The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Amiando Gets A Refresh, Offers Free Tickets For Free Events
- AdGrok Simplifies Keyword Bidding And More On Google AdWords
- Check-In For Swag At The New Foursquare Store
- Skype Files For IPO, Only 6 Percent Of Users Pay
- Bag Week Review Blitz, Back To School Edition
- The HP/Hurd Accusations: Now With More WTF
- NSFW: I Chose Not To Choose iPhone… or Android. I Chose Something Else.
- What Games, Places, Music And News Could Mean For Google Checkout
- The iPhone 4 Antenna Issue Won’t Die — Because Apple Won’t Let It
- Delta Flight 1843 From JFK To Hell
| Amiando Gets A Refresh, Offers Free Tickets For Free Events Posted: 09 Aug 2010 09:12 AM PDT
Event ticketing site Amiando is relaunching today with a new look, new features, and new pricing. The German startup is eliminating its $1-per-ticket fee for free events, bsically matching competitor Eventbrite’s freemium model. About 35 percent of Amiando events currently are free, so this is a major shift of the company. CEO Felix Haas believes the promotional value of going free for customers who don’t charge for their events will outweigh the lost revenue. Amiando has been growing at a nice clip, doubling revenues from last year. Haas won’t disclose total ticket sales going through Amiando, but it will probably be somewhere between $40 million and $60 million this year. Eventbrite, in contrast, sold $100 million worth of tickets last year. Amiando is much stronger in Europe, where it is based, with less than 15 percent of its business in the U.S. It hopes to take more share in the U.S. with its more competitive pricing and set of features. For example, Amiando now includes an email campaign tool which Haas descibes as a “Mailchimp for event organizers.” It allows event organizers to create email marketing campaigns, send them to their list of previous attendees, and analyze the effectiveness of each campaign. Amiando also shows where event attendees are coming from on a map with red bubbles indicating their home cities. Most of its existing features, such as ViralTickets and other social media marketing tools, are still there too.
     
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| AdGrok Simplifies Keyword Bidding And More On Google AdWords Posted: 09 Aug 2010 09:10 AM PDT
AdGrok’s web-based platform allows individual users get the kind of ad buys you’d get from an SEM agency, without the cost of the agency. The SaaS suggests keyword buys carries them out, and then collects and displays stats about their performance. AdGrok essentially becomes a business’ interface to AdWords, replacing Google’s platform with a more user-friendly software. The startup’s web spider, the "GrokBot", will crawl a website looking for product pages. When it finds one, it builds the AdWords campaign structures in order to send traffic to that page, generates keywords for that product, and builds text ads from a template library to accompany the keywords specific to that product. One of the key features of AdGrok that makes it contextual is the GrokBar, a plugin that sits on a website, and pops up anytime the user is on a page that is being advertised on Google. Users will see a full breakdown of impressions, clicks, costs, and conversion. If a keyword isn’t performing well for a given page, the software will suggest alternate buys. AdGrok’s co-founder Antonio Garcia-Martinez says that he is trying to create the Charles Schwab of online advertising, hoping to democratize the SEM world by allowing users to handle keyword bidding without the help of an agency. And as many businesses, both big and small, flock to search advertising on Google, a easy-to-use, affordable platform like AdGrok could come in handy. AdGrok faces competition from Clickable.
     
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| Check-In For Swag At The New Foursquare Store Posted: 09 Aug 2010 06:51 AM PDT
The products are actually pretty cool, and range from a $5 pack of buttons to a $20 Mayor t-shirt. Badges for the buttons include Blue Mayor, I’m on a Boat, Douchebag, Photogenic and Groupie. You can also vote for which badge will be featured in a t-shirt next. According to the announcement, Foursquare also plans reward those who unlock badges with real-life swag. While a swag store is not monumental news for Foursquare, it is definitely a way for loyal followers to express their love of the mobile social network. And t-shirts, buttons and stickers are a form of publicity for the startup. Foursquare is growing fast—the company recently crossed the 2 million member mark and reached 100 million check-ins. Notably missing from swag are headbands with Foursquare badges-I’m hoping that’s the next addition to the store.      
