The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Just Because I Loved My Etch-A-Sketch Doesn’t Mean The iPad Will Save Newspapers
- Mintbox Brings A Rewards Program To Flash Sales
- A Calm, Reasonable Argument Supporting Apple’s Anti-Flash SDK Language
- WaTunes Signs Warner Music, Opens Store Inside Facebook Walls
- Remember Google’s Super Bowl Search Ad? Now You Can Make Your Own
- Video Chat Coming To The Next iPhone? All Signs Are Pointing To Yes
- Developers In Denial: The Seesmic Case Study
- Steve Jobs Responds To iPhone SDK Complaints: ‘Intermediate Layers Produce Sub-Standard Apps’
- Researcher Uncovers (Another) Major Facebook Security Exploit
- Adobe Vs. Apple War Generates Rage, Facebook Group
- myYearbook’s Chatter Driving 1 Million Updates A Day, 1 Billion Page Views A Month
- Will AOL and Demand Media’s Content Farm Strategy Prevail?
| Just Because I Loved My Etch-A-Sketch Doesn’t Mean The iPad Will Save Newspapers Posted: 11 Apr 2010 08:36 AM PDT
Or at least, that’s the logic of an article in today’s Guardian by Alan Rusbridger, who says that a block of wood that he saw sixteen years ago showed him the future. And that future was the iPad. “My personal journey to the iPad began around 16 years ago in Aspen, Colorado,” Rusbridger begins. He saw a website showing a newspaper online and was duly impressed. “But the real excitement lay in Aspen, where the Knight Ridder newspaper chain had set up a “laboratory” to study the future of news. It was rumoured that they had built a “tablet” – a portable screen on which people could read newspapers.” The tablet he saw was a block of wood with a printout of a newspaper glued on the front. No, I’m not kidding.
And the iPad finally fulfilled that dream. “Here it was – the Aspen block of wood incarnate!” says Rusbridger when his iPad arrived. The iPad Will Not Fix Your NewspaperRusbridger then goes on to talk about how perfect the iPad is to consumer the Internet (no disagreement from me on that point). And he suggests the iPad might be the knight in shining armor who rushes in to save the day for newspapers: “So is the iPad the future of newspapers after all?” The best I can tell is that the newspaper guys envision people sitting on a train on the way to work reading their iPad. That’s similar to people sitting on a train read the newspaper. And since those two things are similar, voila!, the iPad will save newspapers. Seriously, that’s as far as the argument goes. But jumping back to reality…the iPad changes everything, which really means nothing has changed. All the pressures the Internet put on newspapers – crushing the business model, unlimited competition, no need for tree massacres – are just amplified by the iPad. Now would be the time to embrace the Internet. But the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other are running in the opposite direction with apps that have no hyperlinks and/or require a fee to get access. All those people sitting on trains with their iPads are going to do the same thing that all those people sitting in their offices on their laptops did – get their news from free sources that hyperlink to other free sources. The etch-a-sketch was very, very cool. But it didn’t give newspapers a competitive advantage and a way to stay alive a little longer. And neither does the iPad.      
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| Mintbox Brings A Rewards Program To Flash Sales Posted: 11 Apr 2010 07:22 AM PDT
Similar to other flash sales sites, Mintbox offers discounts of up to 70 percent on luxury goods. But Mintbox aims to reward the consumer for shopping on its site. The startup partners with designers and retailers to offer extra benefits to members. For example, Mintbox members may get access to order merchandise before it arrives in stores through VIP trunk shows or access to New York Fashion Week shows. Then, early in the season when new merchandise hits the floors, Mintbox members may receive a 20-30% discount. Mintbox members will also receive exclusive invitations to private shopping events, designer previews, tickets to Fashion Week Shows and other exclusive fashion experiences. During February 2010 New York Fashion Week Mintbox members got sets of tickets to attend top designer fashion shows at Bryant Park. And Mintbox is partnering with credit card companies to offer 5 percent cash back deals, which are funded by the retailers, for members. Essentially Mintbox bridges a loyalty program with flash sales. And the site is designed to help retailers bring traffic into their actual stores by offering in-store private sales and invitations to events. In the future, Mintbox will be allowing users to donate cashback rewards to charities and is currently working on developing mobile apps for its platform. Co-founded by former fashion executives and consultants, Mintbox will face competition from the host of luxury-goods focused flash sales site on the web, including Gilt, RueLaLa, and others. And many of these site offer incentives for shopping on their sites. For example, on many of the sites, you can earn a status that allows you to access sales earlier than other members. But Mintbox takes the rewards programs to a different level by also trying to create loyalty for retailers and designers, which is sure to make its platform attractive to some.
