The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- SharesPost Report Values Facebook At $9 Billion, Estimates 2010 Revenues At $1 Billion
- Yahoo Publisher Network To Be Axed, Customers Referred To Chitika Instead
- SharesPost Report Values Twitter At $750 Million
- WePay’s Hassle-Free Group Payments Platform Launches To The Public
- Less Than One Third Of Tweets Come From The United States, Study Says
- Live: Ford And Microsoft Working Together On Electric Cars
- YouTube To Roll Out New Design For All Video Pages Today
- Placecast Launches Match API To Ensure Accuracy In Location-Based Check-Ins
- Analyst Gene Munster: Apple Will Build A Search Engine
- Memeo Is Bringing A Google Docs Reader To The iPad
- InsideView Raises $11.5 Million For Enterprise-Friendly Web Crawler
- More Video-Related iPad News, Courtesy Of Delve Networks And MeFeedia
- TweetDeck Taps TwitVid For Video Sharing, Replacing 12seconds
- Socialcast Raises $8 Million Series B To Spread Its Realtime Enterprise Streams
- Facebook’s Amusingly Cruel CAPTCHA
- Ancestry.com Discovers Family Ties Between Madonna And Ellen DeGeneres
- doubleTwist Gives Android Market The Slick, iTunes-Like Interface It Deserves (With One Catch)
- Might The iPad And iPhone HD Be Apple’s Parting Gifts For AT&T?
- Peixe Urbano: Brazil Gets A Groupon-Like Deal Site
- Orange, OpenX Set Out To Build Pan-European Ad Exchange Ecosystem
- RjDj Now Lets You Create Your Own Trippy, Reactive Music For iPhone And iPad
- Kyte Jumps On the iPad’s HTML5 Bandwagon And Prepares An App SDK
- Tomorrow, SimpleGeo Launches Into Location Orbit With 5,000 Partners In Tow
- Automattic Opens Up VaultPress, A Safe Place To Back Up Your Blog
- An iPad App 2,000 Years In The Making: Air Harp
| SharesPost Report Values Facebook At $9 Billion, Estimates 2010 Revenues At $1 Billion Posted: 31 Mar 2010 09:35 AM PDT
The report, which is embedded below, estimates Facebook’s current valuation between $8.4 and $9 billion after using two methods of analysis comparing revenues with steady-state enterprise valuation ($9 billion) and comparative enterprise valuation ($8.4 billion). The steady-state valuation estimates use a 25x market multiple and normalized net margins of 30%. Assuming that Facebook will make $2.5 billion in 2014, the report arrives at a target 2010 enterprise value of $9 billion. For the comparative valuation, the report uses a secular growth rate of 25% and EBITDA margins of 50%, to arrive at a conservative valuation of $8.4 billion (assuming the company’s revenue to be $1.3 billion in 2011.)
SharesPost’s report estimates that Facebook is currently burning through $200 – $300M of cash a year for its operational expenses and for capacity expansion, and is cash-flow positive, which we knew. The report highlights Facebook’s 400 million users and its dominance as the world’s largest social network, wide network of developers building off the platform, and the amount of ecommerce and advertising revenue flowing through the network. For example, Zynga spends between $5 million and $8 million per month on advertising on Facebook. The report estimates that Facebook’s revenue for 2010 will hit $1 billion and nearly $3 billion by 2015, another stat that we’ve heard before.
SharesPost also released a report on the valuation of Twitter, estimating that the microblogging network is worth $750 million. Strangely, SharesPost’s recently-launched Venture-Backed Index has Facebook’s valuation listed at nearly $12 billion. We’ve contacted SharesPost for comment on this discrepancy. Sharespost Facebook Valuation Report      
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| Yahoo Publisher Network To Be Axed, Customers Referred To Chitika Instead Posted: 31 Mar 2010 09:26 AM PDT
We just received an anonymous tip from someone who claims to have received an email from Yahoo which says that the company’s Google AdSense counterpart, Publisher Network, will be shut down by the company in the next 30 days. There’s some chatter about it on Twitter as well, so this looks like it’s coming from a credible source. Apparently, publishers are being pushed to Chitika instead, which has set up this section on its website to “make the transition from Yahoo! Publisher Network as easy as possible”. Update: it’s legit, alright. Here’s the full email:
The YPN blog remains silent about the axing, so far. We have e-mails in with both Chitika and Yahoo for more information. One thing I’m trying to figure out is why Yahoo doesn’t refer publishers to its search partner Microsoft, who operates adCenter. For background: the Yahoo! Publisher Network (aka YPN) was launched in August 2005. It provides registered publisher with cost-per-click contextual advertising as well as various tools and services to assist them in building and improving their websites.      
