The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Zoho Adds Workspaces, Access Controls, Widgets And More To Zoho Wiki
- Droid X Lands In A Cornfield Near You
- Apptera Raises Another $10 Million For Its Voice & Visual Mobile Advertising Network
- Google’s Commerce Search For Retailers Now Better And Cheaper
- Forrester Projects Tablets Will Outsell Netbooks By 2012, Desktops By 2013
- Internet TV Search Engine TVLinks Exits Stealth – Content Goes Missing
- Pay What You Want for Kiddix OS
- Like.com And Glamour’s What To Wear Is The Quora For Fashion Advice
- SafetyWeb Secures $8 Million So Parents Can Better Secure Their Kids Online
- Confirmed: Criterion Capital Partners Acquires Bebo From AOL
- Huffington Post Buys Adaptive Semantics To Keep Up With 100,000 Comments A Day
- comScore Cans Former AOL Exec Eric Bosco After 5 Months On The Job
- To Bookmark This PCWorld Article On The Future Of Browsers, Just Lick Your Screen
- Rakuten Buys PriceMinister, Enters The European E-Commerce Market With A $250M Bang
- Forget The Mayor, Gowalla Focuses On Serendipitous Deals For All
- InMobi Launches $2 Million Mobile Advertising Developer Fund
- Ustream’s Live Mobilizer Gives Bands And Brands Live Streaming iPhone Apps
- TC Teardown: Pandora – The Tough Business of Webcasting
- Nadanu’s Fundraising Platform Streamlines E-Giving
- Still Really Want An iPhone 4? Find $5,000, Head To eBay
- Disney/Pixar Buys The First Twitter Trending Topic Ad
- 50% Of Android Phones Now Running OS 2.1
- The Playstation Move Is A Wii Clone – But It’s Awesome
- Hot Potato 2.0 Lets You “Check-In” While You’re Doing Anything
- Advocacy Groups Poke More Holes In Facebook Privacy, Facebook Responds
| Zoho Adds Workspaces, Access Controls, Widgets And More To Zoho Wiki Posted: 17 Jun 2010 09:27 AM PDT  Zohi Wiki, which originally launched in 2006, is getting an upgrade today, with additional collaboration features, access controls and more. Zoho has added workspaces within Wiki to allow teams to have their own groups within organization wikis. Each workspace has its own administrative and customization options and can serve as a separate portal. Zoho has also added more in-depth access controls to wikis, which allows administrators to set permissions for Workspaces, multiple groups, individuals, domains, public, and for users within an organization. Admins can also assign separate permissions for edit, view, create and delete functions.
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| Droid X Lands In A Cornfield Near You Posted: 17 Jun 2010 08:57 AM PDT
     
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| Apptera Raises Another $10 Million For Its Voice & Visual Mobile Advertising Network Posted: 17 Jun 2010 08:28 AM PDT
Mobile advertising company Apptera has raised another $10 million in VC funding, we’ve learned via an SEC filing. The startup’s previous financing round dates back to November 2008, also totaled about $10 million and came from investors such as Alloy Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Walden International. The company has yet to publicly disclose the new capital injection, but these types of follow-on rounds typically come from existing backers, with maybe one or two additional investors. Founded in 2001 in Silicon Valley, Apptera operates what it refers to as a ‘Voice & Visual Mobile Advertising Network’, enabling the company to dynamically serve voice ads to callers and enhancing those calls with interactive visual engagements. Callers can opt in to voice ads and have special offers such as coupons and promotional codes, videos, even maps and directions sent direct to their phones, straight away or at a time scheduled in the future. Publishers in its mobile advertising marketplace include movie ticketing services (such as Movietickets.com, Moviefone and Fandango), free-411 services (e.g. Jingle and AT&T), social voice services and blogs, and widgets on social networks like Facebook and MySpace. At the help of Apptera we find Henry Vogel, the former eBay exec that was previously chief revenue officer of Quigo Technologies, the ad network company that was acquired by AOL in December of 2007. The rest of the members of the management team have a ton of experience from a variety of positions at companies like Yahoo, Overture, eBay, Meraki, Spot Runner, ESPN, Sony Pictures and iPass under their belts.
