The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Wipe The Slate Clean For 2010, Commit Web 2.0 Suicide
- TenYears: PC Games of the Decade
- ChaCha Makes Its Crazy Business Model…Profitable
- We All Live In Public Now. Get Used To It.
- At Foursquare Venues, The Mayor Eats For Free
- John Mayer Wants You To Defragment Your Brain With A Digital Cleanse
- TenYears: Console Games Of The Decade
- How Are We Going To Say “2010″? A Website Comes Just In The Nick Of Time.
- Did You Get A Magic Mouse This Holiday? Download MagicPrefs Immediately.
- Hulu Gives A Status Report On Its Alien Plot
- 2009’s Top Products For Amazon: Kindle, Dan Brown, And “Twilight”
- Third Release of Tickets For The Crunchies Awards On Sale Now.
- Leaked: Swype For Android Beta Unofficially Available For Motorola Droid
- Realtime Search-Off: Bing Beats Google To Times Square Bomb Threat News
- Zynga CEO Mark Pincus On Charlie Rose
- Twilio Raises $3.7 Million For Powerful Telephony API
- Evernote Reaches Two Million Lifeloggers, Half Of Them Are On The iPhone
- Hidden Mac Gem: DigitalColor Meter
| Wipe The Slate Clean For 2010, Commit Web 2.0 Suicide Posted: 31 Dec 2009 08:58 AM PST
Are you tired of living in public, sick of all the privacy theater the social networks are putting on, and just want to end it all online? Now you can wipe the slate clean with the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. (Warning: This will really delete your online presence and is irrevocable). Just put in your credentials for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or LinkedIn and it will delete all your friends and messages, and change your username, password, and photo so that you cannot log back in. The site is actually run by Moddr, a New Media Lab in Rotterdam, which execute the underlying scripts which erase your accounts. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is a digital Dr. Kevorkian. On Facebook, for instance, it removes all your friends one by one, removes your groups and joins you to its own “Social Network Suiciders,” and lets you leave some last words. So far 321 people have used the site to commit Facebook suicide. On Twitter, it deletes all of your Tweets, and removes all the people you follow and your followers. It doesn’t actually delete these accounts, it just puts them to rest. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine runs a python script which launches a browser session and automates the process of disconnecting from these social networks (here is a video showing how this works with Twitter). You can even watch the virtual suicide in progress via a Flash app which shows it as a remote desktop session. You can watch your online life pass away one message at a time. Taking over somebody else’s account via an automated script, even with permission, may very well be against the terms of service of these social networks. From the FAQs:
The light-hearted video below explains the benefits of committing Web 2.0 Suicide and disconnecting from “so many people you don’t really care about.” Unplugging from your social life online will leave you more time for your real life, which you’ve probably been neglecting. With the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, you can “sign out forever.” Not that we are recommending you do this in any way. But you may enjoy the video.
web 2.0 suicide machine promotion from moddr_ on Vimeo. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| TenYears: PC Games of the Decade Posted: 31 Dec 2009 07:30 AM PST  It's almost January 1st, 2010 and we've been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present another installment of our "Of the Decade" lists. Valve's follow-up to the revolutionary Half-Life is our game of the decade not just because it's a fantastic game, but because it is a fine example of modern gaming. It exemplifies DLC done right, community support done right, and comes part and parcel with Steam, which has helped revolutionize digital distribution for games. All this while still being the standard by which other FPSes are measured.
