The Latest from TechCrunch

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• Visible Technologies Raises A Whopping $22 Million For Social Media Monitoring Software
• Former AOL Advertising SVP Eric Bosco Lands Management Position At comScore
• China Syndrome: Gmail Now Defaults To Encrypted Access
• Social Marketing Gone Awry: Pepsi Refresh Needs To Refresh Its Security Settings
• Scoutmob Is Like Woot For Local Deals
• InMobi Furthers Expansion Across The Pond With Google Europe Hire
• Microsoft Invests Millions In Innovative Teaching Practices Research
• Unica Acquires Pivotal Veracity For Approx. $17.8 Million In Cash
• GetApp.com Aims To Become The Premier ‘App Store’ For Business Software
• Tolingo Secures Series A For Fast, Cheap Translation Service
• Baidu.tw Wasn’t Hacked To Show Google, Doesn’t Even Belong To Baidu
• Europe’s Zappos.com Spartoo Raises $17.4 Million
• Down For Everyone Or Just Me Gets A New Owner
• Zynga Tiptoes Back Into Offers
• Google’s China Stance: More about Business than Thwarting Evil
• Pinboard’s Dead-Simple Bookmarking Service Is Still Going Strong
• Yesterday Was Twitter’s Highest Usage Day Ever. Today Will Be Bigger.
• Google Defends Against Large Scale Chinese Cyber Attack: May Cease Chinese Operations
• Everything You Need to Know About Apple’s New Gesturing Systems
• Foursquare Follows The Facebook Model, Takes Its Game To Harvard
• An Augmented Shaq Is Used To Market Muscle Milk In Ohio
• Yahoo Sheds Zimbra, VMware Gains A Foundation For Web Apps
• Google Now Tracking The Flu, City By City. So Far, It’s Been A Mild Winter.
• Plancast Makes Arrangements With Search, Facebook Event Importing, And User Tagging
• Interview: Kazunori Yamauchi, Creator Of Gran Turismo

Visible Technologies Raises A Whopping $22 Million For Social Media Monitoring Software Posted: 13 Jan 2010 09:00 AM PST Social media monitoring startup Visible Technologies has raised a whopping $22 million in Series C funding from Investor Growth Capital with Centurion Holdings, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and WPP participating in the round. This round brings the startup’s total funding to $34 million. Visible Technologies is using the funding to invest in further product development and engineering and will also look to expand to international markets. strengthen its technology platform and expand into international markets. Founded in 2003, Visible Technologies offers companies and brands a suite of products that allow users to monitor their brand on social media applications and websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, manage reputations and engage with consumers around conversations regarding a brand. Visible Technologies has several systems for tracking conversation on the web, including TruPulse and TruReputation. TruReputation tracks your corporate reputation by looking at search engine, social media and blog results related to your company and employees and analyzing whether the references are positive or negative. TruPulse is targeted at helping companies "track, analyze and participate" in the conversations taking place across the web. The TruPulse system crawls the web for conversations on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, forums and other sites related to a company. The system then analyzes each topic by subject and sentiment, and allows users to track this information over time using dynamic charts and statistical reports to identify influencers, hot spots, and trends. Users can then engage with consumers from the TruVoice platform by Tweeting or posting to other social media sites. Visible Technologies is also incorporating their platform with the everyday CRM software that companies use, such as those offered by Salesforce.com or Oracle. The startup has accumulated an impressive roster of clients that use its software including Microsoft, Xerox, Autodesk, and Hormel. Visible Technologies faces competition from Radian6, Scout Labs and ViralHeat. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Former AOL Advertising SVP Eric Bosco Lands Management Position At comScore Posted: 13 Jan 2010 08:51 AM PST A little over two months ago, The Business Insider reported that AOL’s Senior Vice President of Global Products and U.S. Operations, Eric Bosco, had left the building. The information was correct, and now comScore informs us Bosco has joined them as Chief Product Officer. In this newly created position, he will be overseeing comScore’s global product development efforts. Bosco was with AOL for a stunning 13.5 years, which is like an eternity in this business. At AOL, he held a variety of positions, most recently as SVP of Global Products and U.S. Operations at AOL Advertising. When Bosco made the switch from Oracle to AOL back in 1996, he played an instrumental role in its online efforts as co-creator of AOL Instant Messaging, writing most of the AIM backend software. He ultimately become responsible for managing all of AOL’s community and communications products including AIM, Email, Chat, Blogs, Wireless and Telephony as VP, Community and Communications Engineering. From October 2005 to March 2008, he was the lead product manager of AOL’s Advertising.com unit. Bosco directed a number of AOL acquisitions, including Quigo, Tacoda, Buy.at and Third Screen Media and drove development of a single targeting suite for AOL’s Platform-A products. At comScore, he’ll be heading up global development of its array of syndicated products and services. I wouldn’t be surprised if that includes more acquisitions of smaller audience measurement firms down the line. (Picture via Facebook) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

