Saturday, February 13, 2010

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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PayPal, Venrock Incubate BillFloat To Develop Innovative Payment Services

Posted: 13 Feb 2010 09:00 AM PST


We got a tip recently about a startup called BillFloat, which sports a rather limited website with nothing but a logo and a call for fresh engineers. The intriguing thing about BillFloat, however, was this sentence on the placeholder website: “We are a PayPal and Venrock backed startup re-defining a $100 billion market and are looking for Rails engineers.”

Since PayPal doesn’t have a particularly noteworthy track record of funding other companies, we asked the company about said investment, and got the following response:

PayPal did provide some seed money to billfloat, but we’re not disclosing any specifics. This is in line with what Naveed Anwar and Osama Bedier talked about at our developer conference in November … to encourage developers through guidance and resources to build innovative payment applications. Developers have the opportunity to secure support from PayPal and VC partners including seed funding, coaching, market insight and strategy. We also announced a developer challenge and a VC Network.

Digging a bit deeper, we found out that BillFloat was founded by two Entrepreneurs-In-Residence from VC firm Venrock (also called The Quarry team): serial entrepreneur Ryan Gilbert and former Yahoo exec Sean O’ Malley.

Gilbert, for one, knows his way around the digital payment market. He was co-founder and CEO of PropertyBridge, which was acquired by MoneyGram for $28 million in cash back in October 2007. He is also an advisor to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s latest startup, Square, which aims to revolutionize card payments on mobile phones.

I had a chat with Gilbert about BillFloat yesterday, in which I learned more about the company and its plans in the payment services space. Turns out BillFloat is not exactly meant to become a stand-alone company, product or service, but rather to function as an incubator for the development of multiple electronic payment ideas he, O’Malley and some people from PayPal have been chewing on for a while.

Here are some of things he said (paraphrased):

I’m excited by the opportunity to do something big in payments – to change the way consumers and businesses transaction. So at “BillFloat” we’re investigating new payment ideas, developing them, testing and softly launching in market in a couple of months. We are building our own products for launch under a brand that we will own; BillFloat is just a working name.

This all sounds rather vague, but Gilbert stressed that they have a clear road map ahead and that they aim to shake up the digital payments space, which he claims no one has done in a big way since the birth and rapid rise of PayPal over a decade ago. The basic idea behind BillFloat is to develop solutions that can payments easier for everyone, whether on the Web, mobile or interactive voice response platforms. We’re all for that.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.

(Thanks to Judd Daniel for the tip)


Refinery29 Raises Seed Funding For Hyperlocal Fashion News Site

Posted: 13 Feb 2010 08:30 AM PST



There are a multitude of fashion news sites on the web that compete to provide up to date news on emerging designers, trends, sales and the hottest stores and boutiques to find collections. Fashion site Refinery29 has an different take on this model; the site hopes to provide hyperlocal fashion news to U.S. cities. Refinery29 has just raised seed funding (the startup declines to name how much, but says it is a “sub $1 million round” from a pool of angel investors, including Ramesh Haridas, Mark Mitchell and Jim Yang.

The site is essentially DailyCandy meets Style.com. Refinery29 offers news on fashion trends, independent designers, beauty secrets, and more. For example, Refinery29 has been offering analysis and coverage of New York Fashion Week, breaking out the hot trends from the various shows. Plus, the site offers advice on where to find the best deals; featuring news of local and online sample sales, and special offers. Refinery29, which currently has a local site for New York fashion, also holds its own “sample sales” in the particular city to feature collections of local designers and boutiques that are marked down by often 50 to 60 percent.

The new funding will be used to expand to other cities; with Refinery launching hyperlocal sites in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago this year. The site will also be using the funding to launch an e-commerce offering within its site, so Refinery can sell many of the fashion designs that it writes about. There’s a ton of potential in fashion content sites using e-commerce to both monetize and boost offerings; Conde Nast’s Lucky Magazine has a similar strategy.

