The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- A First Look At HBO Go: Curb Your Enthusiasm
- Scout Labs Rolls Out Powerful New Version Of Brand Tracker
- Happy Birthday, BBS!
- OpenFeint X Debuts To Help Developers Create The Next FarmVille For The iPhone
- PBworks Integrates Click-To-Call Teleconferencing Into Collaboration Platform
- Salesforce Chatter Starts As A Private Conversation
- iPhone App Developer Pinger Reaches Profitability; Textfree Surpasses One Billion Messages
- Loopt Adds Another Content Partner; Integrates Local Foodie News From Tasting Table
- Visible Measures Launches New Application For Online Video Performance
- The Average Spotify User Has 15,000 Tracks In Collection, CEO Daniel Ek Says
- Google Buzz Warning: Force Feeding Users Can Result In Vomiting
- Facebook’s Mobile Strategy Condensed Into 16 Minutes (Video)
- Zynga Heads To India For First Office Abroad
- Gary Reback: Why the Technology Sector Should Care About Google Books
- MySpace SVP of User Experience Katie Geminder Follows Van Natta Out The Door
- How SecretLondon Switched A Facebook Group To A Startup
- Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation
- Microsoft Fights Google With Google-Hosted Videos
- Facebook Drives 44 Percent Of Social Sharing On The Web
- Tumblr Finally Rolls Out Comments. Sort Of. Trolls Not Welcome.
- TinyChat Launches Grouped Version Of Chatroulette
- Nearly 75 Million People Visited Twitter’s Site In January (comScore)
- Wired’s iPad Tablet App Is Looking Good
- Bloodied By Warner, Redbox Also Damns New Releases To Piracy
- Eric Schmidt’s #MWC2010 Keynote: Underwhelming, But Does It Matter?
| A First Look At HBO Go: Curb Your Enthusiasm Posted: 17 Feb 2010 08:46 AM PST
Today HBO announced it will be making its movies and TV Shows available on the Web to subscribers through HBO Go, which up until now has been in private beta. HBO Go is part of the cable industry’s TV Everywhere strategy to make TV content available online to paying subscribers. It contains 600 hours of movies and TV shows which can be streamed live and even in HD. HBO Go is available first to Verizon FIOS subscribers. Since I am a Verizon FIOS customer, I logged into HBO Go this morning and checked it out. (Despite reports elsewhere that it won’t be available until Thursday, it is in fact now live). Below are my initial impressions and screenshots. The videos play decently and you can watch in HD, but if I wasn’t already paying for HBO I certainly wouldn’t pay for access to this site. The choice of shows and movies is just not that great. You can watch every episode of The Wire, and the final season of The Sopranos, but not one episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. You get a lot more in your cable subscription, especially if you get multiple HBO channels. The on-demand option is great, but essentially HBO Go is competing with much broader array of choices on the TV which can also be made on-demand through a DVR. There are some movies like The Watchmen and Taken, which I think I’ve already seen three times each this month on TV, and a spattering of older archived movies like Canadian Bacon, but for the most part the selection is worse than what you get on Netflix via its streaming option. I’m not sure I want to see The Chumscrubber in HD. The site itself is well-designed, image heavy with lots of entry points. You are greeted with a slideshow view of ten shows and movies on heavy rotation, including the movie Taken, HBO Series Big Love and The Wire, and a Dennis Miller special. If you have HBO, you can’t really avoid any of these shows, so nothing special there except that you can stream it anywhere on your laptop. Tabs across the top allow you to explore deeper into movies, series, comedy, sports, documentaries, and “late night” (aka, HBO’s hard-hitting sex documentary series like Real Sex). Everything is done in Flash, which makes it a beautiful experience, but it won’t be accessible on an iPad or iPhone without converting the site into an app For each series, you can choose any episode for at least one season, but some shows are missing. You can also create a watchlist to watch shows later. When I was clicking through the site, the streaming quality was great, but when I tried to switch to another show or movie the audio to Canadian Bacon kept playing in the background (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing—I love that movie). My main issue with HBO Go is not the fact that it is behind a paywall (after all, that is HBO’s business even on TV) or the site’s look and feel. The site’s navigation is clean, everything is easy to find, and the playback looks great. And moving part of its video library online is a smart move for HBO. My issue is with the selection. It’s not just that 600 hours of rotating shows and movies is just a fraction of what HBO shows on TV in any given month. Managing 600 hours of on-demand video is resource intensive, so HBO has to set some limit. HBO is not Web video company. But Hulu or even Verizon could manage a bigger catalog, and even keep the paywall. TV is moving online, as this first step by HBO illustrates. But ultimately, I want all the channels I get through Verizon to be available for searching, managing, and video streaming on the Web. Verizon FIOS already lets me program my home DVR from the Web, but I can only watch those shows on my TV. There is still a disconnect between my computer and my TV, and that is frustrating. And yes, I want it all because I am already paying for it.
     
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| Scout Labs Rolls Out Powerful New Version Of Brand Tracker Posted: 17 Feb 2010 08:40 AM PST
Scout Labs, a SaaS dashboard that makes it easy to keep track of what people across the internet are saying about particular topics or brands, is releasing a new version of its realtime, user-friendly dashboard. Scout Labs has added several new collaboration features such as new ticketing and assignments notifications. So a user could see an important Tweet and assign and send the mention to another employee for follow-up. The new version also integrates more data, including forums, discussion boards, news sources, Twitter, to be analyzed in realtime. The release also includes more powerful graphing capabilities to break out data. Scout Labs not only imports a large volume of social media data to track, but also take a deep look at this data to score for sentiment, identify trends, extract customer rants, raves, wishes, caveats, issues, comparisons and more. The dashboard will also identify new memes of conversation and filter content for spam and porn. And the product features real-time focus groups. The startup’s offering is also attractive because its pricing is basic. Companies pay a simple one-time fee to use the service, with an unlimited amount of users. The dashboard costs $199 per month for unlimited search results. Scout Labs doesn’t charge a fee per seat or per result. We initially reviewed Scout Labs’ product in 2007 and are big fans of tracking dashboard. But the real verdict lies in the eyes of the customer, and young startup has a number of big-name clients using its social media dashboard, including Coca-Cola, Netflix, McDonalds and Disney.      
