The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Can Entrepreneurs Be Made?
- PayPal To Restore Bank Withdrawal Service In India On March 3rd
- The Steady, Efficient Decline Of Yahoo
- webOS 1.4 update now available for the Palm Pre and Pixi on Sprint
- The iPhone’s Peephole
- Qype, The Yelp Of Europe, Gets A Look From Google & Nokia
- Competition! Mad Lib your favourite site’s sign up page for fame, shampoo and other prizes
- Brightkite: 2 Million Users And A Lot Of Local Promo Interest
- Thank You TechCrunch Readers and Sponsors!
- Rejected By Apple, Grooveshark Releases App For Jailbroken iPhones On Cydia
- Microsoft Tells Google To Face The Antitrust Music
- Let’s Talk: Ztail Scores Deal With A Top Mobile Phone Retailer
- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Please Disregard This Email
- Seesmic’s BlackBerry App Now Sweeter Than All The Others
- Social Graph In Mind, Twitter Starts Prompting Users To Fill Out Their Profiles
- Badges Like Us: Foursquare Gets Its Rap Song
- Google Enhances Local Search With “Nearby” Filter
- Yahoo Answers Gets A Much-Needed Facelift
- Naked Apartments Attempts To Ease The Apartment Hunt For New Yorkers
| Posted: 27 Feb 2010 07:00 AM PST
Jason, Fred, and Silicon Valley VCs, I've got news for you: you've got it all wrong. Entrepreneurs aren't born, they're made. And they aren't anything like you think they are. My team surveyed 549 successful entrepreneurs. We found that the majority didn't have entrepreneurial parents. They didn't even have entrepreneurial aspirations while going to school. They simply got tired of working for others, had a great idea they wanted to commercialize, or woke up one day with an urgent desire to build wealth before they retired. So they took the big leap.
Only a quarter caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college. Half didn't even think about entrepreneurship, and they had little interest in it when in school.
The education and training of entrepreneurs is something that the Kauffman Foundation has been researching extensively. Over the last six years, it has invested around $50 million on academic research to understand what makes entrepreneurs tick and what policies are most conducive to entrepreneurship and to construct data bases to permit analyses of these subjects. (Kauffman has also funded some of my research at Duke, UC-Berkeley, and Harvard.) Its VP of Research, Bob Litan, says that Kauffman has learnt conclusively that entrepreneurship can be taught. The key is to provide education at "teachable moments" — when the entrepreneur is thinking about starting a venture or ready to scale it. What entrepreneurs need isn't the type of abstract course they teach in business schools, but practical, relevant knowledge. That's why Kauffman created a program called Fast Trac, which has trained 300,000 entrepreneurs so far. One of the findings of Kauffman research is that of the appx. 600,000 businesses that are started every year, less than a fraction of 1% become high-growth “scale” businesses. These new firms, especially the "scale" firms, have added all of the net incremental jobs to U.S. economy since 1980 (about 40 million), and probably account for about 1/3 of GDP growth since then. So the key to boosting economic growth is to increase the number of successful high-growth startups. After all, the growth rate of our economy is nothing more than the aggregation of the growth of our firms. That is why Kauffman (which has a $2 billion endowment) is investing heavily in an ambitious new program called Kauffman Labs. This aims to dramatically increase the ability of small businesses to become big businesses. The Labs program is built around a novel idea: that highly motivated individuals with “scalable ideas” can be recruited to be entrepreneurs and to be made successful, by surrounding them with a network of other experienced entrepreneurs; sources of money; and mentors. The goal is to educate entrepreneurs and surround them with a powerful network. This is like a Y Combinator on steroids. Anecdotal evidence also shows that there are many more factors at play than that of genes. Note this BusinessWeek article about waves of spinoffs from Google. I doubt that all of these Google employees who are starting successful businesses were born with entrepreneurial genes. VC and former entrepreneur Brad Feld also blogged about how many of his frat buddies at MIT had become successful entrepreneurs. Were all of these people born to be entrepreneurs as well? I don't think so. It is probably education, exposure to entrepreneurship, and networks that led these people to pursue the entrepreneurial path — which means that Kauffman Foundation may have hit on the right idea with Kauffman Labs. The reason this topic is really important is that, as Wilson writes, "Venture Capital is a lot about pattern recognition". The reality is that VCs like him make quick judgments about people based on the stereotypes in their minds. So, like the women that I wrote about in my previous posts, we may be disadvantaging another important segment of our population – a segment that is older, more humble, more sensible, and more realistic than the population that is getting all the attention (and the money). Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.      
