Saturday, September 18, 2010

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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Email Overload Fix: 3 Sentence Emails

Posted: 18 Sep 2010 08:15 AM PDT


Email is taking up too much time in our lives.

Do yourself and your recipients a favor by making your emails 3 sentences or less.

If we all do it, imagine the time we’ll have to do other things.

If this was an actual email reply and not a blog post, it would have ended before this sentence started. I’ve been trying a new solution to email overload by limiting emails to 3 sentences or less. You can learn the details in just 5 sentences at three.sentenc.es. The basic concept is to treat all email replies like SMS messages. I take this one step further and try to write initial emails in 3 sentences or less whenever possible.

I first learned about 3 sentence emails from a post by Kevin Rose, where he lists 5 good email time saving tips.

The inbox has become the “dreaded inbox” for so many people. A recent study by Xobni claimed 1 in 5 Americans check email either as the first thing they do in the morning or the last thing at night. 26% of Americans feel they can’t handle or feel overwhelmed by the number of emails they receive during vacation. Another report [PDF] by The Radicati Group says the typical corporate user sends 36 emails and receives 61 legitimate emails during the average day. An IDC study estimates email consumes an average of 13 hours per week per information worker.

Since starting at TechCrunch TV, I get about 100 to 200 emails a day which require action or a response. The newly launched Google Priority Inbox, which is getting postive reviews, helps. Although venture investor Jeff Clavier discovered it can make some mistakes. Google decided his wife’s emails weren’t important. Not good.

Even with Priority Inbox, staying up to 2am and working on emails 2 to 3 hours a day during my commute, I still can’t keep up with the email avalanche and get my inbox to zero.

My inbox problems are nothing compared to the TechCrunch writers. Or, to my boss Michael Arrington. Two years ago, when he wrote a post about email overload and a crisis in communication, he had 2,433 unread messages sitting in his inbox. Today, the count is 8 times higher: 20,131 unread messages. And this doesn’t include additional inbox items from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, voicemail, text messages, Skype, etc.

Let’s assume Mike did nothing else but read emails 24/7 – no writing posts, no talking on the phone, no eating, and no sleeping – well, that one might be accurate. It would take him 1 week to just read his email, assuming each email takes an average of 30 seconds to read and digest.

Now, let’s say all of his emails were 3 sentences or less. The average time to read them would be drop to about 10 seconds. He could get through them all in a little more than 2 days.

I’ll admit the 3 sentence email isn’t going to solve the email problem completely. In Mike’s email post two years ago, he wrote “The long term answer is that someone needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages.” He said if he had the right solution, he would quit his job and go do it. Since then, there have been some minor solutions, but the email giant seems to grow just like Moore’s law.

The new version of Twitter.com released this week might provide some relief. MG Siegler has been using the new service for a few days now. He told me he switched some email communication to Twitter Direct Message (or “DM”), which is now cleaner and easier. And Twitter DM forces you to keep things short.

While more communication is being done by social media networks, email usage is still expected[pdf] to rise in the coming years. A Wall Street Journal article one year ago declared “Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.” I’d say not quite yet.

Mike’s growing email overload creates problems for himself and the sender. He admitted to me, once an email comes in and doesn’t get acted on immediately, it enters the black hole. Even if he wanted to reply, it’s now out of sight and unlikely to surface again. For the sender, you don’t know whether the lack of reply is really a ‘no’, a never got read, or a just wait some more time for an answer.

When Mike does reply, he has mastered the art of the short reply. Most of his replies are just 1 sentence or 1 word. ‘Fine’, ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and an occasional ‘Awesome’. Usually, it’s the folks who are higher up in the organization who have perfected the terse reply. Just yesterday, we reported on unconfirmed 2 and 3 sentence Steve Jobs emails. He allegedly emailed a journalism student that “Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry.” Here’s another 3 sentence Jobs email reply to a customer with a water damaged MacBook Pro, upset that Apple would charge $300 to look into repairing it:

This is what happens when your MacBook Pro sustains water damage. They are pro machines and they don't like water. It sounds like you're just looking for someone to get mad at other than yourself.
Steve

Jobs is well known for his short replies. A study of 30,000 corporate emails found that high-status employees “tended to send short, curt messages.” That study includes some other tips on ‘How to E-Mail Like a C.E.O.’

But, a short response still requires clarity and some extra thought. A long, detailed email getting a reply like ‘fix it’ or ‘change it’, may not help unless both parties know what ‘it’ is.

Critics may say this could lead to over-simplification or a dumbing down of communication. But, emails are not the place to write War & Peace (1,475 pages.) Email has come a long way since 1971 when Ray Tomlinson typed an “insignificant and forgetable” message. It’s a great way to get asynchronous feedback. I’ll admit some emails shouldn’t be condensed, especially if they involve a lot of details or you just want to share some thoughts with friends. But those should be the exception.

Many business emails I read and yes, I write, would benefit from trimming. The next time you sit down to write or reply to an email, think about keeping it short. The three.sentenc.es site recommends you add this to your email signature to help spread the word.

——————————————–
Q: Why is this email three sentences or less?
A: http://three.sentenc.es

Flickr Hits Its 5 Billionth Photo, And Here It Is

Posted: 18 Sep 2010 12:16 AM PDT

According to Media Culpa a blog that apparently obsessively tracks these things, photo-sharing site Flickr has hit the 5 billionth photo milestone today with the above, uploaded  by Flickr user yeoaaron. Media culpa blogger Hans Kullin also points out that Flickr has been growing at about 1 billion photos per year, over the past 3 years, eclipsed in market share by social giant Facebook which hit 15 billion photos uploaded in April of 2009.

As Facebook claims it was uploading over 2.5 billion photos a month in February of 2010, we’re loosely guestimating there are somewhere between 30 and 50 billion photo uploads on the site currently. I’ve contacted both Flickr and Facebook for more info and will update as soon as they respond.

In the meantime sit back and enjoy Aaron Yeo’s artistic interpretation of the view of the Woodward’s Building in Vancouver.

