The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- TC50 Movie Search Startup AnyClip Launches, Without Many Clips
- Fake Steve Jobs, Larry Charles Working On EPIX Silicon Valley Comedy Series
- ZumoDrive Brings Cloud Storage And Syncing Application To Android And Palm Devices
- SXSWi 2010: Brightkite’s Brady Becker and Martin May Demo Multi Check-in App
- Google Says There Are Now 30,000 Apps In Android Market
- Shorthand Mobile Launches TextApps To Bring Web Content To Basic Mobile Phones
- This Is Not My Beautiful 3D Television: How Gaming Will Change The 3D Equation
- The Orchard Goes Private In Deal Valuing It At $13 Million
- PowerReviews Lands $6 Million To Power Customer Reviews For Retailers
- Facebook Kicks Off Implementation Of QR Codes
- More Droids Sold In First 74 Days Than iPhones – Nexus One Sales Very Slow
- Questetra Helps Managing Business Processes Via The Web, Supports Google Apps
- NorthScale’s Memcached Data Management Technology Attracts Zynga And Others
- MySpace Employees Speak Their Mind. Lots Of Yelling Going On, Apparently.
- Uh Oh. Not Another “Don’t Be Evil” Company
- NSFW: ‘Tis Pity We Called Her A Whore – And Other Ineffectual Digital Apologies
- Magento Scores $22.5 Million For Open Source E-commerce Platform Play
- PayPal Launches Revamped iPhone App, Teams With Bump For Phone-Tapping Money Transfers
- SEC Filing Shows CoTweet Sold For At Least $8.1 Million
- Justin.TV Turns To Law Professor Eric Goldman As It Battles Live Video Piracy
- Wait, Did Ev Williams Just Interview Umair Haque? Weird.
- Join Charlie Rose, Ron Conway, Jack Dorsey And Lots Of Others At TechCrunch Disrupt
- Twitter’s New “At Anywhere” Platform Allows For Deeper Integration Into Third Party Sites
- SXSWi 2010: Q&A with Gowalla Co-founder/CEO Josh Williams – Pt 1
- Ev Williams: Twitter’s First Principle, “Be A Force For Good”
| TC50 Movie Search Startup AnyClip Launches, Without Many Clips Posted: 16 Mar 2010 09:06 AM PDT
When movie clip search startup AnyClip demoed at last year’s TechCrunch50, it was one of the crowd pleasers. The concept was to be able to search for any line or scene in a movie, and the site would take you to that exact moment and play the clip. The demo looked great, but could the startup actually get the movie studios to license their films? Sean Parker, one of the judges on the panel noted: “This is the kind of thing that absolutely should happen. But it will take you twice as long to make those deals.” Parker turned out to be right. AnyClip continues to negotiate with the studios, but decided not to wait for those deals to open up its service. Yesterday, it launched in a public beta, without many actual video clips. There are some older and public domain movies, licensed from the Film Chest catalog, such as the classic Reefer Madness. Search for “faster, faster” and up comes the piano scene from Reefer Madness. But AnyClip works even for movies where it cannot show the clips. Search for “I drink your milkshake” and the dialogue from the scene in There Will Be Blood comes up as a result. Or you can search for “ferris wheel” scenes, where a ferris wheel appears in the scene but is not necessarily mentioned in the dialogue. AnyClip has indexed 2,000 movies so far. CEO Aaron Cohen estimates that “two percent of all searches appear to be for 8,000 Hollywood films and 1,000 actors.” Creating really deep meta data around movie clips and exposing those to search engines should be enough to get traffic growing simply as movie quotes database. But the ultimate appeal of AnyClip is the ability to start playing the movie clip at the exact moment you are looking for and share those clips. It’s going to happen. Rival MovieClips.com, which launched in December, has already struck licensing deals for 12,000 clips. Those are predetermined clips, however. AnyClip still wants to provide data on, literally, any clip. At the same time, the movie studios are paying companies to index their digital archives for their own internal purposes. Cohen is hoping to do a trade: give them the metadata on their catalogs for free in return for the ability to promote their films. Maybe if AnyClip gets big enough, they will start paying attention.
     
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| Fake Steve Jobs, Larry Charles Working On EPIX Silicon Valley Comedy Series Posted: 16 Mar 2010 09:02 AM PDT
Dan Lyons, the Newsweek writer, book author and creator of the Fake Steve Jobs persona, is currently writing a pilot script for a comedy series on Silicon Valley for entertainment channel and movie streaming network EPIX. Larry Charles of Seinfeld, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Borat and Brüno fame will be directing the pilot and overseeing the script development. The show is going to be called “iCON” and will be a half-hour, single-camera style satire. EPIX, a service from Viacom, its Paramount Pictures unit Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios and Lionsgate, is working with Media Rights Capital to develop the series, which it promises it will “pull out all stops” for and aims it to be a “riotous satire of Silicon Valley and its most powerful figures”. EPIX recently landed its fourth major cable deal by signing up Charter Communications, after sealing deals with Cox, Mediacon and Verizon FIOS. Deadline has more on what the series will be about:
And:
We. Cannot. Wait.      
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| ZumoDrive Brings Cloud Storage And Syncing Application To Android And Palm Devices Posted: 16 Mar 2010 08:57 AM PDT
The startup launched an iPhone app last year, which let users sync their content to their phone without having to deal with local storage capacity issues. The Android and Palm apps include much of the same functionality. The apps allows users to sync their entire iTunes library on their phones even though the songs are not locally saved. Plus, ZumoDrive allows you to import your files. photos albums and videos onto your Android and Palm phones. Additional features include video streaming from ZumoDrive directly to devices in MP4, H.264 format, music organized by artist, albums, and even playlists created on other devices, the ability to stream music in the background and listen to music over both 3G or EDGE networks.
