The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Shazam Settles Patent Infringement Case With Tune Hunter
- Chomp Reveals Itself To Be A Yelp For iPhone Apps
- European Startups Race To Emulate Groupon
- FriendFeed Clone Cliqset Upgrades Real-Time Platform With Sharing, Groups And Firefox Add-On
- What Happened To bit.ly’s Market Share?
- Remote Tech Support Company iYogi Gets A $15 Million Boost From DFJ, Others
- Baidu Confirms New Ad-Supported Online Video Venture
- Send, Receive And Filter Tweets On IM With TweetSwitch
- Aggregate Knowledge Raises $9 Million For Online Ad Optimization Platform
- New Enterprise Associates Bags Nearly $2.5 Billion For Thirteenth Fund
- Andy Rubin Has Some Steve Jobs In Him
- ReelSurfer: A White Label Solution For Video Search
- Let The Nexus One Marketing Blitz Begin
- ZumoDrive Lands Deal With HP To Power Storage And Syncing On Mini Netbooks
- gWallet Sees Deeper Consumer Engagement With Branded Video Campaigns
- Apple And Google Just Tag Teamed The U.S. Carriers
- CrunchGear’s Live Broadcast From CES Unveiled
- 24 Month Ownership Cost of iPhone Nearly 50% Higher Than Nexus One
- Zero Motorcycles Kicks It Into Gear With $5.5 Million Series A
- Gowalla Plays Around With Virtual Product Placements In Apple Stores
- Rally Software Grabs $16 Million For Agile Software Development Tools
- U.S. Mobile Web Usage Grew 110 Percent Last Year; Apple Dominates, Android No. 2
- AT&T Finishes HSPA 7.2 Updates Early. But Not So Fast…
- Phat: Kirstie Alley Launches Phitter To Make You Fit
- Gaming Gear Giveaway: Give Us Your CES Predictions
| Shazam Settles Patent Infringement Case With Tune Hunter Posted: 06 Jan 2010 09:20 AM PST
The list included consumer electronics makers like LG, Apple and Motorola, digital music retailers such as Amazon.com and Napster as well as wireless service operators AT&T and Verizon Wireless. According to Law360 (paywall), Shazam has recently become the first defendant to settle Tune Hunter’s claims. Details of the settlement remain confidential, although both parties will bear their own attorneys’ fees, according to the judge’s approval order. Tune Hunter / Remi Swierczek had sued Shazam and 10 other companies based on a patent (6,941,275) it had filed back in 2005, which revolves around a music identification system. The patent related to methods of identifying songs using cellphones or other electronic devices, which is exactly what Shazam is all about. The London company, founded in 2002, has developed technology that enables millions of music lovers to identify tunes anywhere using their mobile phones. Tune Hunter’s patent covered “a music identification/purchasing system, specifically to a method for marking the time and the name of the radio station in portable device such as a key holder, watch, cellular phone, beeper or the like which will allow the user to learn via internet or regular telephone the name of the song, artist and/or music company by matching the stored data with broadcast archive.” Sounds eerily close to Shazam’s core proposition indeed. The ten other defendants in this case have attempted to end their involvement, though not through settlement, according to Law360. Defendants Napster, AT&T, Pantech Wireles and LG Electronics filed motions in December to dismiss the suit for “failure to meet heightened pleading standards or assert a basis for infringement”. Defendant Gracenote filed a similar motion in November. All dismissal motions remain pending. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Chomp Reveals Itself To Be A Yelp For iPhone Apps Posted: 06 Jan 2010 09:18 AM PST
With more than 100,000 apps available for the iPhone and iPod Touch and more than 3 billion downloaded, figuring out which apps to try out is a real challenge. Those top 100 lists in iTunes just don’t cut it. Ben Keighran thinks that what we need to solve this problem is another app. And he built one called Chomp, which should be available in the App Store sometime in the next few weeks. Here’s my sneak peek. Chomp is a Yelp for iPhone apps. It shows you a live stream of app reviews from other Chomp users, which you can filter by everyone or just your friends. The app uses Facebook Connect to get you started with friends, or you can just follow people as you read their reviews. You can also sort by top reviewers of the week or expert “app celebrities.” When you click through from the realtime stream of reviews to an individual app, you can review the app yourself, bookmark it or get it. Chomp gets an affiliate fee for each paid app downloaded through its recommendations. Reviews can also go viral by being shared on Facebook or via email. As you review more apps, Chomp starts to recommend apps to you Netflix-style. It’s built up its own recommendation algorithm probably based on what other people who agree with your ratings also like. The up-till-now stealthy startup is backed by Ron Conway and other angels. Here are some screenshots:
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| European Startups Race To Emulate Groupon Posted: 06 Jan 2010 09:13 AM PST
Now DailyDeal.de in Berlin, a Groupon-like startup, has attracted Stefan Glänzer (an early investor in Last.fm), Michael Brehm (Ex-StudiVZ) and Jochen Maaß as seed investors. This investment effectively fires the starting gun on the race to build the European “take” on Groupon. Meanwhile – even while at least five other UK startups prep their own versions – Groupon has already rolled out a London service, showing a London landing page to UK visitors to its .com site via IP targeting. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| FriendFeed Clone Cliqset Upgrades Real-Time Platform With Sharing, Groups And Firefox Add-On Posted: 06 Jan 2010 08:55 AM PST  We’ve written several times about Cliqset, a FriendFeed-like online identity platform that lets users merge and share a vast variety of social information, including status updates, location, photos, and more, onto one platform. Cliqset, which offers both a web-based and newly launched desktop app, aims to be a one-stop-shop for social communications, pulling in content from close to 70 social networks and services, including MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and more. Users can also update their status, and share photos, bookmarks, reviews on Cliqset and push them out to wherever they choose. Today, Cliqset has launched a new version that includes increased sharing capabilities, organizational tools to separate streams, and more. The latest version of Cliqset features widespread file sharing functionality (music, podcasts, PDFs, and Microsoft Office documents). Users can share the various types of files with other Cliqset users as part of real-time activity streams. Users can also now organize content from the people they’re following into real-time ’streams’ of information, allowing users to filter the noise from their aggregate streams. And Cliqset has added a groups functionality that lets users form sub-communities and conversations around various interests as well as the ability to turn on geolocation. Cliqset’s new Firefox extension allows users to share compelling content they discover while surfing the Web. The platform has features an enhanced desktop app, which is powered by Adobe Air. As we’ve said in the past, the real-time social media stream is fast becoming a crowded space with Threadsy, Streamy and others launching compelling, social media aggregation platforms. And Seesmic is entering the fray with the acquisition of Ping.fm. Darren Bounds, president of Cliqset, has told us that the platform aims to be a less clunky version of FriendFeed, with a target audience of users who aren't as technologically savvy. Cliqset will be launching an iPhone app in the near future and is currently developing a browser extension for Chrome. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| What Happened To bit.ly’s Market Share? Posted: 06 Jan 2010 08:22 AM PST
It seems like everyone and their mother now has their own URL shortening service, or at least their own short domain. Short URLs have almost become a branding thing. But as the use of short links keeps going up, the market share among different URL shortening services is fragmenting. The biggest URL shortening service is still bit.ly, with more than 2 billion links a month, but it now only has a 56 percent market share of short links on Twitter, compared to nearly 80 percent last summer. The drop wasn’t noticed before because TweetMeme, which keeps statistics on short URL market share, pulled its stats page for a couple months as part of a site upgrade to make it more scalable. But now that stats page is back up, and it is tracking 3.1 million unique links per day compared to 2.5 million last November.. So what accounts for bit.ly’s 24-point drop? When TinyURL was the default service on Twitter it had a 75 percent share, and now it has only 8 percent, so these things can shift quickly. But bit.ly is still the default link shortener on Twitter.com and many Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck. Some of the decline can be attributed to the launch of bit.ly Pro, which is a white-labeling short link service for publishers. We use it to publish links to our posts on Twitter with our tcrn.ch domain, which used to be bit.ly links. Even though bit.ly is still powering those links, it doesn’t get credit for any custom domains. In fact, tcrn.ch is now one of the top 100 short domains (see below). So to the extent that large publishers such as AOL, Bing, foursquare, the Huffington Post, Meebo, MSN, and the New York Times switched to custom bit.ly Pro domains, those are no longer counted for bit.ly in the stats above. I should also mention that these stats represent only a 24-hour snapshot and they are only for Twitter (but Twitter is where the lion’s share of these short links are being passed around). And TweetMeme is now including things like tumblr.com and Justin.tv. Bit.ly says that its own analysis of Twitter’s “garden hose” of Tweets (which is a more limited sample) shows that it is maintaining a 70-to-80 percent share.
Gettuig back to the TweetMeme stats, if you look at bit.ly’s biggest competitor, it is not TinyURL (7.88%), ow.ly (3.92%), is.gd (3.05%), or tumblr.com (2.79%), it is “Other” (26.58%). TweetMeme provided me with a breakdown of the top 100 URL shorteners and their respective shares (see table below). And while some of them are bit.ly Pro accounts, they still don’t add up to bit.ly’s former share. What you see is just a lot more competition, from youtu.be, Goog.le, yfrog.com, Facebook’s fb.me, MySpace’s lnk.ms (which is down significantly from last September when it was No. 2), ping.fm, and StumbleUpon’s Su.pr. Here is the the full top 100 list. I’ve bolded some interesting names. Note that 4sq.com (No. 27) has twice the share of gowal.la (No. 35) and five times that of loopt.us (No. 59). In live video, ustre.am (no. 28) is ahead of justin.tv (No. 37). And flic.kr (no. 31) and digg.com (No. 33) are further down the list than you might expect. Also, the data in teh table belwo is from yesterday, so it is slightly different from the chart above which is from today and formspring.me is No. 6 in the table because it got some attention yesterday and a lot of people were trying it out. Top 100 URL Shorteners On Twitter
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Remote Tech Support Company iYogi Gets A $15 Million Boost From DFJ, Others Posted: 06 Jan 2010 06:53 AM PST
The round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and joined by prior investors Canaan Partners, SAP Ventures, and SVB India Capital Partners. The Gurgaon, India-headquartered firm earlier raised $3.1 million and $9.5 million in two rounds in 2007 and 2008, respectively. iYogi offers a number of tech support services like PC installation and recovery, anti-virus/spyware, data back-up and PC speed optimization. Its annual unlimited tech support plan starts at $139.99. Most of its tech support services are centered around Microsoft software, but Google and Apple products are also listed on iYogi’s website. iYogi says it will use the additional capital to expand its team of Global Tech Experts, which are basically people who help consumers and SMBs solve their computer problems from a remote location. iYogi says that today, it has more than 100,000 annual subscribers and provides thousands of incident sessions every day on a 24/7 basis. The company claims that it has seen a 300 percent growth in revenues and subscribers since 2008, and that it currently boasts an employee workforce of 1,200. iYogi intends to grow the number of Global Tech Experts to 3,000 worldwide in 2010. iYogi delivers its services in partnership with companies like HP, Microsoft and Cisco and counts Amazon and Walmart among the retailers that have worked with the company to enhance customer service. Have you ever used iYogi? Is it something you would recommend to your less tech-savvy friends and/or relatives?
