The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Eyeka Raises $4 million To Crowd-Source Ad Campaigns
- Pastefire: The Quickest Way To Get Stuff From The Web To Your iPhone
- CauseWorld Lets Users Give To Haiti Via Their iPhone
- OneRiot’s Realtime Ad Network RiotWise Now Open To The Masses
- Bing Is Growing Faster Than Ever, Keeps Gaining Search Market Share
- Amazon Opens Up Kindle Digital Text Platform To Authors Outside The U.S.
- Twitter’s Answer To Facebook Connect
- How eBuddy’s Mobile Monetization Strategy Helped It Turn A Profit
- MySpace Reshuffles Its Music Label
- NewsCred Relaunches, Looks To Become “Ning For Newspapers”
- Buy And Sell Proprietary Knowledge Through GenApple
- Donations To Haiti Via Text Message Surge Past $5 Million
- Google Gets Special Order Satellite Imagery For Haiti
- MySpace Hires Sean Percival To Further Socialize Their Content
- Cake Financial Acquired By E*Trade
- Chrome For Mac Finally All Systems Go With Bookmark Manager
- The Wobble iPhone App Guy Really Wants On TechCrunch, And Is Willing To Pay (Updated)
- Gowalla API Coming Very Soon
- Bartz Adds A Finance Whiz To Yahoo’s Board
- Everything You Want To Know About The Most Secretive Startup In The World (Next Jump)
- PC Shipments Up 15 Percent Last Quarter (But None Of Those Are The Apple Tablet So Whatever)
- Foursquare Who? Gowalla What? MyTown Has 500,000 Users And 31 Million Check-Ins
- Segway Acquired By UK-Based Firm, CEO Out
- Transpera Raises $2 Million For Mobile Video Ad Network
- The Top Ten VC Blogs (New And Improved)
| Eyeka Raises $4 million To Crowd-Source Ad Campaigns Posted: 15 Jan 2010 09:17 AM PST
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| Pastefire: The Quickest Way To Get Stuff From The Web To Your iPhone Posted: 15 Jan 2010 08:13 AM PST
Do you find yourself constantly emailing stuff to your iPhone just so you can have it when you leave your desk? I do: emails, links, addresses, phone numbers, photos. Well, now there is an app for that. It’s called Pastefire, and it comes naturally enough from the app-sharing service Appsfire (which was co-founded by former TechCrunch writer Ouriel Ohayon). You can get the free app on iTunes here http://getap.ps/pastefire (if you click that link on your iPhone it will open up the App Store for you, and is another service AppsFire will launch soon which will combine short links for iPhone apps with analytics on conversions). Pastefire lets you send links, phone numbers, email addresses, videos, and photos to your iPhone, and then it figures out what to do with them automatically. For example, after you sign up, you just add a bookmarket to your browser or go to the Pastfire “Copy Zone” and paste a link. Then if you fire up the app on your iPhone, it will open up that link in Safari. A phone number initiates a call. An email address opens up the Mail app addressed to that person. A photo URL lets you save the image to your phone’s image gallery. A video link opens up the YouTube app and plays the video. You can also post to Twitter, search in Google or Wikipedia, or save to a local clipboard. If you turn on the automated mode, the app performs these actions automatically depending on what you send to your iPhone from your desktop. Or you can do it yourself in manual mode. More options are on the way, such as opening up a map for an address. And there are a few bugs which will be fixed soon as well. For instance, when you copy a photo to your gallery, it doesn’t open up the gallery. My other main complaint about the app is that you can only send one thing at a time. So if you want to send a bunch of links, emails, and photos all at once, you have to open up the app for each one and perform an action before you can move on to the next one. It should just store everything in the clipboard if things pile up. The other drawback is that you actually have to open the app. Here notifications would work really well, letting you send things directly to the top of your iPhone screen without having to hunt for the Pastefire app icon. But these are minor quibbles. All-in-all, Pastefire is a solid productivity app and I’m going to be using it a lot. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| CauseWorld Lets Users Give To Haiti Via Their iPhone Posted: 15 Jan 2010 08:00 AM PST
CauseWorld (iTunes link), an iPhone app from Shopkick, is off to a strong start. They first launched in December, and they quickly got the coveted featured spot on the iTunes app store. Yesterday, they started letting users donate to the American Red Cross for Haiti relief. The application gives users karma points for checking in to certain retail stores. Those karma points can then be converted into donations to various charities and other good causes (water in Sudan, food for the poor, trees in the Amazon, etc.). Big brands supply the cash for donations (and get lots of advertising exposure). Users decide how that money gets spent. see our original launch post for more details.