Thanks: Media Culpa

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Google Adds Instant To Chrome Labs In Chromium (Windows Only, For Now)

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 09:45 PM PDT

Google Instant is great — but I rarely use it. Why? Because I simply don’t go to google.com that often. That’s not to say I don’t search Google a lot — I do — I just use the Omnibox in Chrome for almost all of my searches. When Google launched Instant, they noted that it would be added to browser for people like me “in the next few months“. Well, guess what? It only took them 9 days.

Granted, Google has only enabled Instant as a Chrome Labs, and they have only enabled it for Chromium, the open source browser that Chrome is based on. But most features that come to Chromium, usually find their way to Chrome in relatively short order — though they have to then travel through the different levels of Chrome itself (dev then beta then stable). Sadly, this feature is Windows-only for the time being as well.

To activate Instant in Chrome Labs in Chromium, simply type “about:labs” into the Omnibox (the URL area) and hit enter. You’ll then have to click the link to “Enable” the feature, which will require a browser restart. Once you do that, you should be off and running. GoogleWatchBlog took a video of it in action below — it looks great, though I wonder if it will be slightly annoying if I really am just trying to type a URL.

It’s worth noting that this is actually Google Instant, unlike the instant search workaround in Chrome that was reported last week. That uses a different feature called “match preview” to mimick what Instant does, but it’s not exactly the same.

So when can Mac user expect to see the feature? “We’re waiting to iron out the kinks on windows first,” a team member writes on the Chromium Code Reviews page. Oh well, at least we have the Tab Overview lab — which is awesome (and already in Chrome proper — the dev build).

[thanks Pascal]

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Syncronizer: A Chatroom Community With Twitter-Style Following

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 08:46 PM PDT

Started as a way for University of Michigan students to gossip during class, founder Dan Rich says he was inspired by the simplicity of sites like Texts From Last Night and FML when he built Syncronizer, a community where you can follow chat conversations about anything from “Jersey Shore” to “Econ 503.” In fact Rich brings up stealth startup BNTER, started by Texts From Last Night founders Lauren Leto and Patrick Moberg, as a possible competitor.

Here’s what I like about Syncronizer: Like Facebook, it’s another socializing platform germinating from hotbed of all social interactions, a college campus, and despite the fact a lot of the conversations degenerate into the usual fratty deliberations on boobs and beer, it seems as though there is something unique happening here.

The idea of following group chats instead of people is also novel, and socializing becomes more about tracking interests and less about individual personal nodes. You now have the ability to communicate with friends and strangers in both visible and invisible modes, and, in the case of “Econ 503″ some rooms are closed to non-members. The site bridges the gap between public and private so users can pick and choose which conversations to track through your dashboard.

The main difference between a Syncronizer chat and a normal group chat room is that Syncronizer chats stick around for a long time. That and simplicity of use, say Rich, “Everything on the site works with a single click- visibility/anonymity, tracking a room, restricting a room, etc.”

Rich says he was attempting to flip the Twitter model of following people on its axis, so instead of broadcasting updates to anybody and everybody, the conversation becomes the focus of the follow.

“So, for example, you might want a place to discuss plans or stories with a large group of friends you know very well. You could create a room and invite your friends, and restrict access so that only your friends can view it. But at the same time, you may want to also remain engaged in a public conversation about your favorite tv show.”

Self-funded, Rich’s future plans include improving the chat aggregator’s search functionality so users can better find rooms of interest to them, and developing ways that Syncronizer can further connect people with conversations that are relevant.


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Best Buy CEO: The Reports Of Microsoft’s Death Are Grossly Exaggerated… By Me.

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 06:40 PM PDT

All day, the Internet has been erupting with news that the age of notebook and netbooks is over, and the age of tablets — specifically, the iPad, of course — has begun. One of the main catalysts of this eruption was Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn who supposedly told the Wall Street Journal that the iPad is cannibalizing laptop sales, especially netbook sales. Or did he?

Here’s the blurb from the WSJ story this morning:

Mr. Dunn also said internal estimates showed that the iPad had cannibalized sales from laptop PCs, especially netbooks, by as much as 50%.

Now, that’s obviously not a direct quote, but it is a very clear statement directly attributed to him. And it’s a huge statement as Best Buy is the nation’s leading consumer electronics giant. It’s basically saying that not only is the iPad winning, it is ushering in a new era of computing. In other words, Microsoft and all the PC incumbents are screwed.

But wait.

This afternoon, amid the uproar of this statement, Best Buy issued a press release backtracking from the claim. Give Dunn credit, he attempts to use humor to cool down the situation (borrowing a phrase from Mark Twain). “The reports of the demise of these devices are grossly exaggerated,” Dunn says in the release. So is he saying the Journal misquoted him? No — instead he’s doing the classic old non-denial denial:

While they were fueled in part by a comment in the Wall Street Journal that was attributed to me, they are not an accurate depiction of what we’re currently seeing.

Notice that he’s not saying he didn’t say that, he’s just trying to make you infer that he might not have said that. In other words, he probably did say that. Perhaps he was just wrong, or maybe he was feeling some pressure from important PC partners to backtrack from the statement — who knows.

Regardless of the reason for the backtrack, iPads aren’t notebook-killers in his mind anymore. Now, that’s just a “rumor“. Instead, tablets are an “incremental opportunity.” That’s quite a flip-flop.

Microsoft’s official Twitter account immediately retweeted the statement and even tipped Techmeme — though someone else actually beat them to tipping Techmeme. Another Microsoft employee. Just sayin’.

Meanwhile, no word yet from NPD and Morgan Stanley Research if they’re also going to be backtracking from their numbers that notebook sales are going the wrong way.

[image via]

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Why Groupon Needs a Backlash

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 06:36 PM PDT

It's starting. The inevitable "wait-a-minute-this-start-up-isn't-the-second-coming-of-Christ-after-all" backlash has officially hit Groupon. First there was the dodgy fake deals in Brazil, then there was a business owner saying offering a Groupon deal was the worst business decision she ever made, then there was the sketchy photography offer. These are all serious issues, but clearly don't reflect the general performance of the site or views of the majority of its merchants. Still you could almost hear the schadenfreude popping throughout the blog and Twittersphere.