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Baidu Confirms New Ad-Supported Online Video Venture Posted: 06 Jan 2010 06:11 AM PST
Reuters earlier this week caught wind of the company’s plans to launch the Hulu-like destination site, and also reported that Hulu investor Providence Equity Partners was going to have a significant stake in the venture. It cited local websites who reported that the joint venture company had received about $60 million in private equity funds, with Baidu investing about $10 million into the new firm. Baidu didn’t provide any details about the size of its investment (let alone names of other backers) in today’s statement. According to the release, the new company will work with content providers to provide copyrighted video content including movies, TV series, sporting events, animation and other varied content to Internet users through an ad-supported model. It’s worth noting that Baidu took a 8.3 percent stake in UiTV, a Chinese online TV firm, back in September 2008. It is also an investor in PPLive, a Chinese website that streams licensed movies and video for free. Yu Gong, formerly president and COO of China Mobile’s 12580 business, has been appointed CEO of the yet unnamed new company. Prior to his position as 12580, Gong was chief operating officer of SOHU.com, a Baidu rival in online search. According to eMarketer, China will have 518 million Internet users in 2010. The size of the country’s online video market was approximately 162 million yuan ($23.73 million) in Q3 2009, according to data from research firm Analysys International, and analysts expect sales to triple in the coming years. Not everyone is as optimistic, though. Other popular (and well-financed) Chinese video sites include 56.com, Ku6, Tudou and Youku. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Send, Receive And Filter Tweets On IM With TweetSwitch Posted: 06 Jan 2010 06:04 AM PST
At its most basic, the functionality provided by TweetSwitch is similar to Twitter’s original support for IM, which the company was later forced to pull due to too much strain on its servers. Others have stepped in to fill the void, such as tweet.im, excla.im and potentially IMified. In that sense TweetSwitch has plenty of competition. But it’s the way in which you can filter tweets and send them to multiple IM clients that sets the service apart. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Aggregate Knowledge Raises $9 Million For Online Ad Optimization Platform Posted: 06 Jan 2010 05:21 AM PST
The San Mateo, CA company markets a platform, which it says is patent-pending, that provides marketers and agencies with tools that enable them to personalize “audience-centric” advertising campaigns in real-time and with a minimum of effort, using machine-learning algorithms. The extra funds, which brings the company’s total investment to a healthy $34.5 million, will go to building and executing on the platform and business. Aggregate Knowledge historically competed directly with Strands, Loomia, Directed Edge and others, but it has recently moved away from powering product recommendations for e-commerce vendors to a more general technology proposition for the online display ad industry as a whole. Aggregate Knowledge, led by CEO and founder Paul Martino, is said to currently have 26 employees. Lucinda Stewart, managing director of OVP Venture Partners, will be joining the company's Board of Directors as a result of this investment. Also spotted on the company’s website section on its management: Chief Revenue Officer David Jakubowski, former GM adCenter & Search Strategy at MSN / Microsoft. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| New Enterprise Associates Bags Nearly $2.5 Billion For Thirteenth Fund Posted: 06 Jan 2010 04:20 AM PST
According to NEA, its fund XIII represents an estimated 17 percent of all U.S. venture capital funds raised in 2009 and is the largest single fund raised since 2007. The new capital commitments brings the venture capital firm’s total to more than $11 billion across all of its funds. NEA, which has subsidiaries in both China and India, primarily invests in healthcare, energy, consumer and enterprise technology companies. The firm ranked number 4 on our list of most active VCs, which we published in October 2009 on our sister site TechCrunch Trends. Some of its portfolio companies that will likely be most familiar to TechCrunch readers are Loopt, 23andMe, Vuze, Engine Yard and Millennial Media. Its most recent investments were GroupOn (our coverage) and Playdom (our coverage), and it’s worth noting that NEA was the sole backer of Teracent, which was recently acquired by Google for an undisclosed sum after raising just south of $6 million. (Press release via peHUB) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Andy Rubin Has Some Steve Jobs In Him Posted: 06 Jan 2010 01:57 AM PST
Andy Rubin, pictured above surrounded by press after the Nexus One event today, is the guy who founded Android and sold it to Google in 2005. And he’s starting to remind me a little of another product fanatic, Steve Jobs. Everyone knows about Jobs’ amazing ability to build hit products and disrupt entire industries. I wrote extensively about this in What If Steve Jobs Hadn't Returned To Apple In 1997?. Jobs is all about the product. Every last detail. And it shows. He’s disrupted the mobile phone, music, film and television industries, and we haven’t even mentioned the Macs yet. But Jobs is also notoriously touchy and difficult to work with. He demands perfection and doesn’t really work well with others. And Jobs is distrustful of the press. Apple’s PR group is mostly there to not return calls. We forgive him all that, of course. Because he’s changing the world, and forces competitors to do better just to try to keep up. The world, particularly the tech world, is a