The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets
- Google Experimenting With Browser Login For Chrome OS
- Rummble Sends In Local Heroes Against Foursquare’s Mayors
- Microsoft Licenses Flight Simulator Technology To Flight1
- Dictionary.com’s iPhone App Agent X Word Helps You Solve Crossword Puzzles On The Go
- Quicktime Vets Bring Mobile Video And Photo Sharing With Thwapr (Beta Launch)
- Yahoo’s 2010 Turn-Around Strategy Revealed: A Cycling Team
- Nook Shipments Pushed Back Again? Nearly Impossible To Cancel Orders?
- Rackspace Goes Down. Again. Takes The Internet With It. Again.
- PayPal Rolls Out Send Money App For BlackBerry
- iRewardChart Gets Your Kids To Shoot For The Stars… And Behave
- Avatar Screening In Three Hours. Here’s Five Last Tickets
- Google Grabs Plaxo’s CTO To “Turbocharge” The Opening Of The Social Web
- Check In: Has Operation Chokehold Affected Your AT&T Connectivity?
- Facebook Sets A Date For Its Third f8 Conference. Expect Another Huge Announcement
- The Colossus: My Favorite Company I Met in South America
- Twitter App Store oneforty Raises $1.6 Million, With More On The Way
- The Anatomy of The Twitter Attack: Part II
- Indie iPhone Game Doodle Jump Passes 1 Million Downloads
- This Week On TechCrunch: Iran takes back Twitter, RockYou makes data portability too easy, Lacy in South America and more…
- Top Tech Acquisitions Of 2009
| Stealth Startups, Get Over Yourselves: Nobody Cares About Your Secrets Posted: 19 Dec 2009 06:03 AM PST
When Preetam Mukherjee started Marcellus.tv in March 2007, his company was one of the very few players in the professional online video hosting space. He believed he was building a killer product that would become a blockbuster and would compete handily with the one established player in the space, Brightcove. To ensure that he wouldn’t tip off any potential competitors, he went into “stealth mode”. Secrecy was the key to success. He would not even tell his close friends what he was building until his product was complete (after all, who can you trust these days?). Then he would send Mike Arrington an email, get a TechCrunch feature and watch fame and fortune beat a path to his door. But as happens to nearly all secretive startups like Marcellus, the blockbuster never materialized, and the attention never came. When Marcellus did come out of stealth in September 2008, there were many online video platforms available, most of which had better features than Marcellus. Preetam got his TechCrunch mention and experienced a huge spike in traffic for a few days. But when the dust settled, he found himself back in obscurity. Moreover, it was like having a really bad hangover—his product didn’t entirely meet customer needs and no one seemed to care. As I’ll tell you later, Preetam’s story does have a happier ending, but that’s not how it is for most startups. That’s the problem with stealth. Startup guru, Eric Reis says one or two of every 10 companies he meets have what he calls a "stealth-disease”. They are too afraid to show something imperfect to the world or are afraid that a competitor will steal their idea. And they think that when they launch their product will make front-page news and grant them blockbuster success. Wasn’t it Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door”? Well, Emerson was wrong. The harsh reality is that even if you did build a better mousetrap, no one would find you. To be known, you have to have a great story and tell it to the right people. And to build a great product, you need to get all the feedback you can from potential customers, marketing experts, venture capitalists, lawyers and accountants. When you’re starting up, you usually have a great idea and think you know what your customers need. But your customers don't even know what they need—they know what they don't like and think they know what they want—but they don't know what they need. Customers will ultimately buy only those things they really need – no matter how good your product or sales pitch. Learning what a customer needs is an iterative process. You try something, get feedback. Both you and your customer learn more and you try again. You keep doing this until you have something which is so compelling that the customer will pay money to have it—that's when you know you have a killer product. But you can't get feedback if you're in stealth. You only have yourself to talk to. Most entrepreneurs say they are in stealth because they are worried about competitors stealing their ideas. This can be a risk if you have such a simple idea that just by hearing it, someone can replicate it. If this is the case, then you do have a lot to worry about. But even in this case, what will ultimately make the difference between success and failure isn’t your idea but your ability to execute and dominate your market very fast. You need a superb management team including top notch marketing and sales staff, great industry connections, and deep-pocked investors. You aren’t going to get any of these things by staying locked up in your basement. If you’re competing with the big guys and are worried about them stealing your ideas, it's the same story—it boils down to execution. As Eric Reis says, “If a startup can’t innovate faster than a much larger competitor, stealth isn’t going to make the difference —they’re toast”. It may also be that fear of big companies is overblown: those who have worked for one know that it’s incredibly hard to get a manager at a big company to do something new, even if your goal is to give your ideas away. What about the big PR moment? This is also not so simple. To get beyond a TechCrunch launch feature, you need to build a relationship with journalists and analysts. They need to speak to your customers and learn what they think of you. They want to see detailed market analysis and to gain a deep understanding of why this market is important. Beyond press mentions, PR is about relationships. If you want to get quoted, you need to be an easy source—be accessible, willing to give information on background, and don’t expect to be quoted. There is no linear ROI in PR, which can be hard for techies to understand. It’s all about relationships and patience. Once you are mentioned in one publication, then it becomes much easier to leverage that into other coverage because you have a stamp of approval. But make no mistake, PR is a never ending process. One