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| SharesPost Report Values Twitter At $750 Million Posted: 31 Mar 2010 09:10 AM PDT
A new analyst report from private secondary market SharesPost values Twitter at around $750 million, which is less than the $1 billion valuation it got in its last round of funding and less than the $1.5 billion valuation private shares of Twitter are trading for on SharesPost itself. The report notes that the $1 billion valuation was based on preferred shares, whereas it is looking at common shares. The analyst report (embedded below) comes up with an enterprise value for Twitter based on projected revenues, margins, and comparisons to other companies. Depending on the method, it comes up with a range of valuations from $656 million (by comparing Twitter’s estimated enterprise value to comparable companies) to $751 million (by estimating revenues, margins, and a discount rate). It is all pretty much guesswork since Twitter still doesn’t know where the bulk of its revenues will come from. But the report makes a stab at projecting revenues of $45 million in 2010 going to $170 million in 2014. It notes various sources of potential revenue in order of decreasing likelihood, starting with licensing its data feed to search engines (which is where most of its revenue is coming from today) and creating premium accounts for businesses (something else it has already dabbled in). Other options for making money: charging third party apps based on how much API data they use, premium accounts for heavy individual users (limited potential), Web ads on user profiles, or ads in Tweets (these could alienate users). The best bet for Twitter to make money, says the report, is to continue to become a marketing channel for businesses and start charging for leads. The opt-in model of people following businesses and brands should result in much higher sales per lead than other marketing channels such as email marketing, telemarketing, or bulk SMS marketing. Businesses who use Twitter for social media marketing purposes tend to have many more followers than normal users and also Tweet more often.
Another nice chart in the report show how Twitter’s uptime has improved since its early days (other than when it is under a denial of service attack),
And the report confirms that most Twitter users are passive readers rather than active posters. As I’ve long suspected, people on Twitter tend to consume more than they Tweet. About 68 percent of users login at least once a month, but only 17 percent Tweet. (Although, they do tend to start Tweeting more once they’ve been on the service for 9 months or longer).
Sharespost Twitter Valuation Report      
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| WePay’s Hassle-Free Group Payments Platform Launches To The Public Posted: 31 Mar 2010 08:59 AM PDT
WePay’s core architecture is based around a prepaid debit card system, which makes its accounts not only easy to set up but also more flexible when it comes to setting up group paying. So with PayPal, your account is tied to your name, without any way to separate the payments associated with a group. On WePay, you can create a unique, FDIC insured account for each group. While the account is still associated with your name, but you can keep each group account totally separate from your personal transactions. Group money can essentially be kept separate from any individual accounts you may have. You can also designate specific individuals to have control over accounts. From accounts on WePay, users can send emails with electronic bills (which can be paid with bank accounts or credit cards) and spend funds with a WePay VISA prepaid card, paper checks, or electronically. If group members don't pay soon, the site will automatically remind them a few days later. WePay makes money by charging a 3.5% transaction fee (there's also a different plan that charges 50 cents per transaction and limits you on the methods of payment you can accept). The site has been in private beta for the past six months but has received positive feed back from its limited number of users. Co-founder Bill Clerico likens PayPal to the payment equivalent of email (meaning its more targeted towards exchanging information or money between two separate parties) and WePay as the payment equivalent of Facebook, in that there is one central place for everyone to see the latest information, and payments are exchanged between many parties. As we wrote in December, all signs point to WePay being a winner, and viable competitor to PayPal in the group payments space. And a number of notable investors and technology executives seems to think so as well. In addition to funding from Y Combinator, the site has raised $1.65 million from August Capital and angel investors, including PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, PayPal alum Dave McClure, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, Ron Conway, Mark Goines, Andrew McCollum, Joe Campanelli, and Angus Davis.
     
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| Less Than One Third Of Tweets Come From The United States, Study Says Posted: 31 Mar 2010 08:31 AM PDT
Paris-based Semiocast, which helps brands understand and interact with real-time Web services, has again done a study on Twitter usage. After finding that only 50% of tweets are in English, based on an analysis of 2.8 million tweets, the company has now looked at nearly five times as many Twitter messages in order to gain more insight on the increased international presence of the popular micro-sharing service. According to an analysis of 13.5 million tweets published over the course of one week, Semiocast concluded that users located in the United States account for only thirty percent of all tweets. The next English-speaking country on the list comes in fifth, with only 6 percent of tweets analyzed originating from the United Kingdom. Top countries are the U.S., Japan, Brazil, Indonesia and the UK, in that order. Semiocast says only 0.5% of tweets appear to come geo-tagged. In order to establish the share of countries more accurately, the company also processed tweets and self-declared locations in bios from users with the help of its multi-lingual semantic technology platform, effectively parsing the locations of Twitter users as good as possible. Semiocast says the strongest growth rate was not registered in the United States, where Twitter is headquartered, but in other regions around the world. Furthermore, English now accounts for less than 44% of tweets, down from 50% merely six weeks ago. Japan, where Twitter has been actively bolstering its presence for the past two years now, is the second largest tweeting nation, accounting for about 15% of messages worldwide. The third largest Twitter nation is Brazil, with nearly 12% of messages worldwide, which translates to about 6.2 million messages per day. Indonesia, where Twitter is big thanks to partnerships with local carriers, ranks fourth with 10% of messages worldwide or about 5 million messages on a daily basis. Overall, the sample of tweets analyzed is fairly small, considering that today, an estimated 53 million tweets are published on a daily basis, up from 50 million per day in February 2010. Nevertheless, other companies who’ve analyzed the internationalization of Twitter in the past have come to similar conclusions: the growth rate of tweets is clearly accelerating outside the United States, and the share of Twitter messages originating from the company’s home country is getting smaller every day. Even Twitter investor Fred Wilson has written about that trend on his blog last weekend. For more context, Sysomos has published research findings on this topic before. In January 2010, the company looked at 13 million active Twitter accounts from mid-October to mid-December 2009 and found that 50.8% of Twitter activity came from the U.S., followed by Brazil (8.79%), the U.K. (7.2%), Canada (4.35%) and Germany (2.49%). Japan was 10th at 1.22%. That was a sharp drop compared to the 62.1% share in the United Stated Sysomos registered in June 2009. How long until Japan, Indonesia or Brazil takes the lead at the expense of the United States?