     
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| A Calm, Reasonable Argument Supporting Apple’s Anti-Flash SDK Language Posted: 11 Apr 2010 07:17 AM PDT  Gruuuuubeeer! Why do you force us to listen to your reasoned, intelligent arguments explaining the odd language in the new iPhone SDK guidelines outlawing outside iPhone compiling methods, including .NET and Adobe's own Flash-to-iPhone tools? If we follow Godwin's law to its obvious conclusion, we can only say that you are a collaborator with enemy forces! For those of you not following along, the story is this: Apple's new SDK guidelines state, in no uncertain terms, that you can only use Apple tools to compile and submit iPhone and iPad apps. Nothing else is allowed. To many this is an affront to the general dignity of man and a call to arms. To others, and I suspect many others, it's not a really a BFD. 
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| WaTunes Signs Warner Music, Opens Store Inside Facebook Walls Posted: 11 Apr 2010 05:09 AM PDT
Warner has licensed its full catalog of music for use in WaTunes’ brand new Facebook application, which essentially lets people purchase digital music through a full-fledged storefront without the need to leave the popular social networking site. Thanks to the deal with Warner, WaTunes can now provide Facebook users with music from artists like The White Stripes, Seal, Madonna, Eric Clapton, Diddy, Ray Charles, and a lot more. With the Music Store Facebook app, users can discover and purchase millions of songs in high-quality MP3 format thanks to a partnership with MediaNet. It’s far from the only Facebook application to enable users to do that (Lala springs to mind), but notably, you don’t even need to sign up for a WaTunes account to be able to stream 30-second versions of songs or buy and download full tracks and albums. In addition, users can talk to friends while browsing the music store and share albums on their Facebook Wall of on MySpace, Twitter and other social networks. We should note the WaTunes Music Store is U.S. only for now, and only accepts credit card payments through Facebook. WaTunes recently announced that it aims to phase out its digital distribution services for independent artists and record labels. The company at the time said it would retain services for mobile applications, ringtones and licensing, but focus solely on its social platform and online marketplace going forward.
     
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| Remember Google’s Super Bowl Search Ad? Now You Can Make Your Own Posted: 10 Apr 2010 09:00 PM PDT
Some time in the last few days Google launched a new feature called the “Search Stories Video Creator“. And damn if it isn’t fun. The new feature prompts you to input up to seven search queries spread across Google’s search features (including Images, Maps, and standard web search), choose a song, and it generates a video in the same style as Google’s other Search Stories. The whole process only takes a few minutes (the tool automatically uploads your video to YouTube when you’re ready). And while there are plenty of parodies already out there, we can expect a whole lot more of them to pop up in the next few days. For those who were wondering, Parisian Love was only one of Google’s Search Stories — the company actually began releasing a series of them last fall (you can see all of them here). Here’s a test video I threw together:
     
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| Video Chat Coming To The Next iPhone? All Signs Are Pointing To Yes Posted: 10 Apr 2010 07:12 PM PDT
As they do with any major new iPhone OS release, people have been tearing apart the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK from the very second it was available. Almost immediately, someone noticed that bits and pieces of iChat had found their way into the new software. By itself, it didn’t really make sense. The iPhone has plenty of incredibly solid third-party IM applications — some of them being amongst the App Store’s best sellers. Why would Apple be sneaking any parts of iChat onto the iPhone? Then the first mentions of a front facing camera were unearthed, and it all started coming together in the form of two little words: video chat. Alas, there was no concrete proof that Apple was following the same train of thought.. until now. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>      
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| Developers In Denial: The Seesmic Case Study Posted: 10 Apr 2010 05:59 PM PDT
That sure sounds ominous. And then, BOOM. Twitter released its own Blackberry app and acquired Tweetie, which has a popular iPhone and desktop app. The threats are over, Twitter fired missiles at its developers. Anyone who didn’t see this coming was in denial. Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur is one developer who sure didn’t see it coming (disclosure: I’m an investor in Seesmic): Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur two weeks ago, answering questions on Formspring:
Loic Le Meur yesterday:
Oops.      
