The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- The End Of Hand Crafted Content
- A VC’s Advice On How To Pitch VCs
- Can Anyone Help Crowdsourcing Startup crowdSPRING Get Their Site Back Up?
- MySpace Loses Tim Schulz
- Nexus One, The Google Phone, Captured In The Wild (Picture)
- Best Man Rigs Newlyweds’ Bed To Tweet During Sex. Not Kidding.
- Venture Capitalists Ron Conway And Sean Parker Battle For Charity
- TEDxSV: Reid Hoffman On Philanthropic Movements On The Web
- WordPress Makes Blogging On The Fly Easier, Integrates With Twitter API
- The Google Phone, Unlocked (Confirmed And More Details)
- The Medium Is No Longer The Message, . . . You Are
| The End Of Hand Crafted Content Posted: 13 Dec 2009 07:13 AM PST
Speaking broadly, I like what Reuters, Rupert Murdoch and Eric Schmidt are saying: the industry is in crisis, and the daring innovators will prevail. Personally, I still think the best way forward for the best journalists, if not the brands they currently work for, is to leave those brands and do their own thing. But as one of the innovators in the last go round, I think there’s a much bigger problem lurking on the horizon than a bunch of blogs and aggregators disrupting old media business models that needed disrupting anyway. The rise of fast food content is upon us, and it’s going to get ugly. Old media frets over blogs and aggregators that summarize content and link back to the original source. They can’t make a business in that world, they say, so they run the other way and try to find a way to protect and charge for content. These are the cavemen, or whoever, who were afraid of fire when it was discovered because it burned, or was too technologically advanced to really understand. The smart guys used it to cook their meat and keep them warm, and multiplied. For our part, we throw a party when someone “steals” our content and links back to us. High fives all around the office. At least there’s some small nod in our direction. And the aggregators like TechMeme can figure out who broke the news. Page views are lost, but reputation is gained. But for every link there are dozens of sites that outright steal our content with no attribution. Not just spam blogs, even the NYTimes does it. This isn’t a copyright issue – the stories are rewritten by actual people. But it’s far cheaper to simply take the news and rewrite it – if you can get away with it – than to hire people who do actual journalism. Over time, it becomes a competitive tax that is difficult to bear. But even then, companies like ours can find a way to compete. So what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines. On one end you have AOL and their Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media. That leads to a whole lot of really, really crappy content being highlighted right on the massive AOL home page. This article, for example, is just horrendous. One of AOL’s own blogs trashes the company’s spinoff, rambles for miles without any real point, and adds a huge factual error to top things off (”the company is losing money”). Hiring a bunch of people who couldn’t keep their old media jobs and don’t have the stomach to go out on their own and then slapping little or no editorial oversight onto these masses of sub-par journalists leads to an inevitable conclusion – cheap, crappy content. And that crappy content is given a massive audience on the AOL portal. On the other end you have Demand Media and companies like it. See Wired’s “Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model.” The company is paying bottom dollar to create “4,000 videos and articles” a day, based only on what’s hot on search engines. They push SEO juice to this content, which is made as quickly and cheaply as possible, and pray for traffic. It works like a charm, apparently. These models create a race to the bottom situation, where anyone who spend time and effort on their content is pushed out of business. We’re not there yet, but I see it coming. And just as old media is complaining about us, look for us to start complaining about the new jerks. My advice to readers is just this – get ready for it, because you’ll be reading McDonalds five times a day in the near future. My advice to content creators is more subtle. Figure out an even more disruptive way to win, or die. Or just give up on making money doing what you do. If you write for passion, not dollars, you’ll still have fun. Even if everything you write is immediately ripped off without attribution, and the search engines don’t give you the attention they used to. You may have to continue your hobby in the evening and get a real job, of course. But everyone has to face reality sometimes. Forget fair and unfair, right and wrong. This is simply happening. The disruptors are getting disrupted, and everyone has to adapt to it or face the consequences. Hand crafted content is dead. Long live fast food content, it’s here to stay. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| A VC’s Advice On How To Pitch VCs Posted: 13 Dec 2009 07:08 AM PST Editor’s Note: In this guest post, Raj Kapoor gives entreprenuers advice on how to pitch VCs. Kapoor knows both sides of the equation. For the past five years, he’s been a VC at the Mayfield Fund. Before that he founded the photo site Snapfish, which he sold to Hewlett-Packard. Its been almost five years now that I’ve been in venture capital. I finally know what i don’t know. The one thing I do know is how to give better advice on pitching VCs now that I’ve sat through hundreds of pitches and made 8 investments. I gave some advice in an earlier post—this one builds on it at a deeper level (three years later) I’ve mentioned in the past that there are some key things you should include in your presentation when you are pitching a VC. David Cowan’s post on what to include is a great starting point. I thought I would expand on this and add some of the nuances within each section. This may not apply to all types of companies but I think it works for internet-related businesses. Also, I've found that if all the informoation below is addressed succinctly in an executive summary or first pitch deck, it can help us make a much faster decision —which is what the entrepreneur wants and so do we. If we believe the story is lacking in too many areas, sometimes we just pass as there is too much else going on. At the same time, providing too much information is a problem as, like you, we are time-strapped and attention-starved. I think most of the points below can be addressed in a few compelling sentences or slides.
I hope this helps. If you can nail the points above, it can be a 30-45 minute meeting and I think you'll get a quicker and more definitive answer from a VC. Good luck with your pitch! Photo credit: Flickr/Adam Bales Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Can Anyone Help Crowdsourcing Startup crowdSPRING Get Their Site Back Up? Posted: 13 Dec 2009 04:53 AM PST
A couple of days ago, the company set out to improve the performance of both the hardware and software that powers their website. Instead, the site update knocked the website down cold, and they’ve been having trouble getting it back online ever since. When you go to the crowdsourcing startup’s website now, you’ll be forwarded to a message hosted on subdomain apology.crowdspring.com that reads:
It has taken way more than 24 hours, though. The latest update posted on their Twitter account mentioned that they’ll be back in business on Sunday after getting some rest. Downtime’s never fun, and it happens to the best of us, but posting an update that you’re tired and going to sleep before doing some final site testing is simply unprofessional. Maybe they should have crowdsourced for some help while they were going to bed. (Thanks for the tip, Brandon) Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Posted: 13 Dec 2009 04:17 AM PST Tim Schulz has resigned from his role as Senior Product Manager at MySpace, he confirmed a couple of hours ago on Twitter. Schulz let the MySpace executive team know that he was leaving the social networking company on Friday, and he informed us that starting January 2010, he’ll be running products as part of the general management team at e-commerce startup Magento. Schulz was hired in the Fall of 2008 to work for MySpace International, and later moved to a senior role in the Product Strategy team together with Todd Leeloy (former VP of International Product and now VP, Strategy under Jason Hirschhorn). Schulz focused a lot on the realtime web. He