The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Distimo Monitor Lets Developers Track Mobile Apps Across Platforms
- Chinese Censors Turn Up The Heat On Google
- Open Source Enterprise Company MuleSoft Raises $12 Million From SAP And Others
- Medialets Rolls Out Universal SDK For iPhone And iPad Ads
- eBay Expects To Sell $1.5 Billion Worth Of Goods Through Mobile Devices In 2010
- Meteo360: Augmented Weather Reality
- Mobile Advertising Network Greystripe Brings Its iFlash Ads To The iPad
- Meet Tagwhat, Another Augmented Reality Network For iPhone And Android Users
- Goomzee Scores $1.5 Million To Help Real Estate Agents Close Deals Via Mobile
- Yellow Pages Group Buys Canpages For $225M, Contributes U.S. Ops To ZipLocal
- GOOD Adds YouTube CEO Chad Hurley And Pepsi CMO Jill Beraud To Advisory Board
- French Search Engine Publisher AllGoob Scores €1 Million
- Europe’s Biggest Publisher Disses The iPad, Embraces The WePad
- Facebook Files For “Developer Garage” Trademark
- Boxcar Opens Up Its iPhone Push Notifications. And Soon, You Can Monetize Them
- Sorry, Members Only – Keynoir’s New Take On Group Buying
- Aha! Google Buzz Is A Black Hole — Its Traffic Must Be Inferred
- Former MySpace Exec Teams With Yahoo Rock Star For New Startup
- Teleku Takes On Twilio, Helps Developers Integrate Telephony Services Into Web Apps
- Finally, LinkedIn Gives Its Professional Crowd A Native Blackberry App
- Gruber Hints At Possible Next-Gen iPhone Specs… Sort Of
- Hello, iPad. Hello, Cloud 2.
- With More Flash, Is Google About To Cut Off The HTML5 Nose To Spite Apple’s Face?
- Twitter And The Nine-Month Bounce
- Fake Steve Jobs Blog Likely To Shut Down
| Distimo Monitor Lets Developers Track Mobile Apps Across Platforms Posted: 30 Mar 2010 08:55 AM PDT
App store analytics startup Distimo is diversifying its business model and broadening its current offering of reports for operators and handset manufacturers with a new product dubbed Monitor. This solution enables mobile application developers to collect and analyze relevant statistics about their works across app stores. Bonus points for not charging and not requiring developers to insert custom code in their apps. The Distimo Monitor dashboard provides developers with a dashboard that includes the total daily downloads, revenues and global rankings worldwide of their applications, and aims to do this for most popular mobile app stores in the near future.
For now, statistics are limited to Apple’s App Store and Android Market, but from what I can gather the service will soon be extended to include tailored reports for BlackBerry App World, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog and Windows Marketplace for Mobile, as well as mobile operator and independent stores such as Verizon VCast and GetJar. What I like about the tool is that it allows developers to not only track their own applications but also gain some insights into how well they stack up against their competitors, regardless of which country they target. Developers can use such knowledge to adjust pricing and distribution channels to maximize the growth and revenue streams of their own apps. You can sign up here or access a live demo here.
     
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| Chinese Censors Turn Up The Heat On Google Posted: 30 Mar 2010 08:05 AM PDT
When Google shut down its Chinese search operations and moved them to Hong Kong, it placed its search results outside the so-called Great Chinese Firewall. China immediately started blocking politically sensitive search queries, just as it does for all Web content outside the firewall. That was a week ago. But reports are coming out of China today that censors are turning up the heat on Google, and “searches on any topic delivered an error message,” according to the Telegraph One blogger in China says all searches on Google return the “white screen of death” and result in a connection reset. Although some Tweets from inside China say they have no problems with Google being blocked. Google’s Mainland China availability page has yet to be updated today and showed no issues with Web search as of yesterday. However, Google’s mobile sites started to be partially blocked three days ago. Gmail is still working. Whether China is moving to completely block Google or it is just tweaking its settings on the Great Firewall, the Chinese government is likely to continue its efforts to clamp down on access to Google. Chinese media are not allowed to veer from the Party line when discussing the issue. But blocking Google entirely also serves as a stark reminder to China’s people that the Great Firewall exists and there is a whole other world of information on the Web their censors don’t want them to see. Image credit: Flickr/The Humanaught.      