Last year, ZumoDrive released a new version of its system that wirelessly syncs playlists between devices, auto-detects content, and lets users link file folders on their devices to ZumoDrive only once so that changes in that folder will always be linked to ZumoDrive. The service was also upgraded to integrate well with media applications, like iTunes, so users can play entire music libraries saved in ZumoDrive on multiple devices without manually syncing content. We initially reviewed Zumodrive here. Zecter previously launched a product called Versionate, an office-wiki product, that we first covered in July 2007. We wrote about them again a year ago. ZumoDrive faces competition from Dropbox, SugarSync, and Box.net.      
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| SXSWi 2010: Brightkite’s Brady Becker and Martin May Demo Multi Check-in App Posted: 16 Mar 2010 08:19 AM PDT  My dialogue with those at the forefront of mobile, location based social networking continues here at SXSW Interactive 2010. Brightkite founders Brady Becker and Martin May were kind enough to take a moment and talk with me about some current and unreleased features of their service/software called Brightkite. They also showed me an unreleased demo of their new multi check-in web app. Stay tuned for some follow-up conversations soon.
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| Google Says There Are Now 30,000 Apps In Android Market Posted: 16 Mar 2010 08:03 AM PDT  At the most recent Mobile World Congress, Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed that the company's partners are now selling over 60,000 Android handsets on a daily basis. With that kind of growth rate, it's no wonder that the size of the Android Market is increasing in its slipstream. While Google doesn't publicly show how many apps there are in Android Market, a Google rep this morning informed me that the store now serves approx. 30,000 apps in total. 
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| Shorthand Mobile Launches TextApps To Bring Web Content To Basic Mobile Phones Posted: 16 Mar 2010 08:00 AM PDT
Launching in beta today on select Motorola and Nokia handsets on AT&T and on Windows Mobile phones, Shorthand TextApps use SMS to expand access to top brands and mobile content including social networks, local search, sports scores, weather forecasts, movie times, news and entertainment. TextApps is an app you download which then creates a more intuitive UI for text-based apps. Once you download Shorthand, it uses your SMS text messaging plan to connect you to the web content you want. Apps in the TextApps library include CitySearch, Netflix, Facebook Mobile, Twitter, The New York Times and Yelp. Of course, Facebook, Twitter and others have independently integrate with SMS for their sites but Shorthand claims to add more functionality by almost recreating a basic smartphone app. Shorthand is also now available in India on all major carriers and will launch in Brazil this spring. The starup will offer localized TextApps for these countries. Shorthand is free to download, but you will be charged for SMS messages via your SMS plan with your carrier. As we wrote in our initial review, year, the technology behind is very basic so users shouldn’t expect to see a iPhone like Facebook-app on their phone with TextApps. That being said, the fact that Shorthand has struck deals with Nokia and Motorola to include its offering on their phones and could become a useful way to incorporate extra functionality into basic mobile phones.      
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| This Is Not My Beautiful 3D Television: How Gaming Will Change The 3D Equation Posted: 16 Mar 2010 07:40 AM PDT
Gaming will make or break 3D. I don’t care if James Cameron sends miniature 3D cameras into Leonardo DiCaprio’s urethra during his “king of the world” scene in the new 3D version of Titanic: there will be no compelling reason to upgrade your entire TV set-up to watch 3D movies. Why will you buy a 3D set-up? For gaming and you’ll probably buy a 3D-capable PC before you buy a 3D-capable TV.      
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| The Orchard Goes Private In Deal Valuing It At $13 Million Posted: 16 Mar 2010 07:10 AM PDT
How much is a music distribution company worth these days? The Orchard, one of the largest independent music distributors, is going private in a deal valuing the company at about $13 million. Its largest shareholder, private equity firm Dimensional Associates, is buying the 58 percent of shares it does not already own. Dimensional is paying $2.05 a share, which is more than a 20 percent premium over yesterday’s closing price. With 6.228 million shares outstanding, that values the business at $12.8 million—not a hell of a lot, considering that it is less than one quarter’s revenues. The Orchard has yet to file an annual report for last year, but for the first nine months of 2009, it has lost $17.5 million on revenues of $45.5 million. The Orchard specializes in digital distribution. The fact that it cannot make any money is yet another nail in the coffin of the music industry. Perhaps under private ownership, it can transition to a different business model. Dimensional Associates also owns eMusic. Maybe there is a way to combine the two.      
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| PowerReviews Lands $6 Million To Power Customer Reviews For Retailers Posted: 16 Mar 2010 06:35 AM PDT
The additional funding will be used fuel customer acquisition and for new product development. The company’s original products let retailers include Amazon-like product review features into their websites. Last year, PowerReviews launched two more social technologies for retailers to integrate: BrandConnect and Social Megaphone. BrandConnect tracks what consumers are saying about a company and/or brand on the social web and Social Megaphone allows customers to post their reviews to Facebook, Twitter and blogs. Last fall the company also brought on a new CEO, Pehr Luedtke. PowerReviews, which launched in 2007, also powers a consumer-facing site, Buzzillions.com, that aggregates reviews from its partner retailers. The site includes over ten million product reviews. Customers include Staples, Drugstore.com, Walgreens, Diapers.com, Callaway and Jockey.      
