The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Online Advertising Revenues Climb Out Of The Trough, Boosted By Search, Display, And Video
- Over One Third Of iPad-Only Apps Are Games (And More Stats)
- Medialets’ Universal SDK Gets Android-Friendly
- TSA: Your iPad Should Make It Through Airport Security Without Hassle
- Stuart Hughes’ Privé Phone Proves Money Can’t Buy Taste
- Gemvara Raises $5.2 Million For Custom Jewelry Shopping Online
- Quirky Raises $6 Million For Social Product Development Platform
- Our Multimedia Olympics Obsession
- Burst Media Acquires UK Advertising Network OTP Media
- Mobile Ad Network Millennial Media Unveils iPad SDK And New Ad Formats
- Groupon Clones Pop Up Like Mushrooms In The United States, Too
- PayPal’s iPhone App Hits 1 Million Downloads In Under 3 Weeks
- Box.net Raises $15 Million To Take On Microsoft SharePoint In The Cloud
- Gone With The Wind: Flying.com Sells For $1.1 Million
- UnitedParents To Provide Early Warning Against Online Predators, Cyberbullies
- Plaxo Doubles Address Book Traffic, Raises Ambitions
- A Conversation with Greylock’s Reid Hoffman and David Sze [Full Video]
- Screw You, Benioff
- So High Valuations Are Back. But Does that Mean You Want One? [Video]
- Launch: OpenSky Wants To Turn Bloggers Into Sellers Without Sacrificing Their Souls
- Trulia Enters The Real Estate Rental Market And Starts Collecting Location Ratings
- ScienceLogic Raises $15 Million For Cloud And Data Center Monitoring Services
- Greylock Bats off Market Concerns, Calls Pandora an IPO Candidate [Video]
- How “Dirty” MP3 Files Are A Back Door Into Cloud DRM
- Fox And Sony Throw Blockbuster Another Lifeline
| Online Advertising Revenues Climb Out Of The Trough, Boosted By Search, Display, And Video Posted: 07 Apr 2010 08:55 AM PDT
The online advertising industry climbed out of last year’s recession in the fourth quarter. New data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PriceWaterhouseCoopers shows that online advertising revenues in the U.S. climbed 2.6 percent annually in the fourth quarter to $6.3 billion, and were up 13.8 percent from the previous quarter. These U.S.-only numbers compare to 10.2 percent annual worldwide growth last quarter in Internet advertising revenues for the four largest Web companies. Industry revenues for the year as a whole were down 3.4 percent to $22.7 billion. It was the first year of declining revenues since 2001.
Here’s how that $22.7 billion broke down by advertising category:
Search: $10.7 billion (47 percent) Search and Display revenues both managed to grow for the year, up 1 percent and 4 percent, respectively. The other categories were all down between 14 and 29 percent. Some of the surprising relative strength of Display advertising came from video ads, which reached $1 billion and accounted for 4 percent of the total. In the fourth quarter, video ads made up 5 percent of the pie.      
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| Over One Third Of iPad-Only Apps Are Games (And More Stats) Posted: 07 Apr 2010 08:52 AM PDT
It’s still early days, but app store analytics company Distimo is already diving into the App Store for iPad, gathering some data and analyzing the results. More specifically, the startup has compared some preliminary data for iPad-only applications across multiple categories in the App Store with its findings on iPhone apps. Distimo tracked 2,385 unique iPad applications in the marketplace as of 6 April, which is significantly less than the 3,000+ apps Mobclix accounted for on April 4. Perhaps Mobclix counted the applications in the App Store that were available for both iPhone and iPad, while Distimo only looked at iPad-exclusive apps, which would explain the difference (we’re awaiting a response from Mobclix to learn more about their counting methodology). Out of those 2.385 iPad-specific apps, Distimo found that the ‘Games’ category is by far the largest with 833 titles (35%), followed by ‘Entertainment’ with 260 apps (11%) and ‘Education’ with 205 titles (8.6%), respectively. The – relatively – smaller categories include ‘Weather’ (17 apps), ‘Navigation’ (18 apps) and, perhaps surprisingly, ‘Finance’ (with 21 apps).
When comparing categories across devices, ‘Games’ and ‘Entertainment’ applications appear to be even more popular on the iPhone than on the iPad: 70% of the most popular apps on the iPhone are published in either of those two categories, compared to 40% on the iPad. We should note that there are more than 150,000 apps for the iPhone today, so take any comparisons to the less than 2,400 iPad apps with a grain of salt. That said, it’s hardly surprising that games and entertainment apps are clearly the most popular categories for both the iPhone and the iPad – both devices come with a high-quality touchscreen, boast powerful processors and are excellent for content consumption as well as playing anything from simple games fit for kids to complicated ones that require advanced gaming skills. But if the iPad, and by extension other potent tablet computers, will ever replace laptops (like some contend) is a whole different story imho. Also, note the difference in percentages for the ‘Business’, ‘Productivity’ and ‘News’ categories.
