The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- The New TweetDeck Goes List Crazy And Adds Maps To GeoTweets
- The End Of The CrunchPad
- eBay Ordered To Pay $2.5 Million Fine Over LVMH Product Sales Spat
- eBuddy Debuts Premium iPhone App
- Features Chrome For Mac Beta Will Be Missing
- Google Checkout Now Deals In Holiday Savings
- Bing’s 2009 Top Search Terms: Michael Jackson Beats Out Twitter
- Twitter Doesn’t Track The Zeitgeist. Only 2 Percent Of Tweets Overlap With Search Trends.
- Email Of The Week: Journalism School Language Police
- Calling Twitter’s Bluff
- Can India “Jugaad” Its Way To More Angel Investing?
- Scribd Important Stuff List Revealed (Humor)
- Only 8 Bugs Stand In The Way Of Chrome For Mac Beta
- Tweetie 2.1 Hits The App Store With Lists, Retweets, Geolocation And More
- Real Time, Real Discussion, Real Reporting: Choose Two
- Sunday Giveaway: See the World With Your Very Own Vue Camera System
| The New TweetDeck Goes List Crazy And Adds Maps To GeoTweets Posted: 30 Nov 2009 08:21 AM PST
Streamreaders just keep getting better and better. A new version of TweetDeck is rolling out today with some major improvements, including support for Lists, Retweets, maps for geo-tagged messages, and LinkedIn streams. TweetDeck has already been downloaded more than 10 million times, and its active user base is in the low millions so this is a significant update. As soon as Twitter launched Lists (the ability to create and follow groups) as a regular feature, all the stream readers rushed to incorporate it. TweetDeck already let you create Groups in separate columns, and is now replacing that with Twitter Lists. Existing TweetDeck Groups will still work, but from now on when you create a new group it will be via the official List functionality and available for all other Twitter users to see if you choose to make it public. You can also export your old groups as a List. TweetDeck, however, goes beyond simply letting you add Lists as columns. You can edit lists in a pop-up lightbox, weeding out people from other people’s lists or using existing lists as the basis for entirely new ones. There is even a suggested users feature which suggests people to add to a list you are creating based on the existing members of the list you are starting with, as well as the name and the description. This is a first step towards creating dynamic lists.
The one issue TweetDeck (and all desktop Twitter clients) will run into with lists is that they eat up the allotted API calls for each client. Since there are so many users in each list, sometimes hundreds, and lists update with each of their Tweets, it goes through the allowed number of updates pretty quickly. Web-based stream readers such as Seesmic Web don’t run into this issue because they are all centralized on one server rather than making millions of separate API calls from each downloaded client (Seesmic’s desktop apps,however, currently do run into the issue). TweetDeck handles Retweets really nicely as well. There’s been some confusion about how Twitter handles Retweets because people you don’t know all of a sudden appear in your main Twitter stream. TweetDeck alleviates this confusion by showing two small, overlapping avatars of both the person being retweeted and of the person doing the retweeting. It also lets you choose whether you want to retweet the new way or the old way, by editing first and then retweeting. For all the Tweets that now have geolocation enabled, TweetDeck shows a small red drop at the bottom. When you click on it, a Yahoo map comes up showing the location. This is quickly becoming a standard feature. Finally, TweetDeck is adding LinkedIn streams via LinkedIn’s new APIs. In addition to Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, you can now have a LinkedIn column as well. One stream reader to rule them all. Here’s a video showing off some of the new features: Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.  |
| Posted: 30 Nov 2009 07:52 AM PST
Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago. We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want. We’d put 1,000 of the devices on pre-sale and take orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010. And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication. On November 17, our deadline date for greenlighting the debut three days later, the CEO of our partner on the project, Chandra Rathakrishnan, sent me an email with the subject “no good news.” Yuck, I thought. Another delay, probably with the screen that had been giving us so much trouble – capacitive touch at 12 inches isn’t trivial. And sure enough, the email started off with “no good news to update. updated hardware is still on its way , so that’s a timing issue. friday will be a challenge now.” But the email went on. Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project. Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement. Err, what? This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifiying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple. Chandra also forwarded an internal email from one of his shareholders. My favorite part of the email: “We still acknowledge that Arrington and TechCrunch bring some value to your business endeavor…If he agrees to our terms, we would have Arrington assume the role of visionary/evangelist/marketing head and Fusion Garage would acquire the rights to use the Crunchpad brand and name. Personally, I don’t think the name is all that important but you seem to be somewhat attached to the name.” And with that, the entire project self destructed. Neither we nor Fusion Garage own the intellectual property of the CrunchPad outright. Fusion Garage has a team of 13 or so employees, currently working here in Silicon Valley out of a home they rented and in our office. Their team