The Latest from TechCrunch

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• Going Shopping Today? Share What You #JustBought With All Your Friends
• 6 Reasons Why Twitter Japan’s Subscription Model Might Work (In Japan)
• Let’s vote on it: Will Europeans use Gowalla, FourSquare or what?
• Twitter Japan To Introduce Paid Premium Accounts Next January
• 4mapper Puts Foursquare On The Map
• Thanksgiving: a displaced Brit writes…
• Gillmor Gang: Silverlight v. ChromeOS v. Chatter
• You In? Yahoo Wants To Help Spread Ripples Of Kindness This Holiday Season
• Why Google Wave Sucks, And Why You Will Use It Anyway
• Sidebar Delivers Personalized Mobile Apps And Content To Android

Going Shopping Today? Share What You #JustBought With All Your Friends Posted: 27 Nov 2009 08:21 AM PST Perfect for Black Friday: JustBought.it lets you share what you’re thinking of buying – or what you’ve already picked up – with your Twitter and Facebook friends in just a couple of steps. When you sign up for the service, you can have it connect directly to your Twitter and/or Facebook account, giving you the opportunity to share your shopping experience with your social graph by letting your friends and followers know what you’ve purchased where (including pictures and product links). You can hook up with other people who have similar interests, and easily determine if you have friends who are already using the service on Gmail or Hotmail. So if you stumble on what looks to be a good deal today, inform you friends and have them help you decide using the website or the accompanying free iPhone app (iTunes link), if you’re into the whole social shopping thing. Do you have an Android-powered phone? Check out the startup’s augmented reality application, which shows you what others have purchased in the stores you visit. JustBought.it is an initiative from Adarsh Pallian, who has in the past started other projects related to Twitter such as Tweetizen and Chart.ly. It was first launched a couple of months ago, but just recently relaunched with a new design and some additional features. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

6 Reasons Why Twitter Japan’s Subscription Model Might Work (In Japan) Posted: 27 Nov 2009 07:46 AM PST We reported today that Digital Garage, Twitter’s partner in Japan, is ready to roll out a new, Japan-only way to monetize the service. The way it’ll work is pretty simple: Japanese Twitter users will soon be able to charge their followers to view tweets – on a monthly basis or per single tweet. Otherwise they will only see excerpts or no text in the postings at all. Digital Garage gets a 30% cut. Not charging companies for holding accounts but having users pay to view tweets? What may sound like a bold move at first actually makes sense, as the web in Japan (where I am based) features a number of peculiarities that play into the hands of Digital Garage’s Japanese operations: Japan is the only market in the world where Twitter offers an official mobile client (launched last month). And in this country, the mobile web is bigger than the fixed Internet, with no signs of a reversing trend (not too few people even expect the gap to be widening in the future). Japanese mobile web users are used to pay for content. The possibility to conveniently pay through the monthly phone bill makes it easy for content providers to charge fees ranging from a few cents to many dollars (more background). And tweets are nothing but content. Charging for premium access on the fixed web isn’t unusual either. Japanese social networks like Mixi or special interest sites such as super-popular recipe site Cookpad have been doing this for years (paying monthly unlocks premium features on both the mobile and fixed Internet). Roughly speaking, between 5 and 15% of all members usually opt for these premium models in Japan. Twitter is estimated to have around 2 million registered users in Japan – enough critical mass to make a payment model experiment worthwhile. Writing in Japanese and Chinese characters, Japanese Twitter users can squeeze considerably more text into single tweets than those posting in English, for example. This theoretically boosts the potential for posting tweets that are “valuable” content-wise. It might also be part of the thinking behind the pay-per-tweet option. In sharp contrast to the West, Japanese web users are generally way more interested in what celebrities (singers, actors, TV stars etc.) “are doing” or “what’s happening” in their private lives. Some posts on their official blogs can contain simple content such as a picture of a lunch meal and still draw thousands of comments – on a single posting (click here for an example with 10,000 comments). Digital Garage explicitly says the payment model is geared towards fans of those “famous” Twitter users. Fueled by coverage in the press and even on national TV (unusual for any web service in Japan), Twitter’s growth in Japan has been accelerating in the past weeks. Elsewhere it seems to be flattening currently. It’s unclear at this point if only users of the Japanese interface will be able to see if Digital Garage’s experiment (Twitter Japan doesn’t exist as a separate entity) turns out to be successful or not. Another question is how the payment option will be handled in the API and how closely Twitter in the US is watching what’s going on in Japan. We’ll stay tuned. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Let’s vote on it: Will Europeans use Gowalla, FourSquare or what? Posted: 27 Nov 2009 06:48 AM PST So it’s been nearly 10 days since Foursquare launched its social mobile game ‘ground assault’ into 50 more cities, including a bunch of European ones. But what I’d like to know is who’s actually using it here in Europe? Because, you see, Europeans are already quite well served by location based mobile applications like Qype, the various localised versions of Yelp, and other startups like Rummble. And there are increasingly new kids on the block like Flook. What is clear however, is that only Foursquare and Gowalla (at least to my knowledge) have come up with this gaming approach to ‘checking in’ which has attracted so much interest from high profile blogs like TechCrunch and bloggers like Robert Scoble. The question is, which will scale and ultimate prove the winner? Because – at least in this instance – we have two distinct approaches to the issue of social, mobile and location. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Twitter Japan To Introduce Paid Premium Accounts Next January Posted: 27 Nov 2009 04:54 AM PST The news of the day in social media land: Twitter is apparently going to start experimenting with paid premium accounts through its Japanese subsidiary, which has always been a bit separated from the rest of Twitter and in many ways a playground for the company (Groups, Twicco, Twitvideo.jp). Details are sketchy at this point, but Japanese media are reporting that Twitter is going to introduce a tiered payment model and aims to charge people to view tweets from certain premium Twitter accounts. Update: TC contributor Serkan Toto (who’s based in Japan) followed up with six reasons why this subscription model might just work out well for Twitter … in Japan. Twitter Japan, which is operated under supervision of Twitter investor Digital Garage, launched in April 2008 and boasted display ads right out the gate. At a conference earlier this week, Kenichi Sugi, COO of DG Mobile (a Digital Garage subsidiary), announced that Twitter would now add paid subscription options starting in January 2010, allowing account holders to charge audiences for access to their tweets, more text, images, links to their external websites and so on. Billing would be done on a monthly basis for a price that ranges from 100 Yen (approx. $1.15) and 1000 Yen (which converts to roughly $11.5). Users will apparently be able to use their credit cards, have their mobile carrier include it in their invoices, or even purchase a prepaid ticket at a convenience store to pay for the premium service. Finally, Twitter will be taking a 30 percent cut on transaction fees. The assumption is that this model would be fit for account holders who deliver real-time information, news and educational content, and tend to include original photographs, video images and audio in their tweets. The idea isn’t exactly brand new: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone mentioned earlier this year they were thinking of commercializing accounts as a way to get some revenue out of the popular service. But the surprising part is that people will actually be charged for access to premium accounts, rather than having holders pay for them. At least, in Japan. If I were a betting man, I’d say this is not something Twitter is going to be rolling out in the rest of the world any time soon though. (Thanks for the tip, Paul Papadimitriou and ITmedia for the image below – more coverage at The Next Web and Brandrepublic) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

4mapper Puts Foursquare On The Map Posted: 26 Nov 2009 06:00 PM PST As one of the hot social-location properties, Foursquare has a wealth of information about where you go. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really offer many good ways to visualize it. In fact, Foursquare only focuses on providing a text stream of your check-ins. A new app takes that data and puts it on a map. 4mapper, built by John Wiseman, is a very simple application. Once you authorize it to use your Foursquare data (via Foursquare’s new API), it will pull your location information and place it on top of a Google Map. Your check-ins are displayed as white dots on the map. The more times you have check-in to a certain place, the larger the dot will be. Clicking on these dots will give you more information about where you checked-in. And you can zoom in on the map for better detail about your check-ins. As I said, this is a very simple app, built on Google App Engine, but it’s interesting. It’s sort of like a heat map