far more colorful place because of Jobs. There is no one at Apple who has the product vision to push that company forward once he steps down. He’s the Alexander the Great of today’s tech world. And he’s also able to captivate a crowd when he’s on stage. Rubin isn’t Steve Jobs. He doesn’t have the product track record that Jobs has (no one in the world does). And Rubin is shy on stage – he doesn’t make any real effort to win over the crowd. There was no “and one last thing” line at today’s Nexus One launch by Rubin. Only Steve Jobs can really pull that off. But Rubin is a product fanatic in the same way that Jobs is. The NY Times did a good overview of Rubin in 2005. One line about Rubin, a former Apple engineer and cofounder of WebTV and Danger, stuck with me from that article: “Mr. Rubin is a proven member of an earlier group of engineers-turned-entrepreneurs who have a passion for building complete digital systems.” I’ll say. A lot of credit for the Nexus One goes to his senior team, particularly Mario Queiroz and Erick Tseng (two people Google put on stage today). But the vision for the Nexus One was all Rubin, we keep hearing from people at Google. And he wouldn’t compromise, even after it was clear Google would miss their original deadline of shipping the Nexus One in time for the 2009 holiday rush. “Rubin kept saying it has to be thinner,” mumbled one tired team member to me after the event, “so we made it thinner.” He has incredible power within the Android group at Google, and even VPs at Google there make sure not to cross him. People who work with him have told me of his amazing attention to detail and his unbending demands that a product be perfect before it goes out the door. A lot of that shows in the Nexus One, Google’s first complete end to end hardware and software system. Rubin has many of the same personality traits as Jobs. He’s a product visionary and fanatic who likes the dictatorial style of product development. He’s not great with people, and doesn’t deal well with the press. At today’s Nexus One event you could see his barely contained frustration at the questions fired off at him during the Q&A session. “I’m just not going to say anything else about that” was one quip he fired off after a reporter kept asking the same question over and over. Jobs, of course, doesn’t do Q&As. And that’s just fine with me. I don’t care if the people we cover are likable, or like me. Being affable or loquacious isn’t a job requirement for Awesome Product Guy. You just have to have a strong vision, be unwilling to bend, and have the means of following through with that product to launch. Like Jobs, Rubin has known failure. He’s even been fired from his own company, Danger. But like Jobs, he went on to bigger and better things. For Jobs it was NeXT and Pixar, then back at Apple. For Rubin, it was Android. Is the Nexus One as disruptive as the iPhone? No. Apple started this party and the Nexus One is part of that same revolution. But it’s disruptive in different ways, and its openness (and paring with Google Voice) is pretty exciting. And I get the feeling that his team is just getting started with this whole Android thing. Ten years from now we’ll look back. Rubin may just be another exec at another big company. Or he may be something more. Heck, he may even be running Apple. His personality would fit right in. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| ReelSurfer: A White Label Solution For Video Search Posted: 05 Jan 2010 11:59 PM PST
When you’re looking for a specific movie clip, it can often be hard to find exactly what you’re looking for on sites like YouTube, which don’t let you search for keywords generated from dialog spoken during a video. That’s where ReelSurfer comes in. The startup processes long-form video and turns it into short, relevant segments that are easy to watch and search through. With this technology, ReelSurfer aims to increase the value of online content by allowing users to find the 30 second segment they really want to watch, and then save, share and buy the content. Unlike TechCrunch50 company AnyClip, which also offers extensive video search, ReelSurfer is a white label solution. ReelSurfer has multiple solutions for different use cases, including a product that allows you to create a centralized online database for your University. ReelSurfer can archive footage like teacher lectures, making it easy to access and search for future reference. ReelSurfer also comes with its own custom encoder making it easy to download the video to Mac or Windows after the fact. The company’s advisory board includes Bill Fay (Executive Producer of Independence Day, The Hangover, and 300 and President of Production at Legendary Pictures) and Carl Rosendahl (Founder of PDI, which sold to DreamWorks). The company hasn’t raised any money, and is already cash-flow positive. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Let The Nexus One Marketing Blitz Begin Posted: 05 Jan 2010 09:33 PM PST
I don’t think anything could be further from the truth. Google is going to put its marketing muscle behind this in a very big way to ensure that consumer awareness persists long after today’s launch. Granted, the company says it is favoring an online strategy as opposed to television for its campaigns (which is why the analyst quoted above doubted its chances), but Google can still plaster the Nexus One all over the web. It’s already started. Visit the YouTube homepage right now, and you’ll see a fairly prominent link to the Nexus One official YouTube Channel, which is loaded with how-to guides and video walkthroughs. Google is also running quite a few AdWords ads for keywords like “smartphones”, “phone”, “maps”, and “android”. That’s not hugely surprising, though it is worth pointing out that Google is purchasing ads that compete directly against some of its partners.
