The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- eBay To Merge Buying And Selling iPhone Apps; RedLaser For Android On The Way
- CrunchGear Reviews The Parrot AR.Drone
- Starbucks Digital Network: Free, Exclusive In-Store Content Courtesy of Yahoo, iTunes & More
- Microsoft Puts New York City In The Cloud
- Apple To Livestream Today’s Event To Apple Devices Only
- The Galaxy Tab Hitting Verizon Wireless November 11th For $600 Straight Up
- Lenovo Delays US Android Tablet Until Honeycomb, Cancels Windows 7 Tablet Altogether
- Widgetbox Mobile Launches, Create Mobile Web Apps In A Snap
- Google Demo Slam Hopes To Be American Idol For Tech Demos
- What To Expect When You’re Expecting a MacBook Air
- Real-Time Marketing Service Optify Raises $6.1 Million
- Taptu Switches Executives To Favor The U.S. As Touch Search Takes Off
- Google Engineer Builds Facebook Disconnect
- DriveSafe.ly 2.0 Responds To Texts, Email While You Drive
- Google Ventures Invests In Local Deals Site Signpost
- Kiva Partners With Visa To Expand Micro-Loans To U.S. Small Businesses
- Bitten In The Ass: iPhone 4 Is Basically Apple’s “Vista” — Except The Opposite
- Developer Joe Hewitt Tears Into Android’s Definition Of “Open”
- Another Chrome OS Engineer Defects To Facebook In The Build-Up To Launch
- Fast Society Helps You Navigate New York’s CMJ Music Festival
- Bartz On Blogging: “An Extremely Hard Engineering Feat”
- WITN: Extraordinary Chickpeas and the Madness of Crowdsourcing
- Google Serves Up Apple Ads For Search Term “Sex Game Apps”
- Yahoo Shows a Profit Pop In Third Quarter Thanks To HotJobs Sale; Display Up 17 Percent (Slides)
- Webpage Builder DevHub Sees Engagement Spike After Embracing Gamification
| eBay To Merge Buying And Selling iPhone Apps; RedLaser For Android On The Way Posted: 20 Oct 2010 09:17 AM PDT
In a conversation with Yankovich, he told me that eBay will soon consolidate its buying and selling iPhone apps. Currently, eBay has a separate iPhone app for sellers, that allows users to quickly take photos of items and post them on eBay. This is all planning to take place ahead of the holiday shopping season, which for eBay (and most online retailers) is a extremely lucrative and trafficked time period. And Yankovitch says the company will be releasing a dedicated eBay Motors app, which he expects to be very popular with consumers based on the traffic the site sees. Yankovich also said that RedLaser, the barcode scanning iPhone app that eBay acquired from Occipital in June, will soon be extended to Android phones. eBay has seen considerable success with RedLaser, adding 3 additional million downloads of the app since June. Last week, eBay announced that it would be populating the iPhone app with product results with eBay Marketplaces and Half.com listings, and also adding QR codes to the app. While QR Codes aren’t as widely adopted as the standard bar code, says Yankovich, he believes the technology will one day be used much more frequently by consumers. One advantage of QR codes he explains, is that any store or brand can create their own unique code with varying information. And he wants eBay’s app to be the catalyst for making QR codes a more mainstream technology. Regardless, barcode scanning is big. Amazon recently added barcode scanning to its main iPhone app. And eBay will soon be incorporating RedLaser’s technology into its main iPhone app as well, says Yankovich. Whether through a QR Code or a barcode, online retailers are able to give consumers who are shopping in brick and mortar stores the ability to find the item online, at perhaps a more discounted price. It’s very much a traffic play, and way to take product interest offline back online. Moreover, QR Codes, can unlock rich, contextual information to products, including reviews, or even coupons for a particular product. And as the holiday shopping season comes upon us, eBay is certainly ready to capitalize on the possible cash-cow that mobile could bring. One question is whether the number of downloads of its app can actually translate into sales. But currently, eBay is set on pace to reach a whopping $1.5 billion worth of goods sold via its mobile apps in 2010. Over the past year, eBay has launched iPad, Android and Windows 7 apps for its auction business, a new Half.com app, and a Fashion-focused app. And PayPal’s mobile offerings should also help contribute to eBay’s potential holiday success, considering the million-plus downloads its iPhone app has seen.        
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| CrunchGear Reviews The Parrot AR.Drone Posted: 20 Oct 2010 07:46 AM PDT
But the AR.Drone has renewed my faith in gadgets. It is, in short, the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long, long time. This quadro-copter floats effortlessly through the air and has all of the self-righting capabilities of a Segway. The iPhone controls are amazingly intuitive – just press a button and move the iPhone in the direction you’d like it to go – and the emergency controls take over when you screw up. It is fun, technologically advanced, and, in short, amazing.        