     
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| Live: Ford And Microsoft Working Together On Electric Cars Posted: 31 Mar 2010 07:48 AM PDT  You can watch Steve Ballmer talking about Ford and Microsoft's new partnership here but we'll run a liveblog for you all here so you don't have to whip out the headphones. Refresh this page to see updates. 10:41 - Ballmer talking about Hohm. Decreases energy costs. Automating and optimizing the process of charging your electric vehicle.
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| YouTube To Roll Out New Design For All Video Pages Today Posted: 31 Mar 2010 06:55 AM PDT
YouTube’s video page overhaul, which the company itself says is one of the biggest redesigns in its history, is about to get noticed by a lot more people today. A YouTube partner just forwarded us an e-mail he received from the Google company, stating that all videos will be transitioned to the newly designed page some time today. Here is the relevant part of said e-mail, which leaves little to the imagination:
You can read more details about the redesign in the blog posts linked in YouTube’s email to its partners, or check out what Jason wrote when the new video page was publicly released (only opt-in) last January. In short: less clutter, easier search and no more stars. Sure, everyone has been able to active the new look for a while now, but not every member of the humongous YouTube community reads the company blog, or TechCrunch for that matter, so chances are many will be seeing the new video page for the first time today. Remember, this on a site that is seeing more than 20 hours of video uploaded every minute. Expect lots of confused people roaming the tubes today.      
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| Placecast Launches Match API To Ensure Accuracy In Location-Based Check-Ins Posted: 31 Mar 2010 06:49 AM PDT
Following the location-based frenzy that took place at this year’s SXSW festival, my colleague MG Siegler highlighted a definitive issue when it comes to checking in on various social networks like FourSquare, Gowalla, Loopt and others. The problem is that each of these check-in services has their own places database, which means that a place on Foursquare may be slightly different than a place on Gowalla, even though they're technically the same place. Moreover, within many location-based social networks, there are duplicates for some venues since people are allowed to create their own. Location-based advertising and marketing service Placecast is hoping to resolve this problem by launching its Match API, Rosetta Stone like-database for location venue data. Placecast’s free Match API will enables location content providers and location-based application developers to refer to a location in any number of ways, and validate that those references resolve to one true location for each check-in. In more simple terms, the API will take duplicate listings for a venue and combine them into one listing. The API translates data across services and matches it for accuracy, regardless of the ID system. And because the Placecast Match API is an open system, Placecast's Match API enables companies working with location data to use any (or multiple) ID system and resolve to one true location. For example, if I check-in to the lobby of the Hilton Hotel and a friend checks into the restaurant at the Hilton Hotel, the Match API would resolve these and show both as the same location and check-in venue. The Placecast Match API aims to resolves two issues with large location-based data sets. First, it disambiguates addresses, indentifying all of the different ways to express the address of a location. Second, it maps all the relevant IDs from different content providers to that same place on the planet, so that it is always referred to correctly by any other system. Placecast’s system has already been in place for more than a year and has already processed millions of location records worldwide. Location-based companies such as WCities, Socialight, Urban Mapping, and Buzzd have already begun testing the open web services API. Placecast’s CEO and founder, Alistair Goodman, tells me that identifying a venue or business correctly in a location based social network is the foundation for location-based advertising. His reasoning is that for a business to deliver promotions or marketing message, the network needs to correctly refer to the business in its location data. Placecast’s Match API isn’t the only resolution to the issue of multiple check-in data for the same location. yesterday, SimpleGeo launched a Marketplace will make it easy for developers to see a range of different geodata and pick what they want to use. SimpleGeo also launched Storage Engine, which is is a cloud-based system to allow developers to store location and do queries on it, sort of like an Amazon S3 for geodata. Check.in works around this place problem by doing a look-up on each service and letting you pick the correct check-in spot. But it’s a bit slow, and still seems rather tedious. The other option is to adopt a standard for places. The Activity Streams group is working on such a concept. Yahoo could also implement a system on top of its WOEID system. But this risk of adopting a standard for a location-based social network is sacrificing their their business since these place databases are one of the keys to each service. Placecast, which recently raised $3 million in funding, also debuted its technology, called ShopAlerts, that allows retailers bring people into their stores by sending them text messages when they get near their retail outlets. The startup also offers a location-based advertising platform that weaves together location information and other data from audiences across the web, mobile, and email. Placecast will analyze inventory, segments audiences and targets ads for maximum relevance for advertisers and publishers.      