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| Steve Jobs Responds To iPhone SDK Complaints: ‘Intermediate Layers Produce Sub-Standard Apps’ Posted: 10 Apr 2010 05:04 PM PDT
Greg Slepak, CEO of TaoEffect, emailed Jobs to voice his concerns and got a pair of brief responses, which he has posted to his site. In his first message to Jobs, Slepak included a link to a highly negative thread on Hacker News where many developers criticized the move. Jobs responded:
In the post that Jobs refers to, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber explains the logic that was behind Apple’s move (and given Jobs’ endorsement of the article, it looks like he was spot on). The gist of the article is that Apple doesn’t want a ‘meta-platform’ to exist between the iPhone and developers, as this would facilitate simultaneous development for competitors’ platforms and give Apple less control over the iPhone ecosystem. But while Gruber’s article is well thought out and very logical, I don’t think it does much to address why developers are furious. The issue isn’t that developers don’t understand why Apple is doing this — it’s that the actions Apple is taking to protect its own interests are violating something fundamental: they’re keeping developers from using the tools they want to work with. Gruber’s article didn’t convince Slepak, either. His response to Jobs, in part:
Jobs replied once more, this time within a few minutes, to say:
I doubt this argument will do much to placate developers. There are plenty of examples of applications built using intermediary tools that are high quality. And the App Store is rife with applications built using Apple’s own tools that are absolutely terrible. Apple is already enforcing a screening process anyway — why isn’t it checking for quality there, rather than telling developers how they’re going to build their apps? Here’s the last message Slepak sent to Jobs:
For the whole Email exchange (with Slepak’s full responses to Jobs) check out his post.      
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| Researcher Uncovers (Another) Major Facebook Security Exploit Posted: 10 Apr 2010 03:21 PM PDT
The exploit, which we’ve confirmed has now been patched, could hijack the session of a previously authorized third party Facebook application and invisibly pass it off to a malicious app. In his proof-of-concept, Tyson embedded Farmville in an invisible frame on his site. He then used some trickery with Facebook Platform parameters to pass all access rights Farmville had on to a malicious data harvesting application. In short, any of the many millions of people who had previously installed Farmville and visited the apparently benign proof-of-concept site would have their data invisibly harvested. If the user had granted Farmville additional permissions to access their Wall or messages, then the malicious app would have them too. Tyson only used Farmville in this instance because of its massive install base, but he could have used any other third party app. Fortunately, Tyson doesn’t have reason to believe this exploit has been abused, stating “It's unlikely that any real-world attacks used this particular vulnerability, and I certainly have no record of such a case.” But he also notes that it may have existed for a year or longer. Further, Tyson thinks that Facebook still has problems with the way Platform is set up that expose it to vulnerabilities like this:
For more technical details on how the exploit worked, check out Tyson’s post. Tyson has written quite a few other articles detailing flaws with Facebook security, including his Month of Facebook Bugs, which exposed some serious issues with Facebook Platform last October (he notes that some of these have since been fixed).      
