Sunday, November 15, 2009

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Twitter And Facebook Turn Everyone Into An Affiliate Marketer

Posted: 15 Nov 2009 09:00 AM PST

This guest post was written by Steve Poland, a former TechCrunch writer working on his soon-to-launch start-up InSeconds that allows sites to easily customize each visitor’s experience, resulting in optimized revenue for each visit.

Affiliate marketing is 15 years old this month—CyberErotica is said to have launched the first program in 1994. The adult industry has always been ahead of the curve, but I digress. Despite 15 years of existence, which is essentially an eternity in “online years”, the performance based marketing method is still in its infancy. Sure, there are lots of affiliate programs that exist for many online etailers (and other sites that seek sales, leads and visitors) and $2.1b was paid out last year from affiliate programs, but affiliate marketing is still not as easy as it should be for website/blog Publishers to implement and get compensated for their referrals.

For those that don’t know, affiliate marketing works like this—a company with a product or service for sale pays a referral fee to Publishers (marketing companies) that can drive sales, leads, or visitors to them. The Publisher is taking on the risk here—they might be outlaying their own cash on advertising to promote the product/service, or they are linking to that company’s product/service in the content of their site’s own webpages (when they could be linking to another company instead). The Publisher signs up for an account with the affiliate program and is then given “trackable links” to use in their content, which track referrals back to them. Most etailers have an affiliate marketing program in place—for example, Amazon.com’s Associates program will pay 4%-15% referral fees to you when a visitor of your website clicks a link on your site and makes a purchase at Amazon.com.

Twitter & Facebook Turn Everyone Into An Affiliate Marketer

Most recently, it’s not just websites/blogs that are referring sales, but rather individuals themselves, who are using realtime sites like Twitter and Facebook to influence their friends and followers by recommending products to buy, music to listen to, and movies to watch. These realtime discussions are becoming important sources of referral sales and leads for websites—if someone is asking on Twitter what digital camera they should buy, you bet your ass that Amazon.com wants anyone on the Internet responding to that user’s question to be linking to a camera for sale on Amazon.com (and not Walmart.com or BestBuy.com). Amazon.com wants to make sure that those influencers are compensated for referring people to buy from their website, which thus positively reinforces them to continue linking to Amazon.com product pages in the future.

Everyone with access to the Internet today is a Publisher. They are a voice. This has always been the case, but not the way it is now with Microblogging. Individuals were Publishers on a smaller scale via email forwards, email replies, IM, or most recently blog posts. Blogging broadened individual’s view points (influence) up to a global scale—no longer would they only influence just a few friends in a closed-circuit email, but they could influence the masses online. But blogging wasn’t realtime discussions. Instant messaging and chat rooms were always realtime discussions—but primarily on a one-on-one or small-group basis. Twitter and Facebook status updates, aka microblogging, has mashed the realtime nature of instant messaging with the global scale and voice of blogging.

Amazon.com Pioneers Affiliate Marketing, Again

As an early pioneer of affiliate marketing for site/blog Publishers (holding the patent on all the components of an online affiliate marketing program), it only makes sense that Amazon.com would now become an early pioneer of affiliate marketing for individual publishers—those who simply tweet and comment on their friend’s Facebook updates. Last week, Amazon.com announced they would start compensating individuals with referral fees for using Amazon.com links in their Twitter messages and in their Facebook status updates/comments. Although it will likely lead to more noise (and spam), I think we’re going to see many companies follow Amazon.com’s lead. I also think this has the potential of being a game changer, if some other pieces fall into place—more on this in a bit.

What has shocked me over the years is the number of links in webpages that aren’t trackable links. Most links in content are just regular links out to other webpages, which means that they don’t contain a tracking code that corresponds to them as the referring website—which means that when a sale is referred and occurs on a site that has an affiliate program in place, that affiliate program site doesn’t know who to pay the referral fee to (even though they honestly would like to, because it encourages future linking to them by that referring Publisher). In a perfect world, all the links on all the webpages on the Internet that link to Amazon.com product pages would be trackable links which would earn those websites referral fees for whenever their visitors click over and purchase products from Amazon.com. Ditto for all the links that have affiliate programs in place.

Affiliate Marketing for Publishers Still Not Quick and Easy, Yet

I would go out on a limb and estimate that 99.99% of all links on the web are not trackable links. Why? Because it’s been a bit of a pain in the ass, quite frankly. If you’re a publisher and you’re writing a content piece, you would need to go away from your writing, login to the affiliate program for the website you want to link to (i.e. Amazon.com Associates), and then generate the trackable link for the webpage you want to link to—ensuring that when your visitors click that link, that you’ll earn referral fees from Amazon.com when purchases occur. Not to mention that you have to signup for all of these affiliate programs; some of these programs are handled by third-party companies and become discontinued (making your links dead). And then there’s the money—if you don’t get very many visitors each month to your site, you may only earn a few dollars a month from affiliate programs, which then discourages you from putting forth the time to place trackable links into your content in the first place.

The lack of ease that sites/blogs have had to endure to use affiliate marketing over the years is the same for Individuals now. Amazon.com has said they endorse trackable links by users in social media, but it’s still not easy enough. Sure, you can go over to Amazon.com, login to your Associates account, and a button appears at the top of every product page saying “Share on Twitter”, which then creates a tweet with your trackable link in it, but that’s still one too many steps. People are lazy. More than half of Twitter users are using a Twitter application to do their tweeting. Until the affiliate programs are integrated into the social networking platforms (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, forums) or the applications used on these platforms (Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Tweetie, bit.ly), this affiliate marketing by individuals won’t take off.

It’s in the interest of the platform (Twitter) to make this easier because it will ultimately allow their users to earn money. It’s in the interest of the users, because it earns them money and reinforces their usage of the platform (Twitter). It’s in the interest of the affiliate program (Amazon.com), because it positively reinforces users to share links to their site. (On the flip side, Twitter might not want to encourage this for fear of making teh spam problem even worse than it is).

“Facebook Credits” could become de facto Virtual Currency with a Facebook integration of Amazon.com

But if you really think about it, Facebook should really be integrating these affiliate program partners into its platform first. Facebook has the most to gain by integrating. You may have heard of the virtual currency system that Facebook has been working on—Facebook Credits. It will allow users to purchase Facebook Credits with cash and then use them in third-party Facebook applications, such as leveling up your character in a game or buying a virtual rose for a friend. To get people using this system, Facebook will likely give away some initial credits to every user, to get them to see how simple they are to use, then get the user to pull out their credit card and refill.

What about a constant refill of Facebook Credits every month to help spur more in-app activity/purchases? That could happen. Even if users were merely earning $0.44 or $1.32 monthly from their link sharing habits, if these referral fees were automatically turned into Facebook Credits, Facebook could really jump-start this in-app currency of theirs (and if they operate anything like Apple, they’ll nab 30% of all in-app money spent). This will work for Amazon.com and other affiliate program participants, as long as the user knows that the 1000 Facebook Credits they earned this month were from their sharing of Amazon.com links. Facebook would love it because these affiliate links would be an income generator for their users, encouraging their users to spend more time on Facebook, and of course there is revenue associated with users spending their credits. Finally, Facebook application developers would love it because they’ll be seeing a steady stream of revenue as well. Meanwhile, app developers and Facebook can steer clear of Scamville-type offers. With affiliate links, you only get paid if someone actually clicks through and buys something. Good referrals get rewarded,while bad referrals get nothing.

Plus, imagine the publicity for a Facebook or Twitter. I can see the headlines now, “Facebook now ‘employs’ 300 million people” or “Facebook lets 300 million people to start earning money just by sharing links”.

