The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Want More Twitter Followers? Tweetmeme Has A Button For That.
- Petit Petit Touchscreen App: A Fascinating Four-dimensional Contact Management Tool
- Smartphone Sales Up 24 Percent, iPhone’s Share Nearly Doubled Last Year (Gartner)
- Qik Wins Significant UK Distribution Via Vodafone
- Trendrr Launches Web Charting Dashboard For Entertainment Industry
- Grooveshark Launches Mobile App For Palm webOS Platform
- Inbox2 Debuts Public Beta Of Message Management Desktop Client For Windows
- Visage Mobile Gets A $4.5 Million Infusion From Qualcomm And Others
- TeachStreet Launches Decision Engine For GMAT And GRE Test Takers
- Juniper Networks Establishes $50 Million Venture Fund
- Brightcove And Ooyala Go Head-To-Head On Euro Video
- Kobo Books Launches A UK Service To Compete With The Kindle
- You Can Now Send Scans From Lexmark Printers Straight To Evernote
- Social Network For Traders Currensee Raises $8 Million
- Mobile Location-Based Services Could Rake In $12.7 Billion By 2014: Report
- Apple, There’s Pornography On My iPhone. The App Is Called Safari. You Made It.
- Zoho Adds A Social Layer To Productivity Suite With Facebook Connect
- We Are Anonymous. We Are Legion. We Plead Guilty In Court.
- Mobile Roadie Now Creates Apps For Android Ecosystem
- Loud Noises! Google Buzz Is A Broken Instrument Capable Of Beautiful Music.
- Apple Exec Phil Schiller Speaks On The App Store’s Sex Ban
- YC-Funded Etacts Makes Sure You Never Fall Out Of Touch With Your Contacts
- How Random Is Microsoft’s Random Browser Choice Screen In Europe?
- RemakingMySpace: Controversial. Bold. Progressive. And Dead.
- The Mysterious Social Search Abyss Of 2010
| Want More Twitter Followers? Tweetmeme Has A Button For That. Posted: 23 Feb 2010 09:30 AM PST
Now that Twitter did away with its monolithic Suggested User List, everyone can fight for followers on a more equal footing. Tweetmeme wants to help you gain followers with a new Follow Button you can place on your blog or Website. It looks very much like Tweetmeme’s ReTweet button, which is on 100,000 sites and registering 7 billion monthly impressions across the web, except it says “Follow” instead of “Retweet.” When you click on the Follow button, a window pops open that lets you sign into Twitter and follow the account tied to the button (usually the person or publication of the site the button is on). The Follow button comes in different shapes and sizes, shows how many followers you have, and is tied into analytics services such as TwitterCounter, Twitalyzer, and TwitterGrader. The data from the Follow button should also appear in Tweetmeme’s own analytics. Follow buttons are nothing new, but Tweetmeme has a lot of distribution muscle with its Retweet buttons. The question is, how many buttons are you going to gunk up your site with? Should we add a follow button to every post?      
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| Petit Petit Touchscreen App: A Fascinating Four-dimensional Contact Management Tool Posted: 23 Feb 2010 08:49 AM PST  This strange app is a touchscreen interface that connects people, places, and things using "clouds" of items and people. It basically makes Venn diagrams of your contacts and allows you to share and explore content and messages. This looks way too weird for the average user but clearly someone out there may want to move Sven and Nikola to a timeline and figure out which emails came from each person and which emails overlap. The text input system is actually quite cool, however, because it predicts the words you're about to type. Pop over to 4 minutes in to see how that system works. Video after the jump.
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| Smartphone Sales Up 24 Percent, iPhone’s Share Nearly Doubled Last Year (Gartner) Posted: 23 Feb 2010 08:19 AM PST
Last year, Apple’s iPhone nearly doubled its worldwide market share of smartphone sales to 14.4 percent, up 6.2 points from the year before, according to the latest market share figures put out by Gartner. The iPhone still trails behind Nokia’s Symbian-powered smartphones (No. 1), which saw their share decline 5.5 points to 46.9 percent, and RIM Blackberries (No. 2), which gained 3.3 points to end the year with a 19.9 percent share. Remember, these are worldwide estimates. In the U.S., both Blackberry and Apple are much larger than Symbian. And when it comes to mobile Web traffic, Apple and Android dominate with 81 percent share. According to Gartner, Android phone sales jumped 3.4 points (to 3.9 percent), but Android is still smaller than WIndows Mobile or Linux. Those mobile OSes, however, saw their market share drop 3.1 and 2.9 percent, respectively. Palm’s WebOS barely made a mark with 0.7 percent share. So when you tally everything up, Symbian lost the most share (5.5 percent), followed by Windows Mobile and Linux. The iPhone saw the biggest gain (6.2 percent), compared to smaller but roughly equal jumps by Blackberry and Android (up 3.3 and 3.4 percent, respectively). All together, Gartner estimates 172 million smartphones were sold last year, up 24 percent. In contrast, total mobile phone sales were flat at 1.2 billion. Smartphones represented 14 percent of total mobile handset sales last year, up from 11 percent in 2008. The iPhone, for all of its growth, made up only 2 percent of all mobile phone sales last year. Below are the market share tables from Gartner: Table 2
Source: Gartner (February 2010) Table 1
Note* This table includes iDEN shipments, but excludes ODM to OEM shipments.      