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| Analyst Gene Munster: Apple Will Build A Search Engine Posted: 31 Mar 2010 06:18 AM PDT  Ha! Hold on. Let me walk around a little, calm down. Ummm... so Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray, the guy who was right about the iPad because he wouldn't shut up about it for most of the last five years, is saying there's a "70% chance" that Apple will build a search engine. Barring thought that Apple needs to run a search engine like a fish needs to run a bicycle factory, let's look at what he's saying (via BusinessInsider)
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| Memeo Is Bringing A Google Docs Reader To The iPad Posted: 31 Mar 2010 06:00 AM PDT
The application allows users of any Google Docs account (be it normal or Premiere) to automatically download and store their Docs, which they can then view using the iPad’s document viewer that’s been integrated into Memeo’s app. The viewer supports a range of popular formats, including Office, Apple’s iWork formats, and docs created in Google’s online editor (which are downloaded as HTML to preserve formatting). So why is this important? First, given the current battle waging between Apple and Google, it’s unlikely that Apple would even approve a Google-made Docs app at all. But Google Docs is popular enough that it would be unwise for Apple to ban the service from the iPad entirely — users would just make the jump to the upcoming Google tablets. Memeo thinks that it and other independent third parties are well positioned in the current situation, as they’ll be able to provide services to bridge this gap. It’s also worth pointing out that Steve Jobs allegedly sent an email stating that the iPad would support importing Google Docs to the iPad through iWork or iDisk. We last wrote about Memeo in January, when Google started allowing users to upload any type of file to Google Docs, effectively allowing them to use it for online storage. Memeo was one of Google’s preferred partners for the launch, and their desktop sync software has already been adopted by 40% of Google’s enterprise customers (defined as companies with 1000+ seats).
     
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| InsideView Raises $11.5 Million For Enterprise-Friendly Web Crawler Posted: 31 Mar 2010 05:57 AM PDT
The company's flagship product, SalesView, crawls through more than 20,000 web sites, social networks and databases including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Hoovers, Reuters, and SEC filings, to give businesses sales intelligence and information that will aid sales operations with helping develop and maintain leads and clients. SalesView is available as a stand-alone Web application as well as integrated with CRM vendors like SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SalesForce.com. In fact, SalesView is ranked as one of the most popular free apps on SalesForce's App Exchange. The service currently has over 10,000 users with more than 1,700 companies that access SalesView's feed, including Ariba, Centive, Cisco/WebEx, JobScience, and SuccessFactors. The new financing will be used to for new customer acquisitions and for further product development. Competitors include Hoovers and Genius.      
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| More Video-Related iPad News, Courtesy Of Delve Networks And MeFeedia Posted: 31 Mar 2010 05:43 AM PDT
Everyone remotely involved with online video is quick to jump on the iPad bandwagon – we’ve recently covered announcements from the likes of Ooyala, Brightcove and Kyte. You can add two more to that list now, courtesy of Delve Networks and MeFeedia. Delve Networks, for one, says it will support full video delivery when the tablet device lands in users’ hands on April 3rd. Newspaper, magazine and online publishers who already use Delve to deliver video on the iPhone or iPod touch (the company also helps publishers reach audiences on Android and Blackberry phones) will automatically be able to deliver video to the iPad without further changes. Their videos will automatically be encoded in the right format to be viewed through iPad’s player if the publisher inserts some lines of code on its website. Delve’s detection system will then decide the appropriate link to present to the viewer depending on which device he or she is using. Delve does not not require browsers to support HTML5, although the company says it considers HTML5 support to be a key component of its product roadmap. Delve Networks clients include Lego, NFL, Pokemon, the Department of Defense, Skateboard.TV and more. MeFeedia this morning touted its ability for advertising on HTML5 videos, thanks to its All Player technology, which it says is patent-pending. MeFeedia claims the All Player platform powers over 50 million monthly video ads across web and mobile devices (including those that don’t support Flash – guess which ones they mean by that). You can view a demo here. Who’s next?      
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| TweetDeck Taps TwitVid For Video Sharing, Replacing 12seconds Posted: 31 Mar 2010 05:21 AM PDT
TwitVid will be integrated into the next iteration of the TweetDeck’s desktop application, which is expected to be launched next month. TwitVid will also be the default video application in TweetDeck’s iPhone application and soon-to-be-released Android application. Launched last year, TwitVid.com allows users to upload, view and share videos in both HD and SD. Essentially the TwitPic of video, TwitVid rolled out a Twitter video application for the iPhone and unveiled a realtime search engine and analytics platform last December. Scoring a deal with TweetDeck, one of the most popular and widely-used social media clients on the market, is a huge coup for TwitVid, not to mention the fact that the startup edged out competitor 12seconds for the spot.      
