The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- iPad Games We’d Love To See
- Nokia Buys Mobile Web Browser Company Novarra
- Reimagining The Magazine Cover For The iPad
- Twitter Music Sharing Service Song.ly On The Block, Could Be Yours For $50,000
- GeoHot Teases With Untethered Jailbreak That Could Work On IPad
- Russian Search Leader Yandex Launches Custom Google Chrome Browser
- The First TV Show Based On Twitter Buries Its Presenters In Feedback
- Online Game Developer Perfect World Buys C&C Media For $21 Million
- Congress On China: Google Gets A Big Wet Kiss. Microsoft Is “Enabling Tyranny”
- JESS3 Is Fusing The Garbage Pail Kids With Silicon Valley, With Awesome Results
- Check.in Is A Potentially Brilliant Remedy For Check-In Fatigue
- “Text 2.0″ Eye-Tracking Reading Companion: Crazy Or Crazy Awesome?
- Four VC Firms Battle For Foursquare, Valuation Goes Stratospheric
- SpikeTV And UFC Embrace The Internet At Last: Streaming Episodes, Twitter And Facebook Integration
- Facebook To Release A “Like” Button For the Whole Darn Internet
- What Did The Location War Look Like At SXSW? Like This.
- Just a Hunch: TechCrunch’s Twitter Followers Are Entrepreneurial, Gadget-Loving Optimists
- WhiteyBoard: An Instant Whiteboard For Your Instant Office
- What Lengths Will Cities Go To Be Google’s Broadband Guinea Pig?
- Windows Phone 7 Destroys The iPhone (Well, Its Foursquare App Does)
- YouTube EDU Finishes Its Freshman Year With 300 University Partners In Tow
- MyTown Hits 1.5 Million Location-Based Gamers; Ups The Social With Version 3.0
- Plaxo CEO Ben Golub Steps Down, To Be Replaced By Justin Miller
- Citysearch Gets A New CTO
- Tuenti, Spain’s Facebook, Switches On Location Features
| Posted: 26 Mar 2010 08:12 AM PDT  After news of the HD and XL iPad versions of some of our favorite games are on their way - Flight Control being one of my personal obsessions - we thought it would be fun to ponder what other boardgames would make for a fun iPad experience. Here's our list. What would you guys like to see?
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| Nokia Buys Mobile Web Browser Company Novarra Posted: 26 Mar 2010 07:41 AM PDT
The acquisition makes sense, considering that Nokia builds its own browser. Nokia says Novarra’s technology will be integrated to provide a more powerful browsing experience on Nokia phones. Novarra which was founded in 1999, raised $50 million in funding in 2007. The company creates web-based technologies for mobile devices, including functionality for internet access, portals, videos, widgets and advertising. Novarra supplied its technologies to Palm and U.S. Cellular previously. While Nokia develops and operates its own browser on its devices, the Nokia’s Ovi store offers third-party browsers for some phones, including Opera Mini and Skyfire. Nokia is still the world’s top mobile phone maker, and posted impressive 2009 fourth quarter results in January. The company shipped 126.9 million units in the fourth quarter of 2009, representing an increase of 12% year on year. Unfortunately, yearly results weren’t as strong. Nokia was down 20% on net sales compared to 2008. Nokia’s last acquisition was of travel social network Dopplr, which we heard the mobile device company was looking to sell. Nokia was on a bit of an acquisition tear last year, also buying up Plum, Cellity and Bit-Side.      