TechCrunch article may be a good beginning but it is never sufficient to ensure the success of a company. So all that time you spend in stealth not talking to journalists is time your competition has to build a strong relationship with the media while you sit around admiring yourself in the mirror. In a few rare instances, stealth may make some sense. Celebrity involvement is one example pointed out to me by Mike Butorin, founder of Projec.to and Song.ly. If Ashton Kutcher is launching a company, then operating in public may actually distract the engineers from their jobs to the point that nothing gets done due to the media circus that ensues. Another good reason to be in stealth is if a company is built around a technology or idea that it hopes to patent but has not yet filed. In that case, stealth protects the intellectual property and the future of the company by raising high barriers to entry in the future. But these types of examples represent the tiny minority of startups. Most startups use ideas that others have had and will live or die based on how well they execute on those ideas. So how did things turn out for Marcellus.tv and Preetam? They managed to recover from stealth-disease but only barely. After launch, Marcellus.tv spent a year in a closed beta, performing rapid-fire iteration based on regular feedback from early customers. Marcellus launched out of beta as a white-label video hosting and streaming service in August 2009 and was one of many in the space. But the company managed to keep prices at rock-bottom levels through smart usage of cloud computing. The sales team worked the phones and existing customers both to get feedback and leads. Word spread and the customer base grew. They expect to be profitable early next year. The company never developed a PR juggernaut but having loyal customers willing to recommend the service to others has thus far overcome that weak spot. Preetam’s parting shot to me was quite clear. “To hell with stealth,” he wrote in an email. Words to live—or die—by. Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Google Experimenting With Browser Login For Chrome OS Posted: 19 Dec 2009 02:15 AM PST
The feature was first mentioned on October 13: “Using Chrome as our login manager has a number of potential benefits. There are lots of potential benefits to having users log into machines via the browser. In particular it makes syncing easier and furthers the notion that you can log into any Chrome OS machine and have exactly the same experience as you would on any other machine. The fact that users can’t download any software to Chrome OS computers furthers this experience. But it’s also clearly interesting from an identity standpoint. Facebook and Twitter are both making strong plays as the defacto online identity for hundreds of millions of Internet users. Facebook Connect in particular is becoming a very popular way for third party sites to easily add identity and login features to apps (it’s what we use on our own CrunchBase). But people using Chrome OS devices will be logging into the Internet first and foremost with a Google account, or via Friend Connect (which currently allows signin via Google, Twitter, Yahoo, AIM, Netlog, OpenID, etc.). By centralizing authentication once, Google can then use the same Friend Connect credentials to automatically login to sites that support it. If Chrome OS becomes popular, it will be a very powerful weapon for Google to compete with Facebook Connect. See here for a look at how Mozilla is thinking about all of this. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Rummble Sends In Local Heroes Against Foursquare’s Mayors Posted: 18 Dec 2009 05:02 PM PST
The feature is called “Local Heroes” and is billed as “the fun side of Rummbling” but it is quite obviously going to be Rumbble’s way of attacking the buzz surrounding the game of checking-in and becoming a “Mayor” of a location as propogated by the New York-based Foursquare. Local Heroes is a feature listed under “Empire” which suggests that there will be yet more gaming elements introduced. Rummble has until now relied on its users to create content about places they visit and rate their friends’ ability to do so – what it calls the Rummble trust network. But clearly that’s not quite enough in the face of big players like Qype, dominant in Europe for local reviews, and Yelp in the U.S. So Rummble is entering the social location gaming pushed by the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Microsoft Licenses Flight Simulator Technology To Flight1 Posted: 18 Dec 2009 05:00 PM PST
On the heels of the whole Plurk fiasco, Microsoft has struck a deal to license its visual simulation technology to Flight1 Aviation Technologies, According to a release, Microsoft will be licensing its ESP v1.0 object code, which will let the flight technology company create detailed, customized flight safety, flight training and strategic solutions for its customers. Microsoft’s ESP, which is a visual simulation software platform, lets users simulate being in various types of vehicles and modes of transport, letting users feel like they are operating the vehicles. Flight1 Tech will use the technology to create visual simulations to help train users to fly planes. Microsoft also recently licensed its ESP technology to Lockheed Martin, to help train warfighters in battle. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that its Flight Simulator studio was being shut down but it was unclear what the future of the technology would be. It looks like Microsoft will continue to monetize by licensing the technology. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Dictionary.com’s iPhone App Agent X Word Helps You Solve Crossword Puzzles On The Go Posted: 18 Dec 2009 04:29 PM PST