Now let’s take a look at pricing. Distimo found that 83% of applications for the iPad are paid, compared to 73% of all applications for the iPhone. We’ll see how this evolves in the future, but I’d wager that both will end up at approximately 25% free vs. 75% paid in the long run. Also worth noting: the average price of all paid applications that are solely compatible with the iPad is $3.61, compared to $3.55 for applications compatible with the iPhone.
Medical applications are most expensive on both the iPad ($9.39 on average) and iPhone ($10.73). On the contrary, ‘Education’ ($9.10), ‘Healthcare & Fitness’ ($4.41), ‘Music’ ($6.86) and ‘Sports’ ($4.95) applications are significantly more expensive on the iPad. Contrary, books are currently cheaper on the iPad than on the iPhone, which could be explained by the availability of the iBookstore on the iPad right out the gate.
Again, we’ll have to see how iPad owners respond to differences in pricing levels across categories over time before jumping to any conclusions.      
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| Medialets’ Universal SDK Gets Android-Friendly Posted: 07 Apr 2010 08:50 AM PDT
With the Android SDK, Medialets allows advertisers to create and deliver the mobile specific ads across both Android devices and iPhones. Similar to the universal SDK for iPhone and iPad, the Android SDK will allows publishers to modify and change their ad tags from various networks without having to update their app. As the Android platform continues to grow, more and more mobile ad networks are launching Android specific platforms, making Medialets offering appealing. The SDK works with any first or third party ad sever, network or mediator, including AdMob tags. As we’ve written in the past, Medialets promises rich media and display advertising on mobile phones that provides deeper engagement with users. In fact, engagement is a primary measurement that the ad platform focuses on when determining the success of its advertising campaigns. But developers and advertisers may be more beholden to click-through rates, which Medialets claim are between 1 and 8 percent. However, eight percent seems a bit high, considering that other rich media mobile ad platforms, including Greystripe and AdMob, are seeing between 1 and 2 percent, in terms of click-through rates. But Medialets has seen considerable success with its universal SDK offering, most recently striking a deal with The New York Times to use the startup’s rich media ad units for the Times’ iPad app. With the popularity of Medialets’ universal product, I imagine that other mobile ad networks will develop their own universal SDKs in due time.      
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| TSA: Your iPad Should Make It Through Airport Security Without Hassle Posted: 07 Apr 2010 08:45 AM PDT  Good news for iPad-owning travelers: the Transportation Security Administration says that you won't have to remove Apple's magical and revolutionary device from your bag while you go through airport security. That's the official word, at least, but I can just picture the helpful staff (...) at Newark or JFK demanding you remove it from your bag anyway.
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| Stuart Hughes’ Privé Phone Proves Money Can’t Buy Taste Posted: 07 Apr 2010 08:10 AM PDT  Is your StarTAC looking run down? Does it not draw the attention that it once did? It's time for an upgrade. Don't let the technology of the recent decades cloud your judgement when choosing your new phone. Think, and I mean seriously think, about the time when talking on a mobile phone was at its most impressive. That's right, all the way back to 1983. What better way to truly impress your board-room buddies than with a literal homage to the golden era of telecommunication?
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| Gemvara Raises $5.2 Million For Custom Jewelry Shopping Online Posted: 07 Apr 2010 08:00 AM PDT
The new site allows customers to choose from a variety of jewelry designs submitted by artists and designers. Customers can customize each of these designs using one of 7 metals and 16 gemstones (and the number of options is growing), and the piece is manufactured ‘just-in-time’. The artists who designed each piece receive a commission every time one of their works is sold, which generally ranges between 1-10% (and is usually around 5%). Lauzon says that the company will still support the nearly fifty jewelers who have Gemvara’s kiosks already in their stores, but that Gemvara has shifted its focus to its consumer-facing site because it sees a bigger opportunity there. The Boston-based company now has 22 employees. Other online jewelers include Blue Nile, Ice.com, and Amazon.
     
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| Quirky Raises $6 Million For Social Product Development Platform Posted: 07 Apr 2010 07:41 AM PDT
As we reported in our initial review of the site, Quirky is a platform for product ideas that are born on napkin doodles and in other unorthodox ways. The site then tries to use crowdsourcing to develop the product, by engaging participants in collaborating on every aspect of product creation – from ideation, design, naming, manufacturing, marketing, to sales. It’s like a social network for product development. Founded by serial entrepreneur Ben Kaufman (he created mophie and kluster), Quirky lets users submit their product idea for $99. Users can also vote, rate, and influence other people’s product ideas. Every week users can post ideas on quirky to be rated by the quirky community. After a seven day evaluation period, the quirky community chooses one product from the pool of submitted ideas to move forward through the process. Quirky’s community engages and contributes to every part of the product’s development, weighing in on everything from naming to logo selection to packaging. Since the site’s launch last summer, the platform and its community have helped developed 12 different products, including a cord untangler, and a portable mug spoon. The new funding will be used towards the construction of a full-scale rapid prototyping shop, the hiring of a global sales force, greater retail distribution, 24-hour design and engineering capacities, and added interactive collaboration tools. Quirky is similar to one of Kaufman’s previous ventures, NameThis, and other sites IdeaBlob and Innocentive.      
