Tuesday, July 13, 2010

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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GE, Kleiner Perkins, Emerald, And More Launch $200 Million ‘Ecomagination Challenge’

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 09:01 AM PDT

Today at a special ‘Ecomagination’ event in San Francisco, General Electric is announcing the launch of the $200 million GE ecomagination Challenge: Powering the Grid, an investment that’s meant to help spur advances in green grid technologies. The fund is launching in partnership with VC funds Emerald Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and RockPort Capital. Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson is also involved.

GE says that it is looking for proposals in three categories: Renewables, Grid, and Eco Homes & Eco Buildings. Applicants can submit ideas on ecomagination.com over a ten week period. Entrants will be eligable for both “a potential future commercial relationship” with GE and one of five $100,000 awards that are meant to highlight submissions demonstrating “outstanding entrepreneurship and innovation”.

Entrats that stand to land a commercial relationship with GE will be judged by a committee made up of GE businesses and the participating VC firms. There wil also be a second committee (which includes Wired’s Anderson, GE execs, and academics) that will be weigh in on both the commercial relationship candidates and which will choose who wins the $100,000 awards.

Zendesk Ramps Up Twitter Integration; Allows Users To Turn Tweets Into Help Desk Tickets

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 08:00 AM PDT


As more and more consumers turn to Twitter to express their woes about brands and customer service, companies need to keep an eye on the social network to monitor and respond to these conversations and complaints. Help-desk startup Zendesk is ramping up its Twitter integration today, allowing customers to leverage the social interactions on Twitter within their customer service platform.

Zendesk essentially offers a Web-based help desk online ticketing system for customer support. The new integration enables users to turn a Tweet into a Zendesk ticket. You can also respond publicly to a complaint on Twitter from Zendesk’s platform. So you can record any Twitter conversation that is taking place within Zendesk’s platform and also move the conversation from Twitter to an email.

The platform features integration with social media monitoring tools such as HootSuite, TweetDeck, Twitter.com, and the Twitter iPhone and Android apps. The new feature makes sense, considering that Twitter has now become a centralized place for consumer conversations about brands and companies. Of course other help-desk platforms, such as Salesforce’s Service Cloud also features Twitter integration.

Zendesk, which just crossed the 5,000 customer mark, recently raised its pricing, which elicited strong complaints from clients. Zendesk responded to the backlash by reverting to the previous pricing model.

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Study: Gay And Lesbian Adults Are More Avid Blog Readers, Social Network Users

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 07:45 AM PDT

A new national survey carried out by market research firm Harris Interactive suggests gay and lesbian adults online today are among the most loyal and most frequent blog readers and social network users in the United States.

Harris Interactive conducted the study online between June 14 and 21, 2010, among 2,412 adults, of whom 341 self-identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender. The company over-sampled gay men and lesbians in order to allow for more detailed analysis of these groups, and the data was weighted to reflect the composition of the adult U.S. population.

According to Harris Interactive, more than half (54%) of gay men and lesbian respondents report reading some type of blog, compared to only 40% of heterosexuals.

This represents an increase from March 2008, when 51% of gay and lesbian respondents reported reading some type of blog.

When it comes to the types of blogs popular with Americans, the survey found 36% of gay and lesbian adults read news blogs, compared to 25% of heterosexual adults. A quarter (25%) of gay and lesbian adults also read entertainment and pop culture blogs, compared to merely 16% of heterosexuals.

Apart from avidly reading blogs, gay and lesbian adults also are choosing to connect online through social networking sites more often than heterosexual adults. Nearly three-quarters of respondents (73%) of gay and lesbian adults can be found on Facebook, compared to 65% of heterosexual adults. Also, 32% of gay and lesbian respondents report being members of MySpace, compared to 22% of heterosexuals.

Nearly 3 out of 10 (or 29%) gay men and lesbians report they are members of Twitter, while the same can be said of just 15% of heterosexual adults.

When it comes to LinkedIn, which is obviously more business-oriented, 22% of gay and lesbian respondents report being members, compared to 16% of heterosexual adults.

You can find detailed tables here.

(Image courtesy of Flickr user istolethetv)

Video: Top Gear Teases Apple Over iPhone 4 Antenna Problems

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 07:44 AM PDT

Some people say… the iPhone 4 is a piece of junk. The latest episode of the greatest show on television, Top Gear, made mention of the issue that has captured the world’s attention: the shoddy craftsmanship of the iPhone 4. You know a story is huge when Jeremy Clarkson and Co. devote valuable airtime to it.

Gaming-Focused Social Network hi5 Raises $14 Million

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 07:12 AM PDT

hi5, a gaming-focused social network that most people forgot about long ago, has just closed a new round of funding of over $14 million led by Crosslink Capital. This brings the social network’s funding to over $34 million. This round appears to also include the $3 million in debt funding raised from Mohr Davidow in April.

The new funding will be used for hi5′s continued expansion into social gaming and virtual goods. Hi5, which has been actively remodeling its site to cater to the gaming industry, just bought gaming startup Big Six. Last fall, the social network launched a totally revamped site that places a much stronger emphasis on games and virtual currency, along with a new avatar system.

In December, hi5 brought on a new president, gaming industry veteran, Alex St. John, to help lead the social network’s efforts. Earlier in the year, the company suffered from layoffs and also hired a new CEO, Bill Gossman.