If you enjoy crossword puzzles, you are going to love Dictionary.com’s new iPhone app, Agent X Word. The app, which is $2.99 in the App Store, is the ultimate crossword solver. The new app leverages Dictionary.com’s proprietary natural-language technology and semantic search capabilities to provide an actual answer (or up to three hints if you just need a little help). Agent X Word will provide more than two million hints and answers for over 30,000 crossword puzzles updated daily and claims to understand pop culture and current events. The app will offer definitions and synonyms for answers as well as other features such as recent search history and the ability to email answers to yourself or others. If you aren't sure you want the answer revealed, the app can provide up to three hints per clue, to help you solve the puzzle yourself. Dictionary.com’s free iPhone app, which launched in April, has been downloaded more than four million times. The app lets you look up definitions and synonyms from Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com, reaching into a database of more than 275,000 definitions and 80,000 synonyms. The app also features audio pronunciations, similarly spelled words and Word of the Day. The company also recently launched a BlackBerry App and released its API to partners to incorporate into various applications, including e-books. Dictionary.com was bought by IAC-run Ask.com in July of 2008 when the conglomerate bought Lexico, the operator of Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Quicktime Vets Bring Mobile Video And Photo Sharing With Thwapr (Beta Launch) Posted: 18 Dec 2009 03:38 PM PST
Sharing videos on the Web is easy: Upload to YouTube or Facebook, send out a link. Sharing videos on mobile phones is still a pain. The iPhone tries to make it easier by letting you upload directly to YouTube, but what if you want to share a video privately? Sending videos between phones is cumbersome. A new service that just launched in beta called Thwapr seeks to solve this problem by letting you simply uploading videos from your phone to the Web and then texting or emailing a link to your friends. Thwapr already works with 165 phones, from iPhones and Androids to Blackberries and Samsungs. After you sign up, you can email your photos or videos to Thwapr, and then share them from there to any mobile phone that supports links in text messages. As you add contacts to Thwapr, you can select them by name. The recipients get a text message with a link which opens up their mobile browser and takes them to Thwapr’s mobile website. They can see the shared photo or video and “Thwap” back a response, creating a conversation around the image. Each mobile video needs to be 20 MB or less for now. Videos are delivered a variety of ways based on the type of phone the viewer is using. On the iPhone, they come as progressive downloads which open up in the Quicktime player. Other phones support streaming video. Older Blaackberries would get the video as a file download, and Thwapr can even deliver videos as rough animated gif images for phones which can’t handle anything else. Thwapr’s CTO Eric Hoffert worked on the original Quicktime team at Apple, as did COO Duncan Kennedy. Now they want to open up new video experiences on mobile phones. Thwapr is meant for private sharing, but a public sharing option is in the works. And while Thwapr is launching via the mobile browser, the company is putting the finishing touches on an iPhone app, and has plans for Android, Blackberry, and other apps as well. the apps will remove the two-step process of having to send a video or photo via email and then open up the browser to manage to sharing options. The apps will also tie in directly to your phone’s address book, and take advantage of notifications. Thwapr is really built for video. Hoffert considers it to be a type of image communications system which is an improvement on MMS. “With MMS,” he says, “the experience ends with the delivery of the picture. With Thwapr, we are trying to show that the experience begins with the delivery of the picture.” The picture or video is supposed to spark a conversation. Other startups, such as Tiny Pictures (which was acquired by Shutterfly), have followed this road before through dedicated apps. Perhaps Thwapr will have more luck taking an open Web approach. The company was founded in 2007, and is funded with more than $2 million from angel investors. Thwapr plans to eventually charge for premium accounts (more storage, more Thwaps/month), geo-targeted mobile display or video ads, and possible sponsored Thwaps for movie trailers, music videos, and brand advertising.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Yahoo’s 2010 Turn-Around Strategy Revealed: A Cycling Team Posted: 18 Dec 2009 03:10 PM PST
Revenues are down. Search share is down. The social stuff has been outsourced to Facebook. The search stuff is about to be outsourced to Bing. Things are not exactly on the up and up. Not even just one “up.” But it would appear that Yahoo is not one to let grim news stand in the way of its latest ridiculous endeavor: Starting a cycling team. Yes, in 2010, the company will officially launch the Yahoo! Cycling Team. CyclingNews.com has more details, including that they’ve hired a former professional rider, Kevin Klein, to not only run the team, but to deliver a “successful business model” out of the thing. But here’s the best part: “The whole idea behind the Yahoo! Cycling Team is the recruitment of high tech professionals in the Silicon Valley and to provide a platform for partners to achieve more involvement at the community level. If you do it right, everyone should win and grow their business,” Klein tells CyclingNews. Um, what? I cannot for the life of me figure out what he’s actually saying. This team is about recruiting high tech professionals? To ride bikes? It’s a platform? Community? I’m surprised he didn’t throw “geolocation” or “realtime” in there to meet a buzzword quota. Actually, maybe even better is that Yahoo apparently went ahead with this idea based on a survey. “An online survey targeted at Silicon Valley Professionals revealed that an astonishing 50 percent are cycling enthusiasts and follow the local scene. The results were presented to the Yahoo! Management, the internet services company which operates the third most-visited website in the world, and prompted it to come onboard as the main partner to launch America’s newest team in 2010: Yahoo! Cycling Team,” CyclingNews reports. Ahh, so this is all about pleasing that huge, but under-represented cycling contingent in Silicon Valley. It’s good to know that Yahoo’s management is weighing all their options to make 2010 the year that Yahoo storms back. But what I most want to know is, if the team fails to deliver four races in, will Yahoo outsource the sponsorship to Facebook or Bing? Here’s the website Yahoo will be launching for the team early next year. And they already have a Twitter page. Why is Yahoo spending money on this again?
