Sunday, January 24, 2010

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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WooRank Screens Your Website, For Free

Posted: 24 Jan 2010 07:30 AM PST

WooRank is a brand new service designed to let website publishers and marketers evaluate the SEO-friendliness and other aspects of their Web sites on the fly, free of charge. If this reminds you of what HubSpot built with its Website Grader tool, it’s because the concept is extremely similar.

WooRank evaluates Web sites based on 50 criteria in an automated fashion, free of charge, and provides helpful SEO and other tips. A premium version will be offered in about 3 months: for a yet-to-be-determined fee, publishers and marketers will then be able to screen Web sites based on up to 120 pre-defined critera, get served more personalized tips as well as references to online tools that they can use to increase the findability and performance of their Web sites.

Update: site seems to be down or at least terribly slow due to our coverage, so hang in there.

I gave the tool a spin and generated a report for techcrunch.com – turns out we’re worthy of a WooRank of 82.4. While I have absolutely no idea what that means exactly, according to these statistics we’re well above the average. In the overall ranking, we even made the top 50, ahead of sites like the Apple Store, MySpace, ESPN.com and NYTimes.com (take that, New York Times, we haz bigger WooRankz!).

Apparently, we need to work on our headings, immage attribution tags, meta description and keywords, XML sitemap(s) and other aspects like Web standards compliance. We score pretty well on content (number of indexed pages), off-site SEO (particularly on the social media level) and website usability and load time.

Frankly, that’s a lot of valuable information available free of charge, so I’ll be curious to know in a couple of months how WooRank will try to entice people to pay for more detailed information and improvement tips.

WooRank was built by fellow Belgians, namely digital marketer Jean Derély of BetaGroup and the founders of interactive agency 1MD.be. Since soft-launching the service a couple of days ago, 27,000 reports have already been generated by some 7,500 visitors.

For more online tools, check out Website Grader but also HitTail and LotusJump.


Bringing Silicon Valley to Sacramento: Why Entrepreneurs Need to Help Rebuild California’s IT Systems

Posted: 24 Jan 2010 07:00 AM PST

Mainframe

Most people don't realize this, but Northern California actually has two giant technology centers: Silicon Valley and Sacramento. Silicon Valley is the world's entrepreneurship capital, and Sacramento is California's State capital. They are less than 100 miles away from each other.  But technologically, they're light-years apart. While Silicon Valley's workers conceive the next revolution in technology, Sacramento's workers toil away at maintaining computer systems that were built in the tech equivalent of the Mesozoic era. Both depend on each other: Sacramento workers maintain the State's infrastructure and public services, and the Valley's workers generate the revenue to pay Sacramento salaries. The irony is that while the valley entrepreneurs desperately look for problems to solve, Sacramento has problems aplenty and no saviors in sight.

Witness the problems that the state experienced last November when it couldn't issue checks to unemployed workers whose benefits had run out before Congress authorized a payment extension. Workers had to wait for up to two months to receive their checks, because the Employment Development Department couldn't make timely changes to its computer systems. Like most of the State's systems, these were built in the '70s and '80s in now antiquated computer languages like COBOL, Adabas Natural, Assembler, and PL/1. They run under operating systems like CICS and IMS.

This is the tip of the iceberg. California has roughly 130 agencies and departments. Each has its own IT staff and its own systems. Each collects its own information and maintains its own databases. These systems are not usually integrated with each other. When they do share data, it is usually through file transfer in batch mode. This is a nightmare for citizens and businesses. Take the simple task of changing a business address. The business owner has to inform multiple agencies, such as Employment Development Department, Board of Equalization, Franchise Tax Board, Secretary of State, and various licensing and certification departments. Believe it or not, the State has more than 40 separate computer applications to collect the same personal and demographic information about citizens. Even for mundane things like email, the State maintains more than 100 separate systems.

California isn't alone in having such legacy systems and challenges. Its systems are probably better than those of any other State, and it is making the investments in reducing costs and improving infrastructure.  Most large corporations run their operations on systems that were built decades ago.  This is a ticking time-bomb for industry as well as for government.

There was a time when there was a big difference between these enterprise systems and the PC and Web applications that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs build. Enterprise systems require large-scale transaction-processing capabilities, have stringent security requirements, and need to have high availability. But that is not different from what Twitter, Facebook, and Zynga require.

Even fledgling startups in the Valley are building systems that make some enterprise systems seem like child's play. For example, Real Time Matrix has built a facility to create Twitter groups. This requires sophisticated real-time analytics and integration with multiple sources such as Twitter, blogs, and live feeds in order to process information "as it happens".  The Web systems that Real Time Matrix has built process tens of thousands of transactions per second and rebroadcast the results to numerous and varied clients accurately and in real time.