I suspect this is only the beginning. Don’t be surprised if we see ads for the Nexus One on Google’s famously spartan homepage (this would be a very rare move for the company, but it set a precedent with the Droid launch). Likewise, we’ll probably see small ads pop up on various Google products, the same way the company often prompts users to try out Chrome. And there will likely be a big push on third party publisher sites. Google has a lot riding on this launch. Sure, it would be nice for the phone to be a popular device in its own right. But, as many have pointed out, it’s the disruptive distribution model that’s going to have the biggest impact down the line. Google needs to show that this new online distribution model is something that people are willing to actually use. As it stands now, that’s going to be a bit of a challenge. Buying a cell phone online will be a pretty foreign experience to most people (at least in the United States). That isn’t to say it’s a difficult experience. It’s just different. And it’s going to require plenty of ads and hand holding to get people used to the process, because they won’t have a sales rep standing next to them to help. Also, keep in mind that Verizon reportedly spent $100 million to market the Droid in 2009. I doubt Google anticipates that the Nexus One will actually beat Droid in sales in the short term (given Verizon’s thousands of retail stores versus Google’s online-only storefront that would be very difficult indeed). But if three months down the line the Nexus One still represents a very tiny sliver of Android’s market share, you can be sure people will start calling the ‘Google Phone’ a failure. I reached out to Google to see if they’d offer any specifics about their upcoming marketing plans. Their spokesperson wasn’t willing to share much, but they did reaffirm that Google’s spending would be focused primarily online rather than on television:
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| ZumoDrive Lands Deal With HP To Power Storage And Syncing On Mini Netbooks Posted: 05 Jan 2010 08:55 PM PST
File syncing and storage startup Zumodrive has landed a deal with Hewlett-Packard to power the technology giant’s newly announced CloudDrive on all HP Mini netbooks beginning in January 2010. HP CloudDrive, which will be powered on the backend by ZumoDrive, will allows netbook consumers to quickly and easily access their music, documents and other content onto their netbooks even if their media libraries are larger than their available on-device storage. Read our initial reviews of ZumoDrive here. ZumoDrive, which spawned from Y Combinator startup Zecter, has a different take on file syncing. Similar to other services, ZumoDrive. which was built specifically for netbooks, tablets and other devices with low amounts of storage, creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But service has a twist-ZumoDrive tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them. The startup also launched a new version which lets users to access their music playlists, photo albums and document folders on any device. ZumoDrive mimics a standard hard drive but saves content in the cloud and then streams it to each device instead of saving local copies, making it the killer app for the netbook and other devices with limited storage. Its iPhone app lets users sync their content to their phone without having to deal with local storage capacity issues. And the service has also been upgraded to integrate well with media applications, like iTunes, so users can play entire music libraries saved in ZumoDrive on multiple devices without manually syncing content. The Zumodrive-powered HP CloudDrive features the ability to stream music, videos and photos to iTunes, iPhoto, Picasa and Windows Media Player, offline access, mobile acces via the iPhone app, folder linking, playlist syncing, file sharing and tired storage options. This is a pretty big coup for the bootstrapped Zumodrive, which just raised $1.5 million in funding last year. Zecter previously launched a product called Versionate, an office-wiki product, that we first covered in July 2007. We wrote about them again a year ago. ZumoDrive faces competition from Dropbox, SugarSync, and Box.net. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| gWallet Sees Deeper Consumer Engagement With Branded Video Campaigns Posted: 05 Jan 2010 08:54 PM PST  We just wrote about gWallet’s secret weapon, gLTV, that hopes to legitimatize the virtual currency monetization world, following the reports that OfferPal, and others have been scamming (a.k.a. “Scamville”) users of virtual games on social networks. gLTV is a new metric that gives publishers analytics on how they can measure and increase their lifetime value of users on their applications. gWallet says gLTV uses info about individual users to demonstrate specifically how it can increase the lifetime value of a user based on prior usage and transaction history Today, gWallet is announcing its first integrated video offering that already has quite a few well-known brands signed on. Disney, Best Buy, K-Mart, Nestle, Coke, and The History Channel are all using gWallet’s video campaigns on social networks. gWallet says that the 10 brands