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| PayPal To Restore Bank Withdrawal Service In India On March 3rd Posted: 27 Feb 2010 06:34 AM PST
Last week, rumors that PayPal was actually forced into halting personal payments by Reserve Bank Of India (RBI) because they did not comply with all relevant regulatory requirements, were confirmed. Last night, PayPal posted a status update on its corporate blog, saying that they anticipate to resume part of its service, namely bank withdrawal abilities, as of Wednesday, March 3rd. From the blog post:
As part of the changes, Indian customers will be required to fill out a new field dubbed 'Export Code' when they request a withdrawal (here’s how to get one). This information is apparently required under current Indian laws in order to identify the nature of cross-border merchant transactions. PayPal will share specific instructions on how users can move money into bank accounts on Monday, March 1st. But Reserve Bank Of India has informed the eBay company that it requires specific approvals to allow personal inward remittances to India, which it currently does not have. In other words: PayPal is still forced by law to effectively suspend personal payments going into the accounts of its Indian customers for the foreseeable future, unless they are exporters. We’ll provide an update when that changes.      
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| The Steady, Efficient Decline Of Yahoo Posted: 27 Feb 2010 01:23 AM PST
Yahoo’s strategy seems more like “ready, aim, aim, aim, aim…” Yesterday Jordan Rohan at Thomas Weisel Partners described Yahoo in his first analyst report on the company. He thinks this is the right management team to bring more efficiency to Yahoo. But he spends most of his time talking about the negatives, and there’s no excitement around new products or ideas:
On the upside, he notes that a cyclical upswing in advertising is likely to help Yahoo. Here are a few of the negatives:
More worrying are the metrics comparisons to Facebook. Rohan notes that total minutes spent by U.S. visitors to Facebook are set to surpass Yahoo. And the worldwide numbers are even worse. Facebook now has 160 million daily visitors and 227 billion monthly page views worldwide (Comscore), compared to 160 million and just 94 billion for Yahoo. Yahoo still has tons of daily visitors, but they are spending 12% less time on the site in aggregate compared to a year ago. In the same period Facebook has grown total page views by 217%. Yahoo will continue to shrink as sites are sold off and shuttered, and CEO Carol Bartz works on those efficiency gains. But this is no longer even close to an exciting company that thrives on chaotic creativity. Yahoo’s foundation is rotten. They have no plan to get back into the game. Or if they do have a plan, no one knows about it. Sadly, the first site many of us ever visited on the Internet is turning into little more than a business school study in financial engineering. It deserved a better fate.      
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| webOS 1.4 update now available for the Palm Pre and Pixi on Sprint Posted: 26 Feb 2010 10:33 PM PST
Good news, Palm fans! If you’ve taken a break from jamming on the “Update” button, it’s time to go tap it one last time: the rollout of webOS 1.4 has just begun. The catch: it seems that it’s only for Sprint handsets right now, with the Verizon Pre Plus and Pixi Plus still reporting that 1.3 is the latest release. We knew it was coming in February thanks to Palm’s announcement at CES — and thanks to the rumor mill, we were all lead to believe it was coming a few weeks ago. All false starts and false hopes aside, it’s available now. We’re seeing reports (thanks Twitter!) that it just has gone live on Sprint handsets. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>      
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| Posted: 26 Feb 2010 09:43 PM PST
My first reaction to this was the humorous thought that both iTunes and Safari would be banned from the App Store had they not been included by default on every iPhone. But that actually lead to a more interesting thought that a few other posts around the web back up today: Safari is the iPhone’s peephole. What I mean is that Apple very tightly controls nearly every aspect of the iPhone (and really, all products). While they undoubtedly have both selfish (app revenues) and unselfish (protection) reasons for doing this, this type of suffocating control should be enough to make users walk away. But it’s not. And a big reason may be Safari. Think about it: you can’t have porn on your iPhone — but actually, you can. You just have to go through Safari. You can’t have Google Voice on your iPhone — but actually, you can. You just have to go through Safari. Other Google Apps? Same thing. Sure, it’s not as easy or as nice as if there were a native app experience, but it’s doable. And as HTML5 continues to mature, it will be more and more doable. In fact, over the past few months I’ve encountered a number of web apps on the iPhone that are increasingly impressive. One is the Google Buzz app, which is better than Google Buzz on the desktop because it uses HTML5 to access your location through your phone. Remember, when the iPhone first launched in 2007, no native third-party apps were allowed. All Apple said at the time was that if you wanted to make an app, it had to be a web app. The problem was that the HTML5 was basically non-existant at the time, and the older HTML/JavaScript/CSS combination simply wasn’t ideal for developers or users. So Apple shuffled (though native apps may have been the plan all along, who knows), and made third-party native apps the norm with the launch of the iPhone SDK. Unfortunately, as we’ve all become well aware, there’s a price for this native development: you have to play by Apple’s rules. But, at the same time, Apple never said you still couldn’t work outside the App Store ecosystem and make any sort of web app you desired. Again, essentially, they made Safari a loophole — or, as I’ve been calling it, a peephole. Today, Gruber elaborated on this a bit buried in his post about Adobe Flash. Here’s the key part:
So with the web, Apple is giving both developers and users a way to still operate outside the system. And again, that method will keep improving as HTML5 does. In fact, I’m surprised that Apple doesn’t play this up more in response to the criticisms of the App Store. If I were them, I’d simply say something like, “We made the App Store to provide our customers with the best guaranteed experience on their device. If you’d like an app that we don’t allow, that’s fine, you’ll just have to access it through the web on the device.” The first part essentially is their line, but the second part they probably won’t say because then they’ll worry customers will start associating the web apps with Apple itself. But again, that was the initial idea behind the first iPhone, so if they thought it was going to work at one time, they should be comfortable with it now. Another post today on Silicon Alley Insider notes that Apple is stacking the deck against its rivals like Amazon for digital goods because you can’t buy them within native iPhone (and soon iPad) apps. For example, with the Amazon Kindle app, you have to go to the web to purchase a new e-book. But again, it’s not that you flat out cannot buy the book, you just have to go to the web to do it. And you can do that on the iPhone, through Safari. It’s a little more complicated, but it’s manageable. Ideally, would Apple like to all the most popular web apps ported over to native apps available in the App Store? Provided they adhere to their guidelines, of course. At the same time, are they ever going to remove Safari from the iPhone and make all developers do native apps? No way. It would be suicide to do so. And Apple must know that. You cannot remove the safety net just because you think not falling is better than falling. Instead, Apple will focus on making a platform for developers that allows them to create a better tailored experience for users, provided they follow their rules. We see this with apps like Facebook, Pandora, and a number of Twitter apps. Each is better than their respective web app (well, except that you can’t run Pandora in the background, but that may change — soon). And each are among the most popular apps on the device. Meanwhile, I’m using Google Voice, Buzz, and Gmail on my phone — I’m just using them through Safari. I thought it would bug me, but it really doesn’t because HTML5 is getting so good. Is Apple still hypocritical in not allowing some sexy apps but allowing others? Yes. And it’s particularly bad because they initially didn’t allow them, then they did, now they’ve taken them away again. And it’s sad that this is destroying some businesses (no matter what you think of the content). But you still could get this content through the web using Safari. It sucks for the developers that they can’t as easily charge for it, but end users obviously won’t care about that. And those are the people buying iPhones. The iPhone may be a closed door, but there is a peephole, Safari. And if you can’t find what you’re looking for on the device, you might want to look through it. [photo: flickr/wfyurasko]      
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| Qype, The Yelp Of Europe, Gets A Look From Google & Nokia Posted: 26 Feb 2010 07:53 PM PST
The site was first launched in 2005 and today attracts 9 million monthly worldwide visitors, according to Comscore, just a little less than Yelp’s 11 million. Both likely have far more actual visitors, but Comscore is good for comparision – in December, for example, Qype told us they had 17.7 million unique visitors. A year ago the company brought in a new CEO and have been expanding rapidly across Europe. Google supposedly took a look at the company and passed, opting instead to just import Qype’s content. Nokia made a run for the company after Google, with one source saying that a term sheet had been signed in the $50 million range. But another source says that a term sheet was never signed and the deal negotiations broke down over both price and other contract terms. Qype isn’t helping much with the story, sticking to their no comments. But founder Stephan Uhrenbacher did email to tell us that the site has 500,000 registered users who’ve left over 1 million reviews. They are available in seven languages and have sites in UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, Brazil, Ireland. So for now at least Qype may remain independent. But like Yelp, which had its own acquisition drama late last year, Qype is in the local advertising sweet spot, where billions of advertising dollars (and euros) will be flowing over the next few years. Qype has raised around £8 million in venture capital.      