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| ChaCha Makes Its Crazy Business Model…Profitable Posted: 31 Dec 2009 02:43 AM PST
The human powered web search never really worked out. But ChaCha evolved. In 2008 they launched a mobile version of the service that lets users ask questions via SMS. Putting a human into the mix makes sense with mobile, with poor (or no) data connectivity and hard to use keyboards. But all phones have SMS, and ChaCha had a hit on their hands (they also had the infamous Eiffel Tower incident). And ChaCha also made another smart move. They started archiving questions and answers on their website in January 2009. 300 million of them are now published on their website – you can view and search them from the ChaCha home page. Those pages have lots of ads generating revenue, and the search engines tend to rank pages like these highly. The company serves just under a million page views to answer pages per day, they say. CEO Scott Jones says the company has had “explosive growth” in usage of their mobile product. In fact, the company has had to take steps in the past to control that growth, by limiting the number of questions people can ask each month. Even so, people now ask ChaCha a million questions a day via SMS. They recently passed Google and ChaCha is the no. 1 SMS search service according to Nielsen Mobile. Those mobile questions bring in revenue, too. I asked ChaCha tonight “When and where is Avatar IMAX playing in San Francisco?” The first response, less than a minute later, was an advertisement. The second message came a minute later with the correct information: “AMC Loews Metreon 16 101 4th St. San Francisco, CA 94103 (415) 369-6201. Showtimes for 12/31/09. Avatar IMAX 9:45 am, 1:15, 4:45, 8:15, 11:45. ChaCha!” Even on a smartphone, and even dealing with the ad, it was far easier to use ChaCha than doing a mobile search via Google. And while there are a number of easy-to-use movie apps for the iPhone and Android, ChaCha is a multi-purpose app. I can just as easily ask it for flight schedules. Or the first king of England (answer: “No one is universally recognized as the first King of England. Some historians start with Egbert, the king of Wessex”). We’ve said all along, though, that the ChaCha mobile service was useful. But we questioned its scalability since it involves humans. Jones says they’re scaling just fine, thanks to tens of thousands of part time guides who work from their homes for an average wage of $2.50/hour. It’s not much, but they do it voluntarily, so they must think it’s a reasonable deal. The cost of answering a question has dropped from $0.50 two years ago to just a few cents today, and Jones says they’ll get it to under a cent soon. They’re able to recycle a lot of answers, he says, and they’ve built tools to make it easier for guides to quickly answer most queries. The company is now profitable per query, says Jones, meaning they are making more money from those SMS ads than they pay the guides. And when you add revenue from the archived website questions, the company is on path to profitability. Their current revenue run rate is $9 million or so. My guess is they need to roughly double that to become profitable as a business and support their 60 or so full time employees. Jones says has raised $52 million, including a recent $7 million round from insiders. We’re tracking more than that on CrunchBase and have asked the company for clarification. So ChaCha may just have a real business on its hands, despite the near constant criticism from us and others over the years. This is one time that I won’t mind at all being wrong. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| We All Live In Public Now. Get Used To It. Posted: 30 Dec 2009 11:14 PM PST
As the Web becomes more social, privacy becomes harder and harder to come by. People are over-sharing on Facebook and Twitter, broadcasting their whereabouts every ten steps on Foursquare and Gowalla, and uploading photos and videos of their most private moments to the Web for all to see. It’s easy to say that privacy is dead, we all live in public now, and just deal with it. But things are a bit more complicated. It used to be that we lived in private and chose to make parts of our lives public. Now that is being turned on its head. We live in public, like the movie says (except via micro-signals not 24-7 video self-surveillance), and choose what parts of our lives to keep private. Public is the new default. Stowe Boyd, along with others before him, calls this new state of exposure “publicy” (as opposed to privacy or secrecy). He writes:
I don’t particularly care for the neologism, but the idea behind it is spot on. This change represents a major shift in the social fabric, and it is only now just getting started. If you thought there was a lot of hair-pulling over privacy in 2009, just wait until 2010. Facebook’s new privacy policies which favor more public sharing, will be a big driver of this shift, as will the continued adoption of Twitter, which by its very design makes personal utterances public. Then there are startups like Blippy that go even further by turning every single purchase into a public statement. It takes some getting used to the idea of living in public. As I discussed several hours ago with Andrew Keen, in public on Twitter, instead of making the private public, we will make the public private.” When public is the default, you deliberately select what to keep private instead of the other way around. It’s not that privacy disappears. But it becomes more a matter of emphasis and a conscious decision. Boyd points out:
Privacy and secrecy are two different things. Secrets can be shared, and thus become “social objects that link those sharing the secrets together, and excluding others,” writes Boyd. Making it easy for people to move from the public to the private, and in between, will become increasingly important for Web companies. Getting back to the original question, privacy will still live on, but will be so transformed as to become almost unrecognizable. No doubt, many people will mistake it for dead and keep pulling out their hair. The rest of us will go on with our public lives. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| At Foursquare Venues, The Mayor Eats For Free Posted: 30 Dec 2009 08:55 PM PST
Foursquare, the geo-location based check-in game, just announced its first venue that is combining badges and promotions. On Foursquare you get badges for checking into places. The person who checks into a place the most becomes the “Mayor.” You also get promotions from restaurants and bars nearby based on your location. Now those two elements are being tied together. For instance, Blynk Organic a restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina is the first venue to offer this promotion:
A promotion like this is clever since it is also tied to something other than checkins and mayorships. The idea is that it will not only give other customers an incentive to compete and become the mayor, but also motivate customers to complete interesting tasks before redemption. In the past, Foursquare has done check-in and mayorship promotions, but in a more ad-hoc manor. Now the promos are presented as actual ads in the app. I spoke with Foursquare’s Director of Business Development Tristan Walker, who also spoke at our RealTime CrunchUp in November, and he mentioned that there are close to 400 businesses to this date that are running regular geo-triggered promos with Foursquare. It is not clear how Foursquare will get paid for these badge promotions. Walker says, “Right now we’re just focused on getting as many venues running promos on the platform as possible before we think about monetizing. We’d like to understand a bit more about how venue owners would like to leverage our platform in interesting ways first.” Foursquare has been one of the main startups in the geo-location market along with recently funded Gowalla. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| John Mayer Wants You To Defragment Your Brain With A Digital Cleanse Posted: 30 Dec 2009 07:13 PM PST
Tonight, Mayer has announced a One Week Digital Cleanse. The purpose? To ring in the new year with a slightly less chaotic mental state. In his post announcing the Cleanse, Mayer likens our increasingly scattered lifestyles to fragmented hard drives. It’s an apt comparison — between sites like Twitter, Facebook, and multiple Email boxes, most of us have data and friendships scattered across a dozen different places. Mayer thinks giving some of these up for a while might be a good way to “defragment” our minds. He’s not quitting these services the way Trent Reznor and Miley Cyrus did, he’s just taking a week long break, and he wants his fans to join him. Unlike some similar campaigns I’ve heard of, which asked you to quit just about everything with a digital display, Mayer’s drive is probably doable for a lot of people. It doesn’t ask you to give up Email, and you can still use your cell phone for some things. Here are the guidelines :
Work commitments keep me from engaging in the Cleanse myself, but you may want to give it a try, if only for a day or two. If nothing else, consider just how attached you’ve become to these online services. Last June, when I took a weeklong vacation to the Caribbean, I found myself suffering some pretty serious withdrawals when I couldn’t compulsively check my Email or the latest tech news. It took about two full days of perfect weather and endless beaches to kick the sense of impending doom. That’s a little weird. Technology is amazing, but getting some perspective is a good thing. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| TenYears: Console Games Of The Decade Posted: 30 Dec 2009 04:54 PM PST  It's almost January 1st, 2010 and we've been mulling over our favorites of 2009 - and the previous decade. Here we present another installment in our "Of the Decade" lists. The aughts were a great time for gamers. The decade began auspiciously with the launch of the PlayStation2, and is ending quite nicely with a Nintendo victory that would have been thought impossible a few years ago. More people than ever are gaming, and the business has grown to enormous size. We've chosen the following games as the best representatives of this decade of gaming.
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| How Are We Going To Say “2010″? A Website Comes Just In The Nick Of Time. Posted: 30 Dec 2009 03:38 PM PST
Newsflash: Tomorrow is the last day of 2009. That means we’re moving into the first new decade of the 2000s. And we have a decision to make. Say “2009″ outloud. Chances are you’re saying “two thousand and nine.” But if you think about it, that’s weird. Say “1909″ outloud. Chances are you’re saying “nineteen-oh-nine.” It makes some sense, since we weren’t going to pronounce “2000″ as “twenty hundred,” but for whatever reason, going forward, we never moved to something like “twenty-oh-one” for “2001″ and so forth. A new website is urging us to do just that for the next decade. TwentyNot2000.com has one purpose: To break your habit of saying “two-thousand-and-SO-AND-SO” before the new decade begins tomorrow at midnight. Why do they care? Because it takes more time to say “two thousand and ten” rather than just “twenty ten.” Also considered wrong by the site are “two thousand ten” (no “and”) and “two oh ten.” In the site’s own words:
The site also has a Facebook Group and Fan Page, just to drive the point home. The fan page actually has over 17,000 fans. So choose now, but in the words of the Grail Knight from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, “choose wisely” or we could be stuck wasting words for the next 89 years (their math is a little off, but don’t let that distract you). Happy New Year.