In the meantime, Shopkick has added donations to Haiti via the American Red Cross, and Shopkick is matching all donations. So after you’ve donated cash directly to help that desperate situation, and have text messaged some more money in, download the CauseWorld app and go check into some retail stores (no purchase is required). Shopkick says that as soon as they added Haiti, the “entire feed was filled with Haiti contributions.” Shopkick has raised $2.5 million in venture capital from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Reid Hoffman. The company is based in Silicon Valley. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| OneRiot’s Realtime Ad Network RiotWise Now Open To The Masses Posted: 15 Jan 2010 07:54 AM PST  OneRiot’s recently ventured into the advertising world with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. A few weeks ago, the realtime search engine launched a pilot program of RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web. And today, after partnering with select iPhone Apps, Twitter Clients and Search Engines (Including UberTwitter and Digsby), OneRiot's Realtime Ad Network, RiotWise, is now available to all developers. RiotWise's ads are comprised of content that similar to within Google, are served up via keywords being searched for. But unlike Google, advertisers aren't bidding on keywords. Instead, content producers strike a deal with OneRiot to place their content in an emphasized (but clearly labeled) place in their realtime feed within the search engine. In the end, OneRiot’s ambitions are to help the content producer improve click-through rates by sending highly-targeted readers whose intent is to find specific content. RiotWise’s Trending Ads will match trending topics with display ads that are highly relevant to the same topics within an application such as a Twitter client or iPhone app. Similar to the ads displayed alongside search engine results, OneRiot says the realtime relevance results in a higher click through rate on the ads. The system is enabled by OneRiot's realtime search technology and PulseRank relevancy algorithm. OneRiot helps developers monetize social web applications such as Twitter apps, IM clients and iPhone apps and shares advertiser revenue with the application developer. Now OneRiot is reporting that RiotWise ads have been performing at 3 to 4 times the average industry standard click through rates (CTR) for ads in realtime web apps (Twitter clients, iPhone apps, etc.). Developers also have flexibility to display RiotWise ads in the stream or correlating to trending topics. Of course with these realtime ads, OneRiot runs the risk of surfacing irrelevant or spammy content. But as a realtime search engine, OneRiot has invested heavily in spam prevention and is constantly sorting through millions of pieces of content to determine what is relevant and what isn't. As long as OneRiot produces quality advertising content, the new ad format looks to be a viable and profitable monetization tool for both publishers and developers. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Bing Is Growing Faster Than Ever, Keeps Gaining Search Market Share Posted: 15 Jan 2010 06:26 AM PST
Bing just keeps on gaining market share, and is now growing faster than ever before. In December, Microsoft’s search engine gained another 0.4 percent to capture 10.7 percent of U.S. search queries, according to the latest comScore qSearch numbers. That makes five straight months of steady share gains for Bing since it launched—Bing’s share is up 2.7 percent in total since May, 2009. Google gained only 0.2 percent to end the month with 65.7 percent market share. Meanwhile, Yahoo lost as much as Google gained (0.2 percent) to end the year at 17.3 percent (see table above, courtesy of Barclays Capital, click to enlarge). What is even more interesting is if you look at year-over-year query growth rates for each search engine. Bing’s growth is actually accelerating. Its growth rate in query volume was 49.4 percent in December, compared to 20.6 percent growth for Google (which was also above the average), and a 1.9 percent decline for Yahoo. Here are the year-over-year query growth rates for Bing for the past few months:
Barclays Capital analyst Douglas Anmuth attributes Bing’s gains to “advertising, OEM partnerships and toolbars, & Bing cashback.” He also notes that Yahoo’s decline was due “almost entirely” to the loss of some toolbar deals, specifically HP to Bing and Acer to Google, which weren’t particularly profitable anyway. But Yahoo’s core search volume growth is decelerating, which is a concern for investors. And while Yahoo lost 0.2 percent share, that is less than the 0.5 to 0.8 percent losses it incurred in each of the previous three months. He notes that since Bing’s launch, Yahoo has lost almost as much share (2.8 percent) as Bing has gained (2.7 percent), a trend we’ve seen from the very beginning. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Amazon Opens Up Kindle Digital Text Platform To Authors Outside The U.S. Posted: 15 Jan 2010 04:14 AM PST
Until today, DTP was only available to authors and publishers based in the United States. Amazon says additional language options with DTP will be added in the coming months. This is of course a logical expansion for Amazon to make, one that is bound to reinforce the notion that Kindle isn’t simply a ereader device + ebook store but a true global ecosystem of writers and publishers. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Twitter’s Answer To Facebook Connect Posted: 15 Jan 2010 01:47 AM PST