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| Socialcast Raises $8 Million Series B To Spread Its Realtime Enterprise Streams Posted: 31 Mar 2010 05:00 AM PDT
Realtime streams are quickly moving from the consumer Web to the enterprise. The constant flow of status updates, links, and shared items people are becoming accustomed to on Facebook and Twitter is finding its way into enterprise apps like Socialcast, Yammer, and Salesforce Chatter. Investors are betting on this trend. Socialcast is getting an $8 million cash infusion from Menlo Ventures and True Ventures in a Series B financing. In February, 2010, competitor Yammer raised a $10 million Series B. Socialcast previously got $1.4 million from True Ventures and angels a year ago. Blogger Om Malik of GigaOm, who is also a VC partner at True, sits on Socialcast’s board. He will be joined by Menlo’s Sonja Hoel Perkins. The startup’s service combines a corporate activity stream that ties into CRM and ERP systems with social bookmarking, Outlook and SharePoint integrations, mobile (iPhone and Blackberry) and desktop (Air) apps, and analytics. Co-workers can share knowledge and updates in a semi-private setting. Socialcast moved to a freemium model last summer, offering the basic service for free, and charging for upgrades and premium features. The company offers both hosted and behind-the-firewall options. It boasts 7,000 corporate customers, including Guitar Center, turner Broadcasting, and Avaya, and an 1,100 percent growth in users from a year ago (albeit off of a small base). Yammer, by comparison, claims to power 60,000 corporate networks. The realtime enterprise is obviously a growth industry.      
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| Facebook’s Amusingly Cruel CAPTCHA Posted: 31 Mar 2010 04:55 AM PDT
Literally laughed out loud. We’ve all seen our share of amusing CAPTCHA’s – if you haven’t, you simply haven’t seen enough of them in your life – but this one takes the cake. Way to depress people, Facebook. Unless you can point us to funnier ones? (Via @codepo8 and traced back to – of course – Reddit)      
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| Ancestry.com Discovers Family Ties Between Madonna And Ellen DeGeneres Posted: 31 Mar 2010 03:58 AM PDT
Genealogists employed by the company, which offers a subscription-based Web service that allows people to study families and the tracing of their lineages and history, have discovered that the women are 11th cousins. The family history experts uncovered that the pair is related through a common 10th great-grandfather – a Frenchman named Martin Aucoin, whose daughters Jeanne and Michele left their native country of France to settle in Nova Scotia in the early 1600s. DeGeneres’s family supposedly left Canada in the late 1700s when her 5th great-grandfather Joseph Martin relocated to Louisiana. It wasn’t until the late 1870s that Madonna’s 2nd great-grandmother Emilie Daniel left Quebec and moved to Michigan, where the singer herself calls home. If true (or maybe regardless thereof), this is a publicity boon for Ancestry.com, which went public in November and currently boasts a $721 million market cap. No doubt, it will make a lot of people who pick up on the claimed family ties between the two entertainment giants wonder what the site is all about and give it a try themselves. Sadly, the company is pushing it a bit too far by quoting genealogist Anastasia Tyler as follows:
Meh. Would have been better to simply stick to the facts, people. This isn’t exactly the first time Ancestry.com have uncovered family connections between celebrities: in 2009, they connected financier Warren Buffett to President Barack Obama. Are you related to anyone famous? Please don’t let us know in comments.      
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| doubleTwist Gives Android Market The Slick, iTunes-Like Interface It Deserves (With One Catch) Posted: 31 Mar 2010 01:36 AM PDT
I’ve made no secret of my dislike for the current version of Google’s official web presence for Android Market — it offers a sampling of Android’s top apps, but it’s ugly and doesn’t offer a full listing of what’s available (it doesn’t even offer a search function). There are some third-party web directories, like AndroidLib, but these don’t offer the slick feel you get from a desktop application. doubleTwist comes closer than either of these options to matching the iTunes browsing experience, but it still isn’t perfect.
The Android Market integration looks quite nice. Clicking the menu item in the left sidebar brings up a list of the top featured, paid, and free applications on Android Market. And, unlike Google’s official Market site, you can actually search using doubleTwist’s version. Clicking on an app will bring up its description, screen shots, and reviews — it looks a lot like the iTunes App Store interface, which isn’t a bad thing. However, doubleTwist’s Market integration comes with a couple of issues. First, it doesn’t include any application categories, like ‘Games’ or ‘Communication’ (though this seems like it would be a fairly minor addition). The other issue is more problematic: you can’t actually use doubleTwist to download and sync applications to your Android device. Instead, each entry on the Market features a QR code that you have to scan from your phone to bring up the appropriate item in Android Market. doubleTwist co-founder Monique Farantzos says that the company plans to offer Over The Air downloads this summer (which would let you send apps to your device without having to bother with this QR code nonsense), and that the company has also approached Google about a way to make the experience more integrated and seamless. Still, even without OTA downloads, the Market integration looks slick. Alongside today’s update, doubleTwist is also releasing a web version of its podcast directory, which launched earlier this month (you can see a screenshot of the search directory below).      