Generally I think the hype cycle is one of the lamest things about the tech/social media blogosphere—no one is as great or as horrible as we all make them out to be. But this turn of the cycle might be helping Groupon. Simply put, the company could use a discount on some humble pie.

It's a law of startup nature that the easier a business is to create and rip-off the less defensible it is. To wit, there are upwards of fifty Groupon clones in most large countries—several hundred in China— and they're almost all making money and flooded with small businesses wanting to offer deals through them. There seems a limited network effect because the deals are one-off, many of the clones don't require exclusivity, and Groupon hasn't had much of a first-mover-lead on the copy-cats. The company has said that customers look at Groupon deals like an ad purchase—so the company is more like Google than eBay, just a part of a small businesses' marketing strategy not their entire virtual storefront.

And yet, despite all this, Groupon seems wholly unconcerned about any threats to its business. In our August 20 interview with Rob Solomon he seemed to be a bit ahead of himself, saying it was a trillion dollar market opportunity that had completely disrupted offline advertising and indeed possibly "the biggest category the Internet had ever seen." I asked several times about threats to the company's momentum, and he said no one else had innovated on the category, the company had perfected the model and that the ability to do these deals at scale was a major advantage. He was clear that Groupon doesn't see any threats on the horizon other than keeping up with its inevitable growth.

Really? I can think of a few threats:

1. Yelp: It’s not the sexy new kid on the Web 2.0 block but Yelp as a massive install base, has stronger network effect in many cities already, has already copied your business model and seems to be selling at scale just fine. They may well stumble as they add more cities and more deals, but if this is really a trillion dollar opportunity, I’d argue Groupon hasn’t been tested on the scale issue yet either.

2. The Digg-Button Problem: Sometimes the most transformational consumer Internet businesses wind up just being features. Think of how radically Digg changed the distribution of news with its Digg buttons that are now a staple of the Internet and larger companies like Facebook and Twitter. Groupon too may become less of a distinct business, and more of a way of offering discounts that loads of businesses adopt, it could even become a classified revenue replacement for whatever daily newspapers are still in businesses. Is it really a company or just a brilliant new way of marketing? I'm not sure we know yet.

3. An utter lack of focus: I give Groupon huge points for sheer ballsiness. I have never seen a US-based startup explicitly go after a global opportunity so quickly. The company has become nowhere close to locking up the US market or even picking all the low hanging fruit, and best case when something grows that fast they're going to start stumbling here or there and as we saw this week, competitors and the press will be ready to pounce on them when they do. It's like a fat man at an all-you-can-eat buffet—even if the food is there for the taking he can't eat it all at the same time.

I say this out of love, Groupon. Because I have been waiting for a smart company to disrupt ecommerce for a long time and God knows we all need more ways to sell ad-like-products-that-actually-work on the Internet. (cc:Yahoo) But Groupon's demeanor reminds me of two moments I've seen before in the Valley. The first is when Tom Siebel declared his customer relationship management software was so predictive he could "see around corners"…and then he turned a corner and his business fell off a cliff and never recovered. The other was when a WebVan executive—infuriated by a story I wrote that the business wasn't defensible enough—screamed at me "We have built for scale! You should see our warehouses! It's like the Jetsons in here!" And a month later, WebVan was delisted from the Nasdaq, and soon after the WebVan ads were being scraped off of every cup holder at, then, Pacific Bell Park.

Simply put, startups should be more paranoid. Groupon needs to be humbled by something small, so later on it'll be able to anticipate something big.

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Cuil Goes Down, And We Hear It’s Down For Good

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 06:08 PM PDT

Cuil, the much maligned search engine that at one time had hopes of toppling Google, has gone offline. And from what we hear from former employees, it’s not just a temporary outage, it may be done for good. Those employees who are still with the company apparently weren’t paid this week, and they’re starting to say they’re looking for new jobs.

The company had raised $33 million in venture capital in 2007 and 2008. we first started covering Cuil in late 2007 when it was in stealth. It launched in July 2008 but a month later their VP Product had bailed. By December 2008 it had little traffic and since then things have only gotten stranger.

To be clear, we’ve confirmed nothing right now except that the site is down, the rest of what we’re hearing is from former employees. We’ll update as we hear back from the company and/or investors. Meanwhile, it’s in the DeadPuil.

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Why Is This News?: Sweeps Week Trans-Pacific Skype Edition

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 05:46 PM PDT

This week, Why Is This News has gone on the road! Two roads in fact: one towards Tianjin, where Sarah was attending “Summer Davos” and the other towards Las Vegas where Paul was, well, hanging out by a pool.

Fortunately, thanks to the magic of Skype, we were still able to cross time-zones to talk about Sarah’s highlights from China, sustainability, water and the final word on the woman in technology debate. (Spoiler: the chicks are alright)

Video below.

Google’s Investment Pays Off: Ngmoco Building Plus+ (And Possibly Games) For Android

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 05:22 PM PDT

There’s no absolute formula for success in the mobile app world — but if there was, ngmoco would probably be amongst those closest to having it figured out. Just about everything they touch (Gun Range, WeFarm, Rolando, and their Plus+ gaming network) turns to gold; unfortunately, the only stuff they’ve touched so far has been exclusively for iOS.

Back in February, ngmoco CEO Neil Young said they were “encouraged” by Android’s growth, but that they’d be sticking with the iPhone for the time being. Oh, how quickly a big ol’ cash injection can change plans; just a month after an estimated $3-5 million investment by Google Ventures, ngmoco is seemingly looking to dive head first into Android development.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

A Crowdsourced Decision: Should I Move my Blog to Tumblr?

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 05:21 PM PDT

As regular readers may or may not recall, I recently quit Twitter. My reasons for doing so were legion but one of the biggest was the fact that, as someone whose job it is to write about himself, I'd noticed that Twitter had adversely affected my ability to work. Not because it was distracting – which it was – but mainly because I realised that since joining Twitter I realised I'd all but stopped writing my blog.

When I wrote my previous book, back in 2008, my blog archives proved a really useful way to go back and fact-check my recollection of events, not to mention double-checking exactly dates and times of my travels. When it came time to write the next book, though, I was slightly alarmed to discover my Twitter archive mainly furnished me with 2300 (of the 10,000+ I'd actually written) micro-notes packed with some useful insights as "heading out to buy eggs" and “Just saw a man nearly getting hit by a car”, not to mention a couple of hundred context-free OH's, none of which was attributed.

