The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- CrunchGear Reviews the Kempler & Strauss W Phone Watch
- PMSBuddy Helps (Men) Track That “Time Of The Month”
- Motorola Completes Acquisition Of Broadband Video Company BitBand
- MOGMobile – Not A Mobile Music App, But A Crazy Car
- Scribd Inks Distribution Deal With Indie Book Publisher Author Solutions
- Kublax To Get A Lifeline From Simply Finance
- The Rubicon Project Says Ad Server Is Dead, Details Future Plans
- Think Your Start-up Is Venture Worthy? Think Again.
- The People Of Twitter Think NBC’s Olympics Coverage Sucks
- Did Apple Just Ban Sexual Content From The App Store?
- YouTube To Live Stream Tiger Woods Press Conference
- Foursquare Responds To Please Rob Me: Please Shut Up
- Jobs: “Flash Would Murder the iPad.” Really Now, Let’s Be Realistic
- Google Reader Recommendations Swap Popularity For Personalization
- WordPress.com Outage Takes Us And 10,199,999 Other Blogs Down
- YouTube: Queries For ‘Snickers’ Jumped 18,000% After Their Super Bowl Ad
- StockTwits Evolves, Becomes Must Use Site For Traders
- CardPool Wants To Buy And Sell Your Unused Gift Cards
- Sex.com Domain To Be Sold At Auction. The Bidding Starts At $1 Million
- Money Will Flow Like Aquafina If You Can Come Up With A Better Idea Than Pepsi During SXSW
- Line2’s Google Voice For Businesses Can Now Juggle 3G, Cellular, And Wifi Networks
- Bump’s Mobile Data Swapping API Now Open To Everyone
- Google Voice Launches A Series Of Videos To Explain Its “Awesomeness,” Gibberish
- Facebook Now Takes PayPal
- Help Yourself: Triggit’s Real-Time Display Ad Bidding Platform Is Now Self Serve
| CrunchGear Reviews the Kempler & Strauss W Phone Watch Posted: 19 Feb 2010 09:12 AM PST  Short Version: The Kempler & Strauss W Phone watch is a great idea. It's a compact, unlocked GSM phone that makes a great conversation piece and is fun - if a bit maddening - to use. Can it ever be your "first phone?" Absolutely not, but at $199 unlocked you can't get a GSM phone - at least one stuffed inside a watch - for much cheaper.
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| PMSBuddy Helps (Men) Track That “Time Of The Month” Posted: 19 Feb 2010 07:45 AM PST
For men looking to have some sort of forewarning of their girlfriend or partner’s “time of the month,” PMSBuddy has got you covered. PMSbuddy’s iPhone app allows users to track the menstrual cycles of the women in their lives in the hope of notifying men and helping them cope with the dreaded PMS (premenstrual syndrome) and its effects. As ridiculous as it sounds to a woman, the service is currently being used by over 100,000 people worldwide, via an iPhone app, a website and Facebook widget. PMSBuddy is launching a new version of its iPhone app that will offer push notifications of upcoming PMS and the the ability to locate flower shops near you (via GPS). PMSBuddy will also be rolling out similar applications for Android and Blackberry phones. And PMSBuddy is expanding to other verticals. The startup will soon be launching Fertility Buddy, which allows women to track when they are ovulating to increase (or decrease) the likelihood of conception. Similar apps to PMSBuddy include MyMate and iAmAMan.      
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| Motorola Completes Acquisition Of Broadband Video Company BitBand Posted: 19 Feb 2010 07:28 AM PST
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Motorola says the purchase of BitBand will complement its existing on-demand product line, which includes a framework for content management and high-performance streaming servers for centralized on-demand networks. It’s also worth noting that Motorola late last year also completed the acquisition of SecureMedia, a company that specializes in digital rights management for IP video networks. Motorola recently said that it is moving forward with plans to reorganize into two independent companies by the first quarter of next year, with its mobile handset unit and its television set-top box division being combined and spun off as a separate publicly traded company. Rumor has it that Motorola has been seeking a buyer for its set-top box and wireless networking units for quite some time, hoping to fetch between $1 billion and $5 billion depending on which media report you choose to believe.      
