Thursday, January 7, 2010

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Brightcove Comes To Yahoo Connected TVs, But Web Video Is Still Stuck In Widget Hell

Posted: 07 Jan 2010 08:24 AM PST

If you own an Internet-connected TV that is compatible with Yahoo’s TV widgets (AKA, a Yahoo Connected TV), you may soon start seeing video produced for the Web on your TV. Brightcove announced today that media publishers using its online video platform can now distribute their videos through Yahoo’s Widget Engine, which powers the widgets on Yahoo-Connected TVs. These TVs are made by Sony, Samsung, Vizio, and LG, which show widgets along the bottom displaying data and content from the Web. These include your Facebook and Twitter streams, stock quotes, the weather, Amazon on-demand videos, and now Web videos powered by Brightcove.

A lot of print publications use Brightcove to power video on their Websites, and some of these already have Yahoo Connecetd TV widgets. These include MyRecipes, Cooking Light, Real Simple, Southern Living, Sunset, AllYou and ThisOldHouse. There are a lot of Time Inc. titles in there. TheStreet.com, Wine Spectator, Slate, and The Hollywood Reporter now also have TV widgets through Brightcove.

Yahoo also announced a partnership with MIPS Technologies today, which makes processors for Internet-connected TVs and set-top boxes. The idea that you need a special TV to watch video content from the Web seems strange. As long as it’s a flat-panel TV, why should it matter, right? But these integrations are more about bringing data to TVs from the Web in a friendly format. I’m glad Yahoo is pushing this along, but at some point hopefully open standards will develop so that any widget, data, or content from the Web can be viewed on any TV. Why should it go through a Yahoo widget? I get widgets from Verizon FIOS TV on all my TVs, even my old CRT. I don’t believe those are Yahoo Widgets.

The other issue is just getting people to use these widgets. I have yet to even set up my Twitter or Facebook widgets on my TV. I think I looked up the weather once. But if I really want to do all that Web stuff, I have my iPhone or my laptop. There is a reason WebTV failed. Widgets are not going to fare any better. However, if they can be used to put Web video on your TV, I could see that gaining traction. Except that you have to remember to click on the widget button, which is still an unnatural act, instead of just surfing through the regular channels. Once these additional Web channels can be incorporated into the digital guide through which people surf TV, then Web video can be treated just like anything else on TV. It shouldn’t matter where it’s coming from.

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Fandango For Android, Babylon For BlackBerry

Posted: 07 Jan 2010 07:47 AM PST

We're rolling two separate announcements into one post, if you don't mind. Fandango this morning announced the official release of its free app for the Android platform, enabling owners of Google's Nexus One and other devices that run Android to check out movies showtimes and more on the go. The news comes a couple of weeks after the company put out a beta release of the Android app. Translation and dictionary software maker Babylon, has released its application for BlackBerry.


Followbase: A Twitter CRM Starter Kit

Posted: 07 Jan 2010 06:43 AM PST

FollowbaseAlthough there is no shortage of businesses large and small making great use of Twitter, many are still trying to make heads-and-tales of how to harness its power to communicate with existing and prospective clients. CoTweet and HootSuite are trying to meet this opportunity with feature-rich CRM applications, but for businesses who are Twitter newbies, these apps can be daunting.

Followbase saw this opportunity-within-an-opportunity and designed a simple, bare-bones Twitter CRM app that could form a stepping stone to the more heavy-duty apps.

All you need to do to get started with Followbase is to connect it with a Twitter account. Twitter’s standard 3rd-party OAuth approval is used here to ensure the user is the actual account owner. Followbase then begins scanning the stream and funnels tweets into four customer service oriented topics: Mention, Ideas, Problems and Questions.

Tweets under each topic column are displayed with threaded replies as well as highlighting for the main account and additional team members. The columns are formed automatically, based on the usage of the “?” operator and keywords found in the body of the tweets. Examples include: idea, feature, suggestion, bug, issue, fail, etc.

Followbase attempts to deal with false positives in sense that phrases such as “any idea…” or “no idea…” do not end up classified under the Ideas column. If a tweet was accidentally mis-categorized, it can then be moved manually.

If you’re wondering whether there are any semantic or sentiment analyses, the answer is no. Nir Buschi, founder of Followbase, says that a 3rd party semantic engine could be integrated down the road but right now the focus is on keeping the entire experience as simple as possible for newbies.

Additional features expected to be rolled out in the near future include domain aliasing, customization of look & feel, custom search lists, and issue management.

