The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Verizon Buys #CyberMonday From Twitter
- MyYearbook Introduces Realtime Social Gaming With Video Chat
- Cyber Monday Tech Deals Round-up
- Contest: Happy Cyber Monday, Here’s A Portable TV
- Gartner: PC Shipments Up 14 Percent, 409 Million Computers To Be Sold In 2011
- CloudBees Raises $4 Million From Matrix Partners For Java Cloud Computing Play
- Facebook App Scam Promises To Reveal Who Checked Out Your Profile
- John Doerr and Mary Meeker Speak about their New Partnership
- Morgan Stanley Tech Analyst Mary Meeker Joins Kleiner Perkins As Partner
- New European Startup Programme Resembles Y-Combinator Model
- Russian Search Leader Yandex Said To Mull $1.5 Billion IPO
- eBay And PayPal Black Friday Mobile Stats: Sales Doubled; Payment Volume Up 27 Percent
- ClickFox Raises $18M, Helps Clients Get A Cross-Channel View On Customer Behavior
- Is Twitter Predicting Contestant Exits From The X-Factor?
- Nothing Says “I’m Stuck in the 1990s” Like Lëkki’s Motorola StarTAC in Hot Pink
- Google M&A Lead Congratulates Groupon CEO On Um, Something
- Have It Your Way: Sparkbuy Helps You Hone In On Your Ideal Laptop
- Facebook “Thinking” Of Offering Mass Contact Export Since 2004
- Momento Is Perhaps The Perfect Passive Diary App
- Phone SIM Locks: Why Do Carriers Even Bother?
- It’s the Community, Stupid!
- Symbian Sputters Towards Open-Source Irrelevancy
- WikiLeaked Diplomatic Cables Confirm China’s Politburo Was Behind Google Hacking Incident
| Verizon Buys #CyberMonday From Twitter Posted: 29 Nov 2010 08:56 AM PST
As with any purchased Promoted Trend on Twitter, when users click on CyberMonday, they will be see a sponsored Tweet from Verizon, which states “Starting today, Verizon’s giving you 24 days of Seasonal Surprises! Unwrap an exclusive deal now!” The Tweet contains a link to the company’s “Seasonal Surprises” campaign, which encourages users to Tweet Verizon’s message or post the message on Facebook to unlock an exclusive deal. It’s unclear how much Verizon or Target spent on the Promoted Trend, but it’s certainly a compelling way to publicize deals during the holiday shopping rush when users are looking online for deals and discounts. And the form of advertising is becoming a visible source of revenue for Twitter as well-known brands flock to buy Promoted Trends.        
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| MyYearbook Introduces Realtime Social Gaming With Video Chat Posted: 29 Nov 2010 07:52 AM PST
In general, the key driver of social networking so far is games on Facebook. But most of those games aren’t social in the way that playing Monopoly or cards with your friends and family over the holidays is social. MyYearbook, which is a small but profitable social network focussing on younger teenage users, is going to try to make online games more social by getting its members to play together at the same time. The site has 4.7 million active visitors a month generating nearly 1 billion pageviews. It has about 1 million active users every day who spend a third of their time playing games and using other apps. The company makes its money from virtual currency and in-game offers, and is on track to make about $22 million in revenues this year, according to CEO Geoff Cook In mid-December, myYearbook will launch a new set of a dozen live games which will combine casual games with live video chat. These are basic games like Warship, Gin Rummy, Chess, Checkers, line of Four, and Tic Tac Toe. MyYearbook is also partnering OMGPOP (which specializes in live online games), Heyzap, and Viximo to bring some of their games into myYearbook with a live video component. These aren’t amazing games. That is not what they are about. They are designed to get people to interact with one another, to make new friends or to flirt. They are games everybody knows and everybody can play.
“Our take on social games is to help you meet new people,” says Cook. He is betting big on synchronous games that can be played live with everyone present at the same time. Most games on Facebook are asynchronous—players take turns whenever they happen to be online and games can drag on for days. Only five of the top 100 games are synchronous. Facebook has the “wrong social graph” for realtime games because the chances that one of your friends is online right now and wants to play a game with you aren’t that great (see slide at right). MyYearbook takes a different approach, using games as a social lubricant to get you to play with people you don’t know. There are a lot more of those people online at any given time. Gamers will be able to specify what types of people they want to play with using filters to sort by gender, age, and location. In order to avoid the Chatroulette problem of guys exposing themselves over live video, an extensive flagging and moderation system will be in place. Since every member has to be logged in, violators can be blocked from the system. But myYearbook also employs 20 moderators, which will increase to 50 moderators just to police the system. Another Chatroulette problem Cook hopes to avoid is people constantly hitting the next button to find other players. Players will gain or lose karma points depending on how long they play, and if they get to zero karma points, they will be blocked from playing for a certain amount of time. For realtime gaming to takes off on myYearbook, however, it will need better games. Partnering with gaming companies like OMGPOP and other developers is the way to make these games more compelling. If myYearbook can become the place where teenagers go online to hang out and play games, plenty of developers will want to create games for the platform.