[image via] [thanks Andreas] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Nook Shipments Pushed Back Again? Nearly Impossible To Cancel Orders? Posted: 18 Dec 2009 03:08 PM PST  We just got a troubling tip from a concerned Nook buyer. I say buyer because he still hasn't received his Nook. He ordered the Barnes & Noble ebook reader on November 12 and the device was originally supposed to ship on November 30th. But you may recall that date was pushed back to December 11th Frustrated by the delay, he successfully completed the cancellation process on BN.com only to get an email several hours later that stated his order cannot be canceled because it "has entered the shipping process" even though according to B&N's own website, the Nook will not ship for another three days. Now that's some bull.
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| Rackspace Goes Down. Again. Takes The Internet With It. Again. Posted: 18 Dec 2009 02:17 PM PST
The failure apparently originated in the company’s Dallas-area server farm. But unlike previous times, this does not appear to be a power issue, the company says. Some other sites that are currently affected include: 37signals, Brizzly, Scoble’s blog, all of the sites hosted by Laughing Squid, Tumblr custom domains, and many others. This is another black eye for the company, though they are generally responsive with other issues we’ve had throughout our time with them. But until they can prove to be more reliable, we’ve decided to get a backup version of TechCrunch up and running at another datacenter, for when someone inevitably trips over a power cord at the Dallas Rackspace center again. Here’s a few updates from the company:
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| PayPal Rolls Out Send Money App For BlackBerry Posted: 18 Dec 2009 01:23 PM PST
PayPal is finally extending its money transfer system to the BlackBerry, with a new, free Send Money app for the Blackberry. The app will let you access your PayPal account and easily send money to a recipient. You can find on the BlackBerry App World here. The app will also tap into your contact list on the phone making it simple to choose a recipient to send money too. Users can also access their recent PayPal transactions and monitor their account balances directly from the app. You can even send money in 23 different currencies, with the app available in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Ireland, Portugal and Australia. The BlackBerry PayPal app joins its iPhone and Android app cousins. While the new BlackBerry app is minor compared to some of the recent innovations PayPal has launched, it still represents the company’s greater strategy of becoming the next wave of payments technology. PayPal’s parent company eBay, has made a big push in the mobile space so its safe to assume that PayPal will continue to focus on mobile opportunities in the coming year. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| iRewardChart Gets Your Kids To Shoot For The Stars… And Behave Posted: 18 Dec 2009 01:10 PM PST
The startup, which is a a recent graduate of the Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institute, launched an iPhone application earlier this month that you can grab here (or you can try the free lite version). When you first fire up the app, you’ll be asked to enter your child’s name, photo, and a set of tasks they are charged with on a weekly basis. Example tasks include things like “Help Mom”, “Clean up toys”, and various behavior categories. When they complete one of these tasks, you reward them with virtual stars. These stars are the app’s currency. The better your kids behave, the more stars they earn. All the while, they’re looking to get enough stars to ‘purchase’ whatever prizes you’ve made available. For example, you might tell your child that if they earn 30 stars, they can take a trip to the movies. Or you could offer to convert stars in exchange for cash. As with the tasks, these are all up to you to determine (though the app comes with some suggestions). The premium version of the app (which costs $4.99) allows parents to monitor an unlimited number of children, tasks and rewards. The free version is limited to one child, with a maximum of three tasks. Founder Satyajit Sahu says that the company could also offer multiple versions for different use cases. For example, day care centers could use a version suited for large groups. You could obviously do most of this with some markers and paper, but using iRewardChart has a couple of advantages. For one, it allows parents to track their child’s behavior over a long period of time, so they can look back and identify any trends. And while the app is pretty basic at this point, Sahu has some bigger plans. He wants to offer a web version of iRewardChart that would let kids monitor their performance, and he also says that the app will soon be able to sync between multiple phones (so two parents can share one account). iRewardChart could eventually offer parents and kids something akin to a ‘banking for kids’ service, allowing children to monitor their current star count as an analog for real money.  Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Avatar Screening In Three Hours. Here’s Five Last Tickets Posted: 18 Dec 2009 12:49 PM PST