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| Our Multimedia Olympics Obsession Posted: 07 Apr 2010 07:23 AM PDT
It was no surprise that the Olympics was a ratings blockbuster for NBC. The network’s ratings more than doubled during February Sweeps, up 105% from last year, according to Nielsen and RBC Capital Markets research. The interesting footnote, however, is GE’s cross-platform success on the Web and mobile. According to RBC Capital Market’s latest report, “Media and Entertainment: 1Q10 Preview & Outlook,” one third of the people watching the Olympics on their television were also on NBC’s website. We may have stomped our feet and threw Twitter tantrums in response to NBC’s frustrating coverage—including chronic tape delays and the never-ending parade of the Marriage Ref. ads (Kelly Ripa’s laugh still echoes in my head)—but we watched, we clicked and we downloaded again and again. We watched Kim Yu-Na win the gold medal on live television then checked commentary online, we tracked the live blogging of the alpine skiers and watched a live web stream of curling. When we weren’t online many of us were fiddling with our Olympics iPhone apps. In total, 1.2 million iPhone users downloaded NBC’s Olympics app. Reflecting on the growing success of cross-platform strategies, RBC notes: “Content owners haven't found a way to monetize this kind of activity in any material way yet and it's not clear how they can. But if it ultimately leads to more hours in front of the TV, increased engagement and meeting consumer preferences becomes a benefit even without direct monetization.” To further illustrate the shift in media consumption habits, the report brings up the case of Entourage. In 2004 all of the ratings came from HBO channels, five years later in 2009, 54% came from HBO channels, 25% were video on demand, and 21% were DVR. As viewers diversify their media usage and spend more time online, we could see price drops. In the report, RBC predicts that Apple may win its battle to drop TV show prices to 99 cents from $1.99. “If Apple can prove that price elasticity is such that lowering the price of TV episodes to only $0.99 could materially accelerate the consumption of download-to-own TV episodes, we'd expect the TV networks to move more aggressively on pricing to help alleviate some of the slackening demand in DVD-related TV content.” In other words, as people shift from DVDs to downloads, lowering the price of those downloads will help spur the growth of that market.      
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| Burst Media Acquires UK Advertising Network OTP Media Posted: 07 Apr 2010 06:21 AM PDT
Founded in 2002, OTP Media is one of the largest online advertising networks in the U.K. and focused on on premium advertising across a number of verticals including parenting, automotive, sport, food and entertainment. Burst was the 16th largest ad network in the U.K. in February 2010, reaching nearly 12.3 million unique viewers, and OTP will be used to boost Burst’s ranking as a network. Burst just acquired entertainment ad network Giant Realm for $2.1 million, also in an effort to create a appealing ad network.      
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| Mobile Ad Network Millennial Media Unveils iPad SDK And New Ad Formats Posted: 07 Apr 2010 05:54 AM PDT
Millennial Media's iPad SDK is code complete, and will be deployed after testing with beta publishers on-device is finalized this week. Developers will be able to download the SDK through Millennial’s developer portal. For advertisers, Millennial Media is releasing its PadMedia Creative Suite, which includes standard mobile ad units and new unique ad formats for the iPad. These include floating canvas, where a rich media ad will expand upon click, attempting to leverage the canvas of the iPad; RTP (Return-to-Play), which is an ad unit that allows consumers to respond to an ad, pausing their application experience and resuming when they are ready; Motion Creative, which allows ad units to become interactive when the user turns or rotates the iPad in different ways; and full-page Interstitials, which are full-page ads that appear upon application launch or during transition in game play. Millennial is now one of the largest mobile ad networks in and U.S. According to Nielsen, Millennial Media reaches 83 percent of 72 million mobile web users, across every mobile platform. And the Baltimore-based startup is growing; in February Millennial Media acquired mobile metrics and analytics firm TapMetrics. Additionally, the ad network raised $16 million in Series C funding last November. Of course, like many of its fellow ad networks, Millennial finds itself in a perplexing situation in the space. It’s unclear how Google’s acquisition of AdMob (although this may be derailed) and Apple’s acquisition of Quattro Wireless will effect the other ad networks in the space. And Apple is announcing its mobile ad plans tomorrow. If anything, these networks will now have to compete with two of the largest companies in the world. But Millennial Media is wise to being offering innovative ad formats for the iPad and should be able to stand on its own if these formats ends of producing high click through rates.      