Cearadactylus atroxAt a talk I gave at California's Executive Institute on Jan 21, I discussed these issues with the 200 IT managers in attendance; with State CIO, Teri Takai; and with CTO, P.K. Agarwal. Most were in agreement that new thinking was needed. IT managers seemed eager to be using the same technologies as their Silicon Valley brethren. Takai and Agarwal described how feverishly they are working to consolidate and integrate departments and move their systems into a more modern era. They are also working on streamlining the procurement processes for funding IT projects. Not long ago, it used to take an average of three years to obtain approval for a project. Today, they can do this in a year (that's a lifetime in Silicon Valley, but considered fast in the government world). They claim they saved the State $400 million through all these efforts. Despite this, Takai and Agarwal have big challenges: they need to figure out how to make a dinosaur fly. Perhaps what is needed is to let the dinosaurs become extinct and be replaced by swift birds and mammals.

What I suggest that the State do as a top priority is to engage Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to rebuild its systems infrastructure. These entrepreneurs can create new systems for a fraction of the cost of patching up old systems. Take the system that processes unemployment checks. The State has budgeted $50 million to upgrade it. At the end of the day, it will simply have a more maintainable COBOL system if it does business the old way. Instead of the big state contractors who typically bid on and win such contracts, the State should reach out to the Valley's entrepreneurs to rebuild this. Give them the detailed specifications and let them compete for this business (this requires streamlining the bidding process even further – even VC's don't take a year to make decisions). I'll bet that the Valley's entrepreneurs could build this system from scratch in less than a year for less than $5 million. That's right: for less than a tenth of the cost. You can build sophisticated systems in the Web world for a tiny fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time required for maintaining those old monsters. The new systems will be far easier to use, and cost relatively nothing to maintain. And we'd be boosting the local economy rather than the coffers of big state contractors with strong political connections.

I know that some systems are really complex and intertwined with others and can't be fixed or replaced easily. The vast majority, however, aren't like this. Most systems simply perform reporting and analysis – and these can be rebuilt in months, not years. I know because I started my career writing COBOL/CICS transaction-processing systems. Later I developed software to automate the process of developing large enterprise systems and co-founded a company to market it. My second startup built technology to automate the process of modernizing legacy systems. I've seen the technology world evolve and develop and know that what I am suggesting isn't rocket science.

What is needed is to turn the Valley's entrepreneurs loose on these problems and let them do their magic. The net benefit to California could be enormous. The modern world now runs on Web-based technology. So can California — and it can reduce its costs in the process. Sacramento has the advantage of having the world's top-gun techies just a short drive away. They're itching to help (and they can use the money).

Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

NSFW: Conan Online – From Rising Star to Just Another Ginger Cat on a Roomba

Posted: 24 Jan 2010 06:20 AM PST

conanAs a transplanted Brit in America, I’m having something of a hard time getting my head around this whole Late Night debacle.

Unlike most American television, late night talk shows – the Conans, the Lettermans, the Carsons (he’s the one who’s dead, right?) – never really made it out to the rest of the world.

The first, and biggest, reason for this is that the shows tend to be vehicles for movie stars to promote their latest project: movies that probably have different release dates outside the US. Watching Ben Stiller talk about a movie that we won’t be able to see for six months isn’t so much entertaining as annoying.

The second reason is that, to my eye and ear at least, most of the shows are astonishingly unfunny. I mean, really. The men are paid millions – tens of millions – of dollars and given armies of writers to be hilarious and yet they still have to hire a sidekick to laugh at their punchlines. Hell, one of them – is it Leno? – even has a drum rimshot to telegraph when we’re supposed to laugh. It’s about as pathetic as me hiring some guy to add a ‘LOL’ comment to all of my posts on TechCrunch. Which come to think of it isn’t a bad idea.

I’m sure I’m missing the joke somewhere, but I suspect the real reason these shows are so popular to you Americans is that they’re institutions. And what was it Groucho Marx asked? “Who wants to live in an institution?”

Amiright folks? Badoom-tish!

But still, I live in America now, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the most important cultural rift in the country’s history since the great Cheersquake of ‘83. In particular I’d be doing the world a disservice if I didn’t respond to the growing number of apparently sane commentators who are urging Conan O’Brien to take his act online.

Nick Summers at Newsweek began the Siren call:

“The new comedy prestige─to be the material that dominates Twitter’s trending topics list, to create the clips embedded on a million blogs─has nothing to do with airing on a certain network at a certain time.” 

