Thursday, November 19, 2009

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

Link to TechCrunch

As AOL Heads For An IPO, It Leaves 2500 Employees Behind

Posted: 19 Nov 2009 07:40 AM PST

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong this morning informed staff that the company will be looking for 2,500 people to voluntarily hand in their resignations, which would represent about one third of the company's payroll.

The news comes a mere week after AOL, which is preparing to spin off Time Warner and go public, said it would be firing at least 1,000 employees and spend about $200 million cleaning house prior to the planned IPO.

The voluntary layoff program is to begin on December 4 and end after the spin-off date (December 9), and if not enough volunteers come forward the company says it will fire people on its own. AOL says the cuts will drop its annual operating expenses by $300 million, and that it will incur a $200 million charge from the time of the spin-off through the first half of 2010.

Update: Business Insider has the details of the lay-off package.

When AOL will be on its own again, it will be worth about $3.15 billion.

Worth noting: Armstrong says he has personally decided to forego his 2009 bonus (which was guaranteed to be in between $1.5 million and $4 million). This, in contrast to the decision to let 2,500 people go, is not to please the market pre-IPO, but more of a goodwill gesture to current employees.

From the SEC filing:

On November 19, 2009, AOL Inc. (the "Company") informed its employees of proposed restructuring activities as part of its continuing cost reduction initiatives aimed at aligning the Company's organizational structure and costs with its strategy (the "Restructuring"). The Restructuring is conditioned upon the successful completion of the Company's previously announced spin-off from Time Warner Inc. (the "Spin-off"), as well as the approval of the Company's new Board of Directors that will begin service in connection with the Spin-off. It is anticipated that, if approved, the Restructuring will include the reduction of approximately a third of the Company's current employee base, which will be conducted on a voluntary and involuntary basis. The goal of the Restructuring is to reduce ongoing annual operating costs by approximately $300 million. If the Restructuring is approved, the Company expects to incur restructuring charges of up to $200 million, substantially all of which is expected to be incurred from the date of the Spin-off through the first half of 2010.

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Livescribe’s Pulse Smartpen Gets An App Store

Posted: 19 Nov 2009 07:22 AM PST

In the end, everything will have an app store. Take the Pulse smartpen from Livescribe, for example. The company, whose pen is quite cool (it records what you write and can "remember" things on page, allowing for paper-based calculators and control panels), has just launched an app store for its 2- and 4GB Pulse pens. The store offers multiple games, tools, and study aids for prices that range from free to about $2. You can download apps here and then upload to your pen.

TheFind Launches Comparison Shopping Feature

Posted: 19 Nov 2009 07:00 AM PST

In time for the holiday shopping season, TheFind, a technology-heavy shopping search engine, has launched a nifty comparison shopping feature that’s worth a spin.

When you do a search for a product on the find, you can now choose to see the “best price” view. For now, the feature is only available for electronics and appliances, which amounts to around 40 million products (or 10 percent of the total index) indexed by TheFind. The search engine will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. It will automatically try to detect your location and list the best prices from local retailers. The engine will also list the items that have the lowest verified price. And TheFind is using iStorez coupon technology, which they bought a few months ago, to list discount codes and coupons for each applicable deal.

The comparison view also includes several little features, such as the ability to see what tax and shipping will be within results, as well as the inclusion of BizRate ratings for retailers. TheFind will eventually extend the best price feature to other verticals such as toys, health and beauty and more. The new feature is a bonus, but the site will face competition from Microsoft’s Bing, PriceGrabber and others.

TheFind aims to be a one-stop shopping destination for consumers where they can search for a varied list of items from multiple sources. The site currently indexes 400 million products from over 500,000 stores. Last year, TheFind launched an iPhone app that allows users to search for stores in a region that are selling a particular product. The app will also compare prices of products from stores in your location and even calculates the cost to drive from your location to a particular store.

