The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- TechCrunch Friday GiveAway: An Apple iPad #CRUNCH
- Lunch.com Communities Let You Build Your Own Niche Reviews Site
- Update: In Time For SXSW, Twitter Officially Turns On Geolocation
- AOL’s Big SXSW Bet On Seed and “Bionic Journalism”
- Seven Alternatives to the Apple iPad
- Confession: I Pre-ordered My iPad And Breguet Made Me Do It
- Formerly Cc:Betty, Threadbox Emerges As A Realtime Collaboration Platform
- Amidst Controversy Storm, Kwedit Reveals Repayment Rate Already At 26%
- The Real War At SXSW: AT&T Versus 15,000 Data-Crazed Velociraptors
- Music Distribution Service Zimbalam Opens
- And It Begins: Foursquare Shatters Its Check-In Record The Day Before SXSW
- Check-In For Charity During SXSW With CauseWorld And TechCrunch
- Hot Potato Tosses A New Site, API, And iPhone App With Foursquare Integration At You
- On The Eve Of SXSW’s Location War, Plancast Gets An iPhone App
- Milo’s Response To Google’s Blue Dot Specials: A Picture
- iPhone OS 4.0 Looms, But When Will We See It?
- Vicarious.ly: SimpleGeo’s One Location-Based Stream To Visualize Them All
- For The Trifecta: MSNBC Extends Its BreakingNews Brand To Facebook
- AOL Launches Lifestream As New Standalone Product. This Is What Google Buzz Should Have Been
- Google Cuts Milo At The Knees With Its Blue Dot Specials
- SecondMarket: Facebook And Zynga Dominate Transactions In February
- Barnes & Noble Uses Crunchies Endorsement On In Store Nook Posters. We Want One.
| TechCrunch Friday GiveAway: An Apple iPad #CRUNCH Posted: 12 Mar 2010 08:49 AM PST
We know you’ve already bought two for yourselves, the limit, because that’s how TechCrunch readers roll. We know this because we’ve told our advertisers that every single one of our 9.2 million monthly readers is a high disposable income influencer in technology and media that just loves to try out new things that they see advertised on TechCrunch. And since those advertisers believe us, we have the means to buy an extra iPad and give it to you. Even though you’ll then have three of them. Because you, dear reader, are a high disposable income influencer. Anyhow back to the iPad. This isn’ the 3G version, which comes later in April. This is the 16GB Wifi iPad, a $499 retail device, that we’ll give away to one lucky reader chosen at random who comments below or retweets this post. Just do one of two things: either retweet this post, and make sure to include the #crunch hashtag, or leave a comment below telling us why this device must be yours. The contest ends at noon California time on Saturday. Please only tweet the message once, anyone tweeting repeatedly will be disqualified. We'll pick a winner tomorrow afternoon and contact you for more details. Anyone in the world is eligible, as long as you can receive delivered packages (our Nexus One winner lives in Romania). And we’ll throw in a TechCrunch tshirt.      
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| Lunch.com Communities Let You Build Your Own Niche Reviews Site Posted: 12 Mar 2010 08:10 AM PST
The new feature can be likened to a ‘Ning for review sites’. As a community founder, you select a topic on whatever you’d like, then invite other users to contribute reviews and other content (you can elect to moderate this as it comes in). For examples, check out Strollerland, a new community that’s dedicated to reviewing strollers. There’s also Gluten Free Groupies, for (surprise) people who like to talk about gluten-free foods. The benefits of this kind of niche-community setup are clear — if you cater to a group of people passionate about a given topic, they’re probably going to be more knowledgeable and engaged than your average user. I’d rather take recommendations from someone who reads about strollers all day than from a guy who liked the one he chose at random at Wal-Mart. CEO J.R. Johnson says that Lunch’s system allows for the creation of multiple communities around the same topic (for example, there could be ten different reviews communities that revolved around bicycles). Because all of these niche review sites are built on the Lunch.com platform, the site can use its universal search and suggestion engine to recommend content you may be interested in, even if it’s found on a different community than the one you’re currently browsing. However, it sounds like new communities may have some trouble getting off the ground. Johnson says he expects that lots of the niche review sites will be launched by existing online communities (say, a Yahoo Group). For them, the system should work well, but if you just want to launch a review site about stamps but don’t already have many friends who are interested in the topic, you may have trouble getting much traction. That said, these niche communities will be exposed to search engines, and if you produce relevant content Lunch’s recommendation engine should also help introduce your community to new users.