       
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| Cyber Monday Tech Deals Round-up Posted: 29 Nov 2010 07:34 AM PST
       
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| Contest: Happy Cyber Monday, Here’s A Portable TV Posted: 29 Nov 2010 07:25 AM PST
Well I’m here to tell you that this won’t happen to my kids. And it won’t happen to your kids. They’ll get something like this 7-inch portable TV with multiple inputs from Vizio. The screen has 800×480 resolution and and comes to you courtesy of Vizio and Sam’s Club. How do you win? Easy peasy.        
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| Gartner: PC Shipments Up 14 Percent, 409 Million Computers To Be Sold In 2011 Posted: 29 Nov 2010 06:34 AM PST
The report also found that folks are holding on to PCs longer because “because there will be less need to replace them as often” and that there is an increase in thin clients in the enterprise. PCs are also getting it in the knees because Western consumers are deciding to buy tablets (read “the iPad”) instead of a new PC. Emerging markets are helping buoy sales but not by much. So, whither PCs? The desktop form factor isn’t going anywhere. However, the introduction of low-power “acceptable” chips like those found in the Logitech Revue and many mobile devices, the divide between PC and a general “home computing” experience is lessening. The PC is now like a NAS or like heavy iron in a supercomputing facility: it’s designed to run more complex things and to serve data to the other devices on the network. Interestingly, only gamers need the kind of heavy iron we’re talking about here while the rest of us can get along with a $500 PC stuck in the basement. Even gaming doesn’t require that much firepower these days, provided you don’t want a totally cutting edge experience. At CES this year we can expect a few things: first, more Google TV devices on the network as well as small form factor PCs for folks who don’t need much power. The tower configuration is cheap and will always be with us. However, many want to hide their PCs away, out of sight, and get most of their media consumption done on portable devices.        
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| CloudBees Raises $4 Million From Matrix Partners For Java Cloud Computing Play Posted: 29 Nov 2010 06:30 AM PST  CloudBees, a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, has raised $4 million in Series A financing led by Matrix Partners with participation from individual investors, including JBoss founder Marc Fleury and JBoss/HP/Bluestone vet Bob Bickel. The round is said to be only the first in a multi-stage investment to provide CloudBees with the resources to build out a cloud-agnostic, cloud-native Java PaaS that covers both development services and a production runtime for Java.
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| Facebook App Scam Promises To Reveal Who Checked Out Your Profile Posted: 29 Nov 2010 06:24 AM PST
Sophos is reporting that the application does not work and simply allows the makers to steal your private data and virally spread the app amongst your friends.        
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| John Doerr and Mary Meeker Speak about their New Partnership Posted: 29 Nov 2010 06:18 AM PST
As an analyst, Mary Meeker was as famous in the dot com glory days as Doerr was as a VC, so it’s appropriate and seemingly a long time coming that the two would wind up as partners. Meeker said she’d thought about making the change “from the skybox to coaching down on the field,” as Doerr described it, for years. Meeker has been in talks with Kleiner since late September and made the decision to leave Morgan Stanley and join KP the Monday before Thanksgiving. She was swayed finally by a combination of factors including confidence that Morgan Stanley’s tech practice was in a strong place, the opportunity with Kleiner specifically and the stage the Internet is in right now. It’s a tough market with huge spoils. She spoke about the heady combination of the mobile innovation being built on the iPhone and Android platforms with the surging billion-person-plus worldwide Internet audience, combined with a savvier class of entrepreneurs than the industry has seen before and CEOs of companies like Google, Amazon and Apple who are smart, paranoid, and not willingly going to cede any ground to upstarts. For Kleiner, it is another stake in its reinvigorated Web franchise: First it was the hire of Bing Gordon who did KP’s most brag-worthy Web deal with Zynga, then the iFund, then the sFund and now the addition of Meeker. A few years ago, Kleiner seemed to be deemphasizing the Web to focus more on opportunities in cleantech, but the news today is just another signal of how serious Kleiner is about this market opportunity. “This third wave of disruption of social and mobile has meant that digital investing has taken on a new prominence in Kleiner,” Doerr says. Chegg’s CEO Dan Rosensweig was one of many pinging Meeker with congratulatory notes this morning during our call. He described it was “huge news” and a “big coup” for Kleiner. “Mary’s ability to spot the most important trends, evaluate-and-back the most effective entrepreneurs, predict the major pivots in the industry, and do it on a global basis has been unparalleled,” he told TechCrunch via email. That global basis part is key. Meeker will be based in Silicon Valley, but will travel between the Valley and New York and Asia. We spoke a bit about the role Meeker will play between the United States and Asia– given that many venture firms keep their Valley and China franchises pretty distinct from one another. Meeker first dug into China in the early 2000s and was stunned by the deep cultural changes the Web was having in the massive country. “You could take the Internet enthusiasm that was happening in 1999 and 2000 here in the US and China was three to five times more ebullient,” she says. “I thought, ‘My gosh, this is not about a garden variety technology change, this is about cultural change.’” Meeker noted that Chinese Web giants and Valley entrepreneurs have their hands full in their home markets, but in the next five to ten years the two will be colliding– or potentially merging– more. It’s not that Kleiner hasn’t been serious about Asia before. It has an eight-partner team in China. But when DNA Sciences acquired ngmoco and returned the whole iFund, the importance of Asia was certainly hammered home, Doerr says. “Mary is the most eloquent in saying this market isn’t just about social meets local meets mobile, but meets global as well,” he said. I asked Zynga CEO Mark Pincus what specifically Meeker would bring to Kleiner that the firm doesn’t have already. He emphasized Meeker’s data-driven approach to championing new markets versus the Valley’s more common gut-feeling, intuitive approach. “She has been the first to call many major markets, showing with data what many of us are pursuing based on instincts,” Pincus said. “In the past year she has called out the social Web and mobile Internet as opportunities of much bigger scale.Facebook’s market valuation probably went up significantly after her presentation at Web 2.0, in which she showed the potential impact of the social Web.” Kleiner has a history of bringing in big names from other industries– Colin Powell being one of the most surprising and headline-grabbing. It can be a gamble: Venture capital investing is a very specific business and successful executives from large companies, thinkers or politicians don’t always make great investors. Indeed many of Kleiner’s competitors prefer to groom talent from within or plunk an entrepreneur fresh off a big win. But Meeker seems far less of a gamble than your average banker because she has always been so forward looking– a little too forward looking back in the late 1990s some investors would argue.        