to show where you frequent in any given city. It’s similar to what Social Great has been doing with Foursquare data, only this is personalized, whereas that is an aggregator of data in various cities. While Foursquare, the service, is interesting for a number of reasons, namely its gaming element and the potential business component, the geolocation data served up via the API may also prove to be a great source of some new apps. After coding this using Foursquare’s API, Wiseman also came up with a Python module for accessing the API. You can find that here. CrunchBase Information Foursquare Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Thanksgiving: a displaced Brit writes… Posted: 26 Nov 2009 04:54 PM PST When I first heard about this “Thanksgiving” thing, I thought it sounded like a great idea. We Brits spend a ridiculous amount of time each day giving thanks to strangers – we say thanks to people who hold doors for us, thanks to people who stop their cars to let us cross the road, thanks to waitresses when they give us our bill; even thanks again when we hand over the money to pay. But apparently you Americans – innovative people that you are – had found a way to streamline the process. Rather than waste hours each day expressing gratitude, you had decided to compress all of your thank-yous into one annual 24-hour-period of uninterrupted Thanks Giving. Get all that politeness out of the way in one go. An inspired solution, I thought, and one we should copy back home. Hell, we should have a ’sorry’ day too – we’d reclaim weeks of time. But apparently I’d got the wrong end of the stick. Having consulted Wikipedia, it turns out that today is not about mundane expression of gratitude, but rather about big-ticket Thank-yous. For friends, family, a baby’s laugh, spreadable cheese. Stuff that really makes it a joy to be alive, and living in the home of the brave. In just under an hour, I’m heading out to my first ever Thanksgiving dinner; I gather there will be turkey involved, and sweet potatoes – whatever they might be. And, despite my British cynicism, I’m very excited. But before I go, given that today’s celebrations began with some Brits moving to the USA and giving thanks for its awesomeness, I thought it might be appropriate to share five things – technological and otherwise – that make me… well.. thankful that a few months ago I too decided to make America my new home. Here goes… 1. Free refills Seriously, if the Pilgrim Fathers were pleased with their first harvest, they would have shit themselves at the idea of free refills. Back home, a Coke or a coffee means precisely that: one Coke or one coffee. Here it means as much Coke or coffee as it’s humanly possible to drink. And then some. Why you people don’t take hollowed-out false legs with you to diners I will never understand. 2. Getting cool technology first I still remember the frustration I felt living in London and writing about technology. Every new, cool tech launch: the iPhone, Hulu, the Kindle, full episodes of the Daily Show on demand… had to be prefaced with the words “It’s not available in the UK yet but…”. Even technology we did get – SMS notification for Twitter, say -  risked being shut off at a moments notice the moment the math(s) of subsidising a foreign market stopped making sense. Since moving here, my attitude has completely changed. Now I get all the cool stuff first. Screw my fellow countrymen, I’m buying a Droid. 3. Magic ATMs (and banking in general) Given that the PIN (n)umber – and thus the modern ATM – was invented by a Brit, you’d think our ATMs would lead the world in terms of features and ease of use. Not so. With a few exceptions, British ATMs are capable only of doling out money and/or swallowing our cards. Here they can read cheques – sorry, checks – and tell you when they’re likely to clear! (The fact that no Brit has written a cheque since 1992 is irrelevant) They allow you to transfer money between accounts! They sell stamps! I imagine, if I asked nicely, they would also perform sexual favours. Seriously, America, kudos on the ATMs. (While I’m on the subject of banking – additional kudos for making it easy to open a bank account here. Two forms of photo ID and I was out of Wells Fargo, account details in hand, in less than 20 minutes. Note to fellow Brits: they set up your Internet banking username and password at the same time. I know. Freaking mindblowing.) 4. Double-decker trains American trains are pretty awesome on their own. Twice as much leg-room as their British counterparts, at less than half the cost. The urban ones run like clockwork, and the cross-country ones are so comically unreliable that it’s always an exciting adventure to use them. A dude in a hat actually says “all aboard!” like in movies! And as if all that wasn’t great enough, you stack two of them on top of each other. Twice the awesome! 