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| Starbucks Digital Network: Free, Exclusive In-Store Content Courtesy of Yahoo, iTunes & More Posted: 20 Oct 2010 07:29 AM PDT
       
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| Microsoft Puts New York City In The Cloud Posted: 20 Oct 2010 06:58 AM PDT
When Mayor Bloomberg wants to make an announcement with Microsoft, CEO Steve Ballmer gets on a plane and flies to New York City. That’s because he’s Mayor Bloomberg, but also because New York City is a very large customer with 100,000 city employees. Today Ballmer and Bloomberg are in City Hall announcing a new five-year deal which will roll up dozens of separate city contracts with Microsoft into one master agreement and is projected to save the city $50 million. The value of the deal is about $100 million, or $20 million a year. The savings will come from the consolidation of different contracts, but also by shifting some of the city’s software needs to the cloud. The first phase of the deal impacts 30,000 city employees, and will include Microsoft Windows 7, Office, Sharepoint, Exchange, Live Meetings, Azure, Windows Server, development tools, and database products. (When Office 365 becomes available that too could be rolled up into the contract). City workers will fall into one of three buckets: occasional users, basic users, and power users. The city employs a lot of deskless workers who are out on the streets. Giveing them access to Office, email, and collaboration tools in the cloud makes more sense than giving them desktop versions of OFfice. Power users, on the other hand, will require both desktop and cloud versions. The more software that Microsoft hosts on its own servers, the more the city saves on hardware and IT costs.        
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| Apple To Livestream Today’s Event To Apple Devices Only Posted: 20 Oct 2010 06:55 AM PDT
Click through for a list of compatible devices.        
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| The Galaxy Tab Hitting Verizon Wireless November 11th For $600 Straight Up Posted: 20 Oct 2010 06:43 AM PDT
Buyers will have the option of adding on a $20 monthly data plan that will give their Galaxy Tab 1GB of data. That’s the same price as Verizon’s iPad plan. This announcement actually answers a lot of questions about the Galaxy Tab’s US release. Samsung made it known a few weeks back that the US’s four major carriers would sell the tablet, but details were absent. Now we can properly speculate.        
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| Lenovo Delays US Android Tablet Until Honeycomb, Cancels Windows 7 Tablet Altogether Posted: 20 Oct 2010 06:24 AM PDT
While the Android tablet was delayed, the Windows 7 flavor is simply canceled and for good reason too. Lenovo’s director of new technology, Howard Locker, nailed it by saying, “The challenge with Windows 7 is that it’s based on the same paradigm as 1985—it’s really an interface that’s optimized for a mouse and keyboard. It has to be optimized for touch. How do you do that?” Finally! At least someone gets it. Well, seeing how there really isn’t that many Windows 7 tablets available, a good amount of higher-ups probably get it, but it’s nice to see one actually say why. It’s somewhat strange, however, to see Lenovo taking this standoffish approach though. This is the same company that stunned the CES 2010 press with some of the only innovative products at the whole show.        
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| Widgetbox Mobile Launches, Create Mobile Web Apps In A Snap Posted: 20 Oct 2010 06:01 AM PDT
Sometimes you don’t need to spend weeks building the sleekest mobile apps for native environments. And depending on your business, something a little bit more quick and simple can do the job just fine. That’s the theory behind Widgetbox Mobile, a new offering from the team behind ClickTurn ads, which aims to help businesses build mobile web apps in minutes. “There’s a new category of users who view the app store as not the best option for them,” says Widgetbox’s CEO Will Price. In the same way that ClickTurn was created to allow startups to easily create dynamic, rich media ads in half an hour, Widgetbox is trying to compress the typically long development process for mobile apps.