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| Facebook Kicks Off Implementation Of QR Codes Posted: 16 Mar 2010 06:02 AM PDT
I can’t see this on my own Facebook profile yet, but we’ve gotten a number of tips in our inbox in the past 10 minutes so it’s safe to assume it’s not a hoax or anything: Facebook appears to have started enabling users to generate custom two-dimensional QR codes. From the looks of the screenshot embedded above, there are two types of QR codes: a personal barcode or a “status QR barcode”. This also seems to appear on Facebook Fan Pages. Judging from the tweets about this, the QR codes don’t seem to actually function yet, and the links on pages appear to come and go. We’re trying to get more information and will update accordingly. Update – Facebook gave us the boilerplate response:
In case you’re not familiar with QR codes: QR is short for Quick Response (because they can be read quickly by a mobile phone through its camera). They are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone – this can be links, videos, text, photos and more. QR codes are generally more useful than a standard barcode is that they can store much more data. The other key feature of QR Codes is that instead of requiring a scanner to ‘read’ them, most modern mobile phones can convert them and there are applications out there for smartphone that don’t support native QR code scanning. Imagine wearing the link to your Facebook profile on your t-shirt – this is what that would look like when converted to a QR code:
(Thanks to Marco Schierhorn for the tip and screenshot – bottom image via Webometric Thoughts)      
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| More Droids Sold In First 74 Days Than iPhones – Nexus One Sales Very Slow Posted: 16 Mar 2010 05:42 AM PDT
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| Questetra Helps Managing Business Processes Via The Web, Supports Google Apps Posted: 16 Mar 2010 04:32 AM PDT
The way Questetra’s BPM suite (and similar products) work is that users chart business workflows to identify redundancies, “bottle necks” or conflicts in future company processes. Once the design is ready, the designer can authorize other users to revise the system themselves, meaning these designs are then put to actual use in a work environment. The applicant in the reimbursement process visualized below, for instance, submits a request through the Flash application, which then notifies his supervisor who can then approve and send the request to the accounting division for a final check (there’s actually a whole bunch of different task execution functions built into the application). All actions can be managed via a user-specific dashboard, and just like with Salesforce.com’s solution, for example, Questetra users don’t need to deal with any code.
Apart from relatively low pricing and ease of use, Questetra says the “killer feature” of their suite is that it’s 100% web-based, meaning separate software isn’t required to design a process or perform a task. Another key selling point is the seamless integration with Google Apps (in the SaaS version, users can log in with their existing Google accounts and easily export data to Google Docs). Questetra, which says their suite is especially interesting for companies with 20 to 200 employees, offers a self-hosted (downloadable) edition and an SaaS solution for $10 per user per month (there’s also a trial version and a number of free sample workflows). It’s also one of the first applications distributed through the Google Apps Marketplace that launched just last week. Questetra, which is based in Kyoto/Japan, is currently working on mobile-friendly features and an API to be rolled out in the near future. Apart from Salesforce.com’s Visual Process Manager, the Questetra BPM suite competes with SAP’s Visual Composer, Appian, and Intalio, amongst others.
     
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| NorthScale’s Memcached Data Management Technology Attracts Zynga And Others Posted: 16 Mar 2010 03:55 AM PDT
Founded by leaders of the memcached open source project, NorthScale is like Cloudera for Hadoop or Red Hat for Linux; the startup is commercializing the open source technology. As web applications generate vast volumes of data, there is a need for a data management technology that caters towards transactional software systems. NorthScale’s elastic data infrastructure software promises to cache frequently used data while also offering performance and scalability. The NorthScale Memcached Server is the also includes the ability to securely support multiple applications on a shared cluster, and allows a memcached cluster to dynamically change with automatic client updates. The NorthScale Membase Server is a high‐performance, distributed key‐value database which builds on the NorthScale Memcached Server foundation and is directly compatible with memcached APIs and client libraries. Investor Accel Partners’ Kevin Effrusy tells me NorthScale is providing an realtime, efficient and cost-effective product that could radically change the dynamic of transactional data management. Currently Zynga and NHN are using NorthScale as a foundations for shared data management infrastructure. Founded in 2009, the startup has raised $5 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. NorthScale faces competition from Gear6.      
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| MySpace Employees Speak Their Mind. Lots Of Yelling Going On, Apparently. Posted: 16 Mar 2010 12:33 AM PDT
But the emails were most telling. One wasn’t anonymous and the writer asked to keep it off record, and we’ll respect that. But he wrote at length about high level execs “chewing out” the lower ranks, in public. And lots of exec level nepotism hires. This is a theme brought up by another employee, writing anonymously. He or she confirmed that too many mid level managers are leaving the company, and talks about more yelling at employees in public (“Maple” refers to 407 North Maple Drive, the address of MySpace HQ, “Jason” refers to Co-president Jason “Hell Yeah” Hirschhorn):
And one last employee says it’s ok to paraphrase and quote parts of his/her email. This one still has some fight left in ‘em. Here are some of the better parts:
     
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| Uh Oh. Not Another “Don’t Be Evil” Company Posted: 15 Mar 2010 11:18 PM PDT
So when Twitter CEO Evan Williams said earlier today that one of Twitter’s operating principles was to "be a force for good" I cringed a little. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in business, and am still learning, is to never trust anyone who says “you can trust me.” That’s a big red flag that they’re planning something really messed up in the near future. And likewise, a company shouldn’t be out there saying “don’t be evil” or “be a force for good.” First because it’s basically impossible to balance a profit motive with a goodness motive. And in fact the nice thing about capitalism is that everyone acting in their own self interest tends to be good for everyone else, too, if appropriate government forces are put in place to stop monopolies, pollution, etc. Being a socialist is a great way to get laid in college but it’s no way to run a society. And second because when people, or governments, or companies start talking about being a force for good, there’s a good chance that a serious amount of self righteousness is brewing behind the scenes. Everyone who fights a war thinks they have God on their side. And some of the most atrocious moments in history were done in the name of good. What I’d like best is if Twitter just focuses on keeping the lights on, and adds competitive features that keep Google, Facebook and others on their toes. Let others use Twitter to do good things. Twitter should stay goodness-neutral and self righteous free. Or alternatively try to be a force for good. But just do it, don’t talk about it.      