China Syndrome: Gmail Now Defaults To Encrypted Access Posted: 13 Jan 2010 08:40 AM PST As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Google is ending its censorship in China and as a result, may have to pull out of the country. As you also may have heard, this is the direct result of the attempted hacking of some Gmail accounts. Google obviously takes its security seriously, and they’ve made that more clear by announcing that all Gmail accounts will now default to the encrypted version of the service. Specifically, once Google is done rolling this out to its users (it’s in the process of doing it now), the default URL for Gmail will include HTTP Secure (you can tell by looking at the url and seeing if it begins with “https”). “Using https helps protect data from being snooped by third parties, such as in public wifi hotspots,” Google writes today on its Gmail Blog. And while this wouldn’t have stopped the type of Gmail hacking that it seems was going on in China, it does make the service significantly more secure. Anytime you hear the words “hacking” and “Gmail” in the same sentence, it’s not good for Google as it attempts to convince everyone in the world that cloud-based email is the way to go. So a move like this following the China situation is a smart one. Google started offering the option to enable this method of access for Gmail all the time in 2008, but it was previously opt-in. Now it will be opt-out (which you will be able to do in the settings). So why didn’t they turn this on sooner? Because https connections are typically slower than regular http connections since the data must be encrypted and decrypted first. But Google is now saying that after months of testing the latency of https, it feels comfortable enough with the performance trade-off to turn it on for all. They also warn that switching to https can cause some issues if you use Gmail offline access. Read more about there here, as well general Gmail security here. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Social Marketing Gone Awry: Pepsi Refresh Needs To Refresh Its Security Settings Posted: 13 Jan 2010 08:37 AM PST This year, instead of spending $20 million on SuperBowl ads, Pepsi decided to put the money into a Pepsi Refresh, a social marketing campaign which solicits the best ideas from consumers and plans to dole out $20 million in grants to good causes and “great ideas” throughout the year. The site opened up about 10 hours ago to take ideas from people applying for grants. On February 1, voting will begin to determine the best ideas, which will receive grants ranging from $5,000 to $250,000 each. It’s a bold experiment in social marketing, but it is also risky. Not helping matters is the fact that the Pepsi Refresh site isn’t working properly. An attempt to submit an idea resulted in a database error. But even worse, applicants’ personal information was compromised. Reports Rick Delashmit with Farmers4Good, who was trying to submit a proposal for a “Taste Buds” project to promote healthy eating habits of fruits and vegetables among school children, via an email to us: There were also HUGE privacy problems last night as each time you tried to submit your plan, it would be linked to some other applicants personal information. This happened for everyone…..epic fail. name, email address, city, state, zip and their entire plan that they were submitting along with how much $$ they were asking for. I was actually getting random emails last night from other folks who were trying to submit and they were getting my info attached to their plans….craziness. The complaints are also piling up on the Pepsi Refresh Facebook Fan page, where the latest message from Pepsi acknowledges, “We are aware of site issues and are working towards getting everything resolved.” Some of the comments on that page echo what Delashmit experienced: —Its all screwed up now when you press submit I actuall get a persons name and their info… —Looks like the database records are corrupted – as I go through the pages, another person’s appliction is coming up. The Pepsi Refresh site is similar in functionality to other crowdsourced idea generating efforts such as Dell’s IdeaStorm (which is run on top of Salesforce.com) and the type of sites created by UserVoice, although it is not clear who created the site on behalf of Pepsi. I have contacted Pepsi to find out and will update if I hear back from them. Regardless, this is not a good way to launch a massive social marketing campaign aimed at fostering warm-and-fuzzy feelings towards Pepsi. Hopefully, it can fix things quickly and recover because it’s actually a pretty good idea if Pepsi can get past the technical and privacy snafus. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Scoutmob Is Like Woot For Local Deals Posted: 13 Jan 2010 08:25 AM PST Some mobile startups do something that can’t be done online. Others copy an online business and bring it to mobile. And then there are companies like Scoutmob [iTunes link]. They take a great online business and make it ten times better by allowing you to take advantage of the service on-the-go. Scoutmob is Woot on mobile, done on a local scale. Scoutmob provides location-aware coupons directly to your mobile device. They launch in Atlanta, and their first offer is for 50% off at Murphy’s, which is a 4-star restaurant according to Yelp. The offers, according to CEO Dave Payne, have a rapid expiration time (in this example, 24 hours), so you need to use the coupon within one day. They’ll have a different offer every day, so don’t weep if you can’t fly into Atlanta by midnight – you’ll be able to hit up Octane Coffee Bar and Lounge tomorrow. Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >> Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

InMobi Furthers Expansion Across The Pond With Google Europe Hire Posted: 13 Jan 2010 05:40 AM PST We recently wrote about InMobi, a mobile ad network that has seen success in Asia and Africa and was beginning to see traction in Europe. In order to jumpstart growth, InMobi has hired Rob Jonas, Google’s Director of Strategic Partnerships for Europe, Middle East and Africa to lead operations cor the mobile ad network’s European sector. InMobi is currently being used in 37 countries around the world with over 7.5 billion ad requests monthly. In Europe alone, InMobi is now receiving 850 million mobile advertising requests monthly across all major European markets. Jonas was previously responsible for Google's largest commercial relationships in the European region. Before Google, Jonas was at Yahoo Europe. InMobi has raised a total of $7.6 million to date, starting out with a $500k seed round from a group of angel investors and followed up by a multi-million financing round led by Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures (the VC firm started by Ram Shriram, early backer and founding board member of Google). Of course the big elephant in the room is Google’s recent acquisition of AdMob and how that will effect InMobi’s continued expansion into the U.S. and European markets. And there’s the possibility that Google could make a move to overtake InMobi’s stronghold in other countries. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Microsoft Invests Millions In Innovative Teaching Practices Research Posted: 13 Jan 2010 04:37 AM PST Microsoft today announced that its Partners in Learning program is sponsoring the Innovative Teaching and Learning (ITL) Research project, which is led by non-profit R&D organization SRI International. The global research program intends to “broadly investigate” the effects that information and communications technology has in transforming teaching and learning at the school and education system level. Microsoft says it will invest $1 million annually in the multi-year study in partnership with the governments of Finland, Indonesia, Russia and Senegal. The primary focus of this research, which is being guided by outside advisors from the OECD, UNESCO, the World Bank, the International Society for Technology in Education and other organizations, is to assess teachers’ adoption of innovative classroom teaching practices and the degree to which those practices provide students with personalized learning experiences. This will complement the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ACT21S) research that Microsoft announced on Monday, which focuses primarily on identifying what it refers to as ’21st century skills’, and developing ways to measure them by providing new methods of assessing students. The ACT21S research was developed through a collaboration between Cisco, Intel and Microsoft. Teams of national researchers from universities, think tanks and other institutions will work with SRI International to conduct the research in each country. Methodologies, data and reports are open to researchers around the world, and will be free and publicly available each year (the first results are expected this summer and annually from then). In addition, the research project will develop a set of evaluation tools that schools and education systems can adopt to measure their own progress. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Unica Acquires Pivotal Veracity For Approx. $17.8 Million In Cash Posted: 13 Jan 2010 04:11 AM PST Nasdaq-listed Unica has acquired privately-held Pivotal Veracity for approximately $17.8 million in cash, the company announced this morning prior to the opening of the market. The marketing software company picked up Pivotal Veracity, which was founded in August 2003, to ramp up its e-mail marketing software solutions in what it regards as a ‘logical extension’ of their offerings. Pivotal Veracity markets a suite of tools designed to optimize the deliverability, reputation and effectiveness of digital communication. Its software suite enables its customers, which include companies like Cisco, Classmates.com, Digitas, Nestle and Sears, to maximize e-mail content rendering and delivery effectiveness and reduce the cost of sending emails that never reach intended recipients, including those that are filtered by ISP and third party spam filter services, or end up in personal spam folders. Pivotal Veracity also helps customers protect their brands by minimizing the risk of being blacklisted, as well as ensuring that customers are actively protected by ISP and third party whitelists. Unica had already integrated Pivotal Veracity's solutions into its enterprise and on-demand offerings and says it expects to deepen that integration across both companies' product lines and continue to sell Pivotal Veracity's solutions on a stand-alone basis as well. Pivotal Veracity's co-founders, Deirdre Baird and Michelle Eichner, will join Unica and guide the company's efforts in e-mail marketing and deliverability. Unica says the acquisition is not expected to have a material impact to its revenue in fiscal year 2010 and should be neutral to slightly accretive to FY10 Non-GAAP EPS. The company’s stock is slightly down in after-hours trading. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

GetApp.com Aims To Become The Premier ‘App Store’ For Business Software Posted: 13 Jan 2010 03:30 AM PST Today sees the public launch of GetApp.com, which aims to position itself as the leading vertical portal for software, SaaS and cloud-based business applications. The premise of GetApp is fairly simple: offer (potential) professional IT services and software buyers a chance to browse and research business tools, give providers a low-cost way to be found in the directory, and guide both parties in getting the most out of the experience. As a buyer, you can go to GetApp.com to find, compare and select from a wide range of business applications, organized into categories by IT and business need and by industry. The search functionality is pretty powerful and allows visitors to filter results down to a single vendor or enterprise-grade application. To assist buyers from a neutral point of view, GetApp offers user-generated reviews and a free personalized assessment tool as well as a number of guides on the subject. Application providers / ISVs can use GetApp.com to have their tools listed and potentially reach qualified buyers online, either for free or with more options at a premium. This freemium approach and the lead generation part of the equation is key to GetApp’s business model, although there’s some PPC advertising baked into the site as well. At launch, GetApp.com features over 2,200 applications across more than 300 categories. GetApp.com is part of Eurocloud, the Microsoft BizSpark Partner Network and the Sun Startup Essential community. Based in Barcelona, Spain, the venture was co-founded by Christophe Primault (former VP Global Marketing at NCR Corp, CEO at Fluiditi and Kinamik) and Manuel Jaffrin (former European Business Director at Sun Microsystems). Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Tolingo Secures Series A For Fast, Cheap Translation Service Posted: 13 Jan 2010 03:12 AM PST Tolingo, the online translation platform, has secured a Series A round of investment. The investment comes from Neuhaus Partners in Hamburg which is using a local start-up fund run by a public programme in conjunction with the local KfW bank (hey, this is in Europe). The investment will be used to expand further internationally. Terms were undisclosed but sources say it is in the €1 million to €2 million range. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Baidu.tw Wasn’t Hacked To Show Google, Doesn’t Even Belong To Baidu Posted: 13 Jan 2010 01:40 AM PST Lots of interesting commentary in the wake of Google’s bombshell blog post from yesterday about its decision to stop censoring its search results and possibly withdrawing from the Chinese market all together after being hit with severe cyber attacks on its core infrastructure. You can follow the conversation on Techmeme, but there’s one item that just hit the news aggregator that I felt compelled to set straight. Thomas Crampton correctly notes that Baidu.tw, supposedly owned by Chinese search leader Baidu, is currently getting forwarded to the Google Taiwan homepage (albeit only when you put www in front of the domain name). But it’s false to assume that the site was hacked: the domain name never directed to a Baidu property and is even entirely out of the company’s control. There’s a number of ways you can tell. Just to be clear, I’m not criticizing Crampton here. After all, the Baidu.com domain name was hacked just yesterday so his assumption isn’t that far-fetched. However, a simple WHOIS search reveals that the domain name isn’t owned by Baidu but by another entity, either an individual or an organization. The identity (Zheng Xiaodo) and contact details that were given for registration are likely fake, and I seriously doubt the owner really lives in China. The person who registered Baidu.tw, back in 2005, has used the generic contact e-mail address for at least 99 other domain names in the past. He or she signed up for a webmail account on Chinese portal 21cn.com, an ISP under ownership of a holding called Century Dragon Information Network, which can be perfectly done by anyone outside of the country. Furthermore, this person used Malaysian registrar (Web.CC) to secure the domain name, and the nameservers that are currently configured for the Web address are also located in Kuala Lumpur, capital of Malaysia. For its other domain names, Baidu uses its own nameservers. It also uses taiwan.baidu.com for its Taiwan operations, although the site is currently offline. Also, when you look at the cache for Baidu.tw, you can see that just a couple of days ago the domain led to Szhot.com, another domain name registrar. Finally, when you go to Baidu.tw right now and click around (apart from the top menu), you’ll see that there was simply a change in domain name record settings, likely following the flurry of news about Google’s China stance and the role Baidu plays in all this from yesterday. In conclusion: Baidu.tw was not hacked; someone is just trying to play a number on Baidu. (Image via Thomas Crampton) Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Europe’s Zappos.com Spartoo Raises $17.4 Million Posted: 12 Jan 2010 10:33 PM PST Spartoo.com, the European version of Zappos.com, has closed a $17.4 million Series B round of funding round led by Highland Capital Partners and Endeavour Vision with A Plus Finance and CM-CIC Capital Privé participating. This brings the online shoe retailer's total funding to $25.4 million. Launched in 2006, Spartoo claims over 4 million unique visitors per month (Nielsen, November 2009) and a base of 600,000 regular customers. Spartoo operates sites in France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium and Luxembourg.

Down For Everyone Or Just Me Gets A New Owner Posted: 12 Jan 2010 08:00 PM PST With web hosting services like Rackspace going down time, and time again, Down For Everyone Or Just Me has become a hot spot to check to see if a lagging site is down for everyone, or just you. The site was created as a side project by longtime Twitter engineer Alex Payne, and has managed to grow quite a large following. Over the weekend, Payne sold the site to Bweeb, Inc, which is known for running Site5 Web Hosting. Although Payne isn’t too sure what Bweeb’s plans are for the site, I suspect they’ll keep its functionality largely the same (and people will keep coming to it). In a blog post, Payne mentions that the site hasn’t received that much attention lately, and wanted a new owner that would continue development of the site and add some new features. I had numerous feature requests after the site launched, but turning it into a robust, multi-homed uptime checker was never my goal. All I've ever done with the site is: 1. Ported it from a simple Ruby implementation to App Engine. 2. Put some ads on it; first Google AdWords, then later individual campaigns that I negotiated by email. I made about USD $300/month from the site, on average. 3. Wired up a Twitter account that would tweet out sites that were frequently seen by the service as "down" within a short time period. (This functionality has been inactive since November, 2008.) The price of the sale was not disclosed, but Payne also mentioned that “it was proportional to the amount of time and effort I've put into it (that is, not much).” Payne has also made the source code of the site public again. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Zynga Tiptoes Back Into Offers Posted: 12 Jan 2010 07:41 PM PST Zynga CEO Mark Pincus pulled all in-game offers in the wake of Scamville. At the time, he said “We recognize it is our responsibility to ensure that offers which generate a bad user experience are not shown with any of our games. Therefore, we are removing all CPA offers across zynga games until we can control their inclusion and presentation ourselves.” That was November 8, 2009, a little over two months ago. Today offers are officially back on Zynga. In a new blog post, Pincus says they are tightly controlling which offers are accepted. Just eight companies are included: Netflix, Discover Card, Blockbuster, HSBC Direct, Gamefly, Book of the Month Club, SnapFish and The New York Times. More will be added over time after being reviewed by Zynga employees. There’s certainly nothing wrong with Zynga putting these offers back online, and these companies are unlikely to engage in the type of scammy behavior that started the whole Scamville saga in the first place. Not all offers are evil. I am amused though by Pincus saying about the companies “all of which have high Better Business Bureau ratings.” A BBB rating is nothing to be proud of. Video Professor, one of the more serious scammers, maintains an A rating at the BBB. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Google’s China Stance: More about Business than Thwarting Evil Posted: 12 Jan 2010 06:35 PM PST Writing about China as an American is always tricky, but nowhere near as tricky as what an American company faces doing business there. Let me say upfront, I don't envy Google. The company has had more success in China than a lot of other big Valley names, but isn't and will likely never be the market leader. And to get that far, many in the West feel Google has had to compromise its "do-no-evil" ethics by agreeing to some of the government's censorship rules. Google has been damned either way: China is too big of a market to ignore, but getting as far as they have has come at a steep price to their reputation and international (read: Western) integrity. Enter the now famous blog post (that was notably, only on the English-language site) saying that Google was no longer playing by the Chinese government's rules and was prepared to close down Chinese operations if it came to that. Valley elites erupted into applause on Twitter and blogs saying Google was showing more backbone than the US government and was a model of integrity for the world. I'll give Google this much: They're taking a bad situation and making something good out of it, both from a human and business point of view. I'm not saying human rights didn't play into the decision, but this was as much about business. Lest we get too self-righteous as Westerners, we should remember three things: 1. Google's business was not doing well in China. Does anyone really think Google would be doing this if it had top market share in the country? For one thing, I'd guess that would open them up to shareholder lawsuits. Google is a for-profit, publicly-held company at the end of the day. When I met with Google’s former head of China Kai-fu Lee in Beijing last October, he noted that one reason he left Google was that it was clear the company was never going to substantially increase its market share or beat Baidu. Google has clearly decided doing business in China isn't worth it, and are turning what would be a negative into a marketing positive for its business in the rest of the world. 2. Google is ready to burn bridges. This is not how negotiations are done in China, and Google has done well enough there to know that. You don't get results by pressuring the government in a public, English-language blog post. If Google were indeed still working with the government this letter would not have been posted because it has likely slammed every door shut, as a long-time entrepreneur in China Marc van der Chijs and many others said on Twitter. This was a scorched earth move, aimed at buying Google some good will in the rest of the world; Chinese customers and staff were essentially just thrown under the bus. 3. This is only going to be a trickier issue in the next decade. Think the Shanda acquisition of Mochi Media was an isolated event? Think again. Chinese Web companies are building huge cash hoards and valuable stock currencies and it's still a comparatively young Web market. Increasingly, these companies could be likely buyers of US startups—not the other way around. Will the Valley's rhetoric stick then? This may be the most shocking part: In retrospect Yahoo has played China far better than Google. It pulled out of the country years ago, knowing it wouldn't win and owns nearly 40% of the Alibaba, a company that very definitely knows how to grow in China. Entrepreneur and angel investor in China Bill Bishop —who hasn't always agreed with my China coverage in the past—pointed this out, adding "Not often Yahoo looks smarter than Google." Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Pinboard’s Dead-Simple Bookmarking Service Is Still Going Strong Posted: 12 Jan 2010 05:48 PM PST Last July, we took a look at Pinboard, a no-frills bookmarking service that focuses on, you know, bookmarking. Unlike Yahoo’s popular delicious, which is weighed down by feature bloat, Pinboard looks to keep things simple, fast, and elegant. Last week, Pinboard’s creator Maciej Ceglowski posted a recap of the site’s growth over the last six months, giving some honest insight into the progress of a small-but-growing startup. Perhaps the biggest news is that Pinboard is now Ceglowski’s full-time job. The former Yahoo Brickhouse developer started the site as a side project, but since the rollout of a new premium archiving feature (which runs $25 a year), he can apparently make enough from Pinboard to make a living.  He’s also got help from his friend Peter Gadjokov, who also happens to be one of delicious’s founders. Ceglowski takes some jabs at delicious, which has made quite a few frustrating decisions since its acquisition by Yahoo: There have been two big surprises in the past six months. The first was discovering that a minimalist paid bookmarking site can effectively compete against delicious, a free service that has all the resources of Yahoo at its disposal, a five year headstart, and until the recent layoffs employed some thirty people. Yahoo management single-handedly created our market with a series of terrible product decisions, and has continued to push the yoke forward and keep the nose pointed straight at the ground. As happy as I am to see Pinboard succeed, I wish it weren’t due to so much squandered effort by people I like and respect on the delicious development team. Ceglowski writes that Pinboard has grown to 1,200 active users, who have shared nearly 2 million bookmarks. The site has also added a number of features, including a mobile version, an API, integration with Twitter and Instapaper, and more. He notes that there’s “even a version of the site for the five Pinboard users who prefer to browse their bookmarks in Spanish.” Ceglowski also writes that the site’s innovative signup fee has helped keep spammers at bay, which can be a serious problem with link sharing and bookmarking sites. Since launching last summer, Pinboard has charged new users a small fee that increases by a tenth of a cent with each new user (it’s currently up to $5.79). If you’re interested in the more technical side of Pinboard, Ceglowski has written details on the site’s technical underpinnings here. CrunchBase Information Pinboard Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Yesterday Was Twitter’s Highest Usage Day Ever. Today Will Be Bigger. Posted: 12 Jan 2010 03:56 PM PST For several months now, all we’ve heard is how Twitter’s growth, once rapid, is flatlining. And all indications