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| MOGMobile – Not A Mobile Music App, But A Crazy Car Posted: 19 Feb 2010 06:44 AM PST
But no. MOG still says a mobile app is coming sometime soon. But MOGMobile is this crazy car they’re having built to take to the SXSW conference in March. From the guys creating it: “We are basically building out the van with foam which we will fiberglass over. Then we will give the bald bambino 24,000 beautiful blue hair plugs, add a psycko sound system and send her down south.” That’s a conceptual drawing to the right. Below is the actual interior. I can’t wait to go for a spin in this thing. It just screams understated class.
     
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| Scribd Inks Distribution Deal With Indie Book Publisher Author Solutions Posted: 19 Feb 2010 06:30 AM PST
In addition, a portion of its backlist of more than 120,000 titles will be put up for sale on Scribd, although there was no indication of exactly how many books that represents. In March 2009, Scribd had already scored partnerships with a number of major publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications. And all that content is attracting a lot of users too, apparently. In a statement, Author Solutions says the Scribd portal currently attracts over 50 million users per month, and that the startup’s platform will help authors make more money from book sales because it brings higher royalty percentages than are possible with traditional paper-and-ink books. In its promotion video, which I embedded below, Author Solutions says it has helped some 85,000 authors get their books published to date. Under terms of the agreement with Scribds, authors will receive 50 percent of the net sales of their titles through the startup’s social platform. A default price of $9.99 will be set for each title, but authors will have the opportunity to set their own prices. Distribution to Scribd will be included as a free service for all new ASI titles.
     
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| Kublax To Get A Lifeline From Simply Finance Posted: 19 Feb 2010 05:55 AM PST
We recently wrote about the death of Kublax, a Mint.com for the UK. Kublax, a Seedcamp 2007 winner which launched in August 2008, was unable to secure funding in an arena that was chock full of competitors, including MoneyDashboard, and Lovemoney.com. But it looks like Kublax may have found a lifeline. In an email to the customers of its beta site, founders Sridhar Sethuraman and CEO Tom Symonds wrote that Kublax is in discussions with UK site Simply Finance to keep the personal finance sites alive. Here’s the text of the message:
Simply Finance helps consumers to find the lowest rates available on mortgages, insurance, loans, debt solutions and a range of other financial products and services. It’s unclear if Simply Finance is in talks to acquire Kublax or just fund the startup. Kublax launched it's public service in May last year of "just under" 1 million euros. The new funds were from Ambient Sound Investments and individuals such as Stefan Glänzer, former executive chairman of Last.fm and Jonty Kelt, Vice President of Search, International with DoubleClick. Previous investors which participated in that round were The Accelerator Group (TAG) (a Seedcamp backer), Omnis Mundi Invest AG and Digitalents Capital. In February 2008 Kublax won a round of undisclosed angel investment from those latter three, together with Five Ventures.      
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| The Rubicon Project Says Ad Server Is Dead, Details Future Plans Posted: 19 Feb 2010 05:42 AM PST
The company also announced that it has tapped Allen & Company as its financial advisor to support the company's goals, which it says will include strategic acquisitions, platform expansion and other paths to accelerated international growth. The Rubicon Project, which launched in 2007, in its manifesto takes aim at players in the ad server technology market, saying that it is currently in a ‘dangerous’ state of status quo. The company says it will fight to overcome the increasing price erosion that publishers have witnessed over the past few years because the balance in the marketplace has so far favored the demand-side of the equation. Frank Addante, CEO and Founder of the Rubicon Project, in a statement said:
At the PaidContent conference in New York, the company has revealed plans to expand its platform in 2010 to offer additional ad serving, forecasting, and campaign management functionality across both premium guaranteed and non-guaranteed media sales, but also technology for automated demand access, self-service advertising sales, a centralized publisher data platform and self-service advertising sales, among other plans. The event is being streamed live as we speak. The Rubicon Project to date raised about $42 million in venture capital over numerous rounds from investors like Clearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, IDG Ventures and GE/NBC Universal's Peacock Equity Fund.      