Followbase is currently a free service, but I can certainly see it scale into a freemium model where it could charge small and medium businesses $10-20 per month.

Followbase

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Google Chrome OS Is Here! Well, Kinda.

Posted: 07 Jan 2010 06:14 AM PST

Later today at CES, Glide will be debuting its extension for the Google Chrome browser, which it claims turns the software program into a full operating system. The extension, which is also available for Internet Explorer 7+ and Firefox 3.0+, can already be downloaded here.

What Glide does is extend the most popular Internet browsers with a suite of applications that can interact with multiple remote Windows, Mac and Linux desktops and mobile platforms.

These tools include a rights-based file management system, a word processor, presentation app, photo editor, e-mail client, drawing tool, contact manager, calendar and more. When the extension is installed, you’ll see a bunch of new options upon clicking the new Glide icon in the toolbar, but you’ll need to register first.

The Glide extension for Google Chrome also equips the browser with needed file synchronization and automated file format translation features. On top of that, Glide’s solution comes with 20GB of free storage, and doesn’t include ads.

I’ve been playing around with the OS / extension for about half an hour, and the biggest take-away as far as I’m concerned is that while Glide comes with a host of features and applications, the interface is clunky and not aligned with the browser experience very well. If this is the future of convergence between operating systems and the Web, I don’t want it.

Glide is free for up to 6 users, and offers a premium version with 50 GB of storage and support for up to 25 users for $4.95 per month (or 49.95 per year).

Glide is bold enough to state that its extension for Google Chrome effectively one-ups Google’s own, recently announced but unreleased Chrome OS because it supports virtually any device and platform today whereas Google Chrome OS will only run on a limited number of devices.

In the first half of 2010, Glide expects to ship a bootable version of the Glide OS for Netbooks, making it possible to launch the Glide OS at startup. The company aims to provide netbooks with a unified desktop, file management system and a suite of native versions of the Glide Application Suite.

If the experience is anything remotely like the one I’m having with the Chrome extension, I’ll stick to Jolicloud, thanks.

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Jive Software Acquires Social Media Monitoring Startup Filtrbox

Posted: 07 Jan 2010 05:53 AM PST

Businesses and brands have already caught onto the immense power of the social stream that runs through Twitter and Facebook to track the pulse of conversations around consumers. Both tech giants and startups are competing to provide enterprise-friendly, social platforms to businesses that combine both collaboration and social media monitoring. Socialtext and CubeTree offer compelling social collaboration offerings to the enterprise. And Salesforce.com recently entered the market with a new, more social version of its Service Cloud, and also debuted its take on a social platform for the enterprise, Chatter. Now Jive Software, a Sequoia-backed company that develops an all-in-one social enterprise software is acquiring Filtrbox, a startup that provides tools for social media monitoring, to boost its offering. You may remember Filtrbox as a Class of 2007 alum of incubator TechStars. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Jive says that Filtrbox’s social media real-time monitoring technologies will be absorbed into Jive’s platform to help businesses and brands harness the power of the real-time web from within Jive’s collaborative software. Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, Jive combines computing with social collaboration. Its suite of applications help businesses collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, and social networking features and more. The company, which is profitable, recently launched integration with Microsoft SharePoint, letting Jive users easily access data and content from the CMS into Jive's software.

Filtrbox, which raised $1.4 million in funding last February, allows users to monitor thousands of content sources, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. After inputting the terms they'd like to keep track of, Filtrbox can send them continuous updates, weeding out duplicates (you can also choose to receive periodic digests). Filtrbox prioritizes feeds and dials the “noise” up or down to sift through information from social media blogs and other sites. It uses intelligence to adjust rankings based on how the user interacts with the data, and offers the ability to analyze the trends and influencers in an enterprise's market.

Jive says that one of the advantages of Filtrbox’s technology is that it has a scalable architecture that enables enterprises to process large volumes of social intelligence faster and at a lower cost. This isn’t the first acquisition for Jive, the company bought online calendar software developer Jotlet last year.

Jive is wise to boost its offerings as it is going to be competing with Salesforce’s Chatter and other social offerings. But the company is ready for the fight. Jive recently raised $12 million from Sequoia Capital and also expanded its operations to Silicon Valley with a new Palo Alto office.

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Breaking: Google And On2 Technologies Revise Merger Agreement

Posted: 07 Jan 2010 05:13 AM PST

In August 2009, Google announced that it had agreed to acquire On2 Technologies for – then – roughly $106 million. At the end of last year, On2 – not for the first time – postponed a meeting at which it had hoped to get shareholder approval for its purchase by Google.