The push into gaming isn’t a bad idea for hi5, which clearly cannot compete with Facebook. The network has only 60 million members compared to Facebook’s 500 million users. But hi5 faces a number of fast-growing and heavily funded competitors in the social gaming space, including Zynga and Playdom.

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LivingSocial Now Offers Daily Deals In 52 Cities – 25 More Than Yesterday

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 06:49 AM PDT

LivingSocial, the daily deal site that is often referred to as the main competitor to Groupon (see our extensive guide on group-buying sites in the United States and beyond here), is experiencing fast growth.

Rather than launching in one new city on a regular basis, like Groupon tends to do, the company this morning announced that it has added 25 live markets to its roster, nearly doubling the amount of cities it offers daily deals in.

The social commerce startup is now effectively live in 52 markets and 3 countries (the U.S., UK and Canada), now that it has added cities like Sacramento, Miami, Las Vegas, Toronto, Memphis, Buffalo, Detroit and Vancouver to the fray.

Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and cofounder of LivingSocial, refers to the addition of the 25 cities the “tip of the iceberg”, and says the service has seen explosive organic growth since its launch in July 2009 (the company has been around for much longer than that, but it started out as a developer of applications for social networks).

Dubbed a local activity discovery engine, LivingSocial enables people to find out what shops, restaurants, activities and services are popular in their area, and offers new promotions every morning via its website, Twitter, Facebook and an iPhone application. The company says it has dedicated ‘city experts’ on the ground in every market, constantly researching the best in local attractions to bring a savings of up to 90% for consumers.

Deals are live for 24 hours, as is typical with group-buying sites, but LivingSocial interestingly has a referral model in place that gives users their deal for free if they refer three friends who also participate. Seemingly, this helps spur growth tremendously.

To date, LivingSocial claims to have attracted 85 million people, making it a force to be reckoned with in the red hot group-buying space. Investors agree – so far the startup has raised close to $50 million in venture capital.

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GFI Software Acquires Sunbelt Software, Mainly For Its VIPRE Technology

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 06:16 AM PDT

Security software company GFI Software this morning announced that it has acquired Sunbelt Software, and specifically its VIPRE product suite. GFI says the deal will give them access to Sunbelt's VIPRE technology, which it intends to merge into its own email security and web security solutions group. Terms of the acquisition remained undisclosed.


Conduit Reports Big Numbers: 250,000 App Publishers, 170 Million Users

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 05:24 AM PDT

Conduit, the venture-backed company that enables publishers to create and distribute apps on the Web via browser toolbars, is posting some big numbers today.

The startup says its network now boasts more than 250,000 web publishers, and that they’re able to reach some 170 million users. Roughly 23 new users install Conduit Engine every single second, the company adds.

Those stats led Conduit president Adam Boyden to make some bold claims about its size, relative to that of the mobile apps market:

"While most of the buzz in the media is about mobile apps, the reality of the situation is that 118 million more people use Conduit-powered apps than iPhone and Droid apps combined."

Not exactly an apples to apples comparison, but it does indicate that Conduit Network has quietly become a whopper of a distribution channel for a number of big brands, including Amazon, Coke Zero, eBay, Facebook, Fox News, Hulu, Skype, YouTube, and Zynga.

According to Conduit, its App Marketplace (think of it as an app store for Web applications delivered via cross-browser toolbars) is seeing notable growth, particularly. The company says 60 million end users consume apps from the marketplace on a daily basis, not only benefiting major brands but also lesser known software developers.

Since August 2009, Conduit claims the number of Web publishers that have more than one million users has grown from 1 to more than 40 in May 2010.

At this scale, Conduit is able to deliver some interesting trends on Web app usage, and that’s exactly what they’ve provided us with. Full disclosure: note that there’s a TechCrunch App in Conduit’s marketplace somewhere, which the company refers to.

Quoting ad verbatim from the press release:

Entertainment apps are the largest segment among the hundreds of verticals represented in Conduit App Marketplace; 24.4 percent of the apps were created in this category since the launch of the marketplace.

End users are also hungry for news online and app publishers responded; 19.5 percent of apps in the marketplace deliver news from sources such as Fox News, iVillage, and TechCrunch.

The number of social media apps followed closely, constituting 18.2 percent of all available apps. Also noteworthy, the social media apps category grew fastest among end users during the last year, with adoption increasing on average by 87% each month.

Are you a Conduit user? Why (not)?

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Mobile Backstage Aims To Beat Facebook And MySpace For Fan Engagement

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 05:17 AM PDT

Mobile Backstage, a new social music service and mobile app that lets artists and bands "engage" with their fans, is set to officially launch next week, although it's already been trialed by the likes of hip hop star Dizzee Rascal, and the 'emo' outfit You Me At Six (yes, I've never heard of them either). It's been developed by Steam Republic, a Finnish mobile solutions company, which says it recently raised a second round of funding in the region of €2 million of its target of €3 -5 million. That's not necessarily all that newsworthy in itself - there are already plenty of ways for artists to interact with fans online - but what's perhaps more interesting is that the company claims that its bespoke mobile app, which can be fully branded for each artist/band and runs on iPhone and Java-enabled handsets, beats uber social networks such as Facebook and MySpace in terms of the level of fan interaction and user-generated content.


Echo Launches Eye Catching Real-Time Recent Comments Widget

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 05:00 AM PDT

Echo, the real-time comment engine formerly known as JS-Kit, has launched a new real-time recent comments widget that allows publishers to embed a stream of their users’ latest comments and tweets on their homepage and alongside articles.