Nick Bilton at the New York Times joined in:

“Mr. O'Brien's youthful supporters won't crowd around the television at a specific time, instead they go to YouTube and Gawker to watch their late-night television, and share their own commentary around each clip. So here's my advice to Mr. O'Brien: After he leaves NBC and spends a few months healing his wounds and pulling the troops back together, he should come back and make the Internet his time slot.”

But it wasn’t just people called Nick. Jim Louderback from Revision3 went as far making Conan a formal – if attention-seeking – offer: “I’m willing to give him a substantial ownership stake in Revision3, if he makes the jump here.”

In his open letter, Louderback adds that “the [online] space has seen a 35% average increase in advertising spending in 2009.  (Just think how many cigars that would buy for Triumph The Comic Insult Dog).” Bilton meanwhile accepts that “the expenses associated with producing a high-quality show needed to attract celebrity guests quickly add up show” but points to Seth McFarlane as a star who has managed to convince advertisers to move their dollars online.

The size of the potential online audience excites Louderback too: “Conan’s voice – and own special brand of entertainment – deserve to be viewed not just by the 300 million people in the US, but by the 6 billion people around the world,” he says, confident that the Chinese and the Iranians are just crying out to be entertained by an American and his masturbating bear. As Bilson says: “It's clear we are approaching a fork in the road, and the road sign for the next generation clearly points to the Web. For Mr. O'Brien's core audience, the time slot is being replaced by a URL.”

These are arguments we’ve heard many times before. Television is a sinking ship! The Internet is the future, and smart talent will jump aboard and reap the spoils. We’ve heard it for newspapers – journalists should create blogs and become their own bosses; print is dead! – we’ve heard it for books – the Kindle means anyone can distribute their own writing;  publishing is dead! and we’ve heard it for music – bands should release their tracks online for free and make money from live gigs; record labels are dead! And always the same arguments: audiences and advertising money will follow talent, without need for intermediaries. It’s just a matter of time before stars like Conan realise this and then the rest will follow!

It’s a great message; it’s just a shame that it’s also – and obviously – total horseshit.

Let’s start by putting to rest the myth that audience follows talent. Howard Stern’s move from nationally syndicated radio to Sirius satellite might have made him a fortune, but it also lost him a huge chunk of his audience and almost all of his pop cultural influence. Likewise, the vast majority of high-profile bloggers who were given book deals have failed to earn back their advances through sales, despite publishers being certain that their millions of online readers would translate into book buyers. Those journalists who quit newspapers to go solo have struggled to pull in readers. And the idea that Conan’s audience will follow him online is equally ridiculous.

The truth is, audiences aren’t loyal to a particular star: they’re loyal to a medium, and often within that medium they’re even loyal to a slot. Conan knows this which is why when he was offered a later slot for his show – 12:05am, with Leno being moved later to replace him – he refused. “Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet a time slot doesn't matter,” he said. “But with the Tonight Show, I believe nothing could matter more.”

The other reason he refused is that he understands that in the media the most important thing someone can have is not money or viewers or readers or listeners… but prestige: that X factor that makes people know you’re a star.

Getting prestige isn’t easy – and that’s the point. We live in a world that’s full of people who want our attention and we can’t possibly filter all of them ourselves, so we accept that we need certain media gatekeepers to do the filtering for us. NBC is one of those gatekeepers: the Tonight Show spot is the very expensive jewel in their crown – a crown that can only be worn by one person. By choosing Conan to be that person, NBC immediately signals that he’s worthy of our attention. He’s a rising star. He has prestige. As a result, he gets paid a fortune and attracts a large fan base, not just on television but on the Internet and on any other medium he appears.

It’s the same signal that’s sent out whenever a blogger gets a book deal, or an unsigned singer becomes signed to a major label or a local journalist is hired to write for the New York Times. We know that publishers don’t give book deals to everyone, the Times (really) can’t afford to recruit bad writers and record labels don’t hire people who can’t sing. So by being accepted by one of those gatekeepers, an author, or singer or journalist is granted prestige. They are a star.

But the tricky thing about prestige is that it only works in one direction. Moving from obscurity to a prestigious job, or moving from a prestigious job to an even more prestigious job tells everyone that your star is in the ascendancy, that they should keep watching. But the moment you move even one step in the other direction – say by going back a less coveted time slot, or by switching to a less prestigious medium – it’s all over. All of your hard-earned prestige can vanish in months or even weeks.