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| Morgan Stanley Tech Analyst Mary Meeker Joins Kleiner Perkins As Partner Posted: 29 Nov 2010 05:47 AM PST
Mary Meeker joined Morgan Stanley in 1991 as the Firm's PC Software/Hardware & New Media analyst. At the investment bank, she served as a Managing Director, and led the Global Technology Research Team that covered Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Microsoft and others. Prior to her role at the investment bank, she served as a Technology Research Analyst at Cowen and at Solomon Brothers. In a release Kleiner partner John Doerr said: "Mary was an early supporter of some of the biggest technology investment winners of the past 20 years…Her advice and support are already highly sought after by entrepreneurs and in this new role, she will be able to spend even more time providing more direct assistance." Meeker is known for her ability to spot and forecast trends in the consumer internet space. Each year she presents a data set at Web 2.0—this year her presentation addressed the future of mobile. You can also see our coverage from Meeker’s presentations in 2008 and 2009.        
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| New European Startup Programme Resembles Y-Combinator Model Posted: 29 Nov 2010 05:29 AM PST
But this is not the Springboard we wrote about last year. Then, it was the brainchild of Red Gate Software who were effectively offering a very informal arrangement, helping young startups. It was also B2B focused. This is a different beast. The new Springboard programme has wisely realised that there is a gap in the European eco-system for the super-early stage startup that really just needs enough cash to create something. That is in the Y-Combinator and TechStars sort of area, which is much more at the hacker/product end of the market.        
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| Russian Search Leader Yandex Said To Mull $1.5 Billion IPO Posted: 29 Nov 2010 05:13 AM PST
Yandex, Russia’s search engine leader and the nation’s largest Internet company, is reportedly considering a flotation that would raise around £1 billion or $1.56 billion for the firm, thisismoney reports, citing City sources. The company is said to be mulling a listing in London early next year, although it could still end up picking NASDAQ. The IPO would follow in the footsteps of fellow Russian Internet giant Mail.ru’s successful listing – the company raised roughly $1 billion. A Yandex spokesperson declined to confirm or deny the IPO plans, and said:
Founded back in 1997, Yandex has been reported to be preparing an IPO before, with talks dating back all the way to 2006. In 2008, the company planned for an initial public offering but quickly moved to indefinitely delay those plans due to the global economic turmoil. According to LiveInternet, Yandex's market share in Russia reached 64,6 percent or about three times that of the number two, Google, in October 2010. Earlier this year, comScore reported that it had ranked Yandex 7th in the Top 10 world search properties. Aside from Russia, Yandex has operations in Belarus (yandex.by), Kazakhstan (yandex.kz) and Ukraine (yandex.ua).
In 2009, Yandex's revenue reached 8.7 billion Rubles (roughly $278 million at current conversion rates). Contextual and display ads accounted for 86 percent and 11 percent of its revenues, respectively. The company doesn’t provide projections for this year, although it’s clear that contextual advertising in the Russian Internet market is growing quickly. According to research from the Association of Communication Agencies of Russia, contextual ads grew 45% in January-September 2010 compared to the same period last year, reaching roughly 12 billion Rubles or $383 million. Yandex is among the largest high-tech companies in Russia, with an estimated workforce of about 2,500 employees. Currently, Yandex has branches all over Russia (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Kazan), Ukraine (Kiev, Odessa, Simferopol) and in the United States (in Palo Alto, CA, to be exact).        