My plan was that, after quitting Twitter, I'd be able to focus on writing stuff that actually paid the rent, and then go back to using my blog to fill in the gaps. And that's what I've done.

But but but.

But there definitely remains a murky middle ground at the lower end of the scale (if that's not a contradiction in terms) – stuff that I want to draw attention to, that perhaps deserves a wider audience than the two or three friends I might happen to run into while the thought is fresh in my head, but that doesn’t justify a whole blog post. There's also the issue that, with RSS usage trailing off, Twitter has become the default way to keep track of new columns, posts, books etc from writers who you follow.

So what's the answer? Return to Twitter? Definitely not. Write one-line posts on my blog? That's just weird, and it doesn't solve the 'following' problem. So what does that leave?

"How about a Tumblr?"

That's the question I've heard a dozen times from friends who are writers. It's also, apparently, the solution that has John Mayer settled on, having also quit Twitter (copycat, John Mayer!). On the face of it, it seems like a good plan: move my blog over to Tumblr (I already have an account, apparently – although I don’t remember registering it) and benefit from an lower maintenance platform to write shorter – but still substantial – posts plus the ability to follow and be followed by others.

I have questions, though. What should I do with my old blog posts? Can they be ported over, and should they be, given I'd be at the mercy of someone else's SAAS solution rather than my current backup-able dedicated hosting thing? Also: will Tumblr prove just as distracting as Twitter? Does it inherently lead to shorter, pithier re-blogging rather than actual posts? No one I've spoken to seems to have good answers to any of these questions – perhaps I just don't have Tumblry enough friends? – so instead I've decided to crowd-source the decision.

So here I go. It pains me to give the appearance of Mashable-esque comment bait, but I'm genuinely interested: what do you think? Is Tumblr a more feature-rich platform for serious blogging, or is it floss-filled lightweight bullshit for people with short attention spans? I'd be particularly interested to hear from serious bloggers who have made the switch from WordPress to Tumblr.

Let me know in the comments.

(Image stolen from Tumblr’s ‘Topherchris‘)

Back To School: Cameras For Campus

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 05:00 PM PDT


There will be many times you will want to remember during your years at college, and many you will be unable to remember. In both cases you’ll be glad to have taken pictures, though you may wish to keep them off Facebook. And of course there is the whole question of what you’re going to take these pictures with. Well, there’s no shortage of cameras to choose from, but depending on budget and your photographic aspirations, we can probably narrow it down a bit.

Here are our recommendations for the college-bound shutter-hound.

Continue reading this article…

Journalism Student Won’t Leave Steve Jobs Alone

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 04:56 PM PDT

Gawker just published some emails where Apple CEO Steve Jobs comes off as pretty rude to journalism student Chelsea Issacs. We here at TechCrunch we have a tradition of Peter Kafka-esque skepticism when it comes to emails from journalism students, but especially ones that seem to be at the center of some shady Internet fame seeking business themselves.

“In 1998, Isaacs was the most desirable hand model in the United States and Canada. Isaacs has been described by the Cantolino Press as having an “electric presence that is both entertaining and very believable” with “an extremely evolved sense of the human psyche.”

The whole thing comes off as incredibly fishy, especially right after the “Steve Jobs Ninja Stars” incident and especially on this especially slow news day. So after asking Chelsea Issacs whether this was some kind of grand blogger setup and receiving no response, I sent Steve Jobs an email of my own. And am waiting to hear back, from him or anyone at Apple really.

Hey Steve,

Is this for reals? Seems like this journalism student is trying to figure out if we TechCrunchers fact check … :)

Alexia

Here is the alleged Jobs/Issacs exchange as emailed to us below. Parts that seem notable in bold.

On Sep 17, 2010, at 12:44 PM, Chelsea Isaacs wrote:

Please take a look at the email correspondence I just had with Steve Jobs. I am a student in a journalism course and after asking him a question, he responded rather rudely. See for yourself. Thanks.

—————————————————–

From: Steve Jobs

Date: September 16, 2010 6:27:36 PM PDT

To: “XXXX@my.liu.edu”

Subject: Re: Mr. Jobs – Student Journalist Concerned about Apple’sMediaRelations Dept.

Please leave us alone.

Sent from my iPhone

—————————————————–

On Sep 16, 2010, at 5:32 PM, XXXX@my.liu.edu wrote:

You’re absolutely right, and I do meet your criteria for being a customer who deserves a response:

1. I AM one of your 300 million users.

2. I DO have a problem; I need answers that only Apple Media Relations can answer.

Now, can they kindly respond to my request (my polite and friendly voice can be heard in the first 5 or 10 messages in their inbox). Please, I am on deadline.

I appreciate your help.

—————————————————–

From: Steve Jobs

Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2010 17:10:12

To: XXXX@my.liu.edu

Subject: Re: Mr. Jobs – Student Journalist Concerned about Apple’s

MediaRelations Dept.

Nope. We have over 300 million users and we can’t respond to their requests unless they involve a problem of some kind. Sorry.

Sent from my iPhone

—————————————————–

On Sep 16, 2010, at 4:37 PM, XXXX@my.liu.edu wrote:

Thank you for your reply. I never said that your goal should be to “help me get a good grade.” Rather, I politely asked why your media relations team does not respond to emails, which consequently, decreases my chances of getting a good grade. But, forget about my individual situation; what about common courtesy, in general — if you get a message from a client or customer, as an employee, isn’t it your job to return the call? That’s what I always thought. But I guess that’s not one of your goals. Yes, you do have a creative approach, indeed.

—————————————————–

From: Steve Jobs

Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2010 16:19:13

To: XXXX@my.liu.edu

Subject: Re: Mr. Jobs – Student Journalist Concerned about Apple’s Media

Relations Dept.

Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry.