Verdict: Flawless. Epic. Awesome. I can’t wait to see it again in three hours. We’re pleased to announce that all attendees will get a medium popcorn and medium soda free of charge, thanks to our four sponsors: Building43 – A great resource for learning about how to leverage the web’s newest tools. Mashery – A powerful API management service. Kontera – Provider of in-text advertising generated based on the content around it. SingleFeed – Helps retailers manage product listings on multiple shopping sites through one feed.  The tickets for the screening tonight are long gone, and we have a short waitlist (most of the waitlist should get in). But just for fun we’re giving away five last tickets. Want one? Just tell us a joke (we need a good laugh right now). Just type it in, link to a video, or whatever. Whoever is funniest gets the tickets. We’ll pick the winners at 2. Here’s one of my favorite all time: Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Google Grabs Plaxo’s CTO To “Turbocharge” The Opening Of The Social Web Posted: 18 Dec 2009 12:19 PM PST
Smarr is joining Google to “help drive a new company-wide focus on the future of the Social Web,” he writes on his personal blog today. And it seems like a good fit considering that he had been doing things of that nature for Plaxo for nearly 8 years now. In fact, he was the first non-founder to join Plaxo and helped take the social contact list from a tiny company to one that was bought by Comcast last year for $150 million. Most recently, Smarr was officially Plaxo’s Chief Technology Officer. The transition to Google should be a pretty easy one of Smarr as he’s worked with them as a partner for Plaxo on a number of projects over the years. He’s also well-connected in the social web and is one of the leading advocates of open standards. In that regard, he closely resembles Marks, who is now with British Telecom. “Like all incoming Google engineers, my official title for the first year will be ‘member of technical staff’,” Smarr tells us. “The work is on turbocharging the opening up of the social web,” he continues. At Google, he’ll be reporting the David Glazer, an engineering director. Smarr notes his excitement for the various technologies that Google has helped develop over the years to make the web a more dynamic place. He also writes that Google is “unmatched” with its commitment to the open web, and standards like OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and others (like Webfinger, a pretty interesting new one, based on an old concept). That said, Google hasn’t exactly been the most social setting on the web, largely because its services are spread over such a wide range of areas. Facebook, in contrast, is largely a walled garden (that is trying to open up more, to the dismay of some) that has a tightly wound social experience. Google Friend Connect, a key part of OpenSocial, has not be able to gather the buzz that Facebook Connect has, but Google is clearly trying to help it gain steam. It recently revamped the service and even implemented Twitter to help foster its growth. Speaking of Facebook, they recently hired another one of the key players in the open web, Dave Recordon, who came over from Six Apart. All of these guys travel in the same circles and their interests seem pretty aligned, so it will be interesting to see what, if any, relationships they can foster with their parent companies for the good of the open web. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Check In: Has Operation Chokehold Affected Your AT&T Connectivity? Posted: 18 Dec 2009 12:18 PM PST
It’s just after 12 o’clock here on the left coast, which means Operation Chokehold should now be in full effect. What that means (if anything at all) is still up in the air — which is why we’re turning to you for a status report. For the uninitiated: Operation Chokehold is a sort of cyber-protest against AT&T, as conjured up by some dude playing a dude disguised as another dude. For one solid hour between 12 and 1 Pacific, angry iPhone owners are supposed to gobble up as much data as they can in an “attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees.” Read the rest of this post at MobileCrunch >> Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Facebook Sets A Date For Its Third f8 Conference. Expect Another Huge Announcement Posted: 18 Dec 2009 11:45 AM PST
In May 2007, Facebook used the event to launch Facebook Platform, which has spurred the creation of 500,000 Facebook apps to date. A year later, the second f8 saw the debut of Facebook Connect, which has since been used to integrate Facebook’s social graph with 80,000 sites (including TechCrunch). Suffice to say, we can probably expect something big coming this April. Facebook’s blog post announcing the dates is unsurprisingly vague about what we can expect. The site actually actually mentioned the upcoming conference back in October, when it said would was coming in the “first half of 2010″. In that post, it offered some similarly vague details.
I’m guessing we’ll at least see its payments system roll out more broadly. But f8 may also be the place where Facebook launches its long-awaited geo-location support, for which developer support will be key. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| The Colossus: My Favorite Company I Met in South America Posted: 18 Dec 2009 11:37 AM PST
"Why are you sending me a video about….farm equipment?" "Just watch it."
"Oh my God! What is it doing to that tree!?"