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| Qik Wins Significant UK Distribution Via Vodafone Posted: 23 Feb 2010 08:18 AM PST
Vodafone UK customers will now be able to record and share videos from their mobile phone via Qik by texting 'Qik' to 97886 (free) to receive a link to the relevant app for their handset (standard data charges apply). Vodafone is the number two mobile network in the UK, behind O2 and ahead of Orange. Once loaded, videos generated on Qik can be posted to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter and users will be able to send video messages privately via SMS and email, or upload videos to blogging platforms like WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger. It remains to be seen how many customers will actually take up Qik however. However, live streaming video from a mobile has yet to take off here and it may well a deal like this to kick off mainstream take-up.      
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| Trendrr Launches Web Charting Dashboard For Entertainment Industry Posted: 23 Feb 2010 07:30 AM PST
As the presence of television content on the web increases, the entertainment industry needs applications to measure the content’s performance. Wiredset’s Trendrr, a comprehensive digital data tracking platform, is launching a new realtime dashboard catered to TV networks. The new tracking platform, which is available to any Trendrr Pro users, allows film studios, networks and record labels to track and aggregate data surrounding their properties and gain instant insights on location, gender, volume, sentiment, and influence as the conversation takes place. The application gathers data from over 50 of the web’s social destinations, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Last.fm, Amazon, Craigslist, and eBay, and delivers users a realtime view of data within a dashboard. The idea behind Trendrr’s entertainment-focused dashboard is that it will allow the film and television industries to gain actionable intelligence to determine future content decisions. For example, the new application will show a television network is gaining the most reactions by city, if the chatter is positive, and what aspects of a show are gaining traction among viewers and which segment of the population is most receptive to their content. Not only will this data help users determine where to place certain content, but can also help with advertising and marketing strategies. The application is already being used by TV Networks such as NBC Universal’s Oxygen, which is using it for the show, Bad Girls Club. The application will undoubtedly be useful to to measuring engagement on the web, especially on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. However, Trendrr is entering a space where many others are attempting to launch innovative applications. Scout Labs, Viralheat, PeopleBrowsr and Radian 6 are just a few of the startups that are helping companies, including media organizations, attempt to track movement across the web.      
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| Grooveshark Launches Mobile App For Palm webOS Platform Posted: 23 Feb 2010 07:08 AM PST  Online music service Grooveshark is today announcing the launch of a native app for devices running Palm webOS, or in other words the Palm Pre and Pixi phones. With the app, Grooveshark users gain access to its vast on-demand song catalog - the number of tracks in there runs in the millions - but also to the personal playlists and favorites they and other users have cultivated on the kick-ass music service. The app should be available 'very soon', according to the startup, although VIP users (who pay $3/month) can get early access. 
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| Inbox2 Debuts Public Beta Of Message Management Desktop Client For Windows Posted: 23 Feb 2010 07:02 AM PST
Now, the Holland-based company is launching a nifty, free software program (Windows only for now) that does exactly the same in the form of a native desktop client. Inbox2 collects all messages, document attachments, links and contacts from your existing email and social network accounts and brings everything into one place. The app doesn’t merely import incoming streams for consumption, as it also allows you to reply, search and manage all those incoming communication streams without having to login to multiple accounts. The list of supported services is key, and impressively long: the app boasts support for (deep breath) Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, AOL, any custom IMAP/POP3 account, and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yammer and Hyves. In addition, Inbox2 allows the user to organize their inbox around people or content discovery, including through social and real-time channels. In that sense, it reminds a lot of Threadsy, one of the TechCrunch50 finalists, but they haven’t publicly launched yet. Also worth checking out for different reasons is OtherInbox. If you even use but two of the services that Inbox2 supports, I suggest you try out the Web service to start and give the desktop client a good whirl if you’re on Windows. It might just be that messaging management tool you’ve been longing for. Me? I’m waiting for them to integrate simple RSS reader functionality into the tool.
     
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| Visage Mobile Gets A $4.5 Million Infusion From Qualcomm And Others Posted: 23 Feb 2010 05:59 AM PST
Visage Mobile, an enterprise mobility management company, has raised $4.5 million in Series B funding from Qualcomm Ventures with Worldview Technology Partners, ATA Ventures, Vesbridge Partners, and Emergence Capital Partners participating in the round. This funding brings the company’s total funding up to nearly $100 million. Visage Mobile’s SaaS application basically lets businesses have control and visibility over all of the wireless devices and spend within their companies. The service will organize how many wireless devices are being used in your company, which employee is using a device, your company’s monthly wireless spend and how your wireless spending breaks down. Additionally, Visage Mobile helps businesses set policies to govern employee usage of smartphone and mobile broadband. Visage Mobile says the new funding will be used to invest in product development, and additional services to help businesses take control of their mobility budget and inventory.      
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| TeachStreet Launches Decision Engine For GMAT And GRE Test Takers Posted: 23 Feb 2010 05:50 AM PST
TeachStreet, Yelp-like service for real world classes (cooking, dog obedience, music lessons, ballroom dance, foreign language, golf, yoga, etc.), is getting into the standardized test prep space. Today, the startup is rolling out a partner promotion with Kaplan Test Prep, and a number of MBA/GMAT/GRE content providers. TeachStreet, which serves seven metropolitan areas in the U.S. including New York City, Silicon Valley/San Francisco and Seattle, allows instructors to upload information about classes. Users can look for available classes, and read and write reviews on the course and the instructor. Currently, the site includes a selection of more than 150,000 classes and teachers, across more than 700 subjects and categories. With the partnership with Kaplan and others, TeachStreet will be introducing websites geared specifically at students preparing for two of of the most popular graduate school admissions examinations, the GMAT and GRE. The new specialty sites will provide free tools to build an individualized study plan, customized to a student’s test date. The site will also list local and online GMAT and GRE test preparation course providers, including Kaplan Test Prep, The Princeton Review, Manhattan GMAT, ed2go, Grockit, Knewton, PowerScore, and Veritas Prep. And the sites will allows you to compare the providers based on Price, User Ratings, Location, Start Date, Duration, Online/Local, Group/1:1, Guaranteed Results and more. TeachStreet will allso give users access to free GMAT and GRE practice tests and questions from GMAT Club, Grockit, JumboTests, Magoosh and PrepForTests, guides to the best test prep books, and background information a test taker needs, including test format descriptions, scoring, point ranges, official testing websites, and average scores for top colleges.      