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Jolicloud Steps Up Its Game As Pre-Launch Excitement For Chrome OS Builds

Posted: 19 Nov 2009 05:22 AM PST

In a couple of hours, Google is going to share more details about its upcoming operating system Chrome OS at an event in Mountain View that will most likely be covered from start to finish by TechCrunch writers (and then some) as well as a slew of other media outlets. Jolicloud, that other OS for netbooks that is completely built for people who live and work on the Web from the ground up, has in the meantime been running fine on my own netbook for the past couple of months.

So in light of the upcoming GOOG buzz, Jolicloud founder Tariq Krim got in touch with me to share some of the things he and his team have been working on. Since the subject lies rather close to the premise of John Gruber’s great The OS Opportunity blog post, it’s worth reading that before continuation.

Done? ok.

Krim realizes full well that he’s going to have to tell a pretty compelling story to get people to pay attention to what Jolicloud is building, considering the appeal Google has in terms of branding and its history of putting stuff out there that are impressive on a technological level. Even if Google’s OS proves to be ‘good enough’, it’ll be tough for Jolicloud to compete with. But it certainly helps a lot to have a great product that’s unique in its own regards, and the Jolicloud OS is definitely worth a look if you agree that the Web is “the most important software platform in the world today”, as Gruber puts it.

Jolicloud is currently a bit of a drag to install because it involves putting the installer on a USB stick and try to get it up and running that way for every type of netbook out there. The release of Jolicloud Express, however, is going to change all that: you’ll be able to simply download the system from the startup’s website, install and run it alongside whatever else you have as OS on your netbook (usually Windows XP or 7). It will keep the Windows partition and data safe, so you can always switch back to Windows, but if you’re anything like me chances are you won’t. Jolicloud Express will be introduced at the Le Web conference in December.

Jolicloud's Pre-Beta release, which is currently going out to testers and will be the new upgrade for all users next week, will support native resolution for Intel Atom z500-series netbooks (including the Dell Mini 10, Mini 12, the Acer Aspire One 751, Asus EeePC 1101 and many more) with the GMA500 chipset. I’d explain why that’s a rather big deal, but Jolicloud’s Adam McDaniel blogged about the how and why much more eloquently and in much more detail than I ever could. (McDaniel, by the way, is the guy who cooked up EeePC support for Ubuntu and built the Array Linux kernel.)

Biggest plus of Poulsbo (GMA 500 codename) support: compatibility with 720p HD video.

Jolicloud will be debuting something else at Le Web next month: their new HTML5 launcher that was built in collaboration with several key Mozilla developers. The main goal is to give people a way to synchronize as many netbooks as they want with their Jolicloud account, including preferences, installed apps, and so on.

The team is also constantly finetuning the user interface to give users the best possible user experience on a relatively small screen, something as a user I can only acknowledge and applaud. Among other things, Jolicloud is working on implementation of the Activity Streams standard, which essentially means social networking activity will become an integral part of the operating system rather than something bolted on top.

Also in the labs: the idea of providing a Jolicloud-powered netbook with a custom Twitter account, enabling users to converse and interact with their streams even if they’re not actually in front of their computers.

Evidently, Google Chrome OS is going to get all the buzz today, and however well-deserved it’s worth noting that there are startups already working on the next generation of operating systems that can already be installed and tested on netbooks today. Even if Jolicloud never achieves the success the Paris-based team – which is now 12 people strong – and its high-profile investors are hoping for, I think that’s admirable and worth highlighting.

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Review: eMotion Social-Connect Digital Photo Frame Plus A Giveaway

Posted: 19 Nov 2009 05:10 AM PST

I've suffered much when it comes to digital photo frames. I purchased a number of frames from multiple manufacturers for multiple members of my family with the expectation that I would, for time immemorial, be able to email said frames images, thus allowing family members the opportunity to see new photos without having to drag them over from the computer. Alas and alack each one of these frames (Damn you, SmartParts!) has failed and their attendant services have gone out of business. I'm an optimistic fellow, however, and they say digital picture frame usage after being burned by picture frames in the past is a triumph of hope over experience. Well fool me again, picture frames, because I'm going to talk about the eMotion Social-Connect Digital Photo Frame with LifeGoRound.