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| Groupon Clones Pop Up Like Mushrooms In The United States, Too Posted: 07 Apr 2010 05:43 AM PDT
Websites offering deals on a daily basis are popping up all over the place. In Russia, the strategy is apparently to copy the entire website design and business model of one of the most promising companies in this space, Groupon, while in Germany Daily Deal battles with City Deal and the UK has more than its share of group buying websites. But it’s not like the concept isn’t catching on and ‘inspiring’ opportunistic entrepreneurs in the United States as well – much to the contrary, there’s been a surge of new daily deals websites in those parts too over the past couple of weeks alone. The team behind Yipit, which recently launched as a one-stop shop offering a clear, aggregated overview of deals on the Web, have been tracking this space closely and poured the data collected to date in a couple of telling graphs. When Yipit launched a little over a month and a half ago (!), the startup could already identify 30 daily-deal Web services. Today, the company tracks deals from no less than 66 Groupon-like websites across the United States, more than double the number it counted less than two months ago. Needless to say, this makes Yipit’s value proposition more attractive, too.
Some other well-known companies in this space besides Groupon include LivingSocial, Ideeli and Tippr, but as you can tell from the graphs above, there are many more. Yipit is intend on riding the wave of daily deal services increasing in numbers and popularity quickly, and is keen on expanding to more cities in the near future. Today, the company aggregates deals for Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, but promises cities like Atlanta, Las Vegas and even London will be added soon. Yipit has so far attracted over 10,000 registered users, and claims those have collectively saved $100,000 after finding out about some 18,000 deals in the first month since its launch in mid-February. The company is now setting up city-specific Twitter accounts (e.g. @YipitSF for San Francisco) to distribute the most popular daily deals in each of the covered markets. Last but not least: Yipit just raised $250,000 from friends and family.      
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| PayPal’s iPhone App Hits 1 Million Downloads In Under 3 Weeks Posted: 07 Apr 2010 05:20 AM PDT
Ecommerce giant eBay has been reaching big milestones with its mobile apps, and apparently PayPal, its electronic payments subsidiary, is striking a chord with mobile users around the globe as well. The company, which boasts more than 81 million active accounts in 190 markets and 24 currencies around the world, says its new iPhone app (iTunes link) has been downloaded an impressive one million times in less than three weeks since its debut. With the new PayPal Mobile iPhone app, users can split restaurant checks, collect money for events, set reminders for recurring payments, donate to their favorite causes and manage their PayPal accounts. Thanks to an integration with Bump Technologies, users can exchange information and quickly close PayPal transactions simply by ‘bumping’ (tapping) their smartphones together. PayPal Mobile supports fifteen languages and also features a global currency calculator. It has been in the App Store, free of charge, since mid-2008. The company also boasts applications for Android and Blackberry devices, but to date hasn’t released download numbers for those platforms.      
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| Box.net Raises $15 Million To Take On Microsoft SharePoint In The Cloud Posted: 07 Apr 2010 04:22 AM PDT
Since its launch in 2005, Box.net has steadily been growing its cloud-based content management system, and has now accumulated more than 4 million users, with hundreds of thousands of businesses using the application. And the startup is seeing top line growth, with a 500% rise in revenue from 2008 to 2009, and a record first quarter – up 300% from Q1 2009 – thanks to deals with the Oprah Winfrey Network, Volvo, and Nokia Siemens are using Box.net (Box declined to give us exact revenue numbers). And Box.net has made its abundantly clear on who its sees as its main competitor: Microsoft’s content management application SharePoint. If you’ve has driven on the U.S. 101, you may have seen the billboard ad Box.net had displayed prominently last summer on the stretch between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The ad asked SharePoint users to try Box.net with the promise that if they didn't prefer Box, the startup would foot the bill for three months of SharePoint. And in February, the startup posted the billboard displayed below:
You get the picture. So is Box eating away at Sharepoint’s marketshare? Levie seems to think so. He tells me that that Box is capitalizing on the trend of the “consumerification of the enterprise.” Levie says that the social, collaborative nature of Box and the interconnectivity of Box.net’s management platform makes it simple for enterprise users to essentially use the application from beyond the office walls, and across all kinds of applications and devices. There are a variety of ways Box is accomplishing this vast level of integration for its users. Box.net launched integrations with the recently launched Google Apps Marketplace, with Salesforce.com, with LinkedIn, and other business applications. Box also launched a new version of its iPhone application, that integrates with QuickOffice, and just a few days ago brought its content management platform to the iPad with what appears to be an innovative Box App for the device. And Box’s mobile strategy won’t be Apple-exclusive; the startup is developing an Android app at the moment. Plus, Box is working to improve the collaborative capabilities of its platform. Last Fall, Box acquired Increo Solutions, the makers of the Backboard and embedit.in products, in order to integrate the collaboration and annotation functionality from Backboard. The company also launched an integrated Flash file viewer earlier this year that allows users to immediately view over 20 file types from their browser, including most common document formats, images (including Photoshop), audio, and video.      
