The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Dreamforce: Salesforce Launches Real-Time Social Network Salesforce Chatter
- Qlipso Brings Avatars, Video Chat, and Facebook Connect To Virtual Rooms
- Newspapers Are What? Google’s Got Some Suggestions
- Come To The Realtime CrunchUp, Win A Free Sailing Trip In San Francisco Bay
- Fring Finds Its Way To The Android Market
- Twitturly Sold For A Song
- Mendeley, The-Last.fm-of-research, On Course To Be World’s Largest Research Database
- Placecast Raises $5 Million For Location-Based Advertising Platform
- KidZui’s Newest Browser For Kids Is All About Sharing
- Location Is The Missing Link Between Social Networks And The Real World
- Facebook Integration For PS3 Lands Today
- German Media Giant Burda Buys 25% Stake In XING
- The Google Phone Is Very Real. And It’s Coming Soon
- Opera Mobile 10 Beta Now Available For Windows Mobile Phones, Too
- TypePad Dives Into Micro-Blogging With An Important New Feature: Free
- Daily Endeavor Launches A Crowdsourced Guide To Jobs
- Digg CEO Adelson: “I Don’t Think People Expect To Pay For News Any More”
- PublicEarth: Layers, Crowd-Sourcing, And Taxonomy Meet Maps
- LiveOffice: Email Archiving In The Cloud
- Shakira’s Stats Don’t Lie: Facebook/Ustream Music Video Debut Is A Hit
- Yahoo Go Is A No Go
- Murdoch Warns That Without eTablets, “Newspapers Will Go Out Of Business.”
- Intel Capital Invests In Cloud Computing Pioneer Joyent
- Google Holding Chrome OS Event Thursday. Complete Overview And Launch Plans To Be Revealed.
- Mystery Of Droid Autofocus Conspiracy Solved (For Reals This Time)
| Dreamforce: Salesforce Launches Real-Time Social Network Salesforce Chatter Posted: 18 Nov 2009 09:06 AM PST
We’re here at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual cloud computing event in San Francisco. CEO Marc Benioff is delivering the key note and we will be live-bogging the news below. Salesforce has had a banner year, reporting strong earnings yesterday for the third quarter, launching a new version of their fastest growing product, Service Cloud 2; and rolling out a lightweight contact manager for small businesses. So what is the future? Benioff has long praised the virtues of the real-time cloud and said recently that real-time technology is not only crucial to Salesforce's offerings but is the future of the company's products. Benioff has even praised Twitter for making the transition between the cloud and real-time web seamless. Today, Salesforce is launching Salesforce Chatter which allows any company to collaborate in real time with a secure, private social network for their business and leverage social networks’ streams. Content, applications and people will now have profiles, feeds and groups, enabling them to be connected. In addition, developers will now be able to use the Salesforce Chatter platform to build social enterprise applications, and all 135,000 native Force.com applications will instantly become social. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  |
| Qlipso Brings Avatars, Video Chat, and Facebook Connect To Virtual Rooms Posted: 18 Nov 2009 08:55 AM PST
Media on the Web is going from a solo affair to a shared experience. We are seeing this in everything from CNN live news videos enabled with Facebook chat to Meebo Rooms and Tiny Chat. Today, a new startup from Los Angeles called Qlipso is launching its own virtual rooms where friends can share videos and play Flash games with each other. The service is in private beta and is a Windows-only browser plug-in for now, but you can get one of 1,000 invites here. Click on “Get Started” and ignore the beta key request. Send an email to the contact listed (betsy) and put “TechCrunch Invite” in the subject line. You sign in with Facebook Connect and can invite up to eight friends to share any Flash-based media. Once inside the virtual room, you can interact via text chat, video chat, voice-chat, or videogame-quality avatars. The integration with Facebook Connect makes it easy to invite friends via a message in your news feed. It also supports MySpace, AIM, and MSN Messenger. The Qlipso download adds a plug-in to your browser which identifies Flash media whenever you are surfing the Web and places a share button next to it. When you click teh share button, it launches the app and lets you see which of your contacts are online so you can invite them in. Qlipso is aiming the service at media sites which might want to incorporate the experience to make the consumption of their videos and games more social and interactive. When a group of people are watching a video, Qlipso can recommend other videos in the left-hand column to keep the group of friends in the room longer. The service brings in elements of virtual worlds with the avatars which can move realistically and perform tricks like flips and throwing tomatoes at the screen. The startup is a sponsor of our Realtime Crunchup this Friday and will be demoing the service at the event. Here’s a video:
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Newspapers Are What? Google’s Got Some Suggestions Posted: 18 Nov 2009 07:34 AM PST
At least two of the search suggestions still indicate newspapers are important and ‘not dying’. Update: I’m definitely following Autocomplete Me from this point forward. (Via TwitPic and a hat tip to @Wallie – you were right) Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Come To The Realtime CrunchUp, Win A Free Sailing Trip In San Francisco Bay Posted: 18 Nov 2009 07:06 AM PST
We’re just two days away from our Realtime CrunchUp in San Francisco. The CrunchUp agenda is chock full of goodness. Since our first event back in July, the momentum around realtime has accelerated. We find ourselves awash in realtime streams of data, and these realtime streams are becoming the new center of attention on the Web. During the conference we’ll be drilling down into what’s next for realtime in terms of making this stream manageable, adding new tributaries to the stream such as geolocation data, and building businesses on top of it. As if the amazing lineup of speakers (from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Foursquare, Seesmic, Brizzly, Hot Potato, Tweetmeme, DailyBooth) and startup product launch demos were not enough to drop everything right now and buy a ticket, I am going to give you one more reason. We’ll be giving away a half-day sailing excursion to one lucky ticket holder at the event. Event sponsor ekoVenture, which is an OpenTable for active travel, is providing the half-day sailing trip in conjunction with OCSC SAILING. The winner can take five friends on a high-performance vessel in San Francisco Bay, with a professional skipper and instructor on board. The trip is worth $750, which is almost twice as much as a ticket. And remember, you can justify taking a half-day off to go sailing as a “team-building” activity. I love this kind of sponsorship because not only is it an awesome giveaway, but it highlights what the sponsor does in a very effective way. There are still a few sponsorship spots left for start-ups and brands to reach both conference and networking attendees. Please contact Heather Harde or Jeanne Logozo to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities. Also, as we announced already, anyone who buys a ticket can opt-in to pitch your own realtime product on-stage. Friday, November 20, 2009 InterContinental Hotel GET CRUNCHUP TICKETS NOW, courtesy of Eventbrite Enter for a chance to *RealTime Pitch from the Audience*. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Fring Finds Its Way To The Android Market Posted: 18 Nov 2009 06:49 AM PST
