The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Square Now Being Used For Mobile Payments At Political Fundraisers
- RunKeeper Goes Social
- Microsoft’s European Browser Choice Screen Causes Spike In Opera Downloads
- Soon, There’ll Be More Mobile Web Users In China Than People In The United States
- Motally Nabs Nielsen Exec John Forese To Lead Mobile Analytics Startup
- Barnes & Noble CEO Steps Down, BN.com President William Lynch Takes Over
- Trada Raises $2.2 Million For Crowdsourced SEM Management Service
- Google TV Should Finally Push Apple TV Beyond A “Hobby”
- Traducción Necesita? Smartling Raises $4 Million To Do It For You.
- Los Angeles Mentorship Program Launchpad LA Opens Applications For Its Second Session
- Apple Gets Location Fever Too In The App Store
- Gist Acquires Startup Weekend App ‘Learn That Name’
- Choosing Sides? John Doerr Leaves Amazon’s Board Of Directors
- Google Asks Mobile Companies For Help With FTC Over Admob Deal
- Zillow Launches Android App To Browse Home Sales And Rental Listings On The Go
- You Asked For It: TechCrunch, The Mobile Version
- The New York Times Partners With Fwix To License Realtime Hyperlocal News Stream
- Yahoo EVP Ash Patel, One Of the First Yahoos, Announces His Departure
- IGN Entertainment Slashes 20 Percent Of Staff
- The Top 15 Brands on the App Store Might Surprise You
- Generation I: Middle Children Of The Information Age
- Groupon Makes A Big Hire, Rob Solomon Joins As President
- Hands on with the Alex eReader
- Yahoo Acquires Citizen Sports
- The Location War May Be Even, But Foursquare Dominates Twitter
| Square Now Being Used For Mobile Payments At Political Fundraisers Posted: 18 Mar 2010 08:50 AM PDT
Since then, Square, which has been in limited beta, has been used in a variety of use cases. E.g. philanthopic organization charity:water recently used Square at the SXSW festival to collect donations. A local flower cart in San Francisco is using Square to take payments from customers. Denim, a jeans store in New York is using Square to take payments from shoppers. We even used Square at this year’s Crunchies to raise money for the UCSF Foundation. Here’s how Square works: A small device attaches to the phone via the headset/microphone jack. The device gets the power it needs to send data to the phone from the swipe of the card, and sends the information over the microphone connection. The device is compatible with both the iPhone and Android. It’s similar in some ways to PayPal, but anyone can now accept physical credit card payments, too. With no contracts or monthly fees. People are sent receipts by text and email. If you haven’t seen Square in action, check out this video. And now, a new use case has popped up for Square: political fundraising. Square is currently being used in two campaigns. Silicon Valley VC Josh Becker, who is running for state assembly in California’s 21st district, has been using Square at fundraising events. And lawyer Reshma Saujani, who is running for Congress in New York’s 14th district, is using Square at campaign fundraising events, including at an event in San Francisco on Friday. Square is ideal for taking money at political fundraisers for several reasons. Currently, if you want to donate money at a fundraising event, you often have to fill out a form and hand over a check or cash at the event. If you don’t have your checkbook or cash handy (which, many of us don’t), credit cards are the only option. You can write down your credit card number and info for fundraisers to charge at a later date, but you have to trust that the fundraiser keeps track of that information and paper. With Square, there is both a convenience added for both the payee and fundraiser. The donation is instantly processed, and Square will send the receipt via SMS or email to the payee. Of course, political contributions and donations are a little more complicated because of the reporting requirements associated with donations. For many types of donations, you need to take the donator’s name, occupation, address, and other information. Currently Square doesn’t allow users to input all of this information but Dorsey says that they are releasing Square’s API to allow fundraisers to build additional applications on top of Square, where they could input all of the necessary data. Once this is enabled, Square will allows fundraisers to eliminate paper collection and payments all together. Dorsey says he’s already getting significant interest from politicians and political candidates across the country, but because Square is in limited beta, is being selective about how the service is distributed. Dorsey expects Square to be open to the public sometime in the next few months. Valued at $40 million even before launch, Square is off to an impressive start. And technology’s most notable investors and leaders seem to think so as well. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, investor Ron Conway, Google's Marissa Mayer, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley, Digg creator Kevin Rose, investor Esther Dyson and a host of others have invested in Square. The company also raised funding from Khosla Ventures.      