As you’re building your app, you can preview it, to see how it will function as a live app. If the default customization tools are not sufficient, users can also drop their own HTML code— but code is not required to get the app from ground to launch. The price to build and maintain your Widgetbox Mobile app ranges from $25 to $50 per month, depending on the premium features you need. That adds up over time, but it’s still dramatically less than the approximate cost of building your own app from scratch. There are also certain obvious advantages to using a self-service platform like Widgetbox Mobile— no wait for app store approval and the ability to instantly deploy updates. Of course, for the sake of efficiency and convenience, you also lose the richness often found in native mobile apps and the deep sense of customization. Price says users can expect the Widgetbox Mobile to continue to evolve and introduce new layers of customization in the near future, which will hopefully bridge that gap. Another important drawback to note is the lack of convenience surrounding the ad system, you can easily run Admob ads in your Widgetbox Mobile space but if you want to run your company’s custom ads you will have to reach out to Widgetbox directly and try to work with their team to make it happen (Price says this will eventually become a self-service option as well). Although Price doesn’t believe that Widgetbox will completely upend the market and render native apps obsolete, he believes that many businesses, of all sizes, will find his service useful. For example, even though a large corporation will likely have their own team of developers working on their main mobile application, WidgetBox could help them build ephemeral apps that are designed to work for a short period of time, like for conferences or limited events. Beyond Widgetbox Mobile, the marketplace for services that quickly help users build mobile apps is certainly growing— Widgetbox’s competitors include Mobify, which pulls elements from your existing website, iBuildApps and appMobi, which caters to the iPhone and Android platforms.        
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| Google Demo Slam Hopes To Be American Idol For Tech Demos Posted: 20 Oct 2010 06:00 AM PDT
How exactly this will work is still a bit vague, but the company is promising that shortly we’ll be seeing some interesting demos live on the site. It’s “a place where boring tech demos become (hopefully) gotta-show-my-friends awesome — thanks to the creativity of Google users like you,” is how Google is selling it. The overall idea is to have people submit their demos to this Demo Slam site, and each week a “Champ” will be chosen as voted on by the viewers. Every week this process will repeat itself. In other words, it’s sounds like they want this to be the American Idol for technology demos. Google seems well aware that no one wants to watch tech demos, so the idea here it to emphasize some type of flare that make these things watchable. My guess would be that Google is hoping for something like the Arcade Fire project they made in August using HTML5. “Our hope is that the demos push the limits of Google tech in exciting and creative ways,” we’re told.        
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| What To Expect When You’re Expecting a MacBook Air Posted: 20 Oct 2010 05:25 AM PDT
As for the processer, expect something in the 2.6 GHz range with a 2 GB of RAM. Don’t bother trying to replace anything yourself – this laptop will be locked down tight.        
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| Real-Time Marketing Service Optify Raises $6.1 Million Posted: 20 Oct 2010 04:55 AM PDT
Real-time marketing service Optify, which officially launched its software in March, has just raised $6.1 million in a Series B round led by Triangle Peak Partners. Previous investor, Madrona Venture Group, participated in this round, along with Mark Wachen (Upstage Ventures), Bill Baker (formerly of Microsoft), Alan Alexrod (Alexrod Investments) and John Cunningham (Clear Fir Partners). With this latest round, the Seattle-based startup has raised a total of $8.85 million. Co-founding partner of Triangle Peak Partners will join Optify’s board of directors. Optify offers a multi-pronged platform that helps websites track consumer usage, identify the best keywords for search engine optimization (SEO) and manage Twitter campaigns. More specifically, Optify can tell you, for example, how your pages are optimized for search and discovery, how to craft an effective Twitter campaign (also tracking the traffic around those Tweets) and how your keywords are performing on Google search. The analytics can be achieved on a highly granular level. Optify essentially tracks every eyeball on your site, looking at each click and each event and noting the rough composite of your visitors (i.e., location or company— if that information is available) Here’s a look at one layer of Optify’s dashboard: “The goal was to enable enterprises to become experts in search engine optimization and ultimately acquire new customers,” says CEO and co-founder Brian Goffman, a former Partner at Madrona. Optify offers a basic freemium model: new consumers can try the full version for 30 days, simply opt for the bare bones free version, or pay for one of three different packages, ranging from the “professional” option at $500 a month to the enterprise version, at a hefty $3,000 a month. The main different between the top tier service and the rest is full-support for international traffic and analytics and the ability to manage a high volume of traffic. By the numbers, Optify now tracks some 100 pages per second and handles 1,300 consumer accounts, with the bulk of that being “free” customers. That fact doesn’t concern Goffman, who believes Optify’s stats provide a compelling use case for clients who will need to upgrade to a paid package as their business scales up. According to Goffman, the average consumer sees traffic roughly triple. Of course Optify is not the first startup to zero in on the real-time web, nor do they lack any company in the SEO/social media optimization category. One of their closest competitors is Bright Edge, a San Mateo-based startup that raised its own $6 million-plus round this past March.
       
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| Taptu Switches Executives To Favor The U.S. As Touch Search Takes Off Posted: 20 Oct 2010 02:45 AM PDT  After what seems like an age of no news, mobile search and discovery company Taptu seems to be suddenly getting back in the game. Today it's doing a Twitter-style switcheroo - founder and CEO Steve Ives is becomes president and will stay to focus on product, while COO and President Mitch Lazar, who only joined in March from his role as managing director of Yahoo! Mobile Europe, will become CEO. Ives was previously founder and CEO since the company started in 2006. 
