The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- iDroid App Rejected By Apple. Well, Duh.
- How Did The Major Online Retailers Cope With Black Friday Madness?
- CrunchBoard Jobs: uvLayer, MOO, Kakai and More!
- NSFW: 1200 words absolutely, definitely not about Rupert Murdoch and Google
- Watch Out Foursquare, Facebook is Poised To Dominate Geo
- You Can Install Chrome OS On Your Dell Mini 10v Right Now
- Hong Kong Crunch: What’s Up In China?
| iDroid App Rejected By Apple. Well, Duh. Posted: 29 Nov 2009 08:45 AM PST
Here’s a tip for all you iPhone app developers out there. If you want to make sure your app doesn’t join the long list of rejected iPhone apps out there, make sure it doesn’t advertise a competing product, especially if that product runs the Android operating system. Swavv Apps (creators of Beer Pong) learned that lesson recently when they tried to get their iDroid app past the App Store censors. The iDroid didn’t do much. It didn’t replicate any Droid features or take over any functionality of the iPhone (that would have made it a worthwhile app). All it did was display the glowing red Droid eye. If you tapped on the eye, it then showed some marketing bullet points about the competing phone such as the fact that it can run simultaneous apps and has a slide-out keyboard (something the iPhone lacks). The second page also shows a picture of the Droid with its keyboard out. Apple rejected the app because it was nothing more than an ad for a competitor. I kinda have to side with Apple on this one, although I think it would have been smarter for them to let the app through. Sure, the iDroid was an ad for the Droid phone. But what’s the real message it would have sent? What it says is that the iPhone is a powerful marketing vehicle for anything mobile, perhaps even more powerful than Times Square billboards or Google’s homepage. If you can get someone to download an app to their iPhone and show it to their friends that’s more likely to make a lasting impression than a glaring billboard. Now, why anyone would want to download the iDroid app other than to get the increasingly-familiar, if somewhat spooky, Droid eye on their iPhone as a lark is beyond me. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  |
| How Did The Major Online Retailers Cope With Black Friday Madness? Posted: 29 Nov 2009 03:56 AM PST
Website monitoring service InternetVista vigorously measured the uptime and response time of seven of the most popular Internet retail websites from Monday morning November 24 until midnight November 28, to see how the online outlets would cope with the Black Friday madness, traditionally one of the busiest shopping periods in the United States both on the Web as in meat space. InternetVista pinged Amazon.com, Apple.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Dell.com, Target.com, ToysRus.com and Walmart.com every minute for the entire workweek from multiple datacenters located around the world, in order to find how well the websites were handling the influx of visitors looking for great bargains. Turns out all of them managed to stay online the whole time, with the exception of a brief period of downtime that was registered for the Toys”R”Us website, although notably most of the websites clearly suffered from slower response times at busy times. The report – embedded below – shows that the uptime of six out of seven online retail websites was 100% for the entire period, with only Toysrus.com experiencing downtime for 5 minutes (meaning the site still registered 99.9% uptime in total). Perhaps not so surprisingly, practically all of the measured online retail websites suffered from slower response times – particularly on Friday afternoon and evening – with the exception of computer manufacturers Dell and Apple, whose websites actually loaded faster at the end than at the beginning of the week. On average, Walmart.com scored best with an average response time of 0.512 seconds, just beating Apple.com, which came in second with an average loading time of 0.513 seconds. Dell.com’s performance stood out as the poorest with an average load time of 2.75 seconds, at one point even taking nearly 50 seconds (!) to load in its entirety. Have you shopped at any of the measured websites last week? Did you notice any slowness?