With fring, users can make free VoIP calls over Skype, MSN, Google Talk and via hundreds of SIP providers. The app also supports live chatting through ICQ, Yahoo, and more, and also boasts support for Twitter. Fring on Android works over 3G, GPRS or WiFi connection. Frankly, I’m surprised it took fring so long to come out with an app for Android. Rivals Meebo, Nimbuzz and eBuddy have long been available for the platform, so that gave its main competitors quite a head start and makes it way harder for them to acquire new users. When I asked about the apparent delay, fring CEO Avi Shechter responded with:
Israel-based fring has raised $23 million from multiple venture capital firms, most recently securing a Series C round of financing from North Bridge Venture Partners, Pitango Venture Capital, Veritas Venture Partners and VenFin Limited. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Posted: 18 Nov 2009 06:04 AM PST
Joel Strellner, who started the project, finally put Twitturly up for sale on Flippa ten days ago, and the auction just ended. Only five bids came in, and the sale ultimately netted no more than $8,500 – Strellner was hoping for double that amount. Now, to be fair, Strellner has moved on to other things in the past few months and acknowledges that little attention has been paid to the service for a while, but the low selling price is still undeniably a bit of a bummer for him and his team. Despite a PageRank 6 and an Alexa rank of 40,106, Twitturly only attracted about 1,000 unique visitors per day, and that’s not even enough to warrant anyone to start thinking about monetization. It’s unclear who the winning bidder is, but he or she is getting the codebase for the site, one month of support from Strellner, some domain names and 622 GB of data. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Mendeley, The-Last.fm-of-research, On Course To Be World’s Largest Research Database Posted: 18 Nov 2009 04:56 AM PST
That’s pretty impressive stuff and should Mendeley’s database continue to grow at the current rate they’ll overtake Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, the world's largest online research paper database, in April 2010. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Placecast Raises $5 Million For Location-Based Advertising Platform Posted: 18 Nov 2009 04:55 AM PST
Location-based marketing platform Placecast has raised $5 million in funding from Quatrex Capital, Onset Ventures and Voyager Capital. Placecast’s platform uses proprietary algorithms that weave together location information and other data from audiences across the web, mobile, and email. Placecast then analyzes inventory, segments audiences and targets ads for maximum relevance for advertisers and publishers. Placecast manages all of a publisher’s web and mobile inventory, as well as serves targeted ads and messages into outgoing emails. The startup is also getting into mobile web capabilities for retailers, enabling retailers to communicate with their shoppers about location-based alerts. Placecast aims to use these mobile alerts, which are opt-in, to drive in-store traffic. The new round of funding will be used to accelerate progress on the company's this technology. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| KidZui’s Newest Browser For Kids Is All About Sharing Posted: 18 Nov 2009 03:47 AM PST
KidZui, the web browser that’s built for kids, is today launching KidZui 5.0, featuring more functionality for parents and children to discover and share the Internet together. With one click, children can now send KidZui-approved videos, websites, and pictures to their parents with the browser’s new built-in ‘KidConnect’ capabilities. Parents can now also easily send content directly to their children to return the favor. Essentially, KidZui aims to maximize parent and child computer screen time as an opportunity to connect and converse with each other through shared content online. KidZui says it currently boasts over 2 million games, websites, photographs and videos, and that all of them are approved jointly by parents and teachers. New in version 5.0 is that parents can now use Facebook to digitally hook up with other parents and to connect their kids with one another, providing an opportunity to create friendship and community online through the social network. KidZui, which is available for Windows, Mac and as a Firefox plugin, will continue to provide weekly activity e-mail reports to parents about their apparent kids' interests. KidZui has also recently launched a kid-appropriate video destination site dubbed ZuiTube. The company, which is backed by approximately $10 million in funding, claims more than 1 million children and parents have registered for the service since its launch in 2008. KidZui's audience is said to have grown 300% in the past year, mostly through word of mouth. Still according to the company, children have spent more than 5 million hours using the KidZui browser, visited over 100 million web pages, videos and photographs, and shared over 4.4 million items with each other. Yours on it yet? For a cool alternative, check out KIDO’Z’ kid-friendly media browser too.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Location Is The Missing Link Between Social Networks And The Real World Posted: 18 Nov 2009 03:08 AM PST
Though they’d never admit to such a thing, the reasoning should be obvious: The longer you’re at your computer, the more time you’re spending on their sites. The more time your spending on their sites, the more ads you’re being served. The more ads being served, the more money they are earning. No matter why these sites originally started, or what features they add, that is, quite literally, the bottom line. They’d have us strapped to a chair with our eyes taped open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, if they could. The only difference is that we’d have a contraption on our arms to allow us to click on the ads being shown every so often. Thankfully, we don’t quite live in that world yet. And there are a couple factors pushing us the opposite way from that. Mobile devices are the biggest one. But even that is still just a screen. You may not be chained to a desk using it, but as plenty of people with an iPhone will tell you, you may end staring at this screen even more than you do a desktop or laptop monitor throughout a day. But there’s another up and coming factor working against our screen slavery: Location. Social networking has been perhaps the most popular trend on the Internet over the past several years. At first the term was ironic. “Social networking” was anything but social in the traditional sense. But over time, we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that you can do social activities such as play games, collaborate on work, and talk, online. And in fact, many times it’s even more convenient than doing it in person. It’s social, but it’s a different kind of social. Ever since the term was born, countless people have debated the implications of taking social interactions virtual. At one point or another I’m sure that it has been said that it would be both the downfall of mankind, and the thing that would bring the planet together. The truth is that social networking, while great in many respects, does not fulfill a fundamental human desire: To be in the actual presence of other people.