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| Google Engineer Builds Facebook Disconnect Posted: 20 Oct 2010 02:27 AM PDT
In any case, Google engineer Brian Kennish, inspired by the most recent Facebook privacy and data debacles, has decided to create “Facebook Disconnect” i.e. a Google Chrome extension that obliterates all Facebook Connect functionality and all traffic from third party sites to Facebook servers if one searches the web through Chrome. (You can try it out here) Facebook Disconnect will “presumably” prevent the sending of data back to Facebook across the one million sites that use the Facebook Connect service. So far the ones I’ve tested it on (ehem, Huffington Post) seem to be kosher as I no longer see Facebook integration. Kennish says he created the extension to help quell his desire to delete his Facebook account and that he’s tested it out successfully across a sizable amount of previously Facebook-Connectable sites, including our own (screen shots above) with absolutely no encouragement from Google or Facebook, despite the fact that he works for the former, “Nobody at Google asked or encouraged me to do so, or probably, even knows who I am.” Okay well now they do. Thumbnail image: Gizmodo        
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| DriveSafe.ly 2.0 Responds To Texts, Email While You Drive Posted: 20 Oct 2010 01:12 AM PDT
iSpeech‘s service for handling email and text while driving has expanded beyond the Blackberry; DriveSafe.ly 2.0 is now live in the Android marketplace. A noble attempt to make driving a safer experience for those of us addicted to text based communication via our phones, Drivesafe.ly 2.0 currently allows you to respond to your email and text messages via speech if you’re on a Blackberry and respond to texts with voice and have your emails read to you out loud (see demo video, above) if you’re on an Android phone. While the speech to text feature is currently only available for text messages on an Android, a build with full email, text and Twitter functionality should be available in the next week on both platforms. To set DriveSafe.ly up, you download the app in the Android or Blackberry app store or here, turn it on, click on settings and fill in your app preferences for communication while you’re driving. It may take some getting used to (the jarring speech response product has a tendency to mess up) before you’re driving and emailing in “safe” mode full force. DriveSafe.ly, which also recently opened its API to mobile developers, currently has over six million users and has read over 250 million text messages in its three year life span. And TechCrunch readers wishing to try the app out on Blackberry or Android before it hits the iPhone in November can use the purchase code “TECHCRUNCHSAFELY” for the remainder of October. While the DriveSafe.ly website does feature the dubious statistic of “299 million texting while driving accidents” prevented by the app, anyone who’s ever blogged in traffic can tell you this type of technology is at least worth a shot. Especially if you’re from Los Angeles.        
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| Google Ventures Invests In Local Deals Site Signpost Posted: 20 Oct 2010 12:48 AM PDT
At a high level Signpost is pretty straightforward: log onto the site, and you’ll find a listing of deals at restaurants, retailers, and other merchants located in your city (you can zoom in if you want to restrict your search to within a few-blocks). And unlike sites like Groupon, there are dozens or even hundreds of deals visible on Signpost at once, ranging from happy hour at your local bar to a 40% discount at a nearby spa this weekend. The site’s biggest difference from Groupon, though, is the source of its deals: instead of having a salesforce reaching out to merchants, most deals are submitted by other users. That means if you notice that your local coffee shop is offering a two-for-one special on drinks, you can log onto Signpost and tell your friends. At this point there isn’t much incentive to do this — you can earn karma points but can’t exchange them for anything — but it sounds like Signpost has plans to encourage posting more deals down the line. And CEO Stuart Wall says that Signpost is already getting plenty of submissions even without having much of a reward mechanic. Wall says that in cities like New York and San Francisco, there are many thousands of deals and discounts being offered at local businesses on a daily basis — there just hasn’t been a good way to sift through them. To help users filter through the noise on Signpost, users can vote on each deal to determine if it’s any good (you can also verify that a given deal exists, to weed out any possible spam). And while the site isn’t directly targeting merchants yet, local businesses are free to post their own deals themselves, though there’s no guarantee they will be voted up. Signpost originally launched in December 2009, when the site was still known as Postabon. Since then it’s been available exclusively in Manhattan, where 12,000 active deals are currently posted. And starting today, the site is supporting deals in San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago as well. So will Signpost succeed? It won’t be directly competing with Groupon, Living Social, and the hundreds of other daily deal clones, but it certainly won’t be the only site offering this bulletin-board style collection of deals (8coupons is one site that’s doing something like this, though it’s looking pretty noisy these days). Signpost has a few hurdles to clear: it needs to get users coming to the site to browse for deals; it has to get people to routinely upload interesting new deals; and it has to fend off possible competition — there isn’t much of a network effect or any kind of user lock-in at this point, which could lead to trouble if clones start to pop up. That said, the site hasn’t yet shared its monetization plans, so it may have something up its sleeve that drew the interest of the Google Ventures team. Signpost wouldn’t say if anyone from the Google team is joining their board, but Google Ventures partner Wesley Chan appears to be leading the deal — prior to joining Ventures, he was responsible for Google acquiring the companies that became Google Analytics and, later, Google Voice.