has mixed with our CrunchPad team, which is led by Brian Kindle, the former Vice President Hardware Engineering and Manufacturing at Vudu and an early hardware engineer at TiVo. Development expenses have been shared, and our team has spent time in Singapore and Taiwan, and their team has spent time here. We chose to work with Fusion Garage on Prototype C and the launch prototype after we finished Prototype B internally. We jointly own the CrunchPad product intellectual property, and we solely own the CrunchPad trademark. So it’s legally impossible for them to simply build and sell the device without our agreement. We’re still completely perplexed as to what happened. We think they were attempting to renegotiate the equity split on the company behind CrunchPad, which was to acquire Fusion Garage. Renegotiations are always fine. But holding a gun to our head two days before launching and insulting us isn’t the way to do that. We’ve spent the last week and a half trying unsuccessfully to communicate with them. Our calls and emails go unanswered, so we can’t even figure out exactly what’s happened. Yesterday Chandra sent an email saying “Following our phone discussion, I had another round of discussions with my shareholders. The shareholders are not willing to move from their position as they believe their stand is justified. On the other hand, there isn’t an alternative offer on the table from Crunchpad.” My response: “We have not come back to you with any counter offer to the email you forwarded because you and your shareholders have communicated to us that moving forward without us is something that you consider to be a legitimate and legal option. In other words, your “counter” offer is theft of intellectual property.” Ultimately there are two sides to every story, and they’ll certainly have their side. We will almost certainly be filing multiple lawsuits against Fusion Garage, and possibly Chandra and his shareholders as individuals, shortly. The legal system will work it all out over time.
And what’s really sad about all this is the incredible support we were getting from companies and people around the world to launch this device. A major multi-billion dollar retail partner has been patiently working with us for months, giving advice on manufacturing partners and offering to sell the CrunchPad at a zero margin to help us succeed in the early days. They were also willing to pay for the devices on order instead of 30 days after delivery, a crucial cash flow benefit that would allow us to ramp up volume without putting ourselves our of business. They were even willing to fly the devices from China on their own planes to eliminate our shipping costs. Intel, which would supply the Atom CPUs to power the device, has assisted us repeatedly with engineering and partner advice, and gave us pricing that was ridiculously generous given our projected first year sales volumes. Other partners were eager to promote and sell the device for little or no benefit on their end other than “supporting the project.” We even had sponsors lined up to help us sell the device near our $300ish cost. And money wasn’t a problem, either. We had blue chip angel and venture capitalist investors in Silicon Valley waiting to invest in the company since late Spring. We were simply holding them off until we launched, to eliminate some of the risk. It’s a sad day at TechCrunch HQ. Hitting the publish button on this post, which makes all of this so…final…is a very hard thing to do. I’m enraged, embarrassed, and just…sad. The CrunchPad is now in the DeadPool.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| eBay Ordered To Pay $2.5 Million Fine Over LVMH Product Sales Spat Posted: 30 Nov 2009 07:03 AM PST  [France] A commercial court in Paris has fined eBay €1.7 million euros (roughly £1.6 million) for allegedly not sticking to an injunction banning users from selling on products of luxury goods conglomerate Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH in short). Allowing the LVMH perfumes and cosmetics to be purchased by Frenchmen on its French and UK website according to the ruling violated a prior court order to remove all such postings (June 2008), part of a €38 million verdict saying eBay had not done enough to stop the sale of counterfeited LVMH items. |
| eBuddy Debuts Premium iPhone App Posted: 30 Nov 2009 04:42 AM PST
Nearly five months after launching a free, ad-supported application for iPhone and iPod Touch, eBuddy is today introducing a paid version of the program, which enables users to communicate with contacts across various instant messaging clients. Priced at $4.99 (iTunes link), which in my opinion is fairly expensive, the app lets you chat with friends on Facebook Chat, ICQ, Gtalk, AIM, MySpace, Windows Live Messenger or Yahoo Messenger alike. Unlike its gratis counterpart, eBuddy Pro for iPhone and iPod Touch is advertisement-free, and boasts a couple more features that the company hopes people will be willing to pay for: - push notifications for incoming messages when the app is closed (for up to 3 days) The application also lets you switch between chat conversations by swiping the screen of your iPhone or iPod Touch (handy) and sends out a buzzer when the device is shaken. The Netherlands-based company promises more features will be included in future updates (e.g. landscape mode). Ebuddy says over 2.5 million people have download the free iPhone application to date, while (only) some 180,000 downloads have been registered for the Android app. The free iPhone app was ad-free until today – and the company recently partnered with India’s InMobi to increase its mobile advertising revenue and will start doing that now that the premium app is available in the App Store. Alternatives to eBuddy Pro include IM+ and Beejive (both cost more – feature sets vary).