"Turn up the volume. You have to hear the music." I probably could just embed said video and hit publish, but the Colossus—the world's largest and possibly most badass olive harvesting machine—deserves a few more words than that. And so does the company behind it, MaqTec, which spent ten painstaking years building a business that sells $500,000 pieces of farm equipment from the middle of nowhere in Argentina. I know, farm equipment isn't really a regular beat at TechCrunch, but take away the product and the story of the Colossus is just like any story of a scrappy software, hardware, Web or gaming company that saw a big innovation hole in the market and decided it could go up against bigger, lazier competitors who'd dropped the ball on innovation. Only in this case, it wasn't Microsoft or Yahoo. It was John Deere and Caterpillar. To be fair to those lazy giants, the Colossus is attacking (and if you watch the video, you know that's the right word) a small farming niche: High-density olive groves. But that's exactly how most successful Silicon Valley startups skip around the plodding feet of tech giants: They find a market opportunity big enough to be a business, but small enough the big guys won't see it or care about it. (Yet.) That was the formula for Intuit, Adobe, Siebel or more recently Flickr and YouTube. I met Martin Bonadeo and Jose Mourelle, MaqTec's founders, at Endeavor's International Selection Panel in Patagonia two weeks ago and was so captivated I trucked out to Venado Tuerto Santa Fe—aka the middle of Argentina— the following week to see the machine in person. It was a long drive full of pretty much flat farmland. "If you've seen Iowa—you've seen Argentina," Bonadeo said. But it gave me plenty of time to hear Bonadeo's story. This guy isn't Indian, but trust me, he's got enough Jugaad to fuel Argentina for the next forty years. Simply put, this is a company that never should have succeeded, but did through smarts, trial-and-error and sheer "no-we-can-build-this-company-in-rural-Argentina" force-of-will. The idea was born back in the late 1990s. Argentina offered a tax benefit to encourage the planting of some 70,000 hectares of olive trees in poor areas of the country. Argentina had less than 20,000 hectares before the change. The catch was these groves had to be high density, a minimum of 300 trees per hectare. The incentives have worked well enough that Argentina's Ministry of Economy and Production estimates that the country could be a top ten producer of the world's olive oil supply within the next decade. Olive groves take about three years to mature and Bonadeo—a self-proclaimed "soybean man" and long-time farmer—noticed a problem before a lot of other people: Who was going to harvest all these olives? Harvesting olives is expensive and time-consuming and has to be done in a 70-day window. There just wasn't the labor in Argentina, especially given the high-density plots. It would take 800 people to harvest 1,200 hectares. “That’s more like a military operation than agriculture,” Mourelle says. So began years of trial and error building the Colossus, a huge machine that, crassly put, It was a humble beginning. Bonadeo barely had a working prototype and no customers. There's no such thing as venture capital in Argentine farm country. Without money, he couldn't build more machines. Bonadeo used to befriend olive farm managers to find out when the owners would be in town. He and his team would crowd into a van and tow the Colossus over for cold calls. Sometimes he was laughed at, sometimes the owner wouldn't be there after all. "There's no way you guys can build this business from here," potential buyers said, even when they saw the machine working. It was disheartening. The only reason the first Colossus was sold was luck. Two farms were close to signing, but not quite ready to commit to the pricey $500,000 sticker price. So the smaller one called up the larger one and offered to split it with him and share the machine. Simply out of Argentine machismo the owner of the larger farm decided he wasn't going halfsies on any farm equipment, called Bonadeo into his office and said he had five minutes to make a sale. "What'd you say?" I asked. "Hamana…hamana…hamana…" he joked. It didn't matter what he said, the man bought one anyway. Soon after that an Australian company placed and order for three machines. Three! "Not bad, fat boy," Bonadeo said to himself. MaqTec was in business. Today, it's still an uncertain slog. Mourelle is the salesman and he spends much of that time flying around the world selling machines, while Bonadeo manages everything on the ground. He spent much of the week before his Endeavor pitch trying to get some Swedish tires out of Argentine customs. I have to admit my original hope in driving so far to see the Colossus was that they'd let me drive one. Mourelle told me I only needed to watch a 45-minute instructional video to be qualified. (I love South America.) But alas—due to such constraints in parts and working capital—there wasn't one with tires that wasn't already sold and at a customer's farm. But seeing how one was built was more impressive in person. Not because it's elaborate but because the "factory" is so sparse. Each machine is comprised of parts from scores of local vendors and international companies and welded together in big, open garage-like workshops. Sure the rooms are big, but so is the Colossus. It's hard to fit more than one in there at a time. The biggest concern over MaqTec's future isn't so much John Deere building a me-too product. Should the Colossus become a serious enough threat to the $23 billion company, it'll likely do what the big tech companies do: Make MaqTec an acquisition offer. The bigger concern is whether Mourelle and Bonadeo have it in them to keep slogging away at a difficult business that's made only more difficult by capital constraints and the challenges of building a company amid the soybean fields of Argentina. The two are definitely tired. They probably need some money and definitely need to fill out their management ranks to give each of them a break. But I'm not giving up on them. On paper, they shouldn't have made it this far. They've innovated in a forgotten space with huge competitors in a place with no inherent advantages. What's managing growth compared to that? Watch the video below to see the Colossus in action. [NOTE: The bizarre similarity between MaqTec and TechCrunch's logo and video intros are just sheer, weird coincidence.]