Patrick Yee, Refinery29’s Business Development chief, tells me that the New York-centric site is seeing one million visits per month (650,000 unique visitors) and and pulled in $1.4 million in revenue in 2009 from events and advertising. Yee himself is no stranger to online shopping sites, his startup Shopflick was acquired by media network Sugar Inc.

Of course, Refinery29 will face competition from a variety of fronts, including from Vogue’s Style.com and other online fashion magazines. From the hyperlocal standpoint, Refinery will compete with city’s local magazine’s fashion coverage. For example, New York Magazine offers detailed coverage of the New York fashion scene; as does San Francisco’s 7X7. But Refinery’s strategy of e-commerce and local shopping events is compelling and could help differentiate the site from its competitors.


Google, Mozilla Claim AOL’s China Portal May Harm Your Computer

Posted: 13 Feb 2010 07:40 AM PST


Google Chrome and Firefox both throw up a malware warning for AOL’s Chinese portal (click at your own risk), and Google even warns people who run a search for ‘AOL China’ that the site may harm their computer, as you can tell from the screenshot above.

As far as I can tell, Internet Explorer 8 (with Protected Mode turned on), Bing and Yahoo Search don’t flag anything out of the ordinary with the website. Curiously, neither does AOL Search, which is powered by Google.

I continued to the site, which is located at both chinese.aol.com and cn.aol.com, and the warning message tells me the website is getting flagged because it contains elements from the site www.tq121.com.cn, which is said to appear to host malware. The URL www.tq121.com.cn earlier led me to weather.com.cn, but no warning messages pop up when visiting that site.

Digging a bit deeper, I found that the Safe Browsing Diagnostics page for chinese.aol.com reports the domain name tq121.com.cn to function as intermediary for distributing malware hosted at xzgfgh.8866.org. (Best not to visit any of those, obviously).

Looking at the Safe Browsing Diagnostics page for the latter URL turns up red flags for sited hosted on the network The Planet, a hosting company that is suffering from a couple of security issues of its own at the moment, as you can tell from similar warning messages appearing when visiting legacy domain domains.theplanet.com.

We’re sure that these are just pieces of a bigger puzzle, but it’s definitely worth reporting that a website owned by an Internet company the size of AOL appears to be used to distribute malware. And frankly, it’s worrying that Google and Firefox both raise warning flags while behemoths like Microsoft and Yahoo consider everything to be perfectly safe.

(Thanks for the tips, Michel Wester and Andrew Hartnett)


What’s Better: Saving the World or Building Another Facebook app?

Posted: 13 Feb 2010 07:01 AM PST


Running on just sugar and caffeine, 32 teams of students worked non-stop for 18 hours to develop applications that they hoped would blow the judges' socks off. This was at the UC-Berkeley Hackathon, last weekend. Indeed, many teams succeeded in their mission. They built some amazing software: to provide server-side rendering of games, convert website mockups to HTML/CSS, create sophisticated playlists for Youtube videos, and to analyze Twitter streams. One team even built a gaming interface for a neural headset.

There were so many cool tools that the seven judges, who included representatives from Zynga, Facebook, Y-Combinator (and me), had a hard time picking a winner in each category. The exception was the "social good" category. There was only one team worthy of receiving this prize. The team built a system to enable villagers in developing countries to send SMSs to volunteers across the globe who provide emergency medical advice. But the Silicon Valley judges couldn't see the value of this technology. One commented, "If the villager has a cell-phone, why doesn't he just call 911? This is really dumb". (Most of the judges didn't understand that 911 services don't exist in most places in the world, and that SMSs have become the internet of the developing world). Instead, the panel awarded the prize to a team that developed a polling technology for university classrooms and for conferences. The rationale for this decision? "Helping universities is a social good."

This brings me to the point of this post. What if we challenged these students and Silicon Valley to build businesses that do good for the planet and make a healthy profit doing so? Today, the world faces more problems than perhaps at any point in recent history. The economy is on the brink. Greenhouse gases threaten to turn Earth into a giant steam room. Scarce resources such as food, water, and oil have already become international flashpoints as the developing and developed worlds jockey for position to sustain or improve their standards of living. Drug-resistant bacteria threaten us with doomsday plagues. Yet we have the greatest minds and the deepest pool of investment capital in the world focused on building Facebook and Twitter apps.