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| Think Your Start-up Is Venture Worthy? Think Again. Posted: 19 Feb 2010 04:16 AM PST
A lot of the stats weren't surprising. According to VCs, there's been a 65% decrease in up-rounds (where a company gets a bigger valuation) in the last six months and more than 60% of those polled expect a longer wait for an exit. Similarly, the bulk of the companies getting funding are still California-based. There does seem to be some shifts on where the money is going. After Northern California and Southern California the biggest area of investment geographically was in international companies. And investors said they intend to invest more in cleantech than software going forward. This is a big reversal, as software has long been the dominant category for venture deals, but it's unknown whether software has lost favor, or whether it's just become so pervasive that it doesn't really hold together as a category anymore. But it's when you look between the survey of VCs and the survey of private businesses that things start to get ugly. The businesses, it seems, vastly over-estimate their ability to raise funds. 41% of them feel that they qualify for venture capital funding. Meanwhile, the VCs surveyed indicated that their firms are only doing a few deals every six months and go through one hundred business plans to close one deal. Clearly, the rate of acceptance isn't anything like 41%, says researcher John K. Paglia, Pepperdiine's Denney Academic Chair and Associate Professor of Finance. A few more stats make that picture look worse. Researchers divided the portfolio companies into six stages and startups are still operating a loss in each of the first four. Those categories represent roughly 84% of all portfolio companies. That means the vast majority of privately held companies are still very dependent on venture money to stay in business. And investors aren't necessarily keen on their prospects. Respondents deemed between 12%-16% of companies generating revenues to be essentially "worthless" and deemed 20%-26% of their pre-revenue investments to be "worthless." Ouch. Add to this that 72.7% of VCs said they had a decreased appetite for risk and that more than half of those polled expect their firms to do between zero and three deals in the next year and you start to get the feeling things are going to get a lot worse for private companies, in aggregate, before they get better. Of course life isn't that much better for the VCs: Sixty percent of them say their own prospects for raising new funds have declined over the last six months and 41% said they aren't planning on even attempting it in 2010. Long term, shake-outs are good for the industry, Paglia notes. Once valuations finish falling, worthless companies are closed or sold at a loss and venture firms that can’t raise another fund hang it up, venture capital will be a much healthier industry on the rise. The big question is just how long that reset takes.      
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| The People Of Twitter Think NBC’s Olympics Coverage Sucks Posted: 18 Feb 2010 09:56 PM PST
NBC is driving people on the Internet crazy by tape-delaying coverage of the Olympics until primetime. Okay, maybe it’s only driving Henry Blodget crazy, and everyone on Twitter. Well, not everyone on Twitter—68 percent, according to a recent reading I took on Twitter Sentiment. Roughly two thirds of Tweets about the NBC Olympics are negative. Some examples of the venting occurring on Twitter about NBC’s delayed Olympics coverage:
What’s the point of watching the women’s downhill super combined when you already know that Lindsey Vonn crashed because half the people you follow on Twitter decided to spoil the race earlier in the day when it actually happened? Sports need to be shown live because half the drama is in the outcome. The excitement just kind of fizzles otherwise. Everything else is realtime, NBC can’t expect the country to just wait for Bob Costas to start rolling tape.