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| Competition! Mad Lib your favourite site’s sign up page for fame, shampoo and other prizes Posted: 26 Feb 2010 07:50 PM PST
While most sites use a standard form with text-boxes and radio buttons for new sign-ups, Huffduffer presents its questions as a ‘Mad Lib’ style statement… “I would like to use Huffduffer. I want my username to be _____________ and I want my password to be _____________. My email address is _________. By the way, my name is ______________ and my website is ___________.” …which is kinda neat. But Luke, being a ‘chief design architect’ (one of the world’s more tautological job titles), wanted to find out more. Specifically, he wanted to know if this style of form actually encourages more people to sign up than the usual Name: ___________ / Email address: __________ format. So he persuaded Ron Kurti at Vast.com to do some A/B testing and, whaddya know?, it turns out the conversational fill-in-the-blanks form increased conversion by 25-40%. Given those impressive numbers it’s a cast iron certainty that in the next few months dozens of sites, starting probably with Yahoo!, will consider upgrading their sign-up pages to this new, friendlier format. The trick, of course, will be to get the wording just right – to customize each sign-up page for the site’s particular audience. …which has given me an idea for a ‘fun’ weekend contest! Hurrah! Your challenge is this: suggest some Mad Lib-style wording for the sign up page of your favourite web 2.0 site. The funnier the better. Post your entry in the comments and his time next week I’ll pick the funniest (say) three and award some excellent prizes. Prizes that will include (but are not limited to): fame, recognition of your brilliance and whatever crap I can find in my hotel room – a signed copy of my eBay-auction-winning book, a TechCrunch tshirt and maybe one of those little bottles of shampoo you get. Here are some examples off the top of my head to inspire you. Yours should be better… Twitter: “I do everything Oprah tells me to do so I’d like to use Twitter for three days. I’d like my username to be __________ and my password to be ‘password123′, or the name of my dog which is ______________. Please autofollow me to Oprah, Ellen Degeneres and Taylor Swift.”
Google: “My name is ___________ and I would like to sign up to use Gmail/Google Buzz. The name of the person I am secretly having an affair with is ___________ and my social security number is _______________. Please display this information on my public profile.”
YouTube: “LOL!!!! My n@me is ____________ & I wanna join yutube becos this video sukkkssss!! I think _____________ is GAAY!!! LOLLZ”
Livejournal: “My name is ______________ and joining Livejournal is my only hope of getting anyone to read my poetry. My birthstone is ____________ and my current mood is _____________ and lonely. No one understands me. I hate my life.”
MySpace: “My name is ____________ and due to some kind of administrative error I would like to join MySpace.”
Go, submit!      