5. American women Ok, I may be biased, given that my last God-knows-how-many girlfriends have been American. But let’s be honest, there’s a reason why iTunes is full of songs like 'I wish they all could be Californian' and 'American Girls', and yet there’s a conspicuous absence of tracks titled 'I wish they could all come from Croydon' or 'Welsh Girls are great'. (Useful tip, don’t search for that last one on Limewire). Of course American women are – without exception – crazier than a box of Glenn Becks, but somehow that only adds to their charm. Bonus item: Glenn Beck Howard Beale from Network, piped into every home (or hotel room) in the land, daily. What’s not to love? For all of those things – and so much more: thank you, America. And happy Thanksgiving. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Gillmor Gang: Silverlight v. ChromeOS v. Chatter Posted: 26 Nov 2009 03:37 PM PST The Gillmor Gang convened Wednesday to ponder the last several weeks of events loosely contained in a discussion of the next generation Web operating system. Three major announcements set the table for this Thanksgiving edition: Google’s ChromeOS, Microsoft’s Silverlight 4, and salesforce’s Chatter collaboration platform. The last might be pigeonholed as enterprise Twitter, but Marc Benioff’s position as a central driver of Web Services since the last collaboration shootout in Y2K suggests there’s more to Chatter than meets the casual social media eye. This edition sports some familiar longtime Gangsters, including Ziff Davis Enterprise and ITBusinessEdge editor Mike Vizard and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis, who promises not to agree to time limits on his next bets. Alert listeners of the old RSS-bound version of The Gang will recall Calacanis bet a sushi dinner that Google would launch its own OS. I pinned him down to one year, and unfortunately the bet was joined 3 or 4 years ago. Even if you accept the idea that ChromeOS is a real OS, then the next bet might be when Silverlight merges into the new Windows. Robert Scoble says no Silverlight Office for 5 years. I say 2 years tops. More recent regular Kevin Marks continues to party down on the notion that HTML 5 will hit the mainstream shortly. Kevin sees Microsoft’s announced support for Silverlight video transcoded to Apple streaming format for the iPhone as a validation of HTML5, but there’s no getting around Microsoft’s aggressive use of Silverlight to push the market ahead of HMTL 5’s progress in the video area. Scoble says that’s not Silverlight on the iPhone, but if you combine the video hack with Miguel De Icaza’s Moonlight recompiling hack to iPhone primitives, it adds up to a porting path for Mac, PC, iPhone, and Android. Sounds like another sushi dinner for me. A feast of possibilities to ponder on a happy Thanksgiving Day. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

You In? Yahoo Wants To Help Spread Ripples Of Kindness This Holiday Season Posted: 26 Nov 2009 03:17 PM PST The holiday season is in full swing, and that means it’s time to share some of the comfort we enjoy year round with those who are a little less fortunate — and just to be nicer to people in general. This year, Yahoo is kicking off a drive called You In?, where it invites users worldwide to share their “purple acts of kindness” (purple has long been Yahoo’s official color). Here’s how Yahoo describes the campaign: “Help us create a ripple of good around the world with purple acts of kindness. Update your status to share what you’re doing to spread holiday joy, then inspire others to join you by asking, “You in?” Yahoo! will also be doing our own purple acts of kindness inspired by your updates. So whether you pay for someone’s groceries or drop off a coat for the homeless, you’ll be encouraging people around the world to join in acts of kindness.” The site revolves around briefly describing your good deed in a Yahoo status message, which is then plotted on a global map. Right now messages include things like “Connie is buying coffee for everyone at work today. You in?” and “Dropped off supplies to the local Humane Society and to the local women’s shelter”. And then there are gems like this one: “I just returned a case of wine that was mistakenly delivered to our house. Husband had to be dragged along w/this decision.” The site also has a pool of Flickr images that people are using to share their acts of kindness. It looks like we’ve caught the campaign pretty early on: the site only has 161 updates at this point, and the pool of Flickr images only has a few submissions. It’s hard to knock a do-good campaign like this one, but Yahoo might want to consider integrating Facebook and other social networks so that users can share their updates from other platforms. Aside from ‘You In?’, Yahoo also runs regular monthly campaigns though its Yahoo For Good program. Via Khris Loux’s Twitter stream. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Why Google Wave Sucks, And Why You Will Use It Anyway Posted: 26 Nov 2009 11:55 AM PST This guest post was written by Martin Seibert, a German Internet media consultant. Google Wave is a hot topic at the moment. The ambitious group collaboration and micro-messaging platform started rolling out in beta via an initial batch of 100,000 invitations two months ago. Many people still want invitations. Among those who’ve tried it, some criticize it, some praise it. For now it has a lot of usability problems that are described below. Yes, you should look at Google Wave. But there is no need to desperately long for an invitation yet. Nevertheless, this post outlines how you’ll probably use Google Wave in the future and also gives you advice on how to implement it in your company or your team of coworkers. It also reveals some big usability problems in the current version. Those issues aside, I would like to show you the advantages of the “wave” once again and describe some cool use cases that might make you love it at some point in the future. Introduction to Google Wave If you don’t know the wave yet, you might want to see this movie: Advantages of Google Wave Innovative interface The user interface of Google Wave breaks new ground and yet is not unfamiliar as its layout resembles the inbox of your mail application. The timeline that lets you recap how the wave has evolved and changed since your last visit is something that even wikis don’t have today—a feature that will surely be copied extensively in the future due to its intuitive usability. Waves activate participants to contribute Furthermore, the user interface motivates further contributions to the wave. This is an excellent way to convince a lot of people to participate. Real-time collaboration It is a completely new experience to actually see your friends, colleagues and contacts type in and change content in real time. No other application apart from a few client-side chat tools currently offers such a service via a web interface. If you’re a tech geek, you’ll love that part of Google Wave. It is a powerful innovation when it comes to real-time communication and collaboration. It is competing with the well-known comforts of email, wikis and chat, but in a lot of use cases, I think Wave will win. What is Google Wave good for? Brainstorming, early concept creation and discussion is what I see Google Wave being used for extensively in the near future. It can also serve as a multi-user note-taking platform for meetings and sessions in your company or university. If you want to organize an event collaboratively, Google Wave will most likely replace wikis. That’s a punch in the gut for all creators of wiki software.  These are just the most obvious uses.  As more people use Google Wave and become comfortable with it, they will begin using it in entirely new ways.  The real-time communications it makes possible will override its weak points because of the greater efficiency it allows for any group trying to work together.  One day the wave is gonna rock! But that is not today. Google Wave is overly complex (Steve Rubel) Robert Scoble put it this way: “This service is way overhyped and as people start to use it they will realize it brings the worst of email and IM together: unproductivity.” What he means is shown in this video I have put on YouTube: If you look at the public waves being updated at a speed that none of us can follow, you will understand how especially non-tech-savvy users will find it overly complex. I hear them say: “I just don’t want to know all this stuff.” Even if “all this stuff” is relevant content from your teammates, you’ll have to filter and sort it all out to make it manageable. I believe it’s possible, but Google Wave users will have to learn how to do it. The interface after login with an open wave Disadvantages and usability problems Missing revisions with rollbacks There is no professional revisioning system in place yet. If somebody messes up your wave and you want to undo it, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise: You have to do it manually. So folks, please do not delete too much content on waves. No permanent hiding of replies yet At the same time, Google Wave does not offer a way to permanently hide replies. Result? The main text in the wave is disturbed by images, boxes, colors and text from all participants. This can become a real mess and might even prevent you from reading the important content. The Google Wave team should definitely address this. (Look at the screenshot above and see how nice the small “+” sign fits in. That should be the default.) Why can’t I invite everybody yet? Closed preview kills value Right now Google Wave is not suitable for real usage as too few people have an account. If you can’t invite everybody, the value of a wave decreases dramatically. Where are notifications for updates of the waves I follow? There are no means of monitoring waves. This is Google Wave’s biggest weakness.  I don’t get an email, Gtalk alert, or any other notification in the communication systems I already use today when there is new activity in a wave.  