Entrepreneurs: Start. This. Company. Now.

Posted: 19 Nov 2009 03:29 AM PST

GE_Moto_smBANGALORE, INDIA — It's almost as if Russian cell phone carrier MTS has bought the naming rights to Bangalore. I half expected my immigration stamp to read "BANGALORE! ™ BROUGHT TO YOU BY MTS." The carrier recently launched service in the uber-competitive Indian telecom market and has erected billboards every twenty feet or so. I have never seen so much advertising by one company in one space. They all sport an agro looking dude with his face twisted in some rebel-yell while he does inscrutable things with robots and mechanical arms holding different tech gadgets.

Why have these ads made such an impression on me? Because I've spent a week sitting in stopped Bangalore traffic looking at them. Ironically one keeps boasting: CONGESTION-FREE MOBILE NETWORK. Sitting still and listening to the honking of cars, mopeds, bikes and rickshaws all around me, it's an easy guess that, if true, MTS could be the only thing congestion-free in India.

I used to think I knew bad traffic. After all, I moved to Silicon Valley during the famed Internet bubble when Highway 101 slowed to a crawl during peak commute hours. And I've spent time in legendarily congested US cities like Los Angeles and New York.

Now that India has one of the world's best mobile infrastructures, it needs a decent road infrastructure. And a smart entrepreneur needs to come up with a modern fix. But before we talk solutions, let's dwell more on the problem.

Simply put: All of you Americans—or Londoners for that matter—who Tweet about GE_Trucks_smsitting in traffic have nothing to complain about compared to the emerging world. And in my experience, so far, India's traffic is the absolute worst. A drive between cities that should take an hour takes four. A commute across a city can routinely take two hours-plus. We're not talking about rush hour. I've quickly learned to allot at least three hours for each meeting—one hour for the meeting and one each for getting there and back.

Even so, despite my best efforts, I've been late for nearly every meeting. In Mumbai one meeting scheduled for late morning took six hours out of my day. (Fortunately, the meeting was well worth it.) And in Bangalore my cab driver tried to take a back-alley short cut, when suddenly, our path was blocked by a cow just munching on some roadside grass. He honked and honked and she just looked up and batted her pretty brown eyes at me as if to say, "Oh, you're not making that meeting on time, hon."

Indians complain about the poor foresight and urban planning of their government, but it's not all the government’s fault. The Chinese government is the master of over-building capacity to anticipate growth, and city traffic in China is becoming unbearable as well. It'll only get worse as an anticipated 30% more cars per year come on the road.

GE_Traffic_smThe problem is the hyper-charged urbanization these countries have experienced. In the West cities grew over centuries allowing city planners to adjust and modernize as industrialization drove higher occupancy. And in the past few decades there's been a flight out of downtowns to suburbs. Of course that presents its own growing pains—especially in US cities that have experienced massive suburban sprawl like Phoenix and Atlanta. But in the grand scheme of things, the moves have been predictable and manageable, whether individual cities have handled it well or not.

Not so with the rapid urbanization of cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. The step up in pay from hundreds to thousands of US dollars a year has been swift and far reaching. In China, agricultural classes have moved en masse to staff huge several-thousand-person factories, and for the Olympics, they moved en masse into hospitality jobs in Beijing's raft of new hotels, malls and restaurants. This is to say nothing of the increase in government jobs and startups. There is simply no way to make remotely the same wage or have the same access to infrastructure and services outside a city. In some parts of India it's been more pronounced as hundreds of thousands of sophisticated R&D jobs typically pay more than China's factory jobs.

Here's my point: All the existing Western solutions, endless government funds, underground subways and top urban planners will not solve this problem. Because simply put: The world has never seen urbanization so extreme by millions—maybe even billions— of people seeking a better life. We need some innovation here. And I know at least one guy who is thinking about it.

At a conference earlier this year, Elon Musk – the guy who co-founded PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and laughs like a James Bond villain — talked about two new businesses he was mulling.  One was electric, supersonic planes, which I've salivated  over since. The other was pre-fabricated freeway overpasses to alleviate traffic by making it go vertical without the costly billion-dollar customized expansion fees.