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| Reimagining The Magazine Cover For The iPad Posted: 26 Mar 2010 07:08 AM PDT
Print publishers are in a tizzy over Apple’s new iPad because they hope to finally be able to charge for their digital editions. But in order to get people to pay for their magazine and newspaper apps, they are going to have to offer something different that readers cannot get at the newsstand or on the open Web. We’ve already seen plenty of prototypes from magazine publishers which include interactive graphics, photo slide shows, and embedded videos. But what should a magazine cover look like on the iPad? After all, the cover is still the gateway to the magazine. Theoretically, it will still be the first page people see, giving them hints of what’s inside and enticing them to dive into the issue. One way these covers could change is that instead of simply repurposing the static photographs from the print edition, the background image itself could be some sort of video loop. Jesse Rosten, a photographer in California, created the video mockup below of what a cover of Sunset Magazine might look like on the iPad (see video below). The video shows ocean waves gently lapping a beach as the title of the magazine and other typographical elements appear on the page almost like movie credits. He points out that these kinds of videos will have to be shot in a vertical orientation rather than a horizontal landscape one. This is just a mockup Rosten came up with on his own, but the designers of these new magazine apps should take note. The only way people are going to pay for these apps is if they create new experiences for readers.
     
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| Twitter Music Sharing Service Song.ly On The Block, Could Be Yours For $50,000 Posted: 26 Mar 2010 06:33 AM PDT
You can ‘Buy It Now’ for $50,000, but the auction will run for another 12 days at a minimum bid of $15,000. I’m fairly surprised that the people behind the service didn’t think they could fetch more for the property, if only for the nice domain name that comes with it. When you enter a song title in Song.ly, the service searches for corresponding tracks, shortens links for Twitter and packages songs in a handy compact Flash player. Song.ly also boasts extensions for Firefox and Internet Explorer and features an open API. The whole package is for sale, including the associated Twitter account @song_ly. According to the listing, the site has a PageRank 5 and gets about 175,000 pageviews per month (excluding API requests). The developers of Song.ly say they’ve never considered monetizing the site and lack the time to keep running the service, even though they claim it would only take a buyer about an hour and $80 per month to maintain it. Going once, going twice …
(Thanks to Josh Barkin for the heads up)      
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| GeoHot Teases With Untethered Jailbreak That Could Work On IPad Posted: 26 Mar 2010 05:20 AM PDT  Web video star GeoHot just did a quick demo of his untethered iPhone/iPod Touch jailbreak. That's right - you just have to put something on your device - and not directly connect it to your computer - and it will jailbreak the heck out of it in a few minutes. It's just like the old days when you could download an image on the original iPhone and suddenly jailbreak it. While the video doesn't explain anything, it's nice to see America's youth busily attending to the major issues of the day, especially if that issue is jailbreaking the iPad when it comes out next week.
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| Russian Search Leader Yandex Launches Custom Google Chrome Browser Posted: 26 Mar 2010 05:16 AM PDT
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| The First TV Show Based On Twitter Buries Its Presenters In Feedback Posted: 26 Mar 2010 04:50 AM PDT  Yesterday we gave you an intro into the first real Twitter television initiative, Twision, originating from none other than a digital TV channel in Spain, VEO7, a part of Unidad Editorial. Veo7 launched their first Twision program last Thursday and will continue to air every Thursday evening at midnight. Here's some more post-launch insight into the initiative. Unlike other international attempts to integrate Twitter, uni-directionally, Twision viewers are able to use the #veo7 hashtag to speak directly to presenters and influence where the program's discussion goes -- branded "twittertulia". During the latest program (which is at midnight and Veo7 is not a prime channel), Melchor Miralles' timeline crashed and he was quickly buried under nearly 2,000 comments and suggestions. 
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| Online Game Developer Perfect World Buys C&C Media For $21 Million Posted: 26 Mar 2010 03:38 AM PDT
C&C Media was founded in June 2001 and operates a website called “MK-STYLE” which features online games and related services for individual users. Perfect World primarily develops online games based on proprietary game engines and development platforms. The company’s current portfolio of self-developed online games includes massively multiplayer online role playing games “Perfect World,” “Legend of Martial Arts,” “Perfect World II,” “Zhu Xian,” “Chi Bi,” “Pocketpet Journey West,” “Battle of the Immortals” and “Fantasy Zhu Xian;” and an online casual game: “Hot Dance Party.” While a substantial portion of its revenues are generated in its home country China, Perfect World’s games have been licensed to leading game operators in a number of countries and regions in Asia, Europe and South America. The company also generates revenues from game operation in North America. The news of the acquisition comes days after Perfect World rival The9 invested $20 million in U.S.-based Red 5 Studios.      