And that’s why Conan would be insane to leave behind television and move exclusively online. The Internet might have huge audiences and growing ad spending but it has zero prestige. Its greatest selling point is that it isn’t a gatekeeper; everyone is welcome. Anyone with a webcam, some cats and a Roomba can get a million viewers and anyone willing to spend a ton of money can produce a show that looks as good as the Tonight Show. And yet no matter how much money they throw at their video, or how many YouTube views it gets – no matter how Internet famous they become – they’re never going to be a star; not like Conan is a star.

Likewise, by turning his back on the prestige that he has from television, and moving online, Conan’s star – and his associated ability to command large audiences and even larger paychecks – would fade in a matter of months. We might all claim now to be ‘With Coco‘ but before long our attention would drift away to whoever the gatekeepers decide is worthy of it next.

And when that happens, Conan becomes just another ginger cat on a Roomba.

Beezag Raises $2.5 Million, Force-Feeds Video Ads In Exchange For Cash

Posted: 24 Jan 2010 04:43 AM PST

An old idea applied to a whole new generation and its bag of fresh tools. That’s how you could describe Beezag, a service from the eponymous New York startup, that was launched in private beta a couple of months ago.

Dubbed a ‘real-time targeted video advertising service’ by the company, Beezag’s business model is basically to force-feed young adults with video ads in exchange for cash and coupons (which is not to say it won’t work; more on that later).

And they’ve just raised over $2.5 million (on top of an earlier $750k founding round) from a group of angel investors, so time for us to take a closer look.

Currently, the only way to get in to Beezag is to have an invite code or exercise some patience after signing up for the waiting list. Once you get in, you’ll get a bracelet with a PIN sent to you and you’re supposed to let the company know more about what interests you the most. Based on your profile, Beezag will then start offering you selected coupons, rewards and discounts, straight from advertisers.

In addition, registered users get video advertising sent to their iPhones or Facebook accounts based on their profiles, and every time they watch ads completely, their iTunes or PayPal accounts get a little bigger. The way Beezag makes sure users pay enough attention to the video ads is by adding floating digits to the stream which users have to enter on the site to get the dollars.

In the future, more mobile and even interactive TV platforms will be added to the fray.

Now, call me crazy, but I actually think this might work out well considering the startup’s target audience: 18 to 24-year olds (generally strapped for cash but flush with enough free time to watch ads). Of course, a lot will depend on the actual pay-out rates, but according to the company clients like Dr. Pepper, Dentyne, Starbucks Shop, Skull Candy and Mandee have already signed up for campaigns.

It’s also worth pointing out that the two co-founders of Beezag, Richard Smullen and Laurent Alhadeff, have managed to convince two very savvy people to join the management team: six-year Google vet and former Lime Wire business development exec Brian Dick (as Chief Revenue Officer) and former-Upoc/Dada Entertainment CEO/CTO Steven Spencer (as Chief Operating Officer).

The fresh financing round comes from Bruellan Wealth Management (Geneva), whose MD Antoinne Spillmann led the round on behalf of clients that included four undisclosed angel investors.

Jason Calacanis Punches Comscore In The Face. Comscore Punches Back. Fred Wilson Drags Us Into It. $SCOR

Posted: 24 Jan 2010 04:21 AM PST

Jason Calacanis, our partner over the years on the TechCrunch50 conference, wrote quite a rant yesterday about analytics company Comscore. His argument: that Comscore has vastly undercounted traffic and visitors over the years, and is now formalizing “their extortion ring” by offering to track traffic more directly (and the numbers are generally much higher) via tracking pixels for a $10,000/year fee.

You can read the whole post over at Calacanis.com. He doesn’t pull any punches (in fact he goes on a tangent about punching bullies in the face as a kid) He suggests that companies refuse to pay Comscore for the service, and that investors short the stock.

Comscore investor Fred Wilson laid into Jason with a couple of comments on a copy of the post on Posterous. He also randomly dragged me into the argument (I think he’s still mad about the Zynga stuff):

jason, since you’ve slandered me, i’ll respond here.
you don’t know what you are talking about. comscore (SCOR) is a public company. you can go look at their financials. they aren’t exactly printing money. it’s hard to measure the internet and they spend well over $100mm per year doing just that. they aren’t “shaking down” anyone. their move to a hybrid model is a reaction to many of the criticisms that people have had of their panel model over the years. but it isn’t cheap to manage that data either. someone has to pay for this. or of course we could all just let google do it for free. we know how that will play out. eric schmidt has said “analytics are infinitely monetizable” well for google they are. if we want a third party keeping everyone honest, the market has to pay something for it. as i said, go look at comscore’s financials and you’ll see they aren’t exactly getting rich doing that.