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Features Chrome For Mac Beta Will Be Missing Posted: 30 Nov 2009 02:20 AM PST
It’s been known for a while that Google would have to trim some features from the initial Chrome for Mac beta launch to get it out before self-imposed “end of the year” deadline. But what’s on the chopping block? A scan through the Chromium logs on Google Code seems to reveal what will and won’t be a go for Chrome for Mac beta. So what’s out? The biggest feature that is currently not slated to be done in time for “milestone 4″ (aka Chrome version 4, which Chrome for Mac beta will be, at least initially) is the Bookmark Manager. Current Chromium (and dev Chrome) testers will know that this option has been grayed out forever on the latest builds of the browser, and as of September, it was moved from a M4 (milestone 4) to a M5 target. It would appear that Google will launch Chrome for Mac beta without it working. Another feature moved to M5 is App Mode. This is the Chome mode that allows you to run web apps in their own basic browser window. Fans of Fluid, a free program for OS X that works with Safari, will appreciate this being built into the browser eventually, but it doesn’t appear that will be ready for the beta launch either. Likewise, the Task Manager has been moved from M4 to M5, but recent chatter about it makes it seem like it’s possible that it could be done in time. Gears, which allows for offline web app functionality, is completely off the table as a Chrome for Mac feature right now, according to project lead Mike Pinkerton (he actually noted this back in July). Apparently, Google plans to push ahead with full HTML5 support rather than rely on Gears, at least on the Mac. Sync for Mac (bookmark syncing) is another feature that currently works on the PC version of Chrome, but is slated to be a M5 project for the Chrome for Mac team. Still, this thread shows that significant progress has been made on it, and it looks like you can even enable it to try it out, but it won’t be on by default yet. Multi-touch gestures that are built into OS X and used by MacBook trackpads and the new Magic Mouse are another M5 project. The two listed gestures, “Three-finger-swipe up” and “Pinch in/out to zoom in/out” are still being debated as to what they should actually do. While one of the highly touted features of Snow Leopard is that it’s 64-bit, Chrome for Mac beta will not be initially supporting it. In fact, this may not even be a M5 project, it all depends on how well Google’s V8 JavaScript engine is able to perform in a 64-bit environment, apparently. Full extension support will also not be a part of Chrome for Mac beta, Pinkerton tweeted out tonight. While many extensions are working in the latest builds of Chromium for Mac, some are apparently not. Pinkerton promises that the team will get to this “soon,” but needed to “draw a line somewhere.” Another feature currently disabled in the Mac builds of Chromium is Full Screen mode. It would seem this too has been pushed to M5. So those appear to be the big features that will be missing with the launch of the Chrome for Mac beta. There’s a larger list of other M5 projects here. Again, Chrome for Mac beta will be a M4 (version 4) release, so all of these appear to be off the table for now. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Google Checkout Now Deals In Holiday Savings Posted: 30 Nov 2009 01:46 AM PST
And while Microsoft has been making many online shoppers happy the past few days with the Bing Cashback system, Google has now set up a special ‘Checkout Deals’ page where you can get discounts on products purchased using Mountain View’s Internet payment system. Savings range from $5 to $20 and involve hundreds of participating stores, including Buy.com, Petco and Toys”R”Us. I’m left wondering why that Deals page wasn’t launched a week ago. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Bing’s 2009 Top Search Terms: Michael Jackson Beats Out Twitter Posted: 29 Nov 2009 09:43 PM PST
Top 2009 Bing Trending Topics:
Here are Yahoo and Google’s top search terms for 2008. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Twitter Doesn’t Track The Zeitgeist. Only 2 Percent Of Tweets Overlap With Search Trends. Posted: 29 Nov 2009 09:31 PM PST
Whenever you want to take a reading of the current zeitgeist, popular search terms can tell you a lot about what’s on people’s minds. Right now, for instance, the hottest search terms on Google Trends include “lakewood police shooting,” “tiger woods mistress,” “surviving Christmas,” and “cyber monday 2009 deals.” If you look at Trending Topics on Twitter, however, you’ll see “#isitme,” “Google Wave,” and “Soul Train Awards.” I suspect only the last one might make it as a trending search term.
