The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- HipLogic Brings Customizable Realtime Interface To Android
- PackLate.com Scores Seed Funding For Last-Minute Vacation Rental Service
- Where Did VCs Go Wrong In Online Video?
- Microsoft And Partners Are About To Add A Big Fat Social Layer To Outlook
- Motally Cooks Up Flexible APIs To Allow Publishers To Import And Export Analytics
- Google Buzz Privacy Issues Have Real Life Implications
- Foursquare Gets Lucky (Magazine) And A Deal With Conde Nast
- Amazon Wants To Give A Free Kindle To All Amazon Prime Subscribers
- Microsoft’s Keyser Söze Opportunity
- Ohai: City Of Eternals MMOG Opens To All + Details On Their Next Game
- Watch Out Who You Reply To On Google Buzz, You Might Be Exposing Their Email Address
- What If…Apple Only Offered the 64GB/3G iPad and Sold It For $499
- Google Has Another Oprah Moment, Gives A Free Nexus One To Everyone At TED
- Now You Can Follow TechCrunch On Google Buzz
- Google’s Sudden Music Blog Purge And Its Implications
- 2 Days Of Buzz: 9 Million Posts And Comments. 200 Posts Per Minute From Mobile. And Security Fixes.
- PositionApp Helps Developers Track App Store Performance On The Go
- Aviary Now Free As A Bird
- SquarePik: A New Foursquare iPhone App Based Around Pictures And Videos
- Have No Idea How To Do A Sales Proposal? Try Proposable.
| HipLogic Brings Customizable Realtime Interface To Android Posted: 12 Feb 2010 08:59 AM PST
HipLogic’s smartphone interface for non-smartphones recently made news when the startup rolled out a consumer version of its downloadable application that delivers content—including Facebook, Twitter, CBS news, CBS sports, and weather—to select Windows Mobile or Symbian devices. HipLogic is centered around the promise to bring the feel of an iPhone interface and app store to non-smartphones. Today, the startup is launching support for Android to allow mobile phone manufacturers, carriers and operators to customize their interface with HipLogic Live’s application. HipLogic's Android Platform is designed to be used by companies like Verizon, BestBuy, or Orange as a branded phonetop/phonescreen interface that connects to the web. Along with customization, HipLogic allows operators to choose which content to include in the interface, and the ability update the services and applications on the device remotely. Within the HipLogic interface, consumers can toggle between the original mobile operating system and the HipLogic interface for access to a collection of apps. But apart from creating a branded interface, HipLogic’s offering may not add too much to an interface that is already at the top of the line for smartphones. The beauty of HipLogic’s interface is that it brought the feel of a more advanced mobile phone to a non-smartphone. This isn’t the case with the Android platform. HipLogic's application platform features a lightweight virtual machine connected to the cloud which enables on the fly updating, and aggregates info from network operators and the web to create mash-ups on mobile devices. Of course, for its offerings to really take off, HipLogic will need to partner with retailers and phone developers like the ones mentioned above to create these branded interfaces. Formerly known has Numobiq, HipLogic has raised $11.5 in funding, recently adding $7 million to its coffers. HipLogic faces competition from China’s Borqs.      
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| PackLate.com Scores Seed Funding For Last-Minute Vacation Rental Service Posted: 12 Feb 2010 08:51 AM PST
What the fledgling company is trying to accomplish is to fill a gap in the vacation rental market by building a website where second homeowners can connect with people who are interested in renting a place at the last minute, potentially at a substantial discount (subject to market conditions). If that sounds like something that would interest you, keep reading until the end of this post. The idea behind PackLate.com is that consumers would save money by finding and keeping track of good deals on vacation rentals and comfortably book closer to their vacation date. There’s also elements of gaming in the concept, in the sense that users would be competing for the best deals the closer they get to their projected arrival date. PackLate.com claims a lot of vacation rental markets are currently seeing a mere 50% occupancy during prime season as a result of the recession, and the startup aims to do something about with what is essentially a dynamic oversupply-demand matching service. Personally, I think this is a great idea, but a lot will depend on its ability to strike partnerships with property managers and attract a sufficient amount of users to make the gaming aspect a vital – and viral – part of the offering. The service is free of charge for end users, although registration is required (either by signing up for an account or using Facebook Connect). Normally, registered users would get alerts upon price changes for places they track using PackLate.com, but if you sign up with the code ‘TC_PackLate’, you’ll unlock a feature that ensures you get notified 2 hours before price changes get published on the website (and users who don’t read TechCrunch get to see them).      
