The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Google News Tests Trending Topics
- Sciencefeed Launches Friendfeed-Like Platform For Scientists
- ChaCha Turns To Facebook To Socialize Questions And Answers; Rolls Out API
- Microsoft Debuts Windows Mobile 7 … Sorry “Windows Phone”
- Windows Phone UI Leaks Ahead Of Schedule
- Grow VC Aims To Be The Kiva For Tech Startups
- The TED v. Sarah Silverman Fight Turns Really Retarded
- Dazzboard Secures $1.5 Million For A Web-based iTunes
- AIR For Android, And Adobe’s Plan To Deliver Apps Across All Mobile Devices
- Photoshop App Tops 6 Million Downloads On The iPhone
- TechCrunch State Of The Union, Belated Edition
- My Bloody Valentine: Expedia.com
- Sony Ericsson To Pre-Load Gokivo Navigator Onto New Windows Mobile Handsets
| Google News Tests Trending Topics Posted: 15 Feb 2010 07:42 AM PST
Google is already taking a page out of Twitter’s playbook with the recent launch of Buzz, which lets everyone on Gmail broadcast public status updates, share links, blog posts, photos, videos, and more. But Google, which tried and failed to buy Twitter last year, is still studying its various features and building some of them into its own services. The next one it might borrow from Twitter is trending topics. Twitter exposes the keywords people are using the most or growing fastest at any given time under Trending Topics in the sidebar or in Twitter search. Now some people are noticing similar trending topics in the left sidebar of Google News when they are logged in. Joe Hobot captured the screenshot at left on his blog. Some of the trending topics earlier today were “Greece” (which is considering an economic austerity plan) “Iran” (which is facing U.N. sanctions over its nuclear program), “Mobile Technology” and “smartphones” (no doubt due to the Mobile World Congress kicking off in Barcelona today). Google already shows the relative popularity of news topics in Google Trends, but showing them in Google News is probably more helpful. The trending topics, though, appear to be part of a larger redesign. We’ve been getting other reports and images of a Google News redesign bucket test. (See image below). The redesign also has personalization options which let you customize Google News by location or category (business, world, etc.). Of course, MyYahoo did this ten years ago, but it’s good to see Google News finally getting around to letting people personalize their news pages.
     
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| Sciencefeed Launches Friendfeed-Like Platform For Scientists Posted: 15 Feb 2010 07:35 AM PST
We’ve written about social networking platforms that are tailored for the science and research community. ResearchGATE aimed to be the LinkedIn for Scientists. Today, Sciencefeed is launching as a realtime micro blogging platform designed specifically for scientists. Sciencefeed allows users to post short microblogs (not restricted to 140 characters) on scientific headlines, new findings, controversy, conferences and ideas related to science. You can follow users; respond to other member's entries, and comment on various topics in realtime. You can search for topics and keywords fairly easily and publish updates to Twitter and Facebook. Since conferences are an integral part of scientific research, Scienfeed allows users to create groups around events and even aggregate updates from participants based on a hashtag, similar to Twitter. Publications can be attached to a feed, allowing users to automatically search through 10 different literature databases (such as PubMed) and RSS feeds. Co-founder of Sciencefeed, Dr. Ijad Madisch, says that he launched the platform because the science and research community was looking for a Twitter-like social media platform that was tailored to the industry. The biggest challenge Sciencefeed will face is to recruit users to the platform; but the startup could forge partnerships with research institutions to gain a loyal following.      
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| ChaCha Turns To Facebook To Socialize Questions And Answers; Rolls Out API Posted: 15 Feb 2010 07:20 AM PST
With ChaCha’s Facebook App, when individuals pose a question to any friends within their social network, the question is also automatically submitted to ChaCha. ChaCha returns an answer from its database of hundreds of millions of answers. Users can also select "add to profile" to get a permanent “Ask ChaCha” prompt on their profile pages. Additionally, users can select "share" when they submit a question, and the question and answers will post to their friends' Facebook walls that they select. Individuals receive points for questions they answer for pure recognition and fun, and based on points attainment, users receive different titles which are displayed on a leader board. ChaCha has also recently launched an iPhone App and Twitter integration via @chacha, so people can ask questions on the microblogging platform. ChaCha has rolled out its API, allowing developers to tap into the startup’s database with of questions and answers. ChaCha offers developers three variations of its API’s: Quick ChaCha Answer (query the API with a specific question, get an answer instantly); Top ChaCha Answers (query the API with a general topic or keyword(s) and get a list of the most popular answers); and ChaCha Trends (query the API to find out what the world is asking about). Launched in 2007, ChaCha started as a human powered search engine – meaning a human found you answers when you typed in a query. ChaCha encountered the high cost of hiring humans to basically do Google searches and return results to people but then evolved into a mobile version of the service that lets users ask questions via SMS. The site also archives questions and answers on their website, with 500 million of them currently listed on the ChaCha site. ChaCha is answering one million questions a day via SMS, passing Google as the no. 1 SMS search service according to Nielsen Mobile.      