I have to admit, at the time, I was more excited about the planes. But his freeway idea may be a better business. It would dramatically affect the lives of billions (literally) and create at least millions of revenues in the developing world where quick, cheap options are needed and there is hot-and-heavy government money to pay for it.

Now, clearly Mr. Musk is busy with existing ventures Tesla and SpaceX. So now's your chance to steal the market out from under him! India and China are waiting.

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Twitter’s New Retweets Work Via SMS Too

Posted: 19 Nov 2009 12:43 AM PST

IMG_0743First of all, yes, everyone on Twitter now should have access to the new Retweet functionality. Currently, only Twitter.com and a handful of clients support the new mechanism. But did you know that you can also trigger the new Retweets via SMS?

As the Twitter mobile account noted earlier tonight, if you simply send “RT USERNAME” to 40404 (at least in the U.S.) it will automatically retweet the last tweet of whatever username you entered has sent. And yes, it will be a new-style Retweet.

If you love the new Retweets, that’s a great feature. If you hate them, well, then, you’ll hate this too. For more on that, see here.

Regardless, Twitter’s quick moves to expand and extend mobile support is pretty impressive.

A couple other things worth noting about Retweet now that it’s live for everyone:

1) You can stop seeing the new Retweets from any user simply by clicking on their profile and making sure the rotating arrow badge under their name is not green.

2) New style Retweets do not show up in your @replies section. To see them, you have to go into the new Retweets section and click on the “Your tweets, retweeted” area.

Screen shot 2009-11-19 at 12.33.19 AM

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Yammer Continues To Push Features I Want On Twitter

Posted: 19 Nov 2009 12:37 AM PST

Yammer, a twitter-like service for closed groups, continues to add new features that I wish Twitter would implement as well. In the last day or so they added a simple notification for unread messages that syncs across the many ways users can access the service (mobile, AIR, browser). The notification is available through the Yammer API as well.

Twitter needs something like this. Various Twitter clients built by third party services try to do it on their own, but without the feature at the API level it only works if you access Twitter just from that client.

Yammer has consistently pushed new and useful features quickly to users.

If you don’t use Yammer at your business, you should. We’ve been fans of the service since launching at TechCrunch50 in 2008. It has replaced email for most of our in-office communication. And the service is very reliable, other than the occasional service outage while their CEO David Sacks is off playing poker in Vegas.

The company is also getting more serious about the Android platform. Until recently the only Yammer app for Android was created by Nullwire. Yammer acquired the product from Nullwire and will now develop it in-house. You can download it here.

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Engadget’s Secret New Redesign Revealed!

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 11:43 PM PST

Okay, we’ve uncovered Engadget’s big secret: Surprise, redesign! (No, sadly, it’s not a golden heffer or starchild or iPhone-killer.)

The new look is quite magazine-like. Look for it to go live shortly.

Screen shot 2009-11-18 at 11.41.31 PM

Screen shot 2009-11-18 at 11.41.42 PM

Screen shot 2009-11-18 at 11.45.54 PM

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Engadget Teases. Techmeme Responds. TechCrunch Ridicules.

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 11:03 PM PST

Screen shot 2009-11-18 at 10.50.32 PM

This message currently graces every page on Engadget. We’re not sure what they’re up to [Update: Yes we are.], but it’s promised to be “awesome awesome stuff,” editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky tweets.

In fact, beyond the in your face teaser promising that, “What’s next is coming now. Stay close.”, Topolsky has been tweeting teasers all night. So Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera decided to respond (below):

Screen shot 2009-11-18 at 10.49.29 PM

Not ones to be left out of a super awesome please-refresh-our-page-every-5-seconds-party, we have a page of our own now (below):

Screen shot 2009-11-18 at 11.02.46 PM

(And before we start an Internet flame war, we’re just having some good clean fun with our friends at Engadget. We too are interested to see what their surprise is.)

