The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Weekend Giveaway: Waterproof, Fireproof, and Bombproof ioSafe Hard Drives
- Should Tech Startups Outsource Product Development?
- Mark Zuckerberg’s Coding Skills, Circa 2001
- Venture Capital Rises In First Quarter, Software Sector Stalls
- Can You Live A Year On Virtual Currency? Dibspace’s Founder Will Find Out
- Thank You TechCrunch Sponsors!
- Google Puts Its $50 Million To Work, Starts Using Aardvark For Help Support
- The Top 10 DIY iPad Projects
- How Big Is Twitter Really?
- Twitter Developers In Denial: A Teaser Video
- Apple In Talks With AMD? Set Relationship Status To “It’s Complicated”
- Tynt Gets $8 Million For Ctrl-C Action
- AuthorStream Brings Web-Based PowerPoint Presentations To Your iPad
- Google, Speed, and Your Local Pizza Place
- Sprout Now Lets You Simultaneously Build Rich Ads In Both HTML5 And Flash
- Google Suggest Becomes More Local
| Weekend Giveaway: Waterproof, Fireproof, and Bombproof ioSafe Hard Drives Posted: 17 Apr 2010 07:57 AM PDT  Do you live at the heart of the sun? Maybe under an active volcano? Or under water? Then you need an ioSafe 500GB super duper drive. These monsters, if you recall, can take quite a beating, surviving backhoes, fire, and water. So what can you guys get? How about one of two 500GB ioSafe hard drives. How do you win? Glad you asked!
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| Should Tech Startups Outsource Product Development? Posted: 17 Apr 2010 06:00 AM PDT
When I wrote that BusinessWeek piece, Peter Harrison, CEO of GlobalLogic—who happens to be a good friend and someone I have mentored over the years—tore into me. He insisted that I was wrong and offered to prove it by introducing me to his customers. I ignored him (as I often do). But Peter is persistent. Last week, he roped me into his customer conference to have dinner with Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital, who is a GlobalLogic investor. Peter also had me meet some of his customers.
Despite this, I remain unconvinced that outsourcing core development is a good strategy for startups. During my tech days, I outsourced R&D to St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk, Russia. But as you can read in this FastCompany article, my technology was conceived there, and that's where my entire development team was located (and I was able to hire brilliant ex-KGB mathematicians who had skills I couldn't find anywhere else). Having development teams working on a single product but being in different locations makes innovation much harder to achieve (yes, I know this is how open source works, but that’s different). I'm going to detail my reasons and let GlobalLogic CTO, Jim Walsh, tell us all why he thinks I'm wrong. Here are the reasons I've cited for outsourcing not making sense:
2) Components must fit together. Complex software is more like a Swiss Army knife than a meat cleaver. The blade, bottle opener, and screwdriver have to work in an elegant manner and can’t be developed independently. In a similar way, members of a software-development team need to work closely together. 3) Management bandwidth. It is a lot more challenging to manage diverse teams at multiple locations and in different time zones than to manage them together. Additional layers of management are often required. 4) Fewer developers can often produce more. In the tech world, scaling up development teams doesn’t always lead to greater productivity. Small teams are often the most innovative and productive. 5) Skills scarcity. The specialized skill and mindset that tech companies look for are hard to find. For example, India doesn’t have programmers who have grown up to understand the intricacies of computer-game development, because few can afford the high-speed Internet connections needed. In India, the best developers gravitate to prestigious companies like Infosys and Wipro, not to small startups. 6) Intellectual-property protection. This is a particularly strong concern in China, where it is almost impossible to protect trade secrets and where piracy is rampant. Employees often leave to start ventures that compete directly with their foreign employers, and the laws provide little protection, because they aren’t enforced. Here is Jim Walsh's response. I must warn you that this may read like an ad for his company, but I need to be fair, because I've just trashed GlobalLogic's entire business model. So take this for what it's worth:
1) Communication: I completely agree that building great products calls for a deep understanding of customer needs and great communication. We believe in creating small agile teams where the product owner is an integral member. If this team is distributed, then it's essential that you either (a) separate the scrums and have product owners in each location or (b) have the product owner overlap with the engineering team for several hours every day to review deliverables and provide constant feedback. Although in the old days this was hard to do, modern communication and development platforms have made collaborating across distance easier. In some cases, they can improve the quality of communication over co-located teams. 2) Integration: While building tightly integrated products with distributed team members might have been hard in the past, modern development tools and architectures have made it increasingly straightforward for even the most complex products to be built by distributed teams. Most open-source projects are living proof of this progression. 3) Management: Managers who have distributed teams do need to learn new skills; however, once proficient, a manager with a distributed team can often outperform a centralized one. Take for example the opportunity to follow the sun by developing during the day and testing the same code line at night (i.e., daytime in a second location). Or consider the opportunity to leverage specialized skills that you simply don't have in one place or to have a larger or more skilled team than one could assemble otherwise. If you're struggling to overlap enough hours a day, one can always leverage teams in Latin America that work in US time zones. 4) Talent: I'm well aware that one great developer can often outperform many mediocre ones. That's why I'd never compromise on the quality of team members – particularly for new product development. However, it's possible today to get developers in Argentina, China, Eastern Europe and India (i.e., locations where we have innovation hubs) who are just as talented—and in some cases just as experienced and innovative—as those in Silicon Valley. The key is to set your bar high and hand-pick your team in the same way that you would if you were doing the development right here at home. 5) Skills: While there was a time when specialized skills were hard to find abroad, this is simply no longer the case. When I started in this industry 25 years ago, the skills in the U.K. were about 10 years behind those of the U.S. Today, there is no longer any skill lag. Indeed, it's possible to get skills in cities like Bangalore and Kiev that are in advance of what you can find in many U.S. cities. 6) Intellectual Property: For all but a handful of products, IP risk is a red herring thrown out by firms to defend the status quo. In our history of building more than 1000 products for more than 200 product companies, we've never had an incident of IP theft. There is simply too much at stake for our firm and our employees for this to be a meaningful risk. Finally, many firms have concluded that the only true defense for their IP is moving faster than the competition, and we can certainly help them do that. Lastly, we would argue that the day has come when even a startup needs to think globally (i.e., become a micro-multinational) and seize the opportunity to create products that can be used around the world. Therefore, it's not enough to focus only on what American consumers want. Having a global team is a great way to ensure that you're creating a product that can address global needs. The last part, on globalization, is exactly what Mike Moritz said in his talk. I agree with this. But Jim hasn't convinced me about the other issues. It could be, though, that things have changed from the time when I was a CTO and CEO, and that my information is dated. So I look forward to reading your comments on what has and what hasn't worked for you, and what you think about this topic. Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.      
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| Mark Zuckerberg’s Coding Skills, Circa 2001 Posted: 17 Apr 2010 12:17 AM PDT
TechCrunch reader and former Mark Zuckerberg Exeter classmate Nate Chastain noticed our post the other day about Zuckerberg continuing to code at Facebook. He pointed out a web page that Mark created in 2001 when he was 16 or so, and we found a couple of other pages with his name on it, too. See here (click on the Kirtland Society link on the left), here and here for examples. Even by 2001 standards, this was pretty terrible stuff. But he turned out ok in the end.