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| Microsoft Debuts Windows Mobile 7 … Sorry “Windows Phone” Posted: 15 Feb 2010 06:13 AM PST  We're in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, where Microsoft has at long last pulled back the curtains on the next generation of Windows Mobile. Don't go calling it "Windows Mobile 7″, though – at least not around Microsoft's folks, who have officially changed the name of the platform to "Windows Phone".
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| Windows Phone UI Leaks Ahead Of Schedule Posted: 15 Feb 2010 06:11 AM PST  We've gotta give it to Microsoft: considering that they've been working on Windows Mobile 7 for at least a year or two, the fact that they've kept its user interface completely under wraps until a few hours before it's expected to be officially announced is ridiculously impressive. Alas, a leak was bound to happen at some point, even if it is at the very last minute.
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| Grow VC Aims To Be The Kiva For Tech Startups Posted: 15 Feb 2010 02:48 AM PST
Grow VC is a new community funding model for technology startups. Here’s how it works: Grow VC will pool 75 per cent of membership fees into a community fund that gets invested back into ‘promising startups’ which are members of the platform. The fund is managed by Grow VC but all the investment decisions are left to members who determine how to invest their portion of the fund into other startup companies that they feel have the most potential. The most successful decision makers get financially rewarded when the community fund begins earning a return on investment. So, if you promote the best companies you make moola. Joining Grow VC, and the basic features such as building a person profile, are free. Premium features come with subscriptions ranging from $20 to $140 per month, depending on how much money the startup company is seeking or how much the investor is looking to invest. For unlimited service investments, the monthly subscription fee is $90 per month. The fund is aimed at startups that need $10,000 to $1 million USD.      
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| The TED v. Sarah Silverman Fight Turns Really Retarded Posted: 15 Feb 2010 01:57 AM PST
Quick background – comedian Sarah Silverman, who is known for shock and insult humor, was invited to give a TED talk. She was subsquently trashed by TED organizer Chris Anderson, who tweeted "I know I shouldn't say this about one of my own speakers, but I thought Sarah Silverman was god-awful…" The problem was that Silverman kept using the word “retarded” to fight Sarah Palin’s recent rant about the word. The whole talk flew right over the TED crowd. Anderson deleted his tweet, but Silverman hit back today with her own, saying “Kudos to @TEDChris for making TED an unsafe haven for all! You’re a barnacle of mediocrity on Bill Gates’ asshole.” Anderson, who tries to stay above the fray, must be so pleased. And then, somewhat randomly, AOL founder Steve Case waded into the fight to defend Anderson. He (also tweeting) said “Shame on you” to Silverman, adding “The sad thing is you’re not that funny.” Silverman’s response: “@SteveCase You should be nicer to the last person on earth w an aol account.” …the fight between Silverman and Case continued, but you get the picture. Our take: Silverman was invited to TED to do what she does, and she did it. No one should have been surprised by her brand of humor. She was then personally attacked by Anderson. It’s no surprise she fired back. TED speakers beware – make sure your talks are within acceptable parameters or face the wrath of TED. And their friends.      
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| Dazzboard Secures $1.5 Million For A Web-based iTunes Posted: 15 Feb 2010 01:35 AM PST
The product from Finnish startup Linkotec has now received $1.5 million in seed funding to boost growth and expand globally. The investment round was led by HTT Sixgen (a Finnish, family owned, VC) and was followed by additional funding from another Finnish VC, Veraventure. As with so many Finnish startups, there is usually an ex-Nokia person hovering around somewhere. In this case it’s former Nokia Ventures head Timo Teimonen is joining the board. It’s also adding Mats Therman, partner at HTT Sixgen, and Tero Salonen, a serial entrepreneur and CEO and co-founder of Dazzboard.      