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CrunchGear Gift Guide 2009: Portable Media Players

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 10:55 PM PST

The common portable media player has a tough existence. It's expected to handle many tasks well, while being rugged enough to withstand daily (ab)use. It's expected to look nice, it's expected to provide more-than-decent battery life, and it's expected to provide a simple enough interface that it can be operated almost exclusively while on the go. If the world's greatest mom were a consumer electronics device, she'd be a portable media player. And while there's no shortage of portable media players in existence, here's a quick list of some worthy gift options (in no particular order).

The Latest News From Bing

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 09:05 PM PST

Remember the flurry of new features Bing rolled out last week?  Bing announced Wolfram Alpha results for nutrition searches, more in-depth weather results, enhanced hover previews, better maps, and turned MSN Video into Bing Videos. Well, it turns out it is also quietly launched another feature which highlights the latest posts from news sites.

If you do a search for “TechCrunch” or “New York Times,” for instance, underneath the summary information and deep links there are the three latest headlines under “Latest posts.”

This format is similar to when you search for certain widely-followed Twitter users and you get their latest Tweets. It’s part of Bing’s obsession with providing realtime results. Just as the recent broader integration of Twitter into search results brings the latest conversations into search, showing the latest headlines for news sites shows readers what’s breaking on the site without having to click through. Funny that it doesn’t work for the “Associated Press.”

Just to be clear, this is different than searching for a topic which is in the news and getting news results at the top in the form of headlines, which all search engines do. The “Latest posts” appear when you do a search for a specific news site. You’d think it would work for any blog with a feed, but it doesn’t seem to come up for many smaller blogs I tried.

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Mplayit Launches Mobile App Discovery Directory On Facebook

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 08:57 PM PST

There are a host of directories of iPhone apps on the web as well as applications that make personalized recommendations of apps, such as Chorus, that might catch your fancy. Mplayit enters this space hoping to combine these two ambitions into one, comprehensive Facebook app.

Mplayit’s directory of iPhone and mobile apps includes all 100,000 plus iPhone apps and a smattering of other mobile app as well. Each app has a dedicated page where Mplayit will post videos of the app (created either by the developer or pulled from YouTube), a detailed description of the app and reviews. You can also click to buy the app from Apple’s App Store (from which Mplayit receives a affiliate fee).

Once you start clicking on various app and downloading apps, Mplayit will begin to recommend apps to you based on your behavior on the site. And you can share apps on Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook page also shows the activity that’s taking place in other app stores, such as Apple’s, to show users what apps are receiving the most downloads, reviews and more. Users will also be able to see the "apptivity" within their social network, so they can clearly see what apps their friends and family are most interested in. Similar app directories will be rolled out in the Facebook app for the Blackberry and Android in the next few months.

Mplayit already helps major carriers, such as Sprint, power app directories for games and apps, so the startup has experience in the space. Mplayit founder and CEO Michael Powers, says that Facebook is the ideal platform for the the app discovery engine because of the ability to tap into your social graph to discover and share apps. The app is comprehensive and does give you more details about apps than the reviews in Apple’s App store. Mplayit is definitely worth a look.

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SharedDoc Launches Document Commenting Platform

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 08:54 PM PST

SharedDoc is an online document platform that lets anyone upload a document online and then share the file to a community, so they can add comments. We have 500 free invites for TechCrunch readers here.

Once you upload a Word or Google Docs document to SharedDoc’s platform, you can send email invites to a friends or colleagues to comment on the document. In order to comment, a user needs to set up an ID. Users can then highlight portions of the the document where they’d like to leave a comment and post their input.

Comments can be seen by by everyone invited on the document and commenters can respond to others comments. Each comment carries the ID of the user, and the date of posting. SharedDoc also creates a permanent record of the comments by saving or printing the document with the comments as footnotes.

The idea of commenting about documents isn’t new. SharedDoc will face competition from startups Etherpad, DocStoc, and Scribd, to name a few. And SharedDocs will compete with the collaboration features of Google Docs (and perhaps Microsoft Office soon).