     
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| Update: In Time For SXSW, Twitter Officially Turns On Geolocation Posted: 12 Mar 2010 07:37 AM PST
A few days ago, we spotted Twitter’s initial roll out of a geolocation feature on its Website. It appeared that Twitter was testing the feature because it quickly turned it off. Last night, the feature went back on, and Twitter co-founder and CEO Biz Stone officially announced it. While Twitter's geolocation feature has been live through its API since last November, this is the first time Twitter has enabled geolocation on its site. To start Tweeting with your location attached, you need to enable the feature in your Twitter Account Settings. Once you’ve opted-in, you will be able to add your location information to all your Tweets or choose to add them to individual Tweets as you compose them. You can choose to share your exact location (your coordinates) or your neighborhood or town. Currently, the feature only works with Firefox 3.5 and Chrome for Windows. If you decide you want to send a Tweet without your location, you can simply click the “x” next to your location to disable it. Interestingly, if you Tweet with your geolocation on Twitter, the location doesn’t seem to show up in TweetDeck, Seesmic or presumably other third-party clients. And It doesn’t work from Twitter’s mobile site, at least not on the iPhone, where it would make more sense. As we wrote in our earlier coverage, the timing of this move by Twitter is purposeful. With the SXSW conference in Austin starting today, the location wars are heating up. Earlier in the week, the New York Times reported that Facebook would unveil its answer to location next month at its f8 conference. Google, meanwhile, is in the game with Latitude and to some extent Buzz (but could have been in it a lot more). And of course, Foursquare, Gowalla and a host of other location-based apps are rolling out additional functionality. As we previously noted, many of these apps use Twitter’s geolocation API to pass the data back to Twitter, so it makes sense that this would be a good time to turn the functionality on for the website.      
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| AOL’s Big SXSW Bet On Seed and “Bionic Journalism” Posted: 12 Mar 2010 06:24 AM PST
Editor’s Note: This guest post was written and reported by Steven Rosenbaum, the CEO of Magnify.net. Today, the world of music, film, and the internet converges on Austin, Texas for what is fast becoming one of the key the places to launch new software products. For the folks at AOL, South By Southwest—know also as SXSW—will be a debutant party for AOL's new Seed form of journalism. AOL has it’s hopes pinned on that fact that SXSW will be the perfect place to both introduce the new Seed content machine to a large audience and test the concept of mixing freelance and pro-journalists to create a huge amount of original content. Seed has been operational for a few months now, but SXSW will be it coming out party, according to former New York Times writer Saul Hansell who is now the Program Director of Seed. How’s this all going to work? Well, fielding an army of freelancers to cover SXSW’s 2000 bands is certainly a baptism by fire. AOL solicited freelance writers on its music site Spinner. Those interested in contributing were redirected to Seed, where they signed up. Hansell asked for work experience, music tastes, and clips. He says: "I can tell you now that we didn't read the clips. We looked at these things to see if people can follow directions and if they didn't write us 1,000 words when we asked for 100. And that was the criteria.” Next, each of the more than two thousand bands that will play at SXSW were assigned to a Seedster to interview. Hansell says he had his fingers crossed. “I think we're over the hump of my darkest fears,” he says, “and I had many of them. The first dark fear was we'd get total losers. The second fear was how good the interviews would be. " Now, with first results surfacing on Spinner, Hansell says, "The people who sent us e-mails back were entertainment writers for weekend publications, kids in J-school who are also in bands, exactly the right type of people." But they aren’t treated exactly like journalists. Hansell points out that Seedsters don't get a press pass—if they want to hear the bands live they'll have to buy their own ticket. But he expects some number of folks to try and hustle their way into shows by waving around their AOL clips. "That's just expected." With clips like these, Seed writers are held to the same standards as any other freelancer on the AOL site. spinner’s editor Melissa Owen and her team edit the submissions and have final say on what runs and what doesn’t. Why launch at South By Southwest? For Hansell, that was a no-brainer. “I know it is communicating our ambition. We are about reporting. We are about doing big and interesting things.” The big SXSW bet is that Hansell and his Seedsters can make more content, faster, better, and cheaper than anyone else. In addition the distributed community of potential contributors on Seed, AOL already employs 3,500 professional journalists on staff or as regular freelancers. And AOL has some interesting content search technology from its earlier acquisitions of Relegence and Truveo. Man vs. Machine: The Bionic Solution
AOL has built a three legged stool to create content: part professional, part freelance, and part aggregated . . . but its model is far more hand-crafted than the other new players in the mass content creation space. "The essence of journalism has always been separating signal from noise,” says Hansell. “It’s all judgment. It’s all selecting the best bits.” What AOL hopes to create with Seed is an editorial machine which automates the assignment process as much as possible, but keeps the final selection part in human hands. “I call it Bionic Journalism,” says Hansell. “Left brain, right brain. We are trying to take the best of a machine, which does lots of things over and over again, and a person." It’s a tall order, and will take a lot more than a couple thousand band interviews to prove it works. Is AOL trying to beat Google at the news gathering game? Hansell says it’s far more than that. “Google News will give you a whole clump of things that are probably about the same thing with a reasonable degree of accuracy. But it can’t tell you what it’s really about. It can’t summarize it. It can’t translate it into people language." The Ugly Economics: Not My Problem So, what about cost? Some freelancers are complaining that the web doesn’t pay a living wage. “That is not my problem” Says Hansell. He quickly rephrases, “It is my problem but I didn't do that, the world did that." He is however trying to sort it out. Asks Hansell: “How do you deal with the fact that the economics of the Internet can’t let you pay what people think that a freelancer can get paid? One way is you give them a bundle. If you give them ten of the same assignments, even if the price is low, by the time they’re done with the tenth one, they can do the tenth one in half the time they could do the first one.” Here’s another one of Hansell’s analogies: “Seed is to freelancing as Ebay is to classified ads.” AOL’s Seed may be the future of freelance, but the math remains daunting; “The fact that we gave somebody ten interviews to do after she did one or two before, she’s delighted. That’s 500 bucks. That’s 500 bucks more than she was going to make doing something else, and it’s fun.” Well, “delighted” might be pushing it. Pumping out ten assignments for the price of what many professional freelancers charge for one will favor quantity over quality. But if it all works—if Bionic Journalism can attract a massive audience and save AOL—what’s the home run? Here Hansell gets a little bit ahead of himself, but at least he is thinking big: “It’s the most high risk improbable outcome, but the most exciting, which is that we become the most dominant force in journalism, broadly defined, in the Twenty-First Century. That’s what we’re shooting for. That’s what Tim is shooting for. That’s what I’m shooting for.” And it all starts this weekend with 2,000 indie rock band interviews. Steven Rosenbaum is the CEO of Magnify.net, a video curation platform that powers more than 68,000 web sites. Rosenbaum is a serial entrepreneur and Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker. Watch his video notes of Saul Hansell talking about Bionic Journalism and AOL’s larger journalistic ambitions by clicking in the two previous links. .Follow Steve on Twitter.      