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| Posted: 17 Feb 2010 07:35 AM PST
I met a lot of really interesting people, and learned a lot of interesting things, as a result of my participation in BBSes around town. I never got into CompuServe or AOL or Prodigy — they were too corporate for me. I was more interested in the smaller BBSes hosted by people with interests similar to my own: science fiction and fantasy, the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and role playing games. I attended a couple of parties, picnics, and other social events coordinated by BBS users. Because the community of users was smaller — and local — there wasn’t nearly the prevalence of trolling or anonymous flamewars. BBSes were a great way to connect, and communicate, with people. Of course, it was a simpler time back then. We weren’t bombarded with advertisements. There was no Flash animation. Heck, even downloading a low-resolution image of a pretty girl in a bikini took upwards of 20 minutes! There were no hyperlinks, no embedded images or videos: it was all text based, so there was a very real value to careful explication. The depth and breadth of discussion was often greater, with more personal insight and contribution (and sometimes BS). Generally we all knew one another, and welcomed new participants pretty quickly. BBSes exist in stark contrast to today’s web, where the regular participants on many big blogs drown out newcomers, the audience’s fixation on neophilia and the John Gabriel Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory prevail, and a pithy image or silly video can trump even the most erudite discussion. Thanks Wired for the trip down memory lane!      
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| OpenFeint X Debuts To Help Developers Create The Next FarmVille For The iPhone Posted: 17 Feb 2010 05:59 AM PST
With the success of Zynga and PlayFish on Facebook, Aurora Feint wants to help create more of these types of free-to-play games on the iPhone. Launched with Japanese investment partner and mobile gaming company DeNa Group, OpenFeint X will be rolled out to the general public in phases over the next few months. With the international investment in the project, we can assume that OpenFeint X is designed to develop games that appeal to global markets as well. Using the new platform, developers can create games with a chat wall where players can interact with each other, a newsfeed showing recent in-game activity, and game nudges. And OpenFeint X's premium services allows developers to use a cloud-based infrastructure to build and run a full virtual goods store, access detailed analytics, and include game-specific currency wallet. The existing OpenFeint platform is quite popular amongst developers and already powers social gaming services for 12 million users and is growing at a monthly pace of 25 percent. The strategy of trying to develop Facebook-like free-to-play games through Open Feint isn’t surprising. Peter Relan, executive chairman of Aurora Feint, also happens to be the executive chairman of CrowdStar, a social game developer on Facebook, which makes develops Happy Aquarium, Happy Island and Happy Pets.      
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| PBworks Integrates Click-To-Call Teleconferencing Into Collaboration Platform Posted: 17 Feb 2010 05:56 AM PST
Startup PBWorks, which was formerly known as PBwiki, specializes in helping businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions collaborate via wikis. The startup has been steadily adding real-time features to its platform over the past year, most recently integrating Twitter-like microblogging, tapping into the real-time stream and adding a template store. Today, PBworks is adding another collaborative feature: PBVoice, which is click-to-call conferencing from within the platform. The platform, which received, an overhaul of its user interface and features last year, offers businesses a project management application and a customized wiki workspace, with mobile support, document management, access controls and more. Now, users can make a conference call from within the platform by simply clicking the names of the desired participants. Unlike most conferencing calls, there’s no dial-in number; PBVoice will call all the participants. Users can add new participants at any time, and each conference call is recorded and stored for later use and review. You can also send the recording of the call to any participants. The beauty of the integration is that the conference calling feature is an extension of the collaboration platform. Users can call anyone with a single click who already has a PBworks profile or manually dial in any number. PBworks Voice runs on the open source FreeSWITCH telephony platform and phone systems are hosted in PBworks’ own datacenter. For now calling is limited to the U.S. and Canada but the startup plans to enable international calls in the future. PBworks is launching a free beta period of the service today which is capped at 200 minutes for the next month. When the beta finishes, all PBworks paid subscriptions will automatically come with 200 minutes per month. For nationwide calls, 300 min per user per month will cost $5 per user. 2000 minutes for nationwide calling will amount to $20 per user per month. Currently, PBworks manages 1 million hosted workspaces with over 3 million active users and has accumulated a loyal client base. The company serves teams from many of the Fortune 500, and was home to three presidential campaigns, the United Nations, The Financial Times and Harvard University. Like Salesforce, PBworks is a paid subscription service, with no advertising. The company has raised nearly $2.5 million in funding, with its most recent funding round of $2.1 million announced in 2007. Competitors include Microsoft Sharepoint, Jive, and Socialtext.