Yes, I know that some in Silicon Valley are solving important problems. But these are the tiny minority.  Out of 32 teams at UC-Berkeley, only one was focused on a social cause. That's probably the same proportion of do-gooders as in the Valley. I'll bet that most Berkeley students would do anything to better the world if they knew how.  But like the Hackathon judges, they don't know what problems need to be solved and what they can do to solve them.

There is a way. In 2008, Charles Vest, the president of the National Academy of Engineering brought together a group of prominent deans of engineering schools from around the country to create a list of Grand Challenges that can be solved by engineers, in our lifetime. These were in several broad realms of human concern — sustainability, health, vulnerability, and joy of living. Dr. Vest believed that "the world's cadre of engineers will seek ways to put knowledge into practice to meet these grand challenges. Applying the rules of reason, the findings of science, the aesthetics of art, and the spark of creative imagination, engineers will continue the tradition of forging a better future".

Here is the list of the 14 Grand Challenges the deans created:
Make solar energy economical
Provide energy from fusion
Develop carbon sequestration methods
Manage the nitrogen cycle
Provide access to clean water
Restore and improve urban infrastructure
Advance health informatics
Engineer better medicines
Reverse-engineer the brain
Prevent nuclear terror
Secure cyberspace
Enhance virtual reality
Advance personalized learning
Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

Some of these may sound far afield for typical Silicon Valley TechCrunch readers and Berkeley students, but they are not.  I asked Duke University's dean of engineering, Tom Katsouleas, to help me translate some of these into tangible business ideas. Here are three examples:

1.  Engineer better medicines. You might think this is the purview of the medical researcher or biomedical engineer, and it is, but it is also an electrical-engineering (EE), computer-science and information-technology challenge.  For example, one of the big drivers here is the need to predict and prevent future pandemics of highly resistant diseases.  So a concrete grand challenge is to provide early detection of diseases from a saliva swab.  It turns out that the human body when exposed to diseases such as H1N1 responds with elevated gene expressions almost immediately.  Picking out the protein signal from such an event and distinguishing it from the noise of normal metabolism turns out to be amenable to the same techniques EE's develop to pick out a weak cell-phone signal.  Duke Professor of EE, Larry Carin, has teamed up with genomicist Geoff Ginsburg and shown that this approach allows disease prediction up to 5 days in advance of symptoms.  Photonics researchers are busy trying to develop rapid on-chip diagnostics that are optical or based on electrical resistance rather than on lab chemistry and that work on saliva instead of blood.  This information can then be fed into dynamically steered computer models of disease propagation and guide both vaccine developers and public-health officials.

2.  Make solar energy economical.  It is that one extra word at the end of the sentence that changes everything.  Without the word economical, this is a physics challenge that we know how to meet: to convert energy from photons to a flow of electrons.   But with the extra word, the challenge cannot be solved without addressing business, policy, human behavior, and of course a spectrum of technologies far beyond the basic physics.  For example, nano-scale plasmonic structures could be critical to making solar cells as "cheap as paint" as well as coating roofs that are as reflective as white paint but still aesthetic.   Wireless technology could assist the adoption of electric vehicles.   Imagine using metamaterial lenses to make wireless chargers in the floor of garages highly efficient.  The leapfrog from EVs' being less convenient vehicles that have to be plugged in to never having to stop to refuel turns one key obstacle to adoption into an incentive to make a better product.

3.  Reverse-engineer the brain. As brain researcher and Palm inventor, Jeff Hawkins, at Numenta pointed out, there was a time when computer scientists thought they could create artificial intelligence algorithmically.  That hubris is giving way to a recognition that understanding the structure and function of biological neural networks may be essential to achieving applications as mundane as navigating a car down the freeway to as grand as helping individuals optimize their own learning.