The widget can display comments left anywhere on the publisher’s site, or they can elect to only show comments from a certain subsection. Likewise, publishers can elect to display all of the related comments, tweets, Diggs, and other social reactions that Echo can track, or they can choose which they want to show.

Game changing? Probably not, but these real-time widgets have a tendency to catch the viewer’s eye, so I suspect this will be effective. I’m also guessing publishers will take a pretty heavy hand with moderating the comments that appear in the feed, given how poor many comments appear on popular sites.

Echo VP Product and Community Strategy Chris Saad says that the company’s widgets are now on “hundreds of thousands” of sites but that the stat that counts most is page views — Echo gets around 650 million page views per month.

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Brand Marketing Firm Involver Launches ‘AMP’ Social Media Dashboard

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 05:00 AM PDT

Involver, a company that helps both brands and smaller businesses manage their presence on Facebook, Twitter, and other online portals, has launched a new dashboard they're calling AMP. The dashboard allows brands to aggregate all of their inbound tweets, Facebook comments, and other messages on a single site, and it isn’t just for monitoring incoming content — you can also respond to messages directly from the page.

Involver was founded in 2007 and boasts some big brands as clients, including Warner Brothers, American Apparel, Facebook, and Alicia Keys. They're also touting some big stats: in terms of clients, they have 80,000 brands/agencies and 200 million 'Like' relationships on Facebook (at least, their clients do). That includes plenty of dupes (people who have Liked more than one brand that uses Involver), and some of these brands are probably only using an app or two, but it's definitely impressive. Involver has spent the last year and a half building out its suite of applications, like Signup Forms and a music player for Facebook, and the AMP dashboard is being offered in addition to those.

Involver's pricing, which includes both the AMP dashboard and its collection of apps, will run in the $1000+/month range for large businesses (scaling upward depending on the number of Facebook/Twitter fans and the number of channels they're managing). Fees for smaller businesses are a few hundred dollars.

Involver isn’t the first company to offer a social media dashboard — also see offerings from Scout Labs, Hoot Suite, and PeopleBrowsr. Wildfire also competes with Involver on the application front.


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Reddit Convinced Roughly 6,000 Users To Subscribe So Far

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 04:33 AM PDT

Late last week, news recommendation service reddit started soliciting users to donate i.e. subscribe to reddit gold in order to allow the Condé Nast-owned company to hire more people and buy more servers.

In a new blog post, reddit says approximately 6,000 users have donated to date. That represents less than 0.1 percent of reddit’s total number of users (unique visitors?), which comes in at roughly 8 million today, according to the company.

While only a fraction of its user base apparently made the jump, reddit has declared the feat a triumph, as the cash infusion enables them to add more servers to the fray, initially. This should benefit all users, not just reddit gold subscribers, the company added.

As reddit hasn’t disclosed how much money was collected in the pledge drive so far, and the subscription price was left entirely up to the subscribers in question, we’ll have to estimate.

Let’s say each user donated in between $10 and $15, we’re looking at roughly $60,000 to $90,000 to date. Six thousand subscribers may not seem like a lot, but it’s not a shabby sum to raise in just a couple of days, especially since the benefits of becoming a subscriber weren’t clear from the get-go.

Reddit does say it aims to grow reddit gold into a bona fide subscription service like Ars Technica, and the company is taking suggestions for which things to work on first.

You can follow the discussion on reddit here. Going over the comments, particularly those left by reddit folks, it seems like Condé Nast was really blocking the company in terms of resources for hiring purposes. Also, the company has only one sales person on staff, and she just started working there two months ago:

raldi
> They should be banging on the Conde Nast door begging for more cash
Did that. As we said very clearly in Friday’s blog post, the answer was “moar revenue”.

and

raldi
> How about spending 100% of the subscription revenue on hiring some sales staff?
Hiring is out of our hands.
> If your sales team…
Our sales team is one person, and she’s only been on the job for about two months.

Last but not least, the company ends its blog post hinting at a major new feature coming soon:

Oh, and there’s One More Thing coming soon that you guys are gonna love.

Any guesses on what this could be?

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InMobi Gets $8 Million From Kleiner Perkins And Sherpalo Ventures

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 03:47 AM PDT

InMobi, the largest mobile ad network that hasn’t been acquired, has raised another $8 million in funding. The round was led by existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures and brings their total raised capital to $15.6 million.

We’ve estimated that the company did around $35 million in revenue in 2009, and may hit $75 million for all of 2010.

We’ve covered this startup a lot recently. In particular they are are extremely well set up for explosive growth in the U.S., a new market for them. From a June post:

Today they are probably the second biggest mobile advertising network in the world, with nearly 17 billion monthly impressions combined on mobile apps and mobile websites. Google's AdMob has 18 billion impressions/month).

Most of InMobi's ad impressions are outside of the U.S. The bulk – 10 billion – are in Asia where the company first launched. 2 billion are in the U.S., where the company has had limited operations since January 2010. Africa takes 2.3 billion, Europe 1.6 billion and the Middle East .5 billion. A full U.S. launch took place last week, and a Japan launch is coming soon.

How well will InMobi do in the U.S.? They were bullish before the recent news about Apple taking steps to make it nearly impossible for non-independent advertising networks like AdMob to work on the the iPhone and iPad.