Sent from my iPhone

—————————————————–

On Sep 16, 2010, at 3:22 PM, XXXX@my.liu.edu wrote:

Dear Mr. Jobs,

As a college student, I can honestly say that Apple has treated me very well; my iPod is basically the lifeline that gets me through the day, and thanks to Apple’s Final Cut Pro, I aced last semester’s video editing project. I was planning to buy a new Apple computer to add to my list of Apple favorites.

Because I have had such good experiences as a college student using Apple products, I was incredibly surprised to find Apple’s Media Relations Department to be absolutely unresponsive to my questions, which (as I had repeatedly told them in voicemail after voicemail) are vital to my academic grade as a student journalist.

For my journalism course, I am writing an article about the implementation of an iPad program at my school, the CW Post Campus of Long Island University.

The completion of this article is crucial to my grade in the class, and it may potentially get published in our university’s newspaper. I had 3 quick questions regarding iPads, and wanted to obtain answers from the most credible source: Apple’s Media Relations Department.

I have called countless times throughout the week, leaving short, but detailed, messages which included my contact information and the date of my deadline. Today, I left my 6th message, which stressed the increasingly more urgent nature of the situation. It is now the end of the business day, and I have not received a call back. My deadline is tomorrow.

Mr. Jobs, I humbly ask why Apple is so wonderfully attentive to the needs of students, whether it be with the latest, greatest invention or the company’s helpful customer service line, and yet, ironically, the Media Relations Department fails to answer any of my questions which are, as I have repeatedly told them, essential to my academic performance.

For colleges nationwide, Apple is at the forefront of improving the way we function in the academic environment, increasing the efficiency of conducting academic research, as well as sharing and communicating with our college communities.

With such an emphasis on advancing our education system, why, then, has Apple’s Media Relations team ignored my needs as a student journalist who is just trying to get a good grade?

In addition to the hypocrisy of ignoring student needs when they represent a company that does so much for our schools, the Media Relations reps are apparently, also failing to responsibly handle the inquiries of professional journalists on deadlines. Unfortunately, for a journalist in the professional world, lacking the answers they need on deadline day won’t just cost them a grade; it could cost them their job.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Chelsea Kate Isaacs

Senior

CW Post – Long Island University

And besides, if this is real, Jobs is totally in the right.

Update: Issacs responds.

Absolutely not.

—————————————————–

From: Alexia Tsotsis
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2010 19:04:41 -0700
To: XXXX@my.liu.edu
Subject: Re: Steve Jobs’ Emails to Me: “Leave us Alone”

My question: Is your Steve Jobs email part of a project to see if you can trick the media?

See:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/11/elyse-porterfield/

I’m pretty good at telling the truth, so be honest with me.

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Does Quid Have The Most Pretentious Website of Any Startup Ever?

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 03:52 PM PDT


The overly ornate website copy of investment trends startup Quid (tagline: “Mapping the world’s technologies”) has now become a subject on Quora, and is therefore famous enough to warrant objective analysis. So here goes …

First of all I literally spat out my morning coffee when I saw the header “Our Secondary Typeface.” Secondary typeface!? How about a primary business model?

Other highlights:

“Quid is from the Latin ‘quid,’ what.” What?

“In law, quiddity is used to refer to a fine point, the essential difference. Shakespeare includes it in a speech by Hamlet, referring to a lawyer, “Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures.” WTF?

“This contribution is particularly evident in the swash tail of our Quid ‘Q.’” Swash tail!

“We selected it for its clarity, its modernist tone, and its ability to both complement and contrast with Bulmer and Baskerville.”

“Our team brings backgrounds in engineering, finance, physics, computer science, biochemistry, and design to bear on this lacuna.” Lacuna!

Quid recently launched in private beta and is backed by Founder’s Fund for an undisclosed amount. Oh, and I almost forgot, good news for those who have recently finished their Rhodes Scholarships in Classics/Particle Physics and are looking for a gig in between singing in an Art Rock band, learning their 16th language and joining the French Foreign Legion! Quid is hiring.

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Facebook Job-Hunting App BranchOut Raises $6 Million From Accel And Super Angels

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 03:23 PM PDT

When you want to hang out with your friends online, you go to Facebook. When you want to look for a job, you go to LinkedIn. Well, maybe not for long. BranchOut, a startup that is essentially building a LinkedIn for Facebook, raised $6 million in a series A round. Several news sites reported the funding yesterday when the SEC filing came out, but other than Accel Partners, none of the investors were known. Here they are:

In addition to Accel, which led the round (partner Kevin Efrusy sits on the board), the other two VCs were Mike Maples of Floodgate and Tim Chang of Norwest Venture Partners. But the round also attracted a lot of high-profile super angels, including Napster founder Shawn Fanning, former Facebook platform manager Dave Morin (Fanning and Morin are now co-founders of Path), Bebo founder Michael Birch, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, Tickle founder James Currier, former Tickle CEO Stan Chudnovsky, Blippy founder Philip Kaplan, Googler Ben Ling, Naval Ravikant, and Josh Elman (former Facebook, now Twitter).

Many of the angel investors are, appropriately enough, friends and former colleagues of BranchOut CEO Rick Marini, who was also a co-founder of Tickle. (Michael Birch of Bebo fame also used to work there).

The basic idea of BranchOut is to find jobs through your real friends. It is a Facebook app that lets you search for companies and then it shows you all your friends who either work there or know somebody who does. It only goes two degrees of separation out, unlike LinkedIn which goes three. It doesn’t show the names of the people who work at the target companies, just their titles. You ask your friends for an introduction.

Why is this better than LinkedIn? Well, because it is on Facebook. “Basically we have this thesis that the social graph will change a lot of internet businesses,” explains Efrusy. “We fundamentally believe it will change jobs and recruiting. If you look at how most people really get their jobs it is through their real friends.”

Right now BranchOut gets all of its data from Fecebook profiles, including employment histories, but it plans to add more data from other sources, perhaps even LinkedIn. It also allows you to post jobs to your friends for free, and will eventually let companies post jobs for a fee.

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Satish Dharmaraj Answers Your Questions (TCTV)

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 02:58 PM PDT

What is it about doing video interviews with me that makes VCs start swearing? Dave McClure, David Hornik, Fred Wilson and now Redpoint’s Satish Dharmaraj. OK, in most of these cases, I’m the one who starts the swearing, but still, I have a feeling most people don’t have to put “NSFW” on this many posts about wonky old venture capital. I’m thinking about just renaming the show “Fuck You Money.”