As I am still heavily using RSS feeds (in contrast to other TechCrunch authors—by the way, almost 4 million TechCrunch readers use RSS feeds as well), I’d love an RSS feed of the waves I want to keep an eye on. Unfortunately, this isn’t yet an option. Too slow for a real chat For a real chat, Google Wave is much too slow. The performance of live transmissions varies from good to very poor and back without any understandable pattern. Today, you’ll want to keep using Skype or Jabber clients for chatting. I expect this to change, once we see local implementations of Google Wave in companies. Most of the server power can then go to the companies’ employees, clients and partners. Google Wave is unstable If there are peeks, Google Wave seems to have trouble with the load of lots of users. Here is a screenshot that I see way to often. Portability: no exporting of waves possible yet There isn’t an export feature to my beloved wiki yet. I’d love to have the wave content “natively” (not as an embed) in my Confluence, Foswiki (TWiki), XWiki, Mindtouch, DokuWiki or MediaWiki whenever I want it. To Google and wiki vendors: please give us that kind of portability. Google accounts should not be required Why do I need a Google Account to participate in a wave? That is a big problem if you want to engage with clients and non-tech-savvy users. Who is really online? Google Wave tries to display who is online by showing a green dot on the profile picture, but it’s not reliable yet. In fact, I’ve even seen people writing content who were identified as being offline. Remember: don’t share confidential information in waves As soon as you invite somebody to a wave, he can access it forever. If the discussion reveals secrets you don’t want to share with all participants, you’re out of luck: there is no way to get anybody out of the wave. The only chance you have is to create a new wave from the existing one. If you don’t want to do that, you’d better keep confidential information out. No markup editing like in wikis There is no source code view in Google Wave that you would want to use as an experienced wiki user to control what appears and how. Waves lack readable URLs Waves already have permanent URLs. But how readable is this? “https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact,minimized:search,restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252Be-cg7PN0A.1″. The Google Wave team will have to come up with more readable versions that are short and self-explanatory. This one should instead read: “https://wave.google.com/wave/google-wave-learnings-advantages-usecases-and-usability-flaws/252Be-cg7PN0A/fullscreen/” To-do’s for you to use Google Wave in your company The following list to be a bit premature. As one cannot install Google Wave yet, this is just a checklist to help you prepare for it. 1. Technology Server infrastructure and a good sysadmin: You will clearly need a server and a skilled admin to set up a Google Wave server, if you want to use it in your company. If you want a lot of employees, partners and clients to use it, you should prepare to invest in good hardware to make the real-time experience a good one. Up until now no one has been allowed to install the preview version of Google Wave. This means that nobody knows how difficult or easy it will be to install it and how easy it will be to connect it with other public wave servers. Still, it should be helpful to have a sysadmin around who knows what he is doing. HTML5-compatible browsers: Google Wave is an HTML5 application. If your company still works on Internet Explorer 6 or below, you will not be able to use Google Wave flawlessly. Therefore, make sure all participants have access to up-to-date browsers. Fast web connection: A decent web connection for both servers and clients is highly recommended to have a good real-time communication experience. Firewall configuration: Your admin should know how to configure your firewall so that your Google Wave server can communicate with the world. 2. Organization Define the goal of the wave and make sure everybody understands the purpose and the content of your wave. If you don’t, a lot of “side-noise” will arise. Create wave guidelines: You should set up guidelines for your wave participants to make sure they understand what the wave is for. On-boarding: Make sure that everybody you want to work with has a Google Wave account. (I know, this is quite difficult today. And that’s why Google Wave isn’t that useful yet.) What application is to be used? Differentiate the systems in your company so that everybody understands when to use emails, wikis, chats, databases and when to use Google Wave. How to set them apart? I don’t know.  This will emerge organically. Give Google Wave a purpose: Make sure people understand how to use Google Wave. You don’t want them to turn it down before even testing it thoroughly. That is especially true for the non-geek users. Not too many wavers on one wave: You should beware of inviting too many people because you can’t kick them out afterwards. 