The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- MojaMix, A Web Service That Lets You Make Your Own Cereal and Granola
- Not Playing Around. EA Buys Playfish For $300 Million, Plus a $100 Million Earnout.
- Happy 5th Birthday, Firefox!
- Realtime Money Flows: Xignite Supplies On-Demand Financial Market Data
- Last week on TechCrunch: The Skype settlement, Hitler vs Obama in the app store, Scamville, SnapNames and more…
- Adgregate Markets Launches Shopping Cart Platform ShopCloud
- DotBlu Resurfaces From The Deadpool, Starts Third Life As TownHog
- Forget iPhone MMS, Share 100 Pictures In An Instant With Knocking
- Popular iPhone App TweetDeck Gone Missing From The App Store
- Splurb Surfaces The Most Popular Links Across Social Media Sites
- Zynga To Remove All In Game Offers
- CrunchGear Week in Review: Imported Treats Edition
- Zynga’s FishVille Sleeps With The Fishes For Ad Violations
| MojaMix, A Web Service That Lets You Make Your Own Cereal and Granola Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:01 AM PST  Back in the olden days, long before the advent of electric light, our forefathers dreamt of a better place. They dreamt of running hot and cold water in their wash rooms, wireless telegraphy, and the rise of the horseless carriage. They dreamt of threshing machines that could tie down an acre of millet an hour and helioplanes that could transport humans from one place to another in comfort and style. But what was the dream that drove our forefathers to strive for better things, always? What dream sustained them through a Depression and two World Wars? What was the silent prayer they mumbled nightly to the heavens from their pinched and chapped lips? Friends, they dreamt of a website that lets you mix your own trail mix and cereal. And that dream is now a reality. Mojamix is an online granola manufacturing system. You select your base, then add dried fruit, seeds, and nuts. They package up your foodstuff and send it to your home via first class mail. The average 12-ounce bag costs about $12 and there is the possibility of adding chocolate-covered cashews to the mix. This last part is what clinched it for me.   |
| Not Playing Around. EA Buys Playfish For $300 Million, Plus a $100 Million Earnout. Posted: 09 Nov 2009 07:07 AM PST
After lengthy negotiations, Electronic Arts closed it’s anticipated acquisition of social gaming startup Playfish for $275 million in cash. An additional $25 million in stock will be set aside for retaining the top talent at the startup, and another $100 million in earnouts are part of the deal as well if the business hits certain milestones. So the total value of the deal could amount to as much as $400 million when all is said and done. Although, earnouts have a tendency to come up short (see Skype). Playfish is based in London, and has raised $21 million from Accel Partners and Index ventures. The Accel investment is from its European fund. Playfish’s estimated annual revenues are $75 million. Last year at a presentation at the Founder’s Forum in Hampshire, England, CEO Kristian Segerstrale put up a slide with a dinosaur and expressed his desire to "kill EA." Now he’s joining them instead. Funny how that works. Playfish operates social games on Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, and other social networks which have been installed more than 150 million times, and claims 60 million monthly active users. It’s top games include Pet Society, Restaurant City, Country Story and Who Has The Biggest Brain? Social games are increasingly popular and Electronic Arts needed to buy one of the top players: Zynga, Playfish, or Playdom. The issue is that all three make their money from trading in-game virtual currency for advertising offers. Many of these offers are outright scams, which may explain why Playfish got less in upfront cash than the $350 million to $500 million range it was looking for, and the last $100 million is in the form of an earnout. Playfish perhaps also is not as exposed to these scammy offers as its competitors. Kevin Comolli, a partner at Accel, tells us that the “vast majority” of Playfish’s revenues do not come from lead generation or other types of advertising offers for virtual currency. His take on the whole Scamville affair is that “exposure is ultimately helpful. It needs to be a durable business. Cleaning this up important.” Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Posted: 09 Nov 2009 06:40 AM PST  Come back with me to the turn of the century, about 1996. Your humble narrator was working for campus police at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh, creating FileMaker databases for their police reports. It wasn't uncommon then to see DOS machines sitting beside Windows 95 machines and the web was a primitive and strange thing. There were only two browsers of note, Netscape and Internet Explorer, and firing either up was neither comfortable or interesting. But, hidden deep behind Netscape's bland carapace, was Mozilla. When you typed "about:mozilla" in the Netscape address bar, for example, you got: |
