The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- NSFW: Playing catch-up… Or ceci n’est pas une column
- A Fix for Discrimination: Follow the Indian Trails
- CHATROULOLZ Collects Great Chatroulette Screencaps So You Don’t Have To
- The AP Is Using Twitter To Send People To Facebook. Wait. What?
- The New App Store Rules: No Swimsuits, No Skin, And No Innuendo
- Gowalla Gets An Early Native Android App. Prettier, More Social Than iPhone Version.
- Google Officially Deadpools Gears For Safari. Puts It On Death Watch For Firefox And IE.
| NSFW: Playing catch-up… Or ceci n’est pas une column Posted: 21 Feb 2010 09:00 AM PST
A duck would somehow get into the school dining hall. Or an explosion would destroy the chemistry lab. Or two of my teachers would be caught having sex. Or someone would die. The specific incident isn’t important; the point is that I could guarantee that the one day I decided to skip school would be the day that something extraordinary would happen. Something that all of my friends would be talking about for the rest of the year while I was left to sit and sulk at having missed out. It’s a curse that has followed me through life: I could go to parties six days a week and you can be sure that the seventh is the one where the knife fight happens. The conference I skip is the only one where the wifi doesn’t suck ass. The episode of Quantum Leap I miss is the one where Sam Beckett briefly makes it back home. And so apparently it is with my gig at TechCrunch. Regular readers may have noticed that I didn’t file a column last week. This was because for the past ten days or so I’ve been completely out of circulation: racing to finally submit the very, very delayed manuscript for my new book. I finally dragged myself over the finish line on Tuesday and since then I’ve basically been recovering: catching up on things like sleeping, eating and experiencing daylight. During that time I’ve barely glanced at the Internet – or at least not at any technology news. All hell could have broken loose in the past few days and I wouldn’t have had a clue. And so, of course, it did. Knowing that I was out of action for a few days, the tech world took the opportunity to go absolutely ape-shit mental. It’s as if every kooky, ridiculous or hilarious story – the stuff of which columnists’ wet dreams are made – waited until I closed Techmeme for the last time ten days ago before it broke. The last piece of news I saw before I disconnected was the launch of Google Buzz. “Meh,” I thought, “if that the best this week has to offer, I can definitely take some time off.” I mean, at a push, I might have been able to churn out a column about how desperate Google’s new product launches have started to look. How they have started to look like an over-keen salesman at a Turkish Bazaar. “You don’t like Wave? Ok, ok, wait Sir, I have this.. you like Buzz? I do you good price.” But the precise moment I shut down my browser, the whole thing went to shit: it turned out that, unless you chose otherwise, Buzz would automatically display the names of the people you emailed most frequently. I mean – come on. This is Google – a company that sparked an international incident recently when it accused China of hacking its Gmail service to identify dissidents – and now it’s actively doing the spies’ work for them? 1300 words would have flowed like water as I speculated whether Google is trying to prove to China that anything communism can do, capitalism can do better. You want to expose a few dissidents? Fuck that – we’ll expose all of them. And why stop there? You only wanted us to remove photos of tanks in Tienanmen Square from image search. Pah! We’re going to remove all pictures of tanks, and all squares. In fact we’re going to delete anything that’s even in the shape of a square. See you later, Spongebob! Take that, Commies! A few days later, Apple took up the ‘you have got to be kidding me’ mantle by banning thousands of apps which contained even mild sexual content. Had I written a column about that, I’d probably have taken the controversial position that, actually, I agree with Apple: sexy apps should have been banned a long time ago. Not for their sexual content, you understand, but because they’re all really, really crappy. I mean, seriously, who would pay a dollar for a few photos of women in bikinis when you could just open Safari and have access to billions of photos of women without bikinis – for free! Hell, I could have fallen back on the old columnist’s standby of quoting Bill Hicks on how easily sex sells in America…