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| Open Source Enterprise Company MuleSoft Raises $12 Million From SAP And Others Posted: 30 Mar 2010 08:01 AM PDT
Founded in 2006, MuleSoft, provides software, support, and services for open-source technologies. The company offers Tcat Server, an application server that simplifies management, application provisioning, and diagnostics tasks for Tomcat developers and administrators; Mule ESB, an open source enterprise service bus, which enables to create and integrate application services; and Mule Data Integrator that simplifies data integration and transformation tasks. The company’s products have seen over 1.5 million downloads and over 2,500 production deployments by clients such as Walmart.com, Nestlé, Honeywell and DHL, as well as 5 of the world's top 10 banks. Mulesoft faces competition from SnapLogic and others.      
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| Medialets Rolls Out Universal SDK For iPhone And iPad Ads Posted: 30 Mar 2010 07:20 AM PDT
The Medialets Universal SDK for iPhone and iPad will allows publishers to modify and change their ad tags from various networks without having to update their app. The new SDK works with any first or third party ad sever, network or mediator, including AdMob and Quattro Wireless tags. Medialets promises rich media and display advertising on mobile phones that provides deeper engagement with users. In fact, engagement is a primary measurement that the ad platform focuses on when determining the success of its advertising campaigns. Medialets says its app engagement see between 3.5 and 7 minutes of average usage per app usage session. But developers and advertisers may be more beholden to click-through rates, which Medialets claim are between 1 and 8 percent. But eight percent seems a bit high, considering that other rich media mobile ad platforms, including Greystripe and AdMob, are seeing between 1 and 2 percent. The universal SDK is definitely an attractive feature for developers who may not want to waste time in switching in SDKs for different networks (Mobclix allows you to do this within its platform). And I imagine that other mobile ad networks will develop their own universal SDKs in due time. Medialets has raised $4 million in Series A funding last spring and plans to launch a universal SDK for Android in the next month.      
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| eBay Expects To Sell $1.5 Billion Worth Of Goods Through Mobile Devices In 2010 Posted: 30 Mar 2010 06:37 AM PDT
This morning, eBay introduced two new iPhone applications, designed to make sellers’ lives easier when it comes to listing items on the giant online marketplace from their Apple phones. The ecommerce juggernaut also casually mentioned that it is on pace to reach a whopping $1.5 billion worth of goods sold via mobile phones in 2010 – more than double the mobile GMV (gross merchandise value) it registered in 2009 ($600 million). The company claims its primary iPhone app, which is available in more than 190 countries and eight languages, has been downloaded 8 million times to date, and that 1 item is purchased using eBay mobile every 2 seconds. Also, eBay disclosed that it will have an iPad version of the eBay app ready at launch day (April 3). One of the two iPhone apps being launched today is for the eBay.com global marketplace (iTunes link), while the other is for eBay's new classifieds site, eBayClassifieds.com (iTunes link). With the apps, sellers can quickly take a picture of an item, list it in eBay’s auction format free of charge and share listings on Facebook or Twitter. Registered buyers, in turn, can easily purchase items via the mobile apps, particularly when using the PayPal Mobile app for iPhone, which allows users to quickly email money or "bump" iPhones with a seller to transfer funds between PayPal accounts. Since last February, there’s also a mobile eBay app for the Android platform. Here are video demos of the two iPhone apps:
     
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| Meteo360: Augmented Weather Reality Posted: 30 Mar 2010 06:04 AM PDT  While I'm not sure I really need weather in an augmented reality shell, I'm sure, after waking up in a strange, sunny city after a long bender, it could be useful to point your iPhone to the sky and get your current location and weather report. Barring that, it's a nice proof of concept. The app, called Meteo360, has three modes. When you hold the iPhone flat it shows a weather map. When you hold it up to the sky you see the city you're in and the current weather, and when you hold it upright it turns on the camera and overlays weather information over the current scene. 