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| Brightkite: 2 Million Users And A Lot Of Local Promo Interest Posted: 26 Feb 2010 05:33 PM PST
It seems that just about every company, advertiser, and even plenty of users associated with the location space emailed me with pitches, ideas, thoughts, etc. To say that space is red-hot right now, is putting it mildly. One of the companies that reached out to me was Brightkite, one of the earliest hot location players. CMO and co-founder Rob Lawson admits that the network has been “pretty quiet for a while,” but hints at some exciting stuff coming up for March (yes, around the time of SXSW). But he also wanted to share some things they’re working on right now, and a few interesting bits of data. Notably, Brightkite has over 2 million active users currently around the world. While that might seem small compared to the bigger social networks like Facebook and Twitter, that’s actually four times the size of the newer rival Foursquare, that is getting much of the hype these days. Another interesting tidbit: Brightkite has had localized promotions in place for some time now, and they’re seeing strong usage. What users of Foursquare may know as check-in or mayor special, Brightkite calls Local Promotions. And they have a page on the site where local businesses can sign up for free. On that page, they note:
Brightkite says these promotions are seeing a lot of interest from all types of brands. And usage is strong with over 100 brands including big ones like Gap, Ben & Jerry's and Time Warner Cable, seeing over two percent response rates when these notifications are inserted into users stream. And the best ones are seeing five to ten percent. When compared to more traditional ads, those numbers are very solid. Like Foursquare check-in and mayor specials, the Brightkite deals offer things like free (or heavily discounted) drinks and meals, but also extend to things like discounted hotel rooms, car rentals, and even dry cleaning. So is Brightkite making any money off of these? Yes. While many of the smaller local businesses use the service for free or close to free (to both prove the model and drive growth), Lawson notes that some of the big national brands are spending some big time money to advertise locally. These campaigns range from $10,000 to $200,000, Lawson says. Something else that interests me about Brightkite is their unique approach to social relationships. When it started, Brightkite had a symmetrical model, much like Facebook and Foursquare, which requires users to accept each other as friends. But late last year, the company switched the model to be an asymmetrical one, like Twitter, where one party can follow another without permission. This may seem like a horrible idea for a location-based service given the privacy implications, but Brightkite’s is a bit different of an asymmetrical model. “Our model is asymmetrical (like Twitter), but reversed. With Twitter, you decide who to follow but anyone can see your content. With Brightkite, you decide who to share your content with, but you can only see others if they decide to share with you,” Lawson notes. He continues, “We are convinced this is the right model for location based services – people want to be in control of who knows where they are. We turned away from the handshake model (Facebook, Foursquare) because we found users didn’t like the social pressure of having to accept a friend request. Just because you are happy to share your location with me, doesn’t mean I want to share mine with you, even though we want to maintain a relationship.“ As someone who has dealt with this many times before, I see his point. Lawson says that generally Brightkite users have been receptive to the changes, but says that some older users liked some of the more advanced features of the old model better — and Brightkite is working to get some best-of-both-worlds options for them. Brightkite merged with another location-based network, Limbo, last year and raised some new funding. They face a battle in warding off the fast-charging hot location networks like Foursquare and Gowalla (not to mention Yelp and the new Google Buzz), but all of them appear to be benefiting from brand interest in the local advertising space.      
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| Thank You TechCrunch Readers and Sponsors! Posted: 26 Feb 2010 05:27 PM PST
We wanted to take a minute to thank all of our readers and sponsors. Because of you, we have been able to grow explosively in the past year, now getting over 30 million pageviews and reaching more than 9 million unique visitors per month across our network! Thanks for keeping our lights on! Crucial |Cloud Connect |Interop |Terremark |MediaTemple | AskYourTargetMarket.com | Ooyala | StrataScale | Loopt | Cotendo Crucial The memory experts; offering over 280,000 memory upgrades for more than 40,000 systems. Cloud Connect The defining event that brings together the entire cloud computing community, including IT leaders, industry executives and developers. Interop IT event with the most up to date information available on key technologies, latest trends and access to leading vendors. Terremark flexible, high-performance cloud computing the way you need it, when you need it by giving you the power and control to configure resources exactly the way you need them MediaTemple AskYourTargetMarket.com Use the online survey creator to build your survey, define the criteria of your target market, and watch the results begin to pour in immediately. Ooyala StrataScale The world’s first physical cloud. Providing hosting services without the limitations. Loopt Find and stay connected with friends while you're mobile. Join the TechCrunch community on Loopt. Cotendo Offering website performance acceleration, real time content control, and integrated CDN services.      