If you review the list of challenges, you may be able to develop some great business ideas of your own. Olin College and the Kauffman Foundation have created a competition for students who have completed science and engineering projects that tie directly to the 14 Grand Challenges. Several universities, including North Carolina State University and Duke University, are also holding a series of summits to bring thinkers together to solve problems. I encourage you to participate. My hope is that rather than run business-plan contests and hackathons, our universities will start competing to solve the Grand Challenges. Maybe the excitement and sense of purpose will seep through to my fellow judges and others in Silicon Valley… and maybe we'll even help save the world.

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.


MySpace Stream Architect Monica Keller Jumps To Facebook

Posted: 12 Feb 2010 06:56 PM PST


Monica Keller, a MySpace Group Architect who has played a key role in advancing MySpace’s initiatives in activity streams and openness, is leaving the company to join Facebook. Keller announced the news in a blog post this evening. She will be joining Facebook as an Open Source and Web Standards Program Manager, where she’ll be joining a team that includes David Recordon and Luke Shepard. MySpace confirmed that Keller had left the company but declined to comment further.

Keller played a key role in launching MySpace’s Real-Time Stream API, helping to design the Real Time Stream using PuSH and architecting the network’s Twitter Sync Ingest.  Keller was involved with the technical aspects of the Stream, and was also involved with the design of MySpace’s developer platform. She’s also represented MySpace on numerous conference panels.

While Keller has some nice things to say about the struggling company in her post, she clearly wasn’t pleased with the way some things were handled at MySpace:

But I have chosen to leave. While I was able to have some temporary creative freedom this is not the norm or part of what other engineers enjoy and I do not feel there is one cohesive push to deliver the best we can deliver anymore.

To my friends and colleagues at MySpace, some parting advice:

It is imperative that MySpace puts in place strong technical leadership who can attract good technical talent and make well-informed decisions. It is important that they stay connected to rest of the world and work on interoperable standards and solid products which benefit the end user. Many of my fellow engineers have fantastic ideas and a plan for phased delivery.

This is a loss for MySpace, but it certainly isn’t the end of their real-time and open initiatives (which have been more progressive than Facebook’s).  We hear that these are still being spearheaded by recently promoted MySpace co-president Mike Jones, and that Christina Wodtke, who recently joined the company after running the activity stream product at LinkedIn, is involved in running the team’s day-to-day operations.

Image by Adam Tinworth.


Pownce Founder Leah Culver Leaves Six Apart

Posted: 12 Feb 2010 03:25 PM PST


In December 2008, Six Apart acquired Pownce, a microblogging service that never managed to attract a large following. Pownce was shuttered after the acquisition, but its two-person team joined Six Apart to help integrate the technology into Six Apart’s blogging services. Today Pownce founder Leah Culver has written on her blog that she’s leaving Six Apart, where she spent the last year working on its TypePad and TypePad Motion products. Culver writes that her next project is developing an iPhone application for Plancast.

Despite reports to the contrary, Culver isn’t joining Plancast full time (at least not yet). Plancast founder (and TechCrunch alum) Mark Hendrickson says that she’s joining on a contract basis to build the iPhone app, but that the long-term future is uncertain. Culver’s blog notes that she might continue working on Leafy Chat, a web based IRC client that’s in private beta.

One thing worth pointing out: Culver and Mike Malone were Pownce’s only engineers, and they were absorbed into the Six Apart team as part of the acquisition. Malone left Six Apart just over a year after the acquisition to join SimpleGeo, and now Culver has left just a few months later. It looks like they had a one-year post acquisition cliff, and given their departures soon thereafter, it’s possible the integration of Pownce’s technology didn’t work out as they might have hoped.

Image by hyku


CrunchBoard Jobs: College Humor, uStream.tv, MyWire, isocket and more

Posted: 12 Feb 2010 03:13 PM PST


Check out the jobs on CrunchBoard. Jobs from New York to San Francisco to Germany. See jobs in Europe here.

In the last couple of weeks we have added more than 50 jobs on CrunchBoard, including a Ruby Developer and student intern here at TechCrunch.