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OkCupid Checks Out The Dynamics Of Attraction And Your Love Inbox

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 08:02 PM PST

Every few weeks Internet dating site OkCupid uses the power of anonymized data to share a few truths about the online dating scene and human nature in general. To be sure, these reports are often highly controversial and aren’t going to be showing up in scientific literature any time soon, but they’re generally interesting (and often amusing) reads. The latest report to come out addresses ‘Your Looks And Your Inbox’, charting the number of messages users receive in relation to how attractive other members rate them.

Some of the conclusions aren’t surprising. The “most attractive” women receive five times as many messages as the average female does, with 2/3 of all male messages going to the top 1/3 of women. And women tend to favor the most attractive men, though the ratio is less extreme.

But there are a few interesting phenomena. For one, men on the site tend to be more generous than women when it comes to rating attractiveness, leading to a nice bell curve with the bulk of ratings falling around ‘average’. But despite their fair ratings, they tend to ignore many of the women they find reasonably attractive and primarily target the most attractive females.



Women, on the other hand, are harsh with their ratings. According to the study, they rate a whopping 80% of men on the site as ‘below average’. My first guess was that there was an issue with self-selection here (i.e. unattractive men congregate on the site for whatever reason). But the study includes photos of four pretty normal looking guys who were all rated to be unattractive. And perhaps more telling: women don’t seem to be opposed to actually contacting these men that they’ve just deemed unattractive.



From the post:

“As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys' pursuing the all-but-unattainable. But with the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren't good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.”

That last bit seems like a stretch (women could just as well have more interest in a man’s personality/profile than his photo). But an interesting trend nonetheless.

For more, including the message open rates as they vary by attractiveness, check out the OkCupid post here.

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TweetPhoto CEO Says Too Much In Interview, Gets Fired. And That’s Just The Beginning…

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 07:26 PM PST

This story just screams amateur hour, although I can’t figure out exactly who’s the amateur. Maybe everyone. A CEO says too much in an interview and gets fired. Lawyers go after the blogger to get content removed. And a partner is pissed off. Not bad for a day’s work.

It involves TweetPhoto, a service we’ve been writing about since last April. The company has had their rite-of-passage fight with Apple over an iPhone app, and they’ve done a deal with Kodak that got them some additional press. But until now, no serious drama.

TweetPhoto (now former) CEO Dan Caulfield did a 23 minute podcast interview with Frank Peters earlier this month. He apparently said too much in the interview, disclosing confidential information about partnerships. He was fired by the company for the transgression.

That’s enough drama to make me want to listen to the podcast. But it gets better. The company also had its lawyers fire off a letter from its law firm to Frank Peters, demanding that he remove the podcast.

Just to be clear, a company is threatening legal action against a blogger for posting an on the record sound recording of the company’s CEO.

“The interview posted on your website contains numerous factual inaccuracies and disparaging statements from Mr. Caulfield that TweetPhoto is concerned were made in an effort to harm the economic prospects of TweetPhoto and may constitute a violation of the laws prohibiting unfair competition, defamation, as well as tortious interference with contractual relations and prospective economic advantage,” the letter says.

Peters posted the letter and took the link to the podcast down. But it’s still up on iTunes here. And if it gets removed, I’ll upload it to our servers.

I’ve listened to the entire podcast, and there’s not much said that I’d call interesting. A couple of comments about their monetization strategy. And a few sentences on their deal with Kodak. But overall, snoozy stuff. Of course, now that the lawyers are making threats, everyone will listen to it.

And of course it goes without saying that its absolutely absurd that the company is threatening Peters. As I said before, this was an on the record conversation with the CEO of the company. It’s an audio file, so they can’t claim a misquote or any other nonsense.