But wait! It gets better. The story of Apple’s new found prudishness broke on the exact same day that we discovered that the Sex.com domain name was being auctioned off and that YouTube announced plans to livestream Tiger Woods’ press conference in which he would promise never, ever to have sex with anyone ever again. Once again, the column writes itself: clearly we’re seeing the start of an online war against sex. In fact we’re seeing the dawn of Web 3.0: the Puritan Web. Say goodbye to sex.com and say hello to chasteglances.org. Forget Viagra spam and look forward to thousands of emails promising to help you “drive her wild with your extra-long… engagement.” I finally resurfaced late last night, fired up my laptop and started catching up with everything I’d missed. As I paged through all these stories – Google’s epic privacy failures, the war on sex – I cursed my bad luck. Any one of them would have made a great column – but all falling together? It was like Christmas. And yet of course, in my absence, my esteemed TC colleagues had jumped on them all – like Tiger Woods on a roomful of cocktail waitresses – leaving me with nothing fresh to add. I felt like an obituary writer who decided to go on vacation during that week in 1997 when Princess Diana and Mother Theresa both died. But then, just when I was about to give up, I noticed one last story. One that knocked all of the others into a cocked hat but that, as far as I could see, hadn’t been covered by anyone else on TechCrunch… On Friday, a school in Philadelphia admitted using webcams built into students’ laptops to videotape and photograph them in their own bedrooms. I mean, just think about that for a moment: teachers using webcams to watch children in their bedrooms. Which bit of that story isn’t incredible? That they installed that software in the first place? That kids and parents weren’t told about it? That it was actually used? That the teacher then admitted to a student that it had been used? Or that even now the school is framing this as an unfortunate overstepping of an otherwise perfectly acceptable technological mark? Then there’s the fourth amendment angle, the scary paedophilia angle, the Big Brother angle…. I mean, even a arthritic monkey with half a typewriter could make a column out of that stuff. Unfortunately it was at this point – about five minutes ago – that I realised the time. I’ve spent so long catching up with everything I missed from the past week or so that six hours have passed. It’s dawn in San Francisco, a matter of minutes before my deadline, and I still haven’t written a word, let alone 1300. That’s the other annoying thing about skipping a week: it takes you another week just to catch up. Ah well. I guess no column from me again this week. Sorry everyone.      
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| A Fix for Discrimination: Follow the Indian Trails Posted: 21 Feb 2010 07:00 AM PST
Is the Valley deliberately keeping these groups out? I don't think so. Silicon Valley is, without doubt, a meritocracy. In this land, only the fittest survive. That is exactly the way it should be. For the Valley's innovation system to achieve peak performance, new technologies need to constantly obsolete the old, and the world's best techies need to keep making the Valley's top guns compete for their jobs. There is no room for government mandated affirmative action, and our tech companies shouldn't have to apologize for hiring the people they need. But at the same time, without realizing it, the Valley may be excluding a significant part of the American population that could be making it even more competitive. False stereotypes may be getting in the way of greater innovation and prosperity. Consider the data that I highlighted in my earlier post. It wasn't always like this, but girls are now matching boys in mathematical achievement. In the U.S., 140 women enroll in higher education for every 100 men. Women earn more than 50% of all bachelor's and master's degrees, and nearly 50% of all doctorates. The companies they start are more capital-efficient, produce higher revenue, and have lower failure rates than those led by men. Yet women are still a rare commodity in the ranks of tech CEOs and CTOs. How do we fix the "hidden biases" and discrimination? The experts I've spoken to have many great ideas. They suggest we create role models, provide mentorship and financing, and teach entrepreneurship. Foundry group's Brad Feld says that simple acts of encouragement from parents, teachers, and peers would make a