A new shareholder meeting is scheduled for February 2010, but this morning Google and On2 released a joint press release announcing a deal to amend the merger agreement.

Under the revised terms, each outstanding share of On2 common stock will receive 0.0010 of a share of Google Class A Common Stock for each share of On2 common stock, as previously announced, plus an additional $0.15 per share in cash. This would increase the deal size to roughly $133 million, or about $26.5 million on top of the previous offer.

Google and On2 had initially said they expected the merger to be completed by the fourth quarter of 2009. If the deal is not completed by March 31 2010, either party can terminate it.

Right after the initial announcement was made, several On2 investors sued the company, alleging that management had not shopped the company around to get the best price and that it had sold at a discount of what it was actually worth. The lawsuits were settled by On2 in late October 2009.

The companies say the revisions to the terms serve to address the fact that the market value of Google's Class A Common Stock has increased significantly since the initial merger announcement was made last August, while the value of the acquisition has remained fixed for On2's stockholders. By increasing the consideration by an additional $0.15 per share in cash, On2's stockholders are to receive additional value for their On2 common stock.

At the reconvened Special Meeting, scheduled for February 17, On2 common stock holders will be asked to vote upon the merger proposal and the adjournment proposal as set forth in the SEC proxy statement/prospectus that will be filed by Google shortly.

Google says this offer is final.

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Jamendo Runs Out Of Cash, Looks For An Exit

Posted: 07 Jan 2010 04:49 AM PST

Jamendo, a community of free, legal music published with Creative Commons licenses, is actively looking to sell to or merge with another company, TechCrunch Europe has learned. Jamendo CEO Laurent Kratz has confirmed rumors that had made their way to Twitter earlier this week. The reason is fairly simple: Jamendo is running out of money after failing to raise a follow-up round of venture capital. The startup was looking to raise 1.5 million euros (roughly $2.15 million) after securing a 'significant amount' in Series A funding back in June 2007. The company failed to come to an agreement with Mangrove Capital Partners, its original backer, and a potential new investor.


Happy Birthday, Chris Messina, And Enjoy Advocating The Open Web At Google

Posted: 07 Jan 2010 02:58 AM PST

It’s no secret that Google is a big proponent of open source technology and the open web (to a degree), and it’s no secret that Chris Messina is too, either. It’s thus not terribly surprising that the man is joining the Mountain View Internet giant as its new Open Web Advocate.

Messina announced the news on his blog, and referred to his move as a very happy birthday present (he’s turning 29 today).

Although involved in a slew of projects (Diso, Citizen Agency, Activity Streams, and others) and his capacities as board member of the OpenID and Open Web Foundations (which he’ll continue to be), Messina previously worked part-time for Vidoop, but was laid off around May 2009.

In the past, he’s also worked for (other) browser software makers such as Mozilla and Flock.

In his blog post, Messina says he’s been mulling over such a move for some time, and that multiple options were on the table. He writes that he feels he’s just getting started with his work, and that by joining Google he feels he can make a bigger impact.

Google lost one of its social forces and open web evangelists last year when Kevin Marks decided to go work for British Telecom instead, but last month the company recruited former Plaxo CTO Joseph Smarr to ‘turbocharge the opening up of the social web’. Messina’s other good friend, Jaiku co-founder Jyri Engeström, did the exact opposite about two months ago by leaving Google after a two year run.

People come and go, but with Messina, Google has attracted one of the people that I know is the most passionate about the future of the social web, and there’s no doubt in my mind that what he’ll be doing at Google will ultimately prove useful for the Web as a whole.

Happy birthday, Chris.

(Original image via Flickr / Lithfin)

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Let’s Just Skip To The Super-Duper-Phone

Posted: 07 Jan 2010 01:09 AM PST

Google introduced the term “superphone” to the world yesterday when they unveiled the Nexus One Google phone. Right from the beginning of the hour+ presentation, Google execs were referring to the Nexus One as the first “superphone,” a term not previously widely used (of note – GigaOm has a reference to the term last summer).

So what’s a superphone? It’s a marketing term and nothing else. Google VP and Android founder Andy Rubin talked about the term at length in the Q&A session, and we’ve grabbed the relevant parts of the video from the ustream archive and embed it below.