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| Rejected By Apple, Grooveshark Releases App For Jailbroken iPhones On Cydia Posted: 26 Feb 2010 04:50 PM PST
Grooveshark now says it has given up on its ambitions to get approved for the official App Store, claiming that Apple has been “ritually rejecting” the app for “primary selfish reasons”. We’ve heard that song before. The startup says it spent many months developing the iPhone application, and on occasion went months without a hearing a peep out of Cupertino. Denied access to the App Store, Grooveshark decided to head underground and is today releasing the app on Cydia, enabling people who have jailbroken their iPhone and iPod touch devices to enjoy it – and it is actually pretty cool. Much like Spotify – who, for the record, has seen its iPhone app approved by Apple – premium aka VIP users of Grooveshark can use the app to search for tracks within a gigantic catalog of music at lightning speed and instantly stream them from the device. Playlists, favorites and whatnot are completely synced, so the experience for paying Grooveshark users who happen to have a jailbroken device are now able to basically get the exact same experience on their iPhone or iPod touch than using the recently revamped Web application. The app also enables you to make tracks and entire playlists available offline, so you can enjoy the music even without the need to be connected. All in all, it’s simply a great application that many would love to have to their iPhones, I’m sure. At the very least, for those people there now exists an option to get it installed on there, despite Apple. Or they can just go out and buy any rival device that runs Android, or go get a Blackberry, or purchase a recent Palm phone …
     
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| Microsoft Tells Google To Face The Antitrust Music Posted: 26 Feb 2010 04:28 PM PST
Today, Microsoft has written a blog post that admits that it played a part in instigating the inquiry, stating that “complaints in competition law cases usually come from competitors.” And it’s also accusing Google of “telling reporters that antitrust concerns about search are not real because some of the complaints come from one of its last remaining search competitors.” Microsoft’s post, which was written by VP and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner, details some of the company’s recent discussions with the European Commission and US DOJ, which have revolved around the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal (which, in turn, led to talk about Google’s allegedly anticompetitive practices). Heiner also notes that Microsoft has been directing other “concerned companies” to competition law agencies. Here are some of the more interesting passages:
     
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| Let’s Talk: Ztail Scores Deal With A Top Mobile Phone Retailer Posted: 26 Feb 2010 01:47 PM PST
Here’s how it works. LetsTalk now features a ‘ValueLock’ banner for the vast majority of its phones, including popular devices like the Motorola Droid (ValueLock is essentially a branded version of Ztail’s service). Each phone has a ValueLock Price, which is the amount Ztail will pay if you decide to send in your phone up to 18 months later (this price is the same no matter when you send in your phone, up to the 18 month cutoff). The catch is that in order to redeem your ValueLock deal, you have to purchase your next phone through LetsTalk too. The site appears to have competitive prices, so this shouldn’t be a huge deal. From what I can tell, Ztail is offering up some good prices for the used phones. The ValueLock price for a Droid is set at $196, which is nearly $150 more than you pay for the phone up front with a 2-year Verizon contract (and remember, you’re going to get that after using the phone for 18 months). After sending in your device, Ztail sends you your money either through check or PayPal. And CEO Bill Hudak says that trade-in phones don’t have to be in mint condition either — it just can’t have obvious flaws like water damage, cracks, and missing buttons. And, in the event that Ztail goes under some time after you buy your phones, LetsTalk will still back these pricing guarantees. So how does Ztail make money from this? First, they receive a commission for every user that buys a phone and then decides to sign up for the ValueLock service, which only requires an Email address and takes a few seconds to do. Hudak says that during a trial run 30% of customers who were eligible for ValueLock signed up for it (they’re prompted to both by an Email from LetsTalk and a card sent alongside each device). Ztail also gets a substantially larger second commission down the line if the customer sends in their device through ValueLock and purchases their next phone through LetsTalk. This is big news for Ztail — LetsTalk is one of the web’s largest phone retailers, with over $100 million a year in revenue and hundreds of thousands of activated phones sold each year. Ztail has been working on this pseudo-insurance model for nearly a year, and it also has more large partnerships in the works (it’s also worth pointing out that LetsTalk powers the mobile device store on WalMart.com, so it’s possible that their partnership may extend there) . Prior to launching this business model, Ztail had previously focused on streamlining eBay listings and also launched a ‘Kelley Blue Book For Everything” in 2008. If you’d like to try out the system for yourself, Ztail is going to offer a $230 ValueLock price on the new Motorola Devour to TechCrunch readers (use the code ‘TCDEVOUR’ when you sign up for the service). The normal ValueLock price for the phone is $168. You can read our review of the Devour here.      
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| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Please Disregard This Email Posted: 26 Feb 2010 11:58 AM PST First PRMac, and now NBC Universal. I think I’m just going to give up now. There’s no shaming this industry into normal human behavior. I mean, who actually thinks it’s ok to email an entire database with a test message? At least they thanked me at the end.