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| Seven Alternatives to the Apple iPad Posted: 12 Mar 2010 06:23 AM PST
Wait! Stop. Before you hand over Apple your credit card and pre-order the iPad, you may want to check out the other touchscreen options available now and in the near future. The iPad isn’t the only game in town. Sure, it might have a fancy-pants interface, but each of the follow seven tablets win the hardware fight, which is just as important to a lot of consumers. Of course the hardware only tells part of the story. The iPad has a leg up on all of these options because of the user-friendly iPhone interface, but it’s not like you’re dropping $600+ on a tablet for your parents, right?      
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| Confession: I Pre-ordered My iPad And Breguet Made Me Do It Posted: 12 Mar 2010 06:14 AM PST
Bear with me here. Apple is not the bringer of fire to a benighted world. Far from it. In my recent writing I’ve been struck by a few parallels with Steve Jobs to Abraham Louis Breguet, a French watchmaker who lived in the 18th century. He was a mechanical genius, to be sure, but he was also a salesman. While the rest of the benighted world was sloshing around in an admixture of feces and mud in the streets of Paris and telling the time by whether the pikemen were stabbing them for being out after curfew, Breguet was selling watches that would not be out of place on the wrist (had they had straps) of a whale in Las Vegas. He invented secret anti-counterfeiting measures but made them part of the allure and not part of a DRM scheme. He designed elegant and beautiful watches in an age of rococo designs but wasn’t above creating a “subscription” watch for the masses who wanted to own a piece of the good life without paying an exorbitant sum of money. Other watchmakers were making commodities and following Breguet’s lead. That’s what’s happening here.      
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| Formerly Cc:Betty, Threadbox Emerges As A Realtime Collaboration Platform Posted: 12 Mar 2010 06:10 AM PST
Today, Threadbox is officially launching in private beta, as a more collaborative and user-friendly service. Essentially, the site aims to combine email, IM, and collaboration tools into one platform. Instead of focusing on email like Cc:Betty, Threadbox centers around collaboration in the workplace. The service organizes and logs every type of communications with clients, allows users to share documents and images, and record decisions and feedback. The new service also has the ability to serve as a project management tool, allowing users to share and track requirements and specs, then track and follow team members from start to finish. Additionally, Threadbox aims to serve as a communications tool between employees, with the ability to gather comments, opinions, exchange feedback, share documents and media on the same page. You can add maps, files start conference calls from within the platform. And as the service’s name implies, all communications are threaded and organized according to client and subject. Threadbox still incorporates elements of Cc:Betty’s technology. You can received notifications of thread activity and reply to threads directly from your email client. It’s unclear if the service will integrate with social networks, like Twitter and Facebook. The basic Threadbox service is free but the startup offers a premium product for $19.95 per year. Cc: Betty raised $500,000 in December of last year, and has $2 million in total funding now. With Threadbox the startup is clearly making a play towards the work user; I’m doubt the average consumer will find the service as appealing as Cc:Betty was for personal use. But collaboration is the key word in enterprise-focused products at the moment, so Threadbox will certainly catch the wave of small to medium sized businesses which are looking to upgrade their communication platforms. However, this is a crowded space with many worthy players so the competition, which includes Yammer, Chatter, Jive, Socialtext, WizeHive, and many more products, will be tough. Here’s a video from Threadbox that goes into more detail about the new service:
     
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| Amidst Controversy Storm, Kwedit Reveals Repayment Rate Already At 26% Posted: 12 Mar 2010 01:20 AM PST
The service lets users promise to pay later in lieu of a direct credit card payment when they want virtual currency for social games like Farmville. It’s not a legally binding promise, but users have an incentive to pay amounts owed because that allows them to get more virtual currency through the service. Users can pay by, among other methods, mailing in cash or paying at a 7-11. When the product first launched they had no idea what percentage of promises would be repaid. Anything at all is incremental revenue to game publishers, and since the stuff they’re selling has no marginal cost (virtual currency), it’s all upside. But after nearly two months of being live, they say the repayment rate is 25.9% If you’re a credit company that would put you out of business. But for game publishers, that’s a staggeringly attractive monetization option. Hopefully the company (or its partners) will also disclose the monetization rate as well down the road. Because right now game publishers are only able to get cash out of 1-3% of users. If they can get another few percent to pay via Kwedit, and 25% of that money is actually paid, revenue from games can double or more. It’s controversial because Colbert made fun of it, and then the Huffington Post and CBS jumped on the bandwagon. CBS actually called it “toxic.” Founder Danny Shader posted a long response here. But the short version is this – the criticism is ridiculous. It’s coming in one case from a competitor (the Huffington Post article was written by the CEO of a company that promotes Visa cards to teens and adults, without any sort of disclosure on the conflict). And the author of the CBS article doesn’t appear to actually understand the product and seems more concerned with getting parents all worked up. The really scary stuff in social games was the Scamville nonsense where teens and pre-teens where being tricked into putting long term subscription charges on their parent’s cell phone and credit card bills. Kwedit isn’t even close to that kind of evil. It’s simply a very clever way of monetizing social games, and the most innovative new payments product I’ve seen in a very long while.      