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| Congress On China: Google Gets A Big Wet Kiss. Microsoft Is “Enabling Tyranny” Posted: 26 Mar 2010 02:03 AM PDT
Google gets hacked over the Christmas holidays when most people aren’t watching the ship, and all of their source code for all of their products is, embarrassingly, downloaded to a Chinese hacker. Their response? Pull out of a search market that they are already failing in. But leave other assets that have more promise. And suddenly the U.S. Congress is praising Google and slamming, well, Microsoft. Because doing business in China was just fine in December 2009. But today it’s very, very wrong. Says Chris Smith, R-N.J.:
And GoDaddy, a domain registrar that markets itself by suggesting to users that buying domain names can get them laid, gets in on the action, too. Representative Smith “praised Internet domain host site GoDaddy.com which said it will no longer offer new Chinese Web domains.” Also in on the feeding frenzy was Senator Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who applauded Google’s actions by bravely leaving the Chinese market. Let’s put aside the fact that Google has given $8,500 and GoDaddy has given $19,500 to Senator Dorgan. Because politicians never do favors for people who donate to their campaign funds, of course. But let’s not put aside the fact that Go Daddy has registered a mere 27,000 .CN domain names over the years, constituting approximately 0.08% of their 35 million domains under management. Really, GoDaddy? Explain again how this isn’t a publicity stunt? GoDaddy most certainly did pull a publicity stunt, and the publicity was provided by our government. And Google, who had nothing bad to say about China in 2009, is now suggesting Microsoft is only doing business in China to irk Google. Said Google’s Sergey Brin of Microsoft:
Brin’s hypocrisy is astounding. GoDaddy’s brashness is…funny. But our government’s willingness to play this game, and trash Microsoft for not deciding that China is evil at exactly the same moment that Google did, is sad and irresponsible. We all buy China’s stuff every day. Our government is financed by Chinese credit. Whatever China is or isn’t, we are all very much in business with them. Even Google, who retains sales and R&D staff in China and is certainly going to sell a ton of Android handsets there. I can hold my nose at all the BS that Google spouts as they extricate themselves from a sticky situation. I can put up with GoDaddy purchasing publicity from a U.S. Senator. But what I can’t sit and watch is Microsoft being raked over the coals by a government that does nothing to fight the evil that they say exists in China, just to give a little bit back to a couple of companies that have thrown some money their way.      