who participated in the campaigns during December eeceived unprecedented viewer engagement and conversion, while publishers, which include Facebook app developer MobScience, leveraging gWallet's platform saw a sizeable increase in revenue. gWallet also used Tube Mogul to power the video and analytics on its video campaigns. gWallet contends that video content is drawing visitors to review and complete more offers. In one week, gWallet reports that its campaigns received over 480,000 views and over 1 million minutes of total viewing time with user engagement averaging more than 2 minutes per video campaign. Publishers that deployed gWallet videos noted that revenue increased up to 600 percent. Gwallet says that social media advertising, and virtual currency offers in particular, have the potential to be a positive brand engagement experience where users spend minutes rather than seconds engaging with this content and messaging. The startup’s CEO Gurbaksh Chahal has told us previously that unlike its competitors in the space, gWallet has a full-time direct sales force that corresponds between high quality brands and agencies and game developers to ensure legitimacy. There’s no doubt this a lucrative (and competitive) space and TechCrunch’s efforts to expose Scamville has made a lasting impact on both game developers like Zynga and social networks, including Facebook, MySpace and others to provide legitimate offers. Not only has gWallet been able to sign up a number of big-name brands, but the results of the campaigns are promising. The startup, which recently raised $10.5 million in funding, works directly with brands directly as opposed to adopting an affiliate leads model. It’s still early, but it looks like gWallet may be on its way to becoming the beacon of legitimate offers in the virtual currency world. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Apple And Google Just Tag Teamed The U.S. Carriers Posted: 05 Jan 2010 07:10 PM PST
Think about your cellphone and cellular service five years ago. Both were likely horrible. But you were content in your misery, because you didn’t know any better. Then came the iPhone. It was a mobile device that was so good, people were willing to ditch their existing service providers en masse (I did) to go to the only one that had it: AT&T. And while you might think that would be a big plus for AT&T, it actually shifted a massive amount of industry power to Apple. They had the device that everyone wanted. And they used that leverage to renegotiate their exclusive deal with AT&T to pay out a huge amount of money for each device sold. Sure, there were hot selling mobile devices before it — the Motorola RAZR, for example, was the best selling phone for many years in a row — but the iPhone had two advantages: 1) Thanks to Apple’s complete control over the device, including, maybe most importantly, its software, they created a user experience that the RAZR never could. 2) Thanks to the App Store, there is some amount of lock-in to the device because users are spending a ton of money on apps and if they switch phones, those all go away. With the iPhone, Apple has created a device that all the other U.S. carriers lust after. And that, in turn, has allowed Google to come along with Android. When the G1 launched a little over a year ago, it was the first of many devices to be heralded as a “iPhone killer.” It wasn’t. But Google didn’t care about that. All that mattered to them at the time was getting their foot in the door of an industry that they, like Apple, had not at all been a part of leading up to that first device. It worked. The carriers were so desperate for an “iPhone killer” that they seemed willing and ready to negotiate with Google to get as many devices out there as possible to ride the Internet-enabled smartphone tsunami that the iPhone earthquake started. As time went on, and Apple’s exclusivity with AT&T remained intact, Google honed their skills, and improved their software. Their manufacturing partners got better too, culminating in Motorola’s Droid, released late last year. Also not an “iPhone killer,” as I wrote that the time, that device too, was never about that from Google’s perspective (though it was from Verizon’s). It was about continuing to inundate the market with their devices and gain partnerships. With some 20 Android devices now out there, the time was right for what Google did today, which is launch their own agenda to blow up mobile industry as we know it in the U.S. Now, that may sound a bit extreme, but just look at what Google did today. They launched an unlocked phone that you can buy directly from them. Now, this first device may not have much of an impact because it’s too expensive ($529.00) for its limitations (it will only fully work on T-Mobile in the U.S.), but it’s a first step. More importantly, look at the page pictured below. Is there any question what Google is doing here? They’re taking the traditional mobile model in this country, where you first choose your carrier, and then choose your phone, and turning it upside down. It’s what Apple started with the iPhone. But Google goes farther, because they already have multiple carriers (in this case, T-Mobile and Verizon, coming this Spring).