Facebook Connect was first announced in May 2008 (Google and MySpace announced similar projects at the same time). Facebook Connect became generally available later in 2008, and it hasn’t looked back since. Today, Facebook says 80,000 websites have added Facebook Connect, and 60 million Facebook users engage with Facebook connect on these third party websites each month. For many sites, like our own CrunchBase, it’s the only way to create an account and log in. Facebook Connect is attractive to a lot of smaller sites simply because it’s so easy to implement. They’ve created a number of widgets that bring Facebook features directly to third party sites, and integration is easy. You can find some of these here on TechCrunch. Last year Twitter released simply buttons to let users on third party sites sign in to Twitter and identify themselves (we use it in our commenting system). The new Twitter product will allow sites to authenticate users, pull data and then publish back to Twitter, we’ve heard. All of these features exist today via the Twitter API, but the slick Facebook Connect-like packaging and easy-to-use widgets don’t exist yet. Twitter is also taking an open, standards based approach. They use OAuth, for example, for authentication and data sharing. Facebook uses proprietary protocols for Facebook Connect. We’ll update as we hear more. But our understanding is that Twitter has been working with a handful of publishers and will likely announce the new product shortly. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| How eBuddy’s Mobile Monetization Strategy Helped It Turn A Profit Posted: 15 Jan 2010 01:05 AM PST
The company, backed by $11.5 million in venture capital from Lowland Capital Partners and Prime Technology Ventures, markets a Web-based social network and instant messaging aggregator that enables people to sign in to their service once and stay connected to people through various platforms in one single interface where all of them are centralized. It also offers a number of ways for people to use the service on their mobile phones, through a mobile web service, a Java-based messenger client and applications for iPhone and Android. (Keep reading if you want to try their premium iPhone app for free, by the way) Rueb informs me that the J2ME client in particular has seen phenomenal success, recently surpassing 50 million downloads. The free app is currently the most downloaded program as registered on GetJar, a one-stop shop for mobile applications, with more than 36.7 million installations (up from 10 million in March 2009). Its iPhone applications (a free one and a premium one that goes for $4.99) are also quite popular: in total, the apps have been downloaded 3 million times since their debut in the App Store. The free version was released in July 2009, the paid app late November 2009. eBuddy expected between 4% and 8% of its free app users to convert to the paid application, and says it is indeed currently hovering around a 6% conversion rate. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that its revenue from the premium app is thus about $900k, or $600k if you take into account Apple’s 30% cut. Conceivably, adding the revenue from ads on its free app, eBuddy is raking in around $1 million from its iPhone applications alone. If you’re keen on giving the premium app a whirl for yourself: the first 1,000 users who purchase eBuddy Pro from the U.S. App Store and follow the instructions on this promotion page will receive an iTunes gift card worth $5, i.e. the price of the app. In total, eBuddy has attracted about 100 million unique users, of which about a quarter uses the service at least once every month. These are heavy users: on average, 14 billion messages get sent via eBuddy per month. And don’t think all of them are using their cellphones: eBuddy’s Web application has seen 50% growth year over year, says Rueb. Still, its strategy of having a feature-limited, ad-supported app in Apple’s App Store alongside a paid premium one with more bells and whistles, has resulted in close to 50% of the company’s revenues now coming from its slew of mobile products. Advertising accounts for about 60% of that income, and 40% comes from app sales today. Rueb declined to share revenue numbers in greater detail, but said that the company has now been profitable on a net income basis for the past four months and is cash-flow positive, which means its mobile monetization strategy is clearly working out well for them. A bit of good news for BlackBerry users, finally: eBuddy expects to (finally) ship a custom client for the platform in the next couple of months. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| MySpace Reshuffles Its Music Label Posted: 14 Jan 2010 11:11 PM PST
That’s sure to be good news for the label’s artists, which include Pennywise and Nico Vega. The label has also previously featured a handful of artists who were eventually promoted to the main Interscope label, including Kate Voegele and Mickey Avalon. However, while the current artists are safe, we’re hearing that the direction of the label and its future structure are still up in the air. When MySpace Records launched, MySpace planned to leverage its then-recent acquisition by News Corp to turn the label into a jumping off point for hot new bands (former CEO Chris DeWolfe was quoted as saying they’d get the bands into Fox movies and TV shows). Obviously it hasn’t performed as well as everyone hoped, but MySpace has still managed to help kickstart the careers of quite a few well known bands. Likewise, its MySpace Music site continues to perform well despite MySpace’s slowdown in other areas. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| NewsCred Relaunches, Looks To Become “Ning For Newspapers” Posted: 14 Jan 2010 10:00 PM PST
Using the site is simple: you choose the title of your new virtual paper, then specify which topics you’re interested in following. The site includes a number of categories to choose from, including tech and politics, but you can also generate one based on a keyword if you’d like. Once you’ve chosen your topics, NewsCred will generate a virtual newspaper containing the latest stories from each area. Stories are drawn from popular relevant news sites and blogs, and you can specify a RSS feed if it isn’t in the NewsCred directory. Along the left side of the screen is a list of sections that you can jump through, much as you would in a physical paper. There are a handful of sample sites you can test for yourself, like this one on Mobile News, Celebrity Gossip, and Manchester United.