The overlap between trending search terms and Tweets is remarkably low (even if Twitter itself is a popular search term). A couple weeks ago I was moderating a realtime search panel when Vik Singh (the engineer behind Yahoo Boss, soon to be an EIR at Sutter Hill Ventures) declared that only 2 percent of all Tweets match trending search terms. His stats came from an analysis of 10 million Tweets he crawled last summer. He looked at all Tweets, not just trending topics. When he stripped out the non-essential words, he found that the average Tweet consists of 6.28 terms, or the equivalent of a really good search query. But there is not much overlap between what people are Tweeting about and what the general population is searching for. Maybe that is because people tend to search for what they don’t know, whereas they Tweet about what they do know or think they know. Or maybe it’s just because people on Twitter are not normal. Some other data Singh found:
Again, this data is based on a crawl of 10 million Tweets, but those Tweets were from the end of July, which was way before Twitter made retweets an official feature of the service. So I’d be surprised if the retweet rate is still so low. There are also a lot more people on Twitter now, so maybe the subject of people’s Tweets now overlaps with search trends more than the 2 percent Singh found. It would be illuminating if someone ran the same analysis today. Until Twitter becomes a daily habit for everyone on the Web (not just tech-heads and other early adopters), Tweets will not reflect the general zeitgeist. But it does already reflect the zeitgeist of the people you care about and follow. And maybe in the end that is all that matters. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Email Of The Week: Journalism School Language Police Posted: 29 Nov 2009 07:53 PM PST
Gabrielle, a student at Drake University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, writes to tell us that, according to the Associated Press Stylebook, the word website really should be written as Web site:
We have of course banned the AP from our site for inappropriate Internet behavior, and so we don’t often refer to their stylebook. In fact, tonight was the first I’d heard of it – if anyone owns the book please check p. 287 for me. Why in the world it would be considered definitive in journalism school baffles me, but everything about journalism school tends to baffle me. As usual the AP is woefully behind the times. But here’s our response to Gabrielle anyway: First, the word “website” is perfectly acceptable, and in fact it is the proper way to spell and capitalize the word:
Second, I don’t give a damn. Also, are your parents really emptying their savings account for this educational experience? Past Winners Of The Email Of The Week Award: Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Posted: 29 Nov 2009 06:43 PM PST  Ever since FriendFeed was sold to Facebook, we've been told over and over again that the company and its community were toast. And as if to underline the fact, FriendFeed's access to the Twitter firehose was terminated and vaguely replaced with a slow version that is currently delivering Twitter posts between 20 minutes and two hours after their appearance on Twitter. At the Realtime CrunchUp, Bret Taylor confirmed this was not a technical but rather a legal issue. Put simply, Twitter is choking FriendFeed to death. What's odd about this is that most observers consider FriendFeed a failure, too complicated and user-unfriendly to compete with Twitter or Facebook. If Twitter believed that to be the case, why would they endeavor to kill it? And if it were not a failure? Then Twitter is trying to kill it for a good reason. That reason: FriendFeed exposes the impossible task of owning all access to its user's data. Does Microsoft or Google or IBM own your email? Does Gmail apply rate limiting to POP3 and IMAP? So the reason Twitter is killing FriendFeed is because they think they can get away with it. And they will, as far as it goes, as long as the third party vendors orbiting Twitter validate the idea that Twitter owns the data. |
| Can India “Jugaad” Its Way To More Angel Investing? Posted: 29 Nov 2009 04:49 PM PST