This is Now, Get Ready for the Effects

One effect of affiliate programs becoming integrated easily into these realtime platforms (and/or client apps) is that referral fees will go down. Amazon.com currently pays out 4%-15% on referral sales, but that’s because they know only a small percentage of their sales occur now from referrals (because of the lack of ease—and because of the laziness of sites linking to Amazon.com). But with a vast usage of trackable links, then for example, if sales remained flat and 5% of all purchases were referrals previously and now that number becomes 25%, then Amazon.com can’t be paying out 8% referral commissions (unless sales went up 5x too), so Amazon.com would reduce that to 1.6% referral commissions (8%/5).

Yes, this movement is going to turn up the volume of spam noise to us all via our use and searches on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. Those people who you follow may get spammy, but their influence over you will go down (just like those people that send you too many nonsense email forwards). Everyone has a personal brand and if you spam your audience with tons of links, they won’t be listening to you as much.

But what I’m talking about isn’t the future—it’s here now, with Amazon.com leading the way. Those companies that don’t embrace affiliate marketing for Individual Publishers, will lose. If someone is tweeting about the new iPod, that someone is going to link to the webpages that will earn them money.

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CrunchGear Week in Review: New Moon, Now With Water Edition

Posted: 15 Nov 2009 08:00 AM PST

Skip The Hand Shake Now Has A Wristband

Posted: 15 Nov 2009 12:32 AM PST

No Righteous Cause is complete without a colored wristband. That’s why I’m so excited that the no-hand shake movement (yes, movement) now has an official blue wristband for people who want to show that they support the effort. Get a ten pack of them here for $20.

Here’s who has (sort of, not really) pledged their support for the No Handshake cause to date:

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NSFW: ‘Tis Pity She’s A Success – Belle de Jour and the Impossibility of Anonymous Blogging

Posted: 14 Nov 2009 09:48 PM PST

belleSo Belle de Jour was real after all. The Internet’s most famous anonymous sex blogger – turned best-selling author – turned internationally successful TV series – has finally outed herself in the UK’s Sunday Times. And it turns out she’s a character straight from the pages of XKCD.

From her interview with the Times’ India Knight, we learn that Belle is in fact Dr Brooke Magnanti a specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology who ran out of money during the final stages of her PhD thesis and decided to become an escort to make ends meet. So to speak. Add in the fact that Magnanti was already a reasonably well known science blogger and ‘The Secret Diary of a London Call Girl‘ was born.

Despite Belle’s growing fame, and the determined efforts of journalists around the world to out her, Belle’s anonymity remained intact – mainly thanks to a complex series of agents and shell companies that allowed her to receive payment for her work without compromising her identity. Even her agent didn’t know her real name until this week when Belle herself chose to out herself, granting an interview to Knight, one of her harshest critics.

A better example of someone operating on her own terms it’s hard to imagine. Anonymous bloggers everywhere can read Belle’s story and take heart in the fact that it really is possible to be both successful and anonymous in the Internet age.

There’s just one problem: it isn’t.

Let’s give Belle and the Sunday Times the benefit of the doubt and assume that Magnanti really did approach them, and not the other way around. There’s no reason to doubt Magnanti’s version of events, but it’s worth remembering that the Sunday Times has a particularly grubby history when it comes to anonymous bloggers.

As readers of my Emmy-award-winning book will know, back in 2006 my friend Zoe Margolis opened the door of her London home at an ungodly hour of the morning to accept a flower delivery from an anonymous admirer. What she didn’t know was that the delivery man had actually been sent by the Sunday Times who had positioned a photographer across the road ready to snap her when she came to the door. Two days later she learned the horrible truth: an email arrived from the paper’s ‘acting news editor’; a scumbag called Nicholas Hellen. In the email, Hellen announced that the paper was preparing to out Zoe as the author of the anonymous sex blog ‘Girl With A One Track Mind‘, which – like Belle de Jour’s blog – had just been turned into a book.

Hellen proposed a deal: either Zoe could agree to give her story to the Times, illustrated with a photoshoot in “glamourous evening wear” taken by their resident fashion photographer – or the paper would run its own hit-job expose, written by fellow-scum-bag Anna Mikhailova and complete with the (in Hellen’s words) “not particularly flattering” paparazzi shot.

Zoe told the Times to go fuck themselves, and the rest is a painful outing, a hideously uncomfortable conversation with her parents and a week of press-camped-out-on-her-doorstep hell (stories she tells in a follow-up book to be published in March 2010)

But, despite the fact that the print version of Magnanti’s Times’ interview is illustrated with a photograph of her wearing glamourous evening-wear, let’s assume this was an entirely consensual encounter. Knight also mentions in the interview that Magnanti has an ‘ex-boyfriend with a big mouth’ and that she had decided to go public before the decision was forced on her. Again, let’s assume that the ex-boyfriend hadn’t already contacted the Sunday Times.

Even assuming all of that, the existence of the big-mouthed boyfriend neatly illustrates the biggest problem with becoming a successful anonymous blogger. As your hidden life takes over more and more of your normal life, there comes a point where you have to share your secret with someone you trust. Batman had Alfred the butler, Deep Throat had Bob Woodward and, as any child of the 80s will tell you, three people shared He Man’s secret – his friends the Sorceress, Man-at Arms, and Orko. In Belle’s case, there came a point in forming serious relationships where she had to confess her lucrative hobby to her lover. From that point on she was just one bad breakup away from being exposed.

(The break-up didn’t even have to be her own; when screenwriter Nora Ephron divorced Carl Bernstein, she took pleasure in sharing the real identity of Deep Throat – her husband’s biggest secret – with anyone who would listen. Fortunately for Deep Throat, not many people would listen.)

And Belle’s secret was known to more people than just her boyfriends. Since the Times published its story a few hours ago, various friends of Magnanti have admitted to being in on the secret. Most were bloggers who knew her from her science blogging days and who pieced together various clues to stumble upon the truth, but who considered themselves part of a ‘bloggers code’ of silence. That kind of code of honour amongst bloggers sounds great in theory – not least because they make the blogosphere sound noble – but, as the financial rewards of Belle’s blogging became greater and greater, so did the financial incentives for her friends to cash in themselves. Once Belle hit a certain level of fame – or infamy – the question went from being “will she be outed?” to “when will she be outed?”

The only way to absolutely guarantee that no-one can out you, then, is to tell absolutely no-one about your secret. Trust no close friends, take no lovers – and keep your signature a million miles away from a book deal. And yet that’s where we bump into the biggest irony of all: the fewer people who are in a position to out your secret identity, the more fierce the compulsion to out yourself. The only thing worse than enjoying huge success with a blog and only being able to tell close friends and lovers, is enjoying huge success with a blog and not being able to tell anyone.

At the risk of hopping back on an old hobby horse, blogging is is, by nature, an egotistical activity. If Belle didn’t have an ego, she would simply fuck people for money, rather than feeling the need to put herself at risk by writing about her adventures. Sure enough, in the Sunday Times interview, Magnanti admits her frustration about not being able to attend her own book launch parties or to otherwise fully enjoy the rewards that success brings. Meanwhile, a Google search for Brooke Magnanti reveals that earlier this year she invited friends on a local web forum to come and support her debut as a stand-up comedian. It doesn’t take a genius to see how someone with Magnanti’s exhibitionist tenancies would be driven mad at not being able to openly showcase her real literary talents.

The truth is, once your work achieves a certain degree of adulation for doing something (especially something as egotistical as blogging), it is basic human nature to want to shout “THAT WAS ME! I DID THAT”. And as the adulation builds, so too does the desire until you simply can’t contain it any longer – and you either become deliberately sloppy in protecting your identity or you go the whole hog and pick up the phone to India Knight at the Sunday Times.