big difference. Cindy Padnos, of Illuminate Ventures suggested a solution that particularly resonated with me. She says that women should follow the trail mapped by Indian entrepreneurs (no, not the American natives, but my kind: the immigrants). Thirty years ago, there were hardly any Silicon Valley firms with Indian-born founders. UC-Berkeley's AnnaLee Saxenian documented that 7% of tech companies started in 1980–1998 had an Indian founder. A survey conducted by my research team at Duke University found that this proportion had increased to 15.5% from 1995 to 2005. My team also determined that in this period, Indians started 6.7% of the nation's tech and engineering firms. These are pretty astonishing numbers considering that according to the U.S. census, in 2000 less than 0.7% of the U.S. population and only 6% of the Silicon Valley high-tech workforce was born in India. I know from personal experience that Indian immigrants didn't have it easy. They suffered from the same types of stereotypes as women, blacks, and Hispanics. Despite having co-founded a software company that we took from startup to $120m in revenue; profitability; and IPO in a record five years, I couldn't get Research Triangle Park (RTP) VCs to even return my phone calls when I was ready to start my second venture. I later found out why: "my people" were great at mathematics and made great engineers, but didn't make great CEOs — "we" didn't have the necessary management skills, didn't like diluting our equity ownership by raising venture capital, and couldn't "fit" into the rough-and-tough American business-management culture. That's what one RTP VC told me over lunch, to explain why his firm wasn't inviting me to pitch my business plan. They were very busy and had to be selective in who they met. So how did "my people" rise above ignorance and bigotry? When the first generation of Indians in Silicon Valley succeeded in shattering the glass ceiling, they decided to help others follow their path. They realized that they had all surmounted the same obstacles. And they could reduce the barriers to entry for others behind them by sharing their experiences and opening some doors.
One of my current research projects is to document and quantify the accomplishments of TiE. But I already know the impact TiE has made. After my lunch with the RTP VC, I cold-called TiE co-founder, Kanwal Rekhi. He told me that my experience was no different from what he and others in Silicon Valley had endured. Rekhi advised me to look outside the region and to recruit a white male as president of my company. TiE Charter Member Vinod Khosla advised me to contact VCs in Boston and gave me several introductions. After I followed Rehki's and Khosla's advice, it didn't take long for me to get a term sheet from Greylock Partners (of Boston). When the word of this got out, the RTP VCs came begging that I take their money. (I didn't take their money and after I achieved success, I became founding President of TiE-Carolinas and would usually spend five to seven hours weekly — even when I was really busy — mentoring fledgling entrepreneurs.) Telle Whitney, President of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, says that TiE has done an amazing job and that its work is a great example of a mobilizing, formidable force in making change through networks. But all networks are not created equal. To achieve systemic change and have more women and minority-group members as entrepreneurs, we need to involve corporate leaders. They need to personally be mentoring, proselytizing, and demonstrating by example a different model of investing in women and minority-group entrepreneurs. There is nothing more powerful within an organization than having its own CTO talk about the importance of, for example, promoting women. I agree with Telle. Neither Rekhi nor Khosla knew me from Adam, but both readily gave me invaluable advice. That is the type of mentoring that women, blacks and Hispanics need. In addition to establishing stronger networks for these groups, we need to have the CEOs and CTOs of all of our top companies volunteer their own time to help others follow in their footsteps. They need to do this because this is the best path to diversity and this diversity will enrich their organizations. And we need to have VCs mentor the women and minorities they typically ignore. They need to do this not only for social good, but also for their own survival. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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.      