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| CrunchBoard Jobs: uvLayer, MOO, Kakai and More! Posted: 29 Nov 2009 02:04 AM PST
Also, don’t forget that we’re looking for a Conferences & Events Producer, Account Executive and CrunchBase interns here at TechCrunch! For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard. Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| NSFW: 1200 words absolutely, definitely not about Rupert Murdoch and Google Posted: 28 Nov 2009 08:02 PM PST
Throughout the week, my inbox receives a steady flow of emails; from friends, from colleagues, but mostly from total strangers – all containing useful links to stories they “assume I’ve seen”. And always with the same suggestion: “you should write about this in your column!”. Worse than the suggesters are the “trusters”. They’re even more irritating because of their belief that they wield some kind of editorial influence. “Trust you’ll be writing about this in your column this week. Can’t wait to hear your take on it!” they say, blithely assuming that their lack of patience will ultimately be rewarded. Some of them even add a ‘LOL’ to further underline what total and utter wankers they are. In truth, it rarely pays to indulge the recommenders or the trusters. If a subject has blipped across their radar then chances are, by the time my weekly deadline has come around, it will have been done to death by other bloggers and columnists. By Saturday even the person who ‘couldn’t wait’ to hear my take on a subject will be utterly bored with it. The perfect example of this is Rupert Murdoch’s “threat” to remove News Corp content from Google, and his “negotiations” with Microsoft to make articles from The Wall Street Journal and the rest “only available on Bing”. It’s no exaggeration to say that the entire fucking universe has emailed me to say how much they’re looking forward to hearing my opinion on the prospect. Apparently my criticism of the aborted Microsoft adverti-raping of Family Guy means my views on Microsoft and Murdoch somehow matter a damn, and the fact that I’ve worked for old and new media means that I have some unique additional insight. Also, I swear a lot when I talk about Rupert or Microsoft, and people dig that shit. After the eighty-six-millionth email dinged into my inbox, I did almost consider surrendering to popular pressure and dedicating an entire column to my analysis of whether such an arrangement is ever likely to happen and what it would mean for Google, and the wider world. But then I realised that I’m paid to write long, and that a column like that would read as follows (in its entirety)…
…which feels lazy, even for me. The fact is, as a Brit, I’ve seen Murdoch pulling this crap countless times before. The News Corp-owned Sun is the biggest-selling newspaper in the UK, and second biggest-selling English language newspaper in the world. In every national election for as long as anyone can remember, the candidate backed by the Sun has gone on to win. (And not just in the UK – the paper backed Obama for President, even though Murdoch also owns Fox News.) The Sun’s endorsement of winners is, according to some, evidence of Murdoch-as-kingmaker; a man with the ability to shape opinion and to win (or lose) elections. Sure enough, the Sun’s recent shift from supporting Prime Minister Gordon Brown, to Conservative rival David Cameron coincided with a spike in opinion polls for the latter to become the next Prime Minister. But to assume that Murdoch’s backing of Cameron lead to the spike is to flip cause and effect. Murdoch doesn’t create winners, he’s simply adept at spotting where public opinion is heading – waiting until he’s absolutely certain who the winner of a fight will be – and then endorsing them so loudly that when they inevitably win, he can share all the credit. “It’s The Sun Wot Won It”, the paper once declared after an election, when in fact a more accurate headline would be “it’s the Sun wot noticed it”. The idea that Murdoch removing his content from Google will be the beginning of the end for the latter’s dominance is just nonsense. Sure a few smaller news rivals might be dumb enough to heed his rallying cry for a mass-boycott of Google News, but that will just be an added bonus to Murdoch. The numbers show that most searchers wouldn’t even notice if the Wall Street Journal and every other News Corp publication vanished from their results. What would definitely happen, though, is a huge drop in eyeballs and ad revenue for News Corp, which would certainly cost Murdoch far more than he could hope to recoup from a deal with Bing. Again, anyone familiar with the Sun (and its New York-based cousin, the Post) will know that Rupert will always put his hunger for eyeballs above his insistence that people pay for news – to the point where he is happy to slash cover prices to economically-suicidal levels to win readers. But fortunately Murdoch doesn’t need to make that decision: unlike in politics where you can’t endorse both candidates, there’s really no reason for him to pick a horse in the search race. His ideal scenario is to continue to make News Corp content available via both Google and Bing, but to encourage both to display it in a way that drives the maximum monetizable eyeballs. Which is exactly what his current strategy will achieve. By convincing Bing that there’s a chance he might drop Google – for the right price – Murdoch suddenly has a new partner falling over itself to give him prominence in their search results, on his terms. Sure enough, Microsoft has just agreed to help fund the next-generation search crawling protocol, ACAP, which gives content owners like News Corp more control over how their news is indexed. Meantime, Google might not be worried about a mass exodus to Bing, but as more publishers start to consider alternative search services they have to at least begin to take ACAP seriously. After all, if you want to index the world’s information, you have to accept that a big chunk of that information belongs to Rupert. Again, this is win-win for Murdoch who can keep his content on Google, but with the option of locking some of it away behind un-indexable walls in future. And that’s where we see Murdoch’s real genius: he has managed to use his illusion of influence to get all of these benefits without having to commit himself to anything, or expose himself in any way. There is no way in hell that News Corp content will vanish from Google and yet with every headline asking whether Google should be worried or suggesting that other companies might follow Murdoch’s lead, his image as a kingmaker is strengthened. It’s bad enough that he has millions of readers and viewers for his own outlets, without the rest of us doing his dirty work for him. And it’s for that reason that I won’t be swayed by the recommenders and the trusters, no matter how many emails they send. I know Murdoch’s game, and unlike my poor misguided TechCrunch colleagues, I refuse to play it. So, sorry Rupert, I don’t know what my column will be about this week, but one thing’s for sure: it won’t include a single word about you or your…. …oh. Damn you’re good. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Watch Out Foursquare, Facebook is Poised To Dominate Geo Posted: 28 Nov 2009 03:12 PM PST
But all this time I’ve had a nagging feeling that Foursquare, at least in its current form, is not going to be the next Twitter, as some people have concluded. Because as good as Foursquare is at figuring out where and what your friends are up to, they can’t hope to compete with Facebook. That is, if Facebook does Geo right. While the world’s largest social network has been almost totally silent with regard to its plans for geolocation, we’ve been hearing an increasing number of rumors about Facebook finally coming close to launching these features. Such rumors have come and gone for a long time, but all signs point to the most recent batch being true. For one, Facebook recently edited its Privacy Policy to explicitly allow for location-based features. And perhaps more importantly, the clock is ticking: Facebook’s rival Twitter just launched its Geolocation API, and Facebook can’t afford to be left in the dust. Facebook absolutely needs to implement location if it’s going to maintain its status as the top social network. When it does launch, Facebook is going to have a massive impact on the current location based service environment. Much of this still-nascent space will change. And those that fail to evolve quickly will die. Deconstructing FoursquareI’m singling out Foursquare because it’s currently the hottest startup in location. But many of the issues affecting Foursquare apply to other promising geo-based startups like Gowalla, and the countless others that are surely in the works. During our Realtime CrunchUp, Foursquare VP of Business Development Tristan Walker described Foursquare as a company that “makes things that make cities easier to use. We try to get folks to get out and explore the cities in which they live, or visit, and incentivize them to do so. It’s a little bit of a friend finder, a little bit of a social city guide… and we use game mechanics to tie that all together.”
Then there’s the social city guide element of Foursquare, which could one day be a full-fledged social recommendation feature. But right now it revolves around leaving ‘tips’ about the locations you visit. This is Foursquare’s weakest point. When I look through the tips of various restaurants they’re usually filled with things like “try the chicken noodle soup”. These are occasionally helpful, but they lack context. Most of the tips I’m seeing were left by people who I don’t know at all, and they’re too brief to be any more useful than something I can already find on Yelp. I certainly haven’t reached the point where I want to see the available Foursquare tips every time I check into a restaurant. Finally, there’s Foursquare the friend finder. The first thing you see when you boot the app is a list of where your friends have checked in recently. This is the driving force behind Foursquare’s growing popularity. There have been other services, like Loopt and Brightkite, that have let you keep tabs on your friends for quite a while. But Foursquare’s check-in model has struck a chord because it provides more context (you know what people are up to as opposed to just where they are) and a greater amount of privacy, because you have to explicitly choose to check in. The appeal of the friend finder is obvious — if you see your buddy is at a nearby bar, maybe you’ll walk over to meet him. This isn’t just a gimmick. It appeals to some fundamental human desire to hang out with people you enjoy spending time with. This will never grow old. And it’s where Facebook is poised to dominate. Why Facebook Already WonThe most compelling part of Foursquare is the ability to see at a glance what your friends are up to. Unfortunately, most people don’t know all that many people on Foursquare yet — my current Friends List on Foursquare is dominated by folks who live and breathe tech, without a single person from my ‘regular’ social circle on the service. Twitter has always suffered from the same problem, and even a year of stellar growth and constant press attention hasn’t yet given Twitter an on ramp into mainstream use. Facebook doesn’t have that problem. At most, there are probably a few dozen people who you’d like to share your location with. And you’re already friends with all of them on Facebook. You may even have separated them into a Friends List of “real” friends — the people you hang out with on a regular basis. And that’s why Facebook has already won the battle. Unlike Twitter, where you may be interested in following people you don’t know well, your circle of close friends on Facebook and the people with whom you’d probably like to share your location are one and the same. If Facebook really wanted to, it could probably even look at people you’re commonly tagged alongside in photos to help suggest who to include on your list of ‘location’ friends. There are plenty of other things Facebook has going for it. Facebook already has a robust system for managing privacy settings. Granted, they’re confusing as all hell, but Facebook has made it clear that it’s working on making them easier to use. And over the years millions of people have come to trust Facebook as a relatively safe service — something that is key given the sensitive nature of location. Foursquare is a looming privacy disaster. The other key component is Facebook’s ubiquity on GPS-enabled smartphones. These are essential for updating your location on the go (which is where most of geo’s utility comes from). And Facebook is already dominating here. Facebook is the most popular iPhone/iPod Touch app of all time, and it has a strong presence on other platforms as well (it comes preinstalled on Android and Palm’s WebOS). It is hard to overstate how important these advantages are for Facebook. It may not be particularly difficult for other services to implement privacy features and friends lists, or even to build nice iPhone apps. But getting people to start using them will be incredibly difficult. The Big Question MarkFacebook has made it quite clear that location based something is coming. We’ve heard rumors about it for months, and in their most recent Privacy Policy change they actually included language directly pertaining to location based services. Here’s how it reads:
So it looks like it’s coming soon, but we still don’t know the direction Facebook is going to take. There are two obvious ways Facebook could treat location. It can act as a direct competitor to services like Loopt, Foursquare, and the rest by allowing you to directly check into locations from your phone or via the web. Or, it could serve as something of a central hub for location that third parties could update via an API. In other words, updating a service like Foursquare could then update your Facebook location. It seems likely that Facebook will wind up doing both. Twitter is already trying to become the central hub for geo-positioned status updates through its own API, and Facebook isn’t going to give that up without a fight. Given Facebook’s moves to bolster its other API functions, I think it’s safe to say they’ll be allowing developers to push a user’s geolocation from their service or app into Facebook. Facebook would be foolish to rely exclusively on third parties as a source of location data. Many people update their status messages and photos exclusively through Facebook.com and their official mobile applications, probably without realizing they have other options. The big question is what form this native location functionality that appears within Facebook will take. Facebook could simply allow people to geotag their status updates in the same way that Twitter does. Or it could adopt a robust location feature that more closely resembles Foursquare and Loopt. The change in the Terms of Service leaves room for both of these. Again, I think Facebook will do both. Third parties may be able to tap into this data via Facebook Connect, but they won’t own it. I don’t think Facebook is going to set out to beat Foursquare. Far from it, in fact — I think Facebook is going to readily accept geo data through its API, which makes Foursquare a great potential contributor. But if Facebook chooses to own your location and that of your friends, it will severely undermine Foursquare’s primary feature.
Nothing Is In the BagAll of that said, Facebook could still mess this up. The company has been thinking of location for a very long time now, and has held off largely because of the concerns over privacy. These concerns are certainly valid. Attorneys general from multiple countries are clearly keeping their eyes on the site’s potential safety risks. In light of this scrutiny, there’s a chance that Facebook will roll out location too slowly. Or that what they do roll out will be handicapped. Given how much is at stake I don’t think they’ll let that happen, but it’s possible. How Foursquare And The Rest Can Still ThriveIf Facebook does nail geo, that doesn’t necessarily mean Foursquare is doomed. It just means that Foursquare needs to build a product whose core value extends beyond showing where your friends are. That’s why I think its social city guide is probably the best thing it has going for it. It may be lacking now, but if Foursquare can build out a compelling recommendation engine that introduces you to new people to meet and places to see based on your past checkin history, it could be very cool. It could also continue building out its gaming elements to keep them fresh. Looking forward, services like SimpleGeo and GeoAPI will be able to help apps integrate location very quickly. Facebook is going to own the social graph, but there’s plenty that can still be done beyond that. Games. Dating apps. Hyper-local advertising. These all have very bright futures. They’ll just need to figure out how to use location as a starting point, rather than a core feature. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| You Can Install Chrome OS On Your Dell Mini 10v Right Now Posted: 28 Nov 2009 12:40 PM PST  You can now run Chromium OS, the open source developmental version of Google Chrome OS, on your Dell Mini 10v. Don't have one? Neither do I, so don't feel too bad. |
| Hong Kong Crunch: What’s Up In China? Posted: 28 Nov 2009 12:38 PM PST  Hey, guys. I, John Biggs, will be in Hong Kong and Guangdong next week (November 30-December 5) to visit some folks and would love to meet up with Web 2.0 and gadget purveyors in mother China. If you would like to chat, drop me a line at john @ crunchgear.com and let me know what's up. I'm thinking about doing an informal meet-up on Thursday so advice on places to meet in Hong Kong are welcome. |
One of the most tiresome group of people you encounter when you write a weekly column is the “suggesters”.
Over the last six months just about all of my tech friends have started using 
First, let’s look at Foursquare the game. Whenever you check in on Foursquare, you’re rewarded with points and (sometimes) badges with clever names. These are fun initially, because you can easily compete with your friends for bragging rights. But while these game elements are a good way to entice users, they’re ultimately just a gimmick. In two year’s time, will any of these people seriously care about how many checkins they have? I doubt it. Certainly not enough to motivate them to check in every time they enter an establishment. If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a lifelong gamer, it’s that even the most engaging, addictive games out there get tired after a while. And Foursquare’s gameplay simply isn’t that engaging to begin with.
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