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| eBay And PayPal Black Friday Mobile Stats: Sales Doubled; Payment Volume Up 27 Percent Posted: 29 Nov 2010 04:42 AM PST
eBay sales in the U.S. from its suite of mobile apps nearly doubled over Black Friday 2009. Globally, eBay mobile is on track to nearly triple its sales over last year and is expected to bring in well over $1.5 billion in mobile sales this year (previously, the company had publicly stated that eBay would bring $1.5 billion in mobile sales; it looks like that number has been altered slightly). On Black Friday, eBay saw a 30 percent increase in mobile bidding activity, compared to the previous year. And since the launch of its first mobile application in July 2008, nearly 30 million items have been bought or sold using eBay mobile apps around the world. eBay owned PayPal reported a 27 percent increase in total payment volume on Black Friday 2010, compared to the previous year. Generally, PayPal saw an approximately 310 percent increase in mobile shopping on Black Friday. Black Friday 2010 resulted in 21 percent more total payment volume compared to Thanksgiving 2010 and 19 percent more payment volume compared to an average Friday in 2010. These results are definitely representative of a larger trend considering that PayPal processes 16.5 percent of U.S. eCommerce and 15 percent of global eCommerce. In preparation for the holiday shopping season, eBay recently launched a new iPhone app that included bar scanning; and PayPal used exclusive deals as incentives to use the payments technology. Mobile shopping is expected to be huge this year and tt should be interesting to see if eBay and PayPal can sustain the mobile sales today on Cyber Monday and throughout the holiday season. Of course for total retail sales, eBay lost out to Amazon, Walmart and Target who all took the top spors for online retail sales for Black Friday.        
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| ClickFox Raises $18M, Helps Clients Get A Cross-Channel View On Customer Behavior Posted: 29 Nov 2010 04:29 AM PST
According to an SEC filing, ClickFox has raised roughly $17.9 million in fresh funding. ClickFox started out in 2000 as a Web analytics company, but has matured into a full-fledged multi-channel metrics provider that aims to help its clients get a complete view on customer experience. Update: a press release confirms the financing round, which was led by Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners. ClickFox says it has achieved profitability and will use the new funds to expand its sales and marketing efforts worldwide. ClickFox realizes that customers engage with companies through a variety of service channels these days, from visiting a website, voice calling and online chat applications to kiosks, retail stores and mobile apps and websites, and aims to serve its clients with a cross-channel dashboard for keeping tabs on this complex tangle of touchpoints in order to gain insights into how and why customers behave the way they do.
ClickFox CEO Marco Pacelli and CFO Sharon Lynch are named in the filing, along with directors Dave Johnson (Jenne Distributors), Geoffrey Oblak (Ascent Venture Partners), Amnon Shoham (Cedar Fund), Ofer Timor (Delta Ventures) and Laurie Olivier (Veritas Venture Partners). The list of venture capital firms that have participated in the $18 million round mirror that of the current backers as listed on ClickFox’s website. Last time the company raised funding was back in June 2008, when ClickFox secured $12.5 million.        
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| Is Twitter Predicting Contestant Exits From The X-Factor? Posted: 29 Nov 2010 04:05 AM PST
So we make no apology for passing on the news that social media monitoring company Brandwatch is claiming that it can predict who is about to exit The X-Factor TV “musical competition” based on what’s being said about it on Facebook and Twitter. I asked what else they track, but sure enough, Twitter tops the list as a data source.        
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| Nothing Says “I’m Stuck in the 1990s” Like Lëkki’s Motorola StarTAC in Hot Pink Posted: 29 Nov 2010 04:02 AM PST  If you were one of those people that watched the iPhone4 v. HTC Evo Xtranormal videos made by Brian Maupin and caught yourself thinking that today's mobile phones are just downright overcomplicated, you're definitely going to like Lëkki. The brand new Paris-based startup launched in September is looking to bring back the good old simple portable phones of the 1990s - but in an environmentally friendly and stylish way. Forget Facebook, Foursquare, email and all those other time-consuming applications out there. If you don't want to spend your life on your phone (which also happens to be a clock-camera-calculator-garage door opener-microwave-in-one), Lëkki's "Back to Basics" approach offers telephones that make calls and send texts - and do absolutely nothing more.
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| Google M&A Lead Congratulates Groupon CEO On Um, Something Posted: 29 Nov 2010 12:50 AM PST
Rumors of a Google Groupon acquisition are circling through the blogosphere this Sunday night/Monday morning and for good reason, the scrappy little Vator.tv has come up with a 2.5 billion dollar acquisition price for the deal, according to sources. While I’ve contacted both Google and Groupon to no avail, a quick scan down Groupon CEO Andrew Mason’s Twitter account does reveal some interesting activity, namely a vaguely implicit conversation had with Google M&A lead Neeraj Arora back in September.
While we don’t think that exchange means that Google acquired Groupon two months ago, it’s interesting to note that the ongoing dialogue between the companies has been public since then. Mason’s end statement “thanks – gotta leave some for the rest of us :-)” alludes to Google and Groupon possibly going after the same third party company, with Groupon in the lead. This is also around the same time that a rumored Yahoo deal fell apart. We’ll all have to wait at least until tomorrow morning to see if any confirmations or denials will suss out. But, if the Google acquisition rumors are true, then Mason’s parting statement to Arora (above) is the sweetest of ironies.