     
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| Did Apple Just Ban Sexual Content From The App Store? Posted: 18 Feb 2010 07:35 PM PST
From what I can tell, this isn’t an isolated incident. I’ve tried to download apps called “Exotic Positions” and “Sexy Women”, and both of them gave me errors indicating that the applications were no longer available. However, some applications with similar themes (“Beautiful Boobs”, “Sexy Girls Uncovered”, and “Sex Strip”) worked. All of these applications came with Apple’s “objectionable material” warning that requires you to affirm that you’re over the age of 17. This may be a case of Apple picking and choosing which apps are too sexual, or they may still be figuring out which apps to pull (or the changes may not have propagated to all of Apple’s servers). There are reports on Twitter of other developers having their applications pulled as well. Of course, many of these “sexy” applications have been on the App Store for many months. Wobble, which lets you add “jiggle points” to any photo (use your imagination) hasn’t released a change in functionality for 6-8 months, and has been installed 970,000 times — none of these were flying under Apple’s radar. We’ve reached out to Apple for more information.
     
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| YouTube To Live Stream Tiger Woods Press Conference Posted: 18 Feb 2010 07:13 PM PST
This is interesting for a few reasons. First, it’s going to get a lot of traffic, as many people will be at work and won’t be able to watch the conference from their TV sets. But it’s also another live video feed on YouTube, which historically has almost exclusively featured recorded content. Over the last year or so, YouTube has been experimenting more often with live feeds, with broadcasts including YouTube Live, numerous political debates and events including President Obama’s record-breaking inauguration, and more recently, earnings webcasts. But the Tiger Woods event, while certainly newsworthy, is a different beast. It’s related more to gossip and sports than it is to our nation’s future or Google news. It could also be a sign of things to come. YouTube doesn’t stream these events themselves (they’ve often relied on Akamai), but it’s apparent that they’re becoming more open to featuring live streams on the home page. And even though YouTube’s roots may lie in user-submitted videos, it seems foolish to push users to other video sites whenever they want to see a major event live. The event starts at 8 AM PST. Other sites that will be streaming the event include Ustream and major news networks. Update: It’s official, YouTube just announced it here.      
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| Foursquare Responds To Please Rob Me: Please Shut Up Posted: 18 Feb 2010 06:50 PM PST
In fact, it seems the entire impetus behind Foursquare’s post was Please Rob Me, the mock service set up in an attempt to show the dangers of tweeting out Foursquare check-ins. We, along with several other sites, covered it yesterday. And while it’s hard to take that site itself seriously, it does raise some interesting points. Yes, as Foursquare notes and Gawker wrote yesterday, it’s just as likely that a burglar knows your home is going to be empty from 9 to 5 when you’re at work (provided you have a 9 to 5 job, of course). But people also aren’t routinely sending out their home address to thousands of strangers as they might be doing if they have Foursquare hooked up to Twitter. And when you add that on top of all of the other stuff that people send out on Twitter that perhaps they shouldn’t (when mixed with location information, etc), things get interesting. The point here is: does anyone really think Foursquare alone is going to lead to a rise in break-ins? No (I’m not saying that will never happen, but I don’t see it being an epidemic). The main point, as I saw it, is that tying a closed, symmetric network (Foursquare) to an open, asymmetric one (Twitter) is something that’s potentially troublesome for location-based services. But no one really seems to be talking about it. What I mean by that is that on Foursquare, just like Facebook, you have to explicitly allow someone to follow you (and you follow them back in return). On Twitter, anyone can follow you without your permission (assuming you have an unlocked account). When you tweet out your Foursquare check-ins (some people even do this automatically), it essentially makes Foursquare an asymmetric network. And believe it or not, some people are doing that without really thinking about it. Or they’re doing it because it’s easier to gain friends/followers on an asymmetric network. This is an issue that Facebook is undoubtedly thinking about right now as it considers how to enter the location playing field. As I said, right now, the network is largely symmetric, but recent changes are making it more asymmetric. And how they handle location information — with their 400 million+ users is going to be very interesting. And potentially, actually scary.      