     
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| Salesforce Chatter Starts As A Private Conversation Posted: 17 Feb 2010 05:26 AM PST
Salesforce’s enterprise friendly social collaboration platform Chatter was announced at last year’s November Realtime CrunchUp with much fanfare. To many, there is no doubt that Chatter will have a lasting impact on the enterprise and cloud computing. Following Salesforce’s debut of Chatter, over 67,000 Salesforce customers requested to be private beta testers of the realtime collaboration platform. Today, a lucky 100 large and small businesses, including Reed Exhibitions, Schumacher Group, and TransUnion, will begin to use Salesforce Chatter as the platform enters private beta. Salesforce says that private beta participants were chosen based on their existing Salesforce.com technology deployments and potential Chatter use cases. Chatter itself as a platform has much of the same functionality as when the platform first debuted. One addition is the integration of Chatter to Saleforce’s iPhone and BlackBerry apps, allowing users to tap into Chatter’s realtime stream on the go. Chatter will be integrated into the new Salesforce homepage along with a dashboard of reports and approvals, workflow, tasks and calendar. You'll also be able to see filters as well. Chatter will let you see updates from people, files, applications, HR, and will integrate other feeds (Dow Jones, Thompson Reuters). Similar to Facebook, employees can create business profiles with professional information like personal contact data, area of expertise, and work history. Searching other people’s profiles, colleagues can quickly identify individuals who are relevant to their enterprise needs. Users can post status updates to share communications, files and links around a project, sales deal or customer support case. And users can see realtime feeds of personalized updates from people, applications and documents. With Chatter, all status updates from a customer’s Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or custom Force.com application are posted to the feed. So apps actually have the ability to post status updates, similar to a person, creating an actual ecosystem around apps and employees. Any app listed on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange will be able to stream updates to the Chatter feed. Since they are delivered on the Force.com platform, developers can build or enhance cloud applications to use Chatter's profiles, realtime streams, and APIs. Sharing is a huge component of Chatter, with users having the ability to search the Chatter feed to access, share and download any materials. And employees can manage who has has access to certain information. Chatter wouldn’t be a viable communication platform for the enterprise if it didn’t integrate with consumer social networks. Chatter allows employees to pull in social media information from Facebook and Twitter to gain insights into customer satisfaction and the greater community. For example, employees can monitor the Twitter conversation about a particular prospect or competitor from within Chatter. Chatter is also deeply integrated with Google Apps. Salesforce Chatter will be included for free in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform. If businesses don’t use either of these products, they can pay $50 per user per month which will include Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content and Force.com. Salesforce will also be rolling out a lightweight free version of Chatter. At the moment, Salesforce is being cagey about when Salesforce will be available to the general public, but we expect that it should be rolled out at some point this year. Chatter sounds a lot like an enterprise-friendly social network, but Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff is adamant that the product is best characterized as a collaboration platform. In fact, Salesforce doesn’t see its main competitors as Facebook, Twitter or even enterprise friendly social networks like Jive. Instead, the company believes Chatter will pose a serious threat to Microsoft’s Sharepoint and IBM’s LotusNotes. Both of the latter products are used heavily by enterprises for hosted communication. Social CRM startups like Bantam Live are already in the market with competing offerings. The private beta of Chatter represents the unveiling of a brand new strategy for Salesforce, which is the incorporation of the realtime stream within the enterprise. It should be interesting to see the feedback from businesses both small and large on how useful Chatter is for day-to-day business. It’s not a definite that Chatter will revolutionize collaboration in the enterprise, but its sure to be exciting to see if the platform can gain serious traction.
     
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| iPhone App Developer Pinger Reaches Profitability; Textfree Surpasses One Billion Messages Posted: 17 Feb 2010 04:59 AM PST
Pinger has flown relatively under the radar for an app developer that has launched 14 apps that have all reached the top 100 iPhone apps in the App store. The startup’s Textfree app has surpassed more than 1 Billion text messages sent in less than 9 months. The app allows owners to send free text messages to any US mobile phone, including replies. The app has a free version which allows users 15 messages daily at no cost, and an unlimited version which is priced at $5.99 per year. Textfree has seen 5 million downloads since its launch last year. Pinger also says it has achieved profitability though the startup won’t reveal actual revenue numbers. Pinger generates revenue through 4 main channels, including advertising within its apps, affiliate fees to Apple, in-app ads and purchases. And Pinger has more than 15 million downloads across all of its apps. The numbers aren’t to shabby; but Pinger certainly is placing all its eggs in one basket by only developing iPhone apps. Other applications in the Pinger family include Doodle Buddy, Stickwars, and Picfree. Pinger’s Textfree faces competition from Textplus.      
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| Loopt Adds Another Content Partner; Integrates Local Foodie News From Tasting Table Posted: 17 Feb 2010 04:55 AM PST
As Foursquare makes deals with major media companies, competitor Loopt is continuing to partner with with content companies to offer fresh news and reviews of restaurants, bars, businesses and events. Loopt’s mobile apps incorporates local content, deals and reviews about restaurants, bars and events from Zagat, Citysearch, Bing, and most recently Mobile Spinach. Today, Loopt is announcing a partnership with Tasting Table, daily epicurean email about restaurants, bars, wine stores and cookshops in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington D.C. Loopt users can find Tasting Table-approved restaurants and bars within Loopt Pulse on Loopt's free mobile application. Tasting Table recommendations range from directions, menus, editorial insights, special offers, and more. Tasting Table’s editorial coverage is based on first-hand research from local editors who eat and live in the cities they cover. In addition to being able to "check into" the restaurant, Loopt users add their input and tips for other users interested in the same establishment. With 3 million users, Loopt is continuing to innovate its platform to compete in a competitive space, where Facebook may be entering as well. The pioneer of the mobile social network is launching a new app called LooptCard, which lets mobile consumers tap into offers, coupons and discounts by checking-in to spots. Location-based deals are one part of the picture; with check-ins, advertising and even merchant reviews and listings all included as features.      