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| NSFW: ‘Tis Pity We Called Her A Whore – And Other Ineffectual Digital Apologies Posted: 15 Mar 2010 08:44 PM PDT
A prostitute sells sex for money – that money being payable either immediately before or immediately after the act. A memoirist also receives money for having sex – but our payment comes via a publisher, months or years later, once we’ve recounted the amusing or titillating details in print. In the final analysis, really, we’re all whores. And yet, in terms of public perception, the distinction of payment and timing is vital. Actual prostitutes are – generally speaking – looked down on by society: labels like ‘whore’ and ‘hooker’ being, almost without exception, used pejoratively. Memoirists, on the other hand, tend to be reasonably well regarded, not least by themselves. For that reason, accidentally calling a hooker a memoirist is unlikely to cause offense, but accidentally call a memoirist a hooker and… hoo boy… This time last week, my friend Zoe Margolis – who writes as the Girl With A One Track Mind – was asked by the UK’s Independent on Sunday (IoS) newspaper to write a column about how she went from being an anonymous sex blogger to a widely-recognised advice columnist and memoirist. Zoe, I should emphasise, does not have sex for money. I know this for a fact: we shared a house at SXSW a couple of years ago and she stubbornly refused to sleep with me, despite the fact that I paid for all of our groceries at Whole Foods. And yet, thanks to an astonishing but – I hope – innocent piece of lazy subediting, when the IoS published her column they did so under the unambiguously libellous headline “I was a hooker who became an agony aunt“. Hoo boy. The IoS reaslised its mistake (for want of a better word for “misquoting one of our writers as calling herself a whore”) within an hour of the paper going to press and quickly changed the headline in print and online. But of course the damage was already done. Although, according to the paper, only a couple of thousand hard copies had been dispatched to news stands, the web version had already been syndicated to dozens of other sites – including Yahoo! – and such far-flung newspaper websites as the Times of India. Worse still, it took several more hours – and increasingly vocal complaints by Zoe – before the IoS changed the story’s URL which still contained the full wording of the original headline. An embarrassing screw up for the Independent – but one that other papers can learn from, right? Not so much. A few days later, another UK paper – The Daily Mail – ran a story headlined “I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you …” The story was indeed sickening; written by a former police detective, it revealed how after signing up to Facebook as a young girl, he was immediately contacted by middle-aged men looking for sex. There was just one problem with the story: it wasn’t true. For a start the story was ghost-written by a Mail journalist, loosely based on a phone interview with the detective. More importantly, the detective had made clear – repeatedly – that the social network in question wasn’t Facebook. In fact he’d actually praised Facebook for having put in place measures to protect young users against ‘grooming’ by adults. Unfortunately, the Mail seems to have a beef with Facebook – they previously accused the site of causing cancer – and so decided to name and shame it both in the article, and in the headline and – yup – in the URL. As with Zoe’s story, the headline was changed after a few hours (having already been widely syndicated) but the libellous URL remained uncorrected for more than a day. In both cases, the result was the same – the Independent and the Mail each issued apologies and corrections in the next day’s paper and online but both Zoe and Facebook say they intend to take legal action both for the initial error but also for the further harm done by the time the papers took to correct their libellous URLs. We’ll have to wait and see what comes of the proposed lawsuits, but in the meantime both cases illustrate a huge problem with the blurring of the line between old and new media. In the old days, editors understood how their papers worked. If a libellous story was printed, they would stop the presses (if it wasn’t already too late) and they would issue an apology the next day. Most readers would see the apology and all would be well. Yes, there might still be a libel action, but at least the publication could show that they’d halted the presses and issued the apology, thus mitigating some of the damage done. Today, that’s no longer the case. The simple fact is that many editors have absolutely no idea how their papers work any more. According to the Guardian, when Charles Garside, assistant editor of the Daily Mail, was asked about the fact that the libellous URL was unchanged for more than 24 hours, he described it as “a technical matter”, adding: “We are removing elements of that”. “A technical matter” – which of course is code for “I have absolutely no idea how the Internet works. We have geeks to do that kind of thing, and they were at home – probably masturbating or watching Battlestar Galactica – or both – when the story went up” With those three words – “a technical matter” – Garside lays bare the problem newspapers face in moving online. Editors understand stories and they understand headlines, but today they also need to understand URLs and automatic syndication and all of the other “technical matters” that are just as much a part of the modern newspaper as standfirsts and pullquotes. This is a lesson I learned the hard way back in 2005 when I was hit with an enormous libel claim (and the possibility of imprisonment for contempt of court) when the publication I edited linked to a libellous story (published in France) about a certain English Premiership football player. Although we were careful not to name the player in our story, we were still held responsible for identifying him because the URL we published contained his surname. The fact that we’d used our in-house link-shortener to mask the true URL was no defence as the shortener was hosted on our own server and resolved to the correct address before the reader left our site. Since that day, I’ve understood that a URL can get