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| Mobile Advertising Network Greystripe Brings Its iFlash Ads To The iPad Posted: 30 Mar 2010 05:59 AM PDT
Greystripe has been allowing advertisers to use Flash-like technologies in their iPhone advertisements for some time now. The network essentially takes ads created using Flash and transcodes them to run on the iPhone and now the iPad. The technology changes the nature of the Flash ads on the front end but the rich media ad behaves the same way. Greystripe claims that its “iFlash” ads see higher clickthrough rates than even online campaigns, with average CTRs above 1%. And Greystripe says that its mobile iFlash ads increase awareness of a brand and intent to purchase, watch or recommend a particular brand. Brands using Greystripe’s mobile ads include HP, Burger King, Axe, Dunlop and LeapFrog. But the real question is if advertisers see better CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) with Greystripe’s ads than its competitors, such as AdMob or Quattro Wireless. To our knowledge, Greystripe’s CPMs fall into the same range as AdMob’s. But Greystripe has continued to make its rich media ad offerings more appealing and attractive to both developers and advertisers by extending support to various devices and even launching a guaranteed CPM program. The company also partnered with Tribal Fusion to enable online ads to fit on iPhones seamlessly. It’s unclear how Google’s acquisition of AdMob and Apple’s acquisition of Quattro Wireless will effect the other ad networks in the space. If anything, these networks will now have to compete with two of the largest companies in the world. But Greystripe, which received a $2 million infusion from NBC last year, could see its stock go up if its pseudo-Flash ads seem to perform well on the iPad      
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| Meet Tagwhat, Another Augmented Reality Network For iPhone And Android Users Posted: 30 Mar 2010 05:55 AM PDT
Powered by Iryss, which also offers customized mobile and AR software integration solutions for enterprises, Tagwhat is a consumer-facing product that allows people to tag real-world locations and attach information, reviews, links, photos, videos, notes and so on to those particular spots, whether tied to their current location or not. In addition to accessing geo-contextual information, users can also scan a product’s bar code in the viewfinder to pull up information like price comparisons or coupons, as well as instantly contact a nearby friend in their preferred method (call, SMS, email, tweet …). Users can follow other people and merge their respective ‘markers’ together in an effort to build a global network of augmented reality hotspots. If you want to give it a go, you can sign up here and use invitation code ar7890 – the first 100 TC readers to register get in. On a sidenote: Iryss is the new incarnation of GoWeb3D, one of the more prominent providers of ‘layars’ to the popular Layar AR Browser, including overlays for Wikipedia, Yelp and Flickr.
     
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| Goomzee Scores $1.5 Million To Help Real Estate Agents Close Deals Via Mobile Posted: 30 Mar 2010 05:01 AM PDT
Goomzee, a Missoula, MT-based developer of a mobile marketing solution that helps real estate professionals connect with potential buyers, announced this morning that it has secured a $1.5 million Series A round of funding led by Highway 12 Ventures along with additional, undisclosed investors in the US and Europe. Goomzee's text message marketing product, Realty Connect (warning, annoying auto-starting demo video on this page), enables real estate agents across the United States to connect to potential buyers who have shown an active interest in a property on sale. Here’s how it works: real estate agents place signs or ads about a property for sale that prompt interested buyers to send a text message carrying a unique ID code and receive more information, pricing and optionally some photos of the property in response. The agent and potential buyer can then connect in a variety of ways to discuss the properties for sale. I suppose it’s a solution that can benefit real estate pros tremendously, but I’m seriously doubting if people are generally inclined to simply send a text message to an agent. The way I see it, there are enough ways for potential buyers to get in touch with sellers if they’re genuinely interested as it is. I also think QR codes or other types of barcodes that can transfer multimedia to mobile phones directly would be far more effective when placed on signs or ads. Your thoughts?      
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| Yellow Pages Group Buys Canpages For $225M, Contributes U.S. Ops To ZipLocal Posted: 30 Mar 2010 04:21 AM PDT
The seller is a consortium of investors led by PE firm HM Capital Partners, and the purchase price is approximately $225 million. While subject to working capital and other adjustments, the $225 million purchase price will be comprised of $75 million payable in cash at closing to settle third party debt obligations and the issuance of $150 million of Mandatory Exchangeable Promissory Notes of Yellow Media. The Notes will rank subordinate to the senior debt of Yellow Media and bear interest at a fixed initial rate of 5%, payable quarterly in cash. Headquartered in Vancouver, Canpages publishes 84 directories for a total circulation of approximately 8 million copies. The company’s website, Canpages.ca, attracts more than 3.5 million unique visitors each month. Canpages generates annualized revenues of $110M, with an online contribution of approximately 23%. The company employs about 700 people in Canada, of which more than 450 are sales consultants. YPG also announced the contribution of its U.S. directory operations, YPG Directories, publisher of Your Community Phone Book, to Ziplocal, which was acquired by Canpages in June 2009. YCB was itself acquired from Volt Information Sciences in September 2008. After the merger, the combined entity is said to reach over 300 markets across the United States. YPG says it will continue to own and operate its information technology platform and centers located in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania and Indianapolis, Indiana.      