Now, truth be told, that's a complaint I also hear in the American heartland, in Canada, in Europe, in Africa, in China and, well, pretty much everywhere I've traveled to over the last few years. I'm not sure people ever feel they've got enough money being thrown their way. But there is definitely something that makes Silicon Valley and Israel different from almost everywhere else I've been. Both have a wide base of people who made lots of money in the late 1990s Internet boom: The Yossi Vardis and the Marc Andreessens, but also hundreds of lesser known stock option recipients who may not want to start another company, but want to stay in the game $10,000 or so at a time. Sure, Europe has had some big hits, but a culture of being tight-fisted with stock options has kept the wealth from getting spread widely enough to create a large base of millionaires who feel comfortable backing startups. Bebo's Michael Birch and Skype's Niklas Zennstrom are more exceptions in London than the rule. Even a city like Seattle, which had two colossal wins in Microsoft and Amazon doesn't see a critical mass of angel activity—or even venture activity according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Typically just under one hundred startups raise venture capital in the entire state of Washington each year. For all the talk that Boston's venture scene is "dead," Massachusetts still gets nearly three times as many deals. Note, this isn't a question of wealth. There are plenty of pockets of the super rich throughout the world. But unless you earned it from a high tech start-up, you're culturally loath to give it out to a guy you don't know with an unproven idea. Angels may be considered a crucial ingredient in today's modern startup ecosystem, but if you think about it, asking strangers to write you a $20,000 personal check for no guarantee and a chunk of stock is a pretty new phenomenon. It's the result of a decade or more of broad-based success, not the result of one big hit. That means a healthy angel environment isn't necessarily a sign that a place is about to take off, rather, it's a lagging indicator of a healthy startup scene. That brings us back to India—a place that venture capital has been pulling out of in recent years as the burgeoning 1.2 billion person domestic Alok Mittal, a partner at Canaan Ventures in Delhi, agrees with the numbers and says the angel totals are far worse. If there's about $1 billion in true venture capital in India, he says there's only about $50 million in angel deals. Compare that to the United States where there's roughly $20 billion in venture capital and another $20 billion in angel deals that primes that VC pump. That's a disconnect that gives Indian entrepreneurs fits. "Indians are inherently very risk adverse and many of the entrepreneurs who've made money just put it in stocks," Mittal says. It's all the more frustrating to entrepreneurs on the ground because there are so many prominent Indians who've had huge success in Silicon Valley and talk a big game about the opportunities in India and their desire to help give back to their native land. The cash just never seems to make it over. What gives? For a start, angel investing is a local phenomenon, as much about mentoring and connections as it is about the thousands of dollars invested. An Indian who's made billions in the Valley doesn't necessarily know the first thing about mentoring an inexperienced kid with an idea in Mumbai. Until Indians start having more big hits in India, it will struggle to improve its angel landscape. So India—or any region like it that has money, desire and opportunity but a lack of sustained big wins— has two choices: Muddle along without the help of early money and wisdom and churn out some big hits or figure out a way to hack space and time. Not surprisingly, I met several parties in India trying to do the latter. Can it work? Maybe, but there are inevitable tradeoffs. The most common hack is creating so-called angel networks and there are a slew of them in India. They tend to do a few dozen deals a year. The advantage is by sharing the risk, angels get more comfortable with this type of investing and can pool their resources, and diversify across several deals. But there's a clear disadvantage: True angel investing is when a self-made individual with no one to answer to makes a gut decision to back an entrepreneur. Institutionalizing the process makes raising angel funds like raising a small round of venture capital. There are still the same hoops to jump through and demands of near term revenues, there's just a smaller pot of money at the end of the gauntlet. Mittal is part of one of these angel groups and admits it's not nearly a big enough solution. "We have done twenty deals, but what's twenty deals?" he says. Another idea is a Y-Combinator style incubator being hatched by former Valleyite Freeman Murray (above, right) in Bangalore. Murray ran something similar in Pune, and has relocated to the South where there's generally more startup activity as kids watching Web 2.0 glamour from afar are quitting boring jobs with multi-nationals to start mostly Web and service companies. Murray sees the slow growth of India's Web market as a potential advantage, giving him plenty of time to handhold and mentor smart kids with a good idea but little