Here’s part of the transcript (bolding added):

The definition of a superphone…the difference between superphone & smartphone…the evolution of the platform is such that the openness, coupled with these marketplaces and these app stores, that makes it really easy for people to download 3rd party content; an ecosystem by which 3rd party developers can participate in the ecosystem; the Ghz processors; the more memory; the gigabyte storage…. these are all things that didn’t exist 2 years ago. So we thought that the industry needed another term to refer to these innovations. And again, this is as powerful as your laptop was 4 years go. If anything, you’re carrying these around in your pocket, they’re with you all the time they’re always on… these are all new. So we wanted to refer to it by something and we think that “superphone” is the right way to refer to it.

The bar is raising…These superphones are getting more and more sophisticated…everybody knows about Moore’s law…today’s superphone is tomorrow’s smartphone…

“Today’s superphone is tomorrow’s smartphone,” says Rubin. I immediately thought of Highlander and the “there can be only one” quote (the immortals in the movie had to kill eachother until there was just one left). As soon as a new superphone comes out, any previous superphone is relegated to being a mere smartphone. There can be only one superphone.

But what Google is really doing is making a not-so-subtle jab at the iPhone and other competitors. The Nexus One, he implies, is as powerful as laptops were four years ago. All those smartphones from two years ago (iPhone) aren’t superphones. Presumably even the iPhone 3GS, which may have been a superphone last summer when it launched, is a mere smartphone today. Only the Nexus One is a superphone. And soon, it will only be a smartphone as new devices are launched.

It all makes my head spin. But that’s ok. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s phone. The Super-Duper-Phone (too late, I already registered it). It’s tomorrow’s superphone, when today’s superphone has become a mere smartphone. And today’s smartphones are something icky and untouchable.

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The Hacker Fair: Where Job-Hunting Developers Get A Chance Show Off Their Skills

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 11:44 PM PST

For most people on the prowl for employment, job fairs are something of a mixed blessing. Yes, they can sometimes lead to job opportunities. But it’s often very difficult to separate yourself from the dozens (or hundreds) of other prospective applicants in attendance — at the end of the day, you’re probably just another resume in the stack. The Hacker Dojo, a community center that caters to developers in the Mountain View area, is looking to turn that model on its head with The Hacker Fair. Where developers actually get to show off their coding talents to the employers in attendance.

Here’s how they describe it:

At the Hacker Fair, the job seekers are the ones giving demonstrations, and the recruiters are the ones walking around.

Think of it as a “science fair” where the “science projects” are the developers’ personal and side projects, the “judges” are recruiters, and the “prizes” are interviews and hopefully job offers!

The event will be taking place on January 16th from 10am – 1pm, in Mountain View CA (you can find more details on signing up here). It will be attended by some of Silicon Valley’s most well known companies, including Yahoo, Microsoft, Mozilla, Yelp, and plenty more. Microsoft is even sponsoring breakfast.

For those who attend, feel free to let us know how it goes in the comments. I’m guessing a few of the hackers may get creative with their projects, and employers won’t know what to expect, which should make things even more interesting.

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Video And Hands On: Lenovo’s Lephone Android 2.0 Smartphone

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 10:16 PM PST

Lenovo gave us a chance to check out their latest smartphone today at CES 2010. It's Android-based with a complete OS facelift and hardly any of the original OS sticking out. I doubt they intended it to be, but it seems like a sort of interesting mix of webOS, iPhone, and Android features. I quite liked it. From what I was told, the plan is to release the device in China first, then expand to the US. There were no carriers mentioned, and they were still working that out for China, so I wouldn't even speculate just yet. But I was impressed by the phone and the complete little ecosystem they had going.


Oneforty Launching Its Premium Twitter App Store In Alpha Next Week

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 09:15 PM PST

Making Money by Photos8.com by Photos8.comWhen we first wrote about Oneforty, the “App Store for Twitter” in September, founder Laura Fitton told us that plan was for the service to be a full-fledged e-commerce platform eventually. That will start happening next week, we’ve learned.

Specifically, on January 12 (next Tuesday), Oneforty will announce its e-commerce alpha launch. With it, third-party Twitter applications and tools will be able to be sold through Oneforty for the first time. The service is in the process of emailing certain developers so that they can get their apps ready to go for this launch. If they choose to try out this new feature, developers are being told their apps will be featured on the service’s main page.

So what are the details about the e-commerce solution? It looks like there will be a minimum $0.99 price on apps being sold. As with Apple’s App Store and a few other popular app stores out there, Oneforty’s cut will apparently be 30%, with the remaining 70% going to the developer. But if your app is being sold for more than $14.50, Oneforty decreases its cut to 20%.