It’s like the scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit where Judge Doom taps out the rhythm ‘a shave and a haircut’ on the wall of Roger’s secret hiding place. Roger knows that he’ll be killed if he’s caught and yet his frustration at not being able to complete the couplet doubles with each repetition. A shave and a haircut… a shave and a haircut… A SHAVE AND A HAIRCUT… until, eyes bulging, body shaking, he just can’t take it anymore and bursts through the wall….

TWO BIIIITTTTTS!

In Doom’s case, the lesson was “Toons can’t resist the old shave and a haircut trick”; in the case of successful anonymous writers, it’s the “I DID THAT” urge that’s utterly irresistible. Hell, even Mark Felt couldn’t resist outing himself as Deep Throat in his old age. The idea of dying before having the chance to say “I did that” was simply too much to bear and so he picked up the phone to Vanity Fair.

And so, inevitably, ends the story Belle de Jour. She had a good run, and now it’s time for Dr Brooke Magnanti to take centre stage and to finally enjoy all of the fame and adulation her considerable literary talents have earned her.

And like all good stories, hers ends with a wonderful lesson… That the only way to truly remain a successfully anonymous blogger is not to have any success whatsoever. Because the moment people start to pay attention to you, it’s inevitable you’re going to get screwed.

And if someone else won’t screw you, you have no choice but to do it yourself.

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You Can Go Home Again, Even If It Means Back To Yahoo While Rejecting Google (And Maybe Facebook And Twitter)

Posted: 14 Nov 2009 05:20 PM PST

205822611_54169105a4This past summer, Daniel Raffel was desired. Google was pushing hard to hire the product manager, we hear from a source. And there are whispers that Twitter and Facebook were also in pursuit of his services. Basically, it seems like he had his choice of the companies in Silicon Valley that everyone wants to work for. So where did he end up? Yahoo.

Yahoo hasn’t exactly seemed like the ideal place to work over the past couple of years. Besides just the Microsoft acquisition offer distraction (and subsequent search deal), and the CEO shuffle, the company has lost much of its sterling polish that it once had during the dot-com era. But what’s even more odd is that Raffel has worked at Yahoo before. It’s where he made a name for himself by helping to create Yahoo Pipes, the popular content mashup tool. But a few years ago, Raffel took off to work at Pioneers of the Inevitable, where he helped make Songbird, the open source desktop music player.

So why’d he come back to Yahoo at a time when others were pursuing him? It’s hard to say for sure, but one source believes Yahoo paid a significant amount of money to lure him back. Another source believes he was promised more resources and an easier time rising up the ladder than if he went to Google. Still, Yahoo over Google is not a choice that a lot of people seem to make these days. And one source is sure that Bradley Horowitz, a former Yahoo exec that is now at Google, would have obviously wanted to bring Raffel on board, and was likely pushing for it.

There’s another reason he may have went with Yahoo. Since returning in late August, Raffel has been serving as a senior product manager under Cody Simms, the senior director of product management for Yahoo Open Source (Y!OS), we hear. He’s apparently working on mainly off-network projects such as making the Yahoo authentication platform more seamless. That might not sound sexy, but the bigger picture may be involve Yahoo building out its own platform product to better connect Yahoo with the rest of the web. Yes, think Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and the like. The chance to get into this hot space and play a critical role in building a “Yahoo Connect,” may have also enticed Raffel to come back, but that’s pure speculation at this point.

“He’s one of those rare product guys who is technical and can actually build stuff,” says one our sources. We’ll be watching what he’s building for Yahoo the second time around.

We’ve reached out to Raffel for comment, but have yet to hear back. We’ll update if we do.

[photo: flickr/sektordua]

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All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus

Posted: 14 Nov 2009 02:55 PM PST

At the beginning of 2009, during a now-famous strategy meeting, Twitter’s executives asked themselves, “Are we building a new Internet?” At the crux of that question was the realization that Twitter “introduced a new form of communication to the world.” Public micro-messages are now everywhere—on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Bing, Yahoo, AIM. They are infiltrating every part of the Web, particularly as the backbone of realtime search.

Yes, status updates (which are a form of micro-message) existed before Twitter, but it is the growing public nature of these messages which makes them exciting. For one thing, they need to be public in order to be visible to search engines. But when Twitter and other companies talk about building a new Internet, they don’t mean that 140-character messages are going to replace web pages. Rather it is that these realtime streams are becoming the center of people’s attention on the Web, and sending them off in all different sorts of directions.

These streams are the new Internet not so much because of the micro-content which they contain, but because they are a more efficient means of communication. Remember, the Internet at its core is a communications system. The battle going on now between Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others is to control this new realtime layer of communications on the Internet. Each one wants to be driving the micro-message bus.

In computer terms, a message bus carries data between different parts of a computer or between different computers. Realtime streams can be thought of as a micro-message bus which carries information instantaneously between people. The power of a micro-message is its ability to carry data, usually in the form of a link. It is a vehicle for passing links and other information. The value of a Tweet or status update or a Yammer or a Wave is not only in what it conveys about the sender, but where it leads to.

Other kinds of data can take a ride on this micro-message bus as well. Geolocation data, photos and videos are among the most popular. Whoever is in the driver’s seat of this micro-message bus will be in an enviable position, which is why everyone is trying to clamor aboard in hopes of taking over the wheel.

Next week, at our Realtime Crunchup (tickets are still available), we’ll be examining how this new communications layer on the Internet is being built and who will be driving the bus. We hope you can join us.

Photo credit: Flickr/Jan Krutisch.

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iDroid Wars on Gillmor Gang

Posted: 14 Nov 2009 12:32 PM PST

gillmorgangThe Gillmor Gang debated the virtues and otherwise of the smartphone’s latest pretender to the iPhone crown: Droid. Michael Arrington led the Droid’s faction, with a QVC-like enthusiasm for the power of Any Phone That Runs Google Voice. Of course, he keeps his iPhone and iTouch a handy arm-grab away, but with Droid he may finally have some rationale for excommunicating himself from the Apple bosom.

The New York Times’ Saul Hansell provided context at the telecom level, while ex-monopoly telecom BT’s JP Rangaswami placed his and BT’s bet on the future of open platforms such as Android. JP’s partner in crime at BT and subsidiary Ribbit, Kevin Marks, supported Arrington’s vision of a game-changer in voice, while Robert Scoble was happy to defend the iPhone with faint praise just so he could have something to argue about with Arrington. He also elicits some new CrunchPad details from Mike.

Of course, my perspective is the true correct one, that the iPhone will continue to dominate as Android devices demolish RIM, partner virtually with Windows Mobile over the Silverlight bridge to carve up the volume play, and batter the telecoms into submission so that Apple can ride through the big gaping hole and launch the iBook. A great conversation that will continue.

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MySpace Fashion Socializes Content Around Style, Celebrities And Designers

Posted: 14 Nov 2009 11:20 AM PST

At the Web 2.0 Summit a few weeks ago, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta outlined the strategy for the social network to perhaps regain some of its former glory: the “socialization of content.” While MySpace may not be seeing major growth in terms of new users, the social network is gaining major traction on its communities that are based on niche verticals, such as MySpace Music. Van Natta said that he thinks MySpace has a unique position on the web because of its music deals with all the major labels and the independent ones in the music space. Van Natta’s strategy is being applied in other verticals and MySpace Fashion is one niche community that has flown under the radar but features compelling content.