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| GOOD Adds YouTube CEO Chad Hurley And Pepsi CMO Jill Beraud To Advisory Board Posted: 30 Mar 2010 03:29 AM PDT
The company announced today that YouTube co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley (GOOD uses YouTube to power its video channel) and Chief Marketing Officer and President, Joint Ventures, PepsiCo Beverages America Jill Beraud have joined GOOD’s Advisory Board. Also signing up as an advisor is founder and CEO of DonorsChoose.org Charles Best. "Their unique insights and diverse experience will enable us to position ourselves for continued success and achieve our company mission, which is to celebrate and enable individuals, businesses and nonprofits pushing the world forward," said Craig Shapiro, President of GOOD (he was formerly Head of Content Strategy & Acquisition at HELIO, Virgin Mobile USA). In other news, GOOD recently formed a strategic partnership with GoodSearch whereby the two entities will combine their traffic under the GOOD umbrella – generating over four million unique visitors on a monthly basis. GOOD recently secured a "single digit millions" funding round from co-founder and CEO Ben Goldhirsh and a number of angel investors including OLPC’s Nicholas Negroponte, in an effort to solidify as the go-to media platform for people who want to live well and do good.      
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| French Search Engine Publisher AllGoob Scores €1 Million Posted: 30 Mar 2010 03:25 AM PDT  AllGoob, a French search engine publisher, has raised a €1 million first round with Newfund for its European development and new search engine, wiPikit. The company is behind job search engine success JobiJoba - which was launched in 2007 and is now one of the largest job databases in France, uniting over 300,000 job offers with 700,000 candidates on the site per month. The site also launched in Belgium in 2008 along with the UK, the US and Spain in 2009. But the investment is curious as JobiJoba is definitely not a lone star in the French market.
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| Europe’s Biggest Publisher Disses The iPad, Embraces The WePad Posted: 30 Mar 2010 02:58 AM PDT  Billed as an iPad competitor, the WePad is not vaporware, but is in fact, The Chosen One. At least, that's the view of some, who are hailing the WePad as the saviour of the German print publishing industry. While Apple is still racing to the wire to secure enough media content partnerships for the iPad before its launch this week, the WePad has already bagged Europe's biggest publisher, Gruner + Jahr.
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| Facebook Files For “Developer Garage” Trademark Posted: 30 Mar 2010 02:36 AM PDT
Facebook has lately been ramping up efforts to obtain registered trademarks in the United States and other countries and regions for a number of products and services it offers or intends to offer in the future. Fresh off the heels of applying for a trademark for Credits, its virtual payment system, the company is now attempting to gain exclusive rights to the use of the term “Facebook Developer Garage”. In case you’re not aware, Facebook Developer Garage events are developer get-togethers hosted all over the world, which are being described as “a place to explore, get gritty, tinker, experiment, and test out ideas for Facebook Platform”. Interestingly, Facebook filed for a trademark in three separate classes, only one of them including “sponsoring and organizing online and live exhibitions and events in the field of software development”. I’m not sure if that means Facebook intends to use the term ‘Developer Garage’ for more endeavors in the future or if they’re simply covering all their bases, but here are the descriptions of the two other classes the company applied a trademark for:
Trademark applications for ‘Facebook Developer Garage’ were filed in the U.S. on the 24th of March, and in Europe on the 29th of March.      