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| Visible Measures Launches New Application For Online Video Performance Posted: 17 Feb 2010 03:56 AM PST
Visible Measures lets both ad agencies and big video publishing sites on the Web track viewership and engagement with videos across the Web. Ad agencies can measure the effectiveness of specific video ad campaigns, and publishers can see which of their videos are being played and passed around the most. With the new trends application, Visible Measures will include a variety of metrics, including total online viewership, comments, placements, and demographics. Users can even watch videos within the application. The company has launched three different data sets for the applications. The Social Video Campaigns covers brand-driven online video ad campaigns and is designed to help ad professionals measure campaign effectiveness. Social Video Campaigns deploys ad-specific filters to help users identify campaigns by various categories and features. Online Film Trailers measures engagement for movie trailers online. The trend feature covers more than one hundred movie trailer campaigns and similar to the Social Video feature, allows for information to be sorted and filtered by by release time, genre, and even film studio. And the Super Bowl Ads collection covers online performance for the year’s Super Bowl ads. Visible Measures has raised $29 million to date, and faces competition from Viralheat, Omniture, Radian6 and others.      
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| The Average Spotify User Has 15,000 Tracks In Collection, CEO Daniel Ek Says Posted: 17 Feb 2010 03:48 AM PST
This is way more than the average PC user, Ek claimed, who has about 500 tracks on their drives. Ek also repeated that Spotify users have so far created over 100 million playlists. In a Q&A session, Ek said Spotify is very keen on inking more deals with mobile operators from around the world, and that there are lots of conversations ongoing. He reiterated that the packaging will be key, in the sense that bundling Spotify with data plans in a smart way will be crucial both for the music company and carriers, ISPs and device manufacturers. The two key partnerships Spotify has in place right now are with 3 in the UK and TeliaSonera in Sweden. The latter deal is particularly interesting, Ek said, because the operator is the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in Sweden, and that Spotify clearly has the same appeal for users as the combination of iPod / iTunes does. In case you were wondering: not a word about a possible imminent launch in the United States.      
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| Google Buzz Warning: Force Feeding Users Can Result In Vomiting Posted: 17 Feb 2010 12:24 AM PST
It’s been a rough week since then. Both for the Google Buzz team, and those 175 million Gmail users. Google continues to tweak the product almost daily to deal with the incredible backlash. That’s not what this post is about. Another thing this post isn’t about: the fact that Google was forced to launch the product earlier than they wanted to and didn’t have enough time to test the product properly. I’m sure when the dust settles they’ll talk about the process and where it went wrong, and what they’ll do to avoid a mess like that in the future. They messed up. They know they messed up. It’ll pass (see, for example, every interface and policy change ever pushed by Facebook). What this post is about is the powerful urge companies often have to shoehorn a new product into an old one. To ease the uphill battle all new products face with getting early traction. It seems so easy to just force feed existing users on the new product. But in every example I can think of, those users tend to vomit that new product right back up. Some users think they’ve been hit with a bait and switch. Others simply don’t like a big change to what they’re used to. And millions more are just clueless about what’s going on, and they get angry and confused. Examples: In 2006 AOL, fearing the rise of Digg, launched a product that was very similar. Instead of launching it on its own site, though, they simply redirected the Netscape portal to the new product. At the time Netscape.com was generating over 800 million monthly page views. The experiment was a failure, and in 2007 AOL moved the product to it’s own domain, Propeller.com. It turned out that Netscape users for the most part didn’t know about, or care about, Digg. They just wanted their familiar news portal. In 2008 Yahoo launched their own Digg clone, Yahoo Buzz. It was sort of a stand alone product, but the big hook was that stories could be pushed to the Yahoo home page. Yahoo Buzz is still around (I just checked), but it certainly isn’t an interesting product and has never had high user engagement. Again, it turns out Yahoo users weren’t all that interested in Digg. And Digg users certainly weren’t going to start hanging out over at Yahoo. Facebook’s Beacon product is another good example. It launched in 2007, and Facebook users were enraged to see their names and pictures being put on “social ads.” Many lawsuits and one heck of a great April Fools joke later, Beacon stands as Facebook’s biggest stumble to date. On the other hand, if you take the Beacon product idea and start it fresh as a new company, thousands of people flock to join. Everyone knows what they’re signing up to. No one feels screwed over. Buzz is starting to look like Google’s Beacon moment. Even the Canadians are taking shots at them now. Google would have been far better off launching Buzz as a standalone application. Make it invite only to start, and every single one of the early adopters would be begging to get it. A couple of weeks later give them an option of adding Buzz to their Gmail flow, and most would probably do it and call Google brilliant for thinking that one up. Then slowly bring other users on board over time, as they hear about it and want in. Fast forward a year from now and tens of millions of people may happily be using Google Buzz in their Gmail. But the idea of jumpstarting the process and building the Google social graph right now was too tempting to Google, and they pressed too hard. Maybe some other company, seeing the results, will avoid this mistake in the future.      
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| Facebook’s Mobile Strategy Condensed Into 16 Minutes (Video) Posted: 16 Feb 2010 11:23 PM PST
Yesterday, in a session on ‘Mobile Communications 2.0′ at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Facebook’s VP of User Growth, Mobile and International Expansion Chamath Palihapitiya shared the social networking giant’s current mobile strategy and its plans for the future. It was in this session that the company for the first time talked about its latest product, Facebook Zero, which is essentially a stripped down, text-only version of the mobile website for the social networking service. The product aims to give mobile carriers a way to offer a basic Facebook experience to their subscribers free of charge and later convert those users into premium data service customers. We recorded the entire 16-minute session and uploaded it to our YouTube account – these are the highlights of the presentation: - Facebook believes 2010 will be a watershed year for mobile
- Over the next 5 to 10 years, Facebook aims to invest heavily in expanding mobile experiences for their users; they expect a lot more growth in this area
- There are 3 key themes to Facebook’s mobile strategy: - New developments: - Facebook aims to turn FB Connect into a ‘foundational element’ of the web, whether accessed on mobile phones or not.      