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| Posted: 18 Mar 2010 08:40 AM PDT  I'll let the video after the jump do most of the talking on this one but RunKeeper has improved its sharing service by building out a cool run sharing service that works like a social network for the preternaturally skinny yet surprisingly hungry. The system allows you to share runs with friends and/or strangers. You can turn off maps for privacy and selectively share runs with the world. For example, I have one visible activity while RunKeeper founder Jason has like 5,000 (actually 130). This means he is better than me and, in fact, better than most of us.
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| Microsoft’s European Browser Choice Screen Causes Spike In Opera Downloads Posted: 18 Mar 2010 07:11 AM PDT
The Norwegian software maker says that on average, more than half of the European downloads of Opera's latest browser come directly from that Choice Screen. The increase represents more than a doubling from the normal download numbers. At the beginning of this month, Opera touted that browser downloads actually tripled at first, so maybe that growth rate won’t last forever. I’m also very curious if Mozilla, Google and Apple are spotting the same trend for their respective browsers. According to plans Microsoft has agreed to with the European Commission, the rollout of the Choice Screen will continue into May for existing Windows computers and for five more years on new installations. No wonder Opera Software is trying to push for a global roll-out of the choice screen. The following numbers are the percentages of country downloads of Opera's latest desktop browser that originate from the Choice Screen, as part of the total Opera 10.5 numbers:
     
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| Soon, There’ll Be More Mobile Web Users In China Than People In The United States Posted: 18 Mar 2010 06:26 AM PDT
For your reference, the 2010 estimate of the size of the United States population stands at roughly 310 million people according to Wikipedia, so that’s a whole lot of people browsing the Web from their phones right there. The report, which you can purchase here, also says the number of mobile Internet users in China will grow fast to reach a staggering 957 million, and that the country will count approximately 1.3 billion mobile subscribers by 2014. eMarketer points out that those mobile Internet users do not currently monetize as well as smaller mobile audiences in, say, the States, which means that mobile advertising spending levels in China are still low relative to the size of the mobile Web user base. Also, the company highlights another key trend in China, which is that mobile subscriber growth is actually slowing while mobile Internet user growth is accelerating. More in this blog post (via Twitter). (Photo credit: Flickr / lime*monkey / CC BY 2.0)      
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| Motally Nabs Nielsen Exec John Forese To Lead Mobile Analytics Startup Posted: 18 Mar 2010 05:58 AM PDT
Prior to his tenure at Nielsen Mobile, Forese was a senior vice president at mobile metrics and research company Telephia where he led overall product strategy and had P&L responsibility across the company’s product lines. Telephia was eventually acquired by Nielsen in 2007. Forese also worked at several telecom and technology based start-ups, including Flashpoint Technologies, Netro and Pacific Bell Mobile Systems. In addition to their new CEO, Motally has also elected Doug Garland to its board. Prior to joining Google, Doug was an executive in residence at the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. Earlier, he was a senior vice president at Yahoo!, where he led the launch of the broadband access business and the company's mobile efforts. Motally has been expanding and innovating at a rapid pace over the past several months. The startup just launched an analytics platform for mobile game developers, rolled out an extension of their mobile analytics to include content developed on Apple's iPad and released a flexible API. Currently, Motally supports analytics for applications on the iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry platforms as well as the mobile web. For a young startup, Motally has seen significant traction as a mobile analytics provider. Backed by renown investor Ron Conway, Motally's clients include Twitter, Yelp, Fandango and Verizon.      