Here is a quick sample of some jobs posted.

uStream,
Account Manager and more – Mountain View

MyWire
Platform Architect – Redwood Shores

isocket
Web Developer – Burlingame

Linkedin
Senior Software Engineer – Mountain View

BookRenter
Ruby on Rails Developer – San Mateo

CollegeHumor
PHP Developer – New York

See the rest of the postings here!


No, Buzz Is Not Being Clipped From Gmail. It MAY Get A Separate Web App Though.

Posted: 12 Feb 2010 02:55 PM PST


Well, pretty much everyone screwed up this story today, so it’s time for some clarification. Despite what you may have read all over the web, Google is not removing Buzz from Gmail. At least not anytime soon.

The confusion stems from Google VP of Product Marketing Bradley Horowitz’s comments to Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan earlier today at TED. Horowitz said that Google was considering separating Buzz from Gmail. But what he meant was that they’d consider making another app that you can use outside of Gmail, not that it would be ripped from Gmail itself, Google has clarified. I mean, it has been out for three whole days, and usage is skyrocketing, did anyone really think Google was going to mute it so quickly?

No, we’re not planning to remove Buzz from Gmail. Among some of the features we’re considering is building a standalone Buzz experience in addition to the one in Gmail at some point in the future,” a Google spokesperson tells us.

That said, there are plenty of people who want to turn off Buzz in their Gmail entirely. These are users who opted-in to using it, but are now overwhelmed by its noise. But you can do that in the footer of Gmail easily. There’s also no shortage of people concerned about the service’s privacy ramifications. Google already made some tweaks last night to alleviate some problems — expect more of those soon.

So everyone just calm down and keep buzzing. And feel free to follow us there.

[image: New Line Cinema]



Googlers Can Finally Find Their Parisian Love With GoogleCrush

Posted: 12 Feb 2010 02:32 PM PST


By now, you’ve undoubtedly seen “Parisian Love,” the Google Search ad that was run during the Super Bowl. Love, it seems, is in the air at Google. And to capitalize on that, the startup GoodCrush has created a new feature: GoogleCrush.

Here’s how it works: if you work at Google and have a @google.com email address, you simply enter your name and that email address, and then enter the email address of up to 5 other people that work at Google that you have a crush on. If one of those people also enters you as one of their crushes, you’ll be connected. If the person you added as a crush doesn’t add you back, your name will remain anonymous.

This timely and humorous addition is simply an extension of GoodCrush, the service which does the same thing as I described above but for college campuses. For it to work, the sender and recipient have to have the same .edu email address. Since its launch last Monday, GoodCrush is available for a couple dozen colleges around the U.S., there are around 6,000 registered users, and some 18,500 crush emails have been sent.

The ‘CrushFinder’ that you see on the homepage is based on a project that I ran while serving as VP and President of the Undergraduate Student Government at Princeton, we got around 30% of the student body in 24 hours both years,” co-founder Josh Weinstein tells us. “What is unique and exciting about GoodCrush is that it focuses on dense and insulated social networks – college campuses – and we require users to register with their school’s .edu email address. Google’s campuses have the same characteristics as college campuses – so we hope to see the ensuing excitement that comes from GoogleCrush,” he continues.

Cute. And in case you forgot, Sunday is Valentine’s Day, so this is potentially useful if you’re a college kid (or Googler) without a date this weekend. Get on it.

GoodCrush works out of the Dogpatch Labs in New York — the startup workspace affectionately known as the “frat house for geeks.” The company was seed funded by FirstMark.


Shoes Of Prey Friday Giveaway

Posted: 12 Feb 2010 02:13 PM PST


If you haven’t bought a Valentine’s Day gift for your sweetie, this giveaway may be up your alley. Shoes Of Prey, a site that lets you design and order custom-made womens shoes online, is offering a lucky TechCrunch reader a $290 gift certificate to use on the site (that’s the value of the most expensive pair of shoes and shipping on Shoes of Prey). You may remember the Australian startup from this year’s Crunchies, where Shoes of Prey was a finalist in the “Best Bootstrapped Startup” category.