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Loaner Tesla Used And Abused By Eager Game Designers

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 07:00 PM PST

For the last 20 years I've been playing racing games here and there, and when they started becoming realistic (i.e. the cars weren't square and the engine noises weren't square waves), the enormity of the sound challenge never really struck me. Engine, road, and tire noise, plus accurate doppler effects, different crunches and thunks for impacts... the list goes on. As if that wasn't enough, you have to worry about engine noise contaminating your samples. So it's no wonder that some game designers from Microsoft jumped at the chance to use a Tesla for recording game audio. No engine noise and careful mic placement means you can get tire squeal, or any other audio component of driving, almost completely isolated. Now, I know you guys aren't really that hot for the details of audio production, but I know you like fast cars. And it actually is pretty entertaining to see a Tesla with so many big hairy mics on it that it looks like a pussy willow.

Condé Nast Will Officially Be Apple Tablet Ready In 2010, Apparently Without Apple’s Help

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 06:20 PM PST

Well done, Apple. You've finally done it. You've got the world bending the knee for a device they've never seen, and which you deny exists. Condé Nast has declared that Wired will be Apple tablet-compatible by mid-2010, although they admit that Apple hasn't actually told them how they might go about doing that. While this isn't exactly comparable to adjusting office doorway heights in case someone hires a Yeti, the parallels are clear. Of course, it's not so strange to want to streamline your product for tablet access. Make sure column flex doesn't break the layout, don't put critical links in rollover menus, that sort of thing. But if the Apple tablet is anywhere as interesting as people hope it will be, I doubt you're going to be reading Wired in a browser anyway. Quixotic would be too kind a term for what they're doing; not only are they tilting at windmills, but the windmills don't officially exist.

Cisco Confirms New Flip Camera Will Have Wi-Fi

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 06:07 PM PST

Cisco has confirmed that the next version of the Flip Video camera, everyones favorite tiny video camera, is getting Wi-Fi. The model is described as having "a large screen that slides to reveal the record and menu buttons underneath." Pocket-lint is also reporting there won't be a touchscreen. You can, however, upload video that you take over Wi-Fi.

Last Minute New York Meet-Up: A Bit of Holiday Cheer With Cali Lewis and CrunchGear

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 05:39 PM PST

Sorry for the short notice but I thought it might be fun to toast to Turkey Day and the launch of our our Gift Guide. I'm teaming up with Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV for an impromptu CG meet-up in New York. We'll be meeting at 7pm Friday at Heartland Brewery, 35 Union Square West, in Manhattan. We should be able to commandeer the back of the pub for our purposes.

Adknowledge Continues Shopping Spree, Acquires SocialMedia.com’s Ad Network

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 05:22 PM PST

Online advertising company Adknowledge has obtained the advertising business of SocialMedia.com, a social media advertising platform. The terms of the agreement have not been disclosed.

Adknowledge says that the move will “strengthen” the company’s position as a monetization platform for publishers of social apps and social games. SocialMedia, which company specializes in advertising across social networks, was most recently working with MySpace to develop and deploy 'Interaction Ads,” which is an advertising product that can prompt a MySpace member for input and use that, along with MySpace's social graph, to tailor the advertising shown to their friends.

Adknowledge has made four other acquisitions in the advertising space in the past few years. Cubics, which was acquired in 2007, delivers more than 700 million banner impressions daily to consumers using Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites. The company also acquired Lookery’s ad business as well as Adnomics in 2008. And earlier this summer, Adknowledge acquired Super Rewards, a web advertising startup that offers points and rewards to users who sign up for services.

SocialMedia.com will continue to operate its social advertising platform to create ads for social networks, but its publishers who participated in the startup’s network will be moved to Adknowledge.

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Hey Apple, Google, et al.: Why Do You Hate Christmas?

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 04:40 PM PST

grinch

As the TechCrunch Network’s resident mobile guy, I was given the task of writing up a list of apps for each smartphone platform that you ought to buy as little e-stocking stuffers for your loved ones. It was to be my primary contribution to CrunchGear’s ultra-amazing Holiday Gift Guide; my festively themed magnum opus.

But there’s a problem with this idea: it can’t be done. It’s not because I’m lazy (which may be true), nor because I don’t have any apps to recommend (which most certainly is not). I can’t recommend apps for you to buy for others, because you can’t buy apps for others.