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| Barnes & Noble CEO Steps Down, BN.com President William Lynch Takes Over Posted: 18 Mar 2010 04:16 AM PDT
The company also announced the promotion of COO Mitchell Klipper to chief executive of the company's retail group, which encompasses the Barnes & Noble retail business and the Barnes & Noble College Booksellers business. William Lynch joined Barnes & Noble in February 2009 as President of Barnes & Noble.com and has been responsible for the company’s core online business since then. Lynch launched the company's digital commerce platform as well as the nook, Barnes & Nobles’ eBook Reader. You know, the device that won the Best New Gadget Award 2009 at the recent Crunchies show (and boy, do they know how to show off their pride properly). Prior to Barnes & Noble, Lynch was Executive Vice President of Marketing and General Manager of HSN.com. From 2004 to 2008, he was CEO of IAC subsidiary Gifts.com, which he co-founded. From 2000 to 2004, he was VP and General Manager, E-Commerce, for Palm., where he oversaw all of the company’s Web properties, including Palm.com, the Palm Online Store, the Palm Software Connection and the Palm.Net wireless ISP. In short: he’s all about digital, baby.      
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| Trada Raises $2.2 Million For Crowdsourced SEM Management Service Posted: 18 Mar 2010 03:55 AM PDT
As we all know, search advertising is necessary for businesses but SEM can be a time consuming, perplexing and tedious task. Many businesses overpay for common keywords or don’t use the right keywords to drive traffic. Trada comes into play here by crowdsourcing SEM experts to build and manage and advertiser or business’ paid search campaign across search engines. The service currently supports Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Essentially, Trada ends up being a middleman for coordinating SEM service. Advertisers use Trada to enter information about a campaign and experts, who must be AdWords or SEMPO certified and pass Trada certification, use the site to find interesting campaigns and submit keywords, ad copy and bid prices across the search engines and to track and optimize campaigns across the ad networks. Trada coordinates the payments and takes a small cut of each transaction between advertisers and SEO experts. The benefit for the SEM experts is that they don’t have to deal with the administrative and management issues with clients. Experts earn money when they generate clicks or other actions for less than the advertiser's target price. Advertisers get 25 qualified experts to work on their campaigns and according to Trada, those businesses who participated in the private beta of the service are seeing successful results. Trada entered private beta in January 2009 and currently has 70 advertisers and 280 experts to date. Founded by entrepreneur Niel Robertson, Trada was born after Robertson grew frustrated managing his own $8,000-a-month paid search campaign. Realizing that paid search campaigns are best left to experts, he thought an online marketplace for PPC experts and businesses would be the best way to maximize SEM. The startup faces competition from Kenshoo, Conductor and many others.      
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| Google TV Should Finally Push Apple TV Beyond A “Hobby” Posted: 18 Mar 2010 02:17 AM PDT
But there’s actually nothing to be ashamed of. The Apple TV is a good product. Apple just needs to put some proper time and energy into it, to expand it to its full potential. And news today about the so-called “Google TV” should do just the trick. Apple and Google are on the verge of war. The formerly close allies are increasingly competing in key spaces for both, and the living room is likely to be a new battleground because it’s still very much up in air. As the New York Times reported yesterday, Google is working with partners including Intel, Sony, and Logitech to bring a Google TV experience into the living room. This is, of course, where the Apple TV resides. And Apple would be foolish to simply cede any ground it does have to its new favorite rival just because it’s focused on other things (*cough* iPad *cough*). That’s a Microsoft move. As Nick Bilton points out, this Google TV would be based around the Android platform. This means that the key idea is likely to have third-party developers work on it to make applications built for a television set. That’s easier said than done, but Android’s open nature should yield some interesting results rather quickly. Apple, meanwhile, is of course anything but open with regard to their devices. In fact, the Apple TV is entirely closed right now, as only Apple is able to modify its software (without hacking it, of course). I suspect that will change, following this revelation. The idea of running iPhone-style applications on the Apple TV has long been a