and the “huge venture return i made in comscore” is in your imagination. i have not ever made any money personally on my comscore investment.

please don’t spew lies about me jason. with “friends” like you, who needs enemies?

and

hey Karl, i bet if you and i sat down and had a coffee or a beer and talked for a half hour or an hour you’d come away with a different perspective. if you get your data on me and my investments from Jason and his friend Mike Arrington, of course you are going to come away with an impression that isn’t correct. they like to sling mud at me and my investments. i am not going to get into a pissing match with them online. but i am “kinda sad” that you are getting the wrong impression. i don’t know where you live but if we are ever in the same town, give me that half hour and i bet you’ll have a different and better opinion.

Comscore’s CMO Linda Abraham also weighed into the argument on Posterous:

Jason:
You really need to get your facts straight.

1) First of all, we measure Unique People rather than Unique Cookies which web analytics systems erroneously can unique visitors. I would challenge you to find any kind of server side measurement system that measures people, not machines or cookies. To show you how absurd server side numbers are, AOL Inc. had about 259 MM Unique cookies which gives it over 125% reach compared to a true reach of 54%. The inflation is driven by cookie deletion, multiple browsers, multiple machines for the same users, multiple devices etc… Large companies do not complain about their numbers because they know their server side numbers are flawed as obviously evident by the AOL metrics, not because 'comScore fixes your number". This dynamic is less obvious with smaller sites—they don't realize how inflated their numbers are until their reach starts exceeding 100%.

2) Our Hybrid measurement is not mere pixel tracking as you assert. Our panel, which allows us to distinguish people from cookies, is a central part of the system used to correct for the inflation of cookie based server-side measurement.

3) You are confused about our pricing, so let me explain it to you:

• We charge a one-time setup fee of $5,000 that enables us to audit the beacon implementation and make sure we are measuring everyone consistently. This means auditing beacons on every page to identify pages with multiple beacons that result in over-counting, and pages with no beacon that result in undercounting. We have found about 15% of sites have placed multiple beacons on a page, and over 30% of sites that have missed a number of pages on their site. This auditing function is crucial to protect the system from being gamed. Imagine what happens, if unchecked, sites start cross beaconing each other to inflate their audience. The 'free' services do not incur this cost because not much is expected of them. We have seen many sites where the Quantcast beacons 'fire' up to 7 times from a single page!
• The initial $5,000 setup fee pays for that audit and gives you access to our reports on comScore Direct $5K for 6 month period.
• The $10K annual price is for ongoing access to our comScore Direct reporting system. However, you don't have to subscribe to continue being measured using the hybrid methodology. As long as you maintain your beacons we will measure you with our hybrid methodology FREE of charge.

4) You may be upset because you don't get a free subscription to the reports. We make no apologies for charging for access to our reporting system. That is the only revenue source we have to cover our costs. In doing so, we make a 'mafia like' pre-tax margin of less than 9% . Google and Quantcast offer metrics for 'free' because they have an advertising supported model. They use the data they collect from users or publishers to sell targeted advertising. We chose not to have a business model based on selling advertising, because we do not want to compete with our clients who make a living selling advertising, and who need a neutral third party to provide audience data that is free from conflicts of interest.

5) As for the free trial offer we made you, you need to get your facts straight. When we rolled out this new hybrid system, we needed some sites to beacon with us early to test it out and get user feedback .This is a common practice you might have heard of—it's called 'free beta.' You chose not to participate, which is fine. But there was no attempt to 'buy your silence' and we challenge you to prove otherwise.

We provide a valuable service and we are proud of it. We offer the most accurate 3rd audience measurement tools available which are paid for in real dollars by more than 1,200 companies who, unlike you, freely choose them despite available 'free' services.

It's unfortunate that you were picked on as a child. It must have been difficult to you. But you're an adult now. If you want to debate, please do so with facts, not just blind fury.

My take – Abraham is right. Comscore is by far the best analytics service available. Alexa, Compete and Hitwise are seriously flawed (I may dive into this more in a future post). Quantcast has its own issues and is subject to abuse, which we’ve seen directly. Comscore uses panels and statistical analysis to generate traffic estimates. The new product measure traffic directly off of website servers and should provide nearly perfect data.

And the fact is that the company probably does need to charge to do this properly, as Abraham argues. If a competitor can provide the same service for less (or free), God Bless Them and I’ll support them all the way. Until then, the market will bear what it can bear.

We always choose to use Comscore data first when its available, and will continue to do so. Here’s an example of how useful it can be.