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| Skype Files For IPO, Only 6 Percent Of Users Pay Posted: 09 Aug 2010 06:30 AM PDT
Preparing for an eventual public offering, Skype has now filed an IPO registration statement with the SEC. According to the filing, Skype’s revenues for the first six months of 2010 were $406 million, with a net income of only $13 million. But a big portion of that was from interest income. That is only a 3 percent net margin, and this isn’t exactly a new business. Its income from operations was only $1.4 million for the six months. However, its gross margins are 51 percent, and have been expanding steadily as the company benefits from the scale of is operations and is able to negotiate lower telephone termination fees around the world. On the IPO road show, Skype will no doubt point to its adjusted EBITDA (earnings before income taxes and depreciation) numbers, which conveniently strip out things like goodwill, stock-based compensation and litigation expenses. Adjusted EBITDA for the first half of 2010 was $115.7 million, up 54 percent from a year ago. The company currently has $85 million in cash. These numbers reflect pro forma adjustments to Skype’s historical financial statements. (Click on the financial results table below to enlarge):
One interesting tidbit from the filing is that Skype had to pay $344 million to settle with the Skype founders for the Joltid peer-to-peer technology that at one point threatened to hold up the spin-off of Skype from eBay. The filing also reveals that Skype “users made 95 billion minutes of voice and video calls” during the first half of 2010, with a full 40 percent of those minutes being video. Skype users also sent 84 million SMS text messages through Skype during the period. As of June 30, Skype was averaging 124 million users a month, with only 8.1 million of those paying users (out of a total of 560 million registered users). Those users, however, pay an average of $96 a year. Skype’s strategy is to keep growing its overall number of users and convert more of them to paying customers. Getting more people to buy Skype-Out minutes will obviously not be sufficient. Skype also plans on adding advertising revenues and enterprise products (37 percent of users surveyed say they use Skype for business purposes). According to the filing, part of Skype’s strategy will be to:
The company is based in Luxemborg and is offering American depository shares. A new holding company will be created following the offering which will combine the ownership from public investors, private investors such as Silver Lake Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, and employees. The convoluted chart below shows what the new ownership structure will look like:
     
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| Bag Week Review Blitz, Back To School Edition Posted: 09 Aug 2010 06:24 AM PDT
Check back throughout the week. We seriously have a ton of bags to look at with the pic only showing a small sampling of what’s to come.      
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| The HP/Hurd Accusations: Now With More WTF Posted: 08 Aug 2010 07:58 PM PDT
There was no sexual contact and generally it just looks like they had dinners together when she was “under contract to work at high-level customer and executive summit events” for the company. She is also an actress who starred in the hit NBC show “Age of Love,” a show that appears to be about cougars. I know! THAT Jodie Fisher.      
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| NSFW: I Chose Not To Choose iPhone… or Android. I Chose Something Else. Posted: 08 Aug 2010 07:08 PM PDT
There are, after all, actual things happening in the world. There’s been a landslide in China. North and South Korea are heading towards all-out warfare. Hell, a man who makes printers may or may not have had sex with someone! But all those stories will have to wait. Because today I made a momentous decision, and a quick glance at my contract of employment tells me that I'm legally obliged to share it with you. I'm going to buy a Blackberry. Why? Because its operating system is better than your phone’s operating system. In fact I’d go so far as to say – as one is expected to do in these arguments – that Blackberry OS is the operating system that suits my own particular needs so perfectly that all other handsets seem pathetic by comparison. So ideally does Blackberry cater to my every peculiar whim that I’m already judging anyone who doesn’t share my opinion. “Hey, you with your iPhone… and you over there with your – pah – Nexus One… you people are fools! You should be ashamed of yourselves!” Another glance at my contract. Apparently I have to go further. Apparently I’m obliged (it actually says ‘obligated’) to list a number of reasons for my decision. A decision that millions of people around the world make every day, and one that would be utterly unremarkable, were I not sharing it with the 11+ million monthly readers of TechCrunch. So here goes. I’m buying a Blackberry (and so should you) because… It Allows Me To Pretend I Have A Proper Job When I Don't The