totsy Offers Deep Discounts For Moms, Partners With Genealogy App FamilyBuilder Posted: 27 Nov 2009 02:04 PM PST  While consumers around the U.S. are sniffing out Black Friday deals today, sample sale sites have emerged to provide members with serious discounts year round. Online sample sales sites such as Gilt Groupe, HauteLook, Ideeli, RueLaLa and others, have been picking up serious traction in the past year. We’ve seen a plethora of sites pop up for women’s and men’s clothing and accessories, travel deals and even children’s clothes. Totsy, an invitation only sales site that features children’s brands, baby gear and products, recently launched to appeal to parents looking for a bargain. Totsy, which marks down products by 40 to 70 percent, features a variety of toys, baby products (strollers, educational toys, cribs and more), children’s clothing and bedding. Similar to other sample sale sites, shopping events are designer-specific and held over a 72 hour period. The site is also partnering with Facebook app and genealogy site FamilyBuilder to build more buzz for the sale site. FamilyBuilder’s popular Facebook app, Family Tree, has 6.3 monthly active users. The site, which has over 17 million users, also runs applications on Bebo, MySpace, Hi5 and Orkut. The partnership will allow Totsy to send invitations via Facebook and email to Familybuilder's database of users. Even during a recession, sample sales are managing to draw in revenue. With the tremendous opportunity in the children’s and baby good market, Totsy could take off. Gilt also offers deals on children’s goods, but Totsy is primarily focused in this sector of the market. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Posted: 27 Nov 2009 02:04 PM PST
Actual work is out of the question, obviously. If you’re a PC person then there’s always Minesweeper, while Mac users can make a start on editing their Thanksgiving videos in iMovie. Linux fan? I suppose once you’ve finished your daily six hours of masturbation, you can just fill up the rest of the time pompously explaining to the rest of us precisely why what we’re doing is wrong. You know, the usual. But, regardless of our OS allegiance, there’s one activity we can all enjoy together – and that’s taking a look back at the last seven days of TechCrunch. So let’s get started, shall we? (And Linux users, please wash your hands before clicking. We all know where they’ve been…) Something really, really bad of the week… By far the most interesting story of the week was one that was almost entirely ignored by other media outlets for the first 24 hours. On Tuesday, Michael reported that ‘Something really, really bad went down at high flying startup Canopy Financial’. That something, according to multiple sources, was the discovery that Canopy was ‘absolutely making up their financial statements, even forging audited statements with fake KMPG letterhead. And somehow the investment bank and all the investors never figured it out.’ The story developed throughout the day, leading to a second post in which Arrington likened the response from the company’s lead financial advisors to the – shocked, shocked! – police chief in Casablanca. The action continued in the comments: alongside several comments from former Canopy employees, one anonymous reader pointed out that Dave McClure, one of Canopy’s investors, had removed the company from the list of ‘achievements’ on his website. In response, McClure commented that ‘needless to say, after getting a letter from the general counsel of the company that their financials are under review, I no longer feel that way about the company’. He also referred to CEO Vikram Kashyap as a ‘former friend’, adding “Vik: if you're reading this I hope you come to your senses and handle the situation responsibly.” Yeah, bit late for that. European disharmony of the week… In other controversial news, it seems that the Germans are getting irritable, which is most unlike them. Reporting from the relatively safe – but strategically important – stronghold of Belgium, Robin Wauters tells us that ’several federal and regional government officials in Germany are trying to put a ban on Google Analytics’, on the basis that collecting user data without explicit permission breaches the country’s strict data protection laws. Google Germany's Per Meyerdierks, however, says there’s nothing to worry about: the company is well within its rights to process user data in the United States because it respects the Safe Harbour treaty between the EU and the USA. And given that I can’t think of a single instance of Germany breaking a treaty, we can all sleep safely in our beds tonight. Undeterred, the next day Robin had another group of Germans in his sights – this time a manufacturer of laptops marketed under the trademark ‘Smartbook’. The company – Smartbook AG – has been threatening legal action against publications that use the word ’smartbook’ to refer to a generic portable device, leading to the deletion of various blog posts and news stories. Of course, as any intellectual properly lawyer will tell you, trademark owners have a duty to take this kind of action to ensure that their trademark retains its legal protection, and doesn’t become a generic word. But like the plucky Belgian he is, Robin laughs in the face of such lawyers, titling his post ‘Smartbook Says Bloggers Can't Use The Word Smartbook Anymore. Smartbook.‘, which, while not actually infringing on the trademark, is funny enough to be my headline of the week. Einfach klasse, Robin. Gut gemacht. Hill of Beenz of the week… Sticking with Europe and a guest post on TechCrunch EU from an anonymous ‘London-based VC’ sparked a whole lot of controversy. Not for the author’s suggestion that European start-ups needed to work harder if they were going to compete with Silicon Valley, but rather because of the fight that broke out in the comments between former Beenz CEO Philip Letts and – apparently – other former board members of the legendary dot com disaster. Here it is in full…