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| Where Did VCs Go Wrong In Online Video? Posted: 12 Feb 2010 08:17 AM PST
Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, founder and CEO of WatchMojo.You can also read his series on the state of Online video (Parts I, II, III, and IV) video.. Yesterday’s final implosion of video site Veoh, which declared bankruptcy after burning through $70 million of venture capital, was a long time coming. A lot of so-called smart money went into Veoh: investors included Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, Intel's venture arm, Spark Capital and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. And it was hardly an isolated incident. Joost, another high-flying video startup launched by the founders of Skype, went through $45M in VC money before ending up in a fire sale. Who's next? More importantly, why is so much venture capital that funded video startups going down the drain when the number of videos watched on the Web is going through the roof? Nowadays, it is fashionable to discredit VCs as financial engineering hacks with no operational talent who lack the moral compass required to lead people; but that would be unfair. VCs, it turns out, are neither the problem nor the solution: good ones might offer more than cash, bad ones will kill your business. And once killed, they'll blame everything and anyone but themselves. Fish Out of Water Last year I was speaking about raising capital with a fellow CEO, Brightroll's CEO Tod Sacerdoti, and he mentioned that the "video industry is more media than technology", to which I added, "that is why VCs come across like fish out of water". Indeed, most VCs tend to lack any meaningful background in advertising, publishing, sales or media. Selling software doesn't cut it. Building chips is irrelevant. In fact, the very same things that make technology companies successful are often weaknesses and even threats to media companies. For example, a tech company's contract for recurring licensing fees is not as attractive as a series of contracts for recurring advertising deals. This merits a post in of itself, but the kinds of things that VCs were drawn to in video have all become commodities, namely: video aggregators, content delivery networks and content management systems, which are capital intensive, low margin areas always at the risk of getting cancelled and shifted to a competitor. Making things worse is this "crazy ass backwards" investment thesis that they should invest in 10 companies and watch seven burn to the ground, hope that two do "ok", and pray that one will be a "grand slam". Forget the theory of diversification, which underpins all of finance, VCs keep aiming for the fence and let's face it, finding winners in business is as hard as finding them in Hollywood. You win with singles, doubles, triples and occasioanlly home runs. basing your strategy on grand slams is futile, which takes us to VCs odious track record in online video. Online video startups tend to fall in one of the following categories, with some overlaps:
Where are the grand slams other than YouTube? There aren’t any. The Elusive Media VC True media VCs just don't exist. One explanation could be that most high ranking media executives who were working in big media with high salaries but little or no equity, never experienced the massive paydays that would give them a path to investing their own money and subsequently setting up a fund to invest on behalf of others. There are exceptions, of course. But the entrepreneurs who have made fortunes in media tend to reinvest in their own empires rather than dole out the money to potential startup competitors. Media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, William Randolph Hearst, Sumner Redstone, SI Newhouse and the like who never sold out retained their earnings and built empires. Once they became the Establishment, it made little sense for them to finance the disruption. Mr. Murdoch (who bought the company that bought my last company) bought MySpace when it was convenient, generated a windfall from the Google deal, and now that its fortunes have soured, he is divesting from the medium: first Photobucket, then Rotten Tomatoes. Conversely, most VCs were technology founders and executives who sold companies and came into cash. They set up or joined VC funds to reinvest their money and continue the cycle of disruption. The Web is Entering a Period of Massive Content Consumption. There seems to be a massive wedge between media and technology. One side doesn't get the other and the result is wasted investment dollars. “There’s no one in the record company that’s a technologist,” Universal Music Chairman Doug Morris once explained. “That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What would you do?” Well, alternatively, VCs have no clue where the advertising money will go in media but all VCs seek to invest in the Google of Video. Incidentally, Google's initial business model was based on licensing its search technology, a unit which generated hundreds of millions of dollars. But today, Google is foremost an ad-supported business. However, it's one of the only successful ad-supported technology businesses