fact it, it doesn't matter if you're a high powered lawyer or a sharp-suited brain surgeon: the moment you take out an iPhone and start tapping away – even if it's to confirm a meeting with the President himself – you're immediately transformed into a jobless hipster. No serious business could possibly be done with a touchscreen. The Blackberry, on the other hand, has precisely the opposite effect. I could be lying on a park bench, browsing for pornography having been drinking cheap wine since noon, but if I'm holding a Blackberry then – in the eyes of passers by – I must be working. Hard. It Provides Fewer Distractions It’s Built Like A Tank, Inside And Out (The ruggedness extends inside too: Blackberry OS boasts superior encryption to all but the most military-grade operating systems on the market. I don't actually send or receive secret emails but, holding a Blackberry, I can at least pretend that I do.) (I'm aware that readers in Saudi Arabia might not feel so secure using Blackberry messaging as I do. But frankly if you live in Saudi Arabia, you have bigger problems: while I appreciate Hilary Clinton's interest in the country’s freedom-of-text restrictions, she might want to prioritise getting women there the vote first.) It’s The Phone For People Who Love Words …And Above All, Because Whatever Anyone Else Says, You’re Probably Buying One Too Both of my esteemed colleagues, though, all-but-overlooked one other stat (Erick mentioned it in parentheses): Blackberry handsets outsold them all – both in terms of current user base and new users, with 33% of recent purchasers picking up a Blackberry compared to 27% for Android and 23% for iPhone. With numbers like those my choice to go back to Blackberry actually makes me look like a sheep. And yet to read TechCrunch of late, you'd think that to consider both iPhone and Android and choose neither is the boldest possible act of techno-contrarianism. Whatever. My mind is made up, and I insist you follow my lead. I choose not to choose iPhone or Android. Maverick or sheep, I choose Blackberry.      
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| What Games, Places, Music And News Could Mean For Google Checkout Posted: 08 Aug 2010 03:45 PM PDT
First, Google starts pushing Checkout with the launch of Google Games later this year. As we reported earlier in July, Google invested somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in social gaming giant Zynga, with part of the strategic deal including Zynga's games in Google’s Games portal. And Google just bought Slide in an effort to boost its standing in the social games world. These moves give Checkout a platform to grow. According to an Inside Network report, the U.S. market for virtual goods will reach $1.6 billion in 2010 alone. Social gaming contributes $835 million of that number. Zynga is making a killing on virtual goods and currently PayPal is reaping the benefits of this by powering payments for the social gaming giant. Zynga has been reported to be PayPal’s second largest merchant, behind eBay. PayPal has processed about $500 million in virtual goods payments in 2009 alone (though it’s unclear how many of the transactions related to Zynga games). Clearly there is a lot of money to be made here. PayPal had a net income of $817 million in Q2. And with access to a more proven Google Checkout, Zynga could always consider negotiating a lower fee than they currently receive with PayPal (see fees) or make a deal for advertising, as it reportedly did with Facebook Credits. Gaming is the obvious opportunity for Checkout, but the second is Places which Google has scaled to over 4 million businesses . Places lets local businesses claim and edit a page, post realtime updates (eg, "happy hour tonight"), create a custom QR code, and even offer coupons. What's missing here? A transaction. Why not blend Checkout with Places, and allow users to buy directly from the merchant? This seems like a logical and potentially lucrative next step. Yelp is reportedly starting to do this. Imagine if merchants could channel relevant search results to a one-click transaction, of course brokered by Google Checkout. Finally, the writing is on the wall for Google to attempt to integrate Checkout with media consumption. Google is reportedly building a paid content system for publishers, which would allow online news publishers to take payments for subscriptions and content via Checkout. And it would naturally follow that Checkout is the payments platform of choice for Google's upcoming cloud-based Music service. We already know that any of this content that is consumed over an Android will most likely have Checkout as the default option. Each of these three plays relies on execution, and Google has a mixed record with new product development (i.e.Google Wave). But there has never been a more lucrative opportunity for Google’s payments system to become a more viable threat to PayPal or other more popular payments systems. If Google can make Checkout ubiquitous, and loosen PayPal's kung-fu grip on the payment space, then every opportunity mentioned above will only be the beginning.      