are from the various third-party measuring sources is that this is true. But Twitter co-founder Evan Williams just tweeted a little surprise for everyone today: Apparently, yesterday was Twitter’s highest-usage day ever. And today will be even bigger, he continues. While this is very interesting, it shouldn’t be all that surprising. Twitter’s new growth may be stalled, but the users that are already on the site seem to be using it more rabidly than ever. Remember too that a lot of the third-party measuring sites do not count the people who access and use Twitter through the service’s APIs. That means that all the mobile clients, all the desktop clients, and also all those who simply use Twitter via text message are not counted. The fact that there was nothing that huge happened news-wise yesterday is also a good sign for Twitter. Unless Twitter users are directly correlated with those who care about Mark McGwire and/or steroids, it would seem this was just a naturally huge day. Twitter is no stranger to seeing spikes of growth during huge events (Michael Jackson’s death, for example), but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. All that said, Twitter’s lack of web growth remains an issue because at the very least it means that there are probably less people signing up for the site than there once were. But some new numbers from Hitwise in December indicate that Twitter saw a bump (4%) in the right direction once again. Obviously, they’re going to want to build off of that. Twitter’s news follows the news that another hot web property, Foursquare, saw record numbers recently as well. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Google Defends Against Large Scale Chinese Cyber Attack: May Cease Chinese Operations Posted: 12 Jan 2010 03:02 PM PST Google is releasing information about a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” on their corporate infrastructure that occurred last month. The attack originated in China and resulted in the “theft of intellectual property from Google.” In light of the attack Google is making sweeping changes to its Chinese operations. Google is releasing some information about these attacks to the public. The company says that a minimal amount of user information was compromised, but has come to the alarming conclusion that the attacks were targeting the information of Chinese human rights activists. Google found that these attacks were not just going after Google’s data, but were also targeting at least twenty other major companies spanning sectors including Internet, finance, chemicals, and more. Google has also discovered that phishing attacks have been used to compromise the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world. In light of the attacks, and after attempts by the Chinese government to further restrict free speech on the web, Google has decided it will deploy a fully uncensored version of its search engine in China. This is a major change: since January 2006, Google has made concessions to the Chinese government and offered a censored (and highly controversial) version of its search engine at Google.cn. Google isn’t playing that game any longer. Should the Chinese government decide that an uncensored engine is illegal, then Google may cease operations in China entirely.  We have included Google’s blog posts about the decision in their entirety below. Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different. First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities. Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves. Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers. We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People interested wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this U.S. government report (PDF), Nart Villeneuve’s blog and this presentation on the GhostNet spying incident. We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today. We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.” These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised. Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer Here’s a second post, from the Google Enterprise Blog: Many corporations and consumers regularly come under cyber attack, and Google is no exception. We recently detected a cyber attack targeting our infrastructure and that of at least 20 other publicly listed companies. This incident was particularly notable for its high degree of sophistication. We believe Google Apps and related customer data were not affected by this incident. Please read more about our public response on the Official Google Blog. This attack may understandably raise some questions, so we wanted to take this opportunity to share some additional information and assure you that Google is introducing additional security measures to help ensure the safety of your data. This was not an assault on cloud computing. It was an attack on the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical. The route the attackers used was malicious software used to infect personal computers. Any computer connected to the Internet can fall victim to such attacks. While some intellectual property on our corporate network was compromised, we believe our customer cloud-based data remains secure. While any company can be subject to such an attack, those who use our cloud services benefit from our data security capabilities. At Google, we invest massive amounts of time and money in security. Nothing is more important to us. Our response to this attack shows that we are dedicated to protecting the businesses and users who have entrusted us with their sensitive email and document information. We are telling you this because we are committed to transparency, accountability, and maintaining your trust. Posted by Dave Girouard, President, Google Enterprise CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Everything You Need to Know About Apple’s New Gesturing Systems Posted: 12 Jan 2010 02:30 PM PST With the official closure of FingerWorks, the multi-touch interface company Apple purchased five years ago, it is interesting to note just what FingerWorks had to offer and, more important, what Apple may be implementing into the upcoming tablet and, potentially, iPhone 4.0 software. Aside from the obvious click, drag, and pinch, FingerWorks has a large collection of odd gesture and swipe combinations aimed at making basic data entry easier.