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| Boxcar Opens Up Its iPhone Push Notifications. And Soon, You Can Monetize Them Posted: 30 Mar 2010 12:43 AM PDT
What I mean by closed system is that Boxcar only serves up notifications for a select few services, such as Twitter and Facebook. But with its new Provider feature (and API), anyone can tap into the Boxcar platform to enable Push Notifications through the service. This step has been in the works for a few months creator Jonathan George tells us. But it comes just weeks after a competitor, Notifo, started offering the same thing. However, unlike Notifo, Boxcar subscriptions and settings are easily managed from within the iPhone app itself, rather than having to visit a site to manage things. And there’s another potentially huge benefit. Beginning in Q2 2010, Boxcar is going to open up these provider notifications to be monetized. What this means is that third-parties can charge customers for the ability to get Push Notifications and Boxcar will share the revenue from the in-app purchase as a 50/50 split. It’s worth noting that this would work only for one-time purchases, and not for subscriptions. Still, this is potentially a nice way for third-parties to make some money without having to worry about building an maintaining their own Push Notification system. Unlike Notifo, Boxcar plans to review all services that want to use the providers feature to maintain some order. And, as Boxcar notes:
While the service currently only works for the iPhone, the plan is to launch an Android app within the next 90 days. After that, Windows Mobile support should come along. But even without those other platforms, Boxcar is doing just fine. So far, the service has pushed over 100,000,000 Push Notifications to date. You can find Boxcar in the App Store here. It’s a free download.
     
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| Sorry, Members Only – Keynoir’s New Take On Group Buying Posted: 30 Mar 2010 12:11 AM PDT  A new take on the group-buying bandwagon launches today, but this one will attempt to address the information overload about offers, known as "voucher fatigue", while incentivising local businesses. Keynoir is described as a "private buying club meets Woot", in reference to the tech site which made its name by having just one offer on one decent product a day. The startup even includes aspects of the old Letsbuyit.com. But this is not a trivial play. Keynoir has already secured £1.3m of investment from PROFounders Capital, investor Jan Riem and Index Ventures (including Dominique Vidal). Serial entrepreneurs Paul Birch and Andrej Henkler participated. Vidal and Sean Seton-Rogers from PROfounders will be joining the board. The founders are Philip Wilkinson (founder of the UK's first price comparison engine which later became Kelkoo), Glen Drury (ex-MD Kelkoo Europe and VP Yahoo), and Jan Riem (technology deal maker). It launches in London this week , and plans to exand across the rest of the UK and Europe by the end of the year. 
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| Aha! Google Buzz Is A Black Hole — Its Traffic Must Be Inferred Posted: 29 Mar 2010 11:49 PM PDT
Earlier today, I reported that Google Buzz, Google’s new social sharing service, was sending less traffic than FriendFeed, a service which has been a ghost town in recent months. It turns out there’s probably a good explanation for this. You see, in January, Google started defaulting all Gmail traffic to the HTTPS (secure) version of its domain. Previously, it was defaulting to the regular HTTP (unsecure) domain. As a result of this change, all traffic referrers are scrubbed before being picked up by services like Google Analytics. I didn’t realize the change would cause such a scrubbing, but it makes sense. Google’s Matt Cutts pointed it out earlier (in Buzz, appropriately), and looking at our logs, it does, in fact, appear that in January (when the change was made) traffic from the mail.google.com domain plummeted. This was before Buzz ever existed. This is interesting because it means that Google Buzz is essentially a social service that you can’t track the effectiveness of for your own site. Of course, given that so much of Twitter is run through its API, measuring Twitter traffic by the twitter.com domain is also flawed. Still, looking over the overall numbers, it would seem that aside from a rise in referrals from the usual suspects (Twitter.com, Facebook.com, etc), we haven’t seen a huge bump from some unknown anomaly out there — which, you’d assume, would be Buzz. So I’m still not convinced that it’s actually sending a lot of traffic our way. But, admittedly, it’s hard to know for sure, because like a black hole, its existence must be inferred.      
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| Former MySpace Exec Teams With Yahoo Rock Star For New Startup Posted: 29 Mar 2010 10:31 PM PDT
He spent a few months in Hawaii recharging, and then moved his family to Silicon Valley. Since January he’s been working on a new startup, he says, and he’s teamed up with Ori Zaltzman, the former Chief Architect of Yahoo Boss. That’s enough of a team to make things really interesting. Particuarly Zaltzman’s deep infrastructure background. Katz isn’t saying what the new startup will do. When pressed he said “consumer Internet.” When pressed further he said “social infrastructure product.” He says he’s not saying anything else until the fundraising is closed. “Fundraising? What VCs are you talking to?” “No comment.” Etc. My goal is to find out all about the new startup, and share it with you, before Katz wants me to. But until then that’s all I’ve got. This is now the third startup to spring from the loins of former MySpace execs. Back in March 2009 a trio of MySpace execs – COO Amit Kapur, SVP Steve Pearman and SVP Jim Benedetto – left to begin working on a new startup called Gravity. And MySpace cofounder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe recently unveiled MindJolt. All look promising. Perhaps more promising than the company they left behind.      