We’ve seen news aggregators before, but NewsCred has a few options that are less common. For one, the site allows you to write editorials, which can be incorporated into the front page (or the topic specific sections). And the site will soon offer a premium version called NewsCred Pro, which is designed to help you further customize and even monetize the papers you’ve built. With NewsCred Pro, you can host your paper at a personal domain, run your own advertising on the page, eliminate NewsCred branding, and further customize the layout and newspaper template. Together, these features could allow you to build a Huffington Post-style news hub, complete with your own opinion pieces, focused on whatever topic you wanted. NewsCred has done a nice job putting their custom papers together, and most of the site looks very well done (though I did find some poor results as I searched for topics to add). But the new space it is entering is going to be competitive. For one, homepage sites like iGoogle allow users to include news feed widgets. And there are sites that are more directly competitive, like Meehive, the Kosmix-powered custom news site (covered here). That said, NewsCred may be able to build a business helping users build their own niche news portals, the same way Ning appeals to users building custom social networks. NewsCred closed a seed round of funding last year from private investors in the US, UK, and Switzerland, as well as “one of the large Silicon Valley VC firms” (the company won’t disclose the names of their investors).
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Buy And Sell Proprietary Knowledge Through GenApple Posted: 14 Jan 2010 08:40 PM PST
Those with information to sell can create a listing similar to one you would find on any classifieds page. Postings are listed on the website immediately after submission. When creating a listing, the seller has the ability to hide any or all of his personal information which he used during sign-up: all that will show is the username. Conversely, he can show all of his information if he thinks it will aid in the process of a buyer purchasing his information. Potential buyers are able to post listings as well in the “I want to know” section. Here, buyers can state the kind of information they want, along with how much they are willing to pay for said information. GenApple also allows people to create free listings, where users can give away specialized knowledge for free. The knowledge is entered into an information vault for future use and can be any type of text entry or data file. GenApple creates their revenue by taking a commission on the final sale price. The anonymity of sellers, coupled with the fear of fraud may be an issue for some, and as such, GenApple provides a slew of buyer protection features. They have a standard feedback system where users can rate a seller, and also have a feature where sellers can put forth a veracity statement. GenApple operates under a brokerage business model (they host the listings and process payments) in order to instill trust in the listings being offered. In doing so, GenApple has the ability to hold payment to the seller if the buyer is not satisfied. If a buyer is not fully satisfied with the purchase, they can submit a ticket to GenApple who will then make a final decision as to whether fraud was committed or not and will act accordingly. Given the nature of this idea, GenApple will surely run into a couple of roadblocks down the road. The most obvious one, is that of insider trading. GenApple explicitly states in the terms of service that the exchange of insider information is illegal, but when has that stopped anybody? To counter this, GenApple has the authority to delete any suspicious postings and will cooperate fully with any government officials if the problem does come about. Additionally, only two employees at GenApple monitor listings. As they reach critical mass, they may find that personally overlooking the listings will be too great a burden for humans to do no matter the number of staff. To help with this, users are able to flag postings, but they will surely need a better system when they grow. GenApple’s idea is novel and shows promise. If they are able to continually protect buyers as the company grows then they could be successful. We’d give them some more pointers, but why give away such valuable information for free? The company is self-funded and operates out of an office in Minnesota. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Donations To Haiti Via Text Message Surge Past $5 Million Posted: 14 Jan 2010 05:43 PM PST
As of the last update, the number stands at $5.2 million. Of that, more than half have apparently come from AT&T users ($2.63 million), the company told us today. If you’re still interested, simply text HAITI to the number 90999. A $10 charge will be attached to your next cellphone bill. AT&T shared their data today after I reached out over some confusion about whether the company was actually profiting from this fundraiser. Yesterday, in a hurry to get the program going, the service was still charging users for sending this text messages, apparently. But when they realized that, they made them all free, and went back and retroactively removed any charges users may have gotten by texting for the cause. Nice move. This texting drive, being run through mGive, a non-profit working with the Red Cross, is also leveraging Twitter and Facebook to help get the word out there. Donations are said to be coming in to the tune of $200,000 each hour, so they’re very likely coming close to $6 million raised at this point. Impressive stuff. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Google Gets Special Order Satellite Imagery For Haiti Posted: 14 Jan 2010 05:00 PM PST  I just wanted to put a little attaboy in here for Google. The quake in Haiti will of course prompt a humanitarian response, and accurate aerial imagery will help get it to where it needs to be most. Helicopters are probably occupied ferrying passengers and supplies, so I'd imagine few can be spared for reconnaissance; satellite imagery is the best way to go for a snapshot of the area, and Google contracted GeoEye to shoot some shots for just that purpose. Check out Google's Haiti relief and imagery page here. It's good to note every once in a while that the technology we take for granted can actually be used for things other than finding the nearest coffee shop. This kind of quick and helpful response (thanks as well to the mobile companies and their texting donations) is heartening. If you want to help, and I know you do, then text HAITI to 90999 to donate ten bucks to the Red Cross.