Foursquare Follows The Facebook Model, Takes Its Game To Harvard Posted: 12 Jan 2010 02:17 PM PST As part of its goal to expand beyond a simple location-based gaming service among friends, Foursquare has been cutting partnerships left and right. Some of these are for good causes, some are for potential business relationships, and some are just interesting. The latest deal between Harvard and Foursquare, falls into the latter category. Harvard is the first university to use Foursquare to help its students explore the campus, the school notes today in its paper. Foursquare has set up a special Harvard page on the site that includes a special logo, and a series of tips. If you follow this special account, you’ll be able see and contribute to all the tips for the school involving the various venues on campus. “We believe that Harvard's participation will allow our community to engage with friends, professors, and colleagues in new ways. We also hope visitors and neighbors will benefit from the platform as it grows through use,” Harvard’s digital director of communications tells the schools’ paper. The paper explains how students can earn mayor badges by checking-in to venes, and earn points by leaving these tips. Foursquare apparently made a special Harvard Yard badge to mark the partnership. Students that check-in a certain number of places on campus will see it. Facebook, of course, rose out of Harvard’s campus to become the most popular social network in the world with over 300 million users. It seems Foursquare is trying a similar approach now as well. With usage seemingly exploding right now, it’s probably a good idea. Get em hooked young, as they say. Expect other universities to follow this idea quickly. [photo: Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

An Augmented Shaq Is Used To Market Muscle Milk In Ohio Posted: 12 Jan 2010 01:44 PM PST As augmented reality apps gain buzz, marketers are jumping on the bandwagon. Last year, we saw augmented reality campaigns for everything from BMW sports cars to TOPPS baseball cards. Usually these involve printing out some sort of barcode or symbol and sticking it in front of your Webcam, which triggers a 3D image on your screen projected into your office or living room. Now Muscle Milk is getting in on the AR action with a campaign targeted to consumers in Ohio. On each bottle of the high-energy drink, there is a square with the number “33.” When you show that to your Webcam, Shaquille O’Neal will pop out of the bottle like a genie on-screen and give a little song and dance about some Ohio landmarks like the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame. (He now plays for the Cleveland Caveliers). It’s not really that impressive. The Wow factor of these things should wear off soon. I personally like the Topps baseball card implementation better myself (see video below). Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Yahoo Sheds Zimbra, VMware Gains A Foundation For Web Apps Posted: 12 Jan 2010 01:32 PM PST It’s done. VMware has bought email and collaboration software developer Zimbra from Yahoo. Rumors of the sale have been floating around for some time now but the writing was on the wall when Scott Dietzen, former CTO of Zimbra, quit Yahoo last fall. Dietzen joined Yahoo with the acquisition of the open source email startup in 2007 for $350 million. Dietzen went on to replace Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo’s former SVP of Communications & Communities, when he left the company in June 2008. This seems like Yahoo’s greater strategy of getting rid of non-core divisions, even if they are doing well. In place of these technologies, Yahoo outsources to other companies. As product, Zimbra achieved 2009 mailbox growth of 86% overall and 165% among small and medium business customers. Not too shabby, considering the competitive landscape. But it looks like Zimbra’s technologies may be better supported under the VMware umbrella. Jim Morrisroe, VP and general manager of Zimbra, tells me that he expects VMware to invest more capital in the product at a faster pace than Yahoo, allowing quicker release schedules and the ability to add new functionality more often. Morrisroe also said that the support will help take Zimbra to the “next level,” which means adding real-time collaboration, more robust group sharing and more to Zimbra;s platform. Just yesterday, Yahoo announced that it is shutting down its Shopping API and using PriceGrabber to power their shopping arena. Last month, they gave up on trying to figure out social networking, and handed it over to Facebook. And Yahoo’s core search product will soon just be a layer on top of Microsoft Bing. Though they’ve stated their not sure what to do with other products such as MyBlogLog, indications are that those could be on the chopping block soon as well. According to the press release, VMware is buying all of Zimbra’s technology and intellectual property but Yahoo will retain the right to utilize the technology in its communication products including Yahoo Mail and Calendar. It appears that Zimbra will be used as the foundation layer for apps by VMware. Terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the first quarter of this year, were not disclosed. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Google Now Tracking The Flu, City By City. So Far, It’s Been A Mild Winter. Posted: 12 Jan 2010 12:56 PM PST During flu season, one place to check for the level of outbreaks is Google Flu Trends, which extrapolates outbreak levels from the rise in flu-related searches. Today, it launched a more detailed view which maps flu levels across 121 cities in the U.S., including New York City, San Francisco, and Minneapolis. So you can now check to see how your city is doing comopared to past years, or see if it’s a good idea to travel to Chicago in January. As it turns out, after an early spike in flu levels last October, the country is experiencing a relatively low level of outbreaks overall. What happens next is still anyone’s guess, though, because this year’s H1N1 flu strain is new. It could just turn out to be a mild winter, or e could see a more severe outbreak like there was in 1957, when a new strain also hit the country. Another comparison is to the 2003-2004 flu season, when the disease spiked in December rather than October. Who knows why the trend spiked early this year? #Iblameglobalwarming. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Plancast Makes Arrangements With Search, Facebook Event Importing, And User Tagging Posted: 12 Jan 2010 11:55 AM PST Back in November, we wrote about the launch of Plancast, a new service by TechCrunch alum Mark Hendrickson that’s perhaps best described as “Foursquare for the future.” Since that time, the service has gotten much more useful as it now has a bunch of active users. And with things stable, the team is ready to roll out three of the most requested new features: User tagging, Facebook event importing, and search. Search is the most obvious addition. You can now search the entire service for not only events, but also for users simply by running a query in the new search box that resides in the upper right hand side of the top bar. Searches run fast, and Plancast smartly breaks up results into “Users” and “Plans.” For example, if you search for “Mark,” you’ll see a list of all the Marks using the site, as well as the few plans with “Mark” in the title or description. Searches can also work by location too. If you search for “San Francisco,” you’ll see all the plans taking place in this city. But it’s worth noting the search currently only works for upcoming plans, not one that have taken place in the past. From a technical perspective, Plancast search is using Sphinx, an open-source engine that’s one of the most popular among PHP developers, Hendrickson tells us. User tagging is another new feature that adds a useful element to the service. When you set up a new plan now, you can tag another Plancast user in it. For example, if you filled out that you were going to a bar with “+parislemon” (my username on the site), I would be automatically added as a guest of your event. My user name would also be hyperlinked in the title so anyone could click on it to see my profile. Naturally, there are some people who could abuse such a feature, but Hendrickson notes that you can turn off this tagging in the settings. There are also two separate syntaxes you can use for people tagging. The aforementioned “+” parameter adds a user to an event. But if you use the “@” symbol, made popular by Twitter, it will simply bring the event to that person’s attention and won’t automatically add them as being a part of the event. This is a pretty clever way of notifying someone about an event without presuming that they’re going with you. In the future, Plancast wants to extend this tagging beyond site users to be able to link these tags to users on Twitter and Facebook as well. Since the service is tightly integrated with both of them, that makes sense. Speaking of Facebook, the third new feature may be the most useful one to help Plancast grow. Plancast now supporting the importing of Facebook events. Anytime you RSVP to an open event on Facebook, and have your Facebook account linked to your Plancast account, it will automatically import it along with any details present. This importing functionality is even able to add other Plancast users who have also RSVPed to the event in the “With” area of the event. These imported plans then link back to the original Facebook event page. And while it may be slightly controversial, Plancast is turning the feature on for users by default. The thinking here is that it will help new users get into the site because they’ll already have some plans from Facebook imported that they can play around with on Plancast, Hendrickson notes. And you can opt-out in the settings, if you choose to. There’s another upside to this Facebook importing. Currently, the most annoying aspect of Plancast is duplicate events. This is a problem that many sites face since users don’t realize that someone else has already added the same event that they’re adding. Hendrickson notes that their working on a solution for this, but Facebook imports should actually help because they run queries based on the Facebook event unique URL to make sure it hasn’t been imported into the system before. If it has, they simply add that person to the already existing Plancast event. There are a few other smaller updates Plancast has rolled out with the big boys. They include password recovery, the ability to block other users (so they can’t subscribe or mention you), the collapsing of “ongoing” events on the main page, and the ability to put URL in plan titles. Hendrickson also notes that Plancast has started using a “No SQL” solution for some of their data. More tech-savvy readers may recognize that is also a solution FriendFeed is using on their backend, as Facebook’s Bret Taylor wrote about at length here. Plancast has open-sourced their version of this. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Interview: Kazunori Yamauchi, Creator Of Gran Turismo Posted: 12 Jan 2010 11:53 AM PST You may have caught our interview with Yamauchi-san as it streamed live (about 40 minutes in) on Saturday, but for your convenience I've pared it down and added in our non-live footage. At 24 minutes it's quite a long interview (so no transcription ready yet, though I'll add one eventually) but an interesting one. Among other things, we talked about his approach to development, some favorite games from earlier eras, and the effect of casual gaming on the industry. Yamauchi-san seemed to be the kind of guy who knows exactly what he's doing at all times, and it shows, because his games are always among the most polished on the systems they appear on. Enjoy the interview. Gran Turismo 5 hits the PS3 in Japan this March; no date is set yet for the US.

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