That’s where location comes in. It has the power to be the bridge between social networking and actual social interaction. We’re already seeing the very early signs of this with services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, and Google Latitude, to varying degrees. To the masses, most of these services still either don’t make sense, or are way too creepy. Social networks used to be thought of in the same way. This will change. The people who do use these services likely have at least one story about a situation where a friend saw where they were, or where they planned to be, and showed up to meet up. Some have many of these stories. And for some of us in cities where these services are popular, this happens just about everyday. And it’s really quite amazing. Is it annoying if a friend shows up if you want to be alone or don’t want to see them? Of course. But that’s why it’s important that you’re in control of what location information you are sending out. Is it creepy if a stranger shows up to meet you somewhere? Of course, but that’s why privacy settings are so important.
At the core level, using a social network to facilitate actual social interaction just seems to make sense. Though I poked fun at them in the intro of this post, don’t think that Facebook doesn’t recognize this. In some ways they already do this through their popular events offering. But anything they do with location — which it should be no surprise, they are working on — will go far beyond this. When you have a social graph with over 300 million users and you add a realtime location component into the mix, it’s going to change things. I remember the first time I used sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster (back in the day) to find people that I went to high school with who I hadn’t talked to in years. It was a little weird, but also in some ways exciting. Imagine that transfered into the real world. Maybe you’re in a city with a person you went to high school with, but hadn’t talked to in years. It’s unlikely that the two of you were ever run into each other randomly, but maybe you can get pinged by Facebook location when they’re nearby. Maybe neither of you want to meet, and that’s fine. But maybe you do. The word we keep hearing over and over again for such situations is “serendipity,” but really it’s not. None of this needs to be left up to chance. It’s simply an extension of social networking into the real world. Another social network, Twitter, is already in hot pursuit of such functionality. Any day now, the service will turn on its geolocation service which will both allow you to send tweets with your location tacked on, and allow you to pass in location information from other services, like Foursquare. As a service with tens of millions of users, Twitter will be the first massive test of location as an extension of social networking.
And beyond individual user data, this location data will be very interesting as an aggregate. Undoubtedly people will use things like Twitter’s geolocation APIs to make services that can show where people are flocking to in realtime. This is the next step for what services like SocialGreat are doing with location data, showing hot spots in towns. And we already know that Twitter is planning to use the data to tailor its trending topics to show the hot things being tweeted about in specific places. Social networking up until this point has been great. But it’s also really a bit odd. The core concept is still to gather your friends in a virtual construct, while the companies behind these constructs convince you to hang out in them as much as possible. Instead, they should be using the interesting social data they have to help you connect in other places as well. That’s what makes Facebook Connect is so powerful. But that doesn’t extend to the real world yet. But with location, it could. And that’s exciting. We’ll be discussing this and other topics at our Realtime CrunchUp this Friday in San Francisco. [images: MGM and Warner Brothers] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Facebook Integration For PS3 Lands Today Posted: 18 Nov 2009 01:23 AM PST
Here are some of the features listed on the press release Sony just issued about the update:
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| German Media Giant Burda Buys 25% Stake In XING Posted: 18 Nov 2009 01:19 AM PST
More details to follow Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| The Google Phone Is Very Real. And It’s Coming Soon Posted: 17 Nov 2009 11:38 PM PST
The next “super” Android device will almost certainly be a HTC phone that’s much thinner than even the Droid or iPhone – The Dragon/Passion. This is the phone the senior Android guys at Google are now carrying around and testing, at least as of a couple of weeks ago. If you’re willing to give up the Droid’s keyboard, the Dragon/Passion is going to be a really cool phone. It should be fully available very soon. But it isn’t the Google Phone. Everything up until now has just been a warm up to the Google Phone. Way more interesting are the rumors we’ve been hearing for months about a pure Google-branded phone. Most of our sources have unconfirmed information, which we describe below. But there are a few things we have absolutely confirmed: Google is building their own branded phone that they’ll sell directly and through retailers. They were long planning to have the phone be available by the holidays, but it has now slipped to early 2010. The phone will be produced by a major phone manufacturer but will only have Google branding (Microsoft did the same thing with their first Zunes, which were built by Toshiba). There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be. That’s it for confirmed, super-high