Read the rest of this post at Mobile Crunch >>

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Like.com Acquires Street Style Fashion Community Weardrobe

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 03:57 PM PST

I’m a big fan of street style focused-fashion, microblogging sites, like Weardrobe, where anyone can post pictures of their coordinated outfits for others to admire and emulate. Like.com, a visual shopping search engine, has acquired Weardrobe for an undisclosed amount.

Weardrobe is user generated, social platform for personal fashion. It is a place where people can catalog their own clothing and easily browse through the 'lookbooks' of other people's street style. Users can upload photos, tag what they are wearing, and organize these items in a virtual closet to share with others. Weardrobe was also a winner of the 2009 fbFund competition.

Like.com will user its “Likesense” visual search technology to identify the pieces of clothing in a photo on Weardrobe. Like.com will list the items with a link to where visitors can actually purchase the items (with Like.com taking in an affiliate fee from any purchases).

It’s actually a brilliant idea for Like.com to do this and according to Like’s CEO and co-founder Munjal Shah, will only add to the search engine’s growing empire of fashion and shopping related sites. This includes the newly launched Covet.com, which acts a virtual shopper and pseudo stylist. But while the fashion blogging community is a niche space, it is growing quickly. And Weardrobe is an example of high-quality, engaging content that could be attractive to a greater audience.

Like.com, which launched in 2006, is growing steadily both in revenue and networks. The startup raised $32 million in funding during the implosion of the financial industry, with a valuation just north of $100 million. Not too bad for a startup that launched a few years ago.

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MySpace Signs Agreement To Acquire iMeem

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 03:52 PM PST

On Monday we broke the news that MySpace was in late stage negotiations to acquire music service iMeem. Those negotiations are now concluded, we’ve heard from multiple sources, and an agreement has been signed. MySpace will acquire most of the assets of iMeem for a purchase price of around $1 million in cash.

$1 million isn’t the “real” purchase price for the company. Some assets are being left behind, say our sources, including millions of dollars in accounts receivable plus some other cash. All or most of these assets, plus the purchase price, will be used to pay off some of the debt iMeem has accumulated.

About half of iMeem’s 55 employees will now work for MySpace. The rest, we’ve heard, will be looking for a new job.

One question that’s still unanswered – will the iMeem service live on? That’s completely up to the music labels, say our sources. iMeem’s deals with the labels terminate on this acquisition. The service is running at breakeven, we’ve heard, so MySpace may push to keep iMeem alive.

One thing is clear – MySpace is getting the iMeem assets for an absolute steal. I wouldn’t be surprised if other bidders suddenly get interested in iMeem and try to disrupt the deal before it actually closes.

MySpace and iMeem won’t comment on this story.

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Look Mom, Cooliris Is On TV.com!

Posted: 18 Nov 2009 03:03 PM PST

I don’t know about you, but I have a male geek crush on Cooliris, the startup behind this splendid technology that enables users to browse photos and videos from the Web, their desktops or their iPhone devices in a visually attractive 3D manner that one really has to try to get a feel of how amazing that can be.

Publishers are starting to notice that too, and are increasingly turning to the startup to make some of their own imagery and video content more visually appealing and browsing it, well, downright sexy.

Latest premium publisher to join the fray: CBS Interactive’s TV.com, one of the premier websites bringing episode guides, news, reviews, interviews, TV listings, and more to a primarily U.S. audience, is now using Cooliris technology to enhance its ‘Shows’ section.

If you’re not familiar with Cooliris and the Flash-based Embed Wall product that TV.com is now using for its website, go check it out on there or head straight to the Cooliris website to learn more. My guess is you won’t be disappointed, neither as a user or as a publisher.

Backed with about $18.5 million in VC funding, Palo Alto, CA-based Cooliris has also debuted an interesting way to generate advertising revenue with its service.

And with deals like this one with TV.com parent company CBS Interactive, more and more people will grow familiar with Cooliris products, which in turn will make them more interesting for publishers to add, and advertisers to promote their wares on.

Can’t help but root for this one – although I also can’t help but think they’re a bit over-funded.

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