So in this case I respectfully disagree with Jason on the merits of his argument. And I ask Fred Wilson to try to keep me out of his various fights.

Twitter’s Project Mayhem Dilemma

Posted: 23 Jan 2010 08:41 PM PST

project-mayhemIn the film Fight Club (the book has a slightly different plot), the members of Project Mayhem’s main goal is to blow up the buildings that contain credit card companies’ records so that everyone’s debt is reset to zero. (Yes, I know this wouldn’t actually work, but never mind that for now.) Yesterday, two Twitter users, Allen Stern and Louis Gray, proposed the same idea for Twitter. That is to say, with the new suggested users list (SUL) now in place, they’d like to see Twitter reset the follower counts of users (either just those that have been on the SUL in the past, or everyone) to zero, and start over.

The core idea behind this is that anyone on the SUL leading up to the change has gotten an unfair advantage in terms of the number of followers they now have on Twitter. Leaving aside the fairness of it, it certainly is true that just about every person with over a million followers on the service only got that many because of the SUL. And while you may wonder why anyone cares about the number of followers they have, for some accounts, such as those tied to blogs, a huge number of followers is beneficial in terms of clicks coming into the site when links are tweeted out. TechCrunch has certainly benefitted from this, as have a number of other large blogs on the SUL.

As we showed yesterday, the new version of the SUL has drastically altered the rate at which new followers are being added to these accounts. And in many cases, people on the list are now actually losing followers. But as I noted, those who were on the old SUL are unlikely ever to be caught in terms of followers by anyone else now given these new rates — hence, the call for the resetting of the counts.

It’s an interesting idea, but not one that is likely to happen. After all, if Twitter did a reset of users on the old SUL, it would mean breaking all the relationships accumulated over months or even years by those accounts — including plenty completely unrelated to the SUL. And while that may seem more fair to some, to at least as many, it would just be annoying — you would have to follow those accounts all over again. Meanwhile, resetting every user on Twitter to zero followers would just piss everyone off. And the complete distruction of the social graph could even threaten Twitter as a service itself. All social networks, whether they are Twitter or Facebook, are only as strong as their social graphs. Twitter wiping it own out, giving user less of a reason to return would be foolish.

So where does that leave us?

Well, as I said, in reality, nothing is likely to change. While it is a bit odd that the users on the old SUL (including @techcrunch) will continue to have follower counts in the millions while no one else does (except for maybe eventually the hard-charging @billgates), there really isn’t a good solution (or at least one that Twitter would be willing to do). But one thing Stern is concerned about with regard to the inflated follower counts is that anyone who was on the list can use it to their advantage for publicity. A simple solution to that would be to remove the follower count entirely. I wrote about this in length back in April. If Twitter were to simply not tell you how many people are following you, it would remove a huge part of why it matters so much (to both those on it and not on it): vanity. Of course, that wouldn’t be a perfect solution either because it wouldn’t take a smart third-party developer long to figure the follower numbers out through Twitter’s API.

Twitter is well aware that the original SUL was a less than ideal solution. No less than co-founder Evan Williams admitted back in October that he wanted to kill it off. But the fact remains that it did and still does serve a purpose. Without a suggested users list, most people who sign up for Twitter would have absolutely no idea who to follow and would simply leave. While statistics point to a good number of users doing that even with the SUL, Twitter is unlikely to have gotten to where it is today without this type of feature. It would have been the classic problem of: no one I know is using the site so I’m not going to use it either.

As I see it, Twitter’s only real solution is to keep improving this new SUL. While they say it’s already being dynamically updated frequently as determined by a number of unnamed factors, they should really work to make even more personalized. Maybe you get the default category SUL (as it is now) when you first sign up, but depending on your tweets (assuming they’re public), Twitter could offer you more personalized recommendations on who to follow. And they could also do what Facebook does and suggest friends based on other friends you have in common (something which it is promoting even more now, so it must be working).

Thanks to their new geolocation API, Twitter could also do some interesting things with recommending users who are nearby to you at any given moment. That may sounds a little creepy, but as long as it’s opt-in, it might be useful for some.