in the world. Google lucked out by benefitting from a perfect storm and is now limited by its free, ad-supported worldview (Apple understands that if there is one thing people love to do is actually spend money – but again, separate post). Regardless of whether the Internet will be larger on Mobile or PC, the nuts and bolts are starting to matter less than the content that is consumed, and how that content is monetized. More likely than not, the model will be advertising based. Today, fickle media companies have less faith in ad models, but consumers continue to shun paying for content. Regardless, VCs keep investing in the next crapstr, whereas they should be investing in content, which is missing piece for advertising to take off in online video. Content is King "The real barrier is content and the model necessary to make more of it. Cable TV suffered from this same fate early on", states Broadband Enterprises' Matt Wasserlauf. We're still in the early days of online video content and history is repeating itself. The film industry initially recreated theater and added a camera to record plays; early TV recreated radio and added a camera as well. Online video content has much room for improvement, but what is missing is the kind of investment required to create compelling content. VCs keep throwing out cliché after cliché and just show their lack of understanding of that fact. Sure, some of the aggregators such as Veoh did scale quickly but it wasn’t all that defensive. Despite all of this, VCs seem to be making all of the same mistakes over and over again: investing in the technology and not in the content. Photo credit: Flickr/Umberto Salvagnin      
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| Microsoft And Partners Are About To Add A Big Fat Social Layer To Outlook Posted: 12 Feb 2010 07:18 AM PST
That’s about to change soon. The product, dubbed Outlook Social Connector, essentially aims to make Outlook more social by integrating streams from Windows Live and third-party networks directly into the widely used communication app and its familiar interface, among other features that will enhance the functionality of Outlook and other Microsoft products like SharePoint. For more information about how Social Connector, check our previous post and/or watch this video from Channel 9. Microsoft and its initial launch partner, LinkedIn, didn’t share many details about the product at the time of the initial announcement but stated that it would be made available ‘early 2010′. Since then, it’s been very quiet about the product. A public beta version of Outlook Social Connector will be available next week, sources now tell us, and we also hear Microsoft will be announcing a number of additional partners that have been brought on board alongside LinkedIn. These partners include social network juggernauts such as Facebook and MySpace, which are of course far less business-oriented than products and services like Outlook and LinkedIn. While a lot of people will appreciate the ability to see status updates from and interact with friends from multiple social networking services straight from their Outlook application, I have a feeling their managers and their employers’ IT departments will be far less enthusiastic about Social Connector.
     
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| Motally Cooks Up Flexible APIs To Allow Publishers To Import And Export Analytics Posted: 12 Feb 2010 05:58 AM PST
Analytics can be valuable if you are able to actually turn this data into content that you can understand and draw actionable insights from them. Generally this is done through analytics reporting systems, which will make sense of data and produce reports. Today, Motally, which provides user-action tracking services for the mobile web and apps, has released new flexible APIs that allow mobile publishers to import and export their mobile data and integrate Motally directly into other reporting systems. Motally's offering gives developers the ability to receive daily reports, web-based dynamic reports and user statistics such as unique users, page views, engagement time search keywords, average pages/visit, etc. The new API allows app developers and publishers to pull reports out of Motally and integrate them into their existing reporting systems like Omniture. In addition to export APIs, Motally’s new import APIs let developers upload data directly to Motally for processing. This could be useful for platform providers who want to send large quantities of data for analysis on behalf of their user base. Motally, which recently launched an extension of their mobile analytics to include content developed on Apple's iPad, support analytics for applications on the iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry platforms as well as the mobile web. Motally offers more advanced features that allows developers to troubleshoot and debug their products from anywhere in the world, without having to re-deploy apps and games to the Apple iPhone store. For a young startup, Motally has seen significant traction as a mobile analytics provider. Backed by renown investor Ron Conway, Motally's clients include Twitter, Yelp, Fandango and Verizon.      