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| Gone With The Wind: Flying.com Sells For $1.1 Million Posted: 07 Apr 2010 03:07 AM PDT
We’ve seen (and reported on) a couple of premium .com domain names that were sold for 7 or even 8 figure sums in recent times (off the top of my head: Insure.com for $16 million, Toys.com for $5.1 million, Candy.com for $3 million, Ad.com for $1.4 million, and so on). This morning, a company called UsedAirplanes, Inc. purchased the domain name Flying.com and intends to set up a dedicated site displaying all of its the used airplanes and aircraft from the company's flagship website UsedAirplanes.com as of June 2010. Says Mark J Horne, President & CEO of UsedAirplanes:
That doesn’t, of course, necessarily mean that people who search for this particular keyword are going to wind up on Flying.com, and even if they do there’s only a small chance that they’d be interested in purchasing a Cessna or two. In that regard, it seems like a bit of an expensive purchase to make – for comparison, the domain name Fly.com was sold to Travelzoo for about $1.8 million last year and now directs to a website where people can compare hundreds of travel sites in one search. Regardless of its (imo) steep price, UsedAirplanes says it is currently looking to acquire more digital media companies and websites. And in case you’re interested in its history: Flying.com has been online since 1994 and has provided information and links to and within the aviation industry up until September 2009, when it was bought for an undisclosed amount (although the price on the day of the sale was set to $845,000, apparently). The identity of the seller is unknown. The first (beta) version of the new Flying.com will be launched on June 1, 2010, and according to the placeholder website that’s live today it will be “the first community and social media based portal for flying”. UsedAirplanes says it will provide a new and additional sales channel for the brokers that currently list their inventory on their main website. And for all you iPad owners out there: the company promises that the new website will be developed with Apple’s new tablet in mind from the ground up (pun intended).      
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| UnitedParents To Provide Early Warning Against Online Predators, Cyberbullies Posted: 07 Apr 2010 02:23 AM PDT
UnitedParents’ consumer product is a downloadable piece of software (Windows only for now) that monitors children’s online activity. The product will initially latch onto the more popular Instant Messaging apps such as those by ICQ, AIM, MSN, and Yahoo, but will expand to include online chat modules such as that of Facebook’s. Further down the road, the product will also monitor email and public chat rooms. UnitedParents’ software keeps track of the child’s online activity, monitoring over thirty parameters along his or her path. Using analysis, the technology is able to create profiles of the persons the child has engaged with and of the relationships themselves. Once a predator or bully is identified, UnitedParents creates a sort of fingerprint that it propagates across its network. Doing so allows it to track this person and alert potential next cases very early on, theoretically before any harm is done to the next child in line. Parents will be alerted by way of email and in more urgent cases, via SMS. The alerts will provide parents with information on why the alert was sent (e.g. when their 14-year old daughter has been chatting with someone UnitedParents has assessed to be in his 30’s and that is attempting to have her send him photos although she does not really want to). The company also intends to offer their solution to social networks and online communities that operate chat environments for children. The consumer product which will be marketed to parents of children ages 9 to 17 will be priced at under $100 when it officially ships in a few months. In the meantime you can sign-up for the beta by emailing beta@unitedparents.com      
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| Plaxo Doubles Address Book Traffic, Raises Ambitions Posted: 06 Apr 2010 11:29 PM PDT
As we become tethered to a growing number of social media sites, the contact information of our social network inevitably becomes more fragmented. Digital address books and tools like Gist, Xobni and Plaxo are trying to organize the white noise but no one has created the definitive hub. Plaxo wants to be the Google of digital address books but the newly minted CEO, Justin Miller, knows it will be a difficult and long slog. Calling itself “Your Address Book For Life,” Plaxo synchs your address books and pulls in social data from more than 30 sites (like Twitter, Yelp, Flickr) through its Pulse service. The company is trying to design new products to enhance the service including a “smart search” tool that will essentially act like an executive assistant using special algorithms to comb the web and the Plaxo database around the clock to keep your directory up to date, according to Miller. That feature should be released later this year. The site currently has 20 million members in the Plaxo network and hosts roughly 50 million address books— online address book page views are up 100% year over year according to VP of Marketing, John McCrea. Looking across the horizon, Plaxo has grander ambitions. Ultimately, the goal is to help users access their address book across a multitude of electronic platforms— not just your phone and laptop. McCrea envisions a time when you will be able to hop into your car, turn on your navigation device, say a friend’s name, prompting the device to pull up data from your cloud address book and guide you to their location. That’s of course not in the immediate future. For now, the company is still working on an app for the iPad. Meanwhile, Plaxo (which was purchased by Comcast in 2008 for roughly $150 to $170 million) is still trying to distance itself from a somewhat controversial past. In 2006 it wrestled with spam allegations and in early 2008 Plaxo came under fire for its data scraping techniques. All of that has been put to rest since the acquisition but the company acknowledges that there’s still a lot of work left on the PR front. Miller and the VP of Marketing, John