Undoubtedly, whether they say so or not, Twitter sees this type of SUL backlash as a minor bump in the road. After all, they have their goals set much higher then the millions of users they currently have. They want Facebook numbers, and beyond. If that happens, users will a million followers won’t be so uncommon, and the old SUL advantage will be rendered moot. It’s still a big “if,” but I would bet that’s their thinking on the matter.

fight-club-_the-end_

[images: 20th Century Fox]

Magic Wand Bomb Detector Deemed Fraudulent, Inventor Imprisoned

Posted: 23 Jan 2010 07:26 PM PST

Remember back a few months when news broke about a little device that claimed to detect different sorts of bombs? The ones that the Iraqi government spent $85 million on over the last few years even though American military commanders and the FBI stated that they simply don't work. Well, as we all assumed, the ADE-651 is a sham. It's just a dirty racket. Good thing that the British government finally caught on, banned the device and threw the inventor in jail. (He's out on bail as of writing) It seems that the heart of the device is ID badge-sized cards that are supposed to be used for detecting different items. There are different cards for everything from TNT, plastique, to even money and elephants. However, as the Cambridge Computer Laboratory found out, these cards contain nothing more than a dumb RFID tag. Seriously, watch the BBC investigation video after the jump.


WakeMate Delays Initial Shipment, Makes Moves To Appease Upset Customers

Posted: 23 Jan 2010 04:23 PM PST

Your groggy mornings aren’t over yet. A few months ago we wrote about WakeMate, a Y Combinator-funded startup that makes a small gadget designed to help you sleep better. Last time we talked to them, the WakeMate team had a planned ship date of January 25. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. Yesterday, the WakeMate team sent an Email to the thousands of customers who had pre-ordered the device (which included a $5 down payment) to inform them that they wouldn’t be getting their WakeMates on schedule.  Now the first batch of orders will ship “as early as next month”.  But when I asked if the WakeMate team had an idea when the majority of customers would be receiving their devices, they said they were reluctant to give an estimate since they want to avoid disappointing people again. In other words, it may be a while.

The WakeMate device, which costs $50, consists of a small wristband that you wear during the night. It tracks your movements throughout the night, which you can analyze from your computer, and can also work in tandem with your phone alarm to wake you up in the lightest phase of sleep (which is supposed to help eliminate grogginess). There are competitors in this space, like the Zeo Sleep Coach, but WakeMake is about $200 cheaper.

Dru Wynings has posted the Email in its entirety. The reason for the delay? WakeMate says it wanted to make more improvements:

We’ve experienced numerous breakthroughs over these short months. We’ve improved our hardware by leaps and bounds, making it sleeker, smarter and more efficient by taking advantage of the latest technological developments. We’ve also researched new and better algorithms to power our sleep analytics software which will further increase the accuracy and usefulness of your WakeMate. Unfortunately, these improvements have taken time. While this means we will not be shipping the first batch of WakeMates on the 25th as planned, when we do you’ll be getting a much better product!

WakeMate’s letter stirred up quite a bit of unrest among users who had preordered, in part because WakeMate offered access to premium analytics features as compensation for the delay. That would be all well and good, but users who ordered before now were not informed that they would have to pay for premium subscriptions to unlock the full potential of the device.

WakeMate says that the premium features referred to are actually in addition to the features they had previously announced, so customers aren’t dealing with a bait and switch. But in light of the confusion caused, today they’re sending users a follow up Email to announce that all pre-order customers will have access to all premium software features free of charge.

Here’s the second Email, which will be going out this afternoon, in its entirety:

Sorry guys!

In our our previous email we warned about a delay in shipping
WakeMates to our pre-order customers. To compensate customers for
the delay we proposed to give them some future premium features for
free. Unfortunately we weren’t clear enough about this, and some
customers thought it was an attempt to charge them more.

So let’s try this again:

1. The current delay is due entirely to changes in our hardware and
software, and manufacturing issues caused by the volume of orders
we’ve received; it is in no way related to the development of premium
features.

2. Regardless of future premium add-ons, customers who have pre-ordered
WakeMates will never have to pay to use online analytics, nor will
any customer receive an inferior product for not doing so. We
apologize for giving the impression that anyone might.

3. We hope we will be able to start shipping the first units next
month, but since we’re still learning the ropes of large-volume
manufacturing, we don’t want to make any promises we’re not sure
we can keep. We appreciate your patience and we’ll keep you updated.

4. To make up for the frustration and confusion, we’re going to
give all pre-order customers all future premium software features
free of charge.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to email
preorder@wakemate.com directly.

Sincere apologies for the confusion,

The WakeMate Team

Delays are nothing new when it comes to startups that are building hardware. Fitbit, a startup that makes a exercise-tracking gadget, took a year to launch after its debut at TechCrunch50, and new customers still face lengthy waits to receive their devices.

Image by HilaryAQ.