       
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| Have It Your Way: Sparkbuy Helps You Hone In On Your Ideal Laptop Posted: 29 Nov 2010 12:03 AM PST
Sparkbuy thinks there’s a better way. The site, which recently closed a $1 million funding round, has set out to build a ‘Kayak for consumer electronics’, and it’s starting with laptop computers. The gist of it: enter which criteria are important to you, and the site will give a listing of laptops that it thinks you’ll like best. Sparkbuy is entering private beta tonight, and the first 500 TechCrunch readers to enter the invite code ‘TCRUNCH-VIP’ will gain access (make sure to click the ‘Sign Up’ link on the site). At this point navigating Sparkbuy is pretty straightforward. After logging in, you’ll see a list of computers alongside the right side of the screen, and a list of different options that you can rank by importance (if you care about them at all). These include things like screen size, ‘lots of memory’, Bluetooth, and so on. And yes, there’s an option to specify that you only want to see Macs. All of these listings are currently being drawn from Amazon, so you can also include a high Amazon rating as one of your priorities. As you arrange your top priorities, Sparkbuy will refresh its list of suggestions. Clicking on a listing will generate a popup that gives you an at-a-glance overview of the computer’s specs. Once you’ve found a machine you like, the site will happily refer you over to Amazon to complete the purchase (Sparkbuy makes money through Amazon’s affiliate program).
So what’s the secret sauce? CEO Dan Shapiro acknowledges that there are plenty of sites out there that look to help consumers pick out a computer, but he says that most of this information is scattered across various review sites and blogs. Even the electronics databases, he says, are incomplete, because they use data provided by the manufacturer. These can be misleading or worse — the manufacturer will sometimes simply not list a feature that it doesn’t have, which can lead to a blank spot in a database rather than a definite ‘no’. To fix this, Sparkbuy employs a part-time team of around 15, who have fleshed out its database of 2,000 laptops. Shapiro says that by the time the site launches to the public, its database should be 99% accurate. Sparkbuy’s flexibility seems like it will be great for tech-savvy consumers, but I question if it may be a bit too much for some people. After all, there’s a reason why Apple only sells a handful of laptop models — it’s easy to get overwhelmed when you’re choosing between a dozen laptops that differentiate themselves with features you’re only vaguely familiar with. I asked Shapiro if the site might be better if it simply named the best of each class of computer: a great ultralight for people who travel frequently; a workhorse for people who need to do video processing, and so on. But he says that while consumers tend to have a lot of overlap in terms of the features they want, there’s often one outlier — some feature that they definitely need that may not be found on your normal, baseline computer. That surprised me given how well Apple’s one-size-fits-all solutions tend to work, but if he’s right, then Sparkbuy may be on to something. Shapiro says that Sparkbuy will likely open to the public around January. And the site already has its eyes on its next target: televisions.        
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| Facebook “Thinking” Of Offering Mass Contact Export Since 2004 Posted: 28 Nov 2010 11:35 PM PST
When asked about the issue at Web 2.0 Summit, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that he wasn't sure that Facebook was "100% right” in preventing Gmail or other third party apps from crawling the site, and referred to the difference between information you yourself put into an email application versus information put into a social network by people you’ve chosen to befriend as a factor in what the eventual universal export policy will be, “We’re trying to think through these things and be respectful of all the forces that are at play.” In other words, it's complicated. While Facebook "thinks through these things," it seem to making some bold moves, from kicking off power user Robert Scoble for trying to scrape his contacts through Plaxo in 2008 to eliminating the Gmail option entirely from "Find My Friends" while allowing unlimited (albeit problematic) contact info access to partners Yahoo and Hotmail. To give us a better sense of the evolution of Facebook's contact info policy, a tipster who might have been the first person to attempt mass Facebook email scraping, sent us the below string of support emails between himself and Facebook proto-employee Dustin Moskovitz, resulting from attempts to aggregate the contact info of everyone in the Princeton network in 2004.
The moral of this blast from the past? The more things change the more things stay the same, other than that whole "No businesses on Facebook thing.” Well maybe we could also amend Moskovitz's "We pretty much don’t want people to aggregate the information available on the website," statement with "unless of course they are an ad partner." The most interesting thing is about this exchange is that even in 2004, Moskovitz realized the sheer utility of being able to export your Facebook Friend contacts (as opposed to everyone at Princeton) and explicitly references a feature in the works where you could export VCards for your Friends. After all you built those relationships. That mythical VCard feature, which never actually appeared, sounds similar to the universal export that Facebook took advantage of when Google took away access to its API and would allow you to do exactly what the short-lived Google Chrome extension did on Friday before it was shut down. Here's to hoping the feature will one day see the light of day. Update: While it is not clear whether these were official Facebook features or not, according to commenters Facebook has actually experimented off and on with allowing an export feature in both in CSV and VCard format, neither having any staying power.        