you in just as much legal hot water as an ill-judged headline. Unfortunately that seems to be a lesson that editors at certain major national newspapers are yet to learn. If I were the owner of the Independent, or the Mail, or any other newspaper I’d insist that my editors spend a few hours of their time learning how their papers work in the digital age. That means understanding not just how to stop presses and issue apologies but also how to get under the hood and change URLs; how automatic syndication works and how to ensure any subsequent apology is amended to every online version, and not just the one hosted on their main site. Finally, the way that apologies and clarifications are published needs to be seriously re-thought. Publishing a correction in the next day’s paper, or as a separate item on the publication’s website, is a ridiculous anachronism. People no longer read the same paper every day: the fact that they stumbled across a story in the Independent or the Daily Mail once through Google News doesn’t mean they’ll ever read a story in that paper again. It certainly doesn’t mean they’ll see a correction published 24 hours later. Whereas once a libel court could be satisfied that the publication of a printed apology would mitigate libel damages, that’s unlikely to hold much weight in any legal action concerning the stories about Zoe Margolis or Facebook. Both Zoe and Facebook made their reputation online and it’s online rather than in print that they have the most to lose. As a Facebook spokesperson told the Guardian, a traditional correction can’t undo the ‘brand damage that has been done’. Perhaps, then, the Mail and the Independent should take a lesson in damage control from Zoe. Moments after the Independent published their apology, she tweeted out a link to it and asked her followers to ‘please retweet’. Many (including me) did, and still others republished it on their blogs. Not only did that spread the word that Zoe isn’t – and has never been – a hooker, but it also helped ensure that most of the Google results for “Zoe Margolis +hooker” point to the correction and not to the original libel. Had the editors at the Mail and the Independent been quicker to update their libellous URLs, and had they used Twitter and other social networks to push out their apologies then perhaps they could have avoided what will quite possibly be some very costly legal action. But then again that would require them to understand the first thing about the Internet and other “technical matters”. And if they’ve proved anything recently, it’s that they really – really – don’t.      
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| Magento Scores $22.5 Million For Open Source E-commerce Platform Play Posted: 15 Mar 2010 04:47 PM PDT
Magento was originally a product developed and marketed by Varien, a 9-year old company that also delivers e-commerce business consulting and other services, but has now effectively been incorporated as a stand-alone venture. It’s unclear whether the financing of Magento comes from Varien, or if the latter company’s existing and / or other investors have stepped in to provide funding. Either way, the company says it concerns ‘fresh’ cash. If I were to venture a guess, I would say PayPal plays a part in this story – from what I can gather the least you can say is that the digital payment company has a deep partnership with Magento that spans both co-marketing of their respective services as well as a collaboration on a product development level. I had a brief chat with Tim Schulz, the former MySpace product manager who recently became Magento’s Senior Product Manager, who told me they’re positioning the Magento Commerce solution right in the center of various growth areas in electronic commerce and that its goal is to become the provider of the single largest e-commerce platform in the world. Bonus points for showcasing some ambition. Magento currently has over 60,000 merchants using its software, which was downloaded about 1.5 million times as of January 2010. The company also says they’ve registered over $15 billion in transactions to date. The roadmap for the future is apparently paved with additional products, with a number of “Mobile Commerce, Saas offering and other products/services” coming later this year. Here’s a video of Varien / Magento CEO Roy Rubin outlining his vision on open source e-commerce:
     
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| PayPal Launches Revamped iPhone App, Teams With Bump For Phone-Tapping Money Transfers Posted: 15 Mar 2010 04:20 PM PDT
PayPal has offered a free application for the iPhone ever since the App Store launched in mid-2008, and it has gradually been improving over time. Today’s release brings a handful of significant new features. First, it now allows you to send a money request to your contacts (it’s essentially a bill). Second, you can now withdraw money out of your PayPal account and deposit it into your bank account. And there’s the Bump integration, which allows you to exchange money simply by tapping two iPhones together and entering the amount of the transaction — finally, an easy way to collect money from those friends who always seem to be out of cash. The PayPal app includes a few more minor new features. There’s now an integrated tip calculator and bill splitter, as well as a reminder function that alerts you when you need to send or withdraw money. And the application now integrates the ‘PayPal For Kids’ program, which allows kids and teenagers to access a PayPal sub-account that’s linked to their parent’s. PayPal’s iPhone app is only one component of the company’s mobile strategy. Last spring it partnered with RIM for the launch of the BlackBerry App World store, and it has also integrated with eBay’s mobile application. iPhone developers can easily integrate PayPal functionality using a PayPal library. And aside from the iPhone app, it offers native PayPal applications for Android and RIM phones as well (the company plans to brings these apps up to speed with the new iPhone release over the next few months). This is also obviously very big news for Bump, which is still a young startup (the company took part in Y Combinator and was funded by Sequoia last fall). Bump and PayPal declined to disclose the details of the partnership.      