     
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| Google’s Commerce Search For Retailers Now Better And Cheaper Posted: 17 Jun 2010 07:59 AM PDT
The first version of Google Commerce offered a variety of features that are optimized for retail and product search, such as parametric search, sorting of results, spell checker, stemming, and synonym suggestion. The newest version builds on these features, by offering a more in-depth search experience for users and merchants. As Commerce product manager Nitin Mangtani tells me, version 2.0 focuses on enhancing navigation and the user experience. The Merchandising Dashboard: A new merchandising dashboard gives merchants more options within their search portals. Retailers can now rank products, so that certain products rank higher in search results than others. Additionally, retailers can feature promotions and sales within search portals within a given timeline. And retailers can add customized filters or ‘facets’ to search, and Google’s technology will present the appropriate results accordingly. All of these features can be implemented through a rules wizard that requires no custom code so a marketer or merchandiser could easily implement changes. Search Improvements: Google is adding realtime query autocompletion, which is a necessary element of any retail site. And Google will customize auto suggestions for each site, depending on the product indexed. Google has also improved speed of search results in Commerce search, and claim that search results are returned to shoppers in less than a second. Price Drop: Google is dropping the price of Commerce search to a pricing model that starts at $25,000 per year. Previously, Commerce search pricing started at $50,000 per year. Pricing is based on total volume of queries and items indexed. Google Commerce search also integrates Google products like Google Analytics and Google Product Search. Using Commerce, retailers can measure clicks, conversion rates, number of transactions, average order value and other data via Google Analytics. And e-commerce vendors can provide a single feed of products and catelogue items that will power Commerce and indexing of their products on Google Product Search. Retailers using Commerce search include Birkenstock, Smart Furniture and Coveroo. Google declined to release the exact number of retailers who are using the Commerce search product, but did say that Google is powered enterprise search for 30,000 sites currently. Google also offers a general hosted search product that is used by organizations that want to add customized Google search functionality to their websites. I’m curious if Google dropped their price because of a lack of retailers adopting the search product. As the retail industry steadily climbs out of the hole caused by the recession, I still think $25K is a lot to pay for search for smaller retailers. But it’s good to see that Google is dropping the price to allow for more retailers to use the product. And Google is pushing its product as an easily deployable, user-friendly way to integrate powerful search into a retail site. Google faces competition from Omniture, IBM, Endeca and others.
     
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| Forrester Projects Tablets Will Outsell Netbooks By 2012, Desktops By 2013 Posted: 17 Jun 2010 07:04 AM PDT
The tablet era has just begun, but Forrester Research is already predicting tablet sales in the U.S. will overtake netbook sales by 2012, and desktop sales by 2015. At the Untethered conference today in New York City, Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps laid out her projections comparing tablet sales to netbooks, laptops, and desktops. She expects 3.5 million tablets (including the iPad and other tablets) to be sold this year, growing to 20.4 million in 2015. Meanwhile, she expects desktop sales to drop from 18.7 million units in 2010 to 15.7 million units in 2015. As a percentage of overall PC sales, tablets will grow from 6 percent this year to 18 percent in 2012 (when netbooks are estimated to account for 17 percent of sales. The next year, in 2013, tablet sales are projected to outstrip desktop unit sales, 21 percent to 20 percent. By 2015, tablets will make up 23 percent of PC sales in the U.S., while desktops will be 18 percent and netbooks will be 17 percent. Only laptops will sell more in the U.S., with a 42 percent market share. The big question is how much of the tablet market can Apple capture? It has already sold 2 million iPads, and could easily blow past Forrester’s 3.5 million estimate for this year all by itself. It is not stretch for it to get to 20 million by 2015 either. So is there room in this market for other tablets, or will Forrester need to increase its estimates? These projections are for unit sales, not total revenues, but still the expectation that there will be more tablets sold in five years than any other type of computer is stunning. By 2015, the cumulative number of people using tablets will be 59 million, according to Rotman, which will be larger than the installed base of netbooks (but still just a fraction of the installed base of desktops and laptops). On a global basis, IDC also sees tablets and e-readers driving more growth than netbooks. Looks like it is time to stick a fork in netbooks.      