     
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| Venture Capital Rises In First Quarter, Software Sector Stalls Posted: 16 Apr 2010 10:36 PM PDT
Venture capital funding picked up in the first quarter to $4.7 billion, from the year ago period, according to both Dow Jones VentureSource and the MoneyTree Report (PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association). Dow Jones says venture funding rose 12% from $4.2 billion in Q1 2009 (the number of deals jumped to 597 from 522), while MoneyTree noted a 38% increase to $3.4 billion (the number of deals rose to 681 from 635). Although deals were up versus the first quarter of 2009, they were down from the fourth quarter– Dow Jones logged $6.9 billion for Q4 2009 and MoneyTree recorded $5.2 billion. In terms of number of deals, the software industry boasted the most with 144 rounds of funding, according to MoneyTree. However, that represents a relatively low number for the industry— in fact, it’s the lowest number of deals since the fourth quarter of 1995. Meanwhile, VentureSource also noted stagnation in the general Information Technology sector: “IT is losing ground in the venture landscape overall. IT accounted for 32% of the deal flow in the most recent quarter, continuing the downward trend that started in 2005.”
Looking at our Crunchbase data, we have a more bullish take on venture capital funding. According to our data, the total value of venture funding more than doubled to $12.8 billion, from $6 billion for the year ago period. However, as concluded in the other reports, that is a drop from the prior quarter ($15.3 billion for Q4 2009). In total, we recorded 1,201 deals. (Image Source: flickr/Tao_Zhyn)      
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| Can You Live A Year On Virtual Currency? Dibspace’s Founder Will Find Out Posted: 16 Apr 2010 07:56 PM PDT
Can you live on virtual currency? The founder of Dibspace, Dominic Canterbury, says yes. Canterbury is trying to prove that he can live his life (from rent, to food, to the clothes on his back) with just virtual currency for an entire year. This is of course a huge publicity ploy for his online marketplace but it got my attention. “It’s a way for me to push the site to a new level and to dramatize how this economy all fits together,” says Canterbury.
Dibspace.com calls itself an “Overstock.com” for local services that trades in (yes, you guessed it) “Dibits.” One Dibit is worth one dollar but you can never cash out for real dollars. Businesses, like a local inn or a yoga studio, who have excess availability/products can post their wares/services on Dibspace. Interested consumers call “Dibs,” and then the vendor selects a consumer and invoices when the service/product has been rendered. There are multiple advantages from the small business perspective: vendors can use their credit for services from other businesses (like catering, web design) and it’s another way to bring in new clients. "With cash and clients in short supply, many are finding this new barter currency just might save them and their businesses from becoming another casualty of the economy,” says Canterbury. Meanwhile, private consumers can also post goods and services and receive Dibits for those transactions. You get 10 Dibits when you open an account, 10 Dibits for referring friends (30 if you refer a business), and 10 Dibits for posting an offer (up to 5), there is also an option to buy credits at different points throughout the year. The site is still relatively small, with just 4,000 users, but there should be enough on Dibspace for Canterbury’s venture. There are 1,500 offers on the site and roughly half-a-million dollars in goods and services have been traded (currently, the site is focused in the Puget Sound/Seattle area). Canterbury will embark on his virtual currency journey in 42 days. In the meantime, he’s preparing for the campaign by recruiting new businesses that will make it all possible. For example, he says he’s very close to getting developers on board that will let users pay for rent with Dibits.      
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| Thank You TechCrunch Sponsors! Posted: 16 Apr 2010 07:28 PM PDT
We are also still considering sponsors for our exciting New York City event, TechCrunch Disrupt that is taking place May 24th-26th. Contact us to find out about our packages. Web 2.0 Expo | Quinn Emanuel | SugarCon | SourceBits | Nexx |Firehost | Crucial |Terremark |MediaTemple | Ooyala | StrataScale | Loopt | Cotendo | OpSource Web 2.0 Expo Features stories, ideas, demos, and networking to help you create new business opportunities and make the most of the Web. Quinn Emanuel Presenting “Winning Strategies in German and European Patent Litigation” on Thursday, April 22, 2010 in Palo Alto, CA. SugarCon The 2010 SugarCRM Customer and Developer Conference dealing with the cloud, open source, and social CRM. SourceBits Provides beautiful software design and development services for the iPhone, iPad, Mobile, Mac, and Web. Nexx the premier provider of web hosting and domain registration services since 1996. Take advantage of our limited time offer now: Get a full year of UNLIMITED hosting for just $10. Firehost Web hosting. Secured. Fully managed, scalable, and compliance ready with Enterprise-level security. Crucial The memory experts; offering over 280,000 memory upgrades for more than 40,000 systems. Terremark flexible, high-performance cloud computing the way you need it, when you need it by giving you the power and control to configure resources exactly the way you need them MediaTemple Ooyala StrataScale The world’s first physical cloud. Providing hosting services without the limitations. Loopt Find and stay connected with friends while you're mobile. Join the TechCrunch community on Loopt. Cotendo Offering website performance acceleration, real time content control, and integrated CDN services. OpSource Cloud focused on providing complete Cloud operations infrastructure and service solution for every business.      