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| SEC Filing Shows CoTweet Sold For At Least $8.1 Million Posted: 15 Mar 2010 03:21 PM PDT
When CoTweet sold to ExactTarget a couple weeks ago, the acquisition price was not disclosed. But an SEC filing put out today suggests that ExactTweet paid at least $8.1 million in stock for CoTweet. That is the value of “securities offered . . . as partial consideration in connection with a merger,” meaning there was likely a cash portion as well. While this isn’t a huge sum, it’s not a terrible return for an initial investment of $1.1 million. CoTweet helps businesses manage multiple Twitter accounts and use it more effectively as marketing channel. The CoTweet acquisition is now being pointed to as an example of how businesses can be built on top of Twitter. So now we know how much the stock portion of the deal was worth. Will we see more $8 million to $10 million deals in the near future, or do exits have to become bigger to make it worth creating a startup around Twitter?      
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| Justin.TV Turns To Law Professor Eric Goldman As It Battles Live Video Piracy Posted: 15 Mar 2010 02:45 PM PDT
Before livestreaming video networks like Justin.TV can become attractive to advertisers, they need to deal with their piracy issues. It’s the same thing YouTube had to go through, except with live video streams. Like YouTube, Justin.tv complies with DMCA takedown notices and is developing digital fingerprinting technology to identify copyrighted video on its network automatically. It also invites copyright owners to police the site directly. Despite these measures, a casual perusal of the most popular streams on Justin.tv is filled with pirated streams of professional sports, TV shows, and movies. Right now, for instance, you can watch King of Queens or CNN International, taken straight from TV. The company finds itself increasingly under fire for copyright issues. To help it deal with these issues, Justin.tv now has a new adviser, Eric Goldman, the director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clare University and a highly-respected Internet law blogger. Unlike Justin.TV’s very-expensive lawyers at Wilson Sonsini, Goldman will be less constrained in speaking publicly on behalf of the company about these issues. Goldman is an expert on how copyright law is applied to user-generated content. But in many ways live video on the Web is a new beast. It is hard for even a vigilant copyright holder to deliver a takedown notice if the video is only live on the Web for an hour. Competitor Livestream takes a “Zero Tolerance Policy” on piracy and challenges its competitors to do the same. Livestream does pretty much the same things Justin.tv does to fight piracy, with one major exception: it limits new channels to 50 concurrent viewers until the channel is authorized manually as a legitimate channel. Should Justin.tv do the same thing? Goldman dismisses Livestream’s zero tolerance policy as somewhat of a marketing pitch, but he thinks the concept of limiting a user’s “ability to put up content until they are proven trustworthy” is worth exploring. CEO Michael Seibel notes that Livestream can do that because it is pursuing more of an enterprise strategy than a consumer-driven one. He also notes: “We work with the copyright owners. If copyright owners were not happy with us, they would be suing our pants off.” So far, Justin.TV has not been sued in the U.S., while competitor Ustream cannot say the same. Seibel sounds sincere when he tells me, “I don't want that content on my site.” He really believes he can make money off the pure user-generated video, which costs him one third of a penny for every hour streamed, versus the half-a-penny per hour he can make just on remnant ads. But if Justin.tv is really serious about cleaning up the pirated streams on it network, why not simply police itself and strip the most questionable content from at least the most popular channels to start? In the bizarro world of created by the DMCA, legally it can’t. Under the DMCA, the responsibility for finding copyright violations lies with the copyright holders. The second that a site starts to take on that responsibility itself, it risks losing the protection of the DMCA’s “safe harbor” provision. So Justin.TV can give copyright holders the tools to remove content from the site, but can’t do it themselves.      
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| Wait, Did Ev Williams Just Interview Umair Haque? Weird. Posted: 15 Mar 2010 02:01 PM PDT
When SXSW sets up its festival, you have to assume they want the best and most engaging keynotes possible. If the public reaction to Umair Haque’s interview of Twitter co-founder Ev Williams is any indication, they failed. Badly. I wish I could take credit for the title here, but it is all Mike Monteiro, appropriately, by way of Twitter. Below, find a sampling of some of the other best tweets about the keynote. As someone who was in the audience, all seem pretty accurate. Williams had some news to announce during the talk too. Sadly, he got that out of the way in the first two minutes and then it was completely overshadowed by the mass exodus of the crowd and the humorous tweets as the interview went on. Update: Ev Williams just tweeted out that he’s heard the talk about the interview and is willing to answer 10 questions over Twitter. Send away.
     
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| Join Charlie Rose, Ron Conway, Jack Dorsey And Lots Of Others At TechCrunch Disrupt Posted: 15 Mar 2010 01:27 PM PDT
TechCrunch Disrupt is a three-day, single-track conference and startup competition to immerse you in the debate about what's changing in media and technology right now, what's causing it and what we need to do about it to survive and thrive in real time. Join 2,000 or so of your closest friends to talk about what’s most important in the collision of technology and media. Half of the event is a March Madness style startup competition. We’re sorting through hundreds of applications to find the most interesting startups launching this Spring. You’ll see live on stage demos, rapid fire Q&A sessions with expert judges from a variety of backgrounds (product, finance, team building, leadership and more) and highlights from behind the scenes mentoring sessions. The other half of the event will put leading experts from around the world on stage to talk about the stuff that matters most in technology and media. A few of the speakers and experts are listed below. Keep an eye on the Disrupt Blog and Speaker list for more updates.