     
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| Seesmic’s BlackBerry App Now Sweeter Than All The Others Posted: 26 Feb 2010 11:35 AM PST
The new version includes support for multi-accounts, Ping.fm integration (Seesmic acquired Ping.fm earlier this year) and the ability to choose your photo uploading size. So if you have more than one Twitter account, you can set Seesmic to remember all of your accounts, and easily switch between them. You can also cross-post messages between different accounts at the same time. The app allows you to set up default account which will be generated each time you open Seesmic for BlackBerry. You can add up to ten accounts with the new feature. Ping.gm integration allows for you to post your updates to 50 social networks at the same time. In order to engage the feature, you’ll need to start a Ping.fm account. Seesmic for BlackBerry also includes the ability to share pictures through Tweetphoto now. You’ll still be able to post photos with yFrog, which was the photo app the client launched with, but Tweetphoto is now the default. And now you can also select the size of the photos you wish to post. You’ll be given the choice of opting between small, medium or large images. Sessmic made updates to its BlackBerry client in December but multi-account and Ping.fm support is huge for the client. This latest update should make Seesmic’s client the most feature-rich app out there. Of course BlackBerry has launched the private beta of its Twitter app which is missing a few key features and has been receiving mediocre reviews. TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic but I am not.      
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| Social Graph In Mind, Twitter Starts Prompting Users To Fill Out Their Profiles Posted: 26 Feb 2010 11:01 AM PST
A new overlay has started popping up on the service called “Be found on Twitter.” This randomly appears (it did for me a few minutes ago) when you load up twitter.com. It reads, “We were hoping you could help us make it easier for people to discover their friends and colleagues on Twitter. Review your settings below to make sure the people you care about can easily find you.” It then asks for your name, bio, location, email, and phone number. If you’ve already filled these out, it includes what you previously put down. Both the bio and location fields are optional, but everything else, you need to fill out (unless you click on “Ask me later” which presumably will bring up this prompt again). You can also decide whether or not to let people find you by your email address or phone number in searches. Looks like Twitter wants to tighten that social graph a bit. With site growth in the right direction again, and tweeting at an all time high, it’s probably a good call. Now, if only they had a tool like this to help you sort through the people you no longer want to follow.      
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| Badges Like Us: Foursquare Gets Its Rap Song Posted: 26 Feb 2010 10:43 AM PST
“Badges Like Us” finds Mr. Silva (@borismsilver) and “Newby” (@thenewb) rapping about checking-in all over cities and earning badges. It also features the lyric, “I hope this hits TechCrunch or else I’ll be sad,” so of course, we had to oblige. Other choice lyrics include:
Foursquare is quickly gaining mainstream appeal as they are signing major deals left and right with television channels, schools, and publications. In fact, Bravo even made a TV spot for them this week. And while the service only has around 450,000 users right now, it’s growing fast. And they could well have another coming out party of sorts at this year’s SXSW festival in two weeks. Find the full lyrics below the video:
Mr. Silvas in da building Ayo I know its my first stop Bouncin to new places, adding em quick Show up at the Bar and I check in Right Away Looks like you got ousted welcome to the game Now that Im the mayor, now that Im here La la la la [Chorus] Got a rock like this No one on the corner had an app on this You can learn where to eat just by checking my feed Follow my lead its the road to success But I cant teach you my swag School of social media Imma grad Its Newby Newwwbyy [Chorus] Lets talk about the knockoffs, they just imitating Copyin foursquare cuz you lack innovation So let me say it now, let me be clear Hockey stick growth, all star investors I add lots of value, Im a superuser Dont checkin to your house, thats just really lame Your checkins are fake, theres no way those are true And whats up with all these randos trying to friend me?      
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| Google Enhances Local Search With “Nearby” Filter Posted: 26 Feb 2010 09:37 AM PST
Google says that it will shows you Nearby results according to your IP address or your preferred location, if you customized your location in search settings.      