[thanks Chan] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Did You Get A Magic Mouse This Holiday? Download MagicPrefs Immediately. Posted: 30 Dec 2009 02:30 PM PST
MagicPrefs, which is made by developer Vlad Alexa, is a free piece of software that runs in the background once you start it up. It gives you a boatload of new multi-touch options for your Magic Mouse, broken into three main categories: Clicks & Taps, Swipes, and Drag, Pinch, etc. Clicks & Taps are the ones that are likely to be most useful to you, as they’re the ones that are the easiest to use, and get use to. MagicPrefs has options that allow you to set actions for two-finger clicks, three-finger clicks, four-finger clicks, and one-finger middle axis clicks. There are also all of those options and then some for “taps” which is essentially touching the top of the Magic Mouse without clicking on it. Clicking on the checkbox to enable any of these also shows you a picture of exactly how the function works on the Magic Mouse. Similar options also exist for swipes (wiping you fingers across the top of the Magic Mouse, and pinching (pushing two fingers together on the top of the device or pushing them apart). Interestingly, there are also options for the Apple logo near the bottom of the Magic Mouse. Two options allow you to drag your finger from the logo left or right to enable some action. Another allows you to tap logo to enable something.
It’s important to note that a number of actions in both the Swipes and Drag,Pinch, etc areas are labeled with a “*,” meaning they are “potentially hard to use.” There are also some of the Clicks & Taps functions that have this warning. In my experience with the program, it’s a pretty good idea to follow these recommendations and stay away from the harder to use ones. Even an obvious action like two-finger click is hard to use because most people will have two fingers resting on the mouse at all times, and when they do a left or right click, the multi-touch top senses the other finger’s presence and will think you’re doing a two-finger click. Still, after playing around with all the actions and finding the ones that I like and am comfortable using, MagicPrefs is extremely powerful. I now have easy access to things such as Expose, Dashboard, and Spaces right from the Mighty Mouse. It’s so natural, and makes so much sense, that I’m even more dumbfounded as to why Apple wouldn’t just build some of these gestures into the device’s software (and I suspect they will in the future via updates). And there’s actually more. A number of users have complained that the tracking speed on the Magic Mouse is too slow, even at the fastest setting. This is especially a problem for users with the new 27″ iMacs (which come with the Magic Mouse) and/or two monitors (that’s a lot of screen real estate to cover). With MagicPrefs, you also get the ability to improve the Mighty Mouse tracking speed by up to 200%. It’s brilliant. There is also a setting to increase or decrease the touch sensitivity of the device. MagicPrefs is perfect example of software making hardware better. And the developer promises that it will always be available for free (though he does accept PayPal donations on his site). He also promises that it uses less than 1% of system resources running in the background all the time. My usage of the software confirms this. Recent reports indicate that the Mighty Mouse is selling better than any mouse in Apple’s history. This is hardly surprising given that the other ones were awful, and this one is good. But MagicPrefs makes it much better. If you have a Magic Mouse, you need this.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Hulu Gives A Status Report On Its Alien Plot Posted: 30 Dec 2009 02:09 PM PST
CEO Jason Kilar writes that Hulu is now up to 43 million unique visitors — a 95% increase over the same time period last year. That’s impressive, but it’s also not much more than the 41.5 million it had back in April. In fact, in terms of unique visitors, Hulu’s growth seems to be fairly stagnant, which could indicate that the market is getting saturated. On the other hand, the number of videos each user is watching is still growing. In April, Hulu streamed 380 million videos. This month, they’re up to a whopping 924 million streams. The chart below from VideoNuze does a good job showing the trend (blue bars are views, the red line represents unique visitors).  The catalyst for the site’s growth spurt this year was likely its Superbowl Ad starring Alec Baldwin, who unveiled the site’s alien plot to take over our brains. That ad was later nominated for an Emmy award, and was followed up by a handful of other star-studded ads that further raised awareness. Aside from the ads, much of the growth can be attributed to the site’s growing catalog of content: Kilar writes that they’ve grown from 5,600 hours of premium content available up to 14,000 hours. And they’ve gone from 130 content partners to 200, including Disney and ABC. The site has doubled from 166 to 408 advertisers, and its embeds have grown by 237%, up to 6.4 million embedded Hulu players on external sites. Other notable events for Hulu this year include the launch of Hulu Labs which introduced a new native Desktop application that lets you sit back and watch Hulu with a remote. And, of course, the site engaged in a lengthy battle with Boxee: Hulu cut off Boxee support, and Boxee repeatedly would hack together ways to fix it. The next year will be a very interesting one for Hulu. It is beginning to develop its own programming. And there have been reports of internal conflict between the site and the content owners who run it, as well as rumors that it may begin to offer a paid model. Whatever winds up happening, it’s becoming increasingly clear that an on-demand model like Hulu’s is the future of premium video content. If Hulu’s owners can’t get it right, someone else, like Apple, will. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| 2009’s Top Products For Amazon: Kindle, Dan Brown, And “Twilight” Posted: 30 Dec 2009 12:57 PM PST  Amazon has just released its "Best of 2009" lists, showing the top-selling devices, books, DVDs, and such from this, the final year of the aughts. And although 2009 has not brought us hovercycles or Lunar colonies, it has brought us love-stricken vampires and a great number of replacements for paper-based book products, both of which sold extremely well. Do you like drawing conclusions from lists? Then buddy, this one's for you.