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| Google Puts Its $50 Million To Work, Starts Using Aardvark For Help Support Posted: 16 Apr 2010 06:49 PM PDT
Visit the YouTube Help page and you’ll notice a prominent link prompting users to “give Aardvark a try!”. Click that link, and you’re taken to the Aardvark homepage. Google has put an identical message on the Help page for Google Toolbar. No, it isn’t exactly deep integration, but it’s still an interesting move by Google, which has never been known for its customer support. Most Google services offer Help guides, but there’s almost never a phone number or email address to contact an actual human (which isn’t surprising given that most of these services are free). Aardvark could serve as a good compromise for Google, adding a human touch without the need to set up phone banks of support personnel. Aardvark isn’t yet featured on all Google Help pages, but I suspect we’ll see more of these links if it performs well. I decided to put Aardvark to the test with a basic (but probably common) YouTube support question: “What file formats does YouTube support, and will WMV work?”. I had my answer, complete with a link to the appropriate help article on YouTube, within around five minutes.      
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| Posted: 16 Apr 2010 04:17 PM PDT  So you have yourself a fancy new iPad, eh? Good for you. Now it's time to deck it out with all sorts of cool but expensive add-ons. You could either drop some good coin on official iPad accessories or take the more frugal route and make some of your own.
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| Posted: 16 Apr 2010 03:36 PM PDT
It’s always been difficult to get a handle on the size of Twitter because as we learned earlier this week, 75 percent of its activity occurs outside Twitter.com via third-party desktop and mobile clients. But at least we could look at Twitter.com traffic as a proxy for the overall ecosystem and get a sense of growth trend by looking at data from outside traffic measurement services. According to the latest numbers from comScore, for instance, Twitter.com attracted 79.4 million unique visitors worldwide in March, 2010, a 316 percent increase from a year ago. ComScore lists Twitter as the 30th largest site in the world now, bigger than Craigslist, Sony Online, and Expedia. But wait a second. Twitter also disclosed for the first time earlier this week that it currently has 105 million registered users and 180 million unique visitors to Twitter.com. I double-checked with Twitter, and a spokesperson confirmed the numbers are just for Twitter.com from Google Analytics. So that means comScore’s estimate is a little more than half what it should be. Talk about being way off. At 180 million unique visitors per month, Twitter would rank No. 11 in comscore’s list of largest sites, right in between Tencent (172.8 million) and CBS Interactive (190.5 million). That is assuming, of course, that comScore’s estimates for everyone else is also correct. To be fair, no other measurement service got close to the 180 million either. And 75 percent of those users came from other clients, which makes it difficult to measure because they are clicking on links in desktop and mobile clients which then open up Web pages. No matter how you slice it, Twitter is even bigger than anyone previously thought.      
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| Twitter Developers In Denial: A Teaser Video Posted: 16 Apr 2010 03:10 PM PDT
We had Loic Le Meur of Seesmic, and Nick Halsted of Tweetmeme at TechCrunch today to talk about the ongoing Twitter developer ecosystem story. It was a fairly contentious discussion as we tried to wade through all the b.s. and get to the meat of the story.