Founded by two ex-Googlers, Mike Knapp and Michael Fox, Shoes of Prey is every shoe-lover’s dream; the site offers the ability to choose a design (ballet flat, pointy toe shoe, wedge etc.) You can then customize your pair of shoes with heel size, design, bows, type of leather and more. Prices range from $180 for flats to $280 for two-inch heels. The startup says that it will be adding more types of fabric and designs this year.

In order to win the gift certificate, retweet this post and make sure to include the short URL link as well as the #crunch hashtag. Please only tweet the message once, anyone tweeting repeatedly will be disqualified. We'll sort through all of the tweets and pick one randomly for the win.


As The Deals Roll In, So Does Some Revenue For Foursquare

Posted: 12 Feb 2010 01:46 PM PST


Foursquare is cutting deals with major brands left and right. Everyday, it seems like there’s a new one. Like today, for example, they’ve announced a deal with Conde Nast. And here’s another one with Marc Jacobs. This follows a half dozen or so other ones with the likes of Bravo, HBO, Warner Brothers, Zagat, and others over just the past couple of weeks. But here’s the million dollar question, perhaps literally: is Foursquare making any money from these deals?

Yes.

Though they won’t specifically go into the details of each deal, Foursquare is indeed making revenues off of some of them. “Some are paid, some are exploratory,” co-founder Dennis Crowley tells us. “We’re all about trying a little of everything and seeing what sticks,” he continues. When I pressed him if this means the still-small startup is already in the black, he laughed it off, “Ha, not yet. We’re hiring pretty quick, but it’s not totally unreasonable.  There [are] so many deals on the table, it just seems foolish to punt on all of them,” he says.

Specifically, of the new deals, we hear that the Bravo one and the Zagat one are pulling in some money for Foursquare. Earlier, Lucky Magazine (a Conde Nast property) declined to comment as to whether their deal with Foursquare was for money as well, but don’t be surprised if that one is too. Again, none of this is enough to turn a profit, but it says something about the potential of Foursquare’s business model that less than a year after launch, they’re already making revenue.

At first, Foursquare said it wouldn’t focus on revenue and would instead focus on gaining users (they now have over 300,000). But that was still when the business deals were surrounding local bars and restaurants offering free food and drinks to users who became the “mayor” of their venue, or in some cases just checked-in. When the big brands came calling, so did the possibilities of earning money right away.

To that end, Foursquare is working on a set of services and tools, as AdAge reported earlier this month. It seems there will be three tiers of paid services: ones for small (local) businesses, ones for retail chains, and ones for big marketers. With these offerings, Foursquare would offer up analytics packages. “Then, deals could be sold against impressions such as web ads, clicks such as search ads, or a completely new model: cost per check-in,” Kunur Patel writes in the AdAge piece.

With the rate of Foursquare check-ins having doubled in the past month alone, you can probably expect even more revenue-generating deals to come in even faster.


Tom Has Finally Reached His MySpace Friend Limit

Posted: 12 Feb 2010 12:45 PM PST


MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson supposedly begged to keep his job when the rest of the founding team was shown the door nine months ago. They kept him on, almost as a mascot. He was, after all, the first friend everyone had when signing up to MySpace.

He lost his President title (now shared by Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn). And he is rarely seen in the office. Still, MySpace insiders said he was important to have around as a tie to the old days.

No more, it seems. Tom hasn’t actually signed in to MySpace since January 24, and his last status update was on Christmas day.

But more striking is the fact that Tom is no longer automatically added as a new MySpace user’s first friend. Instead, a couple of days ago, new users were simply given “MySpace Today” as their first friend.

I’m guessing Tom’s days as an employee of MySpace are numbered.


Aardvark Continues Running At Full Steam After Google Acquisition, Joins Google Labs

Posted: 12 Feb 2010 11:48 AM PST


Yesterday we broke the news that Aardvark, the social search engine, was being acquired by Google for $50 million. Aardvark confirmed the acquisition to us yesterday (though they didn’t comment on the amount), and now Google and Aardvark have publicly announced the deal with posts to their official blogs, along with some more details about how Aardvark will be integrated with Google.