MySpace Fashion, which had a significant UI overhaul last week, aggregates news and provides original content about all things fashion and style, including established and unknown designers, clothing, accessories, trends and celebrities. The site and all of its features, which like all for MySpace’s niche platforms, can be fully accessed by non-MySpace members, making it a web destination as opposed to an enclosed community. The MySpace fashion community currently has includes over 500,000 MySpace members but site is also being accessed by non-MySpace members who simply want to visit the sites to checkout the latest trends and news about fashion.

The site, which originally launched in 2007, includes several interactive features. The Fit is a weekly video video cast that follows celebrities and designers into their closets and along on their shopping expeditions. This week’s Fit follows celeb stylist Rachel Zoe and past shows have featured Paris Hilton, Lady Gaga and others. Fresh Face is a way to engage up and coming designers in the fashion world, and wisely engages the designer community. The feature includes photos from lines and a Q&A with the designer.

MySpace’s Behind The Seams is a video program that highlights the “influencers” behind the “seams" of the fashion world from store owners to stylists. The social network even has a give away to entice visitors; each Thursday MySpace gives away a designer item (i.e. handbag) to a user. And interestingly MySpace has two features which integrated content from other fashion news and content sites. Shop the Look, which is powered by ShopStyle, lets users find the same style as celebs but at affordable prices. WhoWhatWear, a celeb style and trend site, showcases a trend of the week.

MySpace Fashion’s editor Annie Meyers-Shyer says that all of the content on the site is targeted towards the 18-26 year-old demographic, and the site’s content and subject matter reflects this, with features on the Jonas Brothers and Taylor Swift. And MySpace is continuing to add new features to its fashion platform. In the next month, the social network will launch a designer directory, which will feature the MySpace pages of all the major brands, magazines, stylists, designers and more, making it easier for users to connect with the designers and brands they admire and love.

While MySpace Fashion isn’t expected be nearly as popular as MySpace Music, the site could be an interesting platform for monetization with brands as well as fashion focused entertainment. For example, I could easily see an opportunity to promote content for the popular reality show Project Runway. MySpace faces competition from several sites, including fashion community StyleCaster and AOL’s own venture into fashion news, Stylist.

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India is morphing into a global R&D hub, but can it ever take on Silicon Valley?

Posted: 14 Nov 2009 07:01 AM PST

mapWhen Americans think of the Indian technology sector, they still perceive a nation of call center workers and low-level computer programmers administering databases and updating websites. But while the West was sleeping, Indian IT morphed into a giant R&D machine. Indian companies that started out doing call center and low-level IT work have climbed the value chain to become outsourced providers of critical R&D in sophisticated areas such as semiconductor design, aerospace, automotive, network equipment and medical devices.

This is happening as multi-nationals set up their own R&D operations in India and partner with local shops. Both the Palm Pre smart phone and the Amazon Kindle, two of the hottest consumer electronics devices on the market, have key components designed in India. Intel designed its six-core Xeon processor in India. IBM has over 100,000 employees in India. A large number of these are building Big Blue's most sophisticated software products. Cisco is developing cutting edge networking technologies for futuristic "intelligent cities" in Bangalore. Adobe, Cadence, Oracle, Microsoft and most of the large software companies are developing mainstream products in India.

Equally important are the arrival of Indian multi-nationals who are tackling global markets, such as Tata with its dirt cheap Nano car that the company is now positioning for a European market entry and Reva, which recently announced it was planning to build an electric car factory in New York state to address the U.S. market for electric vehicles.

What has been missing to date in India, however, is early stage venture activity and the type of grass-roots entrepreneurism that is the hallmark of American capitalism and Silicon Valley. In that respect China is way ahead of India with many startups taking advantage of huge government incentives and reeling in talented native Chinese returnees to serve as CEOs and CTOs. Note that Kaifu Lee, formerly Google’s top guy in China, was able to launch a $100 million startup incubator focusing entirely on the mobile sector — and he was flooded with business plans within days of opening his doors in the Middle Kingdom.

On my recent trip to India I started to see new signs of life in tech entrepreneurship.  Many of the startups that Sarah Lacy and I met were really smart and hungry. Some were even doing things better than their Silicon Valley counterparts. Not all of these startups are developing breakthrough technologies but many of them are solving problems that U.S. companies have thus far failed to solve and doing it with fewer resources.

tika powderOne of the most interesting companies I met is in the mundane business of developing offset printer ink. Their ink is made from vegetable oil and is entirely bio-degradable. The offset printing industry consumes 1 million tons of petroleum products and emits 500,000 tons of volatile organic compounds every year. An IIT-Delhi incubated startup called EnNatura developed a printing ink which emits no volatile compounds and is washable. And the overall cost of their solution will be significantly less than all present compounds when produced at scale. I can see a company like this growing into a billion dollar global business.

Another interesting company was LiveMedia. This is an out-of-home advertising company that has 4,500 screens in 2,200 destinations with a total reach of 50 million people. Of course, you can find exactly these sorts of TV screens in thousands of places across the U.S. Unfortunately, it has been very hard to make real money selling advertising on these networks. LiveMedia appears to have cracked that by creating specialized content that is more engaging and interactive than a box droning CNN or the Disney Channel. LiveMedia content includes games, quizzes, horoscopes, a few short animations, and other content that is both cheap to produce and easy to play along with or understand. LiveMedia has also perfected context-relevant advertising spots keyed to the crowds at the screen location.

LiveMedia is in the process of building out a partnership with Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs India that would give the network even more interactive capabilities. Bell Labs has developed a content management and routing system, dubbed Mango, that makes it much easier and efficient to deliver high-bandwidth, high-quality video and interactive content over existing networks. In the developing world, everyone wants a TiVO-like capability to share, store and manage content. But existing GPRS or EDGE-based cell networks are not up to snuff. And the broadband infrastructure still lags behind that of the most developed telecom networks in places like Japan, Korea and Scandanavia.  A product like Mango is tailor-made for VC investment to get it out of the lab and into a spin-off company.

This is partly why so many U.S. venture capital shops have opened up branches in India. In fact, the two lead investors in LiveMedia are both U.S. venture capitalists including the respected Valley firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. But India lags in home-grown venture capital activity. As I have previously discussed, VCs follow the innovation. So the lack of native VC in India is notable in that it implies a critical mass of activity remains lacking, as well.

For example, in the first nine months of 2008, total early stage VC investments in India totaled $678 million, according to the Global India Venture Capital Association. In the U.S. over that same period early stage investments tallied $5.2 billion according to the U.S. National Venture Capital Association – and that number is not entirely reflective of the real situation. The economic downturn hit the U.S. much harder than the Subcontinent and VC activity in the U.S. fell faster and harder. Regardless, a 10-fold difference between early stage venture activity clearly illustrates the capital is not there yet.

So when will there be enough innovative startups to support an explosion in venture capital? I’d argue, sooner than you realize. During my week in India I spoke to close to 100 startups. A few of them had products or prototypes that would easily compete in Silicon Valley. Some of the leading lights of the legacy Indian IT giants are also moving quickly into VC. Infosys founder Narayan Murthy recently sold millions of dollars of shares in the company in order to launch a venture capital fund targeting investments in India.

The dynamics of entrepreneurship are the same in India as in America. Company founders usually come from the ranks of experienced business executives and are middle-aged. They get tired of working for others and want to make an impact and build wealth before they get too old. Given that there are now hundreds of thousands of R&D workers in India who are gaining valuable experience and are getting old, it is simply a matter of time before they begin to hatch their entrepreneurial plans. After all, their colleagues who migrated to the U.S. now start nearly one in six of Silicon Valley's tech firms.