Appropriately, the theme was “assholes” on this week’s “Ask a VC.” We talked about Fred Wilson’s hope that the industry weed out the assholes and asshole-ish VC behavior that Dharmaraj refuses to engage in now that he’s moved from the entrepreneur side of the table to the VC side of the table. We also talked about his angel investing in India– and why Redpoint as a firm doesn’t invest there. We talk about what the role for business people is in a engineer-obsessed Valley. We talk about why VCs rely on their networks for deal flow and why that’s not quite as well, asshole-ish, as you might think. And we talk about the diminishing importance of patents. There’s some swearing in that segment too.

Next week, our guest is Josh Kopelman, the original Super Angel. Send your questions to askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com.

Apple Finally Lets A Google Voice Application Into The App Store (Again)

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 02:51 PM PDT

Google Voice applications have had a pretty tumultuous history in the App Store. At first, Apple approved them, and the people rejoiced. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, they were pulled, with “duplicating features that the iPhone comes with (Dialer, SMS, etc).” cited as the reasoning. The people were, understandably, pretty friggin’ mad.

Over the past few days, the developers of at least two such applications have been indicating that they’d been hearing good news from Apple, suggesting that the Apps would be making an Apple-approved, no-jailbreak-required return. Sure enough, they’ve just started popping up in the App Store.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Google To Distribute Mobile Devices To Businesses For Checkins, Ratings And More

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 02:38 PM PDT

In an effort to compete with services like Facebook, Yelp and Foursquare, Google is preparing to distribute millions of custom mobile devices to small businesses around the U.S., says a source with knowledge of the program. These devices will allow customers to check-in and rate the businesses and perhaps even purchase items via Google Checkout. Eight million of the devices will be distributed, says the source.

Another source has said the 8 million devices figure may be significantly higher than the actual number of devices being rolled out.

Google clearly wants to get a lead in the potentially very lucrative local business market for both checkins (Foursquare, Facebook) and reviews (Yelp). Online to offline commerce is “a trillion dollar opportunity.” Money spent at coffee shops, bars, gyms, restaurants, gas stations, plumbers, dry-cleaners, and hair salons, etc. makes up a very large percentage of overall spending, and online services want a piece of that. Yelp touches this world, as does Foursquare and others. Groupon’s growth can be attributed to the huge untapped potential in local online to offline promotions as well.

Google wants their piece.

The devices will presumably allow customers to check in to businesses, leave reviews and possibly even purchase items via Google checkout. But there’s a lot we don’t know. We’ve heard that Google will give these first devices away for free, but we don’t know if they’d plan to charge once the product is more established, for example.

We’ll update as we get more information. We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

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We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

Social Gaming Market Reaches Its Final Stage…and It’s Not Looking Pretty

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 12:15 PM PDT

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post written by Alex St. John, President and CTO of hi5, on the state of the social gaming market.

When Facebook recognized that early social media games were getting a free ride on their network, they shut down the free viral channels these games relied on for audience, started charging market prices for advertising, and demanded a cut of all commerce transactions (see "Facebook Credits"). This changed the economics of social games dramatically. Reaching a large audience easily and for free ceased to be a benefit of developing social media games. In the downloadable casual game business, game developers get a 25%-35% share of the revenue their games generate online when published via channels other than their own. With Facebook charging a 30% premium for Credits and taking an additional cut on advertising, it's likely that the cost of marketing a social media game is converging on what it costs in the mature downloadable casual game business.

With free virality shut down, social game developers are now forced to compete in the full online game market where a slew of great multiplayer games (such as Club Penguin and Runescape), which interestingly are not called "social media games" because they don't NEED a social network for distribution, succeed and thrive purely on their viral merits with no investment support or dependence on Facebook for their enormous popularity. This creates a very interesting situation: games that nobody wants to play unless they are inside a social network competing against great viral multiplayer games that monetize and spread more efficiently than social media games once "normal" market pricing for promotion is introduced on Facebook. The only advantage social media games have currently is that the Valley thinks they are "hot" and is willing to invest lots of money in them.

The next stage we're likely to see is a replay of what happened in the casual game space between 2004-2006 when capital flooded downloadable casual game companies enabling them to buy audience and distribution at prices ABOVE the monetizable value of the games they were selling. Casual game companies went to war, propped up by investment dollars that enabled them to overspend on audience acquisition, which produced the illusion of user and revenue growth even as every customer acquired in this manor returned less revenue than the cost of acquisition. As long as the investment money flowed, casual game publishing seemed to grow, but once the bubble popped in late 2008, it became very clear which companies had built sustainable publishing businesses and which ones had overextended themselves. RealNetworks, once flush with cash from its victory over Microsoft in an anti-trust lawsuit, was apparently the largest and fastest growing casual game publisher, today it is spiraling into decline.

This same cycle is now taking place in social media. When Facebook changed the rules, the early leaders in the space faced two extremely unpleasant realities: 1) Unlike casual gaming, their popular franchises were ineffective at acquiring Facebook audience directly and 2) Paying market rates for audience made their books look a whole lot less pretty. Faced with this challenging circumstance, social game development studios have started taking aggressive steps to remedy their situations, including:

  1. Finding buyers as fast as possible before people realize that their growth and maybe even their businesses are not sustainable
  2. Leveraging the abundant capital available to try to buy their way out of dependence on Facebook by either acquiring their own standing audiences or by acquiring non-Facebook dependant game companies
  3. Overspending on marketing to try to buy audiences to preserve their apparent growth even as their books leak money and their earned audiences decline

What does it mean that Zynga abruptly canceled its deal with MSN to carry Farmville? Probably that they paid a lot for the distribution only to discover that the game did not perform well enough there to justify the expense. Outside of Facebook, Farmville simply can't hold its own against games like Bejeweled and Scrabble when it comes to monetizing a casual audience, and these games set the market price for advertising on the sites they dominate.