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| AIR For Android, And Adobe’s Plan To Deliver Apps Across All Mobile Devices Posted: 14 Feb 2010 08:55 PM PST
The bane of all mobile app developers is the need to rewrite the same app over and over again for different devices: the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm Pre, Nokia, Windows Mobile. Adobe is positioning its Flash platform (which includes the Flash player, AIR, developer tools, and media servers) as the write-once, deploy-anywhere solution for both the mobile Web and apps. Today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, it will announce plans to bring Adobe AIR to mobile devices, starting with Android and Blackberry phones. AIR is currently used to create desktop applications, but it will soon be used to create Android and Blackberry apps as well. These mobile AIR apps will be able store data locally on the phone, access other data on the phones such as photos, and be distributed as regular apps in the Android and Blackberry app stores. Not only that, but the same apps created with Flash developer tools will be exportable as iPhone apps. Adobe wants developers to create their apps using its developer tools and then output them as AIR apps for Android and Blackberry phones, native iPhone apps, or Flash apps on the Web. With the upcoming Flash 10.1 player—which Adobe is publicly saying will come out in the first half of the year via an over-the-air update, and privately telling developers to expect by the end of April—it will extend the Flash runtime to mobile browsers. The Flash 10.1 player will run consistently across both the desktop and many mobile browsers (except the iPhone). No more Flash Lite (except for Windows Mobile, which initially won’t support Flash 10.1 but is working on a mobile browser plug-in). Flash 10.1 will be great for mobile video. Brightcove, for instance, is announcing support of Flash 10.1 in its video players, which makes possible all sorts of custom video player skins, advertising, analytics, and other features such as share buttons for Facebook and Twitter. (See this video to see how Flash 10.1 will look in a Brightcove player on an Android phone).
Of course, the face-off with Apple continues over Flash on the iPhone, even though last December, 7 million iPhone users attempted to download the Flash player from adobe.com through their mobile browsers, up from 3 million requests in July, 2009. Apple might eventually have to cave if Flash becomes a standard feature of all other smartphones. Adobe execs cite numbers by Strategy Analytics which estimate more than half of all smartphones will support Flash by 2012 (click chart at right to enlarge). Flash in mobile browsers seems like an inevitability. But whether apps built for Flash will be able to compete as standalone mobile apps outside the browser is still up in the AIR.      
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| Photoshop App Tops 6 Million Downloads On The iPhone Posted: 14 Feb 2010 08:54 PM PST
Adobe might still be having trouble getting Apple to accept Flash on the iPhone, but another one of its products is going gangbusters. Photoshop.com Mobile (iTunes link) has been downloaded more than 6 million times since it was released last October and is the second most popular free photography app in the App Store. The app lets you share and edit up to 2 gigabytes of pictures stored on Photoshop.com. It allows you to do basic photo editing on your iPhone, including cropping, rotating, filters, effects, and borders. Both photos and videos taken on your iPhone can be uploaded to Photoshop.com and viewed through the app. Photo sand videos can be shared via emailed links. The Photoshop app is also available on Android and Windows mobile.      
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| TechCrunch State Of The Union, Belated Edition Posted: 14 Feb 2010 06:51 PM PST
Total unique visitors across all TechCrunch sites in 2009, according to Google Analytics, were 69,482,978, up 55% from 2008’s 45 million unique visitors. Those vistors racked up 228,202,753 page views in 2009, up 90% from 2008’s 120 million page views. TechCrunch is the largest site in our network, followed by CrunchGear, CrunchBase, MobileCrunch and TechCrunchIT, in that order. Google search is the single biggest source of traffic, although it decreased from 37.3% in 2008 to 29.6% in 2009. Direct traffic is second, at 24% in 2009 (v. 25.3% in 2008). Then there’s a big drop to Digg (5.1% in 2009, 5.3% in 2008), Google sites (Reader, etc. (3.18% in 2009, 4.2% in 2008) and Twitter (2.9% in 2009, 1.2% in 2008). Feedburner, TechMeme, Facebook and Hacker News rounded out the list of top referrers in 2009. By country: The U.S. is the most popular residence of TechCrunch readers, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, India, Australia, France, Netherlands, Spain, Japan, Israel and Sweden, in that order. Traffic so far in 2010 is way, way up on the TechCrunch sites (11.7 million unique visitors so far in 2009). We’ve heard anecdotally from others that traffic has surged in 2010 across most Internet sites. We’ll be digging into that trend shortly, too.      