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| The Real War At SXSW: AT&T Versus 15,000 Data-Crazed Velociraptors Posted: 11 Mar 2010 11:20 PM PST
AT&T’s struggles to stay up last year are well-documented. CNN recently ran a piece about how AT&T hopes to avoid a similar fate this year. But actually, “struggles” is way too kind of a word. If you were at SXSW last year and happened to be on AT&T’s network — like, say, if you had an iPhone, like many festival-goers did — it was an absolute nightmare. You couldn’t make a call. You couldn’t send a text. Data? Ha. At a few points early on I seriously wondered if I had forgotten to pay my bill and AT&T had simply shut my phone off — except that it was happening to everyone. AT&T has a funny word for the failure, they like to say it was “unprecedented.” As in, the usage of its network was at levels previously unseen, as a strong percentage of the over 10,000 festival goers (just the interactive part) were using iPhones. Well guess what? Word is that is year, there will be some 15,000 people there for the interactive part. As Samual L. Jackson’s character, Mr. Arnold, says in Jurassic Park, “Hold on to your butts.” I’m leaving for Austin tomorrow and I’m terrified of what the AT&T situation will be when I get there. So much so, that I have a back-up plan (which Sprint sent me just in time to test out during SXSW after reading some of my rants against AT&T). With attendance up as much as 50% from the previous year, the number of iPhones in use is sure to be through the roof as well. Did I mention that just about every location-based service known to man is launching an app at the event and hoping every single one of those 15,000 people use it all the time? And based on the early signs, they intend to. You’ll remember that after Mr. Arnold says the above line in the movie, he’s savagely ripped limb from limb by a velociraptor. But there may be hope for AT&T. They’re clearly well aware of the failure last year, and did try to solve the issue to minimal effect towards the end of the conference. I asked a company representative what they’re planning to do this year, and they have a plan of attack. Much of what they sent me is fairly technical, but basically, they now have a system around the Austin Convention Center (where SXSW takes place) that’s the equivalent of 8 cell sites, with 50 antenna nodes to cover the whole venue. Also, they’ve greatly expanded network capacity, moving from one radio network carrier to three, boosting the spectrum available for phones to use. They also say they’ve expanded the capacity of the so-called “high quality” 850 MHz spectrum, which works better indoors because those signals can go through walls more easily. They also have the new HSPA 7.2 software installed at all of the 3G cell towers now. But don’t be confused: that doesn’t mean their network has been upgraded to 7.2 Mbit/s speeds (sadly, at the peak, it’s still half that in almost all of the country), it just means that the upgraded software is in place and should be more reliable and efficient. But there’s more. AT&T has brought in two Cells on Wheels (the so-called COWS that they brought in to help last year), and also a third rooftop temporary cell site. Each of these are equipped with both 3G and WiFi networks to help alleviate overall network strain. AT&T says these three cells are placed in optimal positions around the city of Austin where they expect the most strain. All of that sounds great, but I’m still terrified. Why? Because I live in San Francisco. AT&T has known for months that the network is awful here, and while there have been baby steps taken to improve it in some areas, more often than not, it’s still awful. Take tonight, for example. So if AT&T knows it’s bad here, but still can’t seem to fix it, why should I believe Austin will be any different? I don’t. I’ll just have to hope I’m wrong. Or I’ll have to kick back, relax, and take joy in the bloodbath as iPhones are magically turned into glistening bricks being hurled in anger left and right. As I boot up the Sprint Hotspot, of course.
[photo: universal pictures]      
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| Music Distribution Service Zimbalam Opens Posted: 11 Mar 2010 11:19 PM PST
The service lets artists submit and distribute their music through 25 of the most popular music platforms, including Apple’s iTunes and Spotify, in addition to “several hundred additional stores worldwide”. This makes Zimbalam the largest music distribution network as measured by number of stores and geographic reach, says the Paris-based company. To distribute their music via Zimbalam’s network, artists are charged a simple annual fee ($29.99 in year one then $19.98 per year after for an EP or album) and then once the fee is recouped, get to keep 100% of royalties – after, of course, whatever commission is taken by each store. Additionally, following year one, artists won’t be charged by Zimbalam if they don’t make enough sales to cover the annual fee.      