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| MySpace Hires Sean Percival To Further Socialize Their Content Posted: 14 Jan 2010 04:36 PM PST
Percival, who was apparently one of the first 3,000 people to ever sign up for MySpace, had previously been consulting for the company and has written a book about what he’ll now be preaching: MySpace Marketing: Creating a Social Network to Boom Your Business. He’ll report to Angela Courtin, the Senior Vice President of Marketing, Entertainment & Content for MySpace, and will work with the editorial and content teams to try to help kickstart talk about the service on the web. Percival, who lives in LA, is also known for starting the Southern California tech/gossip blog Lalawag. Previously, he’s worked at Mahalo, Docstoc, and Tsavo, under Mike Jones who is now the COO of MySpace. Jones was MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta’s first hire when he took over that role last year. As he notes on his blog, this is a good week for Percival, he also just announced that his wife is pregnant. Read more about Percival’s new gig on the MySpace Blog. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Cake Financial Acquired By E*Trade Posted: 14 Jan 2010 03:42 PM PST
We’re hearing that there was a bidding war for Cake, and that The Motley Fool was also in the running. CEO Steven Carpenter declined to comment on the details of the deal. We’ve included the full text of the notice below:
Cake launched with the ability to let users share their current investment portfolios with their peers, and built out quite a few other features in the following two years, like the Cakedex social stock index. Last August, it launched a new premium service designed to serve as an automated investment advisor. It’s worth pointing out that the acquisition appears to center on Cake’s team and technology rather than its user base — rather than absorbing Cake’s users into E*Trade, the notice above states that user data will be deleted and destroyed, with premium users getting reimbursements. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Chrome For Mac Finally All Systems Go With Bookmark Manager Posted: 14 Jan 2010 03:09 PM PST
The latest dev channel release of Chrome for Mac, 4.0.295.0, released today, brings with it a bookmark manager for the first time. While you’ve been able to import bookmarks from Safari for a while, you had no way to manage them. Basically, it meant that you had to use Safari to manage them and to make the change in Chrome, go into your file system, delete the Chrome bookmarks file, and re-import anytime you wanted to make a change. With this new Bookmark Manager, Chrome for Mac is now at full systems go for me. Yes, it’s still missing a few other features such as full-screen mode and application shortcuts, but for day-to-day usage, it’s solid. Google is calling this first crack at a bookmark manager “rudimentary,” but I’m using it now and it has just about everything I need: drag and drop, copy and paste, click-to-edit, and delete. There is still one minor thing missing: the ability to manage the “Other Bookmarks” area. Along with the Bookmark Manager addition, Google fixed several bugs that caused crashes in Chrome for Mac, and added another nice feature: a multi-touch way to open new tabs. If you hold command and do a three-finger swipe on a MacBook (or two-finger swipe on the Magic Mouse), Chrome will open a new tab with your previous or next page from the one you are currently on. To open the previous page in a new tab, you hold command and swipe left. To open the next page, you hold control and swipe right. It’s actually pretty useful. Again, these changes are only in the dev channel build of Chrome for Mac right now, which you can find here. But you can expect them to trickle up to the beta channel shortly. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| The Wobble iPhone App Guy Really Wants On TechCrunch, And Is Willing To Pay (Updated) Posted: 14 Jan 2010 02:57 PM PST Update: Atherton, posting under the name ‘The Real Jon Atherton’, says that someone was impersonating him in the e-mail conversation below, and that they’ve done it before. See his full comment here.
This is one of those times we’re going to post the exchange. Because Jon Atherton, the guy who created the Wobble iphone application (here’s a (unpaid of course) story we wrote about them last year), just won’t give up. His latest offer is $1,000 if we do a post promoting the new version of Wobble. Most of the exchange is below. Atherton first offered $300 for a post, then moved it up to $1,000 after we declined. He promised it “will NOT look like a paid-for article” and “if well treated by you on TC i’m willing to make the payment asap.” Well Jon, here’s your post. Please make your payment to the Red Cross for their Haiti earthquake relief fund. You need to balance out the karma a little bit.