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| Jobs: “Flash Would Murder the iPad.” Really Now, Let’s Be Realistic Posted: 18 Feb 2010 06:31 PM PST  I feel like I should come to Flash's defense, partially because I gave it one between the ribs last night, and partially because, in the words of Sherlock Holmes, "to see justice done is every man's business." Now here we have Steve Jobs saying in a WSJ interview that using Flash for video would reduce battery life from 10 hours to 1 hour, and suggests H.264 as an alternative. Let's just take a moment to evaluate these plainly inflammatory statements.
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| Google Reader Recommendations Swap Popularity For Personalization Posted: 18 Feb 2010 06:13 PM PST
The new “Recommended items” feed replaces the “Popular items” feed in the same Explore area. “With the latest round of improvements, we've started inserting items selected just for you inside the Recommended items section,” Google writes. What’s not entirely clear from Google’s post is how they’re pulling together these recommendations for Reader users. I have to assume it’s the same way they’ve long recommended news feeds to you, which is by looking at your Reader Trends and web browsing history (if you have that turned on), and comparing it with other users. A quick scan of my own new Recommended items area shows results that are pretty hit-or-miss. But maybe that’s because I’m a writer who has to scan hundreds of sites every day even if not all of them particularly interest me. There’s another small new feature in Reader today too: related feeds. If you trigger the drop down menu on a certain feed, and hover over “More like this,” you’ll see a list of feeds for what Reader considers to be similar sites. Subscribing to them is then just a button click away. Using Google Reader this past week has been interesting as Google Buzz has multiplied the number of users following the items I share several times over. This is of course because Buzz and Reader (and the other Google properties) share the same social graph now — the same highly controversial social graph which saw you automatically friending certain people you contact on Gmail or over IM. In fact, Google had to stop doing that. I’m still not sure Reader, or Google as a whole, gets this whole social thing, but they’re certainly growing their graph quickly now.      
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| WordPress.com Outage Takes Us And 10,199,999 Other Blogs Down Posted: 18 Feb 2010 05:31 PM PST
TechCrunch is one of the millions of blogs hosted on WordPress.com (not to be confused with sites that run the WordPress software but are hosted elsewhere). All told, some 10.2 million blogs went down — wiping out some 5.5 million pageviews, WordPress estimates. This was their worst outage in 4 years. So what happened? Mullenweg says WordPress is still gathering details but their initial diagnosis is that “an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven't experienced before, and broke the site.” He notes that this also tripped up all the mechanisms to prevent a total failure, so that occurred. Luckily, no data was lost in the outage, it just simply could not be sent out. Mullenweg ends with, “I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again.” So say we all.      
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| YouTube: Queries For ‘Snickers’ Jumped 18,000% After Their Super Bowl Ad Posted: 18 Feb 2010 05:04 PM PST
During the days following the Super Bowl, YouTube reported an 18,000% spike in queries for “Snickers” (no doubt spurred by their ad featuring Betty White and Abe Vigoda). YouTube also says that mobile queries for Doritos rose by 5,000% (note that the Snickers stat was for YouTube’s entire property but Doritios was for mobile only — it’s a bit strange that they aren’t giving an apples to apples comparison). YouTube ran a week-long contest beginning on Super Bowl Sunday that invited users to choose their favorite ad using a special site called YouTube Ad Blitz, during which 2.9 million votes were cast (Doritos took the top spot). YouTube mentions one other interesting stat: clicks on the site’s Promoted Videos, which allow users and brands to advertise their videos on the site, doubled over Super Bowl weekend.      
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| StockTwits Evolves, Becomes Must Use Site For Traders Posted: 18 Feb 2010 04:55 PM PST
Co-founder Howard Lindzon suggests five things that new StockTwits users will want to do on the new site: watch the suggested user stream, peruse charts shared by other users, check out specific filtered ticker pages (example), watch the 24-hour StockTwits TV stream, or contribute your own content. Last month StockTwits acquired a financial news site and continues to bring in authoritative voices to share their trading strategies via blog posts and video. StockTwits is like cocaine for hard core traders, They started long ago with just a filtered stream of Twitter messages that touched on stocks. But they’ve continued to add resources that traders want and need to their product suite. I won’t be surprised if more than a few of the big financial guys make a run for them this year. There’s so much concentrated activity flowing through StockTwits that any number of suitors will be eager to take control of this community.      