In the alpha stage of this program, Oneforty will only support one-time purchases, meaning there will be no subscription-option. But they hint that down the road there will be more options available. There is no word on how exactly the payment structure will work, but it seems like it’s a safe bet that they’ll be taking credit cards payments.

Oneforty also notes that those who choose not to use this e-commerce option are free to continue accepting donations on their Oneforty pages. Oneforty will continue to pay the PayPal fees (up to $500 anyway) for this service, and promises the developers 100% of the donations.

Quickly after its launch, rumors started flying about Twitter looking into buying the service. Instead, they raised a $1.6 million round of funding (some of which was old, previously undisclosed money). The Series A filing also left open the possibility of raising up to $2.4 million in the round. If this e-commerce platform takes off, expect a lot more where that came from.

[thanks Julio]

[photo: flickr/photos8.com]

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MG Talks The Nexus One On Attack Of The Show: “It’s A Nice Little Device”

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 08:29 PM PST

Yesterday, G4’s Attack Of The Show had our own MG Siegler on to talk about the Nexus One, Googles’ much-hyped new smartphone. MG’s early verdict? It’s “a nice little device”, and “by far the sexiest Android device [he's] ever seen”.

The 5-minute interview covers many of the phone’s new features, including voice-to-text and 3D graphics capable of rendering a mobile version of Google Earth. They also discuss the revelation that Verizon will be supporting Google’s new distribution model. And there’s even a brief discussion on the Nexus One’s ability to handle ASCII genitalia, if that’s your thing.

MG has long been on the Apple side of the iPhone/Android religious battle. But he’s giving the new phone a solid shot, and may even wind up switching to it as his primary phone (at least until the next iPhone comes out). I’m sure he’ll have more to say on the matter later this month.


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Live from the CES 2010 Keynote with Steve Ballmer

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 06:26 PM PST

We're live from the CES 2010 keynote, featurin' good ol' Steve Ballmer! We'll keep the live blog flowing as long as Verizon doesn't crumble under the weight of a thousand bloggers. Check out the live blog after the jump.


CrunchBase Funding Digest: Lagotek, Pinch Media, Space Pencil, Precursor Energetics

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 06:12 PM PST

Every day I troll SEC Form D Filings to discover new startups, fundings and investments. I put everything I find into CrunchBase. For everyone else I give you the daily digest, a quick hit of the latest and greatest SEC Form D filings in the TechCrunch sphere: Lagotek - Wireless Home Automation Pinch Media - Mobile Analytics & Monetization Space Pencil - Stealth Web Analytics Precursor Energetics - Stealth


Howard Stern Talks Google Nexus One (NSFW)

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 06:10 PM PST

Howard Stern talks about the Google Nexus One on the air today, quoting from our review. Woot. I got Shatner to say TechCrunch (although I had to pay for that), and now Stern’s said it too. I’m done here, I can retire now.

NSFW. Not even close to SFW. Listen below, or here.

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Crazy Bob: Square Nabs A Core Android Engineer

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 04:55 PM PST

Bob LeeIn terms of new hot startups, Square is among the hottest. And for good reason. If it takes off, it has the potential to transform the way vendors and consumers handle transactions. (There’s a reason it was worth $40 million before launch.) Not surprisingly, the talent is also flowing to them.

Square has just hired Bob Lee, a software engineer at Google. And not just any engineer, Lee led the core library development for Android — yes, Google’s mobile platform that is exploding with growth and excitement right now. And yet, Lee is leaving after 5 years at Google for something he clearly feels is even more exciting, Square.

Square’s Buzz Andersen tweeted the news today, and confirmed that Lee is on board fulltime with Square now. Lee, who is apparently known as “Crazy Bob,” will be heading up development of Square’s Android app, we hear. Currently, Square only works on the iPhone and iPod touch. Getting to the other mobile platforms will be vital for the company’s success. And of these platforms, Android is clearly the first priority.

How Square will interact with Android devices isn’t yet clear since the system requires a hardware component as well. On the iPhone and iPod touch, a little square (hence, the name) plugs into the headphone jack — something which the iPhone OS 3.0 allows for.

Update: Lee has just tweeted about the news as well.

Update 2: Square co-founder Jack Dorsey also says that there are two other hires that Square will be announcing soon.