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| Momento Is Perhaps The Perfect Passive Diary App Posted: 28 Nov 2010 08:04 PM PST
At its core, Momento (made by the UK-based d3i) is a straightforward diary app. It allows you to easy write “Moments” (diary entries) to express what you are doing or feeling on any given day. It takes the process a step further by allowing you to tag friends (from you iPhone contact list), places, events, and add photos to these entries. But the real killer feature of the app is that it also allows you to import bits of information from a number of services including Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Digg, and any RSS feed. The result is a brilliant log of almost everything you’re doing online. Other services have tried to do similar things before, but Momento works because they’ve nailed the user interface and experience. The entire app looks like a journal, which is broken down by days in descending order from the current day. In this view, you get a snapshot of any given day, including the most recent items (tweets, check-ins, etc). Clicking on any of these days takes you to a detail page which shows you all of your activity for that day. All your tweets, check-ins, blog posts, pictures, etc, are here. There’s also a calendar view which allows you to quickly hop to any moment in the past. Clicking on a date will again take you to a specific day page with all of your info with what you did that day.
There’s also a way to see just certain types of elements, such as tweets. Again, these are broken down by the day they were sent. And what’s really awesome is that you can search all of this stuff if it has been imported into Momento. The key to Momento is that all of this information is for you and you alone. You import social items, but it never sends anything out. It’s simply a way for you to log and keep what you did on any of these services in a given day. And it’s all presented in a very nice, easily accessible package. It’s another of the anti-social social apps, like OhLife and the newer Path, which seem to focus more on what experiences mean to you (or a very small group of friends), rather than to strangers and the larger web as a whole. With the personal approach in mind, Momento also comes with an impressive way to both backup and export all of your data (this is accessed through iTunes file sharing). Momento also comes with some nifty importing options to better tailor you data. For example, you can tell it to leave out tweets with a certain hashtag. Or you can tell it to only import tweets with a certain hashtag. You can tell it to leave out @replies and/or retweets, etc. Momento actually isn’t a new app; it first came out about a year ago. But version 2.0 was recently released, and with it comes a huge number of excellent improvements including all the geolocation service integration and the video service integration. Both of these features are pretty key for a full and interesting social service diary. Simply put: I love this app. I think it’s a near-perfect execution of a very compelling idea: passive diary writing. The downside is that it currently only works with the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad. But if you have one of those devices, this app is well worth its current $1.99 price (that’s a limited-time price). Find Momento in the App Store here.
       
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| Phone SIM Locks: Why Do Carriers Even Bother? Posted: 28 Nov 2010 04:03 PM PST
Sadly, most other phones don’t get this sort of white glove treatment. A grey market exists that traffics in phone unlocks for many devices including Blackberries and Nokias. Why? Because someone, somewhere wants to move their phone from country A to country B. The vast majority of phone users will never want to this but there is still plenty of demand. So why not ship without the lock? Well, there are a few possible answers, barring the obvious “Carriers suck.” First, the lock ensures carriers get their pound of flesh before your phone becomes obsolete. By locking your phone, they get to charge you at home, and, more important, they can charge you when you’re roaming (and boy will they ever charge you). This is allows them to make back their phone subsidy and then some. Next, the lock ensures that phones can’t travel. For various reasons, carriers don’t want the phones of Cleveland to end up in Swaziland. The first of these reasons is that many phones just don’t work overseas. Second, phones in some countries are cheaper than in others. An iPhone in Europe, for example, usually costs much more than it costs on AT&T. It won’t do to allow phone buyers to cross the border like so many retirees looking for cut-rate Canadian Viagra, right? That said, why not just give up? All of the great phones, including Windows Phone 7 models, have at least some form of public jailbreak if not a full unlock. The phones without a public unlock actually can be unlocked if you call your carrier after six months. Or, finally, you can pay some weirdo to send you an unlock code. I would estimate the majority of phone users barely know they’re using SIM cards let alone understand the entire SIM unlock idea. Most folks who make calls while travelling are probably doing so for business and so their phone calls are expensed any way. Is it really worth the bad will generated by SIM locks when you’re overseas and want to swap out a SIM and can’t? Probably not, but again, carriers, oddly enough, don’t care. Will the SIM unlock ever disappear even though it is easily surmounted? I doubt it. It’s the famous old chestnut of “security through obscurity” that has always popular with corporate types. After all, if it looks like a lock, it must act like one. Image via ArtLebedev        
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| Posted: 28 Nov 2010 01:31 PM PST
In general Wu — who gets credit for coming up with the term “Net Neutrality” — has a really important mission whether you agree with him or not: Raising alarm bells that the Internet, like every mass communication medium that has come before, could one day become strangled and controlled by a handful of companies. From what I’ve read and from our conversation on and off camera last Thursday, Wu seems to stop short of saying what has happened before on radio, telegram and television will happen with the Internet, saying it could happen. The question, he says, is whether there is something inherently different about the Internet from a technology standpoint that keeps it inevitably open. I think what keeps it from happening is something else: The community around the Internet and the age of modern entrepreneurship in which we live. Unless the FCC totally screws up on Net Neutrality, big Internet companies just don’t have the luxury of shutting upstart rivals out. You want to be cynical and say money drives policy in Washington? Fine. There is more money on the side of the Internet being open than the Internet being closed. Wu argued that there is nothing different about entrepreneurship today in Silicon Valley than there was back in the early days of the telephone or the radio, and– channeling my inner James Carville– I argued why he was wrong. Here’s the gist of my argument, which we didn’t have to time really get into on camera: 1. Invention versus iteration. There was probably more raw invention in early waves of communications industries because a lot of Internet companies have been able to stand on the shoulders of giants. Try inventing the consumer Web without copper lines going to homes and businesses