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| Twitter App Store oneforty Raises $1.6 Million, With More On The Way Posted: 18 Dec 2009 10:56 AM PST
Twitter app directory oneforty has raised $1.6 million, according to an SEC filing. Of that, a previously undisclosed $375,000 is in the form of convertible debt already raised in a couple of angel rounds last year (which are converting to stock). So the company was able to raise $1.25 million in new money, and the filing indicates that the total offering amount will be $2.4 million, meaning that more might be on the way before the current Series A round is complete. Oneforty currently lists more than 2,000 Twitter apps and ranks them based on both their popularity on the site and across the Web. The company makes affiliate revenues for paid apps (mostly on the iPhone), but could eventually charge app developers for featured spots on its homepage. Rumors surfaced in October about Twitter buying the service, but that never happened. Oneforty was part of the Boston Techstars Class of 2009. Contacted for comment, oneforty CEO Laura Fitton (aka @pistachio) said she couldn’t speak about the funding beyond the information in the filing, but that her charity @wellwishes is raising money for Charity Water this year and the NHL is donating two tickets to the Winter Classic at Fenway Park in Boston. No, I don’t know what that has to do with her funding either. Update: The likely venture investor is Flybridge Capital Partners, since general parter Jeff Bussgang is listed as a director on the SEC filing. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| The Anatomy of The Twitter Attack: Part II Posted: 18 Dec 2009 10:53 AM PST
During and after Twittergate, when a hacker broke into a few hosted email accounts and obtained a number of internal documents, I had an opportunity to spend hours speaking to the actual attacker and document how he carried out the attack. The article was called The Anatomy of The Twitter Attack, and today we unfortunately find ourselves with a sequel to that post as the Twitter DNS servers were compromised last night and the site was redirected to a defacement page. Unlike last time, on this occasion I have not had the benefit of speaking directly to the attackers, but have spoken to a number of people within the underground security scene familiar with matters and have constructed other parts of the story from public sources. The incident last night was perpetrated by a group called the Iranian Cyber Army – and we have been told that this group is working with the Iranian government. The attack occurred at the same time as a number of other diplomatic incidents, including the escalation of diplomatic hostilities between Iran and the US/EU as well as an incursion by Iranian troops into a disputed border area containing an oil field. The defacement was carried out by hijacking the servers hosting the DNS records for the twitter.com domain (this is the server that maps the domain name to an IP address). The attackers modified the DNS records to point to an IP address with a web server hosting the defacement page. The twitter.com domain (registered with NetworkSolutions) was not hijacked, nor were its records altered. The DNS records for Twitter are hosted at Dyn. A company that provides DNS hosting for over 100,000 domain names and provides other services for companies. We have been told, but have yet to confirm, that the account password recovery feature was used to reset the password for the Twitter account at Dyn. When we checked the password recovery page, it contains a request to contact Dyn directly – there is no form of any type. We have not been able to confirm is there was an automated process at this page which has since been taken down.
To reset the password to gain access to the account hosting DNS records, the attacker had access to the email address associated with the account. Twitter hosts all email on Google Apps for Domain, which played a central role in the previous attack on Twitter not because of any vulnerability within the application itself, but because of a lapse in password policies which lead to a minor account being compromised, which lead to other accounts being compromised. The attackers gained access to the Twitter account at Dyn, and changed the DNS records for Twitter.com to point to an IP address that was on the anonymous Tor network. The attackers seemed to have changed all the records at Twitter.com, including sub-domains used for the API, the status page, etc. but because of varying caching levels and the fact that some clients were using a direct IP address not all services were affected immediately. For most users the main Twitter web application was displaying the defacement page for just under an hour. This type of attack is not very sophisticated, but it is extremely effective. It was not a direct vulnerability with the DNS server but rather with the accounts system and email addresses. While the Twitter application was not compromised, desktop applications and websites that directly send a users username and password back to Twitter over plain HTTP would have sent this information to the attackers IP address, from where it could easily have been harvested. The solution to similar problems revolves around the management of account passwords, especially with critical services such as DNS hosting. Further, since the status page for Twitter was hosted on the same domain as the main site, it was also inactive during the period of time that the defacement was up on the site and for a short time afterwards while Twitter responded to the attack. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Indie iPhone Game Doodle Jump Passes 1 Million Downloads Posted: 18 Dec 2009 10:40 AM PST
Being insanely catchy has paid off. This morning, Doodle Jump’s developers, Lima Sky, are announcing that they’ve smashed through the 1 million download mark – an especially impressive feat when you consider the circumstances. Read the rest of this post at MobileCrunch >> Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Posted: 18 Dec 2009 10:10 AM PST
Obviously as regular TechCrunch readers will know, any hacker of Twitter is a friend of ours, but there’s something about this recent attack on the popular micro-blogging service that I find particularly heartening. For too long the anti-Iranian lobby has had the upper hand on Twitter, with self-righteous celebrities turning their avatars green in protest at the fraudulent re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and various hashtag memes criticising the country’s human rights record. It’s about time that supporters of the murderous regime got their PR machine in gear and redressed the balance with a bit of pro-Iranian propaganda. And – hell – why mess around with hashtags or avatars when you can just hijack the entire site with your message that “U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don't, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To”? It’s always nice to see Hezbollah getting a bit of linklove too. Let’s hope the fair and balanced trend continues: I’m particularly looking forward to high-profile Iranian celebrities turning their avatars red, white and blue while a flurry of hashtag memes celebrates the continuing erosion of democracy and basic human rights and the subjugation of women. Yunno, inshallah. Next week: China.