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| Juniper Networks Establishes $50 Million Venture Fund Posted: 23 Feb 2010 05:33 AM PST
The fund builds up on Juniper’s efforts to establish an ecosystem of technologies, software and applications built on its cross-network software platform Junos, the company said. According to the press release, the Junos Innovation Fund will invest in companies over the next two years, and focus on areas such as networking technologies, applications, and services that foster the development and deployment of security infrastructure, mobility and video solutions, virtualization, network automation, optical technology, and green networking. Juniper Networks currently has investments in 11 companies, including Ankeena Networks, Blade Network Technologies, Cyan Optics, FireEye and Packet Design.      
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| Brightcove And Ooyala Go Head-To-Head On Euro Video Posted: 23 Feb 2010 05:27 AM PST
Last month Ooyala, a provider of video platform applications and services, and the UK’s Telegraph Media Group signed an agreement for Ooyala to run online video on the publisher's websites and co-develop new technologies. Today Ooyala is partnering with Middle East based social media platform developer H2O New Media, giving it distribution rights to Ooyala's video platform, Backlot. It wil be used to stream video content from the growing Middle East television and media sector. But (also today) Brightcove, which already has some big partners in Europe, is fighting back with a swathe of deals in Spain.      
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| Kobo Books Launches A UK Service To Compete With The Kindle Posted: 23 Feb 2010 05:21 AM PST
The same is true of books. Why lock down books to one device? But of course Amazon is trying to do exactly this with the Kindle. So it makes sense then to disrupt them faster, with a service which syncs across platforms and devices. Step forward Kobo Books. Kobo is a cloud-based book store, previously only available in the US but today launching in the UK in a first push into Europe.      
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| You Can Now Send Scans From Lexmark Printers Straight To Evernote Posted: 23 Feb 2010 05:00 AM PST
The Evernote SmartSolution application basically allows users to send hardcopy scans from these Lexmark devices straight into their Evernote Web account with the touch of a single button, computer not required. The Evernote application was developed by Lexmark, and a shortcut to the service can be added to the printer touch screens in a matter of minutes. After setup, tapping the Evernote application can send scans to pre-configured Evernote accounts over the Web. At the end of last year, venture capital backed Evernote had about 2 million people using its service, and its conceivable that only a small subset of those actually own one of those Lexmark printers. That said, I like the idea of being able to manage Web services on devices other than computers and phones. Now can they please hook up my fridge?
     
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| Social Network For Traders Currensee Raises $8 Million Posted: 23 Feb 2010 04:37 AM PST
The company had earlier raised $6 million from Northbridge Venture Partners, but $2 million of the Series A round (raised in October 2009) was converted to Series B terms as part of the deal. Thus, this round brings the total of financing for the company to $12 million. Currensee allows members of its trader network to see each other’s trades and positions, strategies and performance in real-time, enabling them to make more informed decisions. The company says its network boasts traders from over 70 different countries, and that its platform supports over 100 brokers. The company recently launched Currensee Marketplace, released full MT4 support, a Tweet My Trades feature and a partnership with Thomson Reuters IFR Markets. With the financing, Currensee will accelerate expansion in the UK, Europe, and Asia, where Forex trading is said to be growing at a rapid pace. Part of the additional capital will also be used for the development of Currensee Market Watch, a real-time “social sentiment indicator” that aims to show what traders are doing based on actual trades. To a degree, the company competes with StockTwits, which has raised $4.6 million to date. (Via press release and company blog post)      
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| Mobile Location-Based Services Could Rake In $12.7 Billion By 2014: Report Posted: 23 Feb 2010 04:04 AM PST
The report found that while MLBS had experienced a number of false dawns from 2000 to 2007, improvements in handset UIs together with easier consumer access to an range of app distribution channels had led to greater interest from service providers in providing mobile location-based applications. While service usage will be highest in Far East China over the next few years, greatest revenues will come from Western Europe, Juniper forecasts. Revenues will come from sales of apps through application stores and other channels, but also from mobile advertising tied to those apps. In fact, the Juniper report notes that advertising will likely form an increasing share of MLBS-related revenues over the next five years. In the words of co-author Dr Windsor Holden:
This should sound like music in the ears of juggernauts like Google, Facebook and Nokia, as well startups like Foursquare, Gowalla, aka-aki, Loopt, Rummble and a couple of hundred others playing this extremely crowded field.      