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| And It Begins: Foursquare Shatters Its Check-In Record The Day Before SXSW Posted: 11 Mar 2010 09:17 PM PST
The official Foursquare account just sent out a tweet letting everyone know that today is already the service’s biggest day ever. This is interesting since it’s actually the day before the SXSW conference kicks off in Austin, Texas. According to the tweet, Foursquare broke 275,000 check-ins (the previous record, set last Friday) for the day “hours ago.” This means they’re very likely well past 300,000 now and perhaps even higher. To put that in some perspective, just a month ago, Foursquare set a record with 1.2 million check-ins for the entire week. And that was double was it was the month prior. At today’s rate, Foursquare would be doing well over 2 million check-ins a week. Today happens to be the first birthday of Foursquare, so they shared some numbers earlier. The service now has over 500,000 users, they’ve given out over 1 million badges, there are over 1.4 million venues in the system, with over 1,200 specials available. And in total, there have been some 15.5 million check-ins. But that was before today’s record numbers. While there are well over a dozen location-based services launching something at SXSW, the main two competitors vying for users’ time are expected to be Foursquare and Austin-native Gowalla. For its part, Gowalla noted that it was “Amazing to watch the Gowalla action on the eve of SXSW. AMAAAAAAZING!,” earlier today. Both recently revamped their websites, and both yesterday launched their new iPhone apps. And judging from the Vicarious.ly data provided by SimpleGeo, both are absolutely on fire right now and could go nuclear this weekend. Update: Gowalla has a range of just about every possible venue you can imagine for SXSW and so far (again, the day before the conference), they’ve seen 352 check-ins at the SXSW Badge Pick-Up alone.      
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| Check-In For Charity During SXSW With CauseWorld And TechCrunch Posted: 11 Mar 2010 09:07 PM PST
CauseWorld, is a free iPhone and Android app that lets you check-in places, but it has an added real-world bonus: big brands give money to charity when you do so. And this week at SXSW, CauseWorld is teaming up with TechCrunch to offer double point (which they aptly call “karma”) when you check in to one of over 50 venues around Austin (I’ll paste the full list at the bottom of the post), including the Austin Convention Center (where SXSW is held). We’ve covered CauseWorld, which is the first offering from the soon-to-launch ShopKick, a few times now. It’s a great product because it takes an area that is red hot right now, location-based check-ins, and converts it into good deeds in the real world. For example, if you check-in at a store, you may earn 20 karma points. As you continue to accumulate these, you can turn them into real dollar donations for causes such as water in Sudan or trees in the Amazon. Brands such as Kraft Foods and Citi are currently giving the donations based on what users choose to trade their karma points for. The best part is, you don’t even have to buy anything — you simply check-in at various venues and earn the points. And again, this week at SXSW, checking-in with the app at a bunch of venues will earn you double karma points. And like any good service with a gaming element, there’s a leaderboard to show who has donated the most karma points. And yes, checking-in can earn you badges, such as the TechCrunch one show in this post. So if you’re going to be in Austin for SXSW this week. Or really, if you just want to do some good with your mobile device, check out CauseWorld. Find it in the App Store here, or in the Android Market (on your Android device).
Below find the 54 participating double karma Austin check-in spots:
     
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| Hot Potato Tosses A New Site, API, And iPhone App With Foursquare Integration At You Posted: 11 Mar 2010 05:16 PM PST
First and foremost, there is a new iPhone application that just went live in the App Store. With a completely revamped user interface, the app makes it easier than ever to find and participate in events. Perhaps more importantly, it makes it really easy to create new events — and notably, the service has the nicest third-party Foursquare integration I’ve ever seen. When you click on the button to create an event, you can still manually enter a location, but if you happen to be around the venue, you can simply pick it from Foursquare’s list of venues with the click of a button. This drastically simplifies the event creation process since the venue metadata is already there. This new app will be crucial for the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, which starts tomorrow. If you’ve been reading TechCrunch over the past week, you’ve undoubtedly seen that just about every location-based service has an app they’re unveiling. And another service based around planning events, Plancast, just launched their app this evening. But Hot Potato offers the best of both worlds as it allows you to both plan future events, and interact with ones currently taking place. The new app makes it very easy to chat about the event, and upload photos and videos. And they’ve cleaned up the stream of information around these events. There is now a filter to show everyone commenting, or just your friends. There are also now number indicators to show unread items. And the check-in process has been simplified thanks to big green buttons that make it obvious. Also new for SXSW is Twitter integration. On a case-by-case basis, Hot Potato will be pulling in tweets about certain events at SXSW, using a filter to make sure only relevant ones show up. You’ll be able to do things such as filter those tweets to show only those by people you actually follow, which will make them potentially much more meaningful to you. You can also reply to tweets thanks to integration of Twitter’s API. And you can share tweets from within the app that will show up as retweets on Twitter. Another new features is Calendars — something which each Hot Potato user now has. Obviously, you can add the events you wish to be a part of to your calendar, but people you are friends with on the service can also add you to other events as well. The app also now features Push Notifications now (on top of revamped email notifications). On top of the new app, Hot Potato has rolled out a completely revamped website with just about all of the same functionality of the new app (as well as the new look and feel). And at the highest level, Hot Potato finally has its own social graph, which can pull in friends from the usual suspects: Facebook, Twitter, your address book, etc. And here’s something that should really help Hot Potato this week: each time someone checks-in to a SXSW event with Foursquare, that service will recommend they also join the event on Hot Potato. Clicking on the accompanying link provided in the Foursquare app with open the Hot Potato app and let them join the event with a click (if they have an account). As you might expect, you can also check-in to a venue on Foursquare within Hot Potato. With Foursquare likely to be one of the key apps used by conference goers, this cross promotion is simply huge. On top of all of this, the service now has its own full API, so others can use and interact with their data. Simply put, all these updates are full of win, and make a good app even better. And remarkably, they’ve managed to cram in all these new features while at the same time simplifying the overall experience. Fine the new iPhone app here in the App Store. It’s a free download.