Image credit: Newsweek Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Posted: 14 Jan 2010 01:56 PM PST
In a post on their blog, Gowalla’s Josh Williams notes that the first version of the API is “nearly complete” and that they will be making an announcement about it in the “very near future.” Leading up to that, the service is taking some steps to ensure that user privacy is maintained as third-party services start getting access to their data. To that end, Gowalla notes that if you choose to turn your Passport Privacy on, your check-ins will not register in the public feeds for places and not register in Gowalla’s Top 10 lists. This setting will still be set to off by default, Williams notes. In noting that this setting is completely black and white (which is to say, on and off), Williams also notes that they’re working to make the privacy controls more granular so that users can pick certain things to share while holding back others. This is an increasingly important issue with these location networks, especially as they become platforms. It’s also likely the reason we have yet to see Facebook enter the location space in a meaningful way. Their privacy settings are already a headache and with location thrown into the mix (a feature that is still very new and thus scary to a lot of people) it’s only going to get worse for many users. Services using Foursquare’s API are starting to pop up. It will be interesting to see how third-parties use Gowalla’s with its focus on virtual goods. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Bartz Adds A Finance Whiz To Yahoo’s Board Posted: 14 Jan 2010 01:49 PM PST
James was also named Chair of the Yahoo Board's Audit Committee. Sue James joined E&Y in 1975, served as a partner from 1987 until her retirement in June 2006, and was also on the E&Y Americas Executive Board of Directors from January 2002 through June 2006. She stayed on as a consultant from June 2006 to December 2009. She is a certified public accountant and a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. During her tenure with the professional services firm, she was the lead partner for the audit work for a number of major technology companies including Intel, Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com, HP and Autodesk. Yahoo’s current CEO, Carol Bartz, was previously Chairman, President, and CEO at Autodesk, so she’s already quite familiar with James. Sue James also serves on the Board of Directors of Applied Materials, Coherent and Tri-Valley Animal Rescue, a non-profit dedicated to providing homes for homeless pets. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Everything You Want To Know About The Most Secretive Startup In The World (Next Jump) Posted: 14 Jan 2010 01:06 PM PST  In the annals of stealth startups, Next Jump deserves its own chapter. It’s not often that a company can build a large and successful business for 15 years, raise $45 million in venture capital, hire 225 people, and sign up 60 percent of the Fortune 500 as customers without anybody ever hearing about it. Yet that is exactly what Next Jump did until the first story ever written about the company appeared in the New York Times last month. The $45 million came over the course of 8 rounds and all from angel investors, including early Google investor Ram Shriram and Deutsche Bank asset management chief Kevin Parker (who are both board members).
The company is now coming out of its shell, partly because it is so big that it can no longer hide. “Our thought was to stay quiet until it feels like we had an elephant under a hay stack,” CEO and founder Charlie Kim tells me during a recent visit to Next Jump’s Manhattan headquarters, which take up two floors of a downtown office building. Next Jump runs perhaps the largest set of direct merchant offers businesses in the world, making the growing preponderance of offers in social games seem primitive by comparison. It operates employee discount and reward programs on behalf of 90,000 corporations, organizations and affinity groups which reaches more than 100 million consumers. Next Jump connects 28,000 retailers and manufacturers to these consumers, typically getting the merchants to offer deep discounts to its members. In Kim’s eyes, this is a much better way to advertise. His pitch to merchants everywhere is this: “Take your ad budget and use it to lower prices for targeted sets of customers. The user is in market, and conversion rates are through the roof.” According to Kim, Next Jump’s conversion rate on offers is 11 to 1, compared to 1000 to 1 or worse for typical Internet ad conversion rates.
In addition to Fortune 500 companies, it also runs rewards programs for the AARP, NEA, Dell, Borders, Hilton, and Mastercard, and reaches consumers directly through Overwhelming Offers (which is also an iPhone app) and small businesses through Corporate Perks. It also powers Yahoo’s Daily Deals. And Kim says that Next Jump drives more transactions than any other affiliate to Linkshare, Commission Junction, and the Google Affiliate Network. It derives revenues from corporations on a per-employee basis, as well as from merchants via transaction and advertising fees (for sponsored slots on its various deals Websites). Next Jump’s origins are in local merchant coupon books for corporations and running corporate discount programs for their employees. It started out as a print catalog business out of Kim’s Tufts dorm room in the mid-1990s. By 1997 it went completely online because print costs kept going sky-high as merchants demanded the ability to update their offers more frequently. On the Web they can update them hourly if they want, and the feedback loop of what works and what doesn’t helps them fine-tune their offers accelerate the rate of transactions triggered by the deals. It’s a data-driven business, which is what attracted Shriram to invest and become a board member in 2006—the last time the company raised money. (Shriram used to be the president of comparison shopping engine Junglee before it was sold to Amazon a dozen years ago). Shriram tells me:
Next Jump has three very rich sources of data which it uses to target offers: a unique consumer demographic database, a transactional database, and a consumer preference database. “The consumer is reached through ‘buying circles’ inside their employer's intranet,” explains Shriram. “We know most employees mostly shop on-line while at work. Businesses in turn, see special offers and attractive prices as a perk for their employees.” Since it operates discount programs for roughly one third of all U.S. corporate employees, it is considered a non-traditional benefits provider and gets updated weekly on the employment status of 30 million workers (who also happen to be consumers). It gets part of the employee record, including things like name, address, employment status, home and work address, marital status, and sometimes even job title or salary grade. While it doesn’t have access to actual salaries, it knows enough to put people in the right buckets. “Income is the single largest predictor of future purchases,” says Kim, which makes sense. The more money you have, the more likely you are to spend some of it. But even Amazon doesn’t know your income other than what it can infer from your zip code. Next jump gets transactional data from its merchants, credit card companies such as Mastercard, and affiliate purchases. But it’s preference database is perhaps the most interesting. Because it is seen as an employee perk, says Shriram, “HR departments inside companies and the individuals themselves are willing to engage in a level of preference data sharing that has not been seen in e-commerce before. The customer preference data allows for better targeting and ultimately superior conversions (around 10-11% vs 2% for the best commerce sites today).” Consumers tell Next Jump not only what items they would like to buy, but at what price point they would be willing to buy it for. Across various of its services, consumers can set reminders for when specific products are on available for deeper discounts. For instance, you can say alert me when I can buy this pair of Nike running shoes for a 40 percent discount instead of the current 20 percent discount. Next Jump collects all of this data and presents it to participating merchants in an online dashboard (see screenshots below) which helps them model demand at differemt discount points. The dashboard also shows them current sales, average sales for competitors, conversion rates, and helps them target by different age, income, location, whether they are new or existing customers, and other factors. Every offer gets ranked and every user gets ranked. Next Jump’s OfferRank takes into account the discount price below retail, the quality of the offer as voted by users, and the performance history of that merchant as measured by click-through rates, purchase rates, average transaction size, and other variables. UserRank is based on how many reward points someone earns. You earn points every time you make a purchase. Retailers and manufacturers target their offers by UserRank above all other factors. The higher someone’s UserRank, the more they tend to shop. Next Jump wants to match the best deals with the best shoppers. “Shopping and advertisng has always been the same to us,” says Kim. “Merchants are trying to connect with users and users are trying to connect with advertisers. It is a two sided problem.” Next Jump creates algorithms to reward not only good shoppers, but also good deals. Every time an opt-in offer email goes out, Next Jump measures the response rate. If someone stops responding that merchant is quarantined from that consumer. If the offers turn into spam, then everybody loses. Merchants are willing to participate because the conversions are great, they get a lot of data to help them decide whether to step up their deals, and for the most part the deals aren’t terribly public so premium brands can use it as channel without diluting their premium pricing. Kim knows his advantage lies with his data and improving the matches between buyers and sellers. That 11 to 1 conversion rate was 100 to 1 a year ago, and he wants to get it down to 3 to 1. In order to that, he needs better offer algorithms and is on an engineer hiring binge. Of his 225 employees, 150 are engineers. He hired 50 engineers last year, and plans to hire another 100 this year. Next Jump is one of the top engineering recruiters at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Georgia Tech. If Kim keeps perfecting his shopping algorithms, you may never shop the same way again—and you won’t even know that you are doing anything differently .
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| PC Shipments Up 15 Percent Last Quarter (But None Of Those Are The Apple Tablet So Whatever) Posted: 14 Jan 2010 01:04 PM PST  There was plenty of talk ever since Lehman Brothers exploded in mid-2008 about how would consumers cope. Would they keep buying widgets in the face of insane job cuts? Would they keep buying, but only at a fraction of what they had in the past? Let's take PC sales, a pretty good barometer of where the average person is. (It's a big purchase, but not like buying a car or house.) Shipments of new PCs jumped 15 percent in the fourth quarter of last year. That's worldwide, by the way, and much higher than the people who expect things expected. This is good news.
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| Foursquare Who? Gowalla What? MyTown Has 500,000 Users And 31 Million Check-Ins Posted: 14 Jan 2010 12:33 PM PST
So how did MyTown manage to do that? There are a few reasons, but the main one may be the background of the creators. Lee along with his co-founders Brian Morrisroe and Sam Christiansen all have extensive experience in the gaming industry. In fact, all three did significant work for Blizzard Entertainment for a number of years, serving in key roles to build the Diablo and World of Warcraft franchises. From there, they decided to take their expertise to form their own company, Booyah (parent of MyTown), and work on location-based mobile gaming. MyTown began really as more of an experiment for Booyah, Lee tells us. But the fact that usage has been skyrocketing led the team to work quickly to build a new version, 2.0, which should launch sometime next week, we’re told. Aside from the aforementioned 500,000 users, MyTown has seen some 31 million check-ins and 2.1 million unique locations created. They’re seeing about six check-ins per second now, Lee says. By comparison, Foursquare just noted that it was recently seeing one check-in per second. The idea is similar to both Foursquare and Gowalla, in that it’s a location-based game you play to accumulate both virtual properties and goods. But again, the emphasis here is heavily on the gaming aspect. For example, in MyTown you actually buy properties with virtual currency. And when other users visit, they pay you rent. It’s sort of like Monopoly, but potentially more interesting because of the real-world element and the fact that rents fluctuate based on how popular an actual property is. But none of that really answers how MyTown gained so much usage in such a short amount of time. That likely comes down to the fact that Apple featured the app for two weeks shortly after its launch. At one point, they were the seventh most popular free app in the App Store. From there, Booyah kept its foot on the gas with some viral marketing and cross-promotion. Word of mouth played a big role as well, Lee says. Booyah was finance by Kleiner Perkins’ iFund, which was set up to fund iPhone apps. They also raised a second $5 million round this past September to bring their total funding to just under $10 million. Find MyTown in the App Store here. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Segway Acquired By UK-Based Firm, CEO Out Posted: 14 Jan 2010 12:19 PM PST
Segway’s post indicates that the company is now owned by a UK-based firm backed by an investor in Segway U.K., which is independently owned.