We recently interviewed InMobi CEO Naveen Tewari last week to talk about his business. The video is below:

InMobi serves advertising in 108 countries today, and reaches 179 million consumers. The company launched in 2007. The entire press release is below:

InMobi Raises $8 Million in Series B from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures to Fund Expansion and Mobile Customer Discovery Technology

SAN FRANCISCO AND LONDON: July 13, 2010: InMobi, the world's largest independent mobile ad network, today announced that it has secured $8 million in its Series B round from its existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures. With this new round, InMobi will focus on its recent US expansion, launch in Japan and continue to grow existing operations in Europe, Asia Pacific, and Africa. The company will also double its engineering staff to further enhance its mobile advertising technology platform globally.

This new round brings the total funding to more than $15 million. With 16.9 billion impressions monthly reaching 179 million consumers in 108 countries, InMobi offers advertisers, developers, and publishers a dependable global mobile advertising alternative to Google and Apple. From the beginning, InMobi has invested in building a highly scalable, mobile customer discovery ad network leveraging its unique analytics engine AdROItTM to optimize ad serving in real time. The results provide unmatched performance to its current list of marquee partners including Reebok, Microsoft, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Quaker Oats, Yamaha, Barclays, and Yahoo.

"Since our launch in 2007, we have focused on building global expertise in mobile ad serving technology with a highly scalable platform. After market launches in the US and Europe and further expansion in Asia and Africa, our global ad impressions increased from 7.5 billion to 16.9 billion monthly in just six months – it is clear our strategy is working." said Naveen Tewari, CEO and Founder of InMobi. "This additional funding will help us capitalize on our early success and enable us to aggressively compete in major advertising markets globally."

At the core of InMobi's innovation is its technology. Further product developments will redefine the way advertisers, publishers and developers reach consumers and measure performance including detailed analytics that inform the ad serving process in real-time, automatically enhance ROI, and help advertisers maintain a targeted buy at scale globally.

“InMobi is a great example of the media transformation taking place due to mobile technology. We support their vision to provide high reach, transparent, performance-based mobile advertising to all corners of the globe," said Ajit Nazre, Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

"InMobi has exceeded our expectations every quarter since the company’s inception," said Sandeep Murthy of Sherpalo Ventures. "They've not only developed a truly disruptive and leading edge technology, but applied flawless execution to deliver a market changing ad network platform that will achieve new levels in the industry with this funding."

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We7 Partners With GMG Radio To Inject Breaking News Into Music Streams

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 03:05 AM PDT

One of the key advantages of on-demand music streaming services compared with traditional radio is that as well as listening to the music you choose you can do away with the DJ's endless chatter and other interruptions. But there is a potential downside: being isolated from current events, such as breaking news. We7, the UK music streaming service and rival to the likes of Spotify in Europe, thinks it has a solution in the form of a partnership with The Guardian Media Group-owned GMG Radio, the company behind stations such as Smooth, Real and Rock Radio. Under the agreement, GMG Radio will provide We7 listeners with breaking news via the Real Radio brand, with the two companies essentially creating a kind of hybrid offering, which potentially mixes the best of on-demand and live radio.


With Carrier Rates Dropping, Boku Prepares To Expand Beyond Virtual Goods [Video]

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 02:46 AM PDT


Boku has carved out quite a name for itself in the fast-expanding world of mobile payments for virtual goods. The startup, which has raised more than $40 million since its launch last year, is now in 61 countries and has deals with some 200 carriers. However, while the realm of gaming remains rich (see our latest numbers on Zynga), Boku is ready to expand beyond virtual goods and step into real world transactions— within the next twelve months.

By next year, Boku’s co-founder Ron Hirson, predicts that the company will be launching mobile payments for online (non-virtual) transactions and eventually, test programs for brick and mortar purchases. Boku has always wanted to become the PayPal of mobile payments, but has been hindered by lofty carrier rates. Historically, wireless carriers have charged roughly 30 to 40% to process transactions, making it very difficult for mobile payment companies like Boku to scale beyond virtual goods. That dynamic, Hirson says, is quickly shifting.

“We’re now seeing and having partnerships with carriers where the rates are coming down to about 10% which enables us to start moving beyond virtual goods that have no cost of good sold, to things like digital goods which have licensing and then maybe even physical goods which actually have material costs…

Mobile as an opportunity is starting to plateau, minutes have obviously plateaued and eventually data will follow the same. So there’s a need for carriers to explore new revenue opportunities and payments is a great value added service.”

Ten percent is a significant victory, relative to the previous baseline, but Hirson acknowledges that the rates will have to move even lower to support Boku’s grand ambitions. The magic number, he says, is probably near 5%— which he admits may not happen in the near term.

For those who are unfamiliar with the service, Boku (a rival of Zong) works with many game developers like Playdom and Playfish. When a user wants to purchase a virtual item, he enters his cell phone number on a site, the site sends a text message to the phone, the user confirms the transaction with a short reply, and all the charges show up on his phone bill.

For more on Boku’s 2011 strategy and carrier trends see the video above. On Monday, Hirson was also a guest on TechCrunch NOW with Charlie Graham, Shop It To Me‘s founder. Fittingly, we discussed Google’s recent investment in Zynga, the gaming company’s massive revenues, and what it means for Boku (that video is below).