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| Third Release of Tickets For The Crunchies Awards On Sale Now. Posted: 30 Dec 2009 12:01 PM PST The third (and likely final) batch of 150 tickets to attend the Crunchies Awards are on sale now, courtesy of Eventbrite. Balcony seats are $45 (orchestra is sold out.) If you’re dead set on an orchestra seat, please contact Jeanne Logozzo for sponsorship options. We have creative packages available in all shapes and sizes, such as champagne cocktails, card-game tables, demo tables, photo booths or walls, product giveaways and more. Remember that voting is open through midnight PST, Wednesday, January 6. Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote daily for their favorite people, products and companies of the year.
The Crunchies Awards celebrate the best tech accomplishments of 2009 and will be held at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco on Friday, January 8, 2010 at 7:30 pm PST. Along with our co-hosts, GigaOm and VentureBeat, we will announce the winners from 18 different award categories live on stage from over 125 finalists.
Orchestra and balcony tickets include access to the after party hosted across the street in City Hall’s Grand Rotunda through midnight. There will be a sponsor-hosted bar, savory nibbles and desserts, music and a game room, featuring a mix of traditional and online games to play. Check out more party photos from 2008 and 2007.
Standing ovation to our Crunchies sponsors: after-party co-host Microsoft BizSpark, award benefactor Founders Fund, ustream.tv, specialty cocktail host Grey Goose Vodka, embargo-free beer host Lewis PR, SGN, Zong, DesignAboutTown, Future-Works, Eventbrite, Tap11, Outcast Communications, and Kosmix. Hope to see you there. FINALISTS: If you haven’t already, please contact us asap so we can get you set up with your two complimentary passes to attend. UPDATE: The third batch of tickets have sold out. If any last seats open up, we’ll release them next week. Stay tuned. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Leaked: Swype For Android Beta Unofficially Available For Motorola Droid Posted: 30 Dec 2009 11:41 AM PST
When Swype was nice enough to give us the world’s first hands-on with their ultra-nifty alternative keyboard on the Android platform, I wasn’t about to leak the installation files. It’s just not my style. Now that someone else has gone and leaked them, though, I’m more or less obligated to show you how to get it up and running. I tell you, folks — this blogging thing is one endless inner conflict. Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >> Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Realtime Search-Off: Bing Beats Google To Times Square Bomb Threat News Posted: 30 Dec 2009 11:15 AM PST Times Square was evacuated earlier today when the bomb squad was called in to inspect a suspicious parked van. It turned out to be nothing, but as people were scrambling for information they would have been better off doing a search on Bing than on Google. A search for “Times Square” on Google about 15 minutes after I saw my first Tweet about it turned up two-day old news results up top about New Year’s Eve preperations and generic photos of Times Square, whereas a search on Bing at least had relevant headlines from ABC News (“NYPD: No Bomb Inside Van Abandoned in Times Square”) and CNN (“Police investigate van parked in Times Square”). Of course, Google was perfectly capable of showing the best realtime results. The problem is that the best results were hidden on Google’s realtime updates page (click “Show options” and then “Updates” on any search), and Bing’s Twitter search page, which combines Tweets with headlines. I learned about the bomb scare and subsequent reopening of Times Square on Twitter before it even hit most news sites. But the next thing I did was search on Google. If you look now, Google is finally showing the right news results, but the screenshot above is what I saw when I searched, along with what I saw immediately after on Bing. Google’s realtime results which show what people are saying on Twitter provides much more relevant information than its stale news search results on the main search page. Incidents such as this one show why those realtime results should be on the homepage as well, for both Google and Bing. If this was a real incident, hiding the realtime search results doesn’t do anyone much good.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Zynga CEO Mark Pincus On Charlie Rose Posted: 30 Dec 2009 10:59 AM PST