sexy one. Hell, people have even ported apps over to a TV screen to show how well it could work. The main problem with developing iPhone apps for the Apple TV seems to be resolution. With the iPhone (and iPod touch), Apple offers only one screen size/resolution, ensuring developers have an easy time making great-looking apps — while at the same time, making sure end users have a great experience. But the iPad has already changed everything. With their new device, Apple has kept things as simple as possible by making iPhone apps scale up two times to work on the bigger display, but it’s still shows a willingness to move beyond the one screen size. Unfortunately, with the Apple TV, it can be attached to a screen that could be a huge variety of sizes, so it would be hard to control that. Google doesn’t care about that because Android already runs on dozens of phones with different screen sizes. But Apple clearly cares about how apps look on its devices (so much so that the iPad itself was likely designed at a strange ratio simply to make scaling apps look as good as possible). So does that mean they start offering an actual Apple TV (as in a screen)? Rumors of that have been around for a long time. Or maybe they black-box apps to a certain resolution — similar to what they’re doing on the iPad when an app isn’t scaled up? Who knows. But what I do know is that upon hearing this Google TV news, the Apple TV became a little less of a “hobby” yesterday. Aside from calling it a hobby, Steve Jobs has referred to the Apple TV as being a potential “fourth leg” of a chair Apple is building. Leg one is the Mac, leg two is the iPod, leg three is the iPhone, and Jobs had hoped the Apple TV would complete the chair one day. But it seems clear now that he thinks the iPad could be the fourth leg instead. Screw that. I think it’s time for Apple to build a whole dining room set of furniture. We, as consumers, need a living room arms race between Apple and Google (and Microsoft, TiVo, Roku, Boxee, and the rest) to kick the cable companies’ shitty television user experience to the curb.      
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| Traducción Necesita? Smartling Raises $4 Million To Do It For You. Posted: 18 Mar 2010 12:48 AM PDT
The realtime website translation tool has raised the Series A round led by Venrock. Also participating are U.S. Venture Partners, First Round Capital, and several angels, we’re told. There are professional translators out there that will convert your site into a different language, but they’re usually expensive, and it can take a while. Meanwhile, services like Google Translate are pretty much instantaneous and free, but accuracy is an issue. Smartling attempts to find the middle ground. They offer fast, accurate translations at a low cost. How? They use a hybrid model which essentially allows you to pick between professional translators, machine translations, and crowdsourced translations. The key is managing it all, which can be done with Smartling’s software. With it, you can pick and choose which part of your site to translate which way. As the web continues to grow quickly in places such as China, translation is going to be a very important aspect of an increasing number of sites and services. Smartling, which only started itself last year, seems to be in a good position to expand its operations now with the new money.
     
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| Los Angeles Mentorship Program Launchpad LA Opens Applications For Its Second Session Posted: 18 Mar 2010 12:17 AM PDT
Los Angeles has a growing startup community, and is home to startups like DocStoc and a few much larger businesses, like MySpace and CitySearch. One program looking to help foster that community is Launchpad LA, which has just opened applications for the second round of its mentorship program. The program was created by Mark Suster of GRP Partners, who previously founded BuildOnline (acquired by SWORD Group) and later Koral (acquired by Salesforce, where he became VP Product Management). The criteria for interested companies: startups can’t have raised more than $1 million (or institutional venture capital), and are based in (or willing to move to) Los Angeles, where the program is based. As with incubator programs like Y Combinator and Techstars, Launchpad LA invites VCs and other mentors from the area to help mentor participating companies. But unlike those programs, it doesn’t directly invest in the companies — it’s purely for mentorship. That said, many VCs and angel investors in the Los Angeles area have some involvement, so it has played a role in those companies getting funding down the road. Mentors for the last program included Mike Jones, who is now co-President of MySpace, DocStoc’s Jason Nazar, and Adam Bain of Fox Media Interactive. The last program included 13 companies, including Mobile Roadie, Movoxx , and GumGum.      