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Apple’s Pricing Smoke Around The Tablet Fire Grows Thicker

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 04:26 PM PST

Screen shot 2010-01-06 at 4.24.30 PMTwo days ago, I wrote a speculative piece wondering if Apple hadn’t leaked some of the information about its forthcoming tablet device to the Wall Street Journal itself. I based this on a number of curiosities in the post, the timing of it, as well as the history between the secretive company and the publication. Today, The Mac Observer suspects the same thing happened. Only they have a much better reason to believe: The author used to be in charge of doing just that for Apple.

John Martellaro, now a senior editor at The Mac Observer, was formerly a Senior Marketing Manager at Apple. As he writes in his post:

Often Apple has a need to let information out, unofficially. The company has been doing that for years, and it helps preserve Apple’s consistent, official reputation for never talking about unreleased products. I know, because when I was a Senior Marketing Manager at Apple, I was instructed to do some controlled leaks.

Lest you be suspicious of Martellaro’s claim, he did indeed hold that role at Apple (here’s some Apple developer documentation tied to him in 2001), and it’s hard to imagine he would have any reason to make up such a thing. In fact, it’s been widely believed for a long while that Apple does this from time to time.

And Martellaro goes into more details. Apparently, senior execs used to come to his team and say they need to get information out there. They were never allowed to email it to anyone, it always had to be on the phone or in person, so there was no paper trail.

He also notes that stock manipulation never factors in (one would hope not), though I suppose one could argue that if Apple did in fact leak the Jobs’ liver transplant information to the WSJ on a Friday night a few months ago, it was a form of manipulation, because they were making sure the stock wouldn’t tank on the news.

Martellaro sums up his post: “That’s how Apple does controlled leaks, and the WSJ article from yesterday was a classic example.“ So there you go.

[photo: flickr/photo denbow]

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$0 to $20 Million: Ten Hand-to-Hand Sales Tactics

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 04:07 PM PST

Matt Bell 1This guest post is written by Matt Bell, VP of Sales and Business Development for Azaleos. Azaleos is a company focused on putting the things in the cloud that make the most sense for large enterprise; application management. Matt offers appealing insight because he has grown sales for companies during both of the last two economic meltdowns. This post expands on Vivek Wadhwa's post It's All About Selling for Survival earlier this month.

Technology blogs are full of advice for startups: where to start a company, how to raise capital, what kind of culture to build, whom to hire. But we hardly ever talk about what makes strategic decisions meaningful: sales.

A company with strong sales can build a great culture, hire anyone and take the time to figure out its strategy. Without sales, nothing else matters.

There are a thousand books on how to sell everything from used cars to aluminum siding. But most never talk about the unique problem faced by startups: getting one crazy customer to spend money on a company that has a 50-50 shot at going out of business by year end.

I have run sales organizations that couldn't sell diddly, and others that grew to $20 million. What I learned from both experiences is that even when the product works and plenty of people could use it, you can still fail if you don't get ferocious about finding your first customers.

1. Be mutantly flexible: The biggest advantage you have when competing with giants is just giving customers exactly what they want. Promise the moon then break down your CEO's door to make sure your customer gets it. Engineers can complain all they want after the fact, but most actually prefer rallying for a paying customer. Large competitors have to stick to rigid guidelines, satisfy dozens of constituencies in the install-base and within their own organization, and optimize for the masses. A startup's essential promise isn't to be like Hertz, which gets everything exactly right, but to be like Avis: we try harder.

2. Juice the comp plan: if you want capable, blood-thirsty reps, build a comp plan short on guarantees and big on incentives. High base salaries are for IBM's order-takers, not true hunters. You know you've got it right when the rest of the management team is worried about a success-disaster: if we make our numbers, won't all the sales reps all get rich? That's a good problem to have. Verdiem's Jim Flatley taught me this at Plumtree: he fought to get early reps 15% of every sale, but after we made our numbers for the first time ever, nobody wanted to pay them less. Even after the bubble burst and every other technology company took a blood-bath, Jim kept delivering results.

3. Value speed in everything you do: performance isn't just a characteristic of a technology; it's a characteristic of your entire organization, beginning with how quickly you respond to an inquiry or follow up on a presentation. If your argument is that your competitors are big, slow dinosaurs makes them look that way at every opportunity: whenever a prospect makes a request to you and your competitors, be the one who answers first.