Pincus brought in a printed out screen of a CafeWorld game they created for Rose. Pincus, President Obama and Hillary Clinton are waiters in the cafe. Rose is the cook. Up to half of all user time spent on social networks is spent playing games, says Pincus. Pincus says his business model is direct payments for enhanced gameplay, and virtual gifts. What didn’t come up at all was Scamville. Rose also steered clear of the growing financial ties between Facebook and Zynga. Watch the full interview here (it will re-air tonight on Bloomberg Television at 8PM and 10PM ET). The transcript is below. CHARLIE ROSE, HOST: Welcome to the broadcast. Tonight, Mark Pincus, (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) MARK PINCUS, FOUNDER AND CEO, ZYNGA: I think there is a social media I think the people regularly are consuming media while they’re at work (END VIDEO CLIP) CHARLIE ROSE: We continue with Michael Specter, the author of (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) MICHAEL SPECTER, AUTHOR: Everyone knows what denial is. Sometimes When society does it, I don’t think it ever is healthy. And I think (END VIDEO CLIP) CHARLIE ROSE: We conclude this evening with the architect Annabelle (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) ANNABELLE SELLDORF, SELLDORF ARCHITECTS: You start with listening CHARLIE ROSE: Pincus, Specter, and Selldorf, next. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) CHARLIE ROSE: Mark Pincus is here. He is the founder and CEO of the Among them is Farmville, which allows users to manage a virtual farm. Zynga’s games are part of growing world of apps available on various I am pleased to have Mark Pincus at the table for the first time. And MARK PINCUS: Thank you. CHARLIE ROSE: Tell me what do you. MARK PINCUS: Sure. So the best way to think about what’s going on And that’s really what’s going on with social networks and smart And if you remember, people complained there’s nothing to do now that And when they opened up their platform and then others like MySpace CHARLIE ROSE: You decided to start this company, and you saw what MARK PINCUS: Well, for me, I had started a social network actually And once Facebook opened up their platform to third parties, I CHARLIE ROSE: And did you have any idea of the potential of it all? MARK PINCUS: I’d say, at first we didn’t realize how big social CHARLIE ROSE: And so those people who correspond in face groups, as MARK PINCUS: We don’t have any particular data, I think only the CHARLIE ROSE: Tell me about “Mafia Wars.” MARK PINCUS: Sure, so “Mafia Wars’” is a game where you form a mafia The key difference is that you are relying on your friends. You’re People have taken it to this much more extreme place where they have CHARLIE ROSE: Great. This is great. MARK PINCUS: This is Charlie’s Cafe. And if you look, you’re the And everybody is building out their restaurants, sometimes in CHARLIE ROSE: Talk a little bit about virtual gifts. MARK PINCUS: Sure. Gifting was from early on when Facebook opened So, if you’re playing the game of Facebook or MySpace you’re building CHARLIE ROSE: Right. For your company, you look ahead, is games between social network MARK PINCUS: Well, you may see something I don’t, but we are excited So, what I mean by that is, our users, these are free games. And one And we are very bullish on the growth that have business, and we’re CHARLIE ROSE: Tend to your own knitting, as someone once said. MARK PINCUS: There are different ways to think about it. There are CHARLIE ROSE: And that’s a business that was not in existence how MARK PINCUS: Three years ago. CHARLIE ROSE: Three years ago. A totally new business. MARK PINCUS: Yes. CHARLIE ROSE: Go ahead. MARK PINCUS: Second is you can look at it by numbers of users. And So I think there are several hundred million users interacting with Third, you can think of it in terms of the revenues, which is good way CHARLIE ROSE: And what’s the prospect say for five years out? MARK PINCUS: Well, you can look to the Asian market where it’s not so I think most analysts predict that the worldwide market will grow to CHARLIE ROSE: You have no particular interest in games but you were MARK PINCUS: I saw that social games looked like a perfect CHARLIE ROSE: How much of it is played by smart phones, on smart MARK PINCUS: It’s actually a smaller percentage. It’s maybe — I’d CHARLIE ROSE: And how many on computers? MARK PINCUS: I’d say that’s probably in the range ever 60 million or CHARLIE ROSE: Will that equation change over the next five years? MARK PINCUS: Yes. It’s changing rapidly. So with the iPhone and CHARLIE ROSE: The Droid and everybody else will be in there with apps MARK PINCUS: Yes. CHARLIE ROSE: The penetration of smart phones will change the world MARK PINCUS: I think that the penetration of the Blackberry has CHARLIE ROSE: Blackberries, and specific, not iPhones but MARK PINCUS: Mostly Blackberries but also iPhones. And I believe And it actually raises our opportunity cost of doing other activities. CHARLIE ROSE: How else is the world changing? Who factors beyond MARK PINCUS: Well, I think there is a social media revolution going I think that people regularly are consuming media while they’re at So, more that my friend is talking about a “Charlie Rose Show,” and I CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly. And so that’s one phenomenon happening. Give MARK