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| Teleku Takes On Twilio, Helps Developers Integrate Telephony Services Into Web Apps Posted: 29 Mar 2010 08:59 PM PDT
So how does Teleku differ from Twilio? It’s a matter of flexibility, according to founder (and sole employee) Chris Matthieu. He says that when you use Twilio, it’s an all-in-one deal: you write your code in Twilo’s easy-to-use syntax called TwiML, which is then sent to Twilio’s telephony services in the cloud that are hosted on AWS. That’s great (and may be even preferable to some people), but with Twilio you can’t port your application to a cheaper service should one become available. With Teleku, you can write your code using TwiML, or you can use Teleku’s own simplified telephony scripting language, called PhoneML. Your code is then sent to Teleku’s servers, which translate it into industry standard (but harder to write) VoiceXML. Matthieu says you can use that code on any of a variety of established telephony providers, including Voxeo and Plum Voice, and it will also work with enterprise systems that rely on VoiceXML. Matthieu says this gives Teleku users a few advantages: first, they can swap between various providers if they find a better rate. And he also says that Voxeo and other telecom services have better optimized their servers than AWS has to work with voice traffic, and that they offer a few features that Twilio doesn’t yet, like speech recognition. Finally, Teleku offers a wizard for building web-enabled telephony services for people who don’t have any coding experience at all. This allows you to select actions from a dropdown menu, like “Play”, “Speak”, and “Transfer” (you then fill in text dialogs to instruct the application what to say or what number to transfer to). You can drag and drop these actions depending on what order you’d like to execute each action. Watch the video below for a complete demo of the wizard. Teleku is offering two pricing models: first, an ‘all-in-one’ package similar to Twilio’s that uses Voxeo as to handle its telephony services. This costs three cents a minute, which is the same as Twilio. For users that want to use Teleku in combination with a provider other than Voxeo, Teleku doesn’t charge on a per-minute basis. Instead, it adopts a web-service API model, charging on the number of calls rather than the call length. Teleku is still a small operation, but Matthieu says he’s already had early acquisition talks with potentially interested buyers. All of that said, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson contends that there are some tradeoffs that come with Teleku’s flexibility. He explains that applications ported to these other services won’t always translate properly (he says this is one of the benefits of using Twilio’s all-in-one model). He also says there are some features that Teleku doesn’t offer, like 2-way SMS. But he says Twilio isn’t necessarily opposed to the concept of portability, and that Teleku validates Twilio’s easy-to-use approach to telephony scripting (he also notes that 37signals has started integrating Twilio into some of its products). Image credit: Sumo Web Works.
     
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| Finally, LinkedIn Gives Its Professional Crowd A Native Blackberry App Posted: 29 Mar 2010 08:57 PM PDT
The LinkedIn app for BlackBerry is as feature-rich as its iPhone cousin. You can visualize your feed of network updates, search across direct connections and the entire LinkedIn network, access any of your connections to get get profile information, and message contacts. You can also access your LinkedIn inbox, send and accept invitations and see all of your messages. And the app will suggest new connections to you. LinkedIn has been working with RIM to develop a native application that leverages the phone’s technologies. Users can integrate their LinkedIn connections with their devices’ address book, and view the profile of any contact directly on a device. LinkedIn invitations and messages will show up in the BlackBerry device’s inbox. Users can also view the LinkedIn profile of the sender of any email they receive. And users can view the LinkedIn profile of an attendee of a meeting on their BlackBerry devices’ calendar. There’s no doubt that the LinkedIn app for BlackBerry will be popular; especially considering the significant use of the device in professional environments. LinkedIn has been consistently upgrading its platform over the past few months, adding two-way integration with Twitter as well as opening up its API to developers. LinkedIn also recently unveiled a significant integration with Microsoft Outlook, allowing users to access parts of their LinkedIn accounts from Outlook.      
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| Gruber Hints At Possible Next-Gen iPhone Specs… Sort Of Posted: 29 Mar 2010 07:29 PM PDT  In a post tinged with just a hint of spite, Apple pundit John Gruber has responded to today's WSJ report of a forthcoming pair of new iPhones, one of which they say is headed for Verizon. His reaction? "Lame." The reason it's lame, says Gruber, is that it lacks details. Details which Gruber has. Maybe. 