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| JESS3 Is Fusing The Garbage Pail Kids With Silicon Valley, With Awesome Results Posted: 26 Mar 2010 12:31 AM PDT
If the drawing style looks familiar, you’re either a child of the 80’s or a fan of Mad Magazine — all sketches are by artist Tom Bunk, who is responsible for the look of the Garbage Pail Kids and has contributed to Mad since 1993. Thomas has been posting Bunk’s sketches to his Facebook profile for the last few weeks, which so far include companies like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. There’s also an awesome one of my boss, who has been given the moniker Mike Crushington. All in all, these look seriously awesome — I can’t wait until they’re available for purchase. Twitter LinkedIn
     
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| Check.in Is A Potentially Brilliant Remedy For Check-In Fatigue Posted: 25 Mar 2010 10:10 PM PDT
Check.in is an application that lets you check-in with multiple services at the same time. Or, as they put it, it’s “on check-in to rule them all.” While the team showed it to me briefly at SXSW (and CrunchGear got some video of it in action), they’ve actually given me access to it now to play around with. And I’m happy to report that it works great. So how does it work? Well, for the time being it’s actually a mobile web app. Eventually, the plan is to release a native app version for the different platforms, but in order to get it out there relatively quickly, they made a web version that works on mobile browser that offer HTML5 support for location (currently the iPhone and Android phones). When you load it up, the browser asks for permission to pull your coordinates, and a few seconds later it pulls up a list of venues it believes you’re near. When you click on one, the app does some “magical matching” to find the venue across the various services. (If it’s unsure it asks you to confirm the venue for each different service — a bit tedious, but it goes fast as it’s just one click.) You’re then taken to the final check-in page where you can leave an optional message (which will also get sent to each of the services) and if you’re good to go, you simply hit the check-in button, and you’re done. Currently, Check.in works with three services: Brightkite (of course), Foursquare, and Gowalla. But it’s important to note that the team is likely going to have to pull Gowalla support because that service doesn’t yet technically support writing to their API (only reading from it). Check.in found a work-around through an undocumented API. Still, the Check.in team hopes to add other services quickly as check-in APIs become available. So how much time does Check.in save? At least a few minutes just for the three aforementioned services that it currently works with. Remember, checking-in with all of these apps requires not only that you open each one, but that you wait to pull friend data and location data before you can check-in. Check.in cuts out most of that load time by removing the friend element, and doing the location loads all at once. If they’re able to get all the services playing nicely with their check-in APIs, Check.in is going to be the perfect solution for check-in fatigue. But don’t be surprised if one of the bigger players, like Facebook, are thinking about this as well. Check.in will be launching in beta very shortly.
     
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| “Text 2.0″ Eye-Tracking Reading Companion: Crazy Or Crazy Awesome? Posted: 25 Mar 2010 07:30 PM PDT
The idea is that it tracks where you’re looking, and based on a number of factors, triggers one of several context-sensitive actions. An eye-tracking interface is an entirely new beastie, however, and somehow I’m not convinced that real life usage will be quite as easy to collate and react to as this video seems to suggest.      
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| Four VC Firms Battle For Foursquare, Valuation Goes Stratospheric Posted: 25 Mar 2010 06:45 PM PDT
All that competition is driving the valuation massively upwards, too. A couple of weeks ago we’d heard that the deal would likely be closed at around a $50 million valuation. Today we’ve confirmed that the final price will likely be $60 million – $70 million. They’re raising around $10 million, which means when it’s all over Foursquare will be worth up to $80 million on paper. The front runner in the deal is Gideon Yu from Khosla, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Yu is tight with both Jack Dorsey (he’s an investor in Dorsey’s Square) and Chris Dixon (likewise, he’s an investor in Dixon’s Hunch). And Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley is relying heavily on the advice of his close friends for the deal. And those close friends include Jack Dorsey, who’s an investor in Foursquare, and Dixon. What a choice, though. Most entrepreneurs would sacrifice a kitten to get anywhere near any of these investors, and Crowley has his choice of any of them. A final decision is expected in the next few days, say our sources.      
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| SpikeTV And UFC Embrace The Internet At Last: Streaming Episodes, Twitter And Facebook Integration Posted: 25 Mar 2010 06:00 PM PDT
Continue reading at CrunchGear…      
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| Facebook To Release A “Like” Button For the Whole Darn Internet Posted: 25 Mar 2010 05:19 PM PDT
One of the new features we’ve been hearing about is the extension of Facebook Connect and the Facebook API to allow publishers to add a “Like” button to any piece of content on their site. Sound trivial? It isn’t. This is likely part of Facebook’s Open Graph API project that will incentivize third party sites to interact deeply with Facebook by sharing content and associated metadata. Today you can “share” content with Facebook via a simple button (you can see our implementation at the top of this post). The new Like feature goes way beyond the Share button, we’ve heard. Good for publishers? Yes. But it’s also very, very good for Facebook as hundreds of thousands of websites will rush to format their content to exactly Facebook’s preference and send over all their data without a second thought. One way to think of this, says a source with knowledge of the product, is this. Google spends billions of dollars indexing the web for their search engine. Facebook will get the web to index itself, exclusively for Facebook. Yes, it’s a big idea. Or, as MG put it, the entire Internet will be turned into a tributary system for Facebook. And it all flows from a simple Like gesture, and a few other features we’ll be writing about shortly.      