       
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| Kiva Partners With Visa To Expand Micro-Loans To U.S. Small Businesses Posted: 19 Oct 2010 08:58 PM PDT
Kiva, which just celebrated its five year anniversary is a peer-to-peer lending site that began as a way to facilitate micropayment loans between citizen lenders and extremely low-income entrepreneurs in developing countries, Through Kiva's platform, anyone can loan $25 or more to support an entrepreneur and the specific progress of the loan can be tracked from initial funding to repayment. Upon receiving repayment, lenders can withdraw their funds from Kiva or lend again to another entrepreneur, thereby continuing the lending cycle. Initiatives within the new Visa partnership include efforts to drive awareness and understanding of microfinance for small businesses, building additional features within Kiva's microlending platform to increase capacity to support U.S. small businesses and a joint study to address gaps in research in the marketplace of microfinance in the U.S. The announcement also coincides with Kivas expansion in the Gulf Coast through the addition of ACCIÓN Texas-Louisiana, the largest microfinance institution in the country, to the Kiva Field Partners network. Kiva has been growing like a weed since its launch in 2008. Currently, over 477,000 people have loaned more than $170 million to 408,000 entrepreneurs in 53 countries via Kiva. Kiva’s repayment rate thus far (for entrepreneurs) is 98 percent and the startup is raising $1 million every 5 days for small businesses. And the non-profit just added student loans to the mix. And Kiva CEO Premal Shah predicts that the organization will raise $1 billion in microloans by 2015.        
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| Bitten In The Ass: iPhone 4 Is Basically Apple’s “Vista” — Except The Opposite Posted: 19 Oct 2010 08:35 PM PDT
That was Microsoft COO Kevin Turner during his keynote speech this past July at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington. To be exact, he gave that speech on July 14, two days before Apple’s “Antennagate” press conference. At that point, talk about the iPhone 4′s antenna was at a fever pitch. And there were plenty who (foolishly) believed Apple would have to do a recall. At the time, we noted that this statement was likely going to come back to bite Turner in the ass. Well, here it is, teeth sharpened and hungry for undersides. Yesterday, Apple announced their Q4 2010 earnings. It was basically record numbers across the board (aside from iPods, a shrinking business). But the most impressive number of all was definitely the number of iPhones sold last quarter: 14.1 million. Not just a new record, a new record far beyond anything Apple had ever seen before. A number so big that it pushed Apple past RIM in terms of smartphone sales. When you compare it to a year ago, Apple sold nearly twice as many iPhones (14.1 million versus 7.4 million). When you compare it to the previous quarterly record for iPhone sold, Q2 of this past year, Apple sold well over 5 million beyond even that number (8.75 million). Any way you slice it, the iPhone sales, led by the iPhone 4, were amazing. In other words, the iPhone 4 is pretty much the opposite of Microsoft’s Vista nightmare. This is a little bit like when Palm investor Roger McNamee predicted that once the Palm Pre came out, no one would be using the iPhone anymore. Yeah, that didn’t work out so well either. I’m also reminded of another Microsoftie’s comments about the iPhone around the time of its launch. “There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance,” CEO Steve Ballmer said. At the time, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform was doing quite well for itself in the burgeoning smartphone market place. Since then, it has completely collapsed into a blue screen of death and had to be rebooted this year as Windows Phone 7. Total sales for Windows Phone 7 last quarter? Approximately 14.1 million less than the iPhone, Apple’s “Vista”. [image: Castle Rock Entertainment]        
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| Developer Joe Hewitt Tears Into Android’s Definition Of “Open” Posted: 19 Oct 2010 06:04 PM PDT