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| Apple, There’s Pornography On My iPhone. The App Is Called Safari. You Made It. Posted: 23 Feb 2010 03:10 AM PST
Problem number one is that while Apple is removing most of these sexy apps from the App Store, it’s not removing all of them. So who gets to stay? Big publishers like Sports Illustrated and Playboy. In fact, not only is Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit 2010 app not being removed, it’s being featured in the App Store. Both it and the Playboy app clearly violate the new rules of the more prudish App Store, yet they get to stay. Why? As Apple VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller explained earlier to the New York Times, it’s because they’re well-known companies known for that content. Yet, he also cited women being upset about feeling degraded and parents being upset about kids having access to sexy apps as the main reason Apple is cracking down on them. The omission of the fact that parents probably also don’t want their kids downloading the Playboy app, or that some women might also find the Swimsuit app degrading is laughable. Now, are some apps worse than others with regard to sexy content? Of course. But Apple has removed over 5,000 apps and counting under these new rules — surely some of those would likely be considered less offensive then the Playboy app. Further, this is creating the ultimate gray line when it comes to what is and what is not permissible in the App Store. For example, what if there’s a smaller publication also known for nude pictures that wants to make a lingerie app? Will Apple reject or accept that? Is there a certain circulation threshold one has to have to be considered “well-known” in Schiller’s words? Problem number two is that Apple is breaking a golden rule: don’t take away what you’ve already given (in this case, to both developers and users). Apple has not always allowed these sexy apps in the App Store. But at some point over the past several months they changed their minds and apps like “Asian Boobs” started getting accepted. Why did they do it? At the time, the thought was that with the new parental controls in the iPhone OS 3.0, they could leave it up to parents to decide what their children can or cannot download/use.
Problem number three is related to number two. I fail to see the reason that Apple built parental controls into the iPhone OS if they weren’t to be used for situations like this. Why even bother? For games with violence? Please. I’m all for kids not having access to mature content if their parents are against it, but that’s exactly what these controls are made for. So why is Apple making this big change that is pissing a lot of people off if they have this safeguard in place? Clearly, they must not trust it. But if that’s the case, why not remove the explicit content from iTunes? After all, the parental controls for apps are in the exact same place as the ones from music, movies, and TV shows. Problem number four is perhaps my favorite one. Apple is going through all this trouble of removing these apps, and creating more work in scanning for the next sexy apps to reject, when built into every iPhone and iPod touch is not one, but two huge entry points for explicit material — and both are apps made by Apple themselves. The first, I alluded to above: iTunes. There are no shortage of films and TV shows with nudity and sexual content (along with violence and everything else) that are available on iTunes for purchase on the device. The same is true for explicit music. But the second app is far worse: Safari. Each iPhone and iPod touch has a web browser that is more than capable of accessing any site on the web with a few clicks. This includes sites with hardcore pornography, or anything else a teenage kid can dream up. Apple is going through all this trouble to block sexy apps (which have never contained nudity, by the way, just sexy pictures), when they offer one of their own that makes it much easier to find far more sinister content. Of course, if they removed Safari, it could well destroy the iPhone. So they’re not going to do that. The sad truth is that while everyone can clearly see Apple’s hypocrisy here, it’s unlikely to matter. Just as with all the hoopla over the Google Voice app rejection, this too will blow over. As long as people keep voting for Apple with their pocketbooks, Apple will continue to do as it pleases, hypocrisy or not. The lesson, I suppose, is that killer products give you carte blanche.      
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| Zoho Adds A Social Layer To Productivity Suite With Facebook Connect Posted: 23 Feb 2010 02:55 AM PST
Similar to its integration with Google apps, Zoho users can login to Zoho using their Facebook credentials. Users with existing Zoho accounts can now link the two accounts so that they can login with Facebook credentials alone. But the plus of using Facebook Connect now allows Zoho to transcend platforms. So you can now share documents with Facebook users who don’t have a Zoho Account. Of course this isn’t Zoho’s first foray into Facebook’s territory. Zoho’s Facebook app allows users to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations from within Facebook and includes the ability to view and edit all existing documents, spreadsheets and presentations (both personal and shared) from Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show. Of course, you can add a social layer to Google Apps, a competitor of sorts to Zoho, with Socialwok. But the plus of using Zoho’s applications is that suite ties into its other productivity applications seamlessly. And Zoho is affordable, with a free version of the suite. Last year, we wrote that Zoho has continued to implement an intelligent strategy to launch new products and add-ons to its existing offerings, partly to keep users from flocking to Google Apps and Microsoft’s Web-based version of Microsoft 2010. It looks like Zoho is continuing this strategy in 2010. The adoption of Facebook Connect makes sense for a number of reasons. First, productivity apps in the enterprise are naturally becoming more social. Second, Facebook, with 400 million users, could bring more traffic to Zoho. Last year, startup unveiled a new version of Zoho Reports; launched a deeper integration with Google Docs; rolled out Zoho Discussions, a online forum tool for businesses; and debuted Zoho Recruit. And over the past two years, Zoho has added support for Sharepoint, mobile, Google and Yahoo IDs and group sharing. According to out latest states, Zoho has definitely reached over 2 million users is even catching the attention of its competition.      
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| We Are Anonymous. We Are Legion. We Plead Guilty In Court. Posted: 23 Feb 2010 01:52 AM PST
After his greasy raid, Mahoud Samed Almahadin was charged with burglary, criminal mischief, and aggravated harassment as hate crimes. Weeks later, 21 year-old film student and Anonymous member Jacob Speregen was charged with the same crimes, bar burglary, because he had filmed Almahadin carrying out his prank (video below). This morning, the Church of Scientology put out a press release, rejoicing the fact that Almahadin apparently pled guilty in the New York City Criminal Court. Savvy surfers will correctly assume Almahadin is a ‘member’ of the Anonymous collective, a loosely organized movement of sorts among Internet users often associated with message boards 4chan and Futaba. Anonymous often triggers actions against the Church of Scientology, among other organizations or individuals, both in real life and on the Web. Here’s the Church of Scientology’s take on the guilty plea:
Now that he has plead guilty, Almahadin will be forced to stand on the digital sidelines in Anonymous’ actions against the Church of Scientology: as part of his plea, he is required to stay away from the organization for the next five years. Somehow, I don’t think he’ll mind that.