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| Adobe Vs. Apple War Generates Rage, Facebook Group Posted: 10 Apr 2010 02:19 PM PDT
The group’s manifesto is:
While you would expect a club like this to attract rabid Adobe supporters (and there is a lot of that), several members expressed their longstanding support for Adobe and Apple and the difficulty of reconciling their frustration with the new SDK agreement and their fierce loyalty to Apple. As one Facebook user put it : How did we get to this point? The tension between Apple and Adobe has been simmering for quite a while, but the clear breaking point (as we all know) was the release of the new SDK agreement which essentially blocks Flash developers from the iPhone. I tried to put together an (incomplete) collection of Adobe employee reactions— from the iPad release to Adobe’s “Viva La Resistance.” In my last post, “Adobe: Go Screw Yourself Apple,” some commenters pointed out that the title was unfair because it was the words of Adobe’s Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow and not Adobe’s official position. True, Adobe CTO’s carefully worded (sadly, less colorful) blog was the “official” response, however, Brimelow’s post and comments by several of his Flash colleagues forms an interesting constellation that outlines a deep anger. Adobe is furious. Further, as we previously noted, Adobe did look at Brimelow’s blog and let him run with it anyway— only pushing him to extract one line and add a disclaimer (the disclaimer was added roughly one hour after he sent a Twitter link to his post). First, before we look at the iPhone OS 4.0 fallout, let’s skip to somewhat happier times (to last weekend) when Adobe’s employees lined up at the Apple store to eagerly purchase Steve Jobs’ latest offering. Arno Gourdol, a member of the Adobe Air team, documents their morning: “After queuing for an hour at the flagship Apple Store in SF this morning, we finally got our hands on a stack of magical devices. We’ve spent the rest of the day having fun getting the first Adobe AIR apps running on the iPad….We have also been working on bringing up the first “HD” apps that take advantage of the gorgeous screen of the iPad.”
You can already feel the dark clouds forming. Fast forward to Thursday, developers find out that the SDK agreement will effectively ban Flash and other cross-platform development tools, like Unity, on the iPhone.
Thursday evening: Thursday 11:47pm: Friday 8:44am: Friday about 9pm: Friday 12:47pm: Friday 4:08pm: Saturday around 7:00am Saturday around 11:00 am: Anyone get the sense that this is just the beginning?      
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| myYearbook’s Chatter Driving 1 Million Updates A Day, 1 Billion Page Views A Month Posted: 10 Apr 2010 01:15 PM PDT
The key, Cook says, is a feature that launched in November called Chatter (which has no relation to the Salesforce feature by the same name). Chatter is a lot like Facebook’s News Feed — it’s a stream of content recently posted by other users on the network. But unlike Facebook, which populates your feed with items from your friends, Chatter is geared more towards meeting and interacting with people you don’t know. Cook says one contributor to the feature’s popularity is the fact that you can filter what type of items you’re seeing — for example, I could elect to see only content posted by women aged 20-30 (for this reason, the site has a more flirty nature than what you’ll find on Facebook). That’s helped the feature catch on, and Chatter is now seeing 1 million user updates a day. To help boost engagement, myYearbook has borrowed features popular on other sites and incorporated them into Chatter. First, the site added Ask Me, which is a Q&A feature very similar to Formspring.me. It then added ‘Rate Me’, which lets you post a photo and have it rated by strangers (which sounds like a recipe for low self esteem, but Cook claims that people receive quite a few ’10’s). The site also plans to add a feature called ‘2 Truths & A Lie’, which is an online version of the classic game. Some of the site’s growth — the boost in unique users, in particular — is likely due to the fact that myYearbook now syndicates Chatter updates to Twitter, which direct users back to the site. But he says the rise in engagement (page views have jumped from 544 million in November to 998 million in March) is primarily from users interacting more with the site, and it’s driven by Chatter, along with the site’s redesign. Cook also points out that according to comScore, myYearbook has more page views than Twitter.com does in the United States (though he concedes that much of Twitter’s traffic comes from third party clients, and Twitter has a large international audience).