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| The iPhone 4 Antenna Issue Won’t Die — Because Apple Won’t Let It Posted: 08 Aug 2010 01:45 PM PDT
Instead, talk has died down about the issue. Those still talking about the issue seem to be those who don’t actually own the device. Those that do own it seem to be happy. Again, we’re talking millions of people. I still have yet to hear of anyone I know returning one. Meanwhile, Apple still can’t make the device fast enough to meet demand. And their stock price is up over 10 points since the “Antennagate” press conference. The world has moved on. Or it had. The most peculiar thing about all of this iPhone 4 antenna stuff is the way Apple is handling it. Specifically, they keep doing things to bring it back into the news, ensuring the story won’t die. The latest is the removal of Mark Papermaster, the man who was the head of Apple’s mobile device hardware operations. While neither Apple nor Papermaster have given an official reason for the departure, word is that he was fired because of the iPhone 4 antenna issue. And naturally, that’s the way everyone in the press is covering the story. The man behind the iPhone 4′s antenna screw-up has been fired. Apple had to know that’s the way this would play out. And they had to know it would bring the antenna issue back to the forefront of the news. So why on Earth would they want that? Well, obviously, they don’t. But perhaps they felt by sacrificing the lamb, as it were, they would placate even more people that they were doing something to remedy the situation. But again, with the story having died down, I’m not sure anyone was really looking for that. So perhaps Apple did just really want to axe Papermaster for the screw-up. Okay, but again, the timing here is awful. Just wait a few months and then do it quietly – maybe around the time you launch the Verizon iPhone. It would be a much smaller story at that point — at the very least, far removed from Antennagate. But maybe Apple actually sacked Papermaster a while ago. Maybe The New York Times was only now able to dig up the information and confirm it. After all, it was SVP Bob Mansfield (the exec taking over Papermaster’s role) that was in Apple’s initial promotional videos talking about the iPhone 4′s hardware. Those videos were obviously made before anyone (in the public) knew about the antenna issue. And it was also Mansfield that was on hand during Apple’s press conference three weeks ago. Papermaster was nowhere to be seen. So maybe it has been a while since Papermaster actually worked at Apple. But here’s something else that’s odd: we were told during our tour of Apple’s antenna testing facilities that the iPhone 4 had been in testing for two years. That means it was being tested before Papermaster actually worked for Apple. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber adds a bit more to this today by saying an “informed source” told him that the antenna issue “bug” was filed two years ago — again, before Papermaster worked at Apple. So perhaps Papermaster’s dismissal was about more than the antenna issue. Or, again, maybe it was just Apple making a move to show that they’re holding someone accountable.
Regardless, assuming Papermaster didn’t leave on his own, Apple was in control of the timing of all of this. Why not just wait to make this move until Antennagate was far in the rearview mirror? Instead, a story that was fading just came roaring back to life. And this is hardly the only time Apple has rekindled this fire. First of all, Apple CEO Steve Jobs emailing concerned customers and telling them to hold it different was obviously a mistake. While Jobs was undoubtedly trying to be helpful, he was also undoubtedly annoyed at having to answer such a question. And the press (including us), rightfully teed off on that. Apple has a history of being completely silent as external situations involving them swirl. That would have been the better approach until they had finalized their official response. Second, that official response, the Antennagate press conference, was a bit odd. While I correctly predicted what it was likely to be all about (explaining to the press what the facts were from Apple’s perspective), doing so in such a grandiose manner simply amplified the whole situation further. And it led people to believe that a recall was indeed coming (which Apple likely had to leak out that it wasn’t). Instead, we got free bumpers. While I said this was necessary, I didn’t believe we needed a press conference to notify people of that. The whole press conference just led to the perception that something was indeed wrong with the iPhone 4 — the very message Apple was trying to counter with that very press conference. Third, Apple’s decision to call out rivals for having the same attenuation issues may have made sense on paper, but in practice it also largely backfired. It led some of those other companies to defend themselves (like RIM). This also perpetuated the story. Worse, Apple kept posting more of these rival attenuation videos even after the press conference was long over. Each one of these also kept reigniting dying flames. Apple seems to have realized this last week when they removed all traces of the videos from their website. But then that too became a story. So this really is the story that won’t die. But it’s not because everyone is so outraged at the issue itself — it’s because Apple keeps bringing it to the forefront with all of these related moves. To put it more clearly: this story will eventually die — but it should have already, were it not for Apple. [photo: flickr/timmezies]      
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| Delta Flight 1843 From JFK To Hell Posted: 08 Aug 2010 11:12 AM PDT