     
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| Twitter’s New “At Anywhere” Platform Allows For Deeper Integration Into Third Party Sites Posted: 15 Mar 2010 12:13 PM PDT
During his keynote at SXSW this afternoon (live blog here), Twitter CEO Evan Williams just announced a new “At Anywhere” platform, which allows websites to more deeply integrate the service into their sites. The idea is to offer a more seamless experience to Twitter users navigating third party sites like the Huffington Post and the New York Times, giving them Twitter content without forcing them to jump off the page they’re currently viewing. The details on the new platform are still scant, but this is Twitter’s answer to Facebook Connect, which we reported on back in January. Among the features:
It looks like the platform may eventually be hosted at Twitter.com/anywhere, which currently features a placeholder Twitter account that tweeted “Stay Tuned”. Update This may actually be a Twitter account related to the platform — it just tweeted “If you’re a javascript guru and want to help us build @anywhere and work with publishers @jointheflock”. From the Twitter blog:
     
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| SXSWi 2010: Q&A with Gowalla Co-founder/CEO Josh Williams – Pt 1 Posted: 15 Mar 2010 12:12 PM PDT  In an effort to sort out the state of the "Location War" going on here at SXSW Interactive 2010, I have been lucky enough to chat with several people behind the scenes of these mobile location based services. It's funny to me calling the competition a "War" as everyone with whom I have spoken seems incredibly mellow and down-to-earth but there is a potential definitive moment going on here for that industry. I was able to catch up with Gowalla co-founder Josh Williams and talk a bit about the current state of Gowalla and their mobile app. Standby for more interviews with the some of the competition and a part 2 video of my conversation with Josh.
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| Ev Williams: Twitter’s First Principle, “Be A Force For Good” Posted: 15 Mar 2010 11:57 AM PDT
Interestingly enough, Twitter saw its first burst of popularity three years ago at this very conference. Below find my live notes (paraphrased): UH: Ev you have something pretty interesting you want to say today? EW: Yeah, we want to announce something. We wanted to announce our new “At Platform” (undoubtedly to be spelled an @ Platform) – a way to integrate Twitter into any website. “At Anywhere” – basically this allows you to place the Twitter hovercards on any site. We have 13 sites we’re launching with including Amazon, ebay, Yahoo, Digg, Bing, Meebo, Salesforce. UH: So what can you do with this? EW: You can easily tweet from any page that is using this. Also, maybe you want talk to authors of posts without going to Twitter itself, you can just hover over their name and tweet them. Twitter is a very easy way to keep in touch. UH: So this helps you contextualize information. But why would sites use this? EW: A connection to users you didn’t have before – and it keeps people coming back. And it will result in more followers for a site. Also, hopefully more people who are your fans using twitter to talk about you or your content. And you can bring in users’ tweets talking about your site. UH: So it’s a platform to juice up site’s networks and virility. But it’s an “At Platform” not an “Ad Platform”. EW: Yeah, it’s about lowering the barrier for information. UH: What makes 21st century businesses different? Like Twitter? The first principle to me is experimentation. Why are you willing to explore different possibilities? EW: Experimentation lets you create value. “Whatever you assume when you start out, you’re wrong.” Most of the great businesses of our time have experimented. Like Google. UH: So it’s about creating value, then figuring it out? EW: Yes, it’s about creating experience for users and businesses. There is a ton of business use on Twitter today — it’s one of the biggest uses. We want to make that better, easier, faster. UH: What is Twitter evolving to? EW: What is Twitter has always been a tough question to answer. We think of it as an information network — different from a social network. It’s about getting info and also sharing. You can take advantage of Twitter without sharing anything about your life. We need to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. UH: So better information, better connections, better choices. EW: Yes. UH: Experimentation is about iteration. So how does that happen at Twitter? EW: We have a bunch of awesome people in the company now. We’ve grown very quickly over the past year. Our employee growth curve is almost like our user growth curve now. We have people on focused teams, like mobile, or internationalization. We’re worried about central thinking and slow processes. So we tell our teams to “go for it.” UH: So what’s your role? EW: I don’t get into the nuts and bolts of code, cause things would be a big mess. I spend most of my time thinking about the high level issues. And I think a lot about the company – how do we scale the company, about our culture, etc. How do we define the characteristics we want. I think there is a parallel between the service and the company — openness is huge, transparency. UH: So openness is very important. Help us trace the arc of openness at Twitter. EW: Yeah, it means a lot of things. We debated if openness or transparency. “A window is transparent, but a door is open.” The users have taken Twitter and morphed it into what they want it to be. Now developers are doing the same thing. Openness is really a survival technique. I sit down with new employees when they start and go over 9 assumptions you should have about working at Twitter. One key one is assume there are more smart people outside the company than insides. UH: What about giving the golden goose away? Why be so open? EW: That was a big question for us – the deals with Bing and Google. These were the first guys we shared our full stream with. There’s a lot of debate about that. Because we don’t have a business model yet, so why give it away? But we went back to the principle of giving users the most value. There are 50 million tweets a day, how do we show you the best ones for you? Right now, we don’t do a good enough job of that. But with these partnerships, we have more chances to do that. UH: Was there a lot of internal debate about this? EW: Yeah, there was a ton. But we decided it was good. And now we’ve expanded the deals – like with Yahoo. And a few weeks ago we talked about giving this data to thousands of others. Now third party developers are building a lot of value. Like adding pictures to Twitter. CoTweet and HootSuite are really interesting too. Twitter.com isn’t a good interface for doing customer support, but those guys are. CoTweet just got acquired by a company that wants to focus on that more. We’d love to see much more focus on creating these deep experiences that create value. UH: So experimentation and openness. Other companies want control, like Apple. How open are you guys? EW: We’re pretty open – there is some control we need to employ because if we were