Bonus video:
     
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| Mobile Roadie Now Creates Apps For Android Ecosystem Posted: 22 Feb 2010 11:58 PM PST
We’re big fans of Mobile Roadie, a startup that helps develop iPhone apps. But the one gripe we had was that Mobile Roadie was limited to the iPhone platform. Today, our wish came true as Mobile Roadie is launching functionality for Android phones. The beauty of Mobile Roadie's platform is that it offers a dead simple mostly-automated system to build apps and have them posted to Apple's App Store in as little as a week. Launched earlier this year, the startup develops mobile apps for other conferences, events, and venues, as well as musicians, athletes, politicians, and other celebrities. The apps can provide users with access to news, music, live and recorded video, photos, event listings, and more. The apps also feature integration with YouTube, Brightcove, Flickr, Twitpic, Ustream, Topspin, Google News, RSS, Twitter, and Facebook. Another bonus of Mobile Roadie’s platform is that its CMS allows users to simultaneously make updates to both their iPhone and Android Apps. And using push notifications, customers can send alerts that appear on users' screens, geo targeting messages down to a one-mile radius. With the launch of Google Android support, Mobile Roadie will be powering both iPhone and Android apps for Ashton Kutcher, Dolly Parton, and Madonna. We hear Taylor Swift will be launching apps soon as well. Mobile Roadie also developed the official iPhone app for LeWeb, the foremost European technology conference organized by French entrepreneur and Seesmic founder, Loic Le Meur and his wife, Geraldine. The app was a huge hit at the conference. Mobile Roadie also recently struck a deal with Random House to power iPhone apps for authors. There’s no doubt that Mobile Roadie’s functionality for Android platforms will make its platform more attractive to users. And the ability to simultaneously manage your iPhone and Android apps through one interface is a compelling feature. With Mobile Roadie’s track record of success over the past year, we’ll continue to expect more innovations to be produced from the bootstrapped startup in the near future.      
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| Loud Noises! Google Buzz Is A Broken Instrument Capable Of Beautiful Music. Posted: 22 Feb 2010 10:55 PM PST
My reasoning for holding off is pretty simple: I was confused. For the first few hours I was sure it was the best thing ever. Then I was certain it was the worst thing ever. The truth, not surprisingly, is likely somewhere in the middle. Google Buzz is a service with a ton of potential, but the execution of it is so bad right now, that’s it’s at points completely unusable. I’m not going to go into the privacy implications of it, because those have already been discussed ad-nauseum. And while plenty of them certainly seem valid, I’m just thinking about Buzz from a pure product perspective. First, the bad: These entire two weeks, one problem has stood out above all others to me with Buzz: when people set the service to automatically import tweets and FriendFeed messages, Buzz collects them in bulk and spews them into your Buzz stream only once ever few hours (and sometimes once a day). If you happen to follow a person who imports either of these and is even just moderately prolific on either service, it leads to a Buzz stream that is ridiculously overrun by one contact. Earlier today for example, one of my contacts had 30 messages in a row from FriendFeed import at the exact same time. So in order to see anything else on Buzz, I had to scroll below these 30 messages. Sure, I could mute them (and for some I did), but that takes way too long to do. And the reality is, you shouldn’t have to do that. This is just poor execution. And it’s one thing if this happens once, but it happens multiple times a day. The same exact thing happened just hours after that one incident, but with tweets instead of FriendFeed messages — over 20 of them instantly instantly overtook my Buzz stream. It renders the service completely unusable unless you unsubscribe from that user — how’s that for a social network? One that works best the less social it is.
But that seems to be the case. Google has been testing the product internally for a few months, and a few Googlers have noted that in their longer experience with the site, they’ve found that it’s best to only follow a handful of people and let Buzz’s algorithms do the rest of the work to find you content you’ll be interested in. Again, it’s a social network where it’s better to be less social. Odd. Currently, I’m following just 79 people of the over 1,500 that follow me — I’d like to follow more, but I know it will just make my Buzz experience worse (because I was and had to cut a bunch out). In fact, I could probably do with half the noise I currently see, so maybe I should cut some of those 79 as well. That really seems to be the only way to make it manageable right now. As far as I can tell, even after two weeks of muting, liking, and commenting quite a bit, I’m not seeing the service tailor itself to my needs. Google promised this would be a big part of it, but if it’s doing it, it’s not doing it well enough — to the point where I need them to actually tell me in what way they’re doing it. Basically, Buzz needs to become FriendFeed. From the moment I first saw it, I thought it was FriendFeed — and it kind of is, but minus all of the good filtering, social recommendation, and stacking options. For example, in FriendFeed, I can not only just mute an item, I can mute just a certain type of item just from a certain user. I’d love to do that for the aforementioned people’s tweets and FriendFeed items. Also, FriendFeed does a far superior job of bunching together similar items if you import a lot of them at once. So, for example, those 20+ tweets would have been condensed to one or two with a link to “18 more like this” which you could click to expand if you wanted to see them. Speaking of click to expand, that’s something else Buzz needs to utilize better immediately. When I see I have new Buzz unread items, I expect them to be big entries, not comments. So when I click on the Buzz tab and see 100 new comments that I must scroll through to get to another item, I’m annoyed. The comments, while often interesting, are just meant to supplement the content they are talking about. Instead, they completely overwhelm the original message. Buzz likes to show me all the comments for any item I’ve expanded just once. By default, Buzz needs to collapse all but maybe the top and bottom comments each time, with the option to click to see the rest. You know, just like FriendFeed does.