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| Zynga Heads To India For First Office Abroad Posted: 16 Feb 2010 11:00 PM PST
The new development house won’t be building games that are specific for the Indian market, nor will they be modifying existing games. Instead, it sounds like they’ll be building new games that Zynga will deploy worldwide (the company is also hoping a local presence will increase popularity of existing hits like FarmVille). The company plans to hire around 100 people for the new office by the end of the year. Zynga, which recently raised another $180 million in funding, already has offices in San Francisco, LA, and Baltimore. Below is a mockup of what the new Zynga office will look like:      
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| Gary Reback: Why the Technology Sector Should Care About Google Books Posted: 16 Feb 2010 08:53 PM PST
This Thursday leaders of the international publishing industry will watch with bated breath as a federal judge in New York hears arguments over whether to approve the Google Book Settlement. More a complicated joint venture among Google and five big New York publishers than the resolution of pending litigation, the proposed settlement once promised unprecedented access to millions of out-of-print books through digital sales to consumers and online research subscriptions for libraries. But with the passage of time and the ability to examine the deal more closely, the promises proved illusory. The big publishers, as it turns out, have reserved the right to negotiate secret deals with Google for the books they claim through the settlement (pdf). Meanwhile, torrents of outrage rained down on the New York court – from authors whose ownership rights will be appropriated through the settlement's procedures, from librarians fearful of price exploitation by Google, from privacy advocates worried that Google will monitor the reading habits of library patrons, from libertarians incensed over the use of a legal procedure to effect the widespread appropriation of property, from digital booksellers concerned about Google's unfair advantage in the marketplace. Actually, those in the tech community should be watching the settlement proceedings more closely than anyone else. We have the most to lose if the deal is approved in its present form because, at bottom, the Google Book Settlement is not really about books. It's really about search, the most important technology in the new economy. According to the Department of Justice, Google dominates the market for search advertising and search syndication on the Web, with greater than a 70% share in both markets. These markets are difficult to enter because of powerful network effects and scale characteristics. Recent entry has been all but futile; indeed, the company with the second largest share, Yahoo, is leaving the market. The search markets are special and different – even from other web markets. Google's dominant share in these markets means that substantial numbers of web-based enterprises secure much of their business through "referrals" from Google's search engine or advertisements placed by Google's ad platform. The dominant market share makes Google the arbiter of each web business (books or medical supplies, as examples). In each case, Google decides which company succeeds and which company fails by its placement in search results and ad listings on the Google site. The industry's fear of Google has grown exponentially, right along with the company's influence on web commerce. Not six months ago a prominent executive from a top web site – who withheld his name for fear of retribution – made an astounding proposal in a TechCrunch post. Noting from his own experience the potential for abuse inherent in Google's power, the executive called for government regulation of the search markets to prevent manipulation of search results and ad listings. The last six months have confirmed the anonymous executive's worst fears. Once upon a time, Google claimed it employed neutral, mathematically-based algorithms to prioritize search in ad listings. But last November Google admitted to the Washington Post that only search results from Google's content competitors are listed according to neutral algorithms. Search results from Google's own properties, like maps, news and books, are now listed first, the algorithm notwithstanding. Even more recently Google admitted that it changes the rank ordering of paid search ads to prioritize its own company messages. Whatever the advisability of government regulation, few would dispute that we need more and better competition in search to curb Google's power. But Google is doing its best to keep that from ever happening. That's where the Book Settlement comes in. Google intends to use the settlement to disadvantage its competitors and to bolster its own position in search. Google announced its project to scan and digitize books in December 2004. Both commercial and not-for-profit entities started scanning books before Google did. Several other rivals started scanning books shortly after Google announced its project. All of these competitors scanned (pdf) only books in the public domain or for which they secured the rightsholder's permission. Google, on the other hand, scanned all books in the collections of some of the nation's leading research libraries, including those still under copyright, without securing permission from the rightsholders. In the fall of 2005, five New York publishers along with the Authors Guild sued Google for copyright infringement. After three years of secret negotiations, and without taking a single deposition in the case, the parties announced a settlement on October 28, 2008. Through a legal ploy known as a "class certification" (which must be approved by the court), the plaintiffs who brought the suit now claim to speak for all holders of U.S. copyrights. Their proposed settlement gives Google (among other things) the right, in response to search queries, to display lengthy textual excerpts from just about every out-of-print book with a U.S. copyright (unless the rightsholder affirmatively objects) – tens of millions of books, in all. Very recent results from scientific studies of web searching explain why Google has spent enormous amounts of money to acquire the digital rights to vast numbers of old, dusty books. Most search queries are directed to popular subjects – shopping, travel, medical information, etc. Some queries, though, are directed to more obscure subject matter. These are known as "rare," "obscure," "esoteric," or, sometimes, "tail" queries, in reference to the "tailing off" portion of a graph showing the frequency distribution of a population (search queries, in this case) exhibiting the Pareto principle, known to everyone who sells products as the 80-20 rule. Most queries are directed to a few (relatively speaking) popular subjects and therefore show up in the "fat" part of the frequency curve. The frequency of increasingly obscure queries "tails off" asymptotically, providing a "long tail" to the right of the "fat" part of the curve. For a time, computer scientists thought that most obscure queries were generated by only a few users (again, speaking relatively), and, hence, search engines could ignore obscure tail queries and still serve the great bulk of the user population. But research has shown that just about everyone makes a rare query from time to time. And, people decide which engine to use for their everyday search needs based on the engine's ability to satisfy these rare queries, just as one would expect in a world that values "one-stop shopping." Stated more formally, satisfying demand in the tail increases consumption in the "head" or fat part of