So why on Earth are the carriers playing ball with this? Well, they really don’t have a choice. Every carrier not named AT&T does not have the iPhone, but wants it. Since they can’t have it (not yet, anyways), they’ll settle for the next best thing, which are now more clearly than ever these Android devices. Google, of course, controls those — and increasingly so, now that they’re dictating hardware specs and features to manufacturers. And who did Google have on stage today at the event? Two CEOs of two manufacturers: HTC and Motorola. Google has these guys in their pockets because it’s not like they’re going to team up with Apple to make a device (Motorola tried, and failed). And other partners, like Microsoft, are proving to be less than ideal in an iPhone world. So with the manufacturers on its side, Google has all the leverage it needs over the carriers. And that’s why we’re seeing them fall in line with the new mobile world order. So far, it is just T-Mobile and Verizon in the U.S., but Google alluded to the fact that they’re talking to the other ones as well. That means Sprint and likely even AT&T, for the inevitable day that they do lose the iPhone exclusivity. It’s not hard to imagine going to a website for a phone one day in the near future and seeing a list of all the carriers. And it will be even less of an issue when CDMA and GSM are replaced by LTE, which will allow for more universal devices. Google set this in motion today. And it’s a model Apple is likely to follow when the iPhone gets to more U.S. carriers. Undoubtedly, the other big players, BlackBerry and maybe even Palm would like to do this too, but they haven’t had either the leverage, or the gall, to stand up to the carriers in this country the way Apple and Google have. Maybe they will in the future. But to the victors go the spoils. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| CrunchGear’s Live Broadcast From CES Unveiled Posted: 05 Jan 2010 06:58 PM PST Watch live streaming video from crunchgear at livestream.com Are you ready to take that final, fateful step from “blog reader” to “blog viewer?” Then visit CrunchGear during the next few minutes, my pretties, and you’ll see just what it’s like in the sweaty conference hall mayhem of pre-CES press events. We’ve been streaming live and working out the kinks, and now we’re heading to another event. Go to CrunchGear’s front page for live coverage, or check out the footage embedded in the post if you’re interested in remote control ducks, hybrid smartbooks, and wireless HDMI. We’ll be streaming a huge amount from the show floor once it opens up Thursday, but we’ll also be broadcasting desultorily during tomorrow’s big press preview day. Just keep a tab open and check in; scheduled broadcasts will be shown in the “upcoming” banner, and you’ll be able to watch old clips as well, once we stop being live. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| 24 Month Ownership Cost of iPhone Nearly 50% Higher Than Nexus One Posted: 05 Jan 2010 05:03 PM PST Billshrink has put together one of their handy charts comparing the total cost of the Google Nexus One, including the device cost plus carrier fees. The verdict? On the high end the Nexus One costs $2,580 over 24 months. The iPhone weighs in at an impressive $3780, almost 50% more. The reason are AT&T’s iPhone plans v. the T-Mobile plan. Unlimited voice, data and text messages runs $100 on T-Mobile, and $150 for AT&T. The chart, which also compares the Nexus One to the Palm Pre and Motorola Droid, is below.  Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Zero Motorcycles Kicks It Into Gear With $5.5 Million Series A Posted: 05 Jan 2010 04:35 PM PST
CEO Gene Banman tells us the purpose of the funding is to “expand the business.” He declined to expand upon that statement. Given the emerging sector and the influx of competitors, it seems Zero is simply trying to stay ahead of the curve. The bikes build by Zero are quite impressive. They are zero emissions vehicles, completely non-toxic, silent, almost 100% recyclable, and get the equivalent of 455 miles per gallon. Due to these accolades, Zero bikes are eligible for a 10% Federal tax credit thanks to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Unfortunately, The range (60 miles) and top speed (60 MPH) on a complete four hour charge, leave much to be desired. While the bikes themselves are reportedly silent, Zero has been making quite the roar in the press as of late. They stated their intention to be a part of the 2010 TTXGP, a grand prix for electric vehicles, with a motorcycle based off of their street bike, the Model S (pictured above). In October of last year, Zero voluntarily recalled 200 of their dirt bikes due to a safety hazard arising when the throttle of the bike would stick, causing unexpected acceleration. It will be interesting to see how these bikes continue to do in comparison to traditional bikes given that gas powered motorcycles are capable of much higher speeds and distance. However, if Tesla’s recent profitability is any indication of the high performance electric-vehicle sector in general, then Zero could well be on its way to success. Continued investment in the company can’t hurt either. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Gowalla Plays Around With Virtual Product Placements In Apple Stores Posted: 05 Jan 2010 03:30 PM PST
As geo social networks gain some traction, we are beginning to see novel forms of marketing and advertisements triggered by people’s location. On Foursquare, for instance, you can get a discount if you check into a restaurant or even get a free meal if you become the mayor. GowallaIncase messenger bags, computer backpacks, and iPhone sleeves. Collect all the badges and you get a chance to win a real Incase product. Gowalla is doing the promotion in partnership with Incase. Apple has nothing to do with it, but because the location of Apple Stores is known, Gowalla can trigger the promotional badges whenever someone enters a store. The badges serve as a virtual product placement. The hope is obviously to raise awareness of Incase products at the point of purchase. “Our experimental goal is simply to encourage people to visit a real world location where they can actually find and sample the Incase products,” says Gowalla founder Josh Williams. It is very much an experiment, which is in keeping with Gowalla’s focus on virtual goods. In this case, there is a link between the virtual goods and real-world goods. Gowalla will be tracking impressions, check-ins, number of badges collected and other metrics to figure out how best to charge for such promotions in the future. It seems that one easy way to charge is to tie a coupon to each virtual good and then simply track purchases. Or maybe if you collect all the badges, then you get a discount. But there’s a line between cool virtual goods and spammy ads. The key is to keep it fun and make it seem like a game. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Rally Software Grabs $16 Million For Agile Software Development Tools Posted: 05 Jan 2010 03:10 PM PST
Rally Software, a company that provides agile project management applications to for software development, has just raised $16 million in funding led by Greylock Partners. The brings Rally’s total funding up to nearly $50 million. The new funding will be used to hire additional engineers. Tom Bogan, Venture Partner of Greylock, will join Rally’s board of directors. Rally’s products and services helps businesses implement Agile software development and Lean practices with the right combination of tools, services and best practices. Rally’s clients include Cisco, Microsoft, AOL, and Hewlett-Packard. Last year, the company acquired 6th Sense Analytics. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| U.S. Mobile Web Usage Grew 110 Percent Last Year; Apple Dominates, Android No. 2 Posted: 05 Jan 2010 02:42 PM PST
The mobile Web grew 110 percent in the U.S. last year and 148 percent worldwide as measured by growth in pageviews, according to a new Quantcast Mobile Trends report (embedded below). Even so, the mobile Web accounted for only 1.26 percent of Web consumption in the U.S. (and 0.99 percent worldwide).
Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch drove much of this growth. In the U.S., Apple has a commanding 65 percent market share of mobile Web access as of the end of December, 2009. Only 41 percent of that is from the iPhone. The other 24 percent comes from the iPod Touch, which has been growing rapidly as a mobile Web device even though it only has WiFi. Globally, Apple also dominates in every market except Africa (where simpler and cheaper Java phones still rule).
Android isn’t really much of a player yet outside the U.S. But inside the U.S, Android is coming up fast, with 12 percent market share. Android is now the No. 2 mobile Web operating system, recently beating out Blackberry’s RIM OS, which has an 8.7 percent market share. The sudden growth spurt of Android jives with Admob data showing that it doubled since October. And that’s before today’s release of the Nexus One. Most of that share comes from HTC handsets, and Verizon’s launch of the Droid in November. (Motorola’s Droid is the yellow part of the chart below.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| AT&T Finishes HSPA 7.2 Updates Early. But Not So Fast… Posted: 05 Jan 2010 02:40 PM PST
HSPA 7.2 is the technology that was promising to deliver data speeds about twice (7.2 Mbps, hence, the name) those of AT&T’s current 3G network. The technology became a topic of dicussion last year when it was revealed that the iPhone 3GS would be HSPA 7.2-compatible. Unfortunately, besides the select users in the initial test markets (Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and Miami), no one with the device has been able to utilize the speed increase and likely won’t for some time still. So what’s the point of this upgrade if it doesn’t offer the faster promised speeds? Well, AT&T says the software upgrades done to make HSPA 7.2 possible will “result in a better overall customer experience by generally improving consistency in accessing data sessions.” Undoubtedly, this move comes at least partially as a result of a new round of criticism about the reliability of AT&T’s network. It also comes on the day that T-Mobile says it too has upgraded its network to HSPA 7.2. Like AT&T, T-Mobile is the other major GSM network in the U.S. The move also comes amid all the hoopla Google and T-Mobile are getting today thanks to the new Nexus One device. While the unlocked phone will work on AT&T’s network, it won’t be compatible with AT&T’s 3G service. The Nexus One will, however, be able to run on T-Mobile at 7.2 Mbps, apparently. The key to getting AT&T’s network up to the 7.2Mbps speed it upgrading its backhaul connections. That’s what AT&T is currently doing in the cities where it is testing the faster speeds, and it says it will continue rolling that out to more markets in 2010, and complete it in 2011. Of course, by then, hopefully we’ll be close to having LTE (next generation networks) coverage around the country. AT&T says it has currently has 10 HSPA 7.2-compatible devices. They are:
[photo: flickr/ethan prater] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Phat: Kirstie Alley Launches Phitter To Make You Fit Posted: 05 Jan 2010 01:47 PM PST
Actress Kirstie Alley is venturing into the microblogging world with the bizarre launch of Phitter.com, a Twitter-like community site dedicated to helping consumers share tips on weight loss, dieting, fitness, exercise and living a healthy lifestyle. Alley has been publicly battling with personal weight gain over the past few years, and even sells her own branded weight loss products. According to a release, Phitter.com is a "phitness phocused community that encourages members to talk, or Phit, about fitness, weight loss, working out, dieting, exercising, and healthy living while making new ‘Phriends’ and having ‘Phun’!” The site lets users write and post messages in 140 characters via the web or SMS. Similar to Twitter, you can send private messages to other users. And Phitter also integrated with Twitter to allow users to post directly to Twitter and to find Twitter friends who have already joined Phitter. The site’s UI definitely needs some work, but the ambition of the site may resonate with folks who want to share the trials and tribulations of weight loss and fitness. Of course, there’s no shortage of social networks who are trying to serve the same purpose, including DailyBurn, WorkoutBOX, and ZodBod. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Gaming Gear Giveaway: Give Us Your CES Predictions Posted: 05 Jan 2010 01:15 PM PST  As the tail end of a series of holiday giveaways, SteelSeries and CrunchGear are going to be giving away a pretty fat care package of sweet SteelSeries gear. One lucky winner will be taking home a limited edition gold Xai laser mouse, a Siberia v2 headset, and a 4HD gaming surface (i.e. mousepad). Having reviewed both the Xai and the Siberia, I can tell you it's worth your time to enter. Details follow!
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In May 2009, Texas-based Tune Hunter sued 
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As you’ve probably heard by now, this morning Google finally officially announced the first Google Phone: The 
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Today, AT&T announced that it has completed HSPA 7.2 updates to all its 3G cell sites across the U.S. This was completed earlier than expected as AT&T decided to “expedite” the process to improve customer experience. But don’t get too excited just yet. Despite the upgrade, the faster bandwidth promised by HSPA 7.2 is still limited to a handful of select test cities, we’re told.
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