     
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| On The Eve Of SXSW’s Location War, Plancast Gets An iPhone App Posted: 11 Mar 2010 04:31 PM PST
The application itself looks solid, and includes the core functionality you’ll find on the Plancast website. The main view allows you to scroll through a list of your friends’ upcoming events, and tapping on an event will show you where it is on a map and who else is going. At SXSW, where there are always many panels and parties going on, this can come in handy — sometimes it’s more practical to plan ahead than it is to walk across town when you notice a few of your friends are checking in somewhere. One feature I’d like to see is a way to get push notifications when a bunch of friends are planning to attend the same event (e.g. “Hey, your friends are all going to Salt Lick in a few hours!”); hopefully we’ll get something like that in the next release. There’s also a mobile version of the site available for users on other mobile platforms. Plancast was founded by TC alum Mark Hendrickson, and recently closed an $800,000 seed funding round that included a bevy of well known angels like SoftTech VC, Dave McClure, and Joshua Schachter. For other SXSW-related location news, see Loopt’s new iPhone app, Gowalla’s new app, and Vicarious.ly, a new app from SimpleGeo that brings all of this location data together.
     
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| Milo’s Response To Google’s Blue Dot Specials: A Picture Posted: 11 Mar 2010 03:04 PM PST
This morning Google announced a new Blue Dot feature on the mobile version of Google Product Search that shows whether a product is in-stock at nearby stores. This seems to pose a threat to startup Milo, which highlights local inventory in product search results both on the web and mobile devices. Milo’s co-founder Ted Dziuba subsequently responded to our post with a Tweet that read “Google Product Search has availability for 5 retailers vs. Milo's 49. Super cool web service, bro.” At launch Google only has partnerships with Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and West Elm. Milo’s list of merchants includes a range of retailers, from BestBuy and Nordstrom to Midwestern regional department store Blain’s Farm and Fleet. When we asked for an additional response, Milo sent us this amazing set of pictures below. Milo’s Palo Alto office’s are located at 165 University Avenue, in the same space as Google’s first office back in 1999. Look closely at the picture and you may even see a few of the famous faces from Google’s original team. The building itself is legendary in Silicon Valley and has also housed PayPal. Here’s a 2007 New York Times article detailing the building’s history and apparent lucky karma. The picture of the Google employees was given to Milo by one of its investors.
Milo CEO and co-founder Jack Abraham was quick to respond that they are not implying that Milo is the next Google, but just meant to inject some light-hearted humor into the situation. In all seriousness, Abraham said that Milo has a tremendous amount of respect for Google and its Product Search but aren’t scared of the search giant entering the market and actually welcomes the competition. Abraham and his team have been working for the past two years to scale their product and feel that their offering is more comprehensive than Google’s Blue Dot specials. While Milo is steadily expanding its merchants both regionally and nationally, the startup is also looking to partner with mom and pop shops in cities. Currently, Milo indexes 2 million products. And Forrester reports that the “online research, offline buying” consumer market represents $917 billion in consumer spending, which is 30 percent of all U.S. retail sales. Online, e-commerce spending accounts for less than 5 percent of U.S. sales. With those numbers, it comes of no surprise that Google wants a piece of the pie. But perhaps there’s enough room for a number of players to monetize from this space.      