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| Might The iPad And iPhone HD Be Apple’s Parting Gifts For AT&T? Posted: 31 Mar 2010 12:39 AM PDT
The problem is that these rumors have been circulating almost as long as the actual iPhone itself. And the WSJ report isn’t exactly a slam dunk by only citing the ever-anonymous “people briefed by the company.” But, more so than ever, the timing does appear to be right for Apple to break its AT&T exclusivity. First of all, this Verizon iPhone would not launch alongside the other new iPhone hardware due this Summer. The WSJ report has manufacturing on the CDMA iPhone ramping up in September, but also notes that the phones may not be available to consumers immediately. This means at the earliest, we’re looking at a Fall release, or possibly even a holiday release for the device (if not later depending on several factors). That means that AT&T would still get the supposed “iPhone HD” all to itself for several months at least. Then you’d have to wonder if Apple would dare announce that it would be bringing the iPhone to other carriers “later this year” at its WWDC event (where it traditionally launches the new iPhone hardware)? If they did that, they risk people sitting out for several months, waiting for the Verizon version to hit before buying an iPhone. They’d be putting customers in a tight spot: do you upgrade to the sleek new hardware now, locking yourself into a new 2-year contract with AT&T? Or do you wait? If Apple in in fact planning a CDMA version of the iPhone, I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t say anything about it at WWDC. Apple is also giving AT&T a nice little present in the form of the iPad. While the version hitting stores this Saturday will not have 3G connectivity, the one coming at the end of April will. And yes, it will be exclusively provided by AT&T. There was some speculation leading up to the iPad launch that it may launch with Verizon connectivity, but the chances of Apple building a second CDMA version of the iPad anytime soon seem pretty slim at this point. Especially with AT&T giving them an unheard deal for customers: $15 for 250MB-a-month of data usage and $30 for unlimited data. As anyone with a 3G card will tell you, this is basically half-off of the normal data rates the carriers charge.
So despite all of our bitching, Apple is only likely to move beyond exclusivity if it makes sense for the bottom line. That is, if Apple feels like the iPhone can’t grow any further in the U.S. under one carrier, they will extend it to others. Or, if Apple feels that Android is gaining too much momentum because it’s on several carriers, they will extend it to others. The latter appears to be starting to happen, while the former is still unclear. At one point, it was believed that Apple would wait out going to multiple carriers in the U.S. until the 4G networks (which will be a much more unified technology) were ready. But as the WSJ article states, delays in that process may have forced them to change their minds. So perhaps Apple is dangling the iPad and early access to the iPhone HD as signs of good faith towards AT&T. Maybe they want the carrier to know that even though the time of exclusivity is coming to an end, they intend to give them certain perks in exchange for keeping the same terms of their current deal. Imagine for a second that the iPhone is available on AT&T and Verizon — but AT&T gets access to the new hardware several months before Verizon. You might think most people would wait to buy the new iPhone, believing Verizon is the better network. But going forward, once Apple initially offloads a few million customers over to Verizon (which I don’t think is an unreasonable number for how many current iPhone owners would switch if given the option), some of AT&T’s horrific networks problems (which are related the the network being under too much strain) may be miraculously solved. It seems like a win-win for everybody. Or at least Apple will paint it that way. And, as usual, they will be the real winner in the end.      
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| Peixe Urbano: Brazil Gets A Groupon-Like Deal Site Posted: 30 Mar 2010 10:29 PM PDT
Founder Julio Vasconcellos concedes that Peixe Urbano has many similarities to Groupon — it sends users one great deal per day (generally offering 50-90% off) via Email, Twitter, or Facebook. And, like Groupon, a certain number of people have to sign up for the deal before it “activates”, which gives users an incentive to tell their friends. But Vasconcellos says that he and co-founder Alex Tabor have made some key changes to better adapt the new site to Brazilian culture. While both founders are from Brazil, they decided to do some market research to get a more accurate measure of how they should diverge from Groupon’s model. Their conclusions: first, Vasconcellos says that Brazilians tend to favor spontaneous activities as opposed to discounts or gift cards with a six month expiration, so Peixe Urbano will include more time-sensitive deals, like cheap tickets for next-day shows or happy hour at the local restaurant. Second, Vasconcellos says that Brazilians tend to be less excited about sharing coupons and sales with their friends (they may be frowned upon socially), so Peixe Urbano is positioning itself as a site to discover cool hidden gems in your city, with the added bonus of saving some money in the process. Other international Groupon-like we’ve covered include Snippa(UK), Daily Deal(Germany), and CityDeal(Germany). And there are plenty more — the UK alone has at least a half dozen Groupon clones.      