PINCUS: Well, I think that more and more people are starting CHARLIE ROSE: See, that’s a huge thing. To say that is a huge thing. MARK PINCUS: I hope I’m right. CHARLIE ROSE: No, but it’s amazing to me, rather than Googling for MARK PINCUS: Yes. I think you may get to a public web and a social CHARLIE ROSE: And define how the two would be different. MARK PINCUS: The public web experience is what you have today. It is And the social web experience is a logged in experience where the Web CHARLIE ROSE: Where are we in terms of the digital revolution? MARK PINCUS: I think we’re very early, 10 percent in. When I started It was amazing to me that there was only five or six. CHARLIE ROSE: And today? MARK PINCUS: Seven. (LAUGHTER) CHARLIE ROSE: But if you are starting out today, and if you were MARK PINCUS: Sure. I’m turned on by all of the things that we do in CHARLIE ROSE: A private sale… MARK PINCUS: So in other words, you join her site, and every day they CHARLIE ROSE: Right. MARK PINCUS: It’s an alternative way to shop. Now, e-commerce could happen through a social lens. I could go to It’s not always obvious where it will be better, and that’s the And I think that they’re going to instantiate new web services. So I CHARLIE ROSE: Are you in it for the money? Are you in it because of MARK PINCUS: That’s a great question. I’m interested in creating And as an entrepreneur, the opportunity to potentially create one of My friends who have had big financial pay outs where they sold their And I think so many of us are really searching for our 20-year career. CHARLIE ROSE: A, congratulations. B, it’s fascinating to learn about MARK PINCUS: Yes, thanks for everything me. CHARLIE ROSE: Thank you. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Twilio Raises $3.7 Million For Powerful Telephony API Posted: 30 Dec 2009 10:45 AM PST
Startup Twilio has raised $3.7 million in Series A funding from Union Square Ventures. The startup previously raised $600,000 in seed funding from The Founders Fund, David Cohen, Mitch Kapor, Manu Kumar Chris Sacca, and other angel investors. Twilio creates a powerful API for phone services that allows developers to quickly integrate telephony functionality into their apps. The company plans to use the new funding for growth in sales and marketing and to further the development of new products. Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger and Founders Fund’s Dave McClure will be joining the startup’s board. The Twilio service allows developers to integrate common phone actions (like placing calls or playing back a recording) using a small set of basic API commands. Building basic projects, like this Rick Roll app, takes only a few lines of code, though developers can create far more advanced applications. In fact, Twilio’s early customers include Cheetos, Earth911, Tumblr, and Sony Music. Twilio’s CEO Jeff Lawson says that the service has also gained traction in the political world. Lawson says that one of the major political parties (he declined to name which one), is using Twilio for advocacy efforts. As we’ve said in the past, Twilio has a solid business plan and technology. Founded in 2007, Twilio is still relatively young but has seen some major customer growth. Of course, there are other enterprise-focused solutions that offer similar functionality, but Twilio’s offering and pricing seems to be appealing to many organizations and businesses, including a few Fortune 500 companies. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Evernote Reaches Two Million Lifeloggers, Half Of Them Are On The iPhone Posted: 30 Dec 2009 10:15 AM PST  The idea of a life recorder that captures every moments of your life on video is still a bit of a tech fantasy, but an early version of the life recorder already exists. It is called Evernote, the popular iPhone (and now Android) app which lets you record your memories by snapping geo-tagged photos, making voice notes, or just text notes and making it easy to search through them. Evernote does not yet support video recording other than as an attachment (for premium subscribers), but when that becomes more practical it will. “Evernote is definitely positioned to be the lifelogging tool of choice,” says CEO Phil Libin. “That ambient video capture was my original plan for Evernote—always recording, not storing, you bookmark it—that is exactly what we want to do.” Next year Evernote will introduce voice search, which will be a big step towards that ultimate vision (if you can search audio, you can search through what was said in videos). But full life recording is still a few years out. For now, Libin is more focussed on polishing his current product as it enters the mainstream. Evernote just reached 2 million unique users, only 7 months after reaching its first million. It took Evernote half the time (233 days) to get to the second million milestone than it did the first million (433 days). These numbers are total unique logins over the life of