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| iPhone OS 4.0 Looms, But When Will We See It? Posted: 11 Mar 2010 01:16 PM PST
As AppleInsider reported today, iPhone OS 4.0 is likely to deliver multitasking support. If true, that will make it perhaps the most important OS upgrade for the platform yet. However, in reporting the news, AppleInsider also notes that the software, “remains under development and reportedly has a quite ‘way to go’ before it’s ready for prime time.” Looking back at the iPhone OS SDK history you’ll notice a constant: Apple has released the beta builds in March the past two years. We’re already well into March this year, and so far, no word about Apple being close to doing the same. In fact, last year, Apple held its iPhone OS 3.0 preview event (where it first made a beta available) on March 17. I remember this well because I was unable to attend as I was at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. I also remember when Apple sent out the invites to that event, March 12, because I wrote up the report about it on my way to the airport to leave for Austin. But the difference last year is that there were whispers leading up to that announcement that there would be some kind of event in March for the iPhone OS. This year, so far, nothing. Now, it’s possible that some of the speculation about the new iPhone OS release has been muted because of the recent iPad unveiling, and it’s upcoming launch on April 3. But that very launch also adds fuel to the fire that we won’t be seeing an iPhone 4.0 OS anytime soon. After all, Apple is currently in the process of rolling out the beta builds of iPhone OS 3.2 (currently on beta 4), which is the OS the iPad will apparently ship with. The launch of the SDK is important because it gives developers time to get their apps ready for any big changes coming. And multitasking seems like it would be a pretty huge change, though it’s not entirely clear if most of the work would be done through the OS itself to optimize how app resources are managed, rather than apps having to do that themselves to be deemed “multitasking ready.” Hell, it’s not even clear if any iPhone beyond the inevitable new one will be allowed to let third-party apps run at the same time as the new hardware will undoubtedly have a faster processor (possibly the A4 found in the iPad), more RAM, and maybe even a better battery — all of which will be crucial to multitasking. I’ve spoken with a few developers and none have yet seen any part of the iPhone 4.0 OS. A few have gotten word from the company that it is indeed coming, and that big changes are in store (which had led me to speculate about background running in the past) but have no idea when that will be. Apple, meanwhile, has been thinking about how best to let third-party applications run in the background on the iPhone for about a year now. It seems unlikely that Apple would launch a new iPhone OS without giving developers plenty of time to play around with it. And since there is no word about the 4.0 SDK coming anytime soon, that could well mean a push from the usual June/July timeframe for a new (final build) iPhone OS launch. Might we see new iPhone hardware that launches with OS 3.2? And then iPhone OS 4.0 would be released as a free upgrade closer to the Fall timeframe? It certainly seems possible.      
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| Vicarious.ly: SimpleGeo’s One Location-Based Stream To Visualize Them All Posted: 11 Mar 2010 12:59 PM PST
As I’ve made abundantly clear over the past several days, just about every service that has anything to do with location is launching something at the SXSW festival which starts tomorrow in Austin, Texas. Don’t believe me, here’s a small sampling (Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Plancast, Brizzly, Twitter). So, how are you going to wrap your head around all this location data? SimpleGeo has an awesome way. Vicarious.ly is a real-time location-based stream of information presented in a nice visual way. While the plan is to eventually launch one for many different cities around the U.S. and eventually the world, the first one is based around Austin, for SXSW. To make it, SimpleGeo partnered with BlockChalk, Brightkite, Bump Technologies, Flickr, Fwix, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Twitter to pull all of their location data and place it both in a constantly-updating stream, and put data points on a Google Map at the top of the page. These data points are represented by the logos of the various companies, so it’s easy to follow visually. Those concerned about the privacy implications of this need not worry, Vicarious.ly doesn’t pull actual user names from the companies mentioned above. Instead, they simply note that “someone” checked-in at a venue. They do, however, give the venue name, which is a hyperlink. So if someone just checked into Stubb’s Bar-B-Q in Austin on Gowalla, you’ll see a link back to the Gowalla page for that venue. Likewise, if someone uploads a geotagged picture to Flickr, you’ll see a thumbnail of the picture in Vicarious.ly’s stream, and clicking on it will take you to that picture’s Flickr page. It’s fairly amazing to see just how much activity there is even today, the day before the conference starts. Tomorrow and the weekend should be insane. “The amount of real-time, location-based information we’re indexing is staggering. We wanted a powerful way to showcase that, so we built Vicarious.ly and targeted the launch to coincide with a massive gathering of geeks,” co-founder Matt Galligan says about the project. You’ll note just how much of the activity are check-ins from either Foursquare or Gowalla. Those two are likely to be the two main competitors in the location war that will take place this weekend. (If you’re surprised not to see tweets in the stream, it’s a bug that SimpleGeo hopes to squash tonight). For more on SimpleGeo, which has a powerful set of tools to easily provide geolocation infrastructure for other companies (such as the new hot startup, StickyBits), check out this and this.
     
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| For The Trifecta: MSNBC Extends Its BreakingNews Brand To Facebook Posted: 11 Mar 2010 12:36 PM PST
MSNBC spokesperson Gina Stikes says that the new Facebook account will only send updates for the biggest stories to break (you can still use its other feeds if you want to receive every story to come from the service). The page is obviously still quite new (it only has 645 fans right now), but you can expect that the grow quickly. Just how quickly is the big question, though: we’ll have to wait to see if MSNBC will be able to leverage its large community on Twitter to establish its Facebook page. In any case, it’s managed to take ownership of the term “breaking news” across a large swath of the web, which is no small feat.
     
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| AOL Launches Lifestream As New Standalone Product. This Is What Google Buzz Should Have Been Posted: 11 Mar 2010 11:48 AM PST
Like Friendfeed, Lifestream aggregates a number of third party social networks – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc., so if you follow a Lifestream user you’ll see all of the content that user publishes on those networks, and Lifestream automatically pulls in content from people you already follow on those various social networks, so you don’t have to create yet another new friend list. Lifestream isn’t yet integrated with Google Buzz, but Aol says it may be coming soon. Users can filter out content from specific networks if they like, on a per user or broad basis. A way to think about this – “noise cancellation for social networks.” Lifestream also lets users publish back to social networks. Status updates posted to Lifestream can be posted back to Facebook, Myspace and/or Twitter. Lifestream also optionally notes your location in your status updates via GPS on mobile devices, or you can manually add it instead.