Of course an argument between the board of Beenz is about as relevant today as a debate between the founders of Boo over who made the decision to fly Concorde, but it does provide another useful tip for European founders: working longer hours is not going to help you much if you spend your whole day arguing on the Internet like pathetic little children. Past imperfect, of the week… Speaking of debates from the past, Thanksgiving week has apparently spurred Americans to look back at alternative histories that could have been. Kicking off the orgy of hypothetical-revisionism, the team behind Google Wave decided to demonstrate the service’s questionable usefulness by suggesting how the Founding Fathers might have used it to draft the Declaration of Independence. The result is hardly the pinnacle of satire, but given how shockingly unfunny the Onion has been these past couple of weeks, it’s not a terrible way to pass the time. Slightly more interesting, but even less funny, were Arrington’s musings on what the world of technology might have looked like had Steve Jobs not returned to Apple in 1997. His verdict? ‘We'd likely still be in mobile phone hell. Chances are we still wouldn't have a decent browsing experience on the phone, and we certainly wouldn't be enjoying third party apps like Pandora or Skype on whatever clunker the carriers handed us…Think back to the phone you had in 2006, and then tell me you don't love Apple for the iPhone alone.’ (On the subject of the iPhone, the latest stats show a staggering 75% of smart-phone web traffic now comes from Apple and Android handsets. Apple is still well in the lead but, if this leaked video from Swype is anything to go by, that might start to change pretty soon.) What you two talkin’ about? Shoppin’! of the week… Today is, of course, black Friday, and what better time for Google to up the obnoxiousness level of its in-results advertising in an attempt to grab a few more holiday clicks for its customers? As MG reported, the ads can basically be summed up thus: ‘Bigger, bigger, click me, bigger. Or, in Google's own words, ‘Text is often useful, but sometimes videos and pictures are a more effective way to receive information."’ Certainly the ads are more noticable – so much so that MG reckons Google ‘has finally cracked the code for getting my mother to click on their ads non-stop.’ In other holiday shopping news “mystery buyer” has paid $1.5 million for the Russia.com domain name, previously owned by the consulting firm that also owns Algeria.com, Scotland.com, Nepal.com and Ukraine.com. The ideal stocking stuffer! And finally, of the week… And finally, if you still have time before the weekend starts, Michael has been busy with his Flipcam this week, conducting interviews with Skype CEO Josh Silverman and Twitter’s Dick Costolo. The Costolo one is particularly enjoyable to watch, if only for the revelation that Mike has been mispronouncing his friend’s name for the past five years. Have a good weekend! And don’t work too hard on your generic smartbook. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Psystar Promised Investors Millions Of Sales By 2011 Posted: 27 Nov 2009 01:50 PM PST  We all know that Psystar is busy bleeding out in federal court, but that doesn't mean the fun stops. We'll be dissecting their glorious failure for quite some time. The most recent development: it seems their plan for taking a bite out of Apple's sales was comically ambitious. How many clones do you think they sold in 2009? Somewhat under a thousand would be putting it kindly. And how many were they hoping to sell? Around a hundred times that. This according to some recently released slides depicting Psystar's pitch to venture capitalists — some of whom must have clearly wanted to be taken in, or else they would have called it the cock-and-bull story it certainly was. Now, to be fair, the 12m units figure cited in the headline was part of the "aggressive growth model." 1.45m was the conservative estimate, which is technically not millions. For reference, Apple sold just over 10m Macs during 2009. |
| This Is Why The Internet (And Twitter) Wins Posted: 27 Nov 2009 12:28 PM PST
Instead, as I’m watching this unfold infront of my eyes on the Internet, I’m reminded that this type of story is exactly why the web is destroying newspapers, and should eventually even take down television and the main source of news for most people. I first heard the news via a BNOnews bulletin sent via push notification to my iPhone. I immediately pulled up Twitter and already some 10-15 people had retweeted it and the news was appearing in my stream. The message read, “BULLETIN — REPORT: FAMED GOLFER TIGER WOODS SERIOUSLY INJURED AFTER CRASH NEAR FLORIDA HOME.” Sure, not a lot of information there, but it’s clearly labeled as a report, and yes, it did turn out to be correct. And thanks to Twitter, thousands of people had access to this information about 45 minutes before it appeared on CNN or ESPN, the “worldwide leaders” in news in their respective fields. Of course, there is something to be said for these outlets independently verifying the news, but the the fact of the matter is that there was a report out there, filed by the police department and BNOnews was able to get it and send it out via Twitter much, much faster than any traditional news source. Information wants to be free, and the web, with services like Twitter, provides the easiest way for that to happen. Google was almost as fast on the case, as some 10 minutes after the tweets were flowing, it started showing reports from local Orlando news outlets (where the crash occurred) giving details of the crash. Within 15 minutes, we knew what time the crash occurred at, apparently what happened, and some other important details (like no alcohol being involved). Cut to about 30 minutes after that. CNN finally got its “breaking” story up. And what did it contain? This:
Seriously. That’s it. That apparently took 45 minutes to get up. They could have called anyone on Twitter 30 minutes ago to get those details from what officials were saying based on what they had already read thanks to Twitter and Google. Anyone who doesn’t understand Twitter should look no further than situations like this. Which has been very clear for a long time. From earthquakes, to the massive fires in San Diego (in 2007), to the Mumbai shootings, to the situation in Iran, this is the future of information population, like it or not. It’s interesting to note that MSNBC.com recently reached a deal to take over the @breakingnews account (the one tied to BNO News). Here’s to hoping they don’t slow it down to CNN speeds. But if they do, someone else will come along with another service that will replace it. That’s the beauty of the Internet. It’s Darwinism unbound.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Shots Of Facebook’s Upcoming Redesign In The Wild, With A New Emphasis On Search Posted: 27 Nov 2009 11:43 AM PST Over the last few days, Facebook has apparently been rolling out some UI changes to a small number of users, moving many of the navigation elements that currently rest at the bottom of the screen back to the left sidebar. The changes are subtle enough that they probably won’t spark yet another user rebellion against Facebook — aside from the people who will hate it automatically — but they’re very significant.
The changes in the screenshot above are nearly identical to the shots that were presented at Facebook’s developer garage a month ago. But there are some key differences. First, search now has much more prominent placement, appearing just above (and almost as an extension of) your News Feed. Previously the search box was positioned in the far upper right of the screen. The search box itself appears to have grown by around 50%, as you can see in the comparison shot below. So why the new emphasis on search? Facebook search has long been a rough patch for the site. For a very, very long time, it was just plain bad. Facebook does a great job using algorithms behind the scenes to help surface people you may know at the top of your search results, but actually navigating those results was a pain. Facebook rolled out a much improved version of search in August, but I suspect few people have really explored the new search features, given their poor experiences in the past. And that needs to change: Facebook needs to get people to start using search more if it wants to leverage its Everyone updates as a viable alternative to Twitter’s realtime search. Again, these changes are part of a bucket test, so don’t be surprised if you don’t see them. It’s also possible that Facebook is only testing this design — the one it eventually rolls out to everybody could look different. For more shots, check out this blog post (it’s in French, but the screenshots are easy to access). Thanks to Matthew Carrozo for the tip.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Strange Bedfellows: eBay And Microsoft Team Up To Offer Daily Deals To IE8 Users Posted: 27 Nov 2009 10:31 AM PST
In time for Black Friday, Microsoft and eBay are partnering to offer eBay Daily Deals to Internet Explorer 8 users directly from the browser. Via a Internet Explorer Web Slice, Microsoft will offer users the best “Daily Deals” from eBay from within the browser. The deals will be found within Favorites Bar on IE8, and will be updated daily within the browser. In conjunction with the new feature, eBay will also launch a "12 Days of Deals" promotion that will feature a deal of the day within the browser starting tomorrow. The search feature will also let you search eBay from IE8 and will show suggest popular products on eBay to users. And you can find and preview eBay items from any site you are on without leaving the page. eBay previously launched a browser highlighter for IE last year. In time for the holiday online shopping season, Microsoft is also touting IE8’s malware and phishing protections. And the browser’s InPrivate Browsing feature lets people control what the browser saves in terms of cookies, history files and data. The Microsoft and eBay partnership is odd but eBay is pushing hard this year to get a piece of the holiday shopping market. The e-commerce giant recently launched a new iPhone application dubbed Deals and upgraded its shopping app for the iPhone and iPod Touch platform and debuted an enhanced mobile website. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
The year is 1963. It’s November. At 1:40 PM ET, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite comes on the air. “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.” Rapidly, everyone in America descends upon the closest television set to tune in.
If you’re anything like me – and let’s for all of our sakes pray that you’re not – then your first thought as you stagger back to your desk today, bloated and giddy after 
Undoubtedly by now you’ve heard about Tiger Woods’ car crash. Early reports had him in serious condition (which remember, is better than critical condition) after he apparently hit a fire hydrant and a tree while leaving his home in his SUV. The latest 
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