I'll bet that in 5 years, if you stacked up a TechCrunch 50 of Indian start ups versus a comparable number of U.S. startups, it would be a pretty even match. That’s pretty amazing considering the relatively short length of time that the Indian startup scene has existed. And it’s a good lesson for America that the barriers to starting a company are lower than ever before—and some ambitious engineer in India will eat your lunch if you don’t get your prototype built and perfected ASAP.

Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

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It’s Google’s World And Handset Makers Just Live In It

Posted: 14 Nov 2009 06:47 AM PST

When the Motorola Droid launched this month everyone was amazed that a company so down on its luck was able to put together a well-designed phone running a powerful, "brand new" OS. The whole package - hardware, software, and marketing - seemed flawless. In fact, phones running Android 1.5 now look hopelessly outdated and with 2.0's gesture, CDMA, and search support you'd wonder why handset manufacturers like HTC, LG, Kyocera, and Samsung are using 1.5 at all. The reasons have more to do with Google than any decision on the carriers' part. In fact, according to a source close to the handset business, Google's Android team directly assisted Motorola and Verizon in building the Droid's software from the ground up and is currently assisting another, unknown, handset maker in Korea to create a finely-tuned hardware and software combination. Most important, however, is that this is sort of assistance most manufacturers do not receive and, in the end, they are dinged for running an "older" version of Android.

Tumblr Shares Stats: 20 Million Uniques, 420 Million Impressions Per Month

Posted: 14 Nov 2009 04:47 AM PST

High-school dropout and Tumblr founder David Karp is doing a presentation today at the Eventoblog conference in sunny Sevilla, Spain. In one of his first slides, Karp shared some statistics about Tumblr, which appears to be growing pretty well, pretty quickly.

Last August, the Tumblr team shared some growth statistics and claimed 50 million visitors and a healthy 255 million impressions in July 2009. This month (which I reckon is not actually this month but rather October), Tumblr self-reports 20 million unique vistors and 420 million impressions.

This means either Tumblr lost about 30 million unique monthly visitors in the past few months, or there’s some mix-up about what’s being measured exactly and shared publicly (visits vs. visitors, perhaps?). But third-party measuring services like Compete acknowledge that traffic numbers are definitely heading in the right direction.

According to Karp, Tumblr is currently seeing 2 million Tumblr bloggers publish about 40 million new posts per month. About 10,000 new people sign up for Tumblr every day on average, and the retention rate is very high: close to 85% remains active after registering for the micro-blogging service (note that Tumblr, besides drop-dead simple, is free of charge).

And as you can tell from the picture I took of one of his slides, 35% use Tumblr on Facebook, while only 15% connects the service to Twitter. The bookmarklet is relatively popular too, with about one third of Tumblr’s users installing it. About 15% downloads the company’s iPhone application (which is admittedly really good).

I had a brief chat with Karp last night about the company, which counts only 10 full-time employees today. Karp told me Tumblr is still not all too worried about its ability to generate revenue with the service, keeping its options open and trying to come up with innovative ways of making money rather than merely adding standard premium features or advertising.

What they are experimenting with, however, are imminent paid features that would basically give Tumblr users a way to promote their content in ‘new ways’. Sounds rather vague, so we’ll just have to wait and see what they come up with.

Also on the roadmap: localization. The Tumblr team is currently considering translating the service and offering customer support in more languages besides English.

Karp said Tumblr, which raised about $5.25 million in venture capital to date, has about two years of runway left before running out of cash.

So the main question for Tumblr is: can they continue on their growth path and find a way to turn all those eyeballs and all that activity into cold hard cash, or is it destined to fade out as more and more publishing platforms add micro-blogging features to their applications?

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Android 2.0 Source Released, Already Ported To The G1

Posted: 14 Nov 2009 02:23 AM PST

lockscreen

While Android 2.0 has been floating around on Motorola DROIDs for over a week now, one important chunk of it has been under lock-and-key: the source. Even amongst manufacturing partners, we’re told, Google hasn’t been completely open; outside of Motorola (and more recently, HTC), most of the other handset manufacturers have been left out in the cold with nothing to keep them warm but Android v1.6. Until tonight, that is.

As the sun set over the Silicon Valley last night, Google pushed the source code for Android 2.0 to the Android Open Source Project. Within two hours, the endlessly able Android community had it up and running on the eldest Android of them all, the T-Mobile G1.

Read the rest of this post at MobileCrunch >>

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Palm Pixi Review: Not For Everyone, But It Fits A Niche

Posted: 13 Nov 2009 09:25 PM PST

Palm and Sprint have taken a very different approach to the launch of the Pixi than they did with its slightly older and slightly brawnier brother, the Palm Pre. In the days leading up to the Pre, both parties were on full attack mode; keynotes were held, massive tradeshow booths were built, full page newspaper ads were run, and countdowns ticked away. With the Pixi? They’ve got a commercial.

Compared to Palm’s last run, the marketing campaign surrounding the Pixi is decidedly more average – and after spending a few days with the phone, I’d say they made the right decision there.

Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>

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MakeMyTrip.com: Is eCommerce in India Finally Happening?

Posted: 13 Nov 2009 08:23 PM PST

india-deep-smallGURGAON, INDIA– Back in 1995, Deep Kalra knew that India had burgeoning consumer promise. So he took a risk, quit his safe-but-boring banking job and joined AMF Bowling—an American company that was aiming to bring bowling alleys and billiard halls to India for the first time.

It didn't quite scratch his entrepreneurial itch: The hobby was ahead of its time for Indians. He managed to open about 200 lanes, most of them in small centers. Worse, Kalra was in that business-man's-limbo: The venture wasn't really his own thing, but he had a remote boss back in America who didn't give him much mentorship or guidance.

So after four years, he headed back into the safe world of banking. And then, in 2000, with some money saved up, he decided to leave again and do things his way. Enamored by the Internet and frustrated by how hard it was to travel in India he opened MakeMyTrip.com. The site—as you might guess from the name—was like any of the online travel brokers started during the dot com bubble, only it was in India.

Of course, that was a pretty crucial difference. That venture too was ahead of its time, but it was his and Kalra stuck it out. After the market crash and September 11, Kalra's foreign investors reneged on $1 million in funding commitments. Then there was the triple whammy of SARS, which made everyone want to travel in Asia less. He was 31-years-old with a wife and a baby at a time when starting a dot com was insane and in a place where it was downright suicidal. Indeed, many VCs will tell you today that India—where only 50 million people are online and just two million have broadband connections— is still not ready for the consumer Web.

But Kalra and two senior managers bought back their equity in the business and agreed to go without salaries for 18 months. He called a meeting and asked the staff to take 40% paycuts. Twenty-five of them stayed and 17 balked and quit. Kalra decided to focus on selling travel to returning Indian expats rather than locals, but he kept an eye on that sleeping giant of a domestic market.

A year later, MakeMyTrip broke even, in 2003 he reluctantly decided to trust VCs again and in 2004– when Internet adoption in India had finally started to grow and much of the Indians who had the money to travel had credit cards, bank cards or access to money transfers—Kalra came back to his original vision of building the Expedia of India. "There's a fine line between resilient and stubborn," he says, sitting in his office in Gurgoan surrounded by globes, maps and maps with mashed-up pictures of many of those employees who stayed. "It worked out, so we can say we were resilient. But at the time I worried I was just being stubborn. But I figured you regret the things you don't do in life, not the things you do." When I met him the day before, Kalra easily rattled off details of a bowling supercenter that opened up down the road after his AMF days. You can tell it stings a bit, but if we were sitting here having the same conversation about an online travel company that took off after he gave up, it'd be devastating.