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| Orange, OpenX Set Out To Build Pan-European Ad Exchange Ecosystem Posted: 30 Mar 2010 10:00 PM PDT  France Telecom / Orange is partnering with OpenX to launch Orange Ad Market, a brand new online advertising marketplace tailored to the European digital industry. Orange Ad Market will be operated by Orange and powered by OpenX in exchange for a share on every transaction that is made through the platform. The marketplace will allow all classes of buyers to compete for targeted impressions in real-time auctions and help sellers of online display advertising inventory from all over the globe maximize revenue. The partnership between Orange and OpenX spans multiple years and is mutually exclusive to all regions Orange operates in.
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| RjDj Now Lets You Create Your Own Trippy, Reactive Music For iPhone And iPad Posted: 30 Mar 2010 07:39 PM PDT
To take a step back, when you use RjDj, you listen to what’s called a “Scene” — a combination of filters that determine what your reactive music sounds like. A Scene can pay attention to your iPhone’s microphone, accelerometer (so it can ‘hear’ motion), and even your GPS position. It then interprets those inputs to generate a dynamic music soundtrack. Scenes can vary a lot, ranging from pleasant rain drops to psychedelic audio warping that loops back everything you hear endlessly. With the RJC1000 app, you can customize Scenes to make them sound exactly like you want them to. You can get a feel for how this works in the YouTube video below. I explored the RJC1000 app to try building my own sound Scene, and quickly came to the conclusion that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Fortunately that didn’t really matter — after dragging a few effects from the list of options onto the main sound board, I found myself listening to something best described as an auditory mix of running water, crickets, bongo drums, and a swarm of butterflies. I’m sure someone with more patience and skill could come up with something significantly more pleasant.
Alongside the new application, RjDj is launching the RjDj Network, which allows reactive musicians (this genre is called “reactive music”) to sell their creations to anyone using the RjDj iPhone application, via in-app purchases. RjDj is taking a 50% rev share of any Scenes sold. The company will also be launching an iPad application on April 3 called RJ Voyager that allows for playback of any Scenes from the RjDj Network, and also let users tweak Scenes on the fly, editing the effects they want playing as their music is generated in real-time. RjDj founder Michael Breidenbruecker says that developers and musicians have previously been able to create their own Scenes using Pure Data, but that most of them found it too abstract to use (the screenshots I looked at were pretty daunting). The RJC1000 application uses the Pure Data DSP framework, but makes it significantly easier to build a Scene. He says that beyond the iPad app, RjDj has other applications in the works that will support Scenes from the RjDj network.
     
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| Kyte Jumps On the iPad’s HTML5 Bandwagon And Prepares An App SDK Posted: 30 Mar 2010 05:41 PM PDT
When Steve Jobs tells the technology industry to get in line, it gets in line pretty quick. All the initial hair-pulling and angst surrounding Apple’s decision to not support Flash on the iPad is already mattering less and less. At least for video, most of the major online video platforms such as Brightcove and Ooyala are supporting HTML5 playback in the iPad browser. YouTube might eventually get there as well. Now Kyte is jumping on the HTML5 bandwagon. Kyte videos will stream in an HTML5 player in the iPad browser using the same embed code that triggers a Flash player on other computers. But Kyte is also going to release a software developer kit (SDK) in the next couple weeks which will let its media partners create apps specifically for the iPad. The SDK will also let them create versions of the same apps for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. This will replace the iPhone framework Kyte released last year. The SDK will customize apps for the larger screen of the iPad, allowing for a larger video player and more room for chat and show guides. In the mockup above from Om Records, you can see how there is more room for the various elements of the app on the iPad. Kyte’s main customers are media brands, music bands, and brands such as ABC, Fox News, MTV, Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, and Calvin Klein who want to publish videos to their Websites and mobile apps all from the same system. Kyte’s new Apple “universal” SDK will allow developers to create apps for both the iPhone and the iPad, and send out the correct version depending in the user’s device. They can also charge once and deliver different versions of the app to multiple Apple devices.      