and try inventing all of that without, say, electricity. As the Web gets longer in the tooth, there’s less sheer OH-MY-GOD! innovation and more iteration. Facebook was a version of social media that worked, not the first social media site; same with Google and search. And unlike a lot of the other waves Wu talks about, at this point the consumer Internet is almost purely software development, not hardware and manufacturing; it’s mostly design and user experience not hardcore circuitry and science. This may sound like a knock, but when it comes to commercialization it’s not. The more revolutionary the invention, the harder it is to fund it, manufacture it, commercialize it and get broad distribution for it. The lower the barrier for disruption, the more it occurs and the fewer opportunities large incumbents have to keep markets closed by, say, sucking up manufacturing capacity or raw materials. The assets for the web are smart coders and venture cash. The former tends to flow out of big companies seeking new challenges and new stock options. There’s no shortage of the latter– in fact there’s an unhealthy glut of it. When new upstarts are awash in an industry’s natural resources, it’s hard for incumbents to keep them out. 2. Lines of credit versus venture capital. Wu argues that modern venture capital isn’t a differentiator because there were ways of financing companies in earlier waves of technology, like lines of credit. Come on. Really? There is a world of difference between an entrepreneur able to put up enough personal collateral to secure a line of credit and an industry where thousands of VCs have $20 billion-plus burning a hole in their pocket looking for high-risk, no revenue opportunities in which to invest. By definition it opens the concept of being an entrepreneur up to huge new swaths of the global population. That means at a minimum that more companies are started, and that means there’s more opportunity to start the next Google or Facebook. The barrier of financing for a smart idea is all but eliminated. How different would, say, early Hollywood have been if any kid with an idea for a movie studio had millions of dollars in funding? It creates huge, constant pressure on incumbents to keep users happy and — as mentioned earlier– incentivize the best employees to stay because suddenly jobs at startups not only offer stock options but they have enough cash to pay competitive salaries. And if one hot company gets traction it means hundreds more are started the next day by VCs who want “their YouTube,” “their Foursquare,” or “their Groupon.” This much money with the sole purpose of backing new companies starts to become a game of odds. Every VC would have to be utterly inept not to accidentally back the next great Web mogul. There is a fundamental difference in how banks and VCs make money and what keeps them in business. Lenders want companies to do well enough to repay debt, and then take bigger loans to continue building their business. Venture capitalists want continual waves of industry disruption. When you have power and money behind breaking not protecting big companies, it’s a different scenario. Building a huge company is never easy, but entrepreneurs at the center of the Web are hardly the Davids going up against Goliaths that entrepreneurs were in previous information ages of the past. 3. The culture of pioneers versus the culture of young-eating-the-old. Wu’s argument is that when a technology is new, aggressive entrepreneurs flood in, many go out of business and a few survive to become the big winners. He is right that there is nothing unique about that cycle generally. But the uniqueness of Silicon Valley is that it no longer relies on returns from the pioneers of huge new industries, it relies on the young continually eating the old throughout an industry’s life cycle. Witness the lack of mourning when a former giant falls on hard times. Witness the lack of asking for bailout dollars. Witness the constant churning of talent, press and attention towards new things. The hype cycle is a bad thing in a lot of ways for Silicon Valley. But the one good thing that it does is continually champion the new over the old. Overall, Wu and I agree more than we disagree. If the future of the Internet were up to Google, Apple, AT&T and the federal government, I’d be concerned too. But $20 billion a year in venture capital and thousands of people starting companies all over the world every year aren’t going to cede anyone that right. The biggest evidence of that is Facebook. If the Internet were copying the trajectory he describes, we’d have our winners and they’d be AOL, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and Google– end of story. I doubt AOL, Yahoo or eBay would argue they are protected oligarchs, and Amazon would be in the same state had the company not dramatically pivoted into new areas. Google dominates, in part, because it is the youngest of the bunch and iterated in business model and product after watching the older search and portal companies. And Google is now feeling the heat from companies like Facebook and Twitter. Mobile Web may prove to be another matter, but there are just no signs to support that the early pioneers of the Web have an advantage that makes them immune to younger challengers. Indeed in a lot of verticals, late 1990s companies have already tried to flex these muscles Wu fears, and they’ve largely failed. Look at travel where online travel agents who had protected inventory fought sites like Kayak who wanted to spider their travel listings. The big portals tried to do this pre-Google, de-emphasizing the search box in favor of people staying within their walled virtual department store. Google disrupted that by making the idea of sending people away from your site more lucrative. Google got very little time to bask in that. Just a few years later, one of Google’s biggest challenges is trying to find ways to match the dramatic rise of Facebook, when it comes to keeping their key employees and finding their own answer to social and casual games. Consider the industry that has done the best job using a closed system and high-paid lobbyists to kill startups: Online music. VCs funding nearly any online music company in the last decade could have just made out the investment checks out directly to the labels, and the result would have been much the same. These companies were almost all bled dry with royalties, and then killed. One of the only reasons Pandora has survived is because it catalyzed its loyal users to break congressional fax machines with complaints about proposed legislation that would put the company out of business. But even in this industry where protectionism has killed so many great startups, the labels haven’t “won” because they are still slowly dying. They continue to lose money, because of users like Pandora’s who demand they work with new entrants, rampant and uncontrollable piracy and VCs who continue to fund new music startups like Spotify despite a graveyard of failures. It’s not just the power of the Internet– it’s a powerful community of hackers, entrepreneurs and VCs who send wave after wave of challenges to an industry that they believe should be more open. Wu says somewhat dismissively in the clip below that everyone always thinks there’s something so different about their own time. While it’s good to sound potential alarm bells, I’d argue that believing that industries and consumers never change is just as flawed of an outlook. There’s a clip of the show below, go here to hear Wu talk specifically about the state of Net Neutrality.        