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| Posted: 29 Mar 2010 06:06 PM PDT
Editor’s note: What does the iPad have to do with cloud computing? Glad you asked. In this guest post Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, explains how liberating the iPad will really be. The first piece of software I ever wrote was on the TRS-80 Model 1. It was called “How To Juggle", and it had 4K of memory. It was my version of "Hello World", what every programmer first writes on a new piece of hardware. CLOAD Magazine purchased it for $75, they distributed it to their subscribers on a cassette (there weren't disks for the TRS-80 yet). It was 1979. I was 15 years old, and I was a software entrepreneur. I still am. Just five years later, I was an intern at Apple writing some of the first native assembly language on the Mac and working in a building called Bandley 4 with a pirate flag on the roof. Guy Kawasaki hired me to help developers write software on the Mac without using its predecessor, the Lisa (something that had been required when the Mac launched). My first example of how to write for the MDS 68000 development system manifested itself in a video game called “Raid on Armonk.” It was an allusion to IBM's headquarters. They were the anti-Mac and we clicked and destroyed them. (Turns out they eventually clicked on themselves.) I’m sentimental this week, and thinking about the past, because I have seen the future. The future is not a Mac, or even a PC. Its father created a lot of the computers I've loved: Apple IIe, Mac, and iPhone. There have been others I have loved, even some PCs and yes, my Blackberry, but none of that matters anymore. Looking ahead, I am energized, a door is opening, and we are all going to walk through it. We'll soon enter a new world of computing accelerated once again by the industry’s creator Steve Jobs, and amplified by someone conceived after the PC, Mark Zuckerberg. The future of our industry now looks totally different than the past. It looks like a sheet of paper, and it's called the iPad. It's not about typing or clicking; it's about touching. It's not about text, or even animation, it's about video. It's not about a local disk, or even a desktop, it's about the cloud. It's not about pulling information; it's about push. It's not about repurposing old software, it's about writing everything from scratch (because you want to take advantage of the awesome potential of the new computers and the new cloud—and because you have to reach this pinnacle). Finally, the industry is fun again. Last week I gave presentations to more than 60 CIOs in various meetings throughout America’s heartland. My message to them: We are moving from Cloud 1 to Cloud 2, and the iPad is the accelerator. Many of them haven’t even made it to Cloud 1—some are still on mainframes. They are working on MVS/CICS, or Lotus Notes, and they have never heard of Cocoa, or even that there is now HTML 5. This is unacceptable. The next generation is here. The iPad that shows us what now is really possible—and that we all need to go faster. Unfortunately, some CIOs would rather retire than go faster. Cloud 1 ————————————->Cloud 2 Type/Click———————————->Touch What’s most exciting is that this fundamental transformation—cloud + social + iPad—will inspire a new generation of wildly innovative new apps that will change entire industries. Take health. We have all been waiting for the health application that will revolutionize how we share and communicate with our doctors, and help us make better health care decisions. The apps we have seen as first generation EHR/PHR just have not cut it, and now with ObamaCare there is no killer app to accelerate through the new EHR reimbursement program. The shift ignited by the iPad will allow the proliferation of these new missing apps, and automate the industries and professionals left behind by the last generation of technology. Now, no industry will be left behind. It was on TechCrunch in late February that I first suggested that the enterprise software industry has to move forward and posted an article, “The Facebook Imperative.” In 1999, I was obsessed with the question, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com? And in 2010, the question evolved: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” This week we will have the answer to that question in our hands with the iPad. It's a more productive, easier, and fun way to work and live. The iPad shows us the old world is no longer good enough. We'll need new software with a new UI. Our industry has gone through many shifts, but ultimately, the big ones have always been about software, not hardware. Now, we are seeing a simultaneous software and hardware revolution. The key apps we use in productivity, collaboration, communication, entertainment, education, and even health, will all be rewritten to take advantage of the new capabilities. This will result in a new generation that looks more like Facebook on the iPad than Yahoo on the PC. Our industry is changing. We all need to step up to meet this change head-on or we will leave an incredible opportunity behind.