| Realtime Money Flows: Xignite Supplies On-Demand Financial Market Data Posted: 09 Nov 2009 06:08 AM PST
Customer wins are one thing, but Xignite has a pretty interesting model, has attracted millions in venture capital funding, boasts an impressive customer roster and still manages to largely fly under the radar. So this gives us a perfect excuse to take a closer look. Essentially, Xignite delivers a wide range of financial web services via the cloud, enabling browser and desktop application developers as well as online publishers to tap into a stream of critical market data on-demand in exchange for a monthly subscription fee. The data that can be pulled into applications ranges from market quotes, news, corporate data, industry information and analytics to detailed statistics. Here’s what we wrote when Xignite and Forbes.com jointly announced how the latter was integrating the company’s data streams:
Xignite is today announcing that it has signed up StockTwits, a community-powered micro-blogging information service that allows users to track information about public company stock performances. Another new customer is Turing Studios, an iPhone application developer that is about to debut a realtime version of its PortfolioLive app, which tracks stock prices, values, options and futures. Last but not least, the company has won business from Palantir Technologies, a developer of an enterprise analytics platform called Palantir Finance that enables banks and hedge funds to integrate and analyze data sources. As more and more data moves to the stream, Xignite is positioned well to turn itself in an essential building block for many financial Web and desktop application providers and online publishers. And it’s a great case study for the cloud, too. Privately-held Xignite has to date raised a mere $5.5 million from Altos Ventures and Startup Capital Ventures, although a host of large companies and financial institutions are on their customer reference list, including Citi, GE Commercial Finance, Wells Fargo, ING, Marsh & McLennan, NetSuite, Starbucks, and Wendy's.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Posted: 09 Nov 2009 05:43 AM PST
“Hey, guys! Skype’s arrived!” “Awesome! Quick – open it…” “Wait, what the hell… this isn’t what we ordered. It’s just a big box full of users with the word ‘Skype’ written on the side in Sharpie – none of the core p2p technology is in here.” “What? Didn’t you read the description before you bid on it?” “I guess not. I just got carried away with all the excitement.” “Shit dude. How much did we pay?” “Uh… $2.6 billion” “Man, we have to stop buying stuff on the Internet.” Long overdue settlement of the week: eBay and Skype Robin Wauters provided all the details: The Skype founders are getting 14 percent of Skype back – plus a place on the board – for handing over the rights to the P2P technology as well as investing a ’significant amount of capital’ of their own in the new company. The newly structured buyout group will buy 56% of Skype, with eBay continuing to own 30% in a deal valuing Skype at $2.75 billion. eBay is expected to receive approximately $1.9 billion in cash upon the completion of the sale and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million. Also, contrary to rumours, Index Ventures – an earlier investor in Skype – are playing no part in the deal. While Robin was crunching numbers, Erick was sat down with Marc Andreessen to get a bit of color on the deal. And Andreessen didn’t disappoint, essentially framing the whole settlement as a gesture of goodwill on the part of the consortium who would have been “prepared to litigate” and build their own P2P technology if things hadn’t gone their way. “We assumed it would be a good idea to bring the founders on board and resolve all the issues, we are very pro-founder,” he said – which in no way made him sound like a mafia boss who would hate to see anyone’s legs get broken. “We’ve very pro legs.” So what next for Zennström and Friis? Back to Robin for the answer: “the latest venture they're putting their weight behind [is] Rdio. The yet-to-launch digital music startup was first talked about publicly a couple of weeks ago in a New York Times article but we haven't heard any further information about the startup.” Let’s just say that the new version of Skype is going to have some freaking awesome hold music.