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| Google Buzz Privacy Issues Have Real Life Implications Posted: 12 Feb 2010 05:56 AM PST
Google is -deservedly – getting a lot of heat for the fact that its latest social product has a number of privacy flaws baked into it by design. They’ve since made some improvements to the product, but that’s not where the story ends. Some people think the complaints are unwarranted and the issues not all that bad, while some think it’s mostly annoying and others don’t even know there are issues yet (or that Google launched something new at all). And then there those whose lives are already being impacted by the privacy loopholes in Google Buzz – and not all in a good way. See for example this story of an anonymous woman who writes a (self-proclaimed) feminist blog, which she started after leaving an abusive marriage. (found on Hacker News) Hint: the title is ‘Fuck you, Google’. An excerpt:
You can read the rest of the story in the blog post, but needless to say this woman is justifiably very angry with the Mountain View company. Now, I’m sure some of our readers will have an answer ready. That she should have changed this setting or not have touched that one, but that would be beside the point. Which is that even with the improvements that were made to the Buzz product, Google is confusing the hell out of people here – and make some lives hell for them to boot. Expect more stories like this. (Hat tip to Alex Kaminski, photo credit Flickr / sunside)      
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| Foursquare Gets Lucky (Magazine) And A Deal With Conde Nast Posted: 12 Feb 2010 02:45 AM PST
And a few weeks ago, Foursquare announced a partnership with Bravo. Today, the startup is expanding to the magazine sector with a partnership with Conde Nast’s Lucky Magazine. In time for New York Fashion Week, Foursquare and Lucky Magazine are partnering to allow Foursquare users who are attending the event (show-goers, party-goers, designers, etc) with tips for the best places for a cocktail, WiFi, coffee, etc, near all show locations. So if you check into a show location on Foursquare, Lucky will give people tips on where to go near these big venues in-between shows. Each location will be hand-picked and recommended by Lucky editors.
The partnership isn’t surprising considering Lucky’s current strategy towards expanding their social shopping technologies and Foursquare’s penchant for striking deals with mainstream media organizations. I have to wonder what the monetization deal is for Foursquare with all of these deals, especially if there is e-commerce and transactions involved. The same goes for the Zagat deal. Lucky declined to comment on whether there was a financial deal involved. Regardless, these types of deals are crucial to Foursquare not only because they point to an eventual money-making opportunity, but also because they give the service a way to fend off attacks from Yelp (which just launched a check-in feature on its own iPhone app), and soon Facebook. Meanwhile, these deals give brands a fun way to interact with the public. It’s advertising, but it’s interactive. The deal with Lucky is particularly interesting because it involved a magazine and e-commerce rolled into one partnership. Foursquare has been on a roll lately. They’re now seeing over a million check-ins a week, with that rate doubling in the last month alone. And these new deals can only help them as they bring the type of mainstream appeal that it took services like Twitter so long to find. As for Lucky Magazine, it appears that the publication is the first magazine to be venturing into the location-based game. It’s wise for Lucky to be embracing social media, and leaves me wondering if we will see more Foursquare deals with Conde Nast publications in the near future.      
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| Amazon Wants To Give A Free Kindle To All Amazon Prime Subscribers Posted: 12 Feb 2010 02:11 AM PST
Just as soon as they can work out how to do it without losing money. Amazon Prime is a subscription product that gives customers free two day shipping on everything they buy from Amazon. The current fee is $79/year. These are Amazon’s very best customers – the ones who tend to make multiple purchases per month. And they are also likely to buy multiple books per month on their Kindle devices. If those users buy enough books, and Amazon gets the production costs of the Kindle down enough, Amazon can get Kindles into “millions” of people’s hands without losing their shirt. At least when the goal is to break even or better over the course of a couple of years, the expected lifetime of a Kindle.      