I’m not talking about leg room, which for someone like me who’s 6’4 makes flying coach over long distances torture. Or the indifferent TSA, who often seem to be the biggest security threat in any given airport. I can’t get a bottle of water past security, but I’m pretty sure I could get a gun on board a plane if I wanted to. No, what’s really making flying just terrible are all the people that work for the airlines. My expectations are pretty low after flying mostly with United Airlines for the last decade. And even so, Delta managed to, somehow, make United actually look good. The newer crop of airlines understand that happy employees tend to make good employees. Southwest, JetBlue, Virgin America – I’ve had recognizably positive moments on all of these airlines. Sometimes just from an employee who went slightly out of their way to do something right. But Delta, oh God that airline sucks. I flew them to New York and back last week, choosing them because of the ticket price and because they now have wifi on some flights. This was my first, and last, experience flying that godawful excuse for an airline. I bought a first class ticket, which is one of the small luxuries I’m willing to pay for in life. This was a last minute purchase and the flights were around $1,500 each way. I travel light – a computer bag and one of those very small roller bags that’s always considered a carry on. I don’t check luggage because, we all know, it adds at least half an hour after you land. On the flight out to New York I was stopped at the gate and told my bag was too big and they couldn’t let me take it on. They said it wasn’t their fault, it was FAA guidelines that prohibited them. I told them that I wasn’t going to get on the plane unless I could check it. When they realized I was in first class they said to go ahead and bring it on. As far as I can tell there aren’t really FAA rules on the size of carry on baggage, it’s pretty much up to the airline. And my bag has been carried on to countless flights without, as far as I know, endangering the plane or any other passengers. And if that bag was a danger, it certainly wasn’t less of a danger just because I was in first class. But what really got me was just how gleeful the two gate employees were about the whole thing. I could tell that they lived for moments like this. But that was just a taste of what Delta had for me. The flight back – 1843 from JFK to Seattle – that was the one that I won’t soon forget. I got to the airport and checked in just less than three before the flight. I checked that small suitcase this time because they’d put the fear of God into me on that flight out. That was about 48 hours ago exactly, and I still haven’t seen that bag again. The flight had the obligatory JFK 2 hour wait on the runway, which isn’t Delta’s fault. But the obligatory hateful flight attendants were there too, and seemed pretty happy that they hadn’t stocked enough food on the flight. I heard grumblings from cattle class about it, and an attendant got on the intercom to let them know that they wouldn’t be eating any time soon. Then we landed. At this point my bag was somewhere other than inside the airplane, and Delta should have known all about it. It turns out that at least most of the bags for the first class customers were, likewise, not on the plane. You’d think that they’d maybe let us know about it. Instead, they let us all wait 30 minutes for the bags to start coming out, and another 20 minutes until they were all gone. Then we, the first class passengers, walked over to the Delta baggage counter. To be told that our bags were never put on the plane. Even though I at least checked in hours before the flight. Why weren’t they on the plane? I’m making an educated guess here, but it’s probably because some Delta employee who hates his job decided not to bother. Ok, lost bag. It happens. And it’s annoying that they didn’t take a moment to tell us instead of making us wait and find out an hour later. But the fun was just beginning. They would not deliver my bag to my home. I could choose to come back to the airport over the weekend. Or they’d be happy to fedex it to me for delivery on Tuesday. Can I have a receipt? No, our printer is broken. The guy next to me needed his tuxedo, he said. No luck. Another guy, traveling from India, said he had medication in his bag that he needed immediately. That put a smile on the baggage counter woman’s face as she told him to go find a doctor over the weekend and get new prescriptions. Welcome to America. So I’m now patiently waiting for the Fedex delivery of my bag on Tuesday to my home in Seattle, and I’ve charged back the entire flight on my credit card (I’ll just print out this post when the paperwork comes). And eventually Delta will either get their act together or just flail into bankruptcy and be destroyed by better, smarter, happier competitors. But what I’d wish would happen is that some of these super expensive management consultants that are advising the airlines would just tell them one simple truth – I can live with no leg room, no food, dirty bathrooms and long delays. I can even live with lost bags. If only a flight attendant, or baggage person, or whoever, would just commiserate with me for one moment. Maybe smile and say they’ll try their best to help. But until all that bad energy is gone, and the airlines have employees that don’t stare daggers at their customers, I’m out. I’ll stick to Virgin, Southwest and Jet Blue. Mostly Virgin because they have Internet. And if I can’t fly with them I’ll just cancel and use Skype video. Because life’s too short to deal with these assholes any longer. And if you’ve read this far, thank you for indulging me. This was cathartic and sometimes I just have to rant a little, or else turn into one of those miserable Delta people and hate the world. Update: Read The Insufferable Terror of Economy Air Travel, Featuring Delta Airlines      
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