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Microsoft Looking For A Few Good iPad Users… To Study

Posted: 13 Jul 2010 12:35 AM PDT

Companies do all kinds of studies all the time for all sorts of reasons. Seeing as the iPad is currently one of the hottest devices on the market, it should be no surprise that companies want to know about how users are using it. Even if that company is Microsoft.

Yes, Apple’s rival has created a Facebook event calling for iPad owners to come to Microsoft’s Redmond campus between July 16 and July 21 for a study. Specifically, it’s Microsoft’s User Research group and they want people for chunks of two hours to apparently survey how they use the device. A follow-up note indicates that it’s student iPad users that Microsoft is specifically interested in here.

So what do they want to study about the iPad? Who knows. ZunePad? But as one commenter on the Facebook posting notes, “This gonna be a hard study, since most of the people who bought ipad are apple fanboys and apple regular customers their point of view is, um, damaged.”

Or maybe this is the secret to Microsoft’s second inception.

A “Microsoft gratuity item” is being offered in exchange for participating. Oh goody. Here’s to hoping it’s a Courier.

Here’s the description:

Microsoft User Research is looking for iPad owners for an upcoming study to get feedback. This study will be two hours long and will take place on the Microsoft Redmond campus with a number of dates and times between Friday, July 16th and Wednesday, July 21st.

In appreciation for your time, each participant will be offered a Microsoft gratuity item.

If you are interested, please respond to the questions below to uccoord@microsoft.com with the subject line "iPad":

• Name/Age
• Phone Number
• Job Title/Company
• Are you employed full time?
-OR-
• Are you a student?
• Do you own an iPad?

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AWS Launches Cluster Compute EC2 Instances For High Performance Applications

Posted: 12 Jul 2010 11:59 PM PDT

Amazon Web Services has announced the availability of Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2, which is a new instance type specifically designed for high-performance computing (HPC) applications and other demanding applications. The new offering is designing for EC2 clients that have complex computation workloads with large amounts of data, such as financial services. The benefit of Cluster Compute Instances is that it has been engineered to provide more CPU than any other Amazon EC2 instance. And clients can also group Cluster Compute Instances into clusters which allows applications on servers to get the low-latency network performance required for tightly coupled, node-to-node communication.


You Are Not Your F*cking Khakis (But You May Be Your Phone)

Posted: 12 Jul 2010 09:05 PM PDT

Earlier today, Joel Johnson wrote an interesting post on Gizmodo simply titled “You Are Not Your Phone.” It reads sort of like a modern day existential rant with the ultimate point being: we don’t cater to fanboys, we tell it like it is, so shut up, it’s just a phone. It’s thought-provoking. It immediately reminded me of some of Tyler Durden’s philosophy from Fight Club.

In the film version, at one point Durden goes on a rant:

You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis.

“The things you own, end up owning you,” Durden says at another point. Johnson’s overall point isn’t dissimilar. “Remember these fuckers [the phones] work for us,” Johnson notes early on. But I’m not sure that Johnson doesn’t discount a certain element of fanboydom too easily.

In this particular case, Johnson is commenting on how Apple fanboys are out in full force to defend the iPhone 4 even though it has a very real antenna issue. And he’s making a commentary about how foolish this is in this particular case because Apple is insulting these very fans by suggesting the hardware issue isn’t really one at all. But he rightly extends his idea to all fanboys as he wraps up:

“Things are things. Companies make things. Some things perfect. Some things not so perfect. In a society based on selling things, it’s expected that those imperfections will be corrected. If you don’t want the media to report those imperfections because it personally offends your own sense of satisfaction in owning a product, that’s on you.”

The last sentence is key. Johnson assumes that people get up in arms about negative posts about products because these stories may offend one’s “own sense of satisfaction in owning a product.” This is something I thought about quite a bit after I wrote my review of the HTC EVO 4G.

My review (in which I state my obvious bias towards the iPhone IN THE TITLE), basically says that the device sucks. Okay, it doesn’t say it  sucks, but it does say that it’s nowhere near the iPhone, or even the Nexus One. Mike, Matt, and plenty of others largely agreed with me.

And yet, Android fanboys were out in the comments as if I had just stabbed Santa Claus with the Easter Bunny. But here’s the best part: this was before the EVO was actually released. So something like 99.9% of them had never actually used the device. But that didn’t matter, I was wrong. I just was. Why? Because.

But really, why were they saying that? Again, almost none of these people actually had the device yet. Some of it was undoubtedly because some of them had already made up their minds that they were going to purchase the device and my negative review was directly opposed to an expensive decision they had already committed to. Others were pissed simply because I stated that the iPhone was my phone of choice and so there’s no way I would ever like another phone . (Which isn’t true, by the way, or else I wouldn’t even both trying these other phones.)

But sometimes it goes even deeper.

I’ve been writing about topics that draw fanboy praise and ire for a while now. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. When a company gets big enough, they get fanboys. But in many cases, in some of the more heated discussions in blog comments there’s something pretty large that often overlooked. Very real bias.

Not bias as in, I think the iPhone is the best device so I’m not going to like an Android device as much. But bias as in, I have some skin in this game. Almost none will admit it, but those commenters silly enough to leave links back to Facebook profiles, Twitter profiles, or even personal websites often leave clues to the root of their bile.