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| Microsoft’s Keyser Söze Opportunity Posted: 12 Feb 2010 01:13 AM PST
If Microsoft plays its cards right, that may be a statement we’re saying years from now. What does that mean? Aside from being a riff on one of the best lines in movie history, what I mean by that is: imagine if Microsoft was able to convince Apple to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone, rather than Google. Leading up to Apple’s press event last month, rumors were swirling about this possibility. As is always the case with Apple, it’s hard to know how legitimate those talks were or if they were just some ploy to get something else it wanted. But from Microsoft’s perspective, it should be more than wishful thinking. While the iPhone may not control the overall mobile sphere in terms of sale, it does control mobile web browsing. And increasingly, that’s becoming a popular way for users to browse the web. Basically since its inception, stats have the iPhone at the top of the pile when it comes to mobile browsing share. Yes, as more and better Android phones become available Android can and probably will leapfrog it. But the fact is that the iPhone is going to remain a huge factor in web browsing going forward. And certainly, Microsoft won’t be able to cut a deal with Google to feature Bing on Android. Other recent numbers have Google seeing 1.46 million impressions a month from the iPhone alone. Bing? It gets just 2,387 impressions from the iPhone. That’s pretty incredible. So how much are those million and a half impression worth to Google? Apparently, north of $100 million a year via a revenue share with Google, Silicon Alley Insider reported today. For Microsoft to woo Apple away from Google, it’s going to have to cough up a lot of money. But I would argue that it’s definitely worth it. And Microsoft actually has a history of such maneuvers. Remember, when Microsoft bought a tiny share of Facebook in 2007, everyone was up in arms over the extrapolated $15 billion valuation it gave Facebook. But the truth is, Facebook was never worth that much (at least not at the time) because Microsoft was never interested in purchasing it at that price, nor was anyone else. Instead, Microsoft was making a strategic investment to secure the rights to Facebook search and advertising. More importantly, its $240 million investment for less than 2% of the company insured that Google wouldn’t be able to cut a deal with the social networking giant.
And that deal worked out well for Microsoft. Who knows if Microsoft made any money off of it, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that thanks to that initial deal, Microsoft and Facebook just got done renegotiating a new one, which will now see Facebook take over its display ads, but give a larger role to Bing for web search. With Facebook surging past 400 million users, this search deal is key for Microsoft and it undoubtedly blunts the loss of the display ad business (which probably wasn’t doing all that great anyway). Again, more importantly, it means Google can’t cut a deal with the social network to power its search. And Google loves those deals. Not only did it strike one with MySpace (that didn’t work out so well), it has ones with AOL and others. But the key one for it may be the deal with Mozilla to make Google the default search engine within the Firefox browser. Google is paying something like $75 million a year to Mozilla for this privilege (based on 2008 revenues). That’s relevant because it’s the same type of deal Google now has with Apple for the iPhone. And it’s the deal Microsoft needs to get. Despite pouring resources into its online division, Microsoft continues to bleed money there. And despite some success for Bing this year following its launch, the recent numbers indicate that it’s stealing search share from soon-to-be-search-partner Yahoo (assuming the deal goes through), rather than Google. Top search billing on the iPhone would ensure Bing is eating into Google share instead. And for that reason, price really shouldn’t be an issue for Microsoft if it’s serious about Bing battling Google Search. This is biggest and best opening it has. There are no shortage of people who believe that Google, Bing, Yahoo, and the others are now all basically on par with each other when it comes to search results. Certainly Microsoft and Yahoo believe that to be the case (while Google, of course, does not), but others do too. The problem, as Microsoft and Yahoo see it, is that users are simply used to Google so they keep going back to it rather than trying something new. That’s exactly why Yahoo is moving away from the backend of search and more towards prettying up results on the front-end to give users a better experience. Microsoft has an even easier way to prove this: cut the deal to make Bing the default engine on the iPhone. If users don’t start complaining, we’ll know it’s true. And the Microsoft/Apple deal could go farther. As long as both sides are cutting a deal for the iPhone, why not cut one to make Bing the default engine on the iPad as well? And how about Safari for the Mac in general? Every little bit of share gained is a good thing for Bing. And if the iPad proves to be a huge success, it could end up being a lot more than a “little bit” of search share.
Absolutely, provided it too believed that Bing’s results were at least on par with Google’s. In fact, at this point, Apple might even prefer a deal with Microsoft over one with Google given the war brewing between the iPhone and Android. With every search done on an iPhone, Apple is simply giving Google more fuel to pump into Android. Microsoft’s alternatives aren’t pretty. It can hope and pray that Google will rest on its laurels and let its search engine prowess wither in the way that Microsoft itself rested on its laurels when it had 90% market share with IE. Or it can hope that Windows Mobile stages a dramatic turnaround (Windows Mobile 7 is expected to be unveiled at Mobile World Congress shortly) and becomes the dominant mobile device for searching the web, with Bing in tow. I don’t see either happening. Or Microsoft could keep pumping money into advertisements about Bing and watch as it continues to eat away at Yahoo’s search share. But Microsoft would likely get much more bang out of those bucks if it simply cut the deal with Apple. And the time seems right for that to happen, if it ever will. Microsoft could play the role of the villain that gets its longtime nemesis to do exactly what it wants. And just imagine if that helps Microsoft pull its entire online division out of its funk, thus giving the giant the thing it needs to battle the likes of Apple and Google going forward. That would be Microsoft’s ultimate goal in pulling such a deal off, after all. And then Microsoft can exit the negotiating room — and like that *poof* be gone.