the service. The more interesting numbers are the number of active users over the past 30 days, which has also doubled to 700,000 from 360,000 since last May. Those users have created a total of 76 million notes, up from 36 million in May. But most importantly, the number of premium paid subscribers has gone from about 14,000 in May to 35,000. Premium members get more storage and features for $45 a year. The conversion rate for premium subscribers is also going up. Evernote is converting 4.9 percent of monthly active users to premium accounts, up from a 3.75 percent conversion rate seven months ago. Unlike most apps, which see sharp drop-offs after only a few months, the longer someone stays on Evernote, the more likely they are to but a premium subscription. In the first month after signing up, about 50 to 60 percent of people drop off and only 0.5 percent sign up for a premium membership. But after the first month, retention stabilizes, and by the time people are using Evernote for 12 months, the conversion rate becomes 2 percent, and 6 percent for those on the service for 18 months (and that’s counting all those drop-offs in the first few weeks, the conversion rate for active users 18 months out is 20 percent). This pattern in conversion rates makes sense, since users are basically storing their memories in Evernote and the more they do that the more valuable it becomes to them. ” You can use it for free,” says Libin, “but we want people to use it forever, so that your memories in Evernote become the most valuable thing you have, period.” Libin says the company is profitable on a gross margin basis. He is able to cover all of his variable costs from revenues, and is on track to become fully profitable over the next 18 months. In November, Libin raised another $10 million, bringing the total raised to $26 million. “We definitely sold the vision, but nobody would have bought without the metrics,” says Libin of how he raised the money. Trying to become the de facto life recorder is a long ten-year vision. Evernote’s steady traction in attracting premium subscribers is what will allow it to get there. Evernote’s new users per day keeps growing every time it launches on a new platform or an upgrade (as it did over Christmas for its iPhone app, which now offers local storage). Those 2 million cumulative users are spread across iPhones (49 percent), Windows desktops (30 percent), Web browsers (29 percent), Mac clients (17 percent), Palm Pres (4.4 percent), Windows Mobile (3.9 percent), Blackberries (3.8 percent), and Android (1.4 percent). These device percentages add up to more than 100 because some people use Evernote on more than one device. Looking at new users per day is more instructive. For instance, the Android app which just launched two weeks ago is signing up about 2,000 new users per day, about the same as the iPhone app. iPhone users represent 34 percent of daily active users, but Android already represents 3.4 percent—more than Windows Mobile, Blackberry or Palm Pre (which are all range from 1.2 percent to 1.8 percent). Libin thinks Android will contribute significant growth in 2010. At its current rate of signing up about 6,000 new users a day, Evernote should hit its next million-user milestone in 166 days.   Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Hidden Mac Gem: DigitalColor Meter Posted: 30 Dec 2009 10:15 AM PST
I’ve been using a Macintosh computer for a few years now, but just a few a weeks ago, I decided to look in my Utilities folder—one of those spur of the moment kind of things. I found the regular utilities like Activity Monitor, Airport Utility, Console, and Migration Assistant, but what I just stumbled on was something that has saved me so many times from that point on. DigitalColor Meter. Apple likes to secretly tuck away their best utilities in folders that people will most likely never end up using. So what makes DigitalColor Meter so special? The app does a lot of things, but what I found most useful was the ability for me to hover over any pixel on my screen, and to find out the exact RGB value (read up on RGB here). This is a great tool that I’ve used in many scenarios with great success. For example, my Twitter background was all done through DigitalColor Meter, since I knew the colors I liked, but I just needed their RGB values. So, I whipped open DigitalColor Meter, it told me the RGB values, and bam — I have a new custom-colored Twitter background. If you want check out DigitalColor Meter in action, check out the video I did below detecting TechCrunch’s RGB colors all over the site. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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We’ve always had a lot of fun with Indianapolis-based startup 
Anyone who follows 
Back in November, I wrote up a review of the new Magic Mouse, noting that it was “
It’s been a big year for 
Charlie Rose welcomed Zynga CEO 
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