What Kalra didn't know back in those dark days was that he was about to benefit from a global Internet truism: Online travel is the ecommerce gateway drug. It makes up some 70% of global ecommerce, it was one of the first categories to take off in the United States and one of the only markets big enough to sustain a host of publicly traded Internet competitors. Similarly, Ctrip was one of the first big Internet hits in China.

India—a country with few Internet homeruns—took longer. But Kalra's company is now making $5 million in US  dollars of profit this year and doing more than $500 million in gross bookings. Revenues are up 88% during the recession and one-out-of-every-twelve domestic flights in India is booked via MakeMyTrip.com. After airline tickets, the second biggest category is railway tickets—the site sells 2,500 of them every day. Kalra is busy interviewing a lot of US-trained management types to augment the team. Don't look now, but MakeMyTrip could be India's next dot com IPO. (Like most well-behaved CEOs, Kalra wouldn't comment on any immediate IPO plans.)

Why does travel take off so fast? For starters, it's one of the only categories where you buy something that's delivered over email. Forget costs—in emerging markets shipping to far-flung areas doesn't always exist. Kalra says etickets may have saved the company. For most, booking online doesn't require a huge change in the way they buy travel. In pre-Internet days in India and the US most people booked travel through a travel agent who'd pull up inventory in a computer. The Web just cut out the middleman. (And his fees.)

Compare that to online shopping for physical goods, which requires a radical change in behavior. People who've only recently gained a disposable income frequently want the experience of shopping, and the ability to feel, examine and try things on. "Malls are still a new thing here," Kalra says.

And because a ticket or hotel room is a perishable asset, someone who can move those assets can get a nice cut. Kalra has made more money during the recession by getting better rates from anxious suppliers.

Travel won't be the ecommerce exception forever. India's rush of a middle class with disposable income is evolving fast. When Kalra was growing up no one went on Honeymoons abroad and now most of the kids in his office do. And hotels were verboten—you visited family and stayed with family. Kalra has a hunch the next local ecommerce hit could be FlipKart, an online book retailer with a whopping 5 million monthly uniques, profitability and a new round of cash from Accel in the bank.

MakeMyTrip still suffers from some local cultural hang-ups. Hotel bookings, for instance, aren't doing quite as well. People don't trust unknown brands and only 15% of Indian hotels are known brands. (Personally, I don't think US sites have cracked the hotel problem either. I only book from local recommendations.) Similarly, people don't want to book big vacation packages online, so Kalra has opened 20 physical stores to guide people through the process.

And there's the so-called "last mile" problem. Kalra doesn't plan on addressing it by opening more stores. Instead, he's playing with the idea of a business-to-business product, where existing local travel agents would use a slow-connection optimized version of MakeMyTrip to access more inventory than they can now and sell through the site's existing back-end system. He doesn't want to cram an efficient online option down the throat of a population that knows its local travel agent and likes to go in and chat with them, have a cup of tea and discuss cricket scores. And clearly one deal with a travel agent is a far more efficient way to reach a whole village.

Kalra is smart. He studies every competitor out there. He's ripped ideas off lesser-known companies like FareCast.com, corrected me on the pronunciation of China's up-and-comer Qunar.com (so much for my Mandarin lessons), and can quote Expedia's customer conversion rates. (They're 6%, by the way. His are 7%. It's the most important metric he watches.)

Ahead of his time or no, Kalra is glad he took the risk when he did. He's not sure he would today even with more money in his savings. He's also glad he didn't give up on India's domestic market, "If I'd been in Silicon Valley I'm convinced we might have reached scale in half the time, but we also probably would have been obliterated by the competition."

That's the benefit of slowly emerging markets that'll eventually have a big payoff—you get time to make mistakes.

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Singularity University Executive Program: Ray Kurzweil’s Opening Address

Posted: 13 Nov 2009 06:56 PM PST

Over the last week Singularity University, an educational institution based at NASA Ames that draws some world’s top technologists and futurists, has been holding an Executive Program with the goal of preparing executives for the “imminent disruption and opportunities resulting from exponentially accelerating technologies”. The roster of instructors is impressive, with a number of top professors and executives covering fields ranging from stem cells to robotics.

Singularity has been posting a series of articles from reporters who have been attending the event, and over the course of the next few days we’ll be posting full videos of the lectures, as well as some 1-on-1 interviews with the instructors. You’ll be able to find these videos by clicking the ‘Singularity University’ logo in the right sidebar, or by clicking this link.

Here’s a list of the instructors who have been presenting over the course of the event, which runs through Sunday (we’ll be posting the videos for a few days after that, as there’s a delay in getting them uploaded).

Dan Barry, President, Denbar Robotics, former NASA astronaut
Peter Diamandis, Founder, X PRIZE Foundation; Vice-Chancellor and Chairman, SU
Neil Jacobstein, CEO, Teknowledge; Sr Research Fellow, Stanford University's Media X Program
Stuart Kim, Professor, Developmental Biology, Stanford University
Daniel Kraft, Cancer/Stem Cell Biology Institute, Stanford University
Ray Kurzweil, Founder, Kurzweil Technologies; Chancellor and Trustee, SU
Ralph Merkle, Sr Research Fellow, Institute for Molecular Manufacturing

Below is a video of author, technologist, futurist and Singularity Chancellor Ray Kurzweil as he kicks off the event.



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This week on TechCrunch: Layoffs, movie memes, PlayD’oh and Mike Arrington – the hardest working man in technology

Posted: 13 Nov 2009 06:26 PM PST

office-spaceAs any industry analyst will tell you, since its two journalists were returned from North Korea, Current.tv has been woefully overstaffed. The company simply doesn’t require that many employees to edit YouTube clips for its audience of jobless hipster doucheballs who have fallen asleep in front of the television.

And so it wasn’t entirely surprising this week when TechCrunch reported on a ‘bloodbath‘  at the company, with 80 people being laid-off across all departments.

Current’s COO Joanna Drake Earl (who is herself three separate people) insisted to Leena that the layoffs aren’t a ‘cost-cutting measure’ but rather a ’shift in programming strategy’. In most other companies, this would be classic corporate bullshit, but in Current’s case Joanna, Drake and Earl might actually have a point. After all, by creating 80 new unemployed people – unemployed people who actually know what Current is – they’ve just doubled the target audience for their programming. How’s that for a convenient truth?

More layoffs of the week: It gets worse
Even outside of Current, it’s been a pretty horrible week with layoffs, layoffs and more layoffs. Adobe has Photoshopped  out 9% of its workforce, Sprint is disconnecting 2,500, EA has decided that 1,500 of employees have no more continues and the Guardian / Guardian.co.uk continues paying the karmic price for axing my NSFW column with 100 more losses across editorial and commercial departments. Ouch.

Still, it’s alright for some of the week: Michael Arrington edition
With so many people losing their jobs just before the holiday season, it’s important that those of us who still have a regular paycheck are seen to be working hard – and not rubbing our luck in the faces of those less fortunate. I’m doing my part, of course, with my sympathetic handling of the Current layoffs, and it’s nice to see that Arrington is keeping his nose to the grindstone too. Let’s take a quick look at how the hardest-working man in technology spent his week, according to his posts on TechCrunch…

  • Monday: Celebrated FishVille (the Zynga game that Mike regularly complains has sapped his free time) being returned to Facebook after Zynga agreed to pull all advertising offers from the game until further notice.
  • Tuesday:  Dicked around in Road tested a Tesla all day, before spending the evening dicking around on reviewing new vampire game, City of Eternals.
  • Wednesday:  The Crunchies are Coming!
  • Thursday: Spent the day catching up on parts 2-4 of the brilliant Sales Guy vs Web Dude videos. Oh yeah.
  • Friday: Realised that he’s been so busy during the week that he hadn’t weighed in on Erick’s reporting of Rupert Murdoch’s threat to remove his news sites from Google’s index.