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| Apple Gets Location Fever Too In The App Store Posted: 17 Mar 2010 11:02 PM PDT
As you can see in the images in this post, Apple is highlighting five of the key location players both in the App Store on iTunes, as well as on the App Store on the iPhone itself. On the iTunes version, the apps have their own area right below the “New & Noteworthy” area. On the iPhone, the five apps takes up the top five slots of the “What’s Hot” area. Simply put: This promotion is huge. So what are the five apps? The names should be familiar to you because we’ve covered each very recently. Foursquare (our coverage), Gowalla (our coverage), Loopt (our coverage), Whrrl 3 (our coverage), and MyTown (our coverage). I’d like to think Apple picked these guys to feature after reading TechCrunch, but who knows what goes on behind the doors of the secretive company. As any app developer will tell you, having your app featured can make or break it. Even the two most-hyped players, Foursquare and Gowalla (the two key players in the most recent Location War), stand to benefit from Apple’s ability to reach all kinds of different audiences with the App Store. Foursquare announced earlier that it had gained 100,000 new users in just the past 10 days — that type of growth may actually continue as long as Apple keeps featuring the app. The other three, have all benefited in the past from previous Apple promotions. Notably, this helped MyTown surpass both Foursquare and Gowalla in size in under a month after its launch. Game on, says Apple.
     
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| Gist Acquires Startup Weekend App ‘Learn That Name’ Posted: 17 Mar 2010 09:28 PM PDT
Learn That Name was built last August at a Microsoft-sponsored Startup Weekend and won top prize (which was amusing, because it was built for the decidedly non-Microsoft iPhone). The app’s idea came from lawyer Eric Koester, who was inspired to create it after he failed to remember someone’s name earlier during the event. A team of 14 people came together to build the app that weekend, and since then, a subset of the original LTN team has continued working on it, releasing an updated iPhone version, Palm WebOS app, and Flash app. The deal is for LTN’s tech assets, and the proceeds are being split among the 14 original team members. Going forward, the standalone iPhone and Palm applications will still be available, and the game is also integrated into Gist’s own iPhone application, which you can find here. The Gist version will tap into Gist’s database of contacts (the original uses LinkedIn). For those that haven’t used it, Gist offers services that help you keep tabs on the people in your professional network. The service’s web interface allows you to see past messages and attachments from each contact, news about their company, and their recent messages on services like Twitter. Gist also offers an Outlook plugin that shares similarities with Xobni. Given the business oriented nature of Learn That Name, this seems like a good (and fun) fit. Given the success of the Learn That Name team, it will be interesting to see if more Startup Weekend teams continue working together following the conclusion of their events.      
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| Choosing Sides? John Doerr Leaves Amazon’s Board Of Directors Posted: 17 Mar 2010 09:06 PM PDT
Venture capitalists often try to stay on public company boards well after their investments have run their course. It’s a status thing, but it also puts them in a terrific position to help their younger portfolio companies. There’s no reason for Doerr to step down from the Amazon board of directors based on time commitments, which is what Amazon is saying. There’s just too much upside to being on the Amazon board of directors. And Doerr remains on other boards, including Google. So what is the reason? Our guess is that Doerr is leaving the Amazon board for the same reason Google CEO Eric Schmidt left the Apple board of directors in 2009. Competition and conflicts of interest. Google is increasingly competitive with Apple. But the company also competes with Amazon in a number of areas, particularly web services and big data. And down the road, Google may compete directly in other ways as well. Froogle was a flop, but don’t think Google doesn’t want a bigger chunk of ecommerce revenue from people who begin their product searches on their search engine. We’re betting Doerr had to choose between the two companies. Or maybe Doerr just got sick of flying up to Seattle for the board meetings.      
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| Google Asks Mobile Companies For Help With FTC Over Admob Deal Posted: 17 Mar 2010 08:14 PM PDT
We spoke with one mobile advertising company this afternoon that received the request from Google. The company was asked to write their thoughts on “Do you think mobile advertising is going to keep growing, and that Google’s acquisition of Admob won’t hurt your business or decrease competition in the mobile market?” Last week Bloomberg reported that the FTC had reached out to Admob competitors about the deal. Our source that was contacted by Google says they were also contacted by the FTC months ago about the deal. Since then, silence. Oddly enough, we had also heard recently that Google was actually looking for ways to back out of the Admob deal, which clearly isn’t the case based on this new information today. But there is speculation that Apple will change their SDK to require application developers to use Quattro Wireless if they want to include ads in their iPhone/iPad apps. That change would likely be paired with an argument that consumer safety requires Apple to filter these ads.      