infinitely open we’d be doing a disservice to users. Openness can work against you still. It has to be managed a lot. Having an open API makes it easier to make apps that will spam users. We send cease and desists everyday to companies making spam tools. We have to exert some control. UH: I think shepherding is a good way to put it. So you had some interesting use recently – such as the earthquake in Chile. EW: I got an email recently about the earthquake, thanking us for helping with the situation. This is very gratifying for us because we’ve always held it important for Twitter to reach the weakest signals in the world. We started out with a big focus on SMS – and it’s still really important to us. Because it reaches so many people. We have deals with 65 carriers around the world to send these SMS tweets. We’re at the beginning. We’re seeing really strong growth in India where SMS is huge. And in the Middle East. UH: I think this changing the world stuff is the future for entrepreneurs. It gets to the heart of the point about inclusiveness. So – what is an “active user”? EW: To me it comes back to – is someone getting value out of Twitter? If they don’t have an account it’s hard to know, like people who search Google for tweets. In the beginning we put a lot of focus on telling the world or your friends and family what you’re doing. But now there is something interesting on Twitter for everyone – like the Flaming Lips being on Twitter, you can get updates on the band. And as more people start getting information on Twitter, they’re more likely to get involved. UH: Someone has started using Twitter inside the White House, right? EW: Yeah, it’s really interesting that it’s from in the White House. It’s an official channel, but they’re using it a different type of way. It’s about reducing the walls between people with a lot of influence, and those who they influence. And that’s the most profound promise of the Internet. This is the wave I started on 10 years ago with blogging. It’s about the democracy of information. Anyone can put information on the web — that’s huge. UH: Tweet Minister in the UK aggregates the tweets from members of parliament. This is re-wiring society in some ways. But we also have a counter-force – like state control of information. EW: In some regions, yes, this is bad and hurting the web. But the Internet is a tidal wave that you will not be able to keep out. Like in China, who knows how long those firewalls will hold up – but not forever. UH: Yes, there are many ways to get through the firewalls already. There’s a lot of pressure on them. Let’s talk about “betterness.” I booked a trip to his five star resort in an exotic land. When I got there, it was a shack. The manager couldn’t do anything — so I put it on Twitter. Within 15 minutes the booking company called me, and in 20 minutes I got a new hotel. In a half an hour my vacation was fixed. EW: That’s great. Our hope is that this is the norm, not a fluke. We have a bit of a dichotomy, because there is more everyday you want to search for. We don’t just want to maximize that, we hope to make Twitter more useful to you. We want to decrease time you spend on Twitter, not increase it. Recently we went through a process to define our operating principles. The number one principle is “be a force for good.” Another principle is “pay attention.” UH: David Pogue did a campaign against hidden charges from the carriers. It’s the same thing with the hotel operator and me. I know you’re a big fan of Warren Buffet – he also believes in creating real value. EW: Yes, from a business perspective, Twitter needs to fundamentally be about helping people make better decisions. Or the help something happen that normally wouldn’t. Like the donations to Haiti through text message — we weren’t taking the money, but it spread virally through Twitter. People want to help each other out, we need to reduce the friction. UH: Is that what you want to do with the new At Platform? EW: Yes, totally. We’ll see what happens, the obvious stuff is more tweeting, but I think it’s a lowering of the friction as well. UH: You ask yourself, how would i make Walmart better? Why ask yourself that? EW: Because as we look at how businesses are using Twitter – we want our tool to help businesses get better. The world is so often a black box where there is no communication. There’s a lack of dialogue and a lack of transparency. The promise of all these technologies is that this goes away. You close the loop. UH: Outline for us your big picture goals. EW: Fostering the open exchange of information. To be a force for good. The ease of exchange of information is important. Help out other people with something as small as a retweet. That’s our ambition. UH: Google is all about archiving the world’s information. Yours is different — creating new information. It’s all about advantage though – what’s your advantage. EW: Our advantage will only come if everyone wins. We only do win-win deals. Because any deal where someone is losing is unsustainable. That’s why we haven’t turned on the revenue yet — there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, but none of it is sustainable. Creating an advantage for other people and not giving them a reason to work around you – that’s key. UH: Is the Internet making a better media industry? EW: I think there’s a huge shift going on – but it’s an ecosystem where everything is involved. This user-generated content just makes things richer. Blogging and traditional media work together. Twitter compliments traditional media. I was talking last night to some guys from CNN – it’s helped them change what they do. It’s a win-win. UH: How will the At Platform speak to that? EW: Hopefully these guys will us it to get the new out there. UH: What makes you tick? EW: There are two types of entrepreneurs. What drives me is creating things that didn’t exist before. Your product or service should be at the end of the sentence: “wouldn’t it be awesome if…” It’s creating new stuff versus extracting from old stuff. There are people who look at money as the goal versus the teams. I create businesses to make new things. It’s a fuel for creating more things in the world. I’ve been lucky to stumble upon things that have helped change the world. UH: Why focus on these things though? EW: Largely luck. But maybe it’s what interests me. Twitter was a side project of Odeo – my cofounders came up with it. Blogging was a side project too at one point. UH: If something is awesome, people will use it. EW: Yes. Also, helping others succeed is a sub principle of ours. UH: Tell us one or two more of them. EW: Be a force for good, pay attention — make things happen is another one. There’s also building a culture of trust. UH: What are your big lessons to other entrepreneurs? EW: Create something you want to exist in the world. Another is focus. Many people are trying to do a lot of things when they should be doing one thing. You may be wrong with whatever you’re trying out, but you’ll try other things. A lot of the great companies are now coming from outside Silicon Valley. You don’t have to be there. That’s a wrap.      
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