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| My Bloody Valentine: Expedia.com Posted: 14 Feb 2010 04:21 PM PST
Seeing as it’s a long weekend in the United States (President’s Day is on Monday), I decided I was going to set up a little trip to get away with the girl I’m seeing. A few weeks ago, I set up all the plans for what I thought would be a nice, relaxing weekend. It’s actually been anything but relaxing. My mistake? Using Expedia to book it. After a few hours of driving, we pulled into our destination yesterday and attempted to check-in to the hotel. Problem 1: they’ve never heard of us. My name is nowhere to be found in their reservation system. Problem 2: they were completely booked. Problem 3: even if there was a cancellation, there was a waiting list for a room because apparently, Expedia had done this exact thing to no fewer than four other couples — just at this hotel alone. So what happened? Well, it took me a couple hours to get a straight answer out of anyone, but apparently, the system that Expedia uses to book reservation with its partner hotels is a mixture of antiquated and just completely fucked up. Because it would be too much of a hassle, and more importantly, cost too much money, Expedia has an automated system for communicating with its partners. Sometimes this is done with an email, sometimes this is done with a fax. Yes, a fax. In my case, Expedia’s system apparently faxed the reservation to the hotel I booked. It then claims it got a confirmation back that my hotel room was all set and ready for my arrival. The only problem? According to the hotel, not only did they not receive the fax, but obviously they never sent the confirmation back. And why would they? It turns out all their rooms had already been booked before I attempted to book mine through Expedia. Of course, according to Expedia, there were plenty of rooms available when I booked — I even had many room options to choose from. The icing on the Valentine’s Day cake though was my subsequent six calls to and from Expedia. For the first one, after waiting on hold for 45 minutes, I was told that according to their system, my reservation was indeed confirmed. I knew this would be Expedia’s stance because I received an email from Expedia a few days prior stating that it was confirmed. After I made it very clear to the poor girl (poor, both for having to face my wrath, and working for this awful company) that there was definitely no room under my name at my supposedly booked hotel, she didn’t seem too clear about what to do. I was demanding a full refund (obviously) and demanding that they book me another room in the city and pay for that. She put me on hold so she could talk to her manager. When she came back on 15 minutes later, she wanted to make sure I booked the room correctly in the first place. I demanded to speak to her superior. This guy was great (that’s sarcasm). Not only was he trying to convince me that this wasn’t Expedia’s fault, but he wasn’t sure they’d be able to reimburse me for the room that they had never actually booked for me, and that I clearly wasn’t going to be staying in. He said he’d have to call me back. Meanwhile, I get a call from another Expedia agent whom the hotel had apparently called because again, this had happened a number of times just this day for the same hotel with Expedia. He wanted to let me know that the hotel was overbooked and my reservation wouldn’t be honored. Thanks buddy. The other agent finally calls me back. Good news: he thinks he can refund what I paid for the hotel that I’m not staying at, but wants to make sure I want another room booked for me in the city. If so, they might take some of the refund to pay for that. At this point I start really yelling. On the street. With a lot of children around. After a solid five minutes of verbal abuse from me including no shortage of swear words, he sees my point. But he still has to call his supervisor to okay any kind of deal he can cut. He needs to call me back again, but assures me that when he does, he’ll have another room for me and the refund in my account. He calls me back. The good news: the refund has been processed. The bad news: there are no other rooms in the city that Expedia can book for me. Not one. Further, if I am able to find my own room outside of Expedia, the company can’t do anything for me in terms of reimbursement. He is only authorized to offer me a $100 gift certificate to use for a future Expedia purchase. If there is anything in the world I want less at this point, I can’t think of it. I’m certainly never going to book another trip through this site again. Hearing me still upset, he suggests that maybe if I book a more expensive place, Expedia can make up the difference. That’s a ridiculous proposal for a number of reasons, but the best is that there is no way I’m going to be able to find a hotel nicer than the one I had thought I had booked