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| Zillow Launches Android App To Browse Home Sales And Rental Listings On The Go Posted: 17 Mar 2010 08:13 PM PDT
Zillow’s Android app has similar functionality to the iPhone app. The Android app uses GPS technology to find and follow users on an aerial map, and displays values, homes for sale, homes for rent, listings and recently-sold data on the homes around their local area. Users can also search for homes, even if they're not nearby, utilizing the Android’s voice search capabilities. You speak the address, neighborhood, zip code or city into the phone and the app will instantly take the user to the location on the map. And the app leverages Google Street View by displaying curbside images of homes and streets. Each listing features the same details as the listing on the web, with multiple photos, home details, and contact information on homes for sale or for rent. Users can also filter their home searches by sale price, rental price, number of bedrooms and bathrooms and listing type (for sale, for rent, and recently sold). Zillow, which launched as a mortgage marketplace in 2008, recently added rentals to its business, opening up the site to a new market in the wake of the burst of the real estate bubble. Zillow is also hoping to IPO in 2011 and according to reports, is currently courting Wall Street investors.      
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| You Asked For It: TechCrunch, The Mobile Version Posted: 17 Mar 2010 07:47 PM PDT
We’re happy to announce the rollout of a mobile version of TechCrunch. We know how spotty wireless coverage can be, and how frustrating it can get to wait for a ton of extras to load while you’re staring at 2.5″ screen and can’t see them anyway. To that end, this version is stripped down to the bare essentials to ensure quick load times and ease of use. It’s based on the WPTouch theme by BraveNewCode. It’s not an app – it works with any touch-enabled browser. You can, of course, add it to your home screen for easy access to the latest in technology news. Thank you to Bing, our launch partner for the mobile version. To see the new mobile version, just go to techcrunch.com on any touch-screen mobile device. We’ll be adding full support for non-touchscreen models soon. We’ll be improving on the design in the coming weeks, so tell us your thoughts in the comments.
     
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| The New York Times Partners With Fwix To License Realtime Hyperlocal News Stream Posted: 17 Mar 2010 07:26 PM PDT
Fwix, which launched its realtime API a few weeks ago, aggregates news articles and blog posts that are relevant to a certain region (the site now features support for over 80 cities in the United States and Canada). To do this, the Fwix team selects news sources and blogs that it thinks are related to each city, and also uses automated algorithms to determine when other content might also be relevant. Fwix has also recently tweaked its algorithm and offerings to include “nearby” local content features. So content on Fwix displays relationships between both topics and nearby location. For example, after reading a story about a robbery that took place in the Mission district of San Francisco, you’ll be able to find any other crime and or stories about the Mission neighborhood. While its still unknown how Fwix will be implemented across all of the New York Times’ properties, the startup’s local news content is already being used in the publishing company’s Northern California newspaper, the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. In the “YourTown” section, the Fwix feed is set to a current location and feeds realtime news about the San Francisco Bay area. However in some instances, the Fwix news feed might show the reader his or her own local news by autodetect location via an IP address (say, at a global-reaching site like www.nytimes.com). There is a revenue agreement with The New York Times Company, says Fwix founder and CEO Darian Shirazi, but he declined to reveal the exact amount involved in the deal. And the deal is not exclusive, so Fwix can be incorporated on other news sites as well. Fwix’s local news stream has also been integrated on integrated on WeatherUnderground.com and UPI.com. And the startup also launched the Fwix News Publisher app on Facebook, which lets any Facebook Page add local news of any variety of subjects (business, sports, politics, living, entertainment, etc.) to their page’s feed. The deal with the New York Times is a huge coup for a startup that launched less than two years ago.      
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| Yahoo EVP Ash Patel, One Of the First Yahoos, Announces His Departure Posted: 17 Mar 2010 04:48 PM PDT
Patel was one of Yahoo’s first sixty employees, and joined shortly before the company went public in April 1996. There are just six current Yahoo employees who joined before Patel, the company says. His first job at Yahoo was “technical Yahoo,” a title given to all engineers. He created the My Yahoo product and also built Yahoo’s first instant messenger client. He stopped coding for a living in 2002 and has since been in a series of product and engineering executive positions. His current role is EVP Product Architecture & Strategy. He has also served as Chief Product Officer and has run the engineering group at Yahoo. I met with Patel this morning for a little over an hour to talk about his time at the company the early days at Yahoo.