This is such a fascinating discussion, because most developers are publicly playing along, but privately trashing Twitter as having misled them into thinking that they wouldn’t compete with their third party developers. Loic finally answers the question directly at around 2 minutes into the clip, and that’s when the discussion gets interesting.      
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| Apple In Talks With AMD? Set Relationship Status To “It’s Complicated” Posted: 16 Apr 2010 03:00 PM PDT
So what’s going on here? Is Apple jumping ship, or just teasing in order to get a rise out of Intel and NVIDIA? Maybe a little of both.      
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| Tynt Gets $8 Million For Ctrl-C Action Posted: 16 Apr 2010 02:40 PM PDT
The company allows publishers to monitor copying of text on their websites. 2% of page views involve a user ctrl-c copying of text (for news sites, it’s 7%), Albinson told me today. None of that is tracked, and when that copied text is shared in emails or on social sites, there’s no link back. Tynt automatically adds a unique, trackable link back to the page in the copied text. It looks like this:
Publishers get the benefit of analytics on how much copying is being done, and they get the benefit of the link back when that content is shared. You can try it here on TechCrunch, we just added Tynt. This also gives publishers a way to see what interesting content is being copied. Albinson gave me an example of an article on the failing Detroit economy that got tons of Tynt action. But the sentence that was being copied was about how Ford was actually doing very well. That lets the publisher know what content is working at a deeper level than the article/post itself. Publishers can also add a widget to their site which shows readers what content is being copied. Some users complain about the feature because it adds content they didn’t intend to the copy. Most complaints, however, see to be around users who copy and paste into search engines. Tynt offers publishers the option of showing search results for copies of less than seven words. Try it here by selecting a couple of words and hitting ctrl-c. The service is getting big – more than 10 billion page views a month have Tynt installed, says Albinson. And some big partners are coming on this month that will jump that to 50 billion. Tynt is also doing about 100 million monthly searches from the less-than-seven-words copy feature I mentioned above. For now everything is free, but Tynt is rolling out new versions of the service this year that will bring in revenue, says Albinson.      
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| AuthorStream Brings Web-Based PowerPoint Presentations To Your iPad Posted: 16 Apr 2010 02:24 PM PDT  authorSTREAM.com, a PowerPoint sharing platform, is rolling out an iPad compatible version of its platform. Similar to SlideShare, authorSTREAM is a web-based free platform for sharing PowerPoint presentations through blogs, websites, and on sites like YouTube or an iPod. As authorStream's Jagdeep Pannu tells us, the device's lack of Flash support is an obstacle to many document sharing sites that use Adobe's technology for multimedia support. But the opportunity to view slides on the device's screen could make the user experience much more compelling. So authorStream formatted the site in HTML to be compatible with the iPad.
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| Google, Speed, and Your Local Pizza Place Posted: 16 Apr 2010 12:27 PM PDT  Editor's Note: The following guest post is by Ed Robinson. He is the CEO of Aptimize, a company that produces software to accelerate websites. A week ago, Google announced a change to how its search rankings are calculated. This change will affect every business with a web presence. At the highest level, the change means that a website's Google ranking will now be influenced by its speed. Faster websites now feature higher in search results, and slower websites drop down in the search results. While Google and others are downplaying the impact this will have on most search results, the implications of the changes are much bigger for many businesses. You might recall that load times are very important to Google itself, and they are just as important to every website. 
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| Sprout Now Lets You Simultaneously Build Rich Ads In Both HTML5 And Flash Posted: 16 Apr 2010 10:27 AM PDT
In other words, Sprout could be the magic bullet advertisers are looking for, allowing them to build ads that will work both in desktop browsers and smartphones. Today, the platform is launching a private beta to advertisers, which you can apply to here. Note that at this point, Sprout’s platform is focused completely on serving ad agencies and large businesses, so mom-and-pop shops won’t be accepted yet. Sprout’s ad builder uses drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG tools and doesn’t require any coding. CEO Carnet Williams says that while the platform is designed to be easy to use, it allows for a high level of customization, and allows advertisers to build and integrate their own ad components. One of the nifty features of the platform: even after deploying an ad, you can modify it from Sprout’s platform and the changes will be reflected immediately in the wild on both HTML5 and Flash versions of the ad. You can see an example ad that automatically switches between HTML5 and Flash depending on what your browser supports here. If the ad looks familiar, it’s probably because it’s the one that Steve Jobs showed during his presentation as an example that has interactivity but not much in the way of emotion. In other words, using Sprout doesn’t guarantee that an ad will live up to the iAd promise — the creative will be key as well.