Segway is the brainchild of renowned inventor Dean Kamen, who first unveiled the Segway PT in late 2001 (it went on sale in 2002). At launch, the hype behind the “Personal Transporter” was absolutely massive, and Segways continue to turn heads nearly a decade after their debut. Unfortunately, that attention has never translated into widespread demand from consumers, and Segways are still novelties to most people. That said, it looks like they’re getting some adoption from businesses — for one, I’ve noticed some mall patrols using them. We have one at the TechCrunch office, and it’s certainly fun to zip around downtown Palo Alto. But it’s pretty clear that it isn’t the future of personal transportation. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Transpera Raises $2 Million For Mobile Video Ad Network Posted: 14 Jan 2010 12:10 PM PST
Mobile video advertising startup Transpera has raised $2 million in funding according to an SEC filing. The company most recently raised $8.25 million in 2008, which was accompanied by an undisclosed amount in Series A financing received in July 2007. Transpera develops an ad platform that enables the distribution and monetization of Web videos on mobile phones. With the so-called Transpera Ad Platform (TAP), the company offers mobile video publishers and carriers a suite of promotional and distribution building tools to enhance the end user experience, and advertisers a way to market their wares by serving targeted ads in the form of interactive display banners, pre-roll videos, overlay ads, post-roll experiences and mini sites. There’s even a spin-off platform tailored specifically to the iPhone, which is steadily gaining traction as mobile web usage skyrockets. The platform is in use by a number of established information and entertainment brands, including Associated Press, CBS News, Disney, Discovery Communications, Fox Reality Channel, and MTV Networks. Transpera also recently brought on Jason Weisberger as President and COO. Weisberger was the former COO of Federated Media. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| The Top Ten VC Blogs (New And Improved) Posted: 14 Jan 2010 09:21 AM PST
Every so often, venture capitalist Larry Cheng puts out a list of the top VC blogs. Previously, he ranked the blogs by how many subscribers they have on Google Reader. But now he’s changed his methodology and is ranking them by average monthly unique visitors, based on Compete data. He just came out with his new global ranking for the fourth quarter of 2009. Below are the top ten blogs from that list. If you compare this list to the last one, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is now the top VC blogger, followed by Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures (who previously was No. 1). Now, the always-provocative Paul Graham of Y Combinator is No. 3, whereas he wasn’t even in the top ten on the old list. Other new entrants to the top 10 include Mark Suster of GRP Partners, Dave McClure of Founder’s Fund and soon to launch his own seed fund, and Bijan Sabet of Spark. Some VCs who dropped out of the top ten include Marc Andreessen and David Hornik of August Capital. Four VC blogs in the top ten are new under the Cheng’s method, which better captures which ones are capturing attention since it is based on an average of the last quarter’s audience. Of course, this method does not capture people who read the blogs via RSS. So pick your poison. You can subscribe to the Top 10, Top 25, Top 50, or Top 100 on Google Reader, if that’s your thing (can someone create corresponding Twitter Lists for these VCs?). Cheng is a managing partner at Volition Capital, which was Fidelity Ventures until it was spun off on Monday. His own blog, Thinking About Thinking, ranks No. 12. Top 10 VC Blogs (Average Monthly Uniques, 4Q09)
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We’re waiting patiently for user and usage numbers for the CauseWorld. The app combines the addictiveness and gameplay at FourSquare and Gowalla with actual good deeds, and we’re hoping it’s a winner.
Twitter is preparing to launch a new set of tools that will let third party websites easily integrate Twitter features directly into their web sites and services, multiple sources have confirmed. In a nutshell, this is their response to the massively popular Facebook Connect.
For the past four months, Amsterdam-based 
People are continually looking for new pieces of information. We go to school, read articles on a variety of subjects, have free websites such as 
One of the reasons text messaging is so popular is because it’s so simple. Anyone with just about any kind of mobile device can do it. And that’s why it was ingenious when the Obama administration set up a special number and got the major U.S. carriers on board to allow people to very easily donate $10 to the Red Cross to help with the disastrous situation in Haiti following a major earthquake. So far, that program has raised over $5 million from over a half million different mobile phone users, someone from the U.S. State Department 
Social finance company 
For the past several weeks I’ve only used one web browser: Google Chrome for Mac. Sure, it’s still 
We occasionally get offers for payments in exchange for posts on TechCrunch. Sometimes we post these offers to let the world know who’s out there trying to pay for coverage. Usually, though, we just delete them.
With the location-based social networks starting to 
The race to become the hot location-based gaming service is red hot right now. 
With no fanfare to speak of, Segway Inc, the company behind the gyroscope-powered, self balancing scooters, has been acquired by a UK-based firm. The news was first reported this morning by 
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