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| Internet TV Search Engine TVLinks Exits Stealth – Content Goes Missing Posted: 17 Jun 2010 06:05 AM PDT  What's this, a European startup thinking global? TVLinks, an Internet TV guide and video search engine, exits stealth mode today, and says it wants to battle the big US search engines and TV listings sites. It currently houses a database of over 30,000 movies, and 2,000 TV shows consisting of 80,000 episodes. In total it indexes more than 2,000 content provider websites, some of which it has formal partnerships with - US-centric Amazon VOD, Netflix and Google - while others are, presumably, being scraped or spidered via open APIs. The result is that a lot of content that shows up in search results is likely to be housed on their respective video sharing sites with or without the permission of copyright holders and/or geo-blocked.
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| Pay What You Want for Kiddix OS Posted: 17 Jun 2010 05:58 AM PDT
     
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| Like.com And Glamour’s What To Wear Is The Quora For Fashion Advice Posted: 17 Jun 2010 05:49 AM PDT
Similar to Ask A Stylist, What To Wear gives anyone real fashion answers from fashion bloggers and celebrity and Glamour Magazine-trained stylists in real time. For example, you can pose the question; “What should I wear to the Lady Gaga concert tonight?” and a stylist will respond with visual answers of their suggestions. Stylists can explain their recommendations visually through pictures. Of course, these pictures are sometimes linked to products that a user can purchase, and Like will collect an affiliate fee from this transaction. Users can remain anonymous on the site or can use Facebook Connect to sign in, in which case the site will surface questions from your friends as well as the anonymous questions. Certain sylists wWhat To Wear also has a content partnership. Glamour.com will feature guest blogs by What To Wear stylists, and will highlight the most popular and recently asked questions. The site is part of Like.com’s CEO and founder Munjal Shah’s strategy of bringing interactive shopping tools to the online soft goods shopping experience. Couturious shows you how to wear styled looks on the web. Weardrobe helps you to be visually inspired with streetstyle looks; Covet helps you to visually personalize your shopping (using celebrity photos), Like.com helps you to visually shop for soft goods and What To Wear and Ask A Stylist add a personalized styling consultant to the mini-empire’s offerings. Strategy aside, you have to wonder what these verticals are doing for Like.com. The site’s traffic, which according to ComScore, is stagnated. ComScore reports that Like saw 2.3 million unique visitors in April, and has flatlined in growth. And the other sites in the family don’t have nearly as much traffic as Like.com. But Like, which launched in 2006, says that it has generated $150 million of gross merchandise sales per year. And the startup raised $32 million in funding during the implosion of the financial industry, with a valuation just north of $100 million.
     
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| SafetyWeb Secures $8 Million So Parents Can Better Secure Their Kids Online Posted: 17 Jun 2010 05:00 AM PDT
SafetyWeb is a services that allows parents to monitor their children’s activity on social networks in realtime. They scan the web for a kid’s activity online and send alerts when something notable comes up — things as mild as negative comments being said, all the way up to a person convicted of a sex crime friending a child on a network. Initially, they’re scanning the major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc), but eventually the plan is to scan all sorts of things — including the fast-growing geolocation services. Obviously, child safety on the web is a big issue and it’s growing bigger every day as networks like Facebook approach 500 million users and consume kids’ time. Facebook in particular is interesting because as they continue to grow, they also continue to open up more user data to the public. And that’s right in SafetyWeb’s wheelhouse because they search the web for this public information (as opposed to logging in to kids’ accounts). For as little as $10 a month per child, SafetyWeb keeps parents up to date on all this stuff. “We generally believe that the whole security market is shifting away from protecting people, not machines. We really are the first of a kind service that is not just people search posing as a product. We are the only ones that do both discovery and retrieval of real-time activity without requiring your kid’s credentials,” co-founder Geoffrey Arone tells us. He also hints at some “big deals” the service has recently signed, but won’t say what they are just yet. He will say that right now, there are over 1,000 affiliates distributing SafetyWeb. This new funding round was led by Battery Ventures with First Round Capital also participating. With the funding, Roger Lee from Battery is joining the Board of Directors, and Satya Patel from Battery is being added as an observer. They’re also adding former MySpace Security Czar, Hemanshu Nigam, to the Board. For the past four years, Nigam has been the Chief Security Officer for all of News Corps’ online properties. SafetyWeb is up to 12 full time employees now — some working out of their headquarters in Denver, and the rest in their offices in Menlo Park.