McCrea, dropped by our office to chat about their long term strategy, cleaning up their image and working with Facebook: Here are a few excerpts from the transcript: On the challenge of creating the definitive smart address book: Miller: I think when you look back over the history of Plaxo starting in 2002, there was a great idea. Which is if everyone would put their information, their contact information, on Plaxo and they got their friends to do it when anyone updated their information all of our information would be updated and that’s great. The problem is not everyone joined Plaxo and not everyone keeps their information up to date. And so what we’re able to do, what we’re working on doing now is looking at how we can pull information from everywhere, around the web pull that together for you. But what’s taken so long, over that time, we’ve started looking at different opportunities. So a couple of years ago Plaxo started getting more and more into social networking it was this great space. And then more recently we started looking at business networking another great space but Facebook and LinkedIn are doing pretty well there right now. And recently we said you know what, there’s this need, this unsolved, unsatisfied need to create one place where people can come get all their addresses, and address book, contact information…together. On Facebook: McCrea: Scoblegate happened at a point and time where we weren’t collectively ready to understand the implications of users owning their data, having access to that data through open APIs, but now there’s clearly a march away from the walled gardens toward openness and operability…In a lot of ways this is a technical problem as it is any other. On Spam: Miller: “The perception of spam still exists in some people’s mind. It’s something that I’m really focused on when we think what the brand is. There’s a couple things we’ve gone through in terms of the history, one is spam, the perception of spam. And as John said everyone is doing it and it’s not really spam but you have that perception in people’s mind. Number two is: “Oh Plaxo is social network isn’t it?” or “Oh, Plaxo is a business network isn’t it?” No. We’re not spam, we’re not a social network, we’re not a business network, we are really focused on creating the best, smart, socially aware and pervasive address book.”      
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| A Conversation with Greylock’s Reid Hoffman and David Sze [Full Video] Posted: 06 Apr 2010 10:35 PM PDT
Following the two teasers from earlier, here’s the full video from when Reid Hoffman and David Sze of Greylock stopped by the TechCrunch offices last week to answer Mike Arrington’s questions about valuations, the state of venture capital, and their portfolio companies. They wriggled out of many of the detail-oriented questions like when companies like Zynga, Facebook and LinkedIn would go public and how much revenue they’re each bringing in. But we still got some great gems from two of the best investors in the consumer Internet. It’s required watching if you plan on pitching Greylock or any top investor anytime soon.      
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| Posted: 06 Apr 2010 10:29 PM PDT
“I’ve got some news and I had to talk to you in person about it.” Damnit. I knew right then I wouldn’t like the “news.” And sure enough, he’s taken another job. Starting monday he’ll be on the senior team (senior as in high level, not as in old) at Salesforce. Founder Marc Benioff recruited him directly. “You bastard.” (I tend to take these things personally) Now I know why Benioff has been writing regular guest posts for us. It’s because he’s feeling guilty over stealing Steve from us, obviously. Of course I’m also happy for Steve, and the new job is a terrific opportunity. And graciously Steve has agreed to continue writing every week or so for us, and of course you can follow him on Twitter at @stevegillmor. In some ways things will remain the same with us and Steve. But it’s still a sad day at TechCrunch. I was listening to Steve on the Gillmor Gang long before I ever started TechCrunch. And I miss the old days when Steve, Dave Winer and I used to meet for breakfast in Burlingame most weekends. You can read all of Steve’s posts on TechCrunchIT over the years here. He’s been a technology journalist for something like 30 years, back almost to the beginning of, well, tech reporting. And I’m not exaggerating when I say that Steve has forgotten more things than I’ll ever learn. Steve doesn’t bother much with details, he goes right at the big trends. And he’s usually right. Way before most other people are. Controversial? Yes. Long winded? Yep. Occasionally non linear in his thinking? Understatement. But he’s also brilliant, and he’s always guided me towards rightness. We recorded a short exit interview video for posterity. Good luck, Steve. I hope to see you around the office regularly.      
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| So High Valuations Are Back. But Does that Mean You Want One? [Video] Posted: 06 Apr 2010 09:04 PM PDT
If a valuation is bid up too high, future rounds are a challenge and a company can be opened up to downrounds that squeeze out common stock—typically the shares held by the people actually building the company. Angel investors can also get squeezed out in downrounds, since many of them don't invest along a company's entire life-cycle and that could be bad for future relationships. There are other subtle ways a nose-bleed valuation can change a startup's culture. It was, after all, at the time of Facebook's $15 billion Microsoft valuation that the company suddenly went from David to Goliath, opening itself up to that Harvard lawsuit and the attentions of mercenary employees and other types of gold-diggers. The natural caveat here is that VCs have a vested interest in telling you to keep your valuations low—they get a slice of your company for cheap. But a good many entrepreneurs swear by this rule too. As Hoffman says below, "You want to plan for the entire length and history of the company." We end this clip with some more tough love advice for those pitching Greylock: If you're comparing yourself to existing hot companies, you probably don't have a new enough idea. Update: full interview here.      