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| CHATROULOLZ Collects Great Chatroulette Screencaps So You Don’t Have To Posted: 21 Feb 2010 04:24 AM PST
Check out SFWeekly editor Alexia Tsotis’ experience here on TechCrunch, for instance. It was of course just a matter of time before sites started collecting screencaps from all those mostly NSFW funny, weird, disturbing, [insert appropriate adjective] video chat sessions and turned it into a phenomenon of its own right. One of them, and perhaps the best one around, is Tumblr blog CHATROULOLZ. The blog was set up by young entrepreneur and photographer Lewis Chaplin, who judging from his last post is already getting bombarded with about 50 image submissions a day, mostly from French people who don’t really know what the site is all about in the first place. Without further ado, some of the best Chatroulette has had to offer so far:
     
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| The AP Is Using Twitter To Send People To Facebook. Wait. What? Posted: 20 Feb 2010 07:55 PM PST
The AP is using their Twitter feed to tweet out their stories — nothing new there, obviously — but every single one of them links to the story on their Facebook Notes page. It’s not clear how long they’ve been doing this, but Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan noted the oddness of this, and how annoying it is, tonight. The AP obviously has a ton of media partners, and they could easily link to any of those, or even the story hosted on their own site. But no, instead they’re copying all these stories to their Facebook page and linking there for no apparent reason. As Sullivan notes in a follow-up tweet, “i really miss when people had web sites they owned and pointed at. why lease your soul to facebook. or buzz. or whatever. master your domain.” What’s really odd about this is the AP’s recent scuffle with Google over the hosting of AP content. The two sides appeared to reach some sort of deal earlier this month (after months of threats and actual pulled content), but now the AP is just hosting all this content on Facebook for the hell of it? Sure, maybe they think that by hosting the content on Facebook, they’re being impartial with the tweets. But again, why not just use their own site? When I asked Sullivan to elaborate on this issue, he made a good point, “funny, they seem to get social (twitter & facebook) more than basic SEO (the core of their issues with Google).” Oh the AP; the amusement never ends.      
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| The New App Store Rules: No Swimsuits, No Skin, And No Innuendo Posted: 20 Feb 2010 02:17 PM PST
Earlier this week, when Apple notified developers that their applications were being removed, it said that it was removing applications with “overtly sexual content”. That sounds like the ban only extends to apps that are little more than soft core porn. But we’re hearing from multiple developers that it actually means anything that could be even the slightest bit titillating in any way — including swimsuits and fitness outfits. In short, if your app has skin, it will probably be rejected. One developer, who wished to remain anonymous, spoke to multiple App Store reviewers about the new policy. He was told, “there will be no more applications that are for any purpose of excitement or titillation”. He was told this included swimsuits — both bikinis and one-piece suits. Along with having dozens of his “sexy” apps removed, Apple also removed one that featured a popular fitness model in her workout clothes (the app was a marketing vehicle for the athlete’s line of protein powder). When he asked if the ban would also affect apps like Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit application, the Apple employee wouldn’t give a clear answer, but it was implied that the SI app would probably be removed as well. Developer Jon Atherton, who is behind the popular application Wobble (which doesn’t actually include any sexual photos), also spoke to an Apple employee, and posted this list of rules to his blog based on what he learned:
As far as we can tell, Apple hasn’t spelled out its new policies anywhere (our request for more details has gone unanswered). Keep in mind that these rules may not be set in stone — Apple is purposely vague about its policies, and they’re probably still changing. These moves are pretty ridiculous given the fact that the iPhone offers a full set of parental controls — Apple should have just blocked the applications from view of anyone who wasn’t old enough to see them. But the real issue with all this, as I outlined yesterday, is how callous Apple is being with regard to the well-being of iPhone developers. It’s easy to paint anyone behind a “sexy” iPhone app as a scumbag, but the fact of the matter is that a lot of young men have iPhones, and they’re willing to pay a few dollars for sexy photos — it’s business. There are magazine empires that are built around this very principle. The developer who I spoke to says that he’s spent the last year regularly speaking to Apple representatives, attempting to tweak his “sexy” apps to accommodate Apple’s constantly evolving standards. He was told things like (paraphrased) “a woman can be pictured in a bathing suit, but she can’t have her thumb on the suit’s strings” — because that would have been too sexually suggestive. He’d make the modifications and resubmit, oftentimes only to have another photo get called out for an equally bizarre reason. During these back-and-forths he was told that things would get better when the iPhone’s parental controls came out. And that was true for a little while, until Apple changed its mind. After making around $30,000 last year from the App Store, he’s essentially lost his income. And Wobble’s company, which was pulling in around $500 a day, is now making less than $10. Apple gave these developers the green light to build “sexy” apps, and now that they’ve built businesses around them, it’s tossing them aside without so much as an apology. To Apple, they’re expendable.      