     
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| Confirmed: Criterion Capital Partners Acquires Bebo From AOL Posted: 17 Jun 2010 04:25 AM PDT
To remind you: AOL paid $850 million for Bebo back in 2008. Ouch indeed. In a press release that just went out, Criterion acknowledges that it has acquired the Bebo business from AOL and that it will “assume the rights and complete operating control over the global social platform business”. The acquisition and financing was led by CCP partner Adam Levin in partnership with business strategist Paul Abramowitz and web entrepreneur Richard Hecker. Criterion Capital Partners will take over Bebo's global operations immediately and retain its San Francisco-based headquarters. Exact terms of the deal are not being disclosed by either party, but AOL CEO Tim Armstrong sent a note to all employees this morning that suggests our earlier reports that the ability to offset almost the whole sum it paid for Bebo as a tax loss played a big role are correct. A couple of paragraphs from said note (emphasis ours):
     
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| Huffington Post Buys Adaptive Semantics To Keep Up With 100,000 Comments A Day Posted: 17 Jun 2010 04:00 AM PDT
The Huffington Post has acquired its first company in a small cash deal, and it is not another blog or media site, but a pure technology startup called Adaptive Semantics. The two-person startup provides a semantic analysis engine (aka JuLiA) already used by the Huffington Post to help moderate the 100,000 comments published on the blog every day. Prior to the acquisition, the Huffington Post was already Adaptive Semantic’s largest and only outside investor, buying a 20 percent stake in April, 2009. Adaptive Semantic’s two co-founders, Elena Haliczer and Jeff Revesz, will join Huffington Post to oversee its social news and community technology R&D. The acquisition price was not disclosed “Technology is very critical to us,” says CEO Eric Hippeau. “In this case, the technology has implications for our content. It makes moderation hyper-efficient.” With close to 3 million comments a month, the only way to moderate them is through automation tools (as well as a corp of about 30 professional human moderators). Other companies that license Adaptive Semantic’s technology for online comment moderation include CNN, Newsweek, and Disqus. They might have to start looking for other solutions. “We will honor the contracts, but very likely will not renew them,” says Hippeau, who doesn’t want to be in the business of licensing technology to other news sites and services. JuLiA uses “supervised machine learning,” according to Revesz, to flag inappropriate comments, spam, and abusive language. Humans manually tag a few hundred comments, which then get fed into the semantic analysis engine and applied across every comment. This is an ongoing process so that the system continually gets better and better. Not only can it detect abusive language or hate speech, but it can also help find commenters who may be topic experts. Beyond comment moderation and making sure readers behave themselves on the site, the underlying semantic analysis technology can help bubble up the best contributions from readers. “I am very confident that we are going to find all kinds of ways to apply it,” says Hippeau. The Huffington Post very much sees itself as a social news network, and its success is tied to engaging its readers in a variety of ways, from leaving comments to sharing posts across the Web via Twitter and Facebook. It recently started awarding readers badges. JuLiA could help to feature the best comments or to award specific badges. For instance, if a reader leaves a lot of comments on posts about Afghanistan, Iraq, and Hillary Clinton, they could get a Foreign Policy badge. That is just a hypothetical example, but the technology opens the door to those kinds of features. It also could be applied to article recommendations. “The Huffington Post talks a lot about their social graph,” says Haliczer, “how people are connecting to each other and connecting to content. We can look at the content graph and recommend content to people.” Whatever the Huffington Post will end up doing with the technology, it is important enough that the company wants to own it in-house.      
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| comScore Cans Former AOL Exec Eric Bosco After 5 Months On The Job Posted: 17 Jun 2010 03:50 AM PDT
Five months later, he’s out the door, we’ve now learned. Bosco, who was hired to oversee all of comScore's global product development efforts, will be departing the audience measurement company at the end of the month. ComScore CEO Magid Abraham apparently sent a memo to staffers earlier this morning, announcing the “change in the senior leadership team, and resulting organizational structure”. Full memo:
We have an email in with comScore to confirm the authenticity of the memo, but we have no reason to believe it isn’t legit. Update: authenticity confirmed by comScore. Any comScore folks who know more about this care to fill us in?      