else. And just $10,000 each can keep these companies running and experimenting for a while. Where does Murray get the money? Some of it is his own savings, and some comes from those very same Indian Valley successes who want to seed companies in the motherland but need someone to be the feet on the street. A similar approach is being launched by Indus Khaitan, a former Symantec executive who moved back to India and joined Morpheus Venture Partners, which recently closed a new fund thanks also to Valley-based Indian wealth. He's also based in Bangalore. Khaitan is one of those natural networkers with an easy smile and an ever-available credit card to buy group dinners. But Murray gets the laid-back, hippie points—he's constructed a huge Burning-Man like complex in downtown Bangalore where he'll put on community art and startup events. It's wrapped in Chinese tarps with a multitude of metal stairs leading to different floors and levels inside. It's got wifi (natch), and soon, a garden for a roof and solar panels to replace a power chord that's now being piped in from the neighbors. There's something in India called Jugaad — it's an innate creativity for problem solving that some worry the Zippo-lighter-flashing kids working for multinationals in Bangalore have lost. Murray may be a California native, but he has jugaad in spades. But even if each effort is successful, they are still just tiny drops in the bucket—and India has a pretty large bucket. Vishal Gondal, founder of IndiaGames and a rare Web entrepreneur who's made money in India, has had it with the partial solutions. He's sick of attending startup events where three smart kids win the competition and the so-called "early stage VCs" judging it all say the companies are still too early stage for them to invest in. "Why are they even there?" he says of the VCs. At a recent competition Gondal stood up and personally committed $100,000 to the winner on the spot—giving his wife palpitations.
Having seen loads of cities try to "recreate" Silicon Valley and fail, it's hard to be too optimistic about any plan to short-cut the natural development of the primordial soup that leads to a complex ecosystem of entrepreneurs, VCs, angels, advisors and startup worker bees. But the fact that these efforts are coming from disparate, frustrated grassroots groups and not some top-down government grant or well-meaning, fair weather rich outsiders, lends some hope that things could change in corners of India's entrepreneurial world. The truth is India's dream of building the next big fast-growing powerhouses will have less to do with angel money or Western venture money and more to do with getting around that ingrained fear of risk-taking. There's still a strong cultural stigma to failure in India. Walking away from a prestigious and high-paying multinational job when you don't have an angel to catch you isn't easy, especially in a year when India has seen some of the first corporate layoffs. But jugaad is all about finding a way, and the best Indian entrepreneurs will. The others should probably just stick with the high paying job at Microsoft anyway, angel investor or no. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Scribd Important Stuff List Revealed (Humor) Posted: 29 Nov 2009 04:14 PM PST
“Scribd doing 43M revenue this year??” was the subject line of an email sent to me last week, along with a link to this photo, taken in Scribd’s San Francisco offices, showing a list of “important stuff” on a whiteboard. Our tipster must not have read the whole list, though, because I was immediately suspicious. The items on the list, as best I can read them: Important Stuff
The chart also shows a graph showing profit hitting $1 billion. The first thing I did, of course, was call the phone number (it’s busy/disconnected). Then I emailed Scribd CEO Trip Adler to ask if the photo was actually taken in their office, and what the story behind it was. His reply: “I just put that stuff up on the whiteboard as a joke. At the time we joked that TechCrunch or some other bloggers would somehow pick it up, and it’s pretty funny that that’s what actually happened. If you want to write a post on it, you can try to guess what information is actually real. Oh, and if you can’t read the last one, it is “install waterslide in office”. Haha.” Mission accomplished. But remember, we have spies everywhere, Trip. Oh, and call Arnold back. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Only 8 Bugs Stand In The Way Of Chrome For Mac Beta Posted: 29 Nov 2009 02:27 PM PST