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| What Did The Location War Look Like At SXSW? Like This. Posted: 25 Mar 2010 04:54 PM PDT
Right before the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas a couple weeks ago, some of you may have read about SimpleGeo’s awesome location data visualization tool called Vicarious.ly. The site showed location information coming in to SimpleGeo from Austin in realtime, and included elements such as Foursquare check-ins, Gowalla check-ins, geotagged pictures from Flickr, and geotagged tweets from Twitter. It was really interesting to watch in realtime, but it may be even more interesting in hindsight. Luckily, SimpleGeo has released a video to show the data over the span of just about a week (March 11 to March 17). As you can see, Foursquare and Gowalla clearly dominate the data. This is in line with what we heard in the midst of the so-called “location war” between the two. It’s also kind of fun to watch the early hours of the morning when everyone is clearly asleep, and then watch as the data comes roaring back to life around 8 AM as festival-goers undoubtedly nursed hangovers to head to the convention center.
     
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| Just a Hunch: TechCrunch’s Twitter Followers Are Entrepreneurial, Gadget-Loving Optimists Posted: 25 Mar 2010 02:23 PM PDT
The problem with having more than a million followers on Twitter, or even more than 1,000, is that you don’t really know who they are. But Hunch thinks it knows a lot about the followers of at least popular Twitter users. It is now pulling together detailed psychographic profiles of those followers with a new Twitter Followers tool. For instance, Hunch suggests that if you follow TechCrunch on Twitter—as close to 1.4 million of you do—you are more likely to be entrepreneurial, very experienced in your career, and talk about computers “like a gear head talking about a four-barrel V8 engine.” It also predicts that you are more likely to have bought someone flowers in the past 6 months, get birthday cakes from expensive bakeries, and are an optimist (if you drop a piece of toast you believe it will land butter-side up). I’ve met some of you, and I’m not so sure you’d buy anyone an expensive cake. But some of the other characterizations seem spot on. Hunch is using this Twitter follower analyzer as a clever way to get more people to check out its taste recommendation engine. Any question-answer pair can be Tweeted out with a link back to the full analysis. It only works right now for Twitter accounts with more than 1,000 followers (to keep everything anonymous). Hunch looks at the overlap between those followers and its own users, who have already answered dozens of taste-related questions, and extrapolates from there. This is slightly different from the Twitter Predictor game it released last week which predicts how you will answer a set of questions based on your Twitter profile and who you follow. Breaking down the psychographics and predilections of someone’s Twitter followers could be useful one day if anyone ever figures out how to advertise to those followers in a way that doesn’t make them want to unfollow you. But for now it is just a fun exercise. How accurate is it? Let’s put it to the test. My personal followers for @erickschonfeld on Twitter, according to Hunch, tend to be early adopters of of technology (check), use an iPhone (probably), don’t wait for the crosswalk sign to change before they cross the street (I’m pretty sure that’s true), prefer fluid and flexible jobs (check), and consider a “reasonable number of hours to work” to be “whatever it takes” (yup, that’s how my posse rolls). Looking at some other media accounts, followers of the HuffingtonPost tend to be liberals (I am as shocked), think Bill Maher is funny (which might be their real problem), and don’t realize Elton John can be cheesy . Gawker followers tend to be more “conceptual” than “factual” (draw your own conclusions). Lance Armstrong’s followers are “extremely” competitive and “don’t like kittens” (no idea). While Jimmy Fallon’s followers are more likely to have been in a car accident. I couldn’t make these up if I tried. Hunch plans to follow up with another Twitter tool where it will try to tell you what kinds of things, people, or products you might like or dislike, as opposed to your followers. It will only be visible to you after you sign in via your Twitter account. To learn more about Hunch’s approach to creating a “taste graph” of its users, check out this recent video interview with co-founder Caterina Fake.