Looking forward, Cook says that the company will soon be launching applications for both the iPhone and Android. Here’s a video the site is using to promote its recent growth;
     
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| Will AOL and Demand Media’s Content Farm Strategy Prevail? Posted: 10 Apr 2010 09:37 AM PDT
Editor's note: Guest author Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of video site WatchMojo. In this post he examines the two biggest content farms springing up on the Web: Demand Media and Aol. You can find his previous guest posts about online video here.
Are content farms the future of online media? Demand Media is now providing travel tips to USA Today, and Aol is supplementing its thousands of paid journalists with an even larger army of citizen freelancers. If nothing else, Demand Media and AOL deserve credit for generating excitement over content. While an octogenarian like Sumner Redstone might claim that "content is king" and a septuagenarian like Rupert Murdoch will echo that "content is not just king, it’s the emperor of all", the so-called cool kids advertisers want to reach could care less about content. But, the fact remains, everywhere you look, it's about content consumption and monetization. In The Collapse of Complex Business Models, Clay Shirky argues that the inertia facing TV executives stems from their desire to see "online video generate enough money to cover their current costs". When Wired recently profiled Demand Media, owner of the eNom domain registrar, who, armed with over $300 million in venture capital is positioning itself as a low cost content creation and monetization machine, it summarized its worldview:
Not to be outdone, Aol is using its Seed.com freelance platform to produce more content at lower cost. It also recently acquired Studio Now to freelance its video content needs. Unlike Demand Media however, Aol has also hired expensive writers, leaving some to wonder what its strategy is exactly. Granted, second guessing the companies' Web-savvy CEOs might prove foolish. Former Google ad executive Tim Armstrong is CEO and Chairman at Aol, having since hired a battalion of experienced executives. Richard Rosenblatt —the man who sold MySpace to FOX —is running Demand Media, at his side is Shawn Colo, who was as instrumental as Rosenblatt in raising the war chest currently at their disposal, and their Chief Revenue Officer is Joanne Bradford.
Mind you, an impressive background and money in the bank doesn’t guarantee success (Joost anyone?). To evaluate their strategy, it's important to understand the market they're coveting. In How To Make Money In Online Video, I introduced a pyramid representing super premium, premium, prosumer and user-generated content. We have now updated to reflect where each one operates.
Established and/or well funded companies should focus on the upper half of the premium space and the lower half of the super premium space. The sweet spot for smaller startups is to operate between the 50th and 75th percentile of the premium space. I think for start-ups to tackle the 76th to 100th percentile of the premium space is costly and risky (anything in the super premium space is suicide), and operating below the 50th makes it hard to create a valuable catalogue that can be licensed or secure ad dollars from premium marketers. The upper half of the super premium space should be left to Hollywood. Aol is at once attacking the lower half of the super premium space (by hiring experienced writers and producing live video segments with artists such as Beyonce), the premium space (more or less what its niche sites are doing) as well as the higher end of the user-generated space (through Seed.com and Studio Now). Will it work? I don't know. It cannot possibly be everything to everyone at once, but it can play in the various areas to see what will do best and phase out what doesn't stick to the wall. Demand Media, meanwhile, is clearly operating in a lower sphere, which is the area between the upper half of the UGC space up to the lower half of the premium space. This is a tough space to be in if you want branded marketers and ad agencies to sign on and give you dollars. Advertising: The Last Bastion of Unaccountable Spending in Corporate America For centuries, publishers have filtered audiences for marketers. These days, advertisers like to be next to brands: Pepsi wants to be on MTV, Budweiser on the Super Bowl. There is a science to the decision-making process, but it's fuzzy math at best. Sometimes, marketers will point to one article or video as a reason not to run ads on a site. This could prove to be the undoing of these content farms. So while Demand Media might be printing money matching articles with search traffic and text ads, its current model will always be one questionable piece of content away from losing branded advertising deals, which to quote Google's own CEO Eric Schmidt is "the last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America". That might be why Demand hired Joanne Bradford, who ran ads for MSN before short stints at Spot Runner and Yahoo! Should Demand Media Move Upstream? When Demand Media acquired Expert