3. Culture Do not delete content without permission: My brother had created a new wave to evaluate Google Wave. We were all filling in texts, comments and arguments. Within a very short period of time, a really cool document had evolved, and I thought: “you should make this a blog post.” So I started to restructure it, changed arguments and content into text, and deleted the comments afterwards. The bashing and flaming that triggered from people who were angry with me for killing their content was enormous. Make rules and copyright clear: After I had restructured our wave and taken all the bashing for deleting the obsolete comments, the first participants asked if they could use the content in their blogs. We became aware of the as-yet unanswered question: “Who owns a wave? Who may do what with it? Who is allowed to use its content?” Make sure to clarify this in advance with your coworkers. Be aware of the complexity: The basic use and advantage of Google Wave should be clear to your employees once you roll out Google Wave. If the purpose is not clear, its complexity will quickly drive away many of your colleagues. Good luck trying to convince them to come back. Get ready for live feedback stress: A special problem in a wave is that you get answers to what you write while you’re still writing it. Every other means of communication leaves room to formulate and write your message first. In Google Wave the stress of a personal meeting with live communication can occur. (See the video above if you don’t know what I mean.) For now, consider only inviting geeks: Today, nobody can really control documents in waves, and there’s no real revision yet. And waves change a lot. Therefore, it’s better to invite people who can give good feedback. The more wavers, the more complex a wave will become. Overall evaluation and outlook If you criticize Google Wave, you should keep in mind that it is a “preview” now. It’s not a beta, and it’s not a final release. The Google Wave team has set out to create “email as it should be in 2010″. And from what I see, they have a good chance of doing so, but 2010 is less than two months away. However, I am willing to bet that this piece of software will eventually overcome Robert Scoble’s criticism. For professional collaboration, I still recommend the wikis mentioned above. But if you’re into real-time collaboration, Google Wave will eventually be your choice. Just make sure to bring advanced web skills. Sources A lot of the content for this blog post was created in a wave. As no one knows who owns the content in a wave, I would like to list all who participated: mseibert (That’s me!), jseibert, eicker, bfri, Silke, Sam, Gerrit, Ton, Paul CrunchBase Information Google Wave Martin Seibert Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Sidebar Delivers Personalized Mobile Apps And Content To Android Posted: 26 Nov 2009 10:30 AM PST We recently wrote about Sidebar, an app that wants to help smartphone users with the process of finding the perfect apps for their phones. Sidebar is debuting its first app and guess what? It’s not an iPhone app-it’s an Android app! While Sidebar’s Android app is built for all Google-powered Android phones, the app has been configured specially for the newly released Verizon Droid. Android users can download the app here. Sidebar will ask you a series of demographic questions (gender, age, location) and a series of questions to determine your interests and content preferences (i.e. what type of news do you prefer, do you play online games, what types of outdoor activities are you interested in). Once Sidebar figures out a rough sketch of who you are, the app will begin to recommend mobile content to you. Content consists of videos, games, music, apps, ringtones, podcasts, promotions, news articles. The app will load no more than 12 content recommendations per day, which will last for 24 hours until the next batch of recs are sent to you. Recommendations include a short synopsis of the app or content and a screenshot or image. If you like the rec, you can save it and and download or access it later. While the Android Market no doubt needs an improvement, its promising that nifty apps like Sidebar are coming to the Android before hopping on the iPhone train. We’ve seen Sobees and Seesmic take a similar approach. Because the iPhone market is so saturated, it could make sense for developers to perhaps gain a following from other smartphone users, and perfect their iPhone offerings in the meantime. Sidebar seems like a compelling app for an Android user. Although the number of apps on the Android Market doesn’t yet reach the magnitude of content on Apple’s App Store, there still is a value in receiving customized recommendations for mobile content. Android’s app store features top paid and free apps, but doesn’t have an in-depth personalized recommendation feature that competes with Sidebar. And the app suggests other types of mobile content, like ringtones, videos, news and more. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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