     
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| WhiteyBoard: An Instant Whiteboard For Your Instant Office Posted: 25 Mar 2010 02:00 PM PDT  While I'm not sure what I think about the name, I do like WhiteyBoard's game. WhiteyBoard is an "instant" whiteboard made of plastic that weighs less than two pounds and slaps right up on your wall without screws. Instead of those standard, crazily heavy and expensive whiteboards you're used to, you simply buy a 18-inch, 3-foot, or 6-foot WhiteyBoard, slap it up, and start brainstorming.
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| What Lengths Will Cities Go To Be Google’s Broadband Guinea Pig? Posted: 25 Mar 2010 01:47 PM PDT
It’s understandable why cities would want to be part of Google’s broadband plan. Not only will the broadband network be completely free for the city (only the consumers using the services will be charged), but the 1Gb/sec fiber is roughly 100 times faster than what most Americans get today for Internet speeds. That's especially true in rural areas. Many of the municipal displays of Google love border on the ridiculous. But why wouldn’t a city want Google’s stamp of approval with a side of super-fast broadband speeds? Tomorrow is the deadline for cities to submit applications and here’s a roundup of the various entertaining strategies cities have adopted to catch Google’s attention. One of the first cities to throw its hat into the ring was Topeka, Kansas. The city's mayor signed a proclamation that for March, Topeka will be known as "Google, Kansas" in honor of the search giant. In an attempt at parody, the mayor of Deluth, Minnesota mandated that all firstborn males be named “Google Fiber” and all firstborn females be named “Googlette Fiber.” Baltimore (which happens to be my hometown) took a more bureaucratic approach to the application process by appointing a “Google Czar.” The city chose Tom Loveland, CEO of a local tech company, Mind Over Machines, to take the position. Baltimore also launched a website, BmoreFiber, which states in huge, bold letters, "Ask Google to Invest Billions in Baltimore's Future." California’s Santa Monica used its entertainment talent and posted a YouTube video with a love ballad written and performed by part time city employee and aspiring songwriter Jeff Stevens. Palo Alto also used song and dance to appeal to Google; with city residents and employees videotaping themselves dancing to the Village People’s YMCA. Oklahoma City took a more tech-friendly approach, crowdsourcing ideas for catching Google’s attention. North Carolina’s Asheville passed a proclamation that 1:30 PM EST today would be the city’s “Google Moment.” At that time, everyone in the city is encouraged to submit online applications on Google’s broadband site. At the same time. Greenville, South Carolina recruited citizens to spell out Google with color coded glow sticks. Peoria, Illinois created this cartoon. Other cities have incorporated their natural resources and even animals into their bids to win Google’s attention. In addition to his parody video, Deluth’s mayor also jumped in the icy Lake Superior in the middle of winter. The mayor of Sarasota, Florida jumped into a shark tank to promote the city and renamed the city “Google Island.” Madison, Wisconsin (a state that is famous for its dairy products), has created a “Google Flavored” ice cream that includes M&M’s in the same colors as Google’s logo and granola to represent fiber.