confidence information, which frankly isn’t a whole lot more than we all heard back in late October. But we also have a few more details as well that we’ve gathered from a number of sources. Everything that follows we still consider to be just well-sourced rumors: One source told us that HTC, a Taiwanese company, is building the new Google phone, but we think that information is incorrect. We have some fairly good information that suggests Google is working with a Korean phone manufacturer on the Google phone – LG or Samsung (we mentioned this on CrunchGear earlier this week). Samsung has multiple parts in the iPhone and could be pressured by Apple not to work with Google, which says LG is the more likely partner for Google. So rumors like this one may be much more important than they first appear. But either way, the best information we have right now points directly at Korea as the birthplace of the Google Phone. We’ve also heard from a good source that Google is planning a big advertising push around the device early next year – like January. That’s all we have for now. We don’t yet know what the device will look like, how big it will be, or even if it has a physical keyboard. But we do know that Google is getting into the phone building business directly, and doesn’t seem too concerned about competing with all the other device manufacturers building Android phones. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Opera Mobile 10 Beta Now Available For Windows Mobile Phones, Too Posted: 17 Nov 2009 10:55 PM PST
Microsoft’s operating system for mobiles is taking quite a hit lately, having lost one third of its smartphone market share since 2008 according to research firm Gartner. But Microsoft still holds about 8% market share in the segment and it is currently prepping the 2010 release of Windows Mobile 7, so all is not unequivocally lost for Redmond in this space – whether you want to believe it or not. Anyway, Opera Mobile 10 Beta is now available for Windows Mobile phones, and that means users can benefit from a more enjoyable browsing experience from their handsets than is usually the case with built-in and other third-party web browsing tools. The Opera Mobile 10 beta for Windows Mobile looks and feels similar to the Opera 10 desktop browser and Opera Mini 5 beta and has all the features that were already available for Nokia and other Symbian/S60 phones: Speed Dial, tabbed browsing, a password manager and its super, server-side compressor, Opera Turbo. It’s supposed to be way faster, too. Anyone still own a Windows Mobile smartphone want to take Opera Mobile 10 Beta for a spin and let us know how much of an improvement it is?
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| TypePad Dives Into Micro-Blogging With An Important New Feature: Free Posted: 17 Nov 2009 10:09 PM PST
TypePad Micro will be very familiar to anyone who has ever used Tumblr or Posterous in the past. I hate the term “micro-blogging,” but that’s essentially what this is in the eyes of some people. That is to say, it’s a platform that makes it easy to quickly post items you find that you enjoy from around the web. You can certainly use it to write more traditional blog posts if you want, but the clear emphasis is on sharing links, photos, music, and other quick-share items from around the web. Of course, some people also consider Twitter to be micro-blogging, but as it lays out in its post, TypePad considers the new Micro product be fit in between what people do on Twitter, and what they do on regular blogs. TypePad’s goal with Micro is pretty straightforward: Get more people using their platform, product manager Leah Culver (formerly the creator of Pownce, which TypePad parent Six Apart acquired last year) tells us. The idea is that if users like using TypePad Micro enough, maybe they’ll pay to upgrade to one of the Pro accounts which offer more options such as being much more customizable, adding other blogs, and giving you the option of placing ads on your site. Thankfully, if you stick with the free version, TypePad doesn’t plaster your blog with ads that they’re making money from. And with more people using TypePad in general, it benefits the users who are already paying to use it, since the ecosystem will get larger and their posts will have more potential reach.
With the free version there are some options you get, such as the ability to set a site banner and change your sites’ colors. A nicer feature is the ability to see all your stats. And since Twitter integration is built in complete with Bit.ly links, you can also easily view those stats. Facebook integration is built-in as well to easily auto-posts your post to your Wall. And there is already an iPhone app. But the most important element of these micro-blogging sites is the bookmarklet. And TypePad Micro has a very nice one. Rather than being of the bulky, pop-a-new-window variety like Tumblr, TypePad Micro’s pops up as an overlay on whatever site you are on. And if that site contains a picture, it will auto-populate it in the input fields for you. The same is true if you’re on a page with a video. And the bookmarklet makes it easy to share to Twitter and Facebook just by clicking checkboxes. The TypePad Micro sites themselves will bring the most comparisons to Tumblr. After all, there is an easy, one-click re-blog button attached to each post, just as there is on Tumblr. And there is a way to “like” or “favorite” posts. And there is a social element that allows you to follow other TypePad users and showcase that on your site — which again, is like Tumblr. But unlike Tumblr, TypePad Micro is also a way to comment on each post. You can do so using a TypePad, Twitter, or Facebook account, or OpenID. In that regard, it’s more like Posterous.