This evening Hewitt has tweeted an hour-long stream of criticism directed at Google’s definition of “Open” when it comes to Android — a topic that was brought up by Steve Jobs during his tirade against Google during Apple’s earnings call yesterday. Android chief Andy Rubin responded to Jobs with his first tweet, which contained his definition of open: a terminal command that can be used to download the source code of the current version of Android. But Hewitt obviously isn’t satisfied. Hewitt kicked off his series of tweets with a question: “How does Android get away with the “open” claim when the source isn’t public until major releases, and no one outside Google can check in?” For those who aren’t familiar with Android’s release cycle, Hewitt is referring to the fact that developers can’t take a look at the current version of the OS as it’s being developed. Instead, they have to wait for the Android team to finish the latest release internally, at which point Google releases the code to developers (and carriers begin to deploy it to handsets a few weeks later). This process stands in contrast with many other popular projects that are considered to be ‘Open’, which allow developers to access the code as it’s being written, and in some cases, to check new code in themselves. After that initial tweet, Hewitt continued to explain his argument (in some cases through replies to other users on Twitter). Here are some of the key tweets, you can read his full tweet stream here:
It’s obviously Google’s prerogative to decide what it wants to do with Android’s code. Hewitt’s point, it seems, is that Google’s definition of “Open” in this case is very different from the openness seen in Firefox and Chrome, but it’s reaping the same PR benefits. And while I’d personally consider Android to fall solidly in the ‘Open’ spectrum — you can fork it and install it on whatever device you can get it running on, which can’t be said about iOS — there’s no doubt that the meaning of the word has become very vague (or meaningless, depending on who you ask). One other thing to note: Hewitt has had a lot to say about Android over the last several months. It’s my guess that he’s playing a key role in the customized version of Android that Facebook is probably developing, which could explain why he’d like access to code from a future release.        
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| Another Chrome OS Engineer Defects To Facebook In The Build-Up To Launch Posted: 19 Oct 2010 05:39 PM PDT
Specifically, another Chrome OS engineer has decided to leave his job at Google to go work for Facebook. This time it’s not nearly as huge of a blow as Director of Engineering Matthew Papakipos, the man who created and led the Chrome OS team for Google, leaving for Facebook. But it’s still someone else leaving the team to join Facebook, the enemy. David Garcia, a software engineer who has been at Google for nearly four years has left the company to accept a job at Facebook, we’ve confirmed. You don’t need to look any further than this page to see how involved with Chrome OS development Garcia has been over the past several months. That said, he wasn’t a high-level engineer on the management side of things like Papakipos was. After Papakipos left, Google sent us a statement pointing to their “deep bench of talent” and saying they weren’t worried about missing a beat when it comes to Chrome OS development. That’s undoubtedly true, but I’m still wondering why people continue to leave such a massive project after months of work, before it has ever launched — especially since we seem to be so close to the launch. But I’m even more curious about what Facebook is doing with these people. If you add former Android Senior Product manager (who joined Facebook in May) into this mix, you’re starting to get quite the little collection of people with various OS experience from Google. Oh, and there is what ever project Joe Hewitt is currently working on. Maybe these people are thinking about phones, maybe not. Maybe they’re thinking about Android, maybe not. Maybe they’re thinking about a browser, maybe not. Maybe something else. But the talent continues to pour into Facebook — and much of it from Google. Despite counter-measures.        
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| Fast Society Helps You Navigate New York’s CMJ Music Festival Posted: 19 Oct 2010 05:29 PM PDT
Today the guys behind Fast Society have taken the concept one step further and expanded the original vision behind the app — i.e. the ability to coordinate friends at a rock concert — hooking up with New York’s revered CMJ Music Festival as its official mobile partner, definitely experimenting with the app’s capability to handle larger scale crowds. With an expected attendance of 500,000, the CMJ Music festival runs from today through October 23rd, and during this time you will not only be able to set up texting and conference calling groups through the Fast Society app, but you can actually navigate through the festival as well, clicking on the CMJ button within the app itself to access a CMJ concert schedule as well as bring up maps of different show locations. Co-founder Andy Thompson describes the partnership:
This kind of mass market partnership is rare for an as of yet unfunded startup, especially when you consider that Fast Society will also be hosting a party on Friday at CMJ, indicative of how integrated it is with its target market. When asked how an app with no VC funding currently can afford this kind of placement, Fast Society founder Matthew Rosenberg responded.
I miss New York.