So who will win the golden ticket? Digital communications and measurement firm Steketee Greiner and Co. has been analyzing over 90 cities across the US, measuring activity around online conversation, digital syndication, presence, involvement and activation, to determine which city will come out on top. At the moment, Steketee reports that Duluth seems to be in first place, with Grand Rapids taking second, Topeka coming in third place, Fresno in fourth place and Sarasota rounding out with the fifth spot. Of course, the U.S. government has its own ten year broadband plan, which among other goals, wants to subsidize broadband connections in rural areas, and bring 1-gigabit connections to every community in the U.S. While this is a worthy and necessary set of goals, there are a number of flaws with the strategy, namely that the plans aren’t ambitious enough. For example, under the new plan, some 85% of homes covered would have no choice when it comes to a provider, possibly locking users into higher prices because of a lack of competition. Google represents a small beacon of hope in that it could provide a concrete example for other communities or broadband providers to follow. While initially the search giant is only outfitting 500,000 homes, if the plan works, Google could end up expanding the project nationally. And while it’s still unclear when Google will roll out its test implementations, the expectation is that it won’t take ten years. Photo by Mike Bergen (AidJoy.org for the City of Greenville)      
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| Windows Phone 7 Destroys The iPhone (Well, Its Foursquare App Does) Posted: 25 Mar 2010 01:43 PM PDT
As shown off by Windows Phone Senior Product Manager Anand Iyer on his blog this morning, Foursquare for Windows Phone 7 looks amazing. In fact, it looks much nicer than the recently-revamped version of Foursquare for the iPhone. As you can see in the screenshots, the app has a simple elegance to it, with most of the app being made of different color text against a black background (just about the opposite of Foursquare for the iPhone). Also nice is the maps (Bing, naturally) implementation on the check-in pages, venue pages, and individuals’ profiles. The Windows Phone 7 version also has two killer features that the iPhone version of Foursquare does not: directions within the app, and a new “Society” area. The directions element is great — it seems like daily I’m looking at a Foursquare venue on a map in the app that I’m trying to get to, but would love access to step-by-step directions. To get that on the iPhone, I have to exit the app and open the Maps app. On Windows Phone 7, it’s all integrated into the app. The new Society area, meanwhile, uses Foursquare’s firehose of data to show the hottest areas in a given city. It does this by showing you a heat map indicating where the most check-ins are taking place. You can then see pins showing the different venues in that area. And below that is a list of the venues and tallies for how many people are checking-in there. Obviously, this is just one app, and we’re still a long ways away from Windows Phone 7 launching (next Fall). But consider that Android has been out for a year and a half now, and there are still no Twitter apps for the platform that can touch the top five or so iPhone Twitter apps (though Seesmic is finally getting close). If the first attempt at Foursquare for Windows Phone 7 trumps the iPhone version, that would seem to be a good sign. Of course, it must be noted that third-party developers make the Twitter iPhone apps, and have also made this Foursquare app for WP7 — meanwhile, it was Foursquare that made its own iPhone app. That said, there are others making Foursquare apps for the iPhone now, but none come close to being as nice as the WP7 one shown here.
     
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| YouTube EDU Finishes Its Freshman Year With 300 University Partners In Tow Posted: 25 Mar 2010 01:33 PM PDT
Since launching, YouTube has grown to include content from 300 colleges and universities, spanning 10 countries and seven languages. The collection has grown to 65,000 videos, including 350 full courses. And with the addition of auto-captioning, the site can automatically translate any lectures spoken in English to other languages. Another major player in distributing educational content online is iTunes U, which boasts 600 university partners and “250,000 free lectures, videos, films, and other resources”. The programs do have some differences though — for one, schools on iTunes U can restrict the ability of their content to students (around half of them have share their content publicly), whereas YouTube videos are generally available to everyone.