Patel also talked about how annoyed he would get trying to test Yahoo’s instant messenger client during the wee hours of the night when no one else was awake. He couldn’t test new features on his sleeping friends, so he added a feature where a user could add themselves as a friend. That feature is still part of Yahoo Messenger. Says Filo, "Did you know that you can add yourself as a contact in Yahoo! Messenger? Well, you can. Why? Because Ash needed a way to test the code to see if it was actually working the way we wanted it to while Messenger was first in development. He couldn't wait. He wanted that feedback immediately and he wanted that chance to get things right on the fly. That's the kind of ingenuity Ash brought to Yahoo!. He helped us to move faster than we thought we could and to find new ways to look at our work from the user's point of view."
I asked Patel about Yahoo’s current troubles, saying that Yahoo sort of feels like England in 1940, surrounded by the Nazis (I’m not sure who the nazis are in my analogy, but we met very early this morning and it was the best I could come up with). His response – “Well, look who won the Battle of Britain…Things turned out ok.” We also had a side discussion about whether Carol Bartz could play the part of Winston Churchill. But like I said, it was early. What’s next for Patel? He says he’s going to take a few months off with his family and start to think about the future this summer. He advises a few startups, he says, although he doesn’t seem to be suggesting, yet at least, that a startup is in his future. One thing is clear – Patel will be missed. He is a genuinely likable and intelligent guy who’s seen a lot over the last 14 years. It’s a loss for Yahoo that he’s leaving, but this guy clearly will continue to bleed purple.      
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| IGN Entertainment Slashes 20 Percent Of Staff Posted: 17 Mar 2010 04:46 PM PDT
Nobody is safe in the House of Murdoch, especially on the Internet side of the house. Yesterday, News Corp’s online games business, IGN Entertainment, announced layoffs to its staff. Cuts were pretty even across all parts of the company, and we’ve been able to learn that about 65 people in total lost their jobs, or roughly 20 percent of staff. Joystiq was the first to get a hold of the layoff memo from president Roy Bahat, who wrote:
In other words, don’t let the door hit you on the way out. The layoffs at IGN follow larger cutbacks last year at sister site MySpace, which laid off 30 percent of its U.S. staff and two thirds of its international staff last summer. More recently, MySpace replaced its CEO. Murdoch is definitely not enamored with the Web anymore.      
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| The Top 15 Brands on the App Store Might Surprise You Posted: 17 Mar 2010 04:36 PM PDT
Brands are increasingly prominent on the App Store and Apple tends to love featuring folks like Britney Spears and Coca-Cola on the App Store’s front page. But who’s actually succeeding and which brands have managed to maintain high download numbers? PositionApp, the app that lets you track how iPhone apps are doing on the App Store rankings, might have the answer. They track and record the top 300 apps across all demographics and have provided us with details on the top 15 apps in the US App Store. Hit the jump for the list. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>      
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| Generation I: Middle Children Of The Information Age Posted: 17 Mar 2010 04:05 PM PDT
At no other time in history, and perhaps never in the future, will there be a group of people whose own growth and maturation is so perfectly reflected in the principal technological and cultural advancement of the age.      