     
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| With More Flash, Is Google About To Cut Off The HTML5 Nose To Spite Apple’s Face? Posted: 29 Mar 2010 04:14 PM PDT
Google isn’t talking, but what we’re hearing is that this could be related to the Open Screen Project that Google signed up for late last year. The project, started by Adobe a year ago, aims to give web developers a unified platform for content across a range of devices. The reason Google cares about this is its Android mobile operating system, and undoubtedly its future foray into netbooks with Chrome OS later this year. CNET’s report is short on details other than talk of a “deeper partnership” between Google and Adobe that may see Flash integrated into the Chrome browser more-so than it already is. What that means isn’t clear at all, since Flash is brought to all browsers by way of a plug-in that’s included with almost all browsers already. Of course, how plug-ins will work in Chrome OS isn’t entirely clear yet either, so it is possible this partnership could mean something along those lines. But more interesting than the actual news may be the symbolic gesture of a tighter partnership between Google and Adobe. After all, Google appears to be in the early stages of a war with former buddy Apple. The same Apple that refuses to put Flash on the iPhone. And the same Apple that won’t include Flash on the iPad, which is launching on Saturday. And the same Apple that has a CEO which has supposedly taken shots at the technology recently, while trying to convince partners to give it up — which appears, at least in part, to be working. Something else interesting: Google offering more Flash-support would seem to go against its very public support of the HTML5 standard. Just about every new project Google launches these days, from Wave to Buzz, pushes HTML5 in some way. And a big part of HTML5 is the video component, which will allow users to play web videos without requiring a plug-in like Flash. Google has even made HTML5 available for YouTube videos, which previously only worked with Flash. So on one hand, Google seems to be saying that HTML5 is the future, while on the other perhaps suggesting that the web still needs Flash. Flash, undoubtedly, won’t be dying anytime soon, and so of course Google needs to support it (just as Apple’s Safari web browser does). But to suggest that Flash may be the unifying force for the web (as the Open Screen Project points to), seems to go against their argument that HTML5 is that same unifying force. And I can’t help but wonder if this is all just about positioning itself against Apple again. I guess we’ll learn more tomorrow. [photo: flickr/jem]      
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| Twitter And The Nine-Month Bounce Posted: 29 Mar 2010 03:12 PM PDT
I’ve long suspected that the basic usage pattern for Twitter is that people try it, don’t get it or become discouraged because they don’t know anyone else on it, but it grows on them eventually until they start using it every day. Many people, of course, never come back, but for those who do, they need to get past that familiarity curve before it becomes an essential communications tool. Now I have some data to back up my theory. Social media analytics company Sysomos just released some data based on its analysis of over one billion Tweets which shows the contribution of updates by how long people have been on the service. The most active users are those who joined Twitter more than nine months ago. They account for 41.6 percent of all Tweets. New users are also active as they try to figure out the service, with newbies who joined less than 3 months ago contributing 22 percent of all Tweets. Then it falls to 15.9 percent of all Tweets for people who joined between 3 and 6 months ago (the trough of discouragement), and 20.5 percent of all Tweets for those who joined 6 to 9 months ago. The trend is pretty consistent. There is a big bounce in Tweets from people who managed to stick around more than nine months.
Sysomos’ data also shows that international growth is outpacing the U.S., with the growth in Tweets hitting 8 percent overseas, compared to 5 percent in the U.S. so far in March. That is down from 13 percent and 10 percent growth, respectively, in January. In terms of total Tweets, Sysomos estimates there are now 53 million Tweets a day, which is up 30 percent since December, 2009. Twitter passed the 50-million Tweet mark about a month ago. (You can read more analysis of Sysomos Twitter user data from last year here).
     
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| Fake Steve Jobs Blog Likely To Shut Down Posted: 29 Mar 2010 03:06 PM PDT
Now Lyons’ success in writing about Steve Jobs may lead directly to the blog being shut down, we’ve heard. Earlier this month EPIX announced that they’d be creating a TV series based on Lyons’ book Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs – A Parody. Larry Charles (Seinfeld, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm) is directing the pilot. Lyons is writing the script. The show is about a made up person named Tom Rhodes who’s personality is largely based on Steve Jobs and other Silicon Valley “titans.” Apparently the show will have an online component – a blog or website or both – and there’s some fear that the Fake Steve blog will confuse people. We’re reaching out to Lyons for comment. But not to worry, soon we’ll have a Steve Jobs puppet show to take its place.      
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It took a year for anyone to figure out that Forbes (now Newsweek) writer Dan Lyons was | You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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