the distribution curve. Google will get an enormous advantage over its search competitors if it can support (i.e., respond satisfactorily to) tail queries that its competitors cannot. Scientific research shows that supporting tail queries produces a disproportionately large increase in overall user satisfaction – i.e., disproportionately increases the size of the user population highly satisfied with the engine's performance. In fact, according to the most recent study, satisfying an additional 1% tail queries increases overall user satisfaction with the engine more than 5% — this, in a market in which companies battle fiercely to wrest even a tenth of a point in market share away from Google's control. Digital rights to virtually all out-of-print books will provide Google with a decisive advantage in responding to tail queries. Google created its book database by scanning the collections of the nation's leading research libraries. These libraries consist largely of academic works on a wide variety of obscure subjects. The books contain information relevant to all kinds of rare queries. Much of the older information in the books might not be available from other sources, at least on the public web. Whatever the publication value of these books, they provide an enormous advantage in search. Indeed, presentations by Google within the last couple of months confirm that the company expects to use text from digital books to satisfy many of its users' tail queries. If Google can stretch its advantage even further and deny its search rivals the ability to integrate the same corpus of books, Google's lead in search will become insurmountable. The proposed settlement does just that, leaving Google's search competitors out in the cold. The settlement provides no means at all for competitors to get rights to so-called "orphan works" – in-copyright books whose rightsholders cannot be located. According to the parties' court filings made just last week, ownership has been claimed for only about one million books out of the more than 12 million books scanned and the 170 million unique works identified by Google, leaving the company with exclusive digital rights to well over 90% of U.S. books. In addition, the settlement sets up procedures that make it easy for Google to clear rights to all other out-of-print works where rightsholders can be located, but leaves rivals without a mechanism to easily resolve disputes over ownership and copyright status that preclude competitive distribution. If approved in its current form, then, the settlement will solidify Google's hold on the search market by giving the company exclusive rights to millions upon millions of books. Under some circumstances, Google might be entitled to a competitive advantage that it secured through superior foresight. But, that's not what happened here. The publisher plaintiffs demanded that Google's competitors respect claims of copyright in their scanning, even as they secretly negotiated (pdf) with Google to give that company the settlement deal the plaintiffs never offered to Google's competitors. The Department of Justice made the point most clearly in its brief. Google's search dominance, DoJ said, may be further entrenched by its "exclusive access to content" through the settlement.
Permitting a company to solidify its dominance over all of web commerce through controversial legal stratagems rather than open market competition invites economic disaster. Likely, the judge will see Google's ploy in that light, just as the Justice Department did. If not, government regulation might well be our only recourse.      
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| MySpace SVP of User Experience Katie Geminder Follows Van Natta Out The Door Posted: 16 Feb 2010 07:36 PM PST
MySpace confirmed on background that Geminder is transitioning out of her role with the company, and that VP Product Mike Macadaan will be leading the user experience and design teams going forward. Hopefully they’ll be making major changes soon, because MySpace badly needs them (a recent parody video hints that a redesign is under way). Geminder and Van Natta have had a long working history: they met at Amazon, where Geminder worked from 1999-2005. She then moved to Apple where she worked on the company’s online store. She rejoined Van Natta at Facebook in 2006 as the social network’s Director of User Experience and Design. After leaving Facebook, she followed Van Natta over to Project Playlist during his short-lived run there as CEO, and then made the jump to MySpace after he got the CEO job at the struggling social network. We’ll probably be hearing about more departures at MySpace as employees react to (yet another) executive change. Last week, stream architect Monica Keller left the company to join Facebook.      
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| How SecretLondon Switched A Facebook Group To A Startup Posted: 16 Feb 2010 07:11 PM PST This is a guest post by Tiffany Philippou who started the Secret London Facebook Group. Two weeks after launch the group had amassed over 180,000 members, propelling its 21 year old creator into her first startup – see our previous coverage.
     
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| Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation Posted: 16 Feb 2010 07:02 PM PST
According to a Tweet just sent from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Google has donated $2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation. Wales says the official announcement will be made tomorrow. The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit that focuses on the development of free, multilingual content to wiki-based projects. The Wikimedia Foundation operates Wikipedia, but has also helped develop Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikinews, and Wikiversity. Earlier this year, Wikimedia announced that it has raised $8 million for the 2009-10 fiscal, exceeding its goal for the year by $500K. The Foundation has received over 230,000 donations, up from 125,000 donations received during the 2008-09 campaign. It’s unclear if the $2 million from Google is bundles into the $8 million but I’m sure we’ll find out tomorrow. The foundation recently added Craigslist founder Craig Newmark to its advisory board, which also includes tech visionary Mitch Kapor.      
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| Microsoft Fights Google With Google-Hosted Videos Posted: 16 Feb 2010 05:07 PM PST
On the Microsoft Office Videos channel on YouTube, you’ll find a series of videos which find Microsoft aggressively going after its competition. For example, here’s one in which Microsoft Office is compared to Google Apps and specifically, Google’s “low-cost” email service. Office, it seems deals with “real world” issues, Google Apps (and specifically Gmail) do not, according to the video. Microsoft also notes that Google’s offering lacks some standard features customers are used to — like copy & paste. Another key selling point: if you choose to use Google Apps, your formatting may be screwed up when you inevitably have to work with others who are using Microsoft Office. When all else fails, turn to FUD. Another video sees an actual Microsoft employee comparing Microsoft Outlook with Gmail, again for business. The best part of this one is the ominous gray clouds in the background with “Gmail” written across them. Get it? Microsoft clearly doesn’t enjoy seeing companies make the switch to Google’s business offerings — and why would they? It’s a very real threat to one of their key profit centers: Office. But using these videos to take on Google are humorous for one reason above all else: they’re all hosted on the Google-owned YouTube.