Are commenters pissed off about your anti-Microsoft stance? Check to see how many of them devote their careers to developing on and/or around Microsoft products. Maybe they hate your anti-Apple rant? Check how many make a living off of the App Store. Or are they flaming your anti-Google post? Maybe they work for a company firmly entrenched in Android development.

Of course, this isn’t the source of all of this hatred. Or probably even most of it. But in my experience, it’s also not an insignificant factor in comment hatred. And it makes sense. If someone threatens your livelihood – even in the smallest way — you defend yourself.

Then, of course, there are the people who actually work for the companies being attacked (but conveniently leave that out — or do an anonymous comment). Or there’s the investors in those companies (both public stockholders and private stakeholders). It’s hard to prove. But you’d be foolish to think it doesn’t happen.

So in some ways, some people actually are their phones, to extend Johnson’s phrase. It’s not always that they’re fanboys for no good reason. Sometimes they’re fanboys because they have to be.

Imagine if you’ve committed you whole life to one particular Microsoft proprietary technology, and now a bunch of bloggers are saying Microsoft as we know it is going to be in trouble in 10 years. Yeah, you’d be pissed. And you’d scream from the top of your lungs that they’re wrong. Because even if they’re not, you have to believe it. Or you’re screwed.

That’s the ultimate fanboy. And there are plenty of them out there.

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It’s Alive! Taking Android’s App Inventor For A Spin

Posted: 12 Jul 2010 07:25 PM PDT

By now you’ve probably heard of Google’s App Inventor for Android, a web-based development environment that’s meant to make it possible for non-developers to build their own Android applications. The technology has been in testing for a year, primarily with educational organizations, and may well be a boon for the Android ecosystem as students are introduced to the platform in the classroom. A report in the New York Times quotes project lead (and MIT professor) Harold Abelson as saying "These aren't the slickest applications in the world… but they are ones ordinary people can make, often in a matter of minutes." So does this mean Android’s millions of users are about to start programming for their own devices? Not quite.

I spent around 90 minutes this morning cranking away on a few test applications in App Inventor, and while I’m very excited about it, this is not going to be a walk in the park for “ordinary people”. Unless you’re looking to make an extremely basic application — think “Hello World” — you’re going to have to read through the documentation, and in some cases even the existing tutorials won’t be enough. That said, this will be absolutely perfect for the classroom environment for which it’s been tested in. The learning curve is not trivial, but this isn’t something that will take years to master, either.

Before I relay my experience, it’s worth giving a little context regarding my own programming background (or lack thereof). In high school I took a year of Visual Basic, which App Inventor reminds me of in a few ways, and I later took a couple of classes on C++, which hasn’t come into play at all here. I’ve never used Scratch, which App Inventor shares many similarities with. I’d consider myself far less experienced than any professional developer, but I’m probably more knowledgeable than your average Android user.

Getting started on App Inventor is easy relative to installing Eclipse and the Android SDK, but it’s still a bit involved. First you need to ensure that you’ve got the proper version of Java running; next, you install a client for your OS; then you have to change a few settings on your Android phone (allow for applications installed from Unknown Sources, enable Dev mode on the phone, etc.). Plug in the phone, log-in to App Inventor, allow the Java app to run, and you should be good to go. It may sound like a lot, but the whole process won’t take more than ten minutes if you know what you’re doing.

Once you’re off and running, you’ll find that App Inventor is broken into two parts: the Designer and the Blocks Editor. The documentation does a good job explaining the differences, but the gist is that you add components like buttons and text fields and adjust the layout of your application in the Designer (which is a web page), and do the actual drag-and-drop coding in the Blocks Editor (which is a Java app). You can deploy changes to your Android device, hooked to your computer via USB, in less than a minute.

My first (admittedly overambitious) idea was to create an application that would allow a user to monitor TechCrunch headlines for keywords, which could come in handy if a startup wanted to get notified whenever we wrote a post about them. The basic layout was easy enough — I dragged a text box, a label, and a button to the design canvas, then tweaked the width and layout settings to make it look slightly less ugly. Then came the hard part: making those buttons actually do things, which marked my first introduction to the Blocks Editor.

The Blocks Editor reminds me of Apple’s Automator in that it lets you map out your app logic like a puzzle, though the former is obviously much more complex. Getting App Inventor to do what you want is sometimes very easy, assuming it already has a component for that task. Want to store the contents of a text field to a database when the user taps a button? It’s a cinch. Unfortunately, the list of available components sometimes has some frustrating omissions, which I quickly ran into.

Look (For The Right Components) Before You Leap

I initially planned to monitor TechCrunch headlines in my app using an RSS feed, which I assumed would be one of the available components. No dice — as far as I can tell there isn’t any RSS functionality baked in. However, the App Inventor does have some built-in Twitter components, including a search function — perhaps I could simply monitor the TechCrunch Twitter feed for headlines and run the user query against that? After dragging and dropping the proper components into to place (which took all of two minutes), I had the application spitting out Twitter search results for whatever query the user entered, which was very cool. But it’s trickier to monitor an individual Twitter account (I was getting results from all of Twitter), and it was quickly becoming apparent that I didn’t have enough experience with App Inventor to pull this project off. I’ve shelved it for later. Update:Looks like I could have used the join block to add the query and “from:techcrunch” to the search.