So will people actually start using TypePad Micro over Tumblr or Posterous? If they don’t mind the lack of customization offered, they might. While most users are never going to do something like edit the CSS, it would still be nice to see more options for themes. That is definitely one strong-suit of Tumblr. Those may come down the road for TypePad Micro as well, we’re told. One upside to TypePad Micro versus the others is that it’s built on TypePad’s own long-existing backbone, this makes the service is pretty fast. And thanks to Facebook Connect, setting up a new account takes just a few clicks and a few minutes before you’re ready to go. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Daily Endeavor Launches A Crowdsourced Guide To Jobs Posted: 17 Nov 2009 09:30 PM PST  Career related sites like Monster and others are meant for people who are looking for a specific type of job or area. But what if you don’t know what career or job opportunity you want to pursue? Daily Endeavor is a site that’s designed to help students and job seekers learn about job opportunities and then decide which career suits their skills and interests. Daily Endeavor’s founder Matthew Mahoney says the sites is focusing on content in the social change areas such as education, microfinance and human rights. Ultimately, the site’s goal is to profile 100,000 types of jobs over the next 3 years. The site is hinged on getting people to write detailed descriptions, reviews and guides about their jobs and experiences By design, Daily Endeavor is not a job listings site but hopes to partner with these platforms in the future. And Mahoney says there are opportunities to market the platform at universities. The site also has an existing companion business, EdeavorPrep, that advises students and job seekers with career advice. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Digg CEO Adelson: “I Don’t Think People Expect To Pay For News Any More” Posted: 17 Nov 2009 09:08 PM PST  This afternoon Digg CEO Jay Adelson was interviewed on Fox Business News, where he spoke about the future of Digg and the ways it could potentially cooperate with strugging news organizations. During the interview Adelson made a few interesting comments, some of which contrast with News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch’s assertions in an interview conducted earlier today that “people understand that it’s perfectly fair that they are going to pay for [news]“. Instead, Adelson said that he doesn’t think your average consumer is going to be coughing up money for news any time soon. Instead, he thinks that payments will come from content hubs and aggregators, including Digg itself. One way Digg can help, Adelson said, is by helping these news sites with their advertising using techniques similar to the ones Digg has implemented. Adelson said that Digg Ads, the company’s recently launched ad product that lets users vote on the advertising they’re seeing, has been performing very well, generating high click through rates that the company “wasn’t expecting to see”. He later remarked that these ads were getting up to 100 times the click through rates that standard banner and text ads generate. Adelson also said that the company has shifted gears a bit since the downturn hit last year — it’s now focused on growth rather than monetization. Adelson said that he’s “feeling good” that Digg is going to be profitable, and that reaching that goal is “not the problem any more”. The interview closed out with a question about Digg’s future as an IPO candidate. Adelson says that he “has to go public at some point” both to please investors and to help out Digg’s employees, but that the time for that hasn’t come yet. However, Adelson did strongly hint that we’ll likely see Digg go international as the site looks to capitalize on the fact that 40% of its users are abroad despite the fact that Digg is only available in English. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| PublicEarth: Layers, Crowd-Sourcing, And Taxonomy Meet Maps Posted: 17 Nov 2009 04:50 PM PST Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Jon Steinberg who very recently accepted a position an an Executive-In-Residence at Polaris Venture Partners, which backs PublicEarth. Still, this is an interesting product and concept in an interesting space, location, which we will be dealing with during our Realtime CrunchUp event this coming Friday. Other ideas in the vein include GeoAPI and to a lesser extent, SimpleGeo. Previously, Steinberg was a strategic partner development manager for Google’s Small Medium Business team.
PublicEarth, a Polaris portfolio company that is launching today, takes the power of API layering, crowd-sourcing, and taxonomy and focuses it on maps. PublicEarth describes itself as a wiki of places, specializing in collecting all those "long tail" places that most other databases tend to overlook. Maps is an area where I think there has been relative underdevelopment relative to importance, especially in light of all the emerging mobile, social, local platforms. Everyone I talk to working in this space needs more local data and detail to power their services, as well as, an open crowd-approach to keeping it up to date and granular as possible.
PublicEarth pulls in Google maps, and then applies a customized categorization and set of data fields to each entry. For example, I went to Collegiate School in Manhattan for high school. Rather than just having a one size fits all entry structure that allows for simply "reviews," PublicEarth applies the fields: colors, grade levels, mascot, and size. Similarly, for Dog Parks, the site lists whether or not there are benches, pick up bags, and areas for small dogs. Multiply this type of field customization by the seemingly unending quantity of place categories provided by PublicEarth and you have a "wiki for the world." Notice, also, how on the right side of each place entry is a running log of the changes made by editor users. The site is open and democratic; everything is open for editing and customization by users.
And that use of APIs and layering goes both ways. Public Earth has a detailed API that can be used to both pull content from and push content into the layer. I think being able to push content into Public Earth is of particular importance. There are many stakeholders that want to be able to contribute local map information in individual and bulk fashions to a central wiki-like repository. Public Earth has already taken feeds from dozens of providers, like CitySearch, Sam's Club, and SpaFinder, and plans to incorporate many more. So if you want to update information for individual locations, natural attractions, schools, or businesses use the front-end. And if you have a bulk feed of locations you service in some fashion, you can become a content partner to PublicEarth, or just push them through the API. If you are interested in using the API during this beta period, email the team, email me, or leave a comment on this post and we'll be sure to get you one. Finally, my big congrats to the PublicEarth team. I think PublicEarth is an important site, and as Mike Hirshland put it "The notion of high value discovery layers over web utilities is a theme in the Polaris portfolio." What Brizzly is for Twitter, PublicEarth is for Google Maps. You can find my profile and contribution on PublicEarth here. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| LiveOffice: Email Archiving In The Cloud Posted: 17 Nov 2009 04:49 PM PST  Thinking about moving your electronic services to the cloud? LiveOffice, an SaaS provider of email archiving and hosting, makes the leap that much easier with the release of their CloudMerge technology--offering email archiving for most cloud email providers on the market. In addition to supporting cloud based email archiving, LiveOffice is able to archive email which is on-premise, thus creating a unified archive for all of your email. A core belief of LiveOffice is that your email archive should be portable. By hosting your archive on their end, customers are able to migrate from their current provider to a cloud provider without having to deal with the possibility of losing precious information. Additionally, if customers are dissatisfied with their cloud provider down the road, they can migrate to another provider seamlessly--while keeping all their emails--due to the capabilities of LiveOffice's products. |
| Shakira’s Stats Don’t Lie: Facebook/Ustream Music Video Debut Is A Hit Posted: 17 Nov 2009 03:06 PM PST
Ustream says that Shakira video wasn’t its most popular of all time — the streams for Michael Jackson’s memorial service and President Obama’s Inauguration saw much more traffic, with 4.6MM and 3.8MM total streams respectivly. But those streams were both hours long, while Shakira’s stream lasted a mere ten minutes. It’s also important to note that these viewers were likely more engaged than they would be if they were just staring at the tube. By integrating Ustream into Facebook, Shakira was likely able to gain quite a few new Fans on her Facebook account, which means she’s established a long term way to reach out to them. It’s worth pointing out that Shakira was’t the first artist to stream her video — that title appears to be held by Chamillionaire who debuted his video for Good Morning a few days prior. Given Shakira’s success don’t be surprised if more artists start following suit.