4. Plant landmines: go first in customer presentations so you can set the terms of the debate. Prepare a list of questions for customers to ask your customers. Customers won't trust whatever claims you make about yourself, and they don't like it when you attack competitors directly, but if you let them dig into competitors' weaknesses for themselves, it works. When selling a $3-million deal to Boeing, I included the questions to ask our competitors in a hand-out. Who knows what happened to that hand-out, but we came from far behind to win.

5. Move in after the first date: your first customers are your best sales people, so after the deal closes, you as a sales-person have to move in with that customer — not move on. Every customer who took a crazy risk on your little company has to be completely vindicated in that decision, enough so that he convinces the next customer to ignore the obvious risk of doing business with you. Most customers understand that their career depends on your ability to convince new customers to make the same decision they did, and so they are usually eager to help you out. References can also limit the scope of a startup's greatest sales enemy: proofs-of-concept. If references establish that the product generally works, you can focus the PoC on very specific concerns. At Azaleos, we have a customer who likes to brag that his team went out for drinks during a go-live rather than watching nervously from a server room.

6. Stand tall: Even if you have no right, work from the premise the customer needs you as much as you need the customer. If you don't have confidence in your solution, who will? Half of what a sales person brings to a start up is a little swagger. As long as you aren't obnoxious, customers like to buy from confident companies, and their procurement officers are trained to smell weakness. Riding up the elevator toward a negotiation with one of the world's largest banks, I decided to raise our walk-away price by $1 million. Everyone argued for a lower number to avoid jeopardizing the deal, but the higher number actually increased our chances. We got the deal for 30% above our walk-away price.

7. Partner up: No one gets fired for hiring IBM, so get IBM on your side. Find out which potential partners have a vested interest in your success and sell to them before you sell to the customer. In any deal with a customer employing more than 5,000 employees, you need to find a partner the customer trusts or lower your forecast probability by 50%. Finding a partner isn't so hard. A victory for you is almost always a victory for a larger company: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, SAP, IBM. When trying to get in the door for an enterprise deal with a major transportation company, I spent nearly a month trying to convince 'em that a startup could handle a multi-million dollar project. Rightfully so, the customer said no way, until I reached out to Microsoft. Together, we got the deal.

8. Involve everyone: get as many of your executives, founders, engineers, product managers, and customer-service folks involved in the sales process as possible. You get better perspectives on the deal – a customer will level with an engineer in a way he might not with you – and it makes your company seem bigger to the customer. The customer develops relationships with people throughout your startup, and realizes there's more at stake than a greedy sales-person's commission. Focus on how much your whole startup cares about the individual customer; make your small size work for you by developing intimacy between your startup and the customer. This tactic works with large or small customers. I recommend having the CEO or another member of the executive staff make a personal phone call during the final decision process to pledge their commitment to the customer's success.

9. Hire slow, fire fast: you'll hire some folks who don't work out. If you wait to fire them, you'll run out of money, demoralize your top performers, and lose credibility. Three months after hiring a rep I asked him "how long are you going to be comfortable not selling anything"? His answer, "Don't worry Matt, I can go several quarters without selling anything before I'd start looking for a new job." We let him got the next day.

10. Focus the sales pitch: technology start ups are mostly driven by engineers in the early days. On hiring you, they'll expect you to start cold-calling the whole phonebook. And the truth is, you have to love cold-calling. After all these years, I still love it. But just like Dutch in Predator before the final battle, you have to be able to answer only one question about your target before you start: where they are. A sales force needs to know what kind of companies to call on and the title of the person to call within those companies. Then he needs a pitch that a ten year-old could understand.

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I’m Betting Matilda Tanascov Will Be The First Person In Romania With A Google Nexus One

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 03:00 PM PST

Our Google Nexus One giveaway yesterday drew so much attention so quickly that our site actually went down hard for half an hour.

4,089 comments and 8,242 tweets later, we have a randomly selected winner. Who is from Romania (we said we’d ship it anywhere). Matilda Tanascov is the proud owner of a brand new Google Nexus One phone, if she ever returns our tweet.

Congrats, Matilda. We hope you enjoy it.

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“Inspired” By Formspring, Tumblr Launches Nearly Identical “Ask Me”

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 02:13 PM PST

Remember Formspring.me, the service we covered two days ago that makes it easy to conduct your own online Q&A with the web at large? Popular microblogging service Tumblr has just launched a new feature called “Ask Me” that does the exact same thing.

The new feature is simple: if you have a Tumblr blog, you can now add a form that lets your readers ask you whatever they want. They can leave their questions anonymously or submit them alongside their account name. Then, you can pick and choose which questions you want to answer and post your responses to your blog.