My second attempt was to build an application I’ll call Draw N’ Send. Given my initial setback, the application was to be nearly identical to the one produced with the App Inventor PaintPot tutorial, which allows the user to draw with a few colors on a blank canvas (I hoped to add the ability to email the resulting drawing via email). Things got off to a great start, as they often do when you have a step-by-step guide: I quickly got my colored buttons into place, and getting dots and lines to appear on the Canvas when the user dragged their finger on the screen was surprisingly straightforward. With the basic drawing functionality in place, I got ready to set up my email functionality. Which is when I hit roadblock number two: for some reason there’s currently no component to save the contents of a canvas to an image file, so I had nothing to email. So much for that idea.

Outlook

All of which boils down to say a few things. First, while this may be a development environment “for anyone”, it’s still one that you definitely have to learn before it becomes useful. And that is going to be a bit tricky, as there aren’t a ton of tutorials available yet (if you’re looking for more, check out USF Professor Dave Wolber’s Appinventor.org, which isn’t affiliated with Google).

The other key takeaway is that the variety of components offered in App Inventor still has a ways to go — and if the component you need isn’t there, you’re probably out of luck. Google says they’re working to add new ones, and down the line the Component Developer Kit will probably lead to a huge jump in available functionality. But for now, it’s definitely a good idea to get familiar with the available Functions before you start putting everything together. Whoops.

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eToro: Who Doesn’t Want A little Social Mixed With Commodities Trading?

Posted: 12 Jul 2010 05:01 PM PDT

If you’re not into trading currencies and commodities (who isn’t?), you may not know much about eToro. We first covered them in 2007 when they launched with the somewhat dubious goal of making commodities trading “fun.” But since then they’ve come a long way: users have traded over $100 billion on eToro to date and the company has raised over $10 million in capital. What’s not fun about that?

But now eToro is even “funner.” The company announced its new OpenBook platform today – think Twitter or Foursquare for trades. Users publish their real world commodities trades on the platform. Other users can view their trading history and then choose to follow those users. Or, with the click of a button, duplicate the trade.

This stuff seems absurd, but StockTwits has shows how well it works for stock trades. In fact, eToro and StockTwits are so similar in their approach, it’s no wonder that StockTwits founder Howard Lindzon is also an investor in eToro.

eToro is a good way for people to learn about the commodities trading business, starting off with fake cash or with very small trades. And it’s also clearly attracting higher profile traders who want to talk about what they do, and share with others.

To try out OpenBook, go to openbook.etoro.com.

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Amazon Hooks College Students With A Free Year Of Amazon Prime

Posted: 12 Jul 2010 03:48 PM PDT

Amazon’s looking to hook ‘em while they’re young. The online retailer has launched a program for college students — appropriately called Amazon Students — that offers a free one-year subscription to its premium Amazon Prime service, which normally runs $79 a year. The program also promises exclusive deals and promotions. To join, you’ll need to have an .edu email address and be enrolled in at least one college course (this is US only).

This is a smart move from Amazon. I’ve been a Prime subscriber for a year, and it’s uncanny how addictive “free” two-day shipping can become — you can bet a good number of the students signing up for the program are going to have a hard time going back to the 3-5 day standard shipping in a year. And even if they don’t upgrade to Prime in a year, students will probably feel some affinity to Amazon over its competitors.

Note that even if you’re not a college student, Amazon offers a one month trial membership.

Via Slickdeals

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Casualties Of War: OfferPal Downsizes As Facebook Chooses Competitor

Posted: 12 Jul 2010 03:31 PM PDT

Facebook is steadily converting partners like Zynga away from their home grown payment product to Facebook Credits. And to date there’s just one alternative for users who want to complete offers like getting a Netflix subscribtion in exchange for Farmville credits, or whatever – Trialpay. Offerpal, one of the largest offer providers, is responding to that decision. With layoffs.

In an open letter to be published later today, Offerpal CEO George Garrick talks about the reasons behind the downsizing, and the company’s new focus on other platforms:

As most of you probably know, Facebook has launched Facebook Credits, and certain Facebook games and applications have or will transition from their proprietary currencies to FB Credits.

Facebook has indicated to us that at least initially they have selected another provider to be their alt-pay partner for purchases of Facebook Credits. We respect this decision, maintain a good working relationship with Facebook, and will do our best to facilitate the smoothest possible transition for those games which move to the Credits system. However, this means that for the applications we currently serve which do switch to Credits, once that change happens the user traffic to those games that originates from Facebook will no longer be served by Offerpal.

We will continue to fully support Facebook applications which do not switch to Credits, we will as I mentioned do our best to ensure the smoothest possible transition for those applications which do switch, and we will continue to serve our valued developer partners on other Internet platforms and destination sites as well as on mobile platforms.

But like any good business, we must balance our costs with our revenues by business area. This means that we must downsize our Facebook operations in order to adjust to an anticipated lower scale of Facebook user traffic, while we also re-focus our resources on our growth areas including other gaming platforms, open web gaming, new Internet verticals, and most importantly mobile through our Tapjoy subsidiary.

Unfortunately, as a result of this, some of the outstanding people who have worked tirelessly over the last couple of years to monetize Facebook games will have their positions at Offerpal eliminated. I thank them for their dedication, effort and contribution, and will do whatever I can to help them find exciting new career opportunities.

Meanwhile, Offerpal is currently the largest offers and alt-pay provider world-wide. Offerpal's business continues to grow and expand in numerous other areas including an exciting new agreement with Yahoo!, and on the mobile iPhone, iPad and Android platforms, with more to come. We are projecting continued strong growth going forward as well as sustained profitability.