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| Groupon Makes A Big Hire, Rob Solomon Joins As President Posted: 17 Mar 2010 04:01 PM PDT
Social commerce site Groupon is on fire. Everywhere I go, people are talking about it or trying to copy it. The Chicago-based startup just hired a big gun. Rob Solomon is joining as the company’s president. Solomon is a venture partner at Technology Crossover Ventures, which he joined after selling travel search engine SideStep to Kayak for $200 million. He was the CEO at SideStep, and prior to that was the VP of Yahoo Shopping. Now will help lead fast-growing Groupon. Founder Andrew Mason will remain CEO. “Social commerce is something I have always been fascinated with,” Solomon tells me. He thinks that the virality that comes with online social connections will take e-commerce to the next level. Groupon offers group buying at the local level which is only triggered once a certain minimum number of participants agree to buy. As local businesses try to figure out what will replace the Yellow Pages and radio advertising, Groupon hopes to fill in that gap. The company’s “growth is spectacular in revenues and users,” says Solomon, without going into more details (but the numbers are spectacular enough for him to move from sunny Silicon Valley to Chicago). The company operates in 45 markets, has made 2.5 million group purchases on behalf of customers so far, and says it’s saved them $117 million. Groupon recently raised $30 million at a rumored $250 million valuation. And, yes, it is still hiring.      
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| Hands on with the Alex eReader Posted: 17 Mar 2010 12:51 PM PDT  The Alex ereader is out and I got to look at it today for a few minutes. The top part is a real epaper screen and the bottom part is essentially a small Android MID. The device has Wi-Fi and is available now for $399, shipping in May. The company had a few interesting points about their sales strategy. Their goal isn't to sell and ship devices, although their ereader will play epub, PDF, HTML, and TXT files out of the box. They are currently partnering with international publishing houses and periodicals and will work with those partners to create an web store as well as a unique UI for each device. In this way a newspaper could offer a branded version of its reader and offer it at a subsidized rate to online subscribers or a publishing house or book store could offer their own branded experience. 
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| Posted: 17 Mar 2010 10:38 AM PDT
Citizen Sports has a range of products related to fantasy and real-life sports, most of which incorporate social features. Along with web based leagues and applications on Facebook, the company also offers applications for the iPhone and Android. These applications will nicely complement Yahoo Sports, which offers a number of hugely popular fantasy sports leagues. Citizen Sports raised $10 million from Radar Ventures in 2005, when it was previously called Protrade. The news confirms AllThingsD’s report earlier this week that Yahoo was considering buying a sports site. Press release below:
     
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| The Location War May Be Even, But Foursquare Dominates Twitter Posted: 17 Mar 2010 10:11 AM PDT
As we noted a couple days ago, the so-called “Location War” was essentially an even match throughout the first few days of the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. The services were in a dead-heat when it came to check-ins through Sunday, based on data we’d seen. But when it comes to tweets from the respective services, Foursquare, it seems, is dominating. I had the service Trendrr send me some data for tweets being sent out with “4sq.com” and “gowal.la,” the short URLs for each service. As you can see in the graph above, while Gowalla has a much more steady stream of tweets sent to Twitter, Foursquare has huge spikes. In total, according to the Trendrr data, Foursquare is averaging about 500 Twitter posts per hour with peaks as high as 1,329 posts per hour. Gowalla is averaging about 100 posts per hour with a peak of 190 posts per hour. Now, a few caveats: first, Foursquare has several actions that can be set to auto-tweet, which Gowalla doesn’t have. For example, when you unlock a badge or take over a mayorship on Foursquare, many people have their accounts set up to autotweet. Then, of course, there is checking-in. Gowalla tweets out only when you check-in at a place (if you set it to do so). Second, this data is only for the past two days (Trendrr wasn’t tracking it before I asked), and it’s worldwide. The check-in data I cited for the dead-heat location war was from Austin only. That said, there’s a reason why others are thinking Foursquare is dominating Gowalla, even here at SXSW: The amount of tweets sent from Foursquare seems way above the Gowalla tweets. I’ve noticed it, as have a dozen or so other people I’ve talked to here. Again, that doesn’t mean Foursquare is dominating in actual usage, just that they have a better system set up for this type of viral messaging (which plenty of people hate). Trendrr also has more comprehensive data for the terms “Foursquare” vs. “Gowalla” (and they included “Loopt) on Twitter. There, as well, Foursquare dominates averaging about 20,000 posts a day, with Gowalla at just 3,000 a day (find that chart below). But that could also be because when Foursquare autotweets from accounts it includes the “@foursquare” branding on the end of the tweet while Gowalla does not. Look for more comprehensive data about the Location War over the next few days.
     
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