Village (a user-generated instructional video site), it bet big on UGC, which while highly scalable and low cost is generally shunned by marketers. Before the acquisition, Expert Village allowed filmmakers to submit a) ideas for experts and b) segments they wanted to shoot. The fee was nominal, but with volume, it would be worthwhile to filmmakers and to Expert Village to boost catalog and traffic volume. After the acquisition, everything was transferred to ehow.com and that system completely changed. The new management no longer allowed filmmakers to submit just any idea; in fact, filmmakers were suddenly limited to choosing titles out of a library database on eHow. Telling a creative person that they need to choose subjects from a list in a database is not really going to work in the long term. But exacerbating matters was that this made the revenue potential less interesting for a filmmaker. Since filmmakers would oftentimes match up with an expert, this new system meant far less videos produced per shoot, which after considering the time to travel to a location and back rendered the exercise futile. Adding to the challenges was the sudden new need for graphics. Without a doubt, these little changes improved the quality of Expert Village's library and made the videos more SEO-friendly, but by requiring more from filmmakers, Demand Media inadvertently made the quality of contributors suffer by becoming a more suitable home for novice filmmakers. So what it gained on one front through improved processes it lost through inexperienced talent. This is why folks like Slate's Farhad Manjoo have ripped Demand Media to shreds, echoing the fact that its content is good enough to get indexed on Google’s search results but bad enough to induce users to click on a Google ad and go elsewhere (thereby generating revenue for Demand). That might actually have been one of the nicer things said about the company. Of course, it's not what journalists have to say about the company that will matter in the end. Publishers fight for the hearts and minds of viewers/readers and marketers. So, what do marketers think? Online Content is Art and Science Successful content creation is both art and science. Costing and scalability are important considerations but the winning strategy cannot boil down to that alone. Making sure it's SEO friendly is also important, but in a world where content is shared through social networks, it needs to strike a chord with audiences, be it readers, listeners or viewers. Video, in particular, is not even really properly indexed on search engines, so an SEO-centric strategy might be useless to begin with. I've covered what makes video get discovered before. But as much as venture capitalists don't like to hear this, no amount of science will remove the art that is publishing, or the emotions that fuel marketing decisions. Video content involves production, publishing and distribution.
All in all, considering that Demand Media doesn’t have a big top-10 stand alone property, I can understand why it takes the search arbitrage approach, but AOL's efforts undermine the reality that despite its sliding traffic from ISP users, it has a large audience base and if it produced compelling content, then it would be able to retain and grow that base. It could be argued, of course, that Armstrong is doing both: hiring the best writers to have that front and center but then turning to the world's freelancers and users to contribute the stuff that will trip up Google's search index and offset the fleeting ISP users. I respect that with Tim Armstrong's background at Google, he needs to balance his vision of Aol being the Time Inc. of the 21st century with a scalable model that will get "quants" excited, but he might risk having a bad apple ruin the entire bushel by embracing the UGC freelancer base, as he did during SXSW. Meanwhile, Demand Media has enough money to experiment until it finds a solution, like Aol. At least it's betting in the right broader space, albeit it needs to fine-tune its methodology to make the lofty investment it secured a profitable one. So long as it remains private and all it has to worry about are the journalists, then it might find its sweet spot over time. With the Web entering a phase of greater content consumption and content not being a zero-sum game, the reality is both companies can succeed with their strategies, but how big a crop their content farms will yield is still a big unknown. Photo Credit/Flickr/Andrew Stawarz      
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Thirty five years ago, give or take, I was presented with my first etch-a-sketch. And it looked a little bit like the iPad. Which makes me qualified to declare the iPad the future of media.
The flash sales space is 
Atlanta-based digital music company 
Remember Google’s Hell-froze-over, critically acclaimed Super Bowl ad 
Way back in February the 
Over the last few days, the web has been awash with news that Apple has 
For all the credit Facebook has received for its privacy controls and user safety, the site still falls prey to an unsettling number of 
It was inevitable. 
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