Ordinarily I’d take a moment here to feel sorry for Shukla. Sure she was architect of her own downfall, but it’s still never nice to see someone lose their job – particularly in this climate. And yet in a weird twist of coincidence Shukla wasn’t the only person to find themselves unemployed on Wednesday. On the very same day came an announcement by Don Dodge that he’d been laid off as Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s ‘emerging business team. The contrast between Dodge and Shukla couldn’t be more pronounced. As Arrington wrote…
And for once, the commenters agreed, with Kimbal Musk summing up the majority view: “Don was a star. From his constant evangelism in the face of cynics, to closely working with start-ups to help them navigate Microsoft's massive organization, Don was the ultimate ambassador.” Amen to that. New scandal of the week: SnapNames comes clean For the love of Godwin: Hitler good, Obama bad All was calm and still, until last week when the company received an email from Apple ’suggesting’ that they delete a Halloween-themed card with the punchline "Just double-checking that your Obama costume will involve a mask and not shoe polish." The cost of ignoring this suggestion: deletion from the app store – a threat made all the more bizarre by the fact that the previous day Apple approved the full text of Mein Kampf for inclusion in the store, complete with it’s nifty swastika logo. Seriously, Mike Godwin would be spinning in his grave. If he were dead. But all’s well that ends well – a few hours after Someecards got their email from Apple, they received a call from Google, wondering if they’d like to produce a version of the app for Android. The selling point? There would be absolutely no censorship of the cards. Hurrah! Bring on the Polanski hilarity!
In case you missed the column (you’re forgiven), in it I discussed the solider at Fort Hood who tweeted from inside the base during Thursday’s massacre – including posting a twitpic of a victim. I concluded that her actions were further evidence that social media is encouraging us to put ego before humanity. I didn’t expect everyone to agree with my conclusions – and sure enough the disagreement ran the gamut from the insightful and reasoned (both Mathew Ingram and David Quigg took me to task splendidly) to the batshit insane (hat tip to the commenter who hoped I develop ‘ass cancer’ and the one who insisted that the shootings – carried out by a Muslim soldier – were the work of ‘the Jews’). But even the ass cancer guy pales into relative sanity when compared to the reaction from the poster-child for nominative-determinism that is Dave Winer. I can’t bring myself to dignify Winer’s post with a proper response (or even a link) so I’ll just link to this great rebuttal posted by MG on his personal blog. What I will say is this: for accusing me of faking my concern for the death of innocent people just so that I might drive a bit more traffic and a bit more money to TechCrunch, you, Dave Winer, are my Commenter Of The Week. Congratulations! Now – and trust me when I say I have never meant anything as sincerely as this – go fuck yourself. Best of the rest, of the week: Five links you mustn’t miss: Tudou: A Push Towards Mobile Video and Profits Marissa Mayer Chosen As A Glamour Magazine Woman Of The Year Judge In Google Book Settlement Case Says Photographers Are Not Authors Think The Droid Launch Was A Let Down? Not So Fast Europe's biggest newspaper decides the iPhone browser isn't welcome Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Adgregate Markets Launches Shopping Cart Platform ShopCloud Posted: 09 Nov 2009 04:55 AM PST  Transactional advertising network provider Adgregate Markets, a finalist at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference is launching ShopCloud, a platform for building portable shopping carts and other e-commerce applications. ShopCloud’s platform lets developers build a variety of applications around e-commerce, including distributed shopping carts, lead generation forms, polls and surveys, and social media apps. The platform also promises security and the ability to build and run secure transactional applications even in non-secure content pages. And the shopping cart technology is already being implemented on commerce sites. Adgregate Networks’ client Warner Bros. is using ShopCloud to power the CW channel’s shopping cart. ShopCloud joins Adgregate’s ShopAds product, a fairly innovative advertising network that enables customers to complete secure transactions within Flash-based ad banners. The startup has seen a good amount of growth since it’s launch last year; recently acquiring widget business Gydget and scoring a deal with distribution deal with Google’s DoubleClick, enabling advertisers on that platform to integrate ShopAds widgets with just a few mouse-clicks. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| DotBlu Resurfaces From The Deadpool, Starts Third Life As TownHog Posted: 09 Nov 2009 03:39 AM PST