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WakeMate
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How Facebook And FriendFeed Became Turkish Delights

Posted: 23 Jan 2010 12:00 PM PST

For the past couple of days I’ve been in Turkey, absorbing the tech scene in Istanbul (tomorrow I’m in Munich, Germany, for DLD). I was invited over by the Nubridge Venture Summit which brought together a panoply of European VCs to listen to Turkish tech companies set out their wares. What emerged is a picture of a country in high growth, as this economy and its entrepreneurs latch on to the possibilities offered by the Internet and mobile platforms.

But first, let me tell you a story. Two years ago I contacted Turkey’s pre-eminent “Web 2.0″ blogger, Arda Kutsal of Webrazzi. I said let’s do a TechCrunch Europe meetup in Istanbul. Duly, a few weeks later I took a flight out, got to the hotel he mentioned and figured Arda had organised the meetup in the bar. No, said the receptionist, “It’s in the Grand Ballroom.” I headed down the hall to find about 400 people. That was the kind of thing that was going on then.

Two years on, with a packed room full of European VCs and private equity people hearing pitches from a wide range of Turkish technology companies, it’s clear the investment community is keenly interested in this market.


Facebook Gives Harman His Name Back, Apologizes

Posted: 23 Jan 2010 11:09 AM PST

An update to our post last night – Facebook Snatches User's Vanity URL And Sells It To Harman International. Facebook says they’ll be giving Harman Bajwa his /harman vanity URL back shortly:

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Mike. We made a mistake in this instance and are in the process of returning the username to Mr. Bajwa. To be clear, the move was not driven by monetary reasons, rather trademark protection. We strive to protect trademarks from ’squatters’ — those who try to take protected terms with no legitimate claim. The message Harman received was along those lines, but clearly not applicable. Once we understood the nature of our error, we moved quickly to resolve it. We want to apologize to Mr. Bajwa for being overzealous in our efforts and regret the disruption to his account.

Here are the Facebook guidelines on trademark squatting. Which is fine for Nike or coca-cola, but definitely a grey area for trademarks that are also legitimately in use as people’s names. I’d pay to see the emails that must have been flying around Facebook this morning. But they did the right thing here, and that’s all that matters.

Update: An interesting twist I missed before. Harman set up a Support Harman facebook group last night after our initial post. Mark Zuckerberg joined it:

Thesixtyone Unveils a Gorgeous Redesign, Users Predictably Revolt

Posted: 23 Jan 2010 09:12 AM PST

Music discovery site thesixtyone unveiled a radical—and gorgeous—redesign a couple days ago. The redesign presents a single, lush full-screen photograph as each song plays, while smaller snapshots fade in and out screensaver-style. The controls are minimized to rollover menus on the upper right, an account-info strip along the lower left, and green arrows to skip to the next or previous songs. You are supposed to just select a type of playlist (top songs, hot, moods) and let it play. Thesixtyone adds Digg-like voting and gaming elements to surface the best indie music.

Users hate it. Or at least the vocal ones complaining about the change on the startup’s Facebook wall, organizing a boycott, and sending us tips. This backlash is predictable and always happens whenever a site goes through a radical change. But some of the complaints are valid. For instance, the biggest change is that you can no longer see the playlist of songs you are listening to or skip around willy-nilly. You can see the old design here or in the screenshot below. The old design was more conventional, but it was certainly easier to navigate.

I asked founder James Miao about the backlash, and he responds:

We’ve had an interesting history with change. The reality is that we’re doing some very experimental things and I feel it’s important to have the freedom to explore new directions. Nearly every change we’ve done since releasing in 2008 has been met with a very similar reaction.

He also notes that “we find that lists aren’t very effective for browsing music you don’t already recognize,” but agrees that it should be easier to navigate the site, and more changes are coming which will improve the experience.

There is another issue. Thesixtyone was able to build a small but loyal community of artists and music lovers. The biggest complaint is that many of the community features have been stripped out. Esteban, one “pissed off t61 user,” writes us:

Not sure if you guys cover this sort of thing, but there’s a lot of angry users over at thesixtyone over the big website overhaul. As you may or may not know, thesixtyone is a music discovery website where many indie artists could easily find listeners. The community aspect and fun features of the site were what drove users to be so passionate, when the redesign (most likely design whores) did away with the greatest features, and killed usability it left a big hole in all the hearts of the users and artists alike.

Miao says that there were problems with the old community features. Specifically, some artists were abusing the system, trying to game the ratings or spamming users with mass messages. The new site is designed to create conversations between fans and artists around songs, and more features in this area are also going to be introduced in the future.

I personally like the new design and the way music just plays with minimal fuss. Many of the navigation and discovery issues can be solved simply by bringing back a playlist view as an option for when you want to dive deeper into the playlist or skip around.

Which design do you think is better?
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