Unlike some of Google’s past startup acquisitions that  resulted in services shutting down or restricting new user signups, Aardvark is going to continue running at full steam.  New users can still sign up, and it’s already featured as part of Google Labs (though it hasn’t been integrated with Google search at all — it’s just a link to Vark.com).

As far as changes to the service, a Q&A on the Aardvark blog says that they’ll be able to move faster as Google puts its support behind it (some Googlers will be joining the Aardvark team).


App Store Now Has 150,000 Apps. Great News For The iPad: Paid Books Rule.

Posted: 12 Feb 2010 11:32 AM PST


During Apple’s iPad event in January, CEO Steve Jobs announced that Apple now had over 140,000 apps in the App Store (along with over 3 billion downloads). If the numbers by app analytics company Distimo are correct, that number is now past 150,000.

But the App Store is growing so big, so quickly that these milestones alone are hardly noteworthy anymore. But Distimo also offers up some nice data along with the milestone number. For example, of the 150,000 apps, some 75% are paid applications while only 25% are free. This is in stark contrast to the second largest app store, Android Market, where recent data suggests that over 60% of the app there are free.

Something else that’s very interesting is that the highest percentage of apps in the App Store are now paid book applications. In total, there are over 27,000 book apps in the store, and of those 92% are paid apps, according to Distimo’s data. That number bodes very well for Apple’s soon-to-be-released iPad, of which a big selling point will be the new iBooks application. There has been a lot of talk about how the iPad won’t hurt the Kindle because the Amazon device’s e-ink makes reading more enjoyable. And while it’s true that e-ink is easier on your eyes (thank a backlit screen), it seems that iPhone owners simply don’t care — again, great news for the iPad.

In terms of overall app numbers, games still rule, with over 28,000 of them in the store. But a much higher percentage of those are free versus the percentage of free book apps. All told, both games and book are far and away the two most popular categories in the App Store, with entertainment in third with just over 20,000 apps. And the numbers drop quickly from there. Education is the fourth most popular category, but that means only 10,000+ apps.


Despite The Price, Twitter’s Chirp Tickets Selling Out “Within Hours.” Another Batch Released.

Posted: 12 Feb 2010 11:02 AM PST


The tickets for Twitter’s first official conference, Chirp, are selling quickly — despite the $469 price. Twitter is planning to release about 800 tickets for the event total but is putting them up for sale in waves. The first batch, about 1/3rd of the tickets, went on sale last month and sold out “within hours,” we’re told. Today, Twitter has just released another batch.

Like the first, this batch contains another 1/3rd of the total tickets. You can probably expect this batch to sell out within hours too. The final 1/3rd of tickets will be sold next month, and Twitter also plans to announce more details about the event at that time — likely other speakers and musical guests, etc. The event itself takes place on April 14 and 15 in San Francisco — probably not coincidentally one week before Facebook’s big annual developer event, f8.

Demand has been growing as indicated by inbound interest. Everyone is excited about getting the ecosystem’s top developers in the same room as Twitter’s leadership and technical staff for the first time. The planning is going well and Chirp shaping up to be an entertaining and informative event,” is Twitter’s official statement on the conference, which is being put together by Carsonified, the group behind the popular FOWA events (which is taking place in a few week in Miami).

To sign up for Chirp you have to visit this page. To ensure tickets are going to developers who actually want to attend the event, Twitter actually makes you jump through a few hoops using their API to get a password before you can purchase a ticket.


In English-Crazy China, 8D World Teaches Kids To Speak In Virtual Worlds; Lands A Deal With CCTV

Posted: 12 Feb 2010 10:24 AM PST


In China, learning spoken English is giving rise to a huge and growing market. For instance, in addition to English classes in public schools, parents send their children to about 50,000 for-profit training schools around the country, where English is the most popular subject. Instead of American Idol, on CCTV, the national government-owned TV network, they have the Star of Outlook English Talent Competition. This is possibly the largest nationwide competition in China. Last year, 400,000 students between the ages of 6 and 14 took part in it.