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| To Bookmark This PCWorld Article On The Future Of Browsers, Just Lick Your Screen Posted: 17 Jun 2010 03:15 AM PDT
Some people dislike April Fools Day. We do not. In fact, we think those who do are wrong. Not to mention a little weird, too. It’s just damn funny when we post things like Google going nuclear and witness respectable industry blogs like Venturebeat break the news in quasi real time … only to realize we were just kidding later on. Good times. But you know what’s better than a good April Fools joke? A good April Fools joke that keeps on giving long after April 1 has passed. This morning, I picked up on a tweet from Opera Software, embedded above, pointing to a PCWorld article on the future of the Web browser. Titled ‘Your Browser in Five Years’, it’s an interesting read on how browsers are undergoing changes that could potentially alter our day-to-day computing lives in the coming years. Writes PC World’s Jeff Bertolucci:
Face Gestures. To control your browser. Next time, better check that publication date, Jeff. :) And I truly hope you didn’t watch that video without wondering if this was actually real.
     
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| Rakuten Buys PriceMinister, Enters The European E-Commerce Market With A $250M Bang Posted: 17 Jun 2010 02:16 AM PDT  Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten this morning announced that it is buying France's e-commerce website operator PriceMinister for about €200 million (roughly $250 million), reports the Wall Street Journal. The news comes less than a month after word got out that Rakuten moved to acquire US-based Buy.com for about the same price.
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| Forget The Mayor, Gowalla Focuses On Serendipitous Deals For All Posted: 17 Jun 2010 12:50 AM PDT
One such deal launching later today is with Eye-Fi, the makers of memory cards that give devices WiFi capabilities. Starting in a few hours, when a person checks in through Gowalla at any U.S.-based Best Buy or Apple Store, they’ll automatically have a chance to win a free 4 GB Eye-Fi card. A message will pop up on their screen about the card post check-in. And a simple click on the “Did I win?” button below that message will reveal if you’re a winner of the $75 card the spot. There will be 500 winners for this particular promotion. But even if you don’t win, the check-in grants you access to a coupon code for one year’s worth of free hotspot access if you do choose to purchase an Eye-Fi card. Gowalla founder Josh Williams estimates Eye-Fi is giving away some $35,000 worth of value from this deal alone. “This represents a remarkable opportunity for a brand to promote a product directly to people who are visiting a location where that product is sold. It’s accessible to anyone who checks in on Gowalla, regardless of how many times they’ve checked in or whether or not they’ve been to that location previously,” Williams notes. That last part is obviously a bit of a shot at Foursquare’s mayor deals — but it’s important to note that Foursquare also has some deals for anyone who simply checks-in to certain venues too. Still, Gowalla’s emphasis on equality is nice and doesn’t require people to compete with crazed location addicts who go to venues everyday simply to secure deals (believe me, in San Francisco, it happens a lot). It’s more about serendipity with Gowalla — you go to a place you’re already going, check-in, and you may earn a free prize.      
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| InMobi Launches $2 Million Mobile Advertising Developer Fund Posted: 17 Jun 2010 12:29 AM PDT
Today they’re announcing a $2 million world developer fund to encourage application developers to use InMobi for in-app advertising. Developers on Android, iPhone and iPad are eligible. Here’s how it works: first come first serve. Sign up for the program and add InMobi via their SDKs. InMobi usually keeps 40% of gross advertising revenue, and 60% goes to the developer. But during this program developers get to keep 100% of the advertising revenue, and InMobi’s 40% comes out from the $2 million. Once that $2 million is gone the normal split applies. See this video for more details. This clearly encourages big names to sign up because they can grab a chunk of that $2 million fast. Of course total revenue depends on how much InMobi ads are selling for. If developers have feedback on their monetization rates v. AdMob and other ad networks, I’d love to hear it in the comments.      