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| Tomorrow, SimpleGeo Launches Into Location Orbit With 5,000 Partners In Tow Posted: 30 Mar 2010 05:09 PM PDT
With a frenzy of activity surrounding location-based services, more and more startups are launching ideas that rely heavily on location. But implementing location is still a relatively complicated process. And that’s where SimpleGeo comes in. We’ve written about the service a number of times over the past several months. Basically, they provide the infrastructure and tools to allow other services to add location elements with ease. In fact, since they launched in beta late last year, they already have some 5,000 developers on board using their service. And tomorrow at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, CA, they’re opening up their platform for all to use. Alongside the launch, SimpleGeo is introducing two new products: the SimpleGeo Marketplace and the SimpleGeo Storage Engine. The Marketplace will make it easy for developers to see a range of different geodata and pick what they want to use. This store allows developers to get in touch with the geodata providers who are serving up the data (names you know like Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, etc). The Storage Engine is a cloud-based system to allow developers to store location and do queries on it. Think of it as Amazon S3 for geodata. So how much does it cost to use SimpleGeo? It’s free for up to a million calls, after that it’s $399 for 2 million calls (and additional support), $2,499 for 10 million calls, and $9,999 for 30 million calls. The pricing model is based on how much you’d need to pay for an engineer to handle that much data. Seeing as SimpleGeo curates this data and provides the servers needed for it, it will be a big value to most companies. DeCarta, ESRI, Localeze, MetaCarta, Quova, Stamen Design, and Weather Decision Technologies are a few of the big partnerships SimpleGeo recently signed. There was also a Skyhook Wireless deal that went live during SXSW. And you’ve probably heard of some of the startups already using SimpleGeo, such as StickyBits and BumpRadar. Since its $1.5 million seed funding in November, SimpleGeo has been hiring like crazy and hopes to open a San Francisco branch soon (they’re currently based in Boulder, CO). And despite the launch, SimpleGeo’s work is far from done. The plan is to launch a couple new features in relative short order, co-founder Matt Galligan tells us. One is called “Pushpin” which will let developers send in a coordinate and get back all sorts of data from SimpleGeo such as country, state, city, neighborhood, zip code, etc. And using other data, you could get the names of buildings on college campuses, for example, Galligan says. Another new feature called “Polygon” will let developers send in the name of an area such as “The Mission” in San Francisco, and SimpleGeo will return a list of everything in that area. Look for SimpleGeo’s new website and new admin interface to launch tomorrow after Galligan takes at Where 2.0 around noon PT. You’ll be able to sign up to get in on the location action at that time. Then you can go build your own version of this. [photo: flickr/bruce tuten]      
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| Automattic Opens Up VaultPress, A Safe Place To Back Up Your Blog Posted: 30 Mar 2010 02:25 PM PDT
Currently in private beta, VaultPress is a plugin users can download that acts as a backup service for your blog. Not only will the software help keep your blog up and running, but it will also soon monitor your site to alert you if their is suspicious activity or a hacking. Alternatively, VaultPress will eventually update your blog with security hot-fixes automatically. VaultPress will be a paid service and will probably be in the ballpark range of $15 to 20 per month, according to Automattic VP of User Growth Paul Kim. At first VaultPress will be extended on an invitation only basis and will eventually be open to the public in the near future. While users can still use outside services or WordPress community plugins, VaultPress will be the only WordPress.com branded offering. And the plugin is tightly woven into WordPress.com infrastructure, promising greater operability, says Kim. Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg says VaultPress is one of the most advanced technologies that he’s seen interact with WordPress. The vision of the service is to ensure that every piece of content on WordPress-powered blogs and sites are safe, with WordPress-aware, real-time, multi-cloud backups. VaultPress as a product makes sense for WordPress.com and frankly, I’m surprised that the blogging platform didn’t roll this out earlier. Disclosure: TechCrunch uses the VIP hosted version of WordPress.com.      
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| An iPad App 2,000 Years In The Making: Air Harp Posted: 30 Mar 2010 02:18 PM PDT
If fart apps are what the iPhone is all about, Air Harp is what the iPad is all about. You can sit there, with the device in you lap, and simply strum. You get 2 octaves (15 strings) of tones in G Major. There are no shortage of musical instrument apps for the iPhone and iPod touch (Smule makes some great ones), but apps where you need to strum are tricky because the screen is so small. The iPad corrects that. I can’t wait for the first air guitar iPad apps (and the corresponding lawsuits when people start dropping them en masse). Watch Air Harp in action below. Developer touchGrove promises that it’s coming soon. I’m going to assume the iPad they’re using in the demo is fake, since Apple has those on complete lockdown still until Saturday.
[photo: flickr/geebee2007]      
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This Saturday, Apple will be releasing the iPad to the masses, and you can be sure that one of the first things people will do when they get their hands on the device is explore what awaits them on the App Store. For anyone who regularly uses Google Docs in the workplace, one of the most appealing apps is likely going to be 
No, we’re not becoming a celebrity blog (yet) but the noteworthy thing is that it’s incredibly hard for technology companies to even buy this kind of publicity: 
The rumors keep circulating. The latest came yesterday when the 
Apple is not stupid. They hear all of us bitching about AT&T’s sub-par service, and word is that they’re not too happy about it either. But the fact of the matter is that because of the exclusive agreement, AT&T is paying them a ridiculous fee for each iPhone solid — something to the tune of $600 a phone. At the end of the day, that equals billions of dollars in revenues for Apple. If Apple were to branch out to other carriers, this deal would likely have to be renegotiated because Verizon has some leverage as the nation’s largest carrier and probably won’t give Apple the same kind of deal.
If you’ll pardon the pun, 
Over the past few months, 
The iPhone is great, but it’s small. The iPad is bigger; you can cradle it, like a lap harp. Behold, Air Harp!
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