This year, the competition is adding a virtual twist, and a startup based in Massachusetts called 8D World is at the center of it. 8D World runs a virtual world called Wiz World Online for Chinese-speaking kids who want to learn English. In what is a huge coup for the startup, this year’s CCTV English competition will use Wiz World Online as its official training and competition platform. Wiz World will be used to screen contestants and will be promoted to millions of Chinese viewers.

Each player in Wiz World gets an avatar, but to get through the game and rack up points players need to pronounce words properly in English using a microphone. It is all software based, using speech recognition and pronunciation assessment software. The way Wiz World makes money is through subscriptions: about $20 a month or $160 a year, which is a lot in China, but less than the average $700 a year parents pay to send their kids to the training schools. 8D World also has partnerships with about 1,500 of those training school who resell Wiz World subscriptions and get a rev-share.

Students competing in the CCTV competition won’t have to pay a subscription fee in the competitions themselves, but if they want to train for the event using Wiz World they will need one. The company plans to expand its English-learning virtual world to other languages as well. Next up will be Korean, and after that it may go after Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian.

The company raised $7 million in March 2008 from Spark Capital and Gobi Partners.


A Guide To Following The 2010 Winter Olympics Online

Posted: 12 Feb 2010 09:30 AM PST



The 2010 Winter Olympics kick off in Vancouver tonight, and for those of you who can’t be tied to your TV every night to watch the opening and closing ceremonies and competitions, here’s a compilation of sites where you can not only watch video highlights of the events but also see pictures, scores, medal counts and news from the Olympics:

1. NBC Olympics: NBC, which is covering the Olympics on TV, has also set up a site where you can catch the latest scores, news and select video coverage of the competitions (powered by Microsoft Silverlight). You can also see profiles of athletes and streams of Tweets from athletes on the U.S. Olympic teams. Unfortunately, it appears that NBC is severely limiting the streaming of competitions and the ceremonies to the general public, so video will most probably be comprised of short highlights. But if you are a cable subscriber, you will be able to access 400 hours of live streaming of the events, but will need to prove that you subscribe to premium-cable service to access full and live videos.

2. Vancouver 2010: Sponsored by the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the games, this site offers schedule of events, up-to-date results and maps of the various event sites in Vancouver.

3. Facebook: On Facebook, there is a dedicated page for the Vancouver Games from the Organizing Committee as well as a page from the International Olympics Committee, which will collects Facebook updates from athletes and post up-to-date photos from the various events.

4. Twitter: For real-time updates from the athletes, Twitter has complied a list of verified Olympic athletes. A site called Twitter-Athletes also provides the handles of many of the Olympians at the winter games.

5. Flickr: Flickr has teamed up the International Olympic Committee to create an official photo group on the photo sharing site. The IOC will also use the Flickr group to publish its official event photos, as well as upload images to its own Flickr photo stream.

6. Yahoo Sports: Yahoo Sports has launched a Winter Olympics site that will offer news coverage, photos, videos, medal counts and statistics. This week, Yahoo announced that it has also optimized its search engine for Winter Olympics news and stats.

7. Yahoo Mobile: Yahoo has also rolled out a mobile web site to allow users to news, event schedules, stats and pictures on the go.

8. Google: Google has optimized its mobile search to provide better results for Olympics searches. On Google’s mobile search interface, you can search for the name of your favorite sport, and the engine will give you the latest info about game results, schedules, medal count and more. On Android and iPhone devices, the search engine’s realtime search feature will show you the latest updates related to the games within the same search results. Google has also rolled out a special homepage for Search (see below).

9. iPhone Apps: Apple has recommended several iPhone apps to help you keep up with news, schedules and more, including NBC’s official Olympics App, Canadian TV channel CTV’s Olympics App, push notifications-enabled Vancouver Games, and Olympic Games news aggregatror Winter Games Grub.

Photo credit/Flickr/s.yume


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