to stay at on Valentine’s Day weekend. The only options were going to be shittier ones — and those are probably taken too. So maybe Expedia was trying to trick me into paying me negative $500, I’m not sure. At this point we’re almost 2 hours into my little romantic getaway so I ask for his supervisor’s number, his supervisor’s email, my reference number, anything he can give me. I hang up the phone. I tried calling them. It’s a switchboard. No one seems clear as to who I should talk to. So I write this now from my quaint (used kindly) little motel that I had to book myself, at a ridiculous rate because it was so last-minute on a busy weekend, with my own money. Never in my life have I had an experience as bad as I just did with an online company. This includes Comcast and AT&T. Expedia just made them look like models of business perfection. Expedia, which was founded as a division of Microsoft in 1995, was later spun-off into its own company in the IPO-happy days of 1999. Ticketmaster then bought it in 2001, and eventually, it became a company under the IAC conglomerate. IAC spun it off again in 2005 as Expedia, Inc, which also includes the sites Hotels.com, TripAdvisor, HotWire, and others. In other words, the company’s history has been a mess. Despite being an industry bicycle (everyone has had a ride), Expedia still manages to make $3 billion in revenues a year — undoubtedly helped by cases like mine where they try to make you pay for places you can’t even stay at because they can’t seem to figure out how to properly do a confirmation. Well, except if that confirmation is with one of their never-ending chain of superiors who needs to confirm a Kleenex in case an employee sneezes. And so ends my love story about Expedia. I write this now both because it’s a nice Valentine’s Day tale, but also as a warning to anyone using the service. A simple Google search yields results that show I’m hardly alone in my experience. In fact, the number of hate sites specifically about Expedia is quite impressive. There are far too many other competent companies out there that do the same thing, including a number of startups. Kayak is the one you hear about the most, unfortunately, they have a deal to offer up Expedia results first. Feel free to leave your favorite travel startups in the comments, I’d really like to know the best alternatives. I also write this because even if Barry Diller (Chairman) or some other higher-up sees this post and offers me a full reimbursement of my trip, I’m not accepting it at this point. They may not have ruined my Valentine’s Day, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying. Dearest Expedia, Happy Valentine’s Day. It’s over. Love, MG      
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| Sony Ericsson To Pre-Load Gokivo Navigator Onto New Windows Mobile Handsets Posted: 14 Feb 2010 09:10 AM PST
Unlike most other smartphone platforms, Windows Mobile doesn’t come with a mapping application pre-installed by default. While this may very well change with the soon-to-be-announced Windows Mobile 7, it has thus far been up to the handset manufacturer to throw in a map app if they so choose. Later this week, messaging/location technology providers TCS will announce that Sony Ericsson has chosen their turn-by-turn application, Gokivo, to be pre-loaded onto future Sony Ericsson-made Windows Mobile handsets. The first Sony Ericsson handset to come with Gokivo out of the box will be the Aspen, which was just announced last week. This is pretty big news for TCS; they just acquired the company behind Gokivo, Networks In Motion, back in December, and this is the first time any manufacturer has chosen to pre-install the app at the factory. The flagship features, according to TCS:
While it’s great news for TCS, I have to wonder: with Nokia and Google’s recent moves toward making turn-by-turn navigation a standard feature on S60 and Android, how much longer will smartphone consumers be willing to cough up a subscription fee?      
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Kiva is p2p-lending site that facilitates loans between lenders in wealthy countries and entrepreneurs in developing countries. Now a new startup aims to bring a simialr model to startups in the developed world but with an investment focus. The idea here is to fix the current inefficiencies of private seed funding for web and mobile companies, especially in markets outside of the hothouse that is Silicon Valley (i.e. Europe and Asia).
The 
Last year we 
One thing we love around here at TechCrunch is data. And since we’re busy looking up our own traffic stats for 2009, we thought we might as well share those stats with everyone.
As you know, today is Valentine’s Day. As such, I thought it was the perfect time to write a love sonnet for my new favorite company: Expedia.com. Actually, I’ll do the opposite.
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