[images and videos: MGM]      
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| Ohai: City Of Eternals MMOG Opens To All + Details On Their Next Game Posted: 11 Feb 2010 10:53 PM PST
Key stats from the alpha testing:
The game is clearly working from a user engagement angle. And Ohai is now preparing to release their second game. It’s not named yet, but they’re calling it Project UnicornParade internally. Unlike CIty of Eternals, which is a virtual 3D environment, the unicorn game is a flat 2D environment and, apparently, has animals as the protagonists. That’s about as different from vampires killing each other as you can get. Here’s a screenshot I cajoled out of them:
And Ohai has plans for many more games. Says CEO Susan Wu: “Because this second game is built in the same engine, we’ll be able to get it to release with 3 engineers in 3 months. This is unprecedented in the world of MMO development, since your average game like WoW required 50+ engineers over 3-4 years, with a budget of $60+ million.” Ohai has raised just $6 million in venture capital and has put together a veteran team of game developers and executives. They’re metrics focused, but they clearly have good story lines as well.      
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| Watch Out Who You Reply To On Google Buzz, You Might Be Exposing Their Email Address Posted: 11 Feb 2010 10:31 PM PST
The danger in creating an instant social network around email contacts, as Google Buzz does with Gmail, is that the boundaries between what is private and what is public are not always clear. One issue raised earlier today is that the people you follow and who follow you are made public by default on your profile page, but are based on people who you email the most in private. You can make these lists invisible, but it remains an opt-out process instead of an opt-in one. It turns out there is another privacy flaw in Google Buzz that can expose private email addresses to everyone who follows you. Google Buzz borrows the @reply convention from Twitter so that if you want to reply to someone or direct a comment to them you simply put the @ sign in front of their name. Google autosuggests names from your contact list as you start typing. Normally, this doesn’t cause any problems if you select the Gmail account or chat name associated with that person’s public profile. It ends up posting their name, and not their email address. But if you select a name or account that is not public, Buzz will fill in with their private email. For example, I wanted to direct a comment at TechCrunch writer MG Siegler, so I typed in “@mg” and up came three of his different emails. I picked his TechCrunch email, not realizing that his public profile is linked to a different Gmail account. What this means is that the 231 people following me on Buzz can all see MG’s private email address in my comment even if they had no direct connection to him before. They can now send him unsolicited emails and spam galore. Now multiply that type of potential exposure by the millions of people already using Buzz, and you can see why it is a hole that should be patched up quickly. I asked Google to explain how all of this works, and here is their response:
Except that it is not rare. Many of my contacts, including the ones using Buzz, have multiple email addresses. When I type their name in Buzz to reply to them, the autosuggest box shows me all the different email addresses I have for them in Gmail, and doesn’t specify which of those are public or private. When I typed in MG’s name, for instance, I chose the TechCrunch email because that is the one I use the most. I had no idea that his Gmail address is the one linked to his public profile, and thus the one I should have used to protect his privacy. In my eyes that is a design flaw. Google actually expects us to pick up on these things and protect each other’s privacy, rather than the other way around. What happens when you inadvertently type in someone’s email address? According to Google:
Sorry, but that is expecting too much from the average user, who probably wouldn’t even notice such a tiny detail. It’s really up to Google to warn users or to make sure that only public names come up in the autocomplete. How hard can that be? Instead, Google is telling us that it is our problem and we should be more vigilant using their product. In the overall scheme of things, this is a small and fixable flaw for a feature that 80 percent of people may never even use. But it is an example of what can go wrong when you inject private contacts into a public stream. Google needs to be extra careful with details like this one.      