     
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| Facebook Drives 44 Percent Of Social Sharing On The Web Posted: 16 Feb 2010 04:02 PM PST
If you are still wondering why Google is pushing so hard with its new product Buzz, it is because it wants in on social traffic. For many sites on the Web, social traffic coming through Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace is beginning to rival, and in some cases overtake, search traffic as the single biggest source of traffic. This traffic comes from shared links, photos, and videos. By its own numbers, 5 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every week. What isn’t easily appreciated is the extent to which such social sharing is tied to different identity and authentication platforms across the Web. If you can log into a site easily using your Facebook or Twitter account, it is easier to broadcast links from that site to your friends. To get a sense of which services on the Web drive the most sharing, I asked Gigya for some stats. Gigya powers sharing widgets on more than 5,000 content sites, including ABC.com. NBA.com, PGA.com, Answers.com, and Reuters. Consumers can click a share button on these sites and send an article link, photo, or video via a menu of different services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and AOL. Over the past 30 days, people have shared almost a million items over the Gigya network. Facebook and Twitter dominate with about three quarters of all shared items between them. Here is how the services break down (note that these are relative numbers) : Distribution of shared items It makes sense, people prefer to broadcast links rather than share them one at a time via email. Although Yahoo makes a strong third-place showing. When it comes to authentication, simply using your existing username and password to log into another site, Facebook is still the most popular via Facebook Connect, but only just barely. Google via Gmail and Yahoo are almost equally popular, at least on certain types of sites where people are just reading for themselves like news sites. On entertainment sites where people are more likely to share content, Facebook Connect makes up the majority of logins. Here are the stats: Share of Authentication By Platform: News sites: Entertainment sites: Facebook Chat is also a strong option, making up more than half of all live event chats measured by Gigya. Live Event Chat: Update: A broader view of sharing on the Web comes from Gigya competitor AddThis, which has its sharing buttons on more than 600,000 Websites. (Gigya tends to be on larger content sites). AddThis also shows Facebook on top when it comes to sharing on the Web, but with a smaller 33 percent share. Twitter is at 9 percent, but it gets beat by email and printing out content as options provided by AddThis. Even with these broader numbers, more than 40 percent of sharing is through Facebook and Twitter. Top 10 Services, Overall Facebook: 33%      
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| Tumblr Finally Rolls Out Comments. Sort Of. Trolls Not Welcome. Posted: 16 Feb 2010 03:51 PM PST
Now, to be clear, Tumblr notes that this features is still “very beta.” And it also only works in the Tumblr Dashboard right now (as opposed to on actual Tumblr blogs — which apparently is coming). It also only works on your main Tumblr blog right now (if you have multiple ones). But, “Some big updates are on the way. To turn it on, you need to navigate to: Customize → Advanced → Enable replies, on the main Tumblr Dashboard. Something else important to note: this feature will only apparently let people you follow reply to your posts. Sadly, this means Tumblr posts won’t have the usual anonymous comment trolls we all know and love. Baby steps. Up until now, Tumblr has not had the option to create blogs with comments enabled. Instead, they’ve suggested users try third-party services such as Disqus (which the Tumblr blog uses) to add comments to blogs. If Tumblr only plans to make this commenting feature for users you follow on the service, the third-party options may still be the best ones for most users.      
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| TinyChat Launches Grouped Version Of Chatroulette Posted: 16 Feb 2010 03:40 PM PST
Chatroulette, a website that connects random strangers via video chat, has been receiving a lot of buzz. And we’ve seen it can be quite entertaining. Web-based chat startup TinyChat is launching their own version of Chatroulette, called TinyChat Next. Similar to Chatroulette, you can be thrown into a room with strangers and conduct video chats with random people. When you tire of a person, you can simple move onto the next available user in TinyChat’s “Lobby”. It’s a fairly simple interface and idea, as we’ve seen with Chatroulette. One differing factor is that TinyChat is trying to white label the technology by offering “rooms.” So for example, TechCrunch could create a room for entrepreneurs to chat about technology and meet random people who share the same interests. The idea is that if you can break down the chat topic by subject matter, the greater the chance of having a more compelling conversation with an absolute stranger. Similar to creating a a group chat on TinyChat, a room organizer would post a link to the room. People who join will randomly chat with other people in the room and can choose to skip to another stranger. PopJam also released a Chatroulette-like platform, except that is uses Facebook Connect to randomly send you into a Facebook IM chat with a total stranger. At the moment, TinyChat Next is free to all users, even if you create designated, branded rooms. It seems like Chatroulette is a bit of a novelty that could wear off, but I think the idea of creating rooms according to subject or interest is compelling. It should be interesting to see if TinyChat can actually recruit users to test out and experiment with the service. TinyChat, which recently upgraded its features, has been growing like gangbusters and recently won a Crunchie for best bootstrapped startup. TinyChat started out as a simple IRC-style chatroom app to complement conversations on platforms like Twitter, has been steadily building out its innovative platform to include video chat and screensharing options, live video streaming, and Facebook Connect.