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| CardPool Wants To Buy And Sell Your Unused Gift Cards Posted: 18 Feb 2010 03:42 PM PST
Gift cards can be a double edged sword. I recently got married and received a number of gift cards to stores where I never shop. But at the same time, I don’t want the value of the card to go to waste. There have been a number of auction-like marketplaces, such as Plastic Jungle and Rackup, that have popped up to allow users can buy and sell their gift cards to each other in an eBay like interface (you can also do this eBay itself). Y Combinator startup CardPool is entering the space but with a slightly different twist to its model. Card Pool allows users to both buy and sell gift cards. CardPool buys people’s unwanted gift cards, and sells gift cards at large discounts. Though the idea isn’t new, Card Pool has an attractive and fair pricing model. They judge the buyback and selling amount by how desirable the cards are. For example, you can sell a BestBuy’s gift card, which is highly desirable, to CardPool for 90 percent of its value. And on CardPool’s site, you can find a Best Buy gift card for 5 percent off its original value. On the other hand, 1-800-Flowers’ gift cards, which are not as popular as Best Buy’s cards, are discounted by 30 percent on the site. I’m a fan of the site for a few reasons. The plus about CardPool is that it allows returns for cards for up to 100 days, and many of its competitors don;t have an expansive of a return period. Also, CardPool won’t sell gift cards that have expirations or fees. CardPool makes money off the spread between buying and selling cards. The startup is lean, with its two co-founders running the site, keeping overhead low. The company is also looking into forging partnerships with retailers like Barnes and Noble, Best Buy and others to sell their gift cards at discounted prices from CardPool. CardPool also has talent on its side. Co-founder Anson Tsai developed online music player Anywhere.com, which was acquired by Imeem in 2008.      
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| Sex.com Domain To Be Sold At Auction. The Bidding Starts At $1 Million Posted: 18 Feb 2010 01:31 PM PST
It’s been through several owners, legal battles and even the subject of books, but Sex.com will be sold once again in an auction next month. Bids will start at $1 million. Ownership over the Sex.com domain was the subject of a decade-long legal battle chronicled in not one, but two books. It was sold to a company called ESCOM in 2006 for a reported $14 million. It is possible that ESCOM was never able to pay off that amount because the notice (embedded below) says the sale is due to a foreclosure “for default in the payment of debt and performance of obligations owed by Escom, LLC (“Borrower”) to DOM Partners LLC (Secured Party”). The notice also states: “To be qualified to bid at the auction, bidders must appear at the auction with a certified bank check in the amount of $1,000,000.” The type-in traffic alone might be worth that much. But the domain itself has languished. The site is a PG-13 landing page with links to a story of the day, videos, horoscopes, a shop, and a classifieds section that is still under construction. Sex.com does not even appear in the first page of results on Google for the search term “sex”. It’s sad really, like a scorned lover being put out on the curb. According to one of the investors, there were too many parties involved who “prevented the asset from being operated properly.” It sounds like the site was bedeviled by incompetence and infighting. “I wouldn’t bet on any auction happening with this group on that date, litigated first most likely,” says the investor.
     
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| Money Will Flow Like Aquafina If You Can Come Up With A Better Idea Than Pepsi During SXSW Posted: 18 Feb 2010 01:24 PM PST
Pepsi is calling for you to submit ideas to their Refresh Project before the SXSW conference taking place in Austin, TX next month. During the conference, people both there and across the web would then vote on their favorite ideas (through their site, Twitter, Facebook, etc). The winner, announced on the last day of SXSW’s interactive portion (March 16), would get a spot grant to make their idea a reality. The Refresh Project for this month is currently giving away $1.3 million in funding, for example. The Refresh Project traditionally breaks up ideas into the following categories: Health, Arts & Culture, Food & Shelter, The Planet, Neighborhoods, and Education. But for this SXSW event, Pepsi is looking for “digital pro-social” ideas. Not really sure what that means, but I assume it means they’re looking for something involving the Internet that can make the world a better place. At the very least, they’re looking for a better idea than shipping plastic water bottles to blogs. Kidding aside, Pepsi is investing more than $20 million this year for fund ideas through this Refresh Project. Start thinking about some good ones to submit for SXSW next month.      