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| What If…Apple Only Offered the 64GB/3G iPad and Sold It For $499 Posted: 11 Feb 2010 07:13 PM PST
These numbers can be broken down even further showing Apple’s insane margins. The 3G module only costs $24.50, but Apple charges $129 more for the option. The NAND memory chips are really the only difference between all three options, but their real costs of $29 for 16GB, $59 for $32GB, and $119 for 64GB are nowhere near proportionate with the iPad’s prices. All this data shows that Apple’s abandoning its long-held K.I.S.S. strategy. So what if Apple got back on the keeping it simple bandwagon, only offered the high-end 64GB with 3G iPad and still sold it for $499? After all, the company would still be making at least $153 on each iPad sold. Would that turn around the iPad’s outlook? Read the rest of this story at CrunchGear…      
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| Google Has Another Oprah Moment, Gives A Free Nexus One To Everyone At TED Posted: 11 Feb 2010 07:11 PM PST
Of course, many of the people in attendance are well off and don’t need Google to give them a phone. But it’s a pretty brilliant idea: many of them are also very influential, and there are plenty of various company executives in attendance. This isn’t Google’s first Oprah Moment — last year it handed out HTC Magic phones to everyone attending its I/O developer conference. Here’s a good pair of tweets by Wil Shipley describing the announcement:
     
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| Now You Can Follow TechCrunch On Google Buzz Posted: 11 Feb 2010 05:38 PM PST
You’ll be able to see a stream of our latest stories, and you’ll get the benefits of Buzz, including real-time commenting, Likes, and all the rest. We’ll also be getting a bit more creative with our Buzz feed once we’ve kicked the tires a bit. We’d love to include a simple “Follow TechCrunch” button in this post, but as far as we can tell it doesn’t exist yet so you’ll have to click the link above to join.
     
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| Google’s Sudden Music Blog Purge And Its Implications Posted: 11 Feb 2010 05:35 PM PST
It’s a bit of a sticky wicket, speculating about the legality of these things, but with such a decisive and bold action as the one Google has taken, we can probably reach some conclusions about how it should have gone down. Read the rest of this story at CrunchGear…      
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| 2 Days Of Buzz: 9 Million Posts And Comments. 200 Posts Per Minute From Mobile. And Security Fixes. Posted: 11 Feb 2010 05:21 PM PST
Later today, Google says that they will create a more obvious way to hide your follower count. This has been an issue as it potentially exposes who you email and/or chat with the most. Also new is the immediate ability to block anyone who starts following you. Finally, Google will make it easier to see what people will show up on your “following you” public page. This was (and still is) tricky because only users with public profiles show up there, but it wasn’t obvious who that was. It’s good to see Google reacting so quickly to some of the feedback they’re getting. That said, there remains a lot of work to be done with Buzz. The main problem I have with it is that it’s entirely too noisy and there is no good way to turn that down without unfollowing people. Basically, you have to take the “social” out of the social network for it to be most useful. It seems that there are simply some UI/UX tweaks they could do to correct this. There’s another another potential security issue with Buzz that we’ve been looking into and will be posting on soon. These updates apparently do not correct that. Stay tuned. For now, be sure to follow us on Buzz.
     
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| PositionApp Helps Developers Track App Store Performance On The Go Posted: 11 Feb 2010 05:05 PM PST
Today, UK design firm ustwo has launched PositionApp, an iPhone application that provides data regarding the top 300 apps in the App Store from the last 6 months. The price of the app would have been $7, but AdMob (well, Google technically) is sponsoring the app so that it is free for the next two months. Coupled with its launch, ustwo also provided MobileCrunch with some exclusive graphs showing which app categories have been the most popular over the last 6 months. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>      
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| Posted: 11 Feb 2010 04:37 PM PST
While there has always been a free version of the service, you could not do some of the more advanced things without this subscription. But now you get access to things such as saving private files on Aviary’s servers, adding your own watermarks or go watermark-free, and access to all of their nice tutorials. So why go free? Well, Aviary always wanted the product to be free, but they previously couldn’t justify it. But now, “our recent round of funding (by Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions & others) enables us to finally achieve this goal as we shift revenues to other areas that don’t limit individuals in any way,” co-founder Michael Galpert tells us. He goes on to note that the focus is on building an app marketplace where people can buy and sell goods and services which Aviary would take a cut of. So really, this is a shift in strategy to a new type of model. Existing paying customers will no longer be billed, and those that signed up in the last 30 days will get a full refund. Aviary competes with Adobe’s online version of Photoshop which is also free, but requires you to pay if you go over their 2GB limit.      