Want to see which games dominate the online economy in a competitive market where distribution doesn't come for free? Simply check out the front pages of the leading downloadable casual game publishing sites. The minute that Farmville genuinely has superior online economics, it will displace these games. But, until then, it appears that Cubis monetizes best on MSN, and Zynga will lose money by buying its front page position to promote Farmville.

In the end, I believe that "social games" as we know them will be a forgotten internet fad, ultimately consumed by the already mature online market for downloadable and multiplayer games. The only NEW discoveries that remain will be the realization that social networking itself is a new kind of game play, social graphs are an extremely efficient way for games to market themselves and that microcurrency business models blended with advertising are a superior way to monetize online games in general. Everything else will be consumed by the highly competitive and established downloadable and multiplayer online game market. If some of the big names in social media gaming survive, it will be because they leveraged their abundant access to capital to transform themselves away from dependence on Facebook.


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MySpace’s Last Stand: Project Futura Coming October 15

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 11:54 AM PDT

It’s no secret that embattled MySpace is working on a complete redesign of its site in hopes of reversing the staggering loss of users and traffic over the last couple of years. In December 2008 MySpace had 125 million unique visitors and 43 billion page views. Today they have 95 million unique worldwide monthly visitors and…wow…just 12 billion page views (Comscore).

The redesign is meant to be a dramatic restart to get users excited about MySpace again. Futura, which is the internal name for the project, is set to launch for some users on October 15, although our sources say that date may slip. It will include a much simpler interface, lots of white space, and a focus on the activity stream, say our sources. Much like Facebook.

Many of the design elements were lifted from the Remaking MySpace project that was terminated after CEO Owen Van Natta left the company earlier this year, we’ve heard. And many of the changes are just obvious and are intended to clean up the site.

Parent company News Corp. will be watching how Futura is received very closely, say sources close to MySpace. The hope is that there will be a positive spike in traffic, and that momentum will help News Corp. package the company for a sale or spinoff. News Corp. has already pushed Fox Advertising Network into MySpace after President Adam Bain bailed for Twitter last month. Before those entities were merged it would have been difficult to sell either company.

We’re keeping an open mind until we see the redesign ourselves. But no matter how full of awesomeness it is, it’s unlikely to bring the masses back fast enough to make MySpace relevant again.

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Facebook Expands Instant Personalization Program, Adds Rotten Tomatoes As Partner

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 10:28 AM PDT

Facebook has just expanded its highly controversial Instant Personalization program — which allows select third-party sites to access some of your data without requiring you to login or ‘Connect’ — to popular movie reviews community Rotten Tomatoes. In a blog post announcing the news, Facebook says that the new feature will allow users to “immediately see the reviews most relevant to you, without having to register, search for friends, or fill out a profile.”

Instant Personalization was first announced at Facebook’s f8 conference in April. The feature gives sites that have received Facebook’s blessing the ability to access any information you’ve shared with ‘Everyone’ on Facebook as soon as you arrive at the third-party site, with no authentication required. At launch only three sites featured Instant Personalization: Yelp, Microsoft’s Docs.com, and Pandora — this is the first expansion since the April launch, and Facebook says that it will be expanding it slowly over the next few months. I suspect Facebook would have liked to begin rolling this out more broadly before now, but Instant Personalization sparked waves of privacy concerns as soon as it was announced.

The concept behind Instant Personalization is compelling: it offers the promise of a personalized web, where sites know what you’re interested in as soon as you arrive. But it’s rife with privacy issues. Instant Personalization drew fire from advocacy groups and even some senators, in part because it was initially frustratingly difficult to opt-out of (Facebook has since improved this).

Facebook makes the case that handing over this data to trusted third parties is reasonable, because it’s only handing over data that users have chosen to share with ‘Everyone’. Of course, for nearly a year now Facebook has been prodding users toward sharing more of their data under this less private setting.

The biggest push came last December, when it forced users to go through a new privacy wizard that encouraged users to share their Updates and other key information with ‘Everyone’ (I still believe this was the site’s most egregious privacy move to date). Later changes included forcing users to move their Interests, which could be previously hidden on profiles, to public ‘Likes’. In other words, a lot of people are sharing a significant amount of information with ‘Everyone’.

Facebook is taking baby steps with Instant Personalization, and for good reason — even without press and privacy advocates raising red flags about the issues here, there’s a distinct chance that people will totally freak out when they arrive at a site and it already knows who their friends are. But, as with every other privacy-related issue Facebook encounters, there’s a chance that its users simply won’t care — they’ll just like seeing reviews of their favorite movies as soon as they visit Rotten Tomatoes.

Here are some data points about the program that Facebook sent along:

  • Users control Instant Personalization – when they arrive at a site they can disable the experience, or they can turn off the program for all websites in their Facebook settings.
  • If you have previously opted out of the Instant Personalization program, you'll continue to be opted out for any new sites.
  • Partner sites follow clear product/security/privacy guidelines and may only use your public information and friend lists to offer a more personalized experience.
  • All experiences are based on explicit actions (i.e. info you've typed into your profile or clicked "Like"); passive behavior (what you're reading) is never surfaced.
  • User data is never transferred to ad networks. Update: Facebook also clarifies that “No revenue is ever exchanged as part of this program and user data cannot be transferred by partners to third-party ad networks.”
  • Expanding the program slowly over the next few months with a handful of partner sites where value to people is clear. Focused on verticals where you already find information through friends in the real world (examples like: reviews, food, travel, music, movies).
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Barry Diller Is Going To Give Us A Piece Of His Mind At Disrupt

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 09:54 AM PDT

One of my favorite Barry Diller stories comes from Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone, who used to work for Diller when he was the CEO of Ask. Diller was driving Lanzone in a white luxury convertible to a conference in New York City where he was speaking. He parked the convertible in the middle of Times Square, got out of the car, put on his sunglasses, and looked at Lanzone to see what was holding him up. When they came back to the car, there were three parking tickets waiting for them.

Barry Diller is the consummate player, as evidenced by the fact that he parks wherever the hell he wants to—even in the middle of Times Square. We’ll have a spot reserved for him when he comes to Disrupt in San Francisco. Diller, of course, helped build the modern media industry (first at ABC, then Paramount and Fox). He was also one of the first media titans to recognize the disruption represented by the Internet, and shifted gears with IAC, which operates a large portfolio of Web businesses including Ask, CityGrid Media, Match.com, Evite, Vimeo, College Humor, and the Daily Beast. I guess you can say he’s seen it all.