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| Ustream’s Live Mobilizer Gives Bands And Brands Live Streaming iPhone Apps Posted: 17 Jun 2010 12:04 AM PDT
Each Mobilizer app is branded to the artist’s specifications (in other words, they don’t look like generic cookie cutter apps). The biggest feature here is support for watching an artist’s live video feed through Ustream, but the app also includes support for sharing to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. It also has Ustream’s ‘Social Stream’ feature, which lets you submit questions to the artist during a live stream and syndicate it out to other social networks. To monetize, artists can sell songs, tickets, and merchandise directly through the application (they can also elect to make the application itself a premium app on the App Store). The first musician to take advantage of the new platform is Miley Cyrus, who will be hosting a “listening party” through her application that be streaming her upcoming album for five days before it’s released. We’re told this will be the only place fans will be able to listen to the album during this time frame, so it’s obviously going to get a lot of downloads quickly. Ustream isn’t the first company to offer this kind of platform to brands, celebrities, and bands (though most of its competitors don’t offer live stream functionality) — Kyte launched its iPhone platform in early 2009, and Mobile Roadie launched one soon thereafter. iLike has one too.      
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| TC Teardown: Pandora – The Tough Business of Webcasting Posted: 16 Jun 2010 09:49 PM PDT
Pandora is the widely popular web radio service. Publicly they have said that they turned the corner to profitability in the 4th quarter of 2009. Below I forecast the 2010 numbers for Pandora using information from Pandora, music royalty rates that all webcasters are obligated to pay, and standard expenses of running a California based technology start-up.
Pandora’s 2010With tight management of operating estimates Pandora is going to be close to breakeven in 2010. If they can more than double revenues they could operate break-even or even very slightly in the black. The largest impact to their financial situation is music royalties which takes a majority of their revenues. In 2009, Pandora paid $30,000,000 in royalties or about 60% of their total revenue. This year the royalty obligation will be substantially higher because they are required to pay a fee every time they play a song to a user. It’s not just a flat percentage of their revenue or a preset amount. As their userbase grows their royalties obligation grow proportionally which is why in spite of doubling their revenue from 2009 to 2010 which is a notable accomplishment for a company with revenue of their size, they are not moving to clear profitability. Beyond 2010The per user royalty rates Pandora has agreed to pay will go up 10% per year for the next 4 years. This is the per song rate or what they must pay every time a song is played for an individual user. A highly illogical aspect of radio is that there exists a ‘spectrum bias’. Depending on the spectrum of the radio wave transmitting the song to the listener, the royalty payment can vary widely from zero to a huge number. If the song is transmitted over 30–300 MHz (FM radio) then the royalty rate is zero. For songs transmitted over 2,332.50-2,345.00 MHz (satellite radio like XM) operators are required to pay 15% of total revenues, but for those operating in internet frequencies 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz (wifi) or cellular phone the royalty structure can be 50-60% of total revenues as evident from Pandora’s analysis. Astonishingly in spite of this enormous current inequity, SoundExchange (which represents record labels) has asked the Copyright Royalty Board to more than double the rates for 2011-2015 for webcasters over what Pandora is currently paying. This won’t immediately affect Pandora since they have locked in rates that rise 10% each year over that time period, but after that period they will be susceptible to future rate increases. Most internet companies operate more efficiently as they grow. They take advantage of economies of scale (increased buying power) as they get large. Plus they benefit from cheaper computing, bandwidth and storage. Pandora should experience these benefits in their technology related costs. However those costs will not materially impact the economics of their business since the royalties are so substantial. Pandora has savvy management. They’ve been in this business for about a decade and raised close to $100 million. I don’t believe the economic realities escape them. In fact, they have asked Congress to implement “rate parity”. This would mean old fashioned radio, satellite radio and web radio would all have to pay the same royalty rate. The intention in such a reassessment process would be to remove the spectrum bias and create parity radio over any spectrum would pay the same royalty. From a business standpoint Pandora has many positive attributes. They have 50 million registered users. Their brand is well recognized and regarded. Their service is universally praised as easy to use, satisfying and they’re rewarded with significant usage. They will do billions of minutes of music in 2010. But for each minute the expense odometer turns. Pandora must devise a way to lower this royalty amount if they’re to build a long standing profitable company. * Royalty calculation: Pandora must pay 0.097 cents in 2010 every time any portion of a song is played (even if you only listen to a short part of the song). See: michaelrobertson.com for an in depth analysis of rate structure. Pandora does not disclose the number of songs they transmit. However, in 2009, Pandora stated they paid $28 million in music royalties. In 2009 their per song royalty rate was .093 cents per song which imputes that Pandora transmitted 29.8 billions songs. If one assumes 70% year over year growth in 2010 Pandora will play 50.66 billion which would require them to pay a sound recording royalty of $49.1 million. ** Employee calculation: Pandora has 12 offices and 180 employee, 80 of which are sales people. An estimate of $100,000 per employee is intended to capture the fully loaded employee cost typical for a technology company that is tightly managed which includes healthcare, vacation, HR costs, office space, etc. It’s easy to go much higher than this with lack oversight. 80 of the employees are sales people who likely have a smaller base and are receive substantial compensation via sales commission. If you liked this post, see our previous TC Teardown: Chegg Is A Money Machine.      