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| Posted: 17 Nov 2009 02:57 PM PST
Before there was an iPhone, Android and App Store, there was Yahoo! Go. Launched in 2006, Yahoo! Go was an application offered news, mail, weather, traffic, and Yahoo! search from a mobile device. Today, Yahoo is announcing that Yahoo! Go will be shutdown on January 12, 2010. The app seemed to be ahead of it’s time when it launched but now is useless thanks to Yahoo creating prettier, more powerful, personal content-focused apps that specialize in products, such as Flickr, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Messenger. Yahoo released three versions of Yahoo! Go but hasn’t released a new version in the past year. The last iteration of the app included a mobile widget platform and was available on select Nokia and Windows Mobile devices The reasoning behind shutting down Go is simple, says Yahoo. As Yahoo unrolls individual apps in verticals and boosts its mobile site, Go was becoming obsolete. The team that was working on Go! will now be relocated to working on the mobile site product and various apps. Yahoo recently launched mobile apps for Flickr, and Yahoo Finance. Earlier this year, Yahoo announced a revamped Yahoo Mobile, and rolled it out in April with a new iPhone app and browser support for more than 300 devices. Now Yahoo!'s mobile homepage is now available across more than 1,900 mobile devices in 32 countries. Yahoo Mobile combines mobile search, your email, IM, and social messaging streams, and personalized Yahoo content such as news, sports, stocks, and RSS feeds, which basically replaces Go. Below is the email that will be sent to Yahoo Go users tomorrow:
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| Murdoch Warns That Without eTablets, “Newspapers Will Go Out Of Business.” Posted: 17 Nov 2009 02:52 PM PST
Old habits die hard. Rupert Murdoch believes that the future of the newspaper business is subscriptions—electronic subscriptions. He’s done with giving away his news for free on the Web and to search engines like Google. Instead thinks that Kindle-like tablet computers can save the media industry. It’s a notion that’s been floated before: an entire newsstand in a color tablet which delivers electronic versions of any newspaper or magazine you want for a monthly subscription of $15 to $19 a month. It’s got to work, otherwise, he warns from his soapbox, “Newspapers will go out of business. All newspapers.” In an interview on his own Fox Business (embedded below), he explains his thinking: ALEXIS GLICK: ARE YOU CONVINCED IT IS GOING TO WORK? RUPERT MURDOCH: SURE. ALEXIS GLICK: WHY? RUPERT MURDOCH: WE TEST MARKETED IT AND PEOPLE I THINK UNDERSTAND THAT IT'S PERFECTLY FAIR THAT THEY ARE GOING TO PAY FOR IT. IF IT DOESN'T, THE NEWSPAPERS WILL GO OUT OF BUSINESS. ALL NEWSPAPERS. THERE IS JUST NOT ENOUGH ADVERTISING TO GO AROUND FOR ALL THE SITES ON THE INTERNET. THE NUMBER OF SITES AND AVAILABILITY OF ADVERTISING ON THE INTERNET, THE AVAILABILITY DOUBLES AND TRIPLES EVERY YEAR BUT THE AMOUNT OF REAL MONEY GOES UP 10 OR 15% A YEAR. THE PRICE OF IT KEEPS COMING DOWN. Forget for a moment that news websites will be perfectly readable on these newfangled tablets everyone keeps talking about. So Murdoch still has the problem of “>”leading” all of his media competitors into the promised land of subscription tablets by walling off their websites from readers. And also set aside the fact that newspapers and magazines are already available for paid download on Amazon’s Kindle, and that those subscription revenues are still miniscule. A full-color tablet with access to an entire newsstand’s worth of magazines and newspapers for a single bundled price would be a better deal and better experience than buying subscriptions a la carté from the Kindle. But in the face of free content readable via a browser, the subscription model will be challenged. Even setting aside competition from newer media sites and blogs with lower cost structures and lean staffs, there is no way to completely wall off news from every traditional news organization. At the very least, the weakest newspapers and magazines with the lowest readership and share of attention will find that they are better off remaining free and selling Web ads than taking crumbs from the new electronic subscrtiption pie. (Presumably the subscription revenue will be divvied up based on demand, with the most popular titles getting the largest portion). Apparently, Murdoch also has no interest in simply playing Bing off of Google and making the search engines pay for the right to index his news either. Asked whether he was “moving towards an exclusive deal” with the “aggregators and the Googles of the world” to make them “pay for News Corp. content,” Murdoch replied: NO, NO, NO. I DON'T KNOW THAT THEY CAN AFFORD TO DO THAT. IF THEY WERE TO PAY EVERYBODY FOR EVERYTHING THEY TOOK FROM EVERY NEWSPAPER IN THE WORLD, AND EVERY MAGAZINE, THEY WOULDN'T HAVE ANY PROFITS LEFT. You got that? Even if he were to sell his news to Google, which he is not, Google doesn’t have enough money to buy it. Either