       
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| Bartz On Blogging: “An Extremely Hard Engineering Feat” Posted: 19 Oct 2010 05:08 PM PDT
Carol Bartz was almost subdued on today’s earnings call. Missing were the salty outbursts of previous conference calls, but she did manage one zinger. Apparently, one of Yahoo’s problems before was an inflexible content management system which couldn’t deal with rolling out new features quickly or interactivity. According to Bartz, “to do a blogging event was an extremely hard engineering feat.” Well, now after spending a lot of time and money creating a new content management system (Yahoo News is now on it as of yesterday), Bartz says Yahoo is ready to dive headfirst into the online media business. Instead of a technology stack, she talks about a “content stack,” with original Yahoo editorial on top, followed by licensed news and articles from other sources, “pro blogging,” and then crowdsourced news and information at the bottom (presumably, that will come from her Associated Content acquisition). As an example of how Yahoo can help turbocharge these different forms of content, Bartz shared some pretty impressive numbers for the Upshot news blog Yahoo launched on Yahoo News during the summer. In six months time, the blog is now doing 80 million pageviews a month and minutes spent on the blog shot up from 7 million to 270 million minutes. She also mentioned that Yahoo video streams are up 92 percent on an annual basis. With the new code, adding things like blogging, comments, video and other interactive media is now easier and doesn’t require amazing feats of engineering. Welcome to wonderful world of blogging, Carol.        
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| WITN: Extraordinary Chickpeas and the Madness of Crowdsourcing Posted: 19 Oct 2010 04:26 PM PDT
Not our words, but those of Charles Mackay, author of the 1841 classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Still, it would be safe to say that we've always been a little skeptical of the benefits of crowd sourcing, whether for science, art or literature. On the other side of the fence, sits Peter LaMotte. Peter is president of GeniusRocket, a platform that allows brands to crowdsource commercial and (they hope) viral videos from a closed (but vast) community of filmakers, animators and other similarly creative folks. We like Peter – for reasons outlined here and here – and so we figured if anyone could convince us that the future of creative endeavor lies with monkeys and typewriters it would be him. Did he succeed? The video is below. (And do watch to the end – there's a bit with a naked chickpea puppet.)        
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| Google Serves Up Apple Ads For Search Term “Sex Game Apps” Posted: 19 Oct 2010 03:23 PM PDT
So what is actually going on? Crunchgear’s Greg Kumparak has a pretty solid theory; Due to the fact that Google won’t advertise for actual sex sites (only sex education-related sites pass muster), when a user searches for blacklisted stuff like “Sex Game Apps” the Google AdWords (and/or Automatic Match) algorithm treats the word “sex” as invisible and focuses on serving up ads triggered by the whitelisted keywords “Game Apps” in bold. Hence, why the iPod touch ad shows up above despite not having any mention of sex. The same trick works for “Nazi Game Apps” and myriad other racy iterations. While AdWords loopholes like this are nothing new (try “Android Apps Boobs” if you’d like the Android compatible version), Apple’s inadvertent advertising against people searching for something the App Store explicitly doesn’t allow is enough to at least consider a change in policy, on either Google or Apple’s part. Update: Search expert Danny Sullivan more precisely explains what is going on here in the comments.
Sullivan tells TechCrunch that while Google doesn’t blacklist specific words, the more interesting fact about the above image is that Apple isn’t excluding the word “Sex” from their Google AdWords buying policy, where the company could chose to ensure that an ad would NOT show up for a search term. Sullivan also explains that this is probably an oversight on Apple’s part and they will most likely turn what’s going on above off soon.        
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| Yahoo Shows a Profit Pop In Third Quarter Thanks To HotJobs Sale; Display Up 17 Percent (Slides) Posted: 19 Oct 2010 03:04 PM PDT
Yahoo is still trying to figure out how to reignite revenue growth, but its was able to show a nice pop in profits during the third quarter.. Revenues were pretty much flat, growing only 2 percent to $1.6 billion. Operating profits, however, more than doubled to $189 million (full slides below). Yahoo reported earnings per share of $0.29, well above the $0.15 consensus estimate. Nearly half of those earnings, or $0.13 a share, was due to the one-time sale of HotJobs during the quarter (which resulted in an $186 million gain in the quarter). Backing out the HotJobs gain, and a smaller but corresponding gain a year ago related to the sale of some Alibaba assets, EPS still would have grown 86 percent. Operating margins doubled to 12 percent. Looking at how revenues break down, the strongest area was in display advertising on Yahoo-owned sites, which grew 17 percent to $465 million. That growth was offset by a 7 percent decline in search advertising revenues on Yahoo-owned sites to $331 million. Microsoft paid Yahoo $81 million in “search operating cost reimbursements” related to the cost of the transition of search over to Microsoft, and roughly equal to the savings Yahoo should see once that transition is over. Yahoo is pouring more resources into improving its display advertising revenues, revamping its advertising and content systems. CEO Carol Bartz noted that as of yesterday Yahoo News switched over to a new unified code base, replacing 9 previous systems worldwide. The new back-end system should make it easier to experiment with new features and ad units and to iterate more quickly. Bartz also revealed that so far this year, Yahoo has bought back 7 percent of its own shares. As investors flee the stock, Yahoo may have to continue to repurchase shares to keep the stock afloat, unless some of these initiatives begin to drive overall revenue growth. Bartz kept repeating the mantra “local, mobile, social, and video,” suggesting that she hopes that is where Yahoo’s advertising growth will come from in the future. Asked to comment on the private equity buyout rumors, Bartz was surprisingly tight-lipped: “As tempting as it is to tell you what I really think, I cannot comment on rumors about hypothetical this or hypothetical that. We like our strategy, we like our progress, that is what I am focused on.” Also, she managed to make it throughout the entire conference call without swearing.