I don’t see how Buzz could so closely copy many of FriendFeed’s features but leave out the vital part: the filtering. Without it, FriendFeed would just be a bunch of noise as well. That’s the nature of importing social data from a variety of sites — it’s about taking a lot of content and presenting it in a way that’s manageable. Right now, Buzz is failing badly at that. And just imagine if they add more auto-import options (FriendFeed has dozens) — it will be totally out of control. Frankly, I think Buzz should completely disable the auto-importing of tweets, FriendFeed items, and anything else they cannot pull in in realtime until they are able to. That’s another key area Buzz misses the boat on. FriendFeed works with Twitter because it is real-time importing tweets (and when that was broken, I quit using it). When Buzz imports tweets in bunches (or even just late), they’re pretty much useless across-the-board. They’re just noise. And that’s what Google Buzz is right now, noise. If that’s what they were going for with the name, it worked. But wait, the good: Okay, now that I’ve slammed Buzz for what I see as fundamental flaws that make it unusable for most of the time in its current state. I’ll talk about what I actually do like about it — and make no mistake, there are things, otherwise I wouldn’t care about the poor execution. Hands down, the best thing Buzz has going for it is the usage. It’s huge. Because they crammed it into Gmail, Buzz has likely already been exposed to way more users than FriendFeed ever was. The big knock against FriendFeed was always that it was the coolest service no one was using. Google Buzz can be the FriendFeed that everyone is using. A number of items from popular users are regularly getting over 100 comments, and hundreds of “likes.” Because I’m always in Gmail, I find myself checking it quite often, even despite my aforementioned problems. Further, while some people are annoyed with Buzz messages showing up in their inbox, I find the fact that you can respond to them right from there very, very useful. The fact that you can reply to buzzes over IM is also very interesting. I still believe Google is onto something very smart with this Buzz integration within Gmail (again, it just needs to make Buzz itself better).
Buzz also does a great job of making it quick and easy to share. The box at the top of the service works well, and I particularly like that when you paste a link in, you can easily select which pictures from the site to include in the buzz. The idea of private buzzing at first seemed silly to me because you have to create a group, until I realized that if I wanted to message just one person, I could use IM or even email within Gmail as well. While I’m not yet using it, it does seem like private group buzzing could be useful. But probably my favorite part of Buzz is the mobile version. The web app is very well made, and handles elements like location well (and makes much more sense right now than Google’s other location product, Latitude). On Android phones, Buzz is even better when you use it on the Google Maps app. It’s also very cool to see on a map where other buzzes are coming from. Okay, so there was more bad: Yes, Google Buzz needs a lot of work in my opinion. To be honest, I think they should just finish the job and more completely emulate everything about FriendFeed. FriendFeed was a great service, but once Facebook acquired the team, it became more of a ghost town then some already thought it was. But there still is a need for this type of service in my opinion, and I’m positive that Google Buzz can be it. (That is, unless Facebook, with their secret messaging project, beats them to it.) While Google will never admit it, it seems pretty clear the product was shoved out the door prematurely. The mad rush to make changes and the blog posts with tips on how to use it prove that. It definitely should have launched in Gmail Labs, where these kinks could be ironed out amongst a more understanding early-adopter crowd. Instead, Google clearly wanted to go from zero to social in four seconds flat. Unfortunately, they forgot to install seat belts. Or, at the very least, barf bags. Now Google runs the risk of having users who have already soured on Buzz because it was shoved in their face as a good but completely unpolished idea. Because of that, they’ll have double the work to do if they hope to convince those same users to try it again when it is fully ready to go. That is, if it is ever fully ready to go. They’re close yet so far from turning that annoying buzz into music to my ears.      
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| Apple Exec Phil Schiller Speaks On The App Store’s Sex Ban Posted: 22 Feb 2010 10:09 PM PST
So why did Apple decide to pull these sexy apps?
Which makes sense given the broad appeal of the iPhone, but Apple should have seen this coming, and it implemented parental controls for a reason. And then Schiller goes on to pour salt into the wounds of recently spurned developers with his explanation as to why a select few sexy applications will remain on the App Store.
So apparently exposed cleavage in a Playboy application is less offensive to women and parents because it’s also being printed in a magazine, or something. The decision really isn’t all that surprising, either — there’s little risk of the Playboy application trying to sneak in some extreme nudity, and with only a handful of mainstream sexy apps there’s much less clutter. Still, such favoritism sets another bad precedent for the App Store, and Schiller’s explanation just feels lame. Of course, if you’re still looking for ’sexy’ content on your iPhone, you can still find plenty of nudity in iTunes (Apple has no problem selling R rated movies). Or you could just pop open Safari.      