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| Launch: OpenSky Wants To Turn Bloggers Into Sellers Without Sacrificing Their Souls Posted: 06 Apr 2010 08:57 PM PDT
Any good blogger or “influencer” is a natural salesman, but what he or she sells (typically) are ideas or a lifestyle, not actual goods. John Caplan, the CEO of OpenSky, thinks he can turn influencers with a loyal audience into sellers without necessarily selling out. “Why aren't we buying goods from the people we like and respect?” he asks, bemoaning the impersonal and distant relationships we have with online merchants. But there are plenty of bloggers and writers who pretty much all they do is recommend products and services. Food bloggers, beauty bloggers, fashion bloggers, design bloggers, health bloggers, sports bloggers, you name it. Pretty much any kind of advice that could once be found in a women’s or men’s magazine can now be found online, and many of them have small but loyal audiences. The only way they can make money from their influence is through ads or affiliate networks or underhanded pay-per-posts. Caplan, who previously was the president of About.com and then CEO of Ford Models, thinks he’s found a better way. He raised a $5 million Series A in May 2009 from Highland Capital, Canaan Partners and Ron Conway. OpenSky helps bloggers like Kath Younger of KathEats, chef Michael Ruhlman, and Marta Wohrle of Truth In Aging set up stores with products that they recommend and get a cut of each sale. “Ecommerce revenue is catching up with ad revenue and is on track to exceed it this year,” reports Wohrle, who reviews cosmetics and “anti-aging” products. While OpenSky sounds at first like an affiliate network, it isn’t. Instead of sending customers off to other online stores, they send them to their own stores where they can track sales and follow up with personalized messages. OpenSky hand picks the publishers who are allowed to set up shops and sell in its network. It then strikes deals directly with manufacturers and distributors who agree to drop-ship any sold items to readers who click to buy through an OpenSky shop. Instead of the blogger getting a 3 to 10 percent affiliate fee, they split the net profits 50/50 with OpenSky. The economics work best obviously with high-margin products. There are 250 publishers currently in OpenSky’s private beta and 500 manufacturers. Publishers only get paid when somebody actually buys a product, and if it is returned within a year they get a debit on their account. The system is set up to reward selling stuff you really care and know about. “We sell things that I love and are often hard to get hold of,” says Wohrle. “My newsletter subscribers get a discount and we work really hard with the manufacturers to get good deals exclusively for us.” (You can check out her store here). But isn’t this just hucksterism by another name? Inevitably there will be a lot of that as OpenSky itself opens up to more and more seller-bloggers. OpenSky works with Twitter and Facebook too, where it becomes more of a hard sell. But what OpenSky has going for it is that everything is, well, out in the open. There is no question of whether a brand or manufacturer paid for a post or gave influential bloggers free products. The bloggers are selling the products themselves and readers can make their own judgements about whether or not they are hucksters or genuine. The hucksters will lose their audience (and their souls). The authentic ones will grow their audience and get rich telling them what to buy. Or at least that’s the story John Caplan is selling.
     
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| Trulia Enters The Real Estate Rental Market And Starts Collecting Location Ratings Posted: 06 Apr 2010 08:55 PM PDT
Real estate search engine Trulia is launching rental listings for the first time in an attempt to broaden its offerings from home sales listings. Competitors such as Zillow and Realtor.com already offer home and apartment rental listings, but at a time when up to a third of people looking for a new place to live in the U.S. are still on the fence about buying, going after renters is an obvious strategy. Trulia is leveraging its existing relationships with real estate brokers and other sources of real estate listings to jumpstart its rentals offering. CEO Pete Flint says that Trulia’s rental listings are more comprehensive at launch than his competitors, with millions of units nationwide. In New York City alone, Trulia lists 25,000 apartments for rent, compared to 65,000 nationwide (and 3,600 in NYC) for Zillow, according to Flint. Home ownership levels are down across the country. Going after renters makes sense. I caught up with Flint on Monday in New York City. He explains the new rental and location rating products in the video above: Along with the launch of rental listings, Trulia is also introducing location ratings. These will be geo-coded and tied to a neighborhood or similar area. Visitors to Trulia’s site can rate any location based on schools, traffic, safety, parking, cleanliness, and other attributes. These will be bundled up into an overall rating. Once Trulia collects enough ratings, it will begin showing them on color-coded maps along with reviews of the location itself. The screenshot below is a mockup of how this might look on Trulia’s site when it launches in a couple weeks (the final design will very likely change, but this gives you a good idea). Also this location rating and review data could become very valuable for other sites and mobile apps which might want to integrate it into their own services. Flint hopes to be able to open up the data via APIs eventually.