Of course, that’s exactly what Formspring.me does. Tumblr users have actually been building their own Q&As for a while using generic HTML form builders, which is what drove Formspring (a form builder itself) to build a dedicated service for Q&As called Formspring.me. Formspring.me has since gained quite a large following on Tumblr, so it isn’t all that surprising that the blog platform decided to bake it in. CEO David Karp says that the feature was “inspired by the Q&A posts that our community had been hacking together with Tumblr Submissions, Wufoo, and Formspring.”

All is not lost for Formspring.me, though. CEO Ade Olonoh says that while Tumblr served as a good incubator for Formspring.me, the service has since grown well beyond that site. He says that in the past few days only around 3-4% of questions answered on Formspring.me were syndicated to Tumblr. I suspect those figures are skewed by the fact that Formspring.me has been covered by a number of large tech blogs recently, but the appeal of these Q&A services clearly extends beyond Tumblr.

Tumblr hasn’t exactly shied away from ripping off other sites before. Back in August the site launched a StumbleUpon-like toolbar called TumblUpon (seriously).

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Video: Google’s “F*ck You iPhone” Phone. The REAL Google Phone (Satire, NSFW)

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 02:04 PM PST

As we’re all well aware, Google released the Nexus One yesterday, the first supposed “Google Phone.” But it’s hardly an iPhone killer. For that role, Google has something much more sinister in mind. Meet the “Fuck You iPhone” Phone.

I don’t even know where to begin. The best bits: ”The fastest processor ever in a mobile device. Also, it fucks with iPhones and the tools that own them.” ”This phone will fuck with any iPhone’s shit. Hard.” The “Optimized Urination Interface.” And yes, the phone used as the new Google Phone is an iPhone. Great stuff from LandlineTV.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Stylesight Raises $5 Million For Fashion Trend Forecasting Tools

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 01:55 PM PST

Stylesight, a company that specializes in trend forecasting and product development tools for professionals in the fashion and style industries, has raised $5 million in funding according to an SEC filing. The company previously raised $16 million in series A funding from Fidelity Venture in 2008.

Stylesight allows designers, manufacturers, and retailers to access the latest fashion data and images, which can then be used in online advertising campaigns, design plans, and merchandise displays. Stylesight hosts a library of millions of images from runway shows and other sources, and will give retail operations and designers reports on trends and product ideas.

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AppMakr: Make Your Own iPhone Apps for Just Two Bills

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 01:26 PM PST

What AppMakr lacks in vowels they make up for in coolness. AppMakr is a dead easy app design engine that allows you to enter a URL or search term, pick a few images, and publish an app to the App Store in a few minutes. The service uses RSS feeds and searches to build a comprehensive feed of your website or "personal brand" that is updated automatically. You can then push the app live for $199 or download the app to your own machine for $499.


Chrome For Mac Finally Gains Extensions (Well, The Dev Channel, At Least)

Posted: 06 Jan 2010 01:14 PM PST

Screen shot 2010-01-06 at 1.12.09 PMThis is it, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Well, those of you who are Mac users that use Chrome anyway. Though it took longer than expected, bookmark syncing and extensions have been turned on in the latest version (4.0.288.1) that just went live today.

However, before you start commenting that you don’t see it working yet, please not that this is on the dev channel version of Chrome for Mac. That version is slightly different from the beta channel version, as it’s updated more frequently and could possibly be suseptible to more bugs. But really, if you’re using Chrome for Mac at this early point, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be using the dev channel version (which you can find here), and that’s especially true now that it has these two key features.

Last month, Google officially unveiled the beta version of Chrome for Mac and Linux. But what the Linux version was pretty much inline with the year-old Windows version of Chrome, the Mac version was far from feature complete, leaving out a number of key elements, such as extensions. And while they have been working in the Chromium builds (the open-source browser on which Chrome is based) for Mac since last month when extensions were also formally unveiled.

Again, you should really be suing the dev build of Chrome for Mac just to get extensions now. There are already a number of really good ones out there, some of which we’ve covered. There’s even a TechCrunch Extension! And bookmark syncing is a nice bonus as well.

Update: There’s also a nice new little feature: “Pin Tab” allows you to keep a tab pinned to the left side of the tabs area as a smaller tab with just the favicon. Great to conserve space. Simply right-click on a tab to enable it.

Screen shot 2010-01-06 at 1.16.35 PM

[thanks Alec]

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