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| Symbian Sputters Towards Open-Source Irrelevancy Posted: 28 Nov 2010 01:03 PM PST
Remember two years ago when Nokia open-sourced the Symbian mobile operating system? The thinking was that cell phone manufacturers who depended on the Symbian OS could help keep it going. But it was already too late. The iPhone’s iOS and Android started to take over. Even die-hard Symbian supporters abandoned ship. As the fanboy blogger Symbian Guru explained last summer when he decided to give up on Symbian:
Now Symbian is delivering itself another blow—this time self-inflicted. The Symbian Foundation, which hosts all the open-source code, big fixes, and documentation for the OS, is shutting down its websites on December 17. The Symbian OS will still technically be open-source, it will just be impractical for many developers to look at it or improve it. According to a post on the Symbian Foundation’s developer blog, the open-source code and other information currently on its websites will be made “available in some form, most likely on a DVD or USB hard drive upon request to the Symbian Foundation. . . . A charge may be levied for media and shipping.” In other words, the Symbian OS will be open only in name. What good is open-source code if it is not available online, where it can continue to evolve? For all practical purposes, it will become an artifact of the age of feature phones. Nokia will no doubt continue to develop the Symbian OS for its own purposes. But what a way to show disdain to the open-source community it professed to embrace only two years ago. Of course, there is nothing stopping someone else from hosting all the code and documentation going forward on an independent site. Will any developers care enough to take on that task?
       
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| WikiLeaked Diplomatic Cables Confirm China’s Politburo Was Behind Google Hacking Incident Posted: 28 Nov 2010 10:59 AM PST
Details about the U.S. State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks are starting to come out. Although WikiLeaks itself may be under a denial of service attack, it provided several newspapers around the world access to the raw documents it is preparing to release later today. The New York Times just posted it’s first article summarizing the contents of the cables and highlighting the most newsworthy ones. Among the 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks, there is one set which deals with the massive computer attack on Google and other companies which was first revealed last January. At that time, Google went public with its contention that the attacks came from China, and linked those attacks to government censorship in explaining why Google was pulling out of China proper. They returned in a more limited way last summer. According to the NYT, some of the new leaked cables point directly at China’s Politburo for instigating the original attacks:
The cables should shed some more light on why the White House and State Department backed Google so vociferously at the time.        
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Psssh. 
I remember, back in the old days, there wasn’t much on TV during family holiday dinners and we wished we could play Nintendo. We’d go out to my Uncle’s house in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio and we’d watch whatever was on their old CRT – maybe the Yule log on QVC or the same old holiday specials over and over, and we’d dream about playing the NES on that big old box. But we couldn’t. It was too much trouble and the adults, after all, were hopped up on lasagna and beer. 
Gartner’s preliminary forecasts point to a 14.3 increase in PC shipments in 2010 over 2009 as well as a forecast of 409 million PCs sold in 2011. While these numbers are exciting to anyone following the sad-sack IT industry, remember that 
Over 60,000 people have been hit in the past few hours on Facebook by a scam which claims that after installing an app called ePrivacy you can see who checked your profile. Needless to say the app does not work. Instead it just lets the scammer access your profile and post “OMG OMG OMG… I cant believe this actually works!” to your wall, with a link to the app, thus spreading it further.
Longtime technology analyst 
So we have Seedcamp, Startup Bootcamp, The Founder Institute, Launch48, Hackfwd and various other startup programme across Europe. And we can now add another to that list: 
eBay and 
Glancing at my Twitter stream of an evening, I’ve been surprised at the number of Geeks watching The X-Factor TV show (in the UK) which is similar to American Idol . But then I guess it lends itself extremely well to witty asides on Twitter. This actually makes the show worth watching, much more for the social media discussions around it than the show itself. It’s like being at a football match where the crowd’s chants are more entertaining than the game. If there is a business model for bland, manufactured TV I guess this is it. 
To me, one of the most interesting thing about Foursquare is 
Another view allows you to see entries broken down by tags. From here, you can choose to see only entries with certain people tagged. Or you can see only entries that you gave a high rating to (when you make your own Moments, you can rate them if you want).
Last week’s guest on 
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