Turns out the venture still had a considerable amount of money left in the bank, which they will now be using to run the company in its third life under the name TownHog. The startup has reinvented itself completely this time, leaving its social betting past behind completely because it simply “wasn’t working out”, TownHog CEO Song Kim tells us. It’s now hedging its bets – wink, wink – on the concept of collective purchasing. Much like Woot.com, TownHog will look for and feature one online deal every day, but the main difference with Woot is that it’ll focus on promotions for local businesses rather than good deals on products that are widely available. It’s kicking things off in San Francisco, but intends to expand into more territories quickly, says Kim. The first deal that went live this morning is with Cento, which I understand is a hot coffee bar (pun intented) located in the SOMA neighborhood in San Francisco. Basically, if enough users sign up for a deal they get to redeem a voucher that expires at a certain point in time. In the case of Cento, users get $20 worth of Cento coffee for the price of $10. But the 50% discount will only be valid when 100 people sign up for the offer before the deadline (44 hours away at the time of this writing), and the voucher must be redeemed before the end of this year. People are charged only when the minimum of buyers chip in. TownHog does a good job at keeping things simple and enables people to easily recruit other buyers on Facebook, Twitter and by e-mail. But it will be competing with a host of other companies offering local deals and coupons in some way, and it’s not like the concept of collective buying is new (many startups have stumbled trying to scale it into a big business). DotBlu / TownHog received capital in an early angel round from Jawed Karim (Co-Founder of YouTube), Kevin Hartz (Co-Founder of Xoom and Eventbrite), Joe Greenstein (Co-Founder and CEO of Flixster) and Keith Rabois (Former PayPal & LinkedIn Executive and Current Slide Executive). A later $2 million round was funded by Maples Investments and DE Shaw. We’ve now learned more investors are involved, including Bebo co-founder Michael Birch (who also sits on the board), Jeff Clavier (SofttechVC), Ron Conway and Howard Hartenbaum (via DraperRichards). The company has about $1.5 million in capital left, which Kim says should last them another 17 months at least. Welcome back into the game, DotBlu!
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Forget iPhone MMS, Share 100 Pictures In An Instant With Knocking Posted: 09 Nov 2009 01:45 AM PST
Knocking, made by Pointy Heads Software, is basically a photo-sharing app on steroids. With it, you can pretty much instantaneously share up to 100 photos at once between two iPhones. This works by establishing a connection between the two phones, during which one user selects another user with the app and “knocks” the pictures over to them. The video below shows just how simple and fast this process is. Naturally, for this to work, both people must have the Knocking application. But the app, which is free for the first 50,000 downloads, has other advantages, such as being able to control the photo viewing experience on another phone. So, for example, if I want to send some pictures to my mom and show her specific ones, I would simply create a Knocking connection and send them over where I could then control which ones she is seeing. She would also be able to save any of those pictures to her phone with the click of a button. MMS allows you to send multiple images but the sending process is slow, and the selection process is cumbersome. With Knocking, you can easily share entire albums, not just individual pictures. And MMS limits you to sending 5 pictures. Again, Knocking’s limit is 100. And even with that many photos, it takes only a couple of minutes to sync them all between the two phones. There is also Facebook Connect integration to allow users to share their “knocks.” And Knocking works over both 3G and WiFi. You can find the Knocking app here. Again, it’s free for the first 50,000 downloads. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Popular iPhone App TweetDeck Gone Missing From The App Store Posted: 09 Nov 2009 01:24 AM PST
Now it seems the TweetDeck iPhone app is MIA from Apple’s App Store completely, barring new users from installing the app on their phones and existing ones to upgrade to a new version. Apparently, last Friday when the upgraded iPhone app was pushed, too many crash reports resulted in Update: more information here. No such luck, however. A couple of hours ago at the time of this writing, Barley sent out another message saying that he was ’sorry’ and felt ‘frustrated’ because the updated app still hadn’t found its way back onto the App Store. Of course, Curpertino isn’t exactly at fault here, since it’s the responsibility of TweetDeck’s (admittedly small) team to assure that submitted apps aren’t bug-ridden, which was apparently the case with the first update they had pushed last Friday. But it goes to show exactly how much control Apple has over the whole process, forcing developers to sit and wait until they find time to review updated versions, with no ETA ever given. According to Louis Gray, these are the features the new TweetDeck iPhone app will boast:
Also, here’s a video of the upgraded app, which will hopefully be reinstated by Apple soon: (Hat tip to Austin Nunn) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Splurb Surfaces The Most Popular Links Across Social Media Sites Posted: 08 Nov 2009 02:15 PM PST  There are many sites that show trending links across the web including TweetMeme, Topsy, and Bit.ly. Recently launched splurb is now in the mix with its site that shows the most popular links that are trending on social media sites. splurb currently indexes Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, TweetMeme, Yahoo Buzz and Fark. Splurb tallies the number of votes from the various sites and number of sources that list links. The more sources that cite a link, the larger the story appears on splurb. To get listed, a link must be popular on at least two social websites. The site’s founder, Bill Chasen, said he created splurb because the most popular content on the web has a tendency to repeatedly show up on the seven hubs which are indexed. From there, he says, content then moves to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of social media. I’m not so sure about that statement, but I do think that sites like TweetMeme and Topsy help us understand what links and news are trending on the web. To a certain degree, these sites are able to help us understand the importance of certain links vs. others. Of course, Chasen says that splurb is not a replacement to its competitors, but rather serves as another layer for people to discover the best content without having to dig deep into each site. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Zynga To Remove All In Game Offers Posted: 08 Nov 2009 12:19 PM PST
Zynga insists they are serious about cleaning up the industry. And today Pincus has announced that the company will remove all offer advertising from their games. This isn’t a meaningless action. Offers account for 1/3 or so of Zynga’s rumored $250 million in revenue. All offers will be removed by the end of today, says Pincus, “until we can control their inclusion and presentation ourselves.” The blog post also discloses that Zynga is an investor in DoubleDing, an offer provider that competes with OfferPal and SuperRewards. DoubleDing was serving the mobile offers that popped back onto Zynga on Friday. Pincus’ blog post:
We’ve also heard from DoubleDing President Matt Handal, who responds to our article yesterday:
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| CrunchGear Week in Review: Imported Treats Edition Posted: 08 Nov 2009 11:52 AM PST  Here are some stories from this week on CrunchGear: Japanese company announces Dragon Ball headphones Toyjector: Cute mini projector to be released in Japan Choken Bako: Cute Japanese piggy bank |
| Zynga’s FishVille Sleeps With The Fishes For Ad Violations Posted: 08 Nov 2009 11:12 AM PST
FishVille will remain suspended, Facebook tells us, “until Facebook is satisfied that Zynga demonstrates compliance with Facebook restrictions — as well as Zynga’s own restrictions — on the ads it offers users.” This is a relatively light slap on the wrist since the game only launched two days ago and had a couple of thousand users (Update: Zynga says FishVille had 875,000 users yesterday. wow). Zynga’s other games, including FarmVille with 63 million monthly users, remain online, despite the fact that they were showing the same ads. But this does send a clear message to Zynga and other game developers that Facebook isn’t ignoring the problem. Whether it’s a real concern over the user experience or simply embarrassment from the press suggesting Facebook is a haven for scammers is somewhat irrelevant. Facebook has also shut down a total of four ad networks in recent months for ad violations, including Tatto Media and Gambit. Other networks, such as SendMe Mobile, which was founded by ex-CNET executives, have largely taken their place by offering similarly questionable offers that trick users into mobile subscriptions. This is also a bit of an arms race. Zynga may be specifically filtering Facebook employees from seeing ads that violate Facebook terms and conditions, making it difficult for Facebook to enforce the rules. And the relationship between the two companies is complicated. Facebook battling Zynga on the advertising scams. But Zynga is also one of Facebook’s largest advertisers, probably accounting for between 10% and 20% of total Facebook revenue.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
I’d love to have witnessed the scene at eBay’s house back in 2005 when the FedEx guy delivered their exciting new purchase…
A couple of weeks ago, we put 
As we were all painfully aware, it took AT&T 
A couple of days ago, I checked if there were any updates for the applications I have installed on my iPhone, and one that was identified as having published a more recent version in the App Store was 
Last week 
Zynga’s most recent Facebook game, FishVille, has temporarily been taken offline by Facebook for 
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