     
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| Nearly 75 Million People Visited Twitter’s Site In January (comScore) Posted: 16 Feb 2010 02:51 PM PST
After hitting a flat spot last fall, Twitter’s worldwide growth is pointing in the right direction again. According to worldwide comScore figures released today, Twitter’s own site attracted 73.5 million unique individuals in January, up 8 percent from December, 2009 (when it had 65.2 million visitors). Its annual growth rate is still a phenomenal 1,105 percent. A year ago, Twitter.com attracted only an estimated 6 million visitors. Large sites like Twitter and Facebook before it tend to grow in step-like patterns, with bursts of growth followed by periods of flatness during which the site absorbs its new users and adapts to their needs. Twitter has certainly been improving the functionality of its own site, with the rollout of new features such as local trends, a better suggested user list, Twitter Lists, and the Retweet button. Maybe all that work is starting to pay off. ComScore only estimates activity on Twitter’s own site. Usage across other desktop, Web, and mobile apps may be twice as large as on Twitter itself. In January, CEO Ev Williams noted that the service had its best day ever, and Royal Pingdom estimates that it passed 1 billion Tweets a month in December, and grew to about 1.2 billion Tweets in January, 2009.
     
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| Wired’s iPad Tablet App Is Looking Good Posted: 16 Feb 2010 01:31 PM PST
Whether the iPad uptake rate will justify the R&D and the enormous amount of designer hours that goes into every issue — well, that’s still up in the air. But the truth is that most magazines were going to have to make this shift at some point anyway, so they may as well do it right, which Wired appears to have done. Video follows. Read the rest of this story at CrunchGear…      
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| Bloodied By Warner, Redbox Also Damns New Releases To Piracy Posted: 16 Feb 2010 01:11 PM PST
Naturally, Warner is playing this up as a win for everybody. With this 28-day window, Warner now has the opportunity to try to sell more DVDs, while at the same time offering more video-on-demand options. Meanwhile Redbox ensures that it will be able to keep offering Warner content and be granted more access to it. In exchange, Redbox simply has to agree not to rent Warner movies until 28 days after they’re released — oh, and drop that pesky lawsuit again Warner for trying to prevent them access to their movies. Hugs all around, right? Wrong. Make no mistake, Redbox did not want this deal. Their hand was forced by Warner. But really, what else were they going to do, just not offer Warner titles while their competitors did? From their perspective, a 28-day window is undoubtedly better than no window at all. But what this really is is another example of a movie studio shooting itself in the foot. Warner believes that these windows are going to allow them to sell more DVDs, long the bread-and-butter of the movie industry which is now in rapid decline. The thought is that people are no longer buying as many because it’s so easy to rent them. So if you make them harder to rent… The problem with this is at the fundamental level. People aren’t buying fewer DVDs on a large scale because of rentals, they’re buying fewer ones because most DVDs aren’t simply worth owning. And consumers are finally waking up to that fact. Do I want to own Sherlock Holmes? No. Will I rent it? Yes. The Netflix agreement with Redbox actually makes more sense since they’re all about getting more streaming titles from the studio. They want this because that’s the future of the business and from a business perspective, new releases make up only 30% of their rentals, with the other 70% coming from older catalog films, many of which they can now stream to customers. Of course, if other studios cut the same 28-day deal with Netflix, it’s going to decimate the top rental list. And while plenty are quick to say, so what? Make no mistake, this will lead to more piracy. Further, while part of Netflix’s agreement with Warner was supposed to lead to better availability of these new releases after the 28-day window, the opposite appears to actually be happening. The first two movies that fell under this new rule, The Invention of Lying and Whiteout, were recently granted Netflix availability. So you can rent them right now, right? Nope. The Invention of Lying has a “Long wait” while Whiteout has a “Short wait.” It seems that there is some pent-up demand to rent these new releases that Netflix wasn’t expecting. Both movies, meanwhile, were immediately available to rent through iTunes a month ago, which didn’t cut this silly deal. Here’s what Warner has to say:
Here’s the release:
[image: Warner Brothers - funny, yes]      
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| Eric Schmidt’s #MWC2010 Keynote: Underwhelming, But Does It Matter? Posted: 16 Feb 2010 12:52 PM PST
I was planning on liveblogging Eric Schmidt’s keynote speech here at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but a serious lack of any kind of Internet connectivity threw a wrench into those plans. I’m not too bummed about it though, because the whole thing was frankly quite boring. Apart from some history lessons about the convergence of telecommunications and cloud computing, all we really got from Schmidt and fellow Googlers was that Android handsets are now seeing over 60,000 shipments on a daily basis, and some previews of add-on features for existing Google mobile products that were cool but not earth-shattering in any way. I’m sure it’s nice for German speakers that they’ll soon be able to search Google using their voice in their native language, and the upcoming real-time translation element for Google Goggles is impressive. But having Google’s Chairman and CEO fly over to Spain to mostly read from his notes and basically tell the audience of 1500 people (and many more thanks to the live video streaming) that mobile is going to be big and that the company is very committed to making its mark? Nothing short of underwhelming. The question is: does it matter, really? Having had numerous conversations with developers, handset manufacturers, mobile software companies and yes, even operators at this show, I get the feeling Schmidt really didn’t have to make a big splash at the event. Android is taking care of that job quite nicely, and I’m sure that’s just the way Schmidt likes it. I have more thoughts on this that I’ll post shortly, but I would also invite you to check out MG Siegler’s take, which is slightly more critical than most of the stuff I’ve heard about Google and its Android plans here at MWC.
     
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Antitrust lawyer and 
The website build weekend drew to a close two days ago and it is only beginning to dawn on me that we might just have achieved the impossible. Building a website for £3,000 and in only 48 hours.
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As some of you know, I’ve been 
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