You also have a variety of choices in how you use Lifestream. You can access it via the website, an AIR application, or via iPhone and Android applications. As I said above, the mobile applications are particularly useful because they auto-note your location for easy check-ins, and you can post pictures you take from the phone. That mobile version of the product is what excites me most. You can see where your friends are checking into on, say, Foursquare, click through to a place page and then go there yourself and check in. And Lifestream allows you to follow places just like people, so you can see whenever someone checks in to your local cafe or bar. That ability to follow places is probably the single best reason to use Lifestream. The Lifestream product is simple, intuitive and really, really useful. Frankly it’s what Google Buzz should have been – both an independent social network on its own, but very deep integration into all of the other social networks you are likely to use daily. It’s nice to see actual innovation coming out of Aol.
     
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| Google Cuts Milo At The Knees With Its Blue Dot Specials Posted: 11 Mar 2010 10:34 AM PST
Google just launched a new feature on the mobile version of Google Product Search which could take local shopping search startup Milo out at the knees. Whenever you do a Google product search from a mobile phone, blue dots will appear next to items which are in-stock at nearby stores. The image at right is from a search I just did for “HDTVs.” The blue dots are subtle, but they certainly distinguish those results. Google has partnerships with Best Buy, Sears, Williams-http://www.crunchbase.com/widgetSonoma, Pottery Barn, and West Elm to show local inventory, and it is inviting other merchants to apply to participate as well. Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra previewed the local product search last December, but it is now live. Highlighting local inventory in product search results is exactly what Milo does, although it works on the Web as well as mobile. Milo will have to try to keep one step ahead of Google now that its business has been targeted as a feature of Google Product search. The good news for Milo is that nobody really uses Google Product Search. It is not even highlighted as one of the products on the Google iPhone app, for instance. Maybe that will change, now that it has a geo-enabled set of results. When you are looking for stuff to buy, it always helps to know where you can buy an item nearby. The vast majority of people who shop on the Web actually just use it for research, and then go local to buy. Milo co-founder Ted Dziuba responds via a Tweet:
How long before Google closes that gap?
     
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| SecondMarket: Facebook And Zynga Dominate Transactions In February Posted: 11 Mar 2010 10:03 AM PST
Transactions more tripled in February, from $13 million in sales to $43.8 million in sales last month. A full 48% of the transactions were sales of Facebook stock, compared to 38% in January. And last month, we reported that sales are being completed for as high as $40 per share (or a $17.6 billion valuation). But we learned this week that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in no rush to take the company public. LinkedIn took 18% of the transactions, and sales of both Twitter and Zynga stock were each 15% of the total. LifeLock rounded the group out with 4% of the total. The transactions concentrated mainly in consumer products and services (85%) and media and entertainment (15%). Similar to January's trends, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter attracted the most transactions on SecondMarket. On the buying side, Facebook led the way with one-third of all buyside demand followed by Twitter (7%) and LinkedIn (5%). Interest in Zynga (3%) also rose in February. On the seller side, ex-employees of start-ups stepped up their selling activity in February, comprising over 80% of sales, the highest percentage in the past nine months. Noticeably missing from the report was Tesla, which filed for a $100 million IPO in late January. TechCrunch_Private_Company_Presentation_Final_2010_03_09      
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| Barnes & Noble Uses Crunchies Endorsement On In Store Nook Posters. We Want One. Posted: 11 Mar 2010 09:50 AM PST
We were somewhat sad when Barnes & Noble sent their PR firm to accept their award for the Nook for Best Gadget of 2009 at the Crunchies in January. Traditionally only Apple blows off the awards, and we’ve always been able to work around that. But apparently Barnes & Noble are at least aware that they won the award. They are using it to promote the Nook on in-store posters, we learned recently. We sent TechCruncher Laura Boychenko over to the local Barnes & Noble last night with strict instructions to rip one of the posters off the wall and run like hell back to the office with it. She failed in her task, but did take a few pictures and a video and promised to ask Barnes & Noble for one of the posters for our office. Less dramatic, but just as effective I guess. I’m not suggesting anyone should commit a crime, but if someone were to obtain one (legally, mind you) and show up at our office with one of these we’d likely send them away with a thank you and a TechCrunch tshirt. No questions asked. Video is below.
     
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Apple has set the standard that once every year they will release a new version of the iPhone. It stands to reason that this year will be no different, with a new model likely coming sometime this summer. But arguably just as important as Apple’s hardware refresh is the accompanying software refresh that comes with it as well. And that’s why it shouldn’t be surprising at all that whispers of iPhone OS 4.0 are starting to grow. But this year, the timeline appears a bit off.
Last November, MSNBC 
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That’s not it though. Users can sign in to Lifestream using their Facebook account via Facebook Connect, making it unnecessary to remember separate account and credentials for the site.
In January, private company stock marketplace 
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