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| Line2’s Google Voice For Businesses Can Now Juggle 3G, Cellular, And Wifi Networks Posted: 18 Feb 2010 12:45 PM PST
CEO Peter Sisson says that this is the first iPhone application that lets you use one phone number for both inbound and outbound calls over both WiFi and cellular networks on AT&T. So what does that mean? If you’re one of the millions of iPhone users who has to deal with AT&T’s shoddy network, Line2 can now intelligently receive a call over WiFi when it’s available (you don’t have to manually instruct the app to use WiFi — it will do it automatically). And if you leave your WFi network during the call, the phone can automatically switch to 3G. Unfortunately, the new feature comes with a caveat: in order to receive an inbound call over WiFi, you’ll have to have the Line2 application open at the time the call comes in. Sisson says that the company is developing a workaround that uses push notifications (you’ll get an alert when someone tries calling you, hit OK, and the app will launch and receive the call over WiFi) but for now I suspect most people will still be getting inbound calls over the cellular network. Still, if you’re using your iPhone for business calls and are sick of dealing with dropped calls, this seems like a great solution. Line2 offers a 30 day free trial, and costs $15 a month after that.
First Dual Mode WiFi VOiP Cell Phone App – Line2 from Toren Ajk on Vimeo.      
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| Bump’s Mobile Data Swapping API Now Open To Everyone Posted: 18 Feb 2010 11:26 AM PST
To kickstart its API launch, Bump held a contest that invited developers to work the API into their iPhone applications. You can see a gallery of the winners here. The winning apps include CheckOut, which lets you share gift cards with friends by tapping your phones together; CloudNote, which lets you swap digital Post-It notes; and SocialFuse, which allows you to connect on Twitter and LinkedIn with someone (again, by tapping your phones together). Be sure to check out the gallery page for a half dozen runners-up to get more ideas of what the API can do. For many startups, an API is a nice way to build a community but isn’t necessarily a key to success. I don’t think that’s the case for Bump — its API will likely prove very important. Bump wants to become the way people are swapping their contact information, data, and even money when they’re standing next to each other. Bump can integrate that functionality into their own app, but the barrier to using the service would be much lower if it was built-in to a variety of other popular applications. CEO David Lieb says that Bump issued 300 developer keys so far. And while the current API is iPhone only, an Android version is in the works — and it’s getting “an increasing number of requests”. Bump’s official mobile application, which is available on both iPhone and Android, is now closing in on 10 million downloads.      
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| Google Voice Launches A Series Of Videos To Explain Its “Awesomeness,” Gibberish Posted: 18 Feb 2010 10:48 AM PST
The first (embedded below) is a simple overview, “What is Google Voice.” The 11 others go into more detail about actual features such as the mobile app (as in, the one that actually works on the iPhone), how to block callers, sharing voicemails, personalized greetings, and connecting all your numbers to your one Google Voice numbers, among other things. You can find them all on this new YouTube page that Google has created (just in case you thought Microsoft were the only ones using YouTube for product promotion). There is also a video describing voicemail transcription. My favorite part of this video is how Google skirts around how the vast majority of the voice transcriptions are in absolute gibberish. “Transcriptions aren’t perfect, but we hope they’re good enough to save you from listening to the message.” I have yet to experience that. Instead, here are some of my favorites that I’ve gotten just in the past couple of weeks:
Hands down, the best way to experience Google Voice is to let it take over the phone controls on your mobile device. Unfortunately, that only works on Android devices right now — and likely never will for the iPhone. Those of us with iPhones will have to settle for the web app version (which is still pretty nice).