So how does Sprout already have a HTML5 export tool available when iAd was only announced last week? Williams says that the company made a big bet over a year ago that things would be moving toward HTML5, especially given that the iPhone had shown no signs of supporting Flash. That bet looks like it may pay off. As for competitors, Williams says that Adobe’s CS5 does include some Flash-to-HTML5 exporting, but that this still requires that the advertiser know ActionScript, and it also means the advertiser has to find a way to serve the ad— Sprout’s service takes care of ad hosting. Aside from that, Williams says there aren’t many comparable options, though I suspect the field will be much more crowded very soon. We should note that the ad platform is a relatively new business for Sprout — the company has long offered tools for building Flash apps, but these tools were marketed toward consumers, not advertisers.      
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| Google Suggest Becomes More Local Posted: 16 Apr 2010 09:19 AM PDT
Google is going after local search in a big way, especially with mobile and enhanced place listings. Now it is pushing more local searches through its auto-suggest feature on Google.com. When you start typing in a keyword, the suggestions that you see are now geared to your location. Previously these were already specific to a country, but now they are by city. For example, when I enter the word “central” in New York, the top suggestion is “central park,” followed by “central park zoo” and “central hudson.” When Leena searches for the same keyword in Chicago, the second suggestion is “central time,” which shows up as No. 5 on my autosuggest list. Google also improved its spelling correction for people’s names by taking into account descriptive words in the search that provide clues as to what the person does or who they are. For instance, if you add “baseball player” or “author” it narrows down the choices. Finally, auto-suggest is now available in 31 languages.      
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When startups ask me whether they should outsource product development, I usually advise against it. If they're desperate to save money, they should outsource some testing or ancillary-product development, not core products. That's because the developers of innovative technologies need to interact with each other and be close to customers and markets. In my book, outsourcing is for corporate I.T. departments and for large companies with global operations, not for small tech companies. I said this in my 
1) Communications and customer needs. Developing a product requires a deep understanding of customer needs, and extensive user interaction. Locating R&D personnel away from customers limits the ability to develop innovative products that meet market needs.
If by "outsource" you mean throwing stuff over the wall to a third party, then I'd never advocate this for core development. If, on the other hand, you mean collaborating with a firm that possess specialized skills that you lack, are hard to find or very expensive and aligning your goals around a common outcome, then clearly I'm a fan. Firms that fail at globalizing R&D do so because they either because they pick the wrong partner (i.e., one that lacks the R&D DNA and does not specialize in the firm's domain) or because they throw stuff over the wall and don't invest in the intimate collaboration and goal alignment that true R&D requires. Most IT services firms make poor product development partners because they focus on compliance and optimization, which suppresses innovation. By contrast, GlobalLogic has created a network of global innovation hubs that are made up of some of the brightest and most innovative software minds. Our software professionals are connected by a platform that supports Agile collaboration and that is designed exclusively for the purpose of accelerating breakthrough products to market. We are doing this successfully for a "who's who" of the technology sector, from the very tiny to the very large. That said, let me respond to each of your points in turn.
We would like to take a minute to thank all of our amazing sponsors for keeping our lights on, our bellies full, and our fridge stocked with diet coke!
Two months ago, Google 
We’ll post the full video tomorrow, but here’s a teaser where I debate Loic on 
Last week during Apple’s iPhone 4.0 Preview, Steve Jobs 
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