But it got worse – a few hours later Nik reported an even more dramatic twist: not only had RockYou been storing users’ passwords in plain text, but they’d been doing the same with login credentials for other services used by those users via RockYou. The result: millions of users had their webmail, MySpace, Bebo, Facebook – and the rest – passwords exposed to hackers, fraudsters and other ne’er-do-wells. The phrase you’re looking for is ‘holy shit’. Thank God only children and idiots use RockYou, otherwise this could be really troubling.
After Chile, it was off to Argentina where Sarah met two interesting start-ups that just so happened to be based in the same building. First was MercadoLibre – the eBay of Latin America and the only company in the region to be quoted on Nasdaq, a refreshing counter to the usual South American route of selling quickly and cheaply to America. The second was Globant, an outsourcing company with clients in the UK and the US, which just so happens to also have its eyes on an IPO. Fascinating companies both, reflecting as they do the prevalence in emerging markets for copycats and outsourcing companies. Even most interesting to me though was the detail that Globant’s founders came up with the idea for the company in a bar. As Sarah says, “at TechCrunch we are firm believers that some of the best things happen in bars.” Damn right. Have a good weekend. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Posted: 18 Dec 2009 09:23 AM PST
We track a lot of acquisitions on CrunchBase. At the beginning of 2009, acquisitions were at a standstill. But as the economy begrudgingly roused itself from recession, the deal flow started to pick up in the summer, and then rebounded more in the third quarter. There are still a couple weeks left in the year, and a lot can still happen, such as Google buying Yelp for more than $500 million. But with the year wrapping up, we put together an initial list of the top technology acquisitions of 2009. We’ll update the list if necessary at the end of the year (for instance, we don’t include Yelp in our list because it is not yet final), but it is not likely to change by much. Out of $64 billion worth of technology M&A Crunchbase tracked in 2009, about $54 billion went to the top 30 deals ((see table below). These are only technology deals (Web, software, hardware, mobile) and do not include cleantech or biotech (nor do they include other industries Crunchbase tracks as well). The largest announced deal, Oracle’s $7.4 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems, is still awaiting regulatory approval. But it set the pattern for bottom-fishing during a financially difficult year. Hewlett-Packard picked up 3Com for $2.7 billion (No. 8) and Intel bought Wind River for $884 million (No. 16), while Microsoft unloaded Razorfish for $530 million (No. 23). Some of the more significant deals in terms of potential market impact include Amazon’s $1.2 billion shoe-buying spree with Zappos (No. 14), Google’s $750 million acquisition of mobile ad network AdMob (No. 20), and Cisco’s $590 million Pure Digital/Flip Video deal (No. 21). And social gaming saw a lot of activity this year. Two days after Electronic Arts bought Playfish for $400 million (No. 27), competitor Playdom raised money at a $260 million (pre-money) valuation. Other notable deals which didn’t make the top 30 include American Express paying $300 million for Revolution Money (which would have put it at No. 35), Intuit’s purchases of Mint (No. 45) and PayCycle (No. 46) for $170 million apiece, Google’s $106 million acquisition of On2 Technologies (No. 57), Facebook’s $47.5 million purchase of FriendFeed (No. 86), MySpace’s $20 million deal for iLike (No. 133), and Apple’s $17 million for LaLa (No. 143). The top 30 tech M&A deals are below:
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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Google has made a 
Oh, Yahoo.
Another day, 
If you’ve got young children, there’s a good chance you’ve worked out a system to convince them to behave themselves and do their chores. In the old days, they called this an allowance. But many families have moved on to systems that are a bit more complex, like progress charts they hang on their refrigerator. That’s where 
Last night a bunch of us from TechCrunch went to see the midnight first showing of Avatar. Sure, we’re 
Back in June, Google 
Over the last few years, Facebook has held a semi-regular conference called 
"I just emailed you a video. You have to watch it now," I said to Paul Carr, my resident TechCrunch partner-in-crime.
looks like it's having its way with an olive tree. The machine straddles a row of trees and rubber tentacles gently swat off the olives at rapid speed. The arms can move in and out to hug the canopy of the tree—all controlled by a joystick in the air-conditioned, comfortable cab. The company is doing roughly $4 million a year in revenues and sells the machines in six countries. The Colossus increases productivity ten-fold and cuts harvesting costs by a third once the cost of the machine is paid back.
This time next week, if Mel Tormé is to be believed, chestnuts will be roasting on an open fire and Jack Frost will be nipping at your nose. There will also be some business with a sleigh. But Christmas is still a whole seven days away and right now it’s business as usual on TechCrunch, as evidenced by our up to the minute coverage of 
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