The media industry is still trying to come to grips with the changes in audience behavior the Internet is bringing. And meanwhile, entertainment is no longer limited to highly-produced TV shows and movies (although, I do miss the days of Laverne & Shirley, Taxi, and Raiders of the Lost Ark—all produced under Diller’s watch. He also greenlighted The Simpsons). Even commerce can be entertaining and social. Diller has his fingers in many of these new media pies—form College Humor to the Daily Beast. And meanwhile, Citysearch (now CityGrid Media) is transforming itself into an ambitious local advertising platform.

He will join our other speakers, including John Doerr, Mark Pincus, Mike Moritz, Reid Hoffman, Marissa Mayer, Chris Sacca, Dave McClure, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks. You can still buy tickets here at the early bird rate until Monday.

Photo: flickr/David Shankbone

How Small Countries Out-Perform (Spoiler: It’s A Lot Like Startups)

Posted: 17 Sep 2010 09:17 AM PDT

Any time economists, politicians and businessmen talk about emerging markets, the conversation seems to drift invariably to China like the Death Star pulling in the Millennium Falcon. And it's not only words; China frequently does the same tractor-pull with foreign investment, high-paying multinational jobs and talent. So how can a tiny country in the emerging world possibly compete?

This is one of my favorite topics, having done reporting trips to Israel, Rwanda, Colombia and Chile in the last year – and getting ready to do one to Singapore in October and hopefully Kenya early next year. The topic was also one of the better panels I attended at The World Economic Forum's "Summer Davos" a few days ago. Appropriately enough it was for a small audience, while most people flocked to a panel about China. It's also appropriate that I'm writing about it on the plane from huge China, headed back to tiny San Francisco—a city of well under a million that nevertheless houses the bulk of the hottest Web 2.0 companies.

It's easy to look at the emerging world right now and get carried away with jaw-dropping demographics. By 2050 the United States will be the only G7 nation that is still one of the seven largest economies in the world. Our new peers, if Goldman Sachs and other researchers are right, will be China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia. That's a stunning transition in fortunes and between now and then each country will be exploding with growth in its own way and that growth isn't always easy for Western companies to exploit.

So if you are an investor or entrepreneur, why even waste your time trying to build something in a smaller country? Isn't that like walking past a supermodel to hit on your little sister's friends? I'll give you two reasons: Israel and Singapore. These are two countries that had little in terms of natural resources and have far out-performed their larger neighbors thanks to a culture of entrepreneurship and playing to their natural advantages. In the late 1990s, Israel was home to more Nasdaq-traded companies than any other country and while returns have fallen off since, it still gets loads of venture cash– 30-times Europe on a per capita basis. Similarly tiny Singapore has just 2% of the population of its giant neighbor Indonesia but its GDP is 35% of Indonesia’s– despite Indonesia’s abundant natural resources. Less staggering, but still pretty impressive have been the economies of Iceland and Finland, which were both represented on the panel.

Here are some keys to small country success that most of the panelists agreed on. And a lot of ambassadors and statesmen were there taking notes: There are more small states than ever before, with one-quarter of the United Nations having a population smaller than the Chinese city the conference was held in. And everyone wants a culture of entrepreneurship. Rather than sending yet another president or delegation to the Valley, you should listen to these guys' advice:

  • You have two road maps: Carving out a niche based on unique natural resources (what Iceland did with geothermal energy and other assets) or making yourself into a central hub for something (what Israel did for security tech innovation.) Said someone from Singapore on the panel "Our only asset is human capital." You could say the same with Israel.
  • Don't turn a blind eye to limitations; turn disadvantages into advantages. I hear a lot of countries trying to spin conversations away from their limitations instead of just owning them. Israel, for instance, indirectly benefited from its instability, in that most of the innovation in the late 1990s spun out of the army. And Israel was ideal to be an early beta country for Shai Agassi's network of battery charging and switching stations Better Place because of the travel embargo placed on the country by its hostile neighbors. Israel is essentially an island. Similarly, Singapore's strategy is to be an Asian guinea pig—a controlled spot to do market testing or prototyping for everything from new products to new energy and water systems for bigger emerging giants.
  • Think symbiotic relationships. The biggest reason Israel so outperformed when it came to startup returns was the country did an excellent job aligning itself with Silicon Valley. 15 years later, nearly every small country is seeking to do the same thing with China. Almost every small economy has done well, has a big brother that's made huge use of its natural resources and human capital. The President of Iceland Olafur Regnar Grimsson, who was on the panel, said his size has been an advantage in doing deals with the global giants because it's not a threat and there are no political dustups. "They know they can invite us into the house, even invite us into the bedroom, and know we're still never going to take over the house." That's an interesting way of putting it…
  • They're paranoid. No matter how well each country has done, they are paranoid it'll get ripped away at any minute. Each of these countries has only had success over the last 50 years or less and they're still in touch with how bad things used to be. And there's the curse of success: One huge international giant, like Nokia in Finland, can have a disproportionate effect on the economy as it swings up and down with the market.
  • Unlike the US, they not only welcome but require government support. What works best isn’t erecting some incubator but favorable tax policy, labor laws that allow for rapid company formation and failure and incentives for foreign investors. Grimsson from Iceland said his country's smartest move fifty years ago was setting up long term student loans for any citizen to go to college anywhere in the world.
  • You have to have a stomach for volatility. Iceland was brought to the brink of financial collapse and has only now clawed its way back, similarly Singapore's GDP was down 8% last year but is up 18% in the most recent quarter. No emerging markets are for the weak-stomached but especially small, countries basing an economy on hit-or-miss innovation or risky public bets.

Notice that a lot of the advantages above sound similar to the generally held reasons that young tech startups outperform large, slowing moving public companies. Which lead me to think: Is it the medium-sized countries that have neither the agility and focus nor the market heft and near-endless resources the ones who really suffer as the global economic landscape gets transformed over the next 40 years?
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