       
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| Webpage Builder DevHub Sees Engagement Spike After Embracing Gamification Posted: 19 Oct 2010 02:50 PM PDT
DevHub, a startup that lets users build out their own websites, certainly thinks so. Back in July the company relaunched its service using BigDoor to power some gaming mechanics, and the results are impressive: cofounder Mark Michael says that adding game mechanics to the site “increased their bottom line, user interaction, and the ultimate goal” of getting users to build out their custom websites.
The gaming elements in DevHub are pretty straightforward: after initially signing up for the service, you’re prompted to earn more points by adding more elements to your site. As you earn more points, you get access to more options to further customize your webpage, like media widgets and link rolls — or, if you’re short on time, you can purchase these new features using real money. This system has worked well for DevHub so far, especially during the crucial period between getting the user to sign up and getting them to build out their custom website (which involves a little bit of work on their part). Before the relaunch, the average new user would complete four actions in the site builder before logging out (and possibly never coming back). Now, the average new user completes twelve actions during their first session. And the number of users who post to their blogs has more than doubled, from 7% to 15% of new signups. Things aren’t just looking up in terms of engagement, either. Prior to the site’s relaunch, virtual goods had a negligible impact on the site’s bottom line— they now make up 29% of DevHub’s gross revenues. For every 100 active users on the site, DevHub reports 3.5 paid purchases per month, which go for an average of $10.55 a pop.
       
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We’ve seen the AR.Drone floating around multiple events this year including CES but we never really got a chance to play with it until this week. Before I get into my review, I’m going to tell you a story. People ask me all the time “What’s the coolest thing you’ve seen” and like a football stadium toilet attendant being asked how his Sunday went, I always reply with a downcast face and a sad, slow sigh. “Nothing,” I’d answer. “Nihil.”
Yeah, today is 
Look at Apple. Isn’t it so cute that they finally discovered the joys of livestreaming? Or rather rediscovered it as they used to stream their conferences way back when. But anyway, 
Verizon will soon be a one-stop shop for all your tablet needs. Come November 11th, the wireless carrier will be selling the 
Hopefully you weren’t sitting on the Android tablet sidelines, patiently waiting for Lenovo’s options. Yeah, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. The company’s COO recent stated that the Lenovo’s US-market tablet will not be based around the Android 2.2 Froyo release, but rather Honeycomb. Therefore, if Google pushes back Honeycomb, Lenovo’s tablet will obviously have to suit. This puts the tablet on schedule for a Summer 2011 release — or rather a few months into the iPad 2′s life. 
Forget Android, iOS and the rest of the mobile operating systems.
A couple days ago, we 
As it becomes increasingly important to measure website and social media analytics in real-time, new optimization tools are rising to the surface and gobbling up investor dollars.
Tired of the endless unsolicited entreaties to 
No, it’s not what you’re thinking — Google Ventures didn’t just invest in a Groupon clone. But the search giant’s VC arm is taking a stake in a local deals startup called 
Last year, 
"It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I'm okay with that."
In Silicon Valley, there are few developers more respected than 
I’d venture to say that I’m as excited about Chrome OS as anybody. 99.99 percent of my working day is currently spent in Chrome currently, and I’d be just fine with it being 100 percent if it gains a few features that Chrome OS is promising. But there’s a mildly worrisome trend occurring leading up to the launch of Google’s first desktop operating system: defections. Also interesting: what does Facebook want with these guys?
We covered 
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
While yes it would be an amazing feat of hypocrisy if 
Silicon Valley loves its buzzwords. And amid the current standbys like “Location-based” and “Social”, there’s a word that seems to be popping up more and more: Gamification. The basic idea is to incorporate game mechanics, like badges and points, into sites that don’t traditionally have them. This wouldn’t normally be a trivial task, but there are already a number of startups popping up that make ‘gamifiying’ a site much easier, like 
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