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| Yahoo Answers Gets A Much-Needed Facelift Posted: 26 Feb 2010 09:10 AM PST
Navigation: The homepage’s navigation bar has four new tabs: Home, Browse Categories, My Activity, and About. Each of the tabs stays on every page you visit in Yahoo Answers. “Home” brings you to the homepage which includes a rotating Best of Answers feature, the link to the Answers Blog and more. “My activity” lets you access your Answers profile, and view your activity on the site. “About” features the Community Guidelines, answers leaderboard, Suggestion Board, and links to the Answers blog. Browse Categories: Yahoo has redesigned the feature to browse answers by categories. On the previous version of the Answers homepage, all of the categories were displayed on the left hand column, which Yahoo says took up prime landscape on the homepage. Now, Categories is featured in a navigation tab within a hide-away menu. So you can always see the categories on any page via the drop down feature of the “Browse Categories” tab. And you can also lick on the tab j to be taken to the "All Categories" page. From this page, you can access all the questions that are open, resolved or in voting on the site.
Aesthetics: Yahoo has slightly changed the background color of the Answers page; toning down the green and replacing the white background with a light blue palate. Even the smiley icons have received a facelift. With the removal of the categories section, the homepage is a bit more cluttered and roomier. Yahoo says that the backend of the site has been fixed to eliminate a few bugs. Answer category leaderboards will now be updated on a daily basis instead of weekly. While Yahoo Answers is still one of the leaders in the Q&A space, the site is now facing competition from startups who are innovating in the space, including Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake’s Hunch.      
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| Naked Apartments Attempts To Ease The Apartment Hunt For New Yorkers Posted: 26 Feb 2010 09:05 AM PST
Anyone who has lived in New York, knows the hassle and stress of finding an apartment that fits within their budgets and has enough space to live in. New startup Naked Apartments attempts to ease the process by being a sort of Match.com for renters and landlords and apartment brokers. The site matches qualified renters with brokers and landlords, automating the process of finding an apartments that meet renters’ search criteria. Here’s how it works. Renters sign up, creating anonymous profiles that feature key statistics such as annual income, desired monthly rent, their desired apartment size, location and move-in date. Naked Apartments will also supplement that information with a free credit check, which means that the completed profile includes a renter's credit score range. Brokers and landlords can get access to the anonymous profiles and choose to contact the renters that meet their financial requirements and have matching interests in their rental properties. The catch is that brokers and landlords have to buy credits in order to contact each renter. Landlords pay $2 to contact a renter. Once a brokers contact renters with their rental properties, renters can choose whom to exchange contact information with and which apartments to see. The idea is that after renters work with a broker or landlord, they write reviews of their experience, helping other renters know which brokers and landlords to trust and how to navigate the waters Naked Apartments also allows renters to take a more active approach and browse its listings database. Similar to Craigslist, the site allows renters to contact brokers and landlords to find out more about the property. Since the site’s launch, 2000 renters have found apartments through the system, through 100 brokers and landlords. Currently, Naked Apartments lists 13,000 apartments for rent. The idea of Naked Apartments is compelling but like many rental listings sites out there, it will face strong competition from Craigslist. And Zillow, which catered to home sales previously, is now offering rental listings.      
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Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant. They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school. Angel investor and entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis said as much in his 
About three weeks ago, eBay’s electronic payments daughter 
Efficiency is a business school idea that suggests a company is running smoothly. It’s absolutely terrific when you’re talking about a coal mining operation or a Supercuts. But when it comes to a company like Yahoo it’s not a positive. The Internet is still in its wild west days, and the “ready, fire, aim” game plan of Facebook and the other young guns is eating their lunch. Even the massive Google is still trying to shake things up with new and controversial products. 
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber wrote what I thought was 
Hamburg, Germany based 
Yesterday, I wrote that 
When Jason Kincaid tried out the iPhone app online music streaming startup 
Earlier this week, news broke that the EU was opening an antitrust investigation into Google — and 
One of the more frustrating things about shopping for electronics is the fact that many devices don’t hold their value for very long — you can’t typically buy a cell phone and expect to sell it for $200 a year later. At least, that’s how it used to be. Now Palo Alto-based startup 
When 
When it comes to user discovery, the best way for services to do it is to use your profile information. Basic things like your name, location, bio, and email are all helpful ways for other people to find you on a network. The problem is that a lot of users don’t bother to fill this out when they sign up for a service. So Twitter is now prompting existing users to do so.
There’s a pretty good indicator that a service is evolving from its early-adopter base to the mainstream: if there’s a rap song about the service. It’s happened numerous times 
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