This means that there are only 8 things standing in the way of Chrome for Mac going beta. “M4″ stands for “milestone 4,” which is how they phrase “version 4,” which the Mac beta build of Chrome will be (the current dev channel version is 4.0.249.12, for example). It’s not entirely clear what these 8 things are as the Chrome Mac Status page hasn’t been updated in a while, and the known issues listed include things that are meant for milestone 5, not 4. But in early November, Pinkerton noted that there were 20-some M4 blockers. So it’s possible we’re just a couple weeks away, and maybe even days (again, depending on the bugs) from those getting wiped out and Chrome for Mac going beta. In the latest Mac Chromium (the open source project Chrome is based on) builds, everything appears to be really solid. A few notable things still not working include the Bookmark Manager and full screen mode. But extensions are working, and an extension manager was recently added. The browsing experience is fast, and seems quite stable. Earlier this month, Nick Baum, a Chrome Product Manager, wrote on a Google Group page for Chrome extensions that Chrome for Mac would have a “Beta launch in early December.” That appears to still be on track. Update: As commenter Andrew points out below, it would appear that these are the 8 bugs. It’s worth noting that only one of them is “priority 1.” When Pinkerton sent his update in early November, the 20+ bugs he mentioned were all priority 1. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Tweetie 2.1 Hits The App Store With Lists, Retweets, Geolocation And More Posted: 29 Nov 2009 01:40 PM PST
Previously, we went over the way Tweetie 2.1 integrates new-style Retweets and Geotagging, but another big addition that developer Loren Brichter was able to squeeze in is new Twitter List support. While it’s perhaps not as obvious as it should be (it’s in the “more” tab at the bottom of the app), Lists are not only viewable in Tweetie 2.1, but you can edit/create them as well. Another nice addition is the ability to report spam right from the app. Since Twitter recently created an API for this, a lot of apps are starting to integrate it in. But one of the coolest new features may be “gap detection.” Basically, Tweetie remembers the last time you updated your tweet stream and it now makes it very obvious where the new tweets start when you open the app after it being closed for a bit. Previously, these old and new tweets sort of blended together, so you had to pay attention to time stamps. You can also not click in this new gap area to load older tweets and bridge the gap between the old ones you’ve seen and the new ones. Tweetie’s handling of geolocation functionality has also been improved since we did the preview. Now that the service has been turned on by Twitter, you can tag each tweet with your location and if you decide to do that, Tweetie will remember your preference for doing that. Another Twitter iPhone app, Birdfeed, still handles case-by-case geolocation a bit better, but if you’re going to want to geotag every tweet and not worry about it, Tweetie is solid. Find Tweetie 2.1 here in the App Store. Again, it’s a free upgrade — a point which caused some controversy when Tweetie 2 came out since it required Tweetie 1 users to purchase it separately. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Real Time, Real Discussion, Real Reporting: Choose Two Posted: 29 Nov 2009 12:08 PM PST  As you likely know, Tiger Woods was in an accident under apparently mysterious circumstances early Friday morning. Predictably, the reports and reactions thereto pertaining varied somewhat in quality and timeliness, and predictably, this has led to paroxysms of futurist glee in some and sullen condemnation by others. Now that the smoke has cleared, we can examine the event, which is certainly worth a little inspection despite its obvious triviality, with a little perspective. I'm not going to speculate on Woods' injuries, the cause of the crash, or rumors of fights and affairs. I don't care, personally. But how the information proliferated makes for interesting dissection. And the fun part is that there's something for everybody's agenda! Many will choose to ignore or emphasize unduly one party's role in this drama, but the fact is that it very neatly exposes both the strengths and weaknesses of both traditional and so-called new media. I hope you're sitting comfortably. |
| Sunday Giveaway: See the World With Your Very Own Vue Camera System Posted: 29 Nov 2009 11:38 AM PST  It's Sunday and I want you to be happy. That's why I'm offering you your very own Vue Personal Video network so you can keep an eye on Santa as he sneaks up to your back porch and steals your garbage cans. We reviewed this kit a few months ago and were impressed. It's completely wireless and the cameras are battery powered. |
It was so close I could taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the 
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