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| YC-Funded Etacts Makes Sure You Never Fall Out Of Touch With Your Contacts Posted: 22 Feb 2010 07:38 PM PST
Etacts is similar in some ways to CRMs like Highrise and SalesForce, but founders Evan Beard and Howie Liu say they’re focusing on helping people stay in touch, rather than on teams looking to complete sales. The service’s home screen features a list of people you know, ranked by how often you communicate with them via Email or phone. The list includes information like the total number of times you’re interacted with each person and when you first began talking with them online. Most important, it lets you know how long it’s been since you last contacted them, and lets you set regular reminders — if you go too long without talking to someone, the service will send you an alert. To start using Etacts, you enter your email account login credentials (at the moment the service only works with Gmail or Google Apps, but support for any IMAP service provider is coming soon). From there, Etacts will examine your inbox to automatically build out your list of important contacts, so you don’t have to do any work. You can also optionally enter the credentials for your mobile carrier, which Etacts can use to track who you’ve talked to over the phone or have text messaged.
The service can use this data to offer plenty of related features. If you tell Etacts which of your contacts are especially important, it can automatically flag any new incoming messages. The service offers a plugin for Google Chrome and Firefox that adds a new button to Gmail’s interface: “Send and Remind Me”. Hit that, and you’ll send the message and automatically add a reminder to your Etacts account. If too many days go by without receiving a response, Etacts will remind you to resend your message (or to ask your contact what’s up). And, if you really want to pump out your correspondence, you can turn to Etact’s message sending feature. This allows you to build templates of messages you commonly send, with variables for each person’s name. It’s essentially a mail merge, but it makes it easy to manually tweak each message for each recipient — you can construct 90% of the message from a template, and then add a personal touch yourself. You can get a feel for how you can modify the base message from this screenshot. I really like most of the features Etacts has to offer — it’s straightforward enough that it didn’t take long at all to figure out how everything worked, and it seems like it would appeal to any professional that has to manage a sizable contact list. My biggest gripe with the service is the fact that it requires users to hand over their email login credentials to Etacts. The company only stores your Email headers (as opposed to the full message body), and I’m significantly more paranoid than your average consumer about this sort of thing, but other startups have had issues with this in the past. For example, reMail (which was just acquired by Google) launched with Email search that was powered by its own servers, and then switched to a model where searches were done locally on the user’s mobile phone (so that credentials weren’t exchanged).
     
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| How Random Is Microsoft’s Random Browser Choice Screen In Europe? Posted: 22 Feb 2010 05:07 PM PST
After a lengthy legal face-off, Microsoft and European antitrust officials recently agreed on the implementation of a so-called ballot screen that will give European Windows users a chance to download rivals’ browsers – including Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera – as possible alternatives to Redmond’s own Internet Explorer (see screenshot above or go here). Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft has agreed to provide a “ballot screen” to most European customers that will offer links to downloads of browsers offered by the company’s fiercest competitors when it comes to the Web browsing space, starting next week. The browser choice screen was designed to give all listed browsers a random order upon each new visit; antitrust regulators saw this as the right path to take to make European consumers more aware of alternative browsers to IE without favoring one over the other. But how random is the presentation of the browser on that ballot screen, really? That’s exactly what the good people behind Slovakian tech news site DSL.sk set out to discover, based on the current implementation and code found on www.browserchoice.eu. Their findings were quite interesting, as they seem to suggest that the selection isn’t really that random as one would imagine, and that Microsoft is not doing itself any favors at all, when in fact it may even be giving Google’s Chrome browser a bit of an edge. It took me some creative Google Translating to figure out how the team got to its conclusion, but finally a Skype chat with one of the reporters at DSL.sk cleared things up for me. The page on www.browserchoice.eu is static, running nothing but Javascript. The guys at DSL.sk basically automatically loaded that page tens of thousands of times, and they kept score of which browsers were shown in which order for each of those instances. And not only did they test this sufficiently on this page, but DSL.sk did the same for the core Javascript algorithm that triggers the random ordering. The test were run using Internet Explorer 8 on a Windows 7 machine, because the ballot screen will pop up in IE for users who install the relevant Windows Update and have set Microsoft’s browser as default. More than once out of every four hits, the page would show Google Chrome on the far left, and Internet Explorer would only make it to the first spot in 13,8% of page loads (scoring well below all four other browsers). In fact, in over 50% of all page hits, Internet Explorer would come out to the far right spot of the five browser choices shown on the screen. Here’s a table with the stats – the titles are in Slovakian but are simply indicating the order of the browser and its average position in the right column:
What’s most apparent is that Google Chrome scored ‘best’ out of five for all 3 first spots on the browser choice screen, and that Internet Explorer appeared on the far right way more than rival browsers. We should note that this doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a conspiracy going on – perhaps tens of thousands of hits are simply not enough to produce relevant results, or the results are skewed for a different reason. DSL, for one, claims the test results are quite stable and don’t seem to alter much when the number of loads keeps on increasing. Be that as it may, it’s also worth noting that the ‘first spot’ doesn’t necessarily mean it’s also the ‘best spot’ – eye movement research could well conclude that the middle, far right or any other of the spots is actually the most beneficial one. For what it’s worth, the DSL team says they had to make two minor changes to the code in order to run their tests mimicking the real behavior of the page as closely as possible, so theoretically the results could end up being more random than they appear based on the results cited above when the browser choice screen actually goes live. Also, different browsers produced different results, although it didn’t matter much whether IE6, IE7 or IE8 was used for testing. Tests were also run in Firefox, baring completely different results, although there was never an equal distribution between browsers whatsoever, so even then the ‘randomness’ can be questioned. Do you think the selection on the browser choice screen will end up being completely random, or will more exhaustive research ultimately show that there’s a consistent pattern of browser selection happening here? (Hat tip to Patrik Hornik)      