that, or Murdoch is negotiating in public as Google’s search deal with MySpace comes up for renewal. Video and partial transcript below: Transcript excerpt via Fox Business News ALEXIS GLICK: YOU HAVE MADE A LOT OF NEWS ABOUT AGGREGATORS AND GOOGLES OF THE WORLD AND WHETHER THEY SHOULD PAY FOR NEWS CORP. CONTENT. ARE YOU MOVING TOWARD EXCLUSIVE DEAL WITH THEM? RUPERT MURDOCH: NO, NO, NO. I DON'T KNOW THAT THEY CAN AFFORD TO DO THAT. IF THEY WERE TO PAY EVERYBODY FOR EVERYTHING THEY TOOK FROM EVERY NEWSPAPER IN THE WORLD, AND EVERY MAGAZINE, THEY WOULDN'T HAVE ANY PROFITS LEFT. THEY HAVE DEVISED A BRILLIANT SEARCH ENGINE THAT SCRAPES ALL OF THE MATERIAL PUBLISHED IN THE WORLD, AND ON THE BACK OF THAT THEY SELL SEARCH, BUT THEY DON'T PAY FOR THE RAW MATERIAL. WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT. WE CAN PUBLISH OUR PAPERS ELECTRONICALLY, AND OTHERS CAN TOO, AND PEOPLE CAN STILL GO TO A SEARCH ENGINE IF THEY WANT TO FIND OUT SOMETHING, NOT NEWS PERHAPS, BUT THEY SEE TERMS THAT NEWS REFERS TO IN NEWSPAPER STORIES AND MAGAZINES THEY CAN EITHER GO TO GOOGLE OR MICROSOFT OR WHOEVER. THEY'LL STILL HAVE A VERY GOOD BUSINESS. ALEXIS GLICK: YOU ENVISION A WORLD THEN WITH A TABLET, A HANDHELD DEVICE OR SOMETHING OF THAT NATURE WHERE YOU CAN OFFER A FINANCIAL MARKETPLACE OR A SUPERMARKET FULL OF MEDIA CONTENT AND DATA ON A MULTI-TIERED SYSTEM? RUPERT MURDOCH: YES. ALEXIS GLICK: HOW DOES THAT WORK? RUPERT MURDOCH: WELL, YOU'D BE ABLE TO GET ON IT, AS WOULD BE TRANSMITTED TO IT, A TABLET. TRANSMITTED THROUGH THE AIR OR OVER WI-FI. A REASONABLE SIZE, ATTRACTIVE TABLET IN FULL COLOR AND YOU COULD READ A NEWSPAPER ON IT. YOU PRESS A BUTTON WHEN YOU WANT IT OR IF YOU WANT TO PLAY EXTRA, MORE THAN THAT, BUT IF IT COSTS $15 OR $19 A MONTH, IF YOU WANTED TRAVEL MAGAZINES OR SOMETHING YOU CAN ORDER THEM UP AND HAVE THEM. ALEXIS GLICK: ON THE TABLET, IF I PAY THE MAXIMUM AMOUNT I CAN HAVE ANYTHING I WANT? RUPERT MURDOCH: ANY CONTENT. BOOKS, ANYTHING AT ALL. YOU JUST HAVE TO PAY. THAT'S THE FUTURE. IT COSTS A FORTUNE. THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY – THE NEWS INDUSTRY, PUT IT THAT WAY. LET'S NOT TALK ABOUT PAPER. THE NEWS INDUSTRY SPENDS A FORTUNE IN COLLECTING THE NEWS. IT NEEDS TO BE PAID FOR IT. THERE IS NOT ENOUGH ADVERTISING TO GO AROUND. IT'S ALRIGHT ON CABLE TELEVISION BECAUSE IT GETS PAID BY THE CABLE SUPPLIERS, MONEY, WHICH, OF COURSE, GETS PASSED ON TO THE PUBLIC. AS WELL AS SUPPLEMENTED BY SOME ADVERTISING AND IT HAS TO BE THE SAME WITH OTHER FORMS OF NEWS. ALEXIS GLICK: ARE YOU CONVINCED IT IS GOING TO WORK? RUPERT MURDOCH: SURE. ALEXIS GLICK: WHY? RUPERT MURDOCH: WE TEST MARKETED IT AND PEOPLE I THINK UNDERSTAND THAT IT'S PERFECTLY FAIR THAT THEY ARE GOING TO PAY FOR IT. IF IT DOESN'T, THE NEWSPAPERS WILL GO OUT OF BUSINESS. ALL NEWSPAPERS. THERE IS JUST NOT ENOUGH ADVERTISING TO GO AROUND FOR ALL THE SITES ON THE INTERNET. THE NUMBER OF SITES AND AVAILABILITY OF ADVERTISING ON THE INTERNET, THE AVAILABILITY DOUBLES AND TRIPLES EVERY YEAR BUT THE AMOUNT OF REAL MONEY GOES UP 10 OR 15% A YEAR. THE PRICE OF IT KEEPS COMING DOWN. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Intel Capital Invests In Cloud Computing Pioneer Joyent Posted: 17 Nov 2009 02:32 PM PST
The news comes only a few weeks after Intel helped the 5-year old company launch a cloud computing service in mainland China, reportedly the first ever to launch over there. Joyent says it will use the extra cash to accelerate its product development and expand its sales & marketing efforts around the world. The investment by Intel Capital in Joyent was announced today at the investment organization’s 10th Annual CEO Summit, where seven investments were made public (for approximately $25 million in total). The other six capital infusions went to Korea-based Crucialtec, Taiwan-based Gudeng Precision Industrial Co, Japan-based V-cube, China-based Phoenix New Media, United Arab Emirates-based NeuString and US-based Active Storage. In a blog post about the reasons for accepting institutional financing for the first time since its inception in 2004, Joyent founder and CEO David Young disclosed that the company earlier raised a small seed funding round from Peter Thiel and the good old “myself, friends and family” and turned profitable quickly. So why raise extra funding? Young explains:
Joyent counts some noteworthy companies among its customers, including social network LinkedIn, social gaming platform operator Watercooler and clothing and home good retailer Gilt Groupe. They used to handle hosting for Twitter, too, but that relationship turned sour in early 2008 after frequent downtime issues. Curious to see what the future holds for the company. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Google Holding Chrome OS Event Thursday. Complete Overview And Launch Plans To Be Revealed. Posted: 17 Nov 2009 02:13 PM PST
Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Google Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS will be speaking at the event. And there will be a Q&A session afterwards. As we reported a few days ago, Google had been planning to release at least part of Chrome OS this week. That still may be the case at this event, but it looks for now that the more complete launch will in fact take place next year. And if they are holding this event now with a “complete overview,” progress is clearly being made, so you can probably expect that launch to be early next year. Google first announced Chrome OS in July, but gave very few details about it. It seemed the idea there was more to drop a nuclear bomb on Microsoft, which was just about to announce its online free version of Office. In the subsequent months, interest has remained high for Chrome OS, but about all we’ve seen is what the OS’s browser may look like. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Mystery Of Droid Autofocus Conspiracy Solved (For Reals This Time) Posted: 17 Nov 2009 01:33 PM PST
But there were even better conspiracy theories out there, such as Engadget’s idea of a secret software update, which quickly spread around the Internet. It turns out that wasn’t true, either. And we’ve confirmed that there’s no such thing as a secret software update on Android phones anyway, at least according to people at Google. Updates, even security updates, must be approved for installation by the user. So what was the real reason for the problem, and the fix? Well, it fixed itself. The problem, as MobileCrunch duly noted, was an issue with the phone’s timestamp: “According to Google Engineer Dan Morrill, there is an unfortunate bug in the Droid's autofocus routine. It improperly rounds a timestamp used in the calculations, which somehow throws the entire focusing process off. Today it works, and tomorrow it will work…but 24.5 days from now, the bug will be back.” But by the time the problem cycles back again, Verizon will have pushed out a fix for the problem. As we say around the office, Android is freedom from the iPhone. But sometimes that freedom feels a little bit like this: Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
Funny 
We wrote that 
London-based 
Have young children? You might want to check this out, particularly if they’re taking their first steps on the Web right about now.
Imagine a world where you sit at your computer and you never go outside. Where you never see another human being. This is the world that sites like Google and Facebook want you to live in.
If you’ll allow me to be embarrassingly obvious for a second: Sitting in a chat room all day, even if all of your friends are in it as well, is not the same as being in the same physical room with them. Even if you all are having great discussions in the chat room, and not saying a word when you’re hanging out with one another, there is just something that’s different. Something that social networking will never be able to replace.
Make no mistake, there are hurdles to location-based services gaining widespread acceptance. But the upside of it far outweighs the downside. And with that the case, these types of services are ripe to take off.
It may be a while before users start truly taking advantage of it since it is an opt-in feature. But eventually, I believe we’ll see more and more users opt-in to be able to use third-party clients 
Facebook is coming to a PS3 near you as part of the latest 3.10 update, which will be rolled out over the course of the next day. We 
BREAKING: German media giant Burda has used its digital arm to purchase a 25.1% share in XING, the business social network that is biggest in Germany and competes with LinkedIn. The 1,323,041 shares were sold to Burda by Cinco Capital, the investment vehicle owned by the former XING co-founder Lars Hinrichs. Priced at €36.50 per share, the deal is therefore worth €48.3 million. This makes Burda Digital the largest shareholder in XING.
The debate over 
About two weeks after 
I don’t recall ever paying for a TypePad blog, but apparently I did. I learned this today when I logged in for the first time in years to see that the site I had set up in 2005 was deactivated because my credit card had expired. Lucky for me, I don’t have to pay anymore because TypePad has finally launched a free version of the service.
The rapid development of interesting web services can be attributed to the ability of each successive builder to create a layer upon what others have built. The existence of APIs and callable web services means that each builder can add value on top. When you combine this with crowd-sourcing, you effectively pour lighter fluid (in a good way) on this layering process. The only remaining element required is a taxonomy to insure that the crowd-sourcing creates content that is structured enough to make sense despite coming from many hands.
Last week we reported on Shakira’s 
Google is planning to hold a special Chrome OS event at its headquarters in Mountain View, CA this Thursday morning, we’ve just been notified. The plan is to give some technical background information as well as show off some demos, we’re told. More notably, they will be giving a “complete overview” of the new OS, which they say will launch next year.
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