     
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| MyTown Hits 1.5 Million Location-Based Gamers; Ups The Social With Version 3.0 Posted: 25 Mar 2010 12:34 PM PDT
MyTown 3.0 comes just two months after the launch of MyTown 2.0. The easiest way to think about the game is as a sort of real world Monopoly for the iPhone. You travel around your city and check-in places, gain points, and then decide which properties to virtually buy. While no one could argue that MyTown hasn’t been a fun and addicting game, previously, it was largely a solitary game. With this latest version, Booyah pumps up the social aspect. Now, like the aforementioned Foursquare and Gowalla, you can see a stream of your friends’ check-ins. But it’s more than that. Staying true to their game-centric roots, you can also travel to friends’ towns and view their properties and upgrades. There is also a new way to easily message friends, through a new contact list which can be built with Facebook Connect (or email contact import). And yes, there are now leaderboards to show how you’re doing in the game versus your friends. Another important social element is the ability to send virtual gifts to friends. Virtual items are a big part of MyTown, and the service offers a unique blend of items you can buy with virtual (fake) currency, as well as real currency via in-app purchases. It was only this past January that MyTown announced they had hit 500,000 users. Now just two months later, they’ve tripled in size. Being featured in the App Store undoubtedly has helped this growth (and now many of the other location players are being featured as well). But perhaps more impressively, users on MyTown are averaging around 70 minutes of playtime a day, we’re told. Equally impressive: MyTown is opened 850,000 times a day. Maybe it’s time to start wondering if MyTown is quietly becoming the Farmville of location-based gaming? Find MyTown in the App Store here. It is a free download.
     
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| Plaxo CEO Ben Golub Steps Down, To Be Replaced By Justin Miller Posted: 25 Mar 2010 12:02 PM PDT
A lot has happened at Plaxo in the five years since Golub joined. The company, which builds software to help consolidate all of your contact information into a single address book (among other things), was acquired by Comcast in May 2008 for between $150 and $170 million. In the years before the acquisition, Plaxo had to deal with criticisms for making it overly easy to accidentally spam your friends with your contact information, and later got into hot water with some of its screen scraping techniques. But the service has cleaned up its act, and continues to work at making managing your contacts less of a hassle (a problem that is only getting worse with the popularity of social networks, not better). This isn’t the only recent personnel change at Plaxo — last December, Plaxo CTO Joseph Smarr left to join Google. Before joining Plaxo in early 2005, Golub served as SVP of Marketing and Corporate Affairs for VeriSign.      
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| Posted: 25 Mar 2010 12:00 PM PDT
Louvion most recently served as chief technology officer for online ad sales company Gorilla Nation Media. Prior to that, he held positions with BizRate.com and Shopzilla. In his new role, Louvion will be responsible for CityGrid’s ad and content engine, in addition to Citysearch’s search and data platform. Citysearch recently launched CityGrid, a set of APIs which makes all of Citysearch's local listings content and advertising available to other Websites and mobile apps. The APIs include more than 15 million local business listings, 3 million user reviews, and access to 500,000 local advertisers looking to reach people near their places of business.      
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| Tuenti, Spain’s Facebook, Switches On Location Features Posted: 25 Mar 2010 09:54 AM PDT  Madrid-based Tuenti, sometimes called the Facebook of Spain, has been around for four years now. It's a very well funded company that, despite a huge growth in user numbers and a number of product releases, has been getting some bad press on their lack of monetization and for not having a clear direction - though if you follow the product releases and the company's hiring habits, there is a roadmap. However Tuenti has now launched what it deems to be their most strategic move yet - tapping into their social graph to introduce location-based features. The launch is a beta, still lacking some oomph perhaps, but it's interesting to pick over what they've done. Especially as everyone is expecting Facebook to do the same at some point.
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This is why I have a strong dislike of government and our system of lobbyists. Many people in the tech community are becoming increasingly 
Silicon Valley — long home to an array of eccentric personalities and world-changing companies — is finally getting the irreverent caricatures it deserves. 
Last week, I wrote about 
It’s an interesting time to be in the e-book business. E-readers 
What do 
There will be lots of news leaking about Facebook’s product announcements at their upcoming
There’s no denying that Windows Phone 7 (or Windows Phone 7 Series, or whatever awful branding was chosen) looks to be a huge improvement from the previous iterations of Windows Mobile. And there’s even some talk that it may be able to compete with the current golden boy of the smartphone industry, Apple’s iPhone. If an early look at the new Foursquare app for Windows Phone 7 is any indication, it just may.
While Foursquare and Gowalla garner much of the 
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