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| Gowalla Gets An Early Native Android App. Prettier, More Social Than iPhone Version. Posted: 20 Feb 2010 12:48 PM PST
While it’s not yet in the Android Market, Gowalla has released a very early beta version of the native Android app to its most dedicated users that patrol the company’s Get Satisfaction page. Williams posted about the new app a few days ago, and noted that “Technically, we are calling this beta release 0.1. We will release a more fully featured beta to the Marketplace before the end of the month.” Since it’s not in the Market yet, you can only get the app by visiting this static link — or by using your Android camera to scan one of the bar codes you can find in that Get Satisfaction thread. Note: To install the app, you have to have your device set up for the installation of “non-Market applications". This site runs through how to do that, but basically you go to Menu -> Settings -> Applications, then check the "Unknown sources" checkbox. So how is the app compared to its iPhone brother? Well, surprisingly, in some ways I think it might already be better. While, as Williams, notes, it is currently missing the Trips feature, and it’s not doing any image caching, the 0.1 build of Gowalla for Android is slick and lightweight. As you’ll notice right away, the app has a distinctly different look because it has ditched the iPhone’s green hues for a cleaner, white look. I can’t tell you how many Gowalla users I’ve talked to that hate the green look of the iPhone app and would like a way to change it (I’m included in that list). More importantly, the Android version of Gowalla flips the features of the service so that your friend check-in stream is now the first tab. This makes the Android version more social right off the bat than the iPhone version, which buries that information in the last tab. Gowalla’s Android launch is timely as the SXSW conference is less than a month away. Last year, both Gowalla and rival Foursquare launched their iPhone apps at the conference, with Foursquare able to take an early lead over the past year. Foursquare now has apps for all the major mobile OSes except for Symbiam. Meanwhile, Gowalla is also close to launching a BlackBerry app. Game on. Check out some early screenshots below.
[thanks Wes]      
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| Google Officially Deadpools Gears For Safari. Puts It On Death Watch For Firefox And IE. Posted: 20 Feb 2010 11:50 AM PST
In a post yesterday on the Gears API blog, Ian Fette from the Gears team comes right out and says it in his title: “Hello HTML5.” Fette notes that the reason there haven’t been many updates to Gears in the past several months is because the team has shifted its focus towards implementing the same features into Chrome through HTML5. So far, this includes Database API, workers, local storage, and web sockets. And soon, LocalServer API and Geolocation will be a part of Chrome as well, Fette notes. In essence, all of these features make Gears unnecessary — well, at least in Chrome, which Google obviously wants you to use. Because of this shift of focus, Fette notes that support for Gears will be increasingly “constrained in scope.” What this means is that beginning immediately, they will no longer be supporting Gears on OS X Snow Leopard (and later). Meanwhile, Gears support in Firefox and Internet Explorer will continue in limited form for now. But both of those too will eventually be killed off. “We will not be investing resources in active development of new features,” Fette writes. Really, all Google is waiting for is an effective way to migrate Gears-enabled apps (and their users) over to HTML5. While there is currently no good way to do this, it seems as if Google just may wait for developers to drink the HTML5 kool-aid and then kill of Gears support entirely — even if there are still some who are using it. I’m all for this. As I wrote back in December, I’m of the opinion that plug-ins are perhaps the biggest inhibitor of a unified web. That is, a web where everyone sees the same content the same way, no matter what browser or which OS they’re using. It doesn’t matter if those plug-ins are made by Google (Gears), Microsoft (Silverlight), Adobe (Flash), or anyone else.      
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Women, Hispanics and blacks have always been underrepresented in the ranks of the Valley's tech companies. A new analysis by the 
By now, you’ve probably heard of 
Oh the Associated Press, our most favorite 
Over the last few days we’ve been tracking Apple’s recent decision to remove 
In November of last year, 
While digging through the Chromium forums back in November looking for clues about the then-unreleased Chrome for Mac beta, we stumbled on an interesting bit of information: | You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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