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| RemakingMySpace: Controversial. Bold. Progressive. And Dead. Posted: 22 Feb 2010 03:47 PM PST
RemakingMySpace was going to be a new version of MySpace with every piece of legacy stuff thrown out the door. Users and employees would be solicited for input – to get new ideas and vote on already submitted ones – to rebuild the service brick by brick. Most of the work over the last six months was spent reimagining the design in various ways that would be shown to users, and building tools for the submission and consideration of new ideas. And “users” was broadly defined to include input from artists and bands, advertisers, etc. It was bold, controversial and progressive, say some sources. And now it’s also very, very dead. Geminder left MySpace last week. And the guy who hired her, former CEO Owen Van Natta, was terminated the week before. So what happened? The project was trouble from the start. Geminder was strongly pushing the project, obviously, and had the support of Van Natta. But she was working outside of Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn’s organization. Hirschhorn hated the idea from the start, say multiple sources, and constantly worked to undermine it. He favored a much more straightforward redesign effort. And, sources say, VP Product Mike Macadaan was also an outsider to the project, and strongly disapproved say of the whole process. None of that mattered as long as Van Natta was CEO and was able to push the project along. But once he was gone and Mike Jones and Hirschhorn took over as co-presidents, remakingmyspace was history. Within a day the team was dissolved and moved back into the product organization. The Apple designers, there as consultants, will likely be leaving shortly as their contracts expire. We’ve spoken with sources on both sides of this. Some say that the the consultants were way too expensive and Hirschhorn and Jones thought the pace of the project was too slow. One source said that almost no work was done at all, and that the team was often absent from the office. But others who knew about the project (the site was live for some MySpace employees) thought it was brilliant, and noted that six months wasn’t all that long for a project of this scope. There was genuine excitement within MySpace over remakingmyspace.com, and some are disgusted that it was all thrown away. One thing that strikes us as odd is the fact that the chief complaints – expense and time – were no longer relevant. The project was effectively done and the expense of it was behind them. “This was killed out of pure vindictiveness,” says one source. Another said that Hirschhorn never even bothered to really understand it, he just wanted it killed. So what comes next? A straightforward redesign that won’t rock the boat, says one source. Another says that many of the ideas from remakingmyspace will eventually make their way into whatever MySpace launches. Officially, all MySpace will say is “The reimagination of MySpace’s user interface is a top priority. Under Jason Hirschhorn, VP of Product Mike Macadaan and his team are leading the charge to redesign the site and create a beautiful new and exciting environment for our users.” We’re now trying to track down and verify screen shots and the new logo for remakingmyspace.com. Stay tuned for updates. And in all fairness, unless and until we’ve seen some of the site for ourselves, there’s no way to know which “side” of the argument is right.      
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| The Mysterious Social Search Abyss Of 2010 Posted: 22 Feb 2010 03:41 PM PST
At some point in mid January, a group of sites including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and Foursquare saw a huge drop in number of searches for their domains. Now, to be clear, these are only searches for the .com names, for example, “facebook.com” and “youtube.com” and not just the terms “facebook” and “youtube” themselves. Still, across the board, traffic had been rising for these .com domains and then at the same time all dropped off a cliff. One might think this has to do with the China situation (Google warned it might have to pull out of China after saying it would remove previous restraints on searches). But drilling down into the data shows that while the searches from China did take a big fall, they did as well from other countries around the world too. Other sites saw drops as well, but by far these large social sites saw the most pronounced drops that all seem to be aligned. Weirdly, google.com did not see any drop (though I’m not sure who uses Google to google google.com). We’ve reached out to Google for some clarification or insight into this and will update when we hear back. The logical answer would seem to be that they switched something in mid-January that led to these huge drops in social site searches on Google, but who knows. Maybe we have a wild honey bee extinction situation going on here within Google. Update: Google’s own Orkut.com also seeing a drop. As are several popular European social sites like Tuenti.com.
[via Mrinal]      
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Mobile streaming video startup 
Leena Rao picked a great title when she wrote a post about fledgling 
Tech giant 
Recently a war has broken out in Europe about who will power online video for media owners. The two main players tussling it out are both from the US: 
In theory there would be a huge advantage to having a bookstore that was not locked to one device. Historically the music industry was caught on the hop when Apple launched the iPod. Because it could play MP3s the iPod was the perfect companion to the Napsters/Kazaas of this world. That was a business for Apple, but not for the music industry, which later found itself locked into the the Apple store. Eventually online stores started offering DRM-free MP3s for sale, but as we know, the slow-to-react music industry has not recovered since. 
Social network for currency traders 
The rapid evolution of mobile phones, both on a hardware and a software level, combined with a surge in application storefront releases, deployments of higher-capacity network infrastructure and recent developments in positioning technologies could drive revenues from mobile location-based services to more than $12.7 billion by 2014, according to a new report published by 
Apple’s hypocrisy with regard to the App Store is something I know well. Several times last year I wrote about Apple allowing apps like “
Apple was probably happy to let another huge rush of apps into the store, while yes, generating revenue off of them. Meanwhile, this spawned a wave of developers who were making these types of apps. Several of those developers have reached out to us over the past few days basically saying that Apple has just destroyed their businesses. Again, businesses that these people would not have created without Apple approving these apps in the first place. Apple giveth, Apple taketh away.
On Thursday 8 January 2009, then 18-year old Mahoud Samed Almahadin (aka Matt Connor aka 
Google Buzz is now 
It took them four days, but Apple is finally explaining its surprise decision to 
In the summer of 2009 
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