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| Nadanu’s Fundraising Platform Streamlines E-Giving Posted: 16 Jun 2010 08:00 PM PDT
Nadanu's Push-K platform allows register and “drop coins” into a custom receptacle. It is modeled after a traditional charity coin box, and donors can click to drop virtual coins into their eCharityBox and watch it fill up. Once the box reaches a predestinated amount the box is emptied, their credit card charged and an automated tax receipt is sent via email. Payment options include Authorize.net and PayPal. The interface is sleek and easy to users. On the backend, Push-K allows organizations to deliver content such as video and audio and also serve text messages to users. Launched a few months ago, Nadanu is already powering e-giving for over 400 charities. Nadanu also has mobile offerings available for the iPhone, iPad, Android and more. And the company has a web offering and Facebook app.
     
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| Still Really Want An iPhone 4? Find $5,000, Head To eBay Posted: 16 Jun 2010 06:35 PM PDT
Scanning eBay right now, there are roughly 400 iPhone 4s for sale (between the 16 GB and 32 GB models). Sure, the device isn’t out yet, but people are willing to part with the device as soon as they get it on June 24. The question is: how much do you have to pay to get them to part with it? Currently, the cheapest ones are going for $550 — and that’s the $199 16 GB model. The cheapest 32 GB model? $799 — a full $500 over the $299 retail price. Both of those are bargains compared to what some people are selling them for. Want the iPhone 4 hand delivered to you by June 27? That will cost you $5,000. Yes, $5,000 for one iPhone. At least 50 other people are offering to sell theirs for $1,000 or more. And this is just two days after the initial pre-sale. As the expected ship date continues to get pushed back, these prices are going to get much more ugly. By the time launch day hits and people have them in their hands, don’t be surprised if many of these new iPhones sell for thousands of dollars.
     
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| Disney/Pixar Buys The First Twitter Trending Topic Ad Posted: 16 Jun 2010 05:42 PM PDT
As you can see in the right hand toolbar of Twitter.com, at the bottom of the Trending Topics area there is now an 11th topic, “Toy Story 3.” Next to it is a big yellow box letting you know that it’s a promoted Trending Topic. Just as with Promoted Tweets, the functionality for these Promoted Trending Topics is the same as the regular Trending Topics — clicking on it takes you to a search results page to see what people are saying about Toy Story 3. “As we have always said, we plan to test different advertising and promotional models in these early stages of our monetization efforts for both user and brand value. As part of this effort, we are testing trends clearly marked as “promoted” for an undefined period of time,” a Twitter representative tells us. And along with buying the Trending Topic, Disney/Pixar gets a Promoted Tweet at the top of the stream, Twitter confirms. Twitter also says that just as with Promoted Tweets, the Promoted Trending Topic “has to resonate” or it will disappear. Two more things of note here. First, it’s interesting that Twitter is putting these at the bottom of Trending Topics rather than at the top. Still, the yellow badge draws your eye naturally to it. Second, the Promoted Trending Topic appears no matter which city or country you set your Trending Topics to. In the future, you can imagine these Promoted Tending Topics being even more highly targeted to just certain regions/cities.
     
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| 50% Of Android Phones Now Running OS 2.1 Posted: 16 Jun 2010 05:22 PM PDT
This is a big change since early May, when only 32.4% of phones were running 2.1. Since then, a number of older phones have been upgraded, and the new Sprint Evo and some other newer devices run it as well.