     
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| Posted: 18 Feb 2010 10:25 AM PST
Over the last year or so, Facebook has been gradually ramping up its Credits system, which for a long time was used just to purchase virtual gifts (now you can use it to buy real gifts, songs, and it’s been integrated with some applications). Today comes news that will make it even easier to buy Facebook Credits: you’ll be able to buy them with PayPal. The new partnership actually encompasses a few areas of Facebook’s payments. Along with Facebook Credits, you’ll be able to use PayPal to purchase Facebook Ads. This is big news for both companies. PayPal has been trying to establish a greater presence in micropayments and on Facebook itself. And Facebook will now make it easier for PayPal’s 81 million users to quickly stock up on ads and buy its credits, which are only going to become more important on the site going forward. Other payment options for Facebook include standard credit cards and mobile phones (using Zong). One other reason why this is interesting: given Facebook’s interest in extending itself beyond Facebook.com through services like Facebook Connect, it wouldn’t be surprising if it started prompting people to start “Paying With Facebook” on external sites, which would make it competitive with PayPal. Given how nascent Facebook payments are this would likely be a long ways off (if it’s even coming). Note: I made the image above, so the payment screen may look a bit different.      
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| Help Yourself: Triggit’s Real-Time Display Ad Bidding Platform Is Now Self Serve Posted: 18 Feb 2010 10:01 AM PST
Triggit launched this demand-side platform in October, but up until now it has been a ‘full service’ solution — in other words, you’d have to work directly with the company in order to manage your advertising campaigns through their system. Now anyone can sign up. For those who aren’t familiar with these real time ad auctions, Triggit sits on top of a half dozen real time ad exchanges, which are offered by Google, Yahoo, and others. When these ad exchanges have an available impression they offer it, in real-time, to services like Triggit to see how much their clients are willing to bid for the ad impression. Triggit’s system automates this for their customers, allowing them to set rules around how much they’re willing to spend and where their ads should be shown. The new self-serve signup form should be straightforward to anyone who has run an ad campaign before. You enter the maximum CPM you’re willing to spend on your ads, upload your creative, and if there’s a maximum number of times you’d like the ad to be shown to a given user, you can set a frequency cap. There are also some advanced options for tracking ad conversions and retargeting. And Triggit’s tracking pixel can dynamically adjust an advertising campaign automatically — if the system detects that a certain site is performing better than others, it can start sending more impressions to that site. Other options include geotargeting, and the ability to whitelist or blacklist specific sites.
     
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Motorola this morning announced that it has completed the 
When I saw the email talking about MOGMobile, I thought “yes, 
Independent book publisher 
Digital advertising infrastructure company the 
Apple may have just made a major change to the App Store that could render many developers’ applications worthless. We’ve just heard from Jon Atherton, the developer behind Wobble iBoobs, who says that he just received an Email from Apple indicating that his application was being removed from the App Store because of a new policy change: Apple has apparently decided “to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store.” Here’s the letter Atherton says he received: 
Gossip mongers and sports fans alike are eagerly awaiting Tiger Woods’ press conference tomorrow morning, when he’ll confront the public and apologize for his string of affairs that tarnished both his image as a role model and his endorsement earnings. And, according to one source, you’ll be able to live stream it from the world’s most popular video portal: YouTube.
The team behind the hot location-based service 
Back in October of last year, Google Reader 
As you may have noticed, TechCrunch was down for an extended period of time this afternoon. In case you haven’t read about 
It’s been nearly two weeks since the Super Bowl, but the stats behind one of the world’s biggest media spectacles keep pouring in. YouTube has just 
It was only a few months ago that 
You may recall that last year we 
Last September, while the Apple/Google Voice 
Last December, mobile data swapping startup 
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