     
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| ScienceLogic Raises $15 Million For Cloud And Data Center Monitoring Services Posted: 06 Apr 2010 08:50 PM PDT
ScienceLogic’s EM7 IT Management System is designed to monitor datacenter resources, mobile and remote assets and public and hybrid cloud resources all from a single console. The bootstrapped company seems to be growing fast, according to these numbers from Inc Magazine. The company grew its revenue over 500 percent from 2005 to 2008, with 2008’s sales coming in at $5.9 million. While data center management is a needed application for IT departments, cloud management is hot right now and enterprise companies are waking up to this. For example, CA just acquired cloud monitoring startup Nimsoft Nimsoft for $350 million, along with a number of other purchases of cloud-related monitoring companies. With its cash flow profitability and valuable technology, ScienceLogic could become an acquisition target in no time.      
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| Greylock Bats off Market Concerns, Calls Pandora an IPO Candidate [Video] Posted: 06 Apr 2010 08:40 PM PDT
We’ll be posting the full interview soon, but first here’s a sneak peak, including this bold statement from Sze about the funds the firm has been investing over the last five-to-seven years: "We think those will be our best funds ever." Ever? That's a claim I can't imagine many Silicon Valley firms making—especially those that were in business during the late 1990s when nearly anything could go public. Later in the video below, Sze noted that Greylock had three of the five potential blockbuster Web IPO candidates on most bankers' and analysts' short list: Facebook, LinkedIn and Pandora. As you can see in the video that last one caught Arrington by surprise and with good reason: A little more than a year ago Pandora was still on deathwatch. We knew it was profitable but, if it's being bandied about as an IPO-hopeful, things may be even better than people realize. The good thing about being the only online music company to live long enough to go public is you don't have a ton of competition. And, of course, if you count Reid Hoffman's personal investment and seat on Zynga's board, Greylock has tentacles in four of the top five Web IPO candidates, Twitter being the one missing. Note: We're talking about potential billion-dollar-market-cap-and-up-style IPOs that tend to make or break a firm's returns, not the smaller-sized issues in registration now. Is there another firm that can boast the same hat trick? Sequoia Capital—usually the firm that owns every big Web hit—has LinkedIn and had YouTube, but missed Facebook, Zynga and Twitter. Kleiner Perkins has just Zynga. Founders Fund was the firs institutional investor in Facebook, and Peter Thiel personally is an investor in LinkedIn. Fred Wilson's Union Square Ventures comes close with early investments in Twitter and Zynga. Of course we're just speculating until those IPOs actually price, but if things go according to plan Greylock could be the new top dog in the consumer Web game. One final note: We asked Hoffman which of the three companies he's involved in, Zynga, Facebook and LinkedIn, would likely go public first. It the past, he's speculated away when I asked that. This time Mike got a terse, "Unfortunately, being on the LinkedIn board and the Zynga board, it’s something I have knowledge about, so, I cannot comment on." Do I smell a LinkedIn S-1? Update: full interview here.      
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| How “Dirty” MP3 Files Are A Back Door Into Cloud DRM Posted: 06 Apr 2010 07:16 PM PDT
All the big music sellers may have moved to non-DRM MP3 files long ago, but the watermarking of files with your personal information continues. Most users who buy music don’t know about the marking of files, or don’t care. Unless those files are uploaded to BitTorrent or other P2P networks, there isn’t much to worry about. A list of which music services are selling clean MP3 files without embedded personal information, and which aren’t, is here. Apple, LaLa (owned by Apple) and Walmart embed personal information. Amazon, Napster and the rest have resisted label pressure to do so. A music industry insider who’s asked to remain anonymous writes to us:
Cloud Music And The New DRMApple, Google and Amazon are all reportedly in discussions with big labels to provide a cloud music service. These services will allow users to purchase rights to stream music, and they will also allow syncing of songs on your hard drive already so you can play those without repurchasing them (this was the original LaLa model). The labels, say our source, are demanding that a user can only stream music that is watermarked to their username. Change the username, or try to stream music that you’ve ripped from a CD, and those songs won’t play. In other words, it’s DRM déjà vu all over again.      
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| Fox And Sony Throw Blockbuster Another Lifeline Posted: 06 Apr 2010 07:10 PM PDT
Additionally, Blockbuster will get favorable payments terms from the studios in return for a lien on some assets involving Blockbuster Canada. So basically Blockbuster is giving them Blockbuster Canada until it pays back some loan or reverts to the normal payment terms The struggling-Blockbuster also says that it has implemented a plan to cut operating costs by $200 million this year to preserve cash and further improve liquidity. Blockbuster is also in discussions with advisors for its bondholders related to debt recapitalization. The Warner-Blockbuster deal was controversial because the studio had recently negotiated deals with Blockbuster rivals Netflix and Redbox to give them such access only after the movies have been available to purchase on DVD for 28 days. Warner basically screwed Netflix and Redbox. If what happened with Warner is any indication of things to come, Netflix might end up with the short end of the stick again if Sony And Fox withold their movies from Netflix for 28 days as well.      
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