Phew, it’s tough at the top.

MG’s news meme of the week: Movie tie-in edition
Eagled-eyed readers might have noticed that while Mike was living it up in the Tesla, MG was having a little fun of his own. Perhaps inspired by his story on how Netflix is about to make a deal with the devil to prevent its subscribers from getting hold of new release DVDs, the former Hollywood-dweller went into movie-reference overload.

After the Netflix story (illustrated by a still from Dumb and Dumber) came a movie-title-packed post about Apple adding a ton of HD movie content to its iTunes store, a  story on Apple ‘Bathing’ in profits complete with a still of Julia Roberts in the bath from Pretty Woman, a 2000-word treatise on Twitter’s new retweet functionality that was basically one huge Forest Gump reference and – most blatant of all – a review of the new site launched to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of Fight Club.

Of course, only a cynic would suggest that, with all the layoffs in the Valley, MG might be laying the groundwork for a return to his old career in tinsel town.

Victory continues to be ours of the week: ScamVille, part 3,983
To be fair, if TechCrunch has been having a little fun this week, it’s only because we deserve it. After all, we’re still riding high on the back of our huge and unequivocal victory in the ScamVille scandal. Sure, the occasional bitter commentator has found fault in some of our reporting in the past. But even they can’t deny that, through our commitment to exposing Internet scams in all their many guises, TechCrunch has single-handedly sparked a chain of events that will save the Internet industry, and by extension the world.

Hyperbole? Pft – let’s look at a few more of this week’s headlines…

Case closed. You’re welcome, the world.

PlayD’oh of the week: Social gaming, ftw; traditional gaming, less so
It’s Friday, so let’s end with some good news, particularly for our poor wounded friends in the social gaming arena.

Playdom – responsible for some of the most popular MySpace games – has raised a seriously impressive $43 million round from New Enterprise Associates, Rick Thompson, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners, on a $260 million pre-money valuation. Woo!

Meantime, over in the UK, Steve O’Hear reports that Playfire – a social network for gamers – has raised $2.1m in Series A funding, lead by Atomico Ventures (Niklas and Janus from Skype), in conjunction with Bebo founder Michael Birch, LastMinute.com’s Brent Hoberman and others. Yay!

Finally, not to be outdone by all the other Play-whatever companies, Playfish has finally completed its acquisition by Electronic Arts for $300m in cash and stock, plus a $100 million earnout. This is of course a fantastic deal, not just for Playfish but also for Electronic Arts who immediately celebrated their new prize (and their decent second quarter earnings) by….

...laying off 1,500 employees.

Oh.

Commenter of the week: Outsourced to Arrington edition
And finally, with so much time on his hands this week, Mike even took over my job in finding this week’s best TechCrunch commenter. In fact, he went one step further by actually replying to her. Thanks, Mike!

Have a good weekend – I’m off to get fired.

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Startup Crawl: Your Chance To Meet A Dozen San Francisco Startups

Posted: 13 Nov 2009 05:55 PM PST

On Friday November 20, Scribd is teaming with a bunch of other well known startups in San Francisco to hold a new event called Startup Crawl, where they’ll be taking shuttles to check out the offices (and meet the teams) of a dozen different companies, including Engine Yard, Justin.TV, and Yammer (you can see the full list below).

The event is contracting three or four 56 passenger buses, which will be driving in a circuit between the startups (you can expect a bus every 15-20 minutes, but many of the offices are close enough to walk between them). Each office will be doing something different, with activies including everything from hacking sessions to happy hours. The first shuttle leaves the Embassy Suites SFO/Burlingame at 5:30, and the last bus begins its last run around the circuit at 11 PM. To participate you don’t have to start at the Embassy Suites — you can also show up at any of the participating startups beginning at 5:30.

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Facebook Killed The MTV Star: Shakira To Debut New Music Video On Ustream/Facebook

Posted: 13 Nov 2009 04:09 PM PST

International music star Shakira is taking a new approach to releasing her latest music video: she’s doing it through a live stream on Ustream, which will be emedded on her Facebook Page. According to Sony, this is the first time an artist has used the platform to debut a music video (Updated: Sony is wrong. Chamillionaire did it first, see below). Shakira (and her managers) are keen on the idea because it allows her and her fans to interact with each other in real time — something that’s not practical on TV, where these videos have been making their debuts for decades. The stream will start here on Monday at noon, PT.

The live video/Facebook combo is quickly gaining steam for artists looking to connect with their fans — we’ve recently seen the Foo Fighters stream a live concert using LiveStream, and earlier this week Jason Mraz held a couple live chat session with fans as well. Other sites that have also recently streamed live concerts include MySpace, YouTube, and Hulu.

Update: Looks like Sony was wrong. As our commenters point out, Chamillionaire was the first to use Ustream for the debut of his music video, Good Morning (which you can watch here). As we saw at TechCrunch50 he’s definitely ahead of the curve with regard to web services, so it’s no surprise that he was first.

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The TechCrunch Friday Giveaway: Sonos S5 Wireless Music System #Crunch

Posted: 13 Nov 2009 03:55 PM PST

Last week we gave away a TwitterPeek device on a whim. It turns out giving stuff away for free is popular, so we’re going to keep doing this every Friday until we forget to keep doing it. Up this week was going to be a shiny new pair of Facebook cufflinks. But at the last minute Sonos stepped in and is generously offering to give one of our lucky readers a $399 Sonos ZonePlayer S5 all-in-one wireless music system.

Want it? It’s yours. Just do one of two things: either retweet this post, and make sure to include the #crunch hashtag, or leave a comment below telling us why this device must be yours. Please only tweet the message once, anyone tweeting repeatedly will be disqualified. We’ll pick a winner tomorrow afternoon and contact you for more details. Anyone in the world is eligible. Sonos is generously donating the device and covering the shipping costs as well. If you aren’t lucky enough to get the free one, you can buy the S5 for $399 here.

More details on the S5 in the demo video below. You can also read more about it on CrunchGear.

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Skies Of Glory: A Sneak Peek At The Followup To SGN’s Aerial Combat Hit F.A.S.T.

Posted: 13 Nov 2009 02:51 PM PST

SGN has just given us a peek at Skies of Glory, its upcoming dogfighting game for the iPhone that’s the followup to its hit game F.A.S.T., which was released last June. That app proved to be a run-away success, pulling in over a million dollars in its first six weeks of release. Skies of Glory takes the gameplay that made F.A.S.T. a hit and builds on it, adding much improved graphics, more missions, and a World War II setting. The company is targeting an early December launch date.

Here are some of the details;

  • Battle up to three human opponents around the world or up to seven locally over Wifi connection
  • 10 Campaign Missions to complete (Battle over Britain or the Pacific)
  • Skirmish Mode, including single player Teams, Free For All and Capture the Flag.
  • 100 missions to perform in Training exercises.
  • Players will be able to buy planes and equipment via in-app purchases
  • Initial launch is the beginning, with more campaigns, planes and gear to be available over time.
  • Bluetooth support to play with friends (in addition to the Wi-Fi support)
  • Supports Jukebox, in which the player can listen to their library of music throughout all of their air combat battles.



Aside from the gameplay and graphical enhancements, Skies of Glory is making another big change: it will be free to download, with in-app purchase options for new planes, eqipment, and more. F.A.S.T. intially launched at $9.99 — a pricepoint that would be perfectly reasonable on most platforms, but is relatively high on the App Store. The app still did well regardless, but having any upfront price presents a major hurdle to getting new users on board.