So why does this matter? We’ve written pretty extensively about Android fragmentation, or the fact that there are many phones running older versions of the OS. The Android team contests the use of the word ‘fragmentation’, (one blog post actually calls the term useless because it has been used in so many ways). But the fact remains that nearly 50% of phones are running older versions of the OS, and if a developer wants to make use of the latest Android features, they’ll leave a big chunk of the Android userbase behind. Case in point: when the official Twitter application was released in April, it was only available to 27.3% of all Android users. Still, the tide appears to be turning. OEMs are going to get faster with their updates, and Android upgrades will eventually start coming more slowly, which will hopefully result in fewer phones getting left behind.      
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| The Playstation Move Is A Wii Clone – But It’s Awesome Posted: 16 Jun 2010 05:15 PM PDT  The Playstation Move is just what it looks like: a Wii clone. It feels the same, looks the same, and works the same. That's a good thing, though. Everyone and their grandmother has played Wii bowling and knows how it works. Sony isn't reinventing motion control with the Move. They are, however, seriously improving it.
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| Hot Potato 2.0 Lets You “Check-In” While You’re Doing Anything Posted: 16 Jun 2010 04:31 PM PDT
When it first launched, Hot Potato was basically an iPhone app that let you build a social stream around events happening at any given moment. Right before SXSW, the newer version of the app added killer Foursquare integration, and tied everything together with the service’s website. The update today shifts the focus away from events, and makes it about all kinds of activities. Really, anything in the world you may be doing, you can now “check-in” while you’re doing it on Hot Potato. It’s actually pretty cool. When you load up the app, you’re taken to a screen with six default prompts for what you may be doing. Those six are: “I’m watching..”, “I’m listening to..”, “I’m attending..”, “I’m reading..”, “I’m thinking about..”, and “I’m playing..” After each, there’s a box to fill in the noun that should follow each of those. When you enter that, Hot Potato searches to see if it’s already in the system. So, for example, if you say, “I’m watching Lost”, Hot Potato finds the other people doing that as well and ties you altogether into one activity. Within this activity page, people can comment and respond to comments about the activity, just as you previously could in Hot Potato. You can also add pictures to this stream. There’s also a seventh activity option in which you choose your own verb. Hot Potato gives you a list of new options (such as “I’m eating”, “I’m drinking”, “I’m checking out”) — or you can add your own. This reminds me a bit of the service Plurk, which is a Twitter-like service that allows you to organize your status updates around verbs. But obviously, this is more robust. Just as before, when you fill out what activity you’re doing, you can send it to Twitter, Facebook, or use it to check-in on Foursquare. The way Hot Potato has set this all up is quite seamless. And there is of course an activity stream front and center in the app to showcase all of your friends’ activities. There’s also a new element: awards. Yes, just as with some of the other location-based services, you can now get badges for doing certain activities. For example, when you share your first activity, you earn the “You’re a Big Deal” award. Hot Potato 2.0 also brings a revamped version of the website to match this new activity focus. And for the first time there’s an iPad app as well. We’re already seeing a ton of Foursquare-like services that let you “check-in” when doing various things. For example, Miso lets you check-in around movie, television, and Internet video content. This new version of Hot Potato aims to let you check-in no matter what you’re doing. And it smartly ties in with Foursquare. Find the new version of Hot Potato in the App Store here. It’s a free download.
     
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| Advocacy Groups Poke More Holes In Facebook Privacy, Facebook Responds Posted: 16 Jun 2010 02:39 PM PDT
Along with Instant Personalization, other issues addressed in the advocacy letter include the fact that Facebook is able to track user browsing behavior through its ‘Like’ buttons and other widgets (these widgets are served up by Facebook to third-party sites, so it can see which sites you’re visiting). And the letter says that users should have more control over what information third-party applications should have access to. Finally, the letter asks Facebook to give more control over what information mandatorily made public, and the ability to export data so that users can easily transition to social networks other than Facebook. Facebook’s response addresses each issue point by point:
Here’s the full letter from the advocacy groups: And Facebook’s response:      
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