Finally, we would like to thank our 2,000+ developer partners for their continuing support of Offerpal and we look forward to continuing to work with all of you as we collectively grow our exciting new industry.

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Netflix Edges Past Hulu In Total U.S. Traffic (comScore)

Posted: 12 Jul 2010 03:27 PM PDT

As the great race to become America’s favorite source of full-length TV and movie streams gets underway, two of the favorites in that race are Hulu and Netflix. Hulu has a fairly large headstart. It is the No. 2 video site in the U.S after YouTube, and serves more than 1 billion videos a month. Meanwhile, Netflix, which is constantly adding to its catalog of streaming movies, only just broke into the top 20 last February. However, it is catching up fast, with serious streaming offerings on laptops, the Wii, and the iPad.

These video view numbers come from comScore Video Metrix, but by a more recent, and more general, measure Netflix is edging past Hulu. According to comScore, plain Web traffic in terms of unique individual visitors to Netflix was 20.2 million in June, 2010, just edging past Hulu’s 19.7 million (see chart). The vast majority of Netflix visitors are there to add movies to their mail-in DVD list, but increasingly they are starting to stream them directly as well. Overall traffic has been growing nicely since April, when Netflix streaming became available on the Wii. Traffic is up 15 percent since April (during a time when Hulu traffic has been essentially flat), and 46 percent from last year. On an annual basis, Hulu is still growing much faster, though, with 126 percent growth.

Even when you look at total time spent on each site, which is a closer approximation of viewing time (although with Netflix it includes browsing the site picking DVDs as well), Netflix also beats Hulu, based on comScore’s numbers (ditto with pageviews). In June, visitors in the U.S. logged an estimated 662 million minutes on Netflix, compared to 598 million minutes on Hulu (see chart below). Netflix shows a steady 62 percent annual rise in minutes spent on the site, compared to an even healthier 97 percent gain for Hulu. But in June, comScore shows a 29 percent drop in time spent on Hulu.

Whether that is just a glitch in comScore’s numbers or an actual drop in viewership because of summer reruns, Netflix does have a built-in advantage of streaming more movies, which are longer, than TV shows. I just streamed a movie from Netflix this weekend, and it looked indistinguishable from a DVD on my large flat-screen TV. The reason I don’t do it more often is because it is a pain to hook up my laptop to my TV. As it becomes easier and easier to stream directly to your TV or iPad, Netflix becomes another source of on-demand movies that you are already paying for (you get to stream movies for free as part of your monthly subscription).

That said, traffic and time spent does not equal videos streamed, and Hulu still dominates by all indications. Hulu is also adding to its fare with better shows and movies via its own subscription service, Hulu Plus, and killer iPad app. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see Netflix break into the top 10 movie streaming sites by the end of the year, and really start to put pressure on Hulu next year.

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Android App Inventor To Eventually Expand Third Party Support With Component Developer Kit

Posted: 12 Jul 2010 02:51 PM PDT

This morning Google officially unveiled App Inventor for Android, giving non-developer Android users the ability to build their own applications using a visual, puzzle-like interface. I’ve been playing around with the tool all morning (more on that soon), and noticed that one set of Components allows users to seamlessly integrate Twitter functionality. As far as I can tell this is the only third-party service that’s currently included, but Google tells us that it will eventually offer a Component Developer Kit, giving third party developers the ability to integrate their services as well. And that could be a very big deal.

For those that haven’t seen it in action, building an application in App Inventor involves putting together puzzle pieces called Components. Want to do something when the user taps on a Button? Use the Button.Click component. Want to change the color of something to Red? There’s a component for that too. There are also over twenty Twitter-related components, which let you integrate functionality like Twitter Search, user authentication, tweeting, and direct messaging with a few drag-and-drops.

Now imagine what will happen when you can do the same thing for Facebook, Dropbox, Foursquare and other services that offer an API or widgets. Implementing Facebook Connect could potentially be as simple as dragging-and-dropping the proper puzzle piece. Your custom data entry app could possibly upload files to your Dropbox account. Likewise, it may also be possible for developers to build Components that don’t necessarily tie directly into third party services but are more advanced than the default Component set. It’s still obviously very early days for App Inventor, and this all assumes that third parties will be throwing support behind the CDK, but it’s quite exciting.

Google declined to get into specifics on the timing of the release of the CDK. App Inventor is still in Google Labs and the core set of components still needs some work, so this is probably still a way off.

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BRDA: Blu-ray Doing Just Fine, Comments From Steve Jobs Notwithstanding

Posted: 12 Jul 2010 01:46 PM PDT

If you follow Jobs-related news closely (and I have reason to believe that you do, dear reader) then you might have chuckled with cruel mirth at that man’s recent comparison of Blu-ray to “one of the high end audio formats that appeared as the successor to the CD.” Those with extensive SACD collections will consider that a compliment, but the other 99.9% of us felt the sting. The music industry underestimated how easily its product would move on the internet, and the humbling process is well underway for them. But high-definition video is not so easily traded and stored — need Blu-ray fear the same fate?

The Blu-ray Disc Association doesn’t think so; when asked about the Jobs comment, a spokesman for them expressed optimism (naturally) and quoted figures showing that it’s seeing lots of adoption. Unfortunately for me, they expressed it in Italian, one of the many languages I do not know. Here’s Google’s translation, with a little smoothing.

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