But things have changed a lot on the App Store since F.A.S.T. launched. First, Apple started allowing in-app purchases with its iPhone 3.0 update, which lets developers sell virtual goods from within their apps. Initially developers could only do this from paid apps though, so SGN wound up dropping the price of F.A.S.T. significantly but was unable to switch to free. However, last month Apple made the surprising announcement that it would allow developers to offer in-app purchases from their free games — a change that will have a major effect on the App Store (see my interview with SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar for more on that). Expect Skies of Glory to see a lot of downloads, which SGN surely hopes will turn into plenty of microtransactions as well.




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How Murdoch Can Really Hurt Google And Shift The Balance Of Power In Search

Posted: 13 Nov 2009 02:30 PM PST

I’ve mostly been a spectator in this whole Rupert Murdoch de-indexing his news sites from Google circus. First because I didn’t really believe he even knew what he was talking about (or how much traffic he’d lose), and more recently because Erick Schonfeld took the story here at TechCrunch.

But suddenly this is a fascinating story to me for a bunch of reasons. This may be less about the self destruction of traditional journalism and more about the search wars.

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, who used to work for Murdoch’s Digital Chief Jonathan Miller when the two were at AOL, posted a video last week (embedded below) with a simple suggestion: Not only should Murdoch de-index from Google, but he should get Bing to pay him for the exclusive right to index it. TechCrunch Europe’s Mike Butcher has been sniffing down a similar trail.

If other media companies joined Murdoch Google could actually find itself in a very difficult position, where Bing had content that Google didn’t. If you knew that Wall Street Journal and, say, New York TImes content was only in Bing search results, mainstream search users would suddenly have a big reason to go to Bing.

This would shift the balance of power away from search engines and to the content sites – if they could pull it off. Bidding wars over rights to index content would conceivably break out between Google and Microsoft, just as bidding wars have broken out in the past over the right to serve search ads into third party publishing sites.

If Murdoch is going to go through with this de-indexing Mexican standoff thing, he might as well do it the right way and drive the fear of God into Google. As a spectator, I’ll enjoy watching the fireworks.

Of course there’s another sideshow going on here as well – the renegotiation of the MySpace search deal with Google that ends next year. That deal brings in $300 million a year to News Corp., and it’s clear Google is done paying that much money.

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Bit.ly Now Summarizes Your Link Data For Even Better Metrics

Posted: 13 Nov 2009 01:40 PM PST

Screen shot 2009-11-13 at 1.29.33 PMPerhaps the top reason to use Bit.ly (beyond obviously shortening links) is for its analytics. The service makes it easy to see all sorts of data about your short URL links going out to services like Twitter. But sometimes looking at the bigger picture is more interesting than individual data. Now you can see that too.

Today, the service has unveiled its new Bit.ly Click Summary. This is a new page on the site that allows you to see aggregate data for all your Bit.ly links over a set period of time. Currently, this only works for the past 7 days, but Bit.ly says that monthly views will be added soon as well.

Along the top of this new page, you’ll see a bar graph showing your aggregate clicks over each of the last seven days. Next to that, you’ll find pie charts showing Top Referrers and Locations for your link data. Finally, below that is a huge list of referrer and country data for the set time period (again, in this case, a week).

The referrer list is particularly interesting because it gives you a good sense of which Twitter clients are most popular among the people that click on your links.

As Twitter’s default URL shortener, Bit.ly has been gathering a ton of valuable link data for quite some time now. We’re still waiting for them to launch Bit.ly Now, a service expected to take on popular link sites like Digg.

Screen shot 2009-11-13 at 1.29.46 PM

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Grab Your Beta Invites To Wasabi, Netvibe’s Powerful New Stream Reader

Posted: 13 Nov 2009 12:55 PM PST

We recently reviewed Wasabi, Netvibes’ powerful new stream reader which consolidates news feeds, blogs, Twitter and Facebook streams, email, and more in an extremely manageable interface. The site entered private beta recently and we have 200 invites for TechCrunch readers. To get an invite, visit Wasabi and enter the code “WASABITC.”

As we wrote earlier, Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini demonstrated parts of Wasabi at our first Realtime CrunchUp in July. In addition to the traditional widget view, which breaks up your feeds and applications into a grid of boxes on your Netvibes homepage, Wasabi now also has a “smart reader” view. The smart reader borrows from traditional RSS readers in that all the feeds and widgets you subscribe to are presented together in one column, updated in reverse chronological order.

You can see just a list of headlines, or an expanded view with the full feed. It looks similar to Google Reader, except that Netvibes supports more than just RSS feeds. You can import your Twitter and Facebook streams (read-only right now), as well as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Flickr photos, weather widgets, stock widgets, and more. Plus, Wasabi has also sped things up to make the stream as realtime as possible. It is caching content from the most popular feeds and pushing that down to users as soon as there are any updates, and it will also be supporting both the Pubsubhubbub (PuSH) and RSSCloud standards aimed at eliminating the lag time inherent in RSS and Atom feeds.

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Facebook Cufflinks Ask You To “F Me”

Posted: 13 Nov 2009 11:00 AM PST

-1There’s a certain type of man that wears cufflinks. Don Draper, for example, wears cufflinks. But he’s also a fictional character set in the 1960s. In the real world, these days, it’s usually the well-off that wear them. Basically, you need to have enough money to not care about spending hundreds of dollars on buttons.

But CuffLinks.com appears to be going for a new crowd with its latest design. The “Facebook Me” cufflinks are $50 and feature yes, the Facebook logo on them. They are approximately 3/4″ by 3/4,” are “Rhodium plated,” and feature a “Bullet back closure.” One cufflink features the Facebook “f,” the other reads “me.” Classy.

Facebook has well over 300 million users now, but I’m just not sure how much overlap there is with the cufflink crowd. Much of that crowd seem to prefer monogrammed cufflinks, so perhaps it would have been a better idea to engrave Facebook vanity names or profiles pictures in these bad boys.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg also famously doesn’t like to dress up. But he has traded his North Face/flip flop uniform for a tie with jeans. He could well be on his way to cufflink status.

Again, let me just clearly point out again that these cufflinks very clearly spell out “f me.” If the presence of Facebook cufflinks wasn’t going to ruin your chances of meeting that someone special this weekend, this likely will.

mm

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Wikipedia Runs Ads Highlighting Their No-Ad Policy

Posted: 13 Nov 2009 10:05 AM PST

Moments after Craigslist founder Craig Newmark joins the Wikimedia/Wikipedia advisory board things start to go crazy.

Way back in 2006 Jason Calacanis, then an executive at AOL, was trying to convince Wikipedia to puts ads on the site. It would generate $100 million a year in revenue, he said, which could fund the project and other charities:

I sat next to Jimbo at a Wikipedia dinner over the summer. I begged him to put a leaderboard on Wikipedia and told him I would get AOL to sell it and host Wikipedia–for free. He declined saying there will never be ads on Wikipedia. I then explained to him in detail how that one leaderboard could make over $100M per year. I told him that they should take the $100M and give it to charity. They could help fund MediaWiki, the EFF, Firefox, and dozens of other open source projects.

Agree with them or not, Wikipedia has held firm to their no-ads philosophy, struggling through with donations instead. But today Rex Hammock noticed something on Wikipedia – a banner ad.

These aren’t “real” ads promoting third party sites, products, etc. They’re just in house ads reiterating the policy that Wikipedia will never have ads. But they clearly are ads. As a commenter notes below, Adblocker even filters them out.

“Knowledge Forever, Ad-Free Forever, Wikipedia Forever,” say the ads. They link to this page asking for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Update: Readers point out that this is an annual effort by Wikipedia.

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