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| SquarePik: A New Foursquare iPhone App Based Around Pictures And Videos Posted: 11 Feb 2010 03:48 PM PST
SquarePik is an app that lets you check-in on Foursquare while at the same time dropping an image or video at a venue you check-in at. Because Foursquare doesn’t support media natively, SquarePik does by combining Foursquare’s check-in API with its own backend to store the pictures and record their location. Sadly, to see these pictures or videos you have to sign in to your Pikchur account (which you can do with your Foursquare credentials) on the web. Still, it’s kind of cool that Pikchur was able to build an entirely new Foursquare iPhone app with added functionality. Some people may even prefer its look and feel as it features bigger icons and a large centrally-located check-in button. The downside is that the venue location information doesn’t seem to be as accurate as Foursquare’s actual iPhone app, and there are none of the other goodies such as seeing who else is at a venue. SquarePik also doesn’t break up check-ins by city, it just shows them all in a stream. Pikchur is the latest service to add picture functionality on top of Foursquare. Last month, Photocheck.in started offering the same idea, but it’s slightly different in that you send a geotagged picture and it checks you in on Foursquare at the address. TweetPhoto quickly followed with an approach that is much more like Pikchur’s (but again, Pikchur’s is all about their native iPhone app). Given Fousquare’s growth it should be no surprise that we’re seeing these new services that reside on top of it much like we did with Twitter. And while one might think Foursquare could eventually cripple these simply by adding a native photo element, that was also said about Twitter, but it never happened. That said, given that Foursquare is much more app-centric, I wouldn’t be shocked if we do see the ability to tag pictures to venues eventually. Find SquarePik in the App Store for $1.99.      
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| Have No Idea How To Do A Sales Proposal? Try Proposable. Posted: 11 Feb 2010 03:29 PM PST
Proposable is a web-based app that allows you to create, deliver, and get insight into your sales proposals in minutes (if they’re short enough). It does this with its proposal-building tools and templates that offer a combination of customization and standardization. Perhaps more importantly though, they offer a set of tools to get feedback on the proposals, and look at information about what’s working at what’s not. For example, one of Proposable’s features allows for recipients to add comments to the side of any proposal. And because this is all online, if a client gives you some feedback on something they’ve liked changed, you can do so on the web and have it updated in realtime. That combined with the service’s notifications (via email or SMS), really does make the process a realtime one.
So what does Proposable cost? There are three options. For $19.99 a month, you get the ability to deliver up to 15 proposals and 1 GB on online storage. For $29.99 a month you get an unlimited number of proposals and 4 GB of storage. Or, if you want to use this with a larger team, the biggest plan is $79.99 a month, and you get 10 GB of storage and the ability to add 3 users (with additional ones being $15 a month extra). Each plan also comes with a free 30 day trial. There are no shortage of sales proposals sites out there, such as the aptly named Salesproposals.com, but Proposable’s overall look and feel is far superior. The startup is the latest to launch out of Sproutbox, the Indiana-based incubator.
     
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But the meat of the partnership is in a long term deal where Foursquare users can check into stores in Lucky's coveted "Shopping Directory,” which includes nearly 700 stores in 30 states and 72 cities, and earn the “Lucky” badge. Once users check-in to a Lucky recommended store, users can read tips from Lucky editors about each boutique or store. The idea is to give users editorial insider scoop, a.k.a. incentives, to check-in. User who check-in to these boutiques may also receive discounts and or deals at some locations. Lucky’s long-term strategy is compelling; they want to co-sponsor “boutique crawls” (similar in idea to pub crawls) for users to earn deals and badges. 
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For startups, the idea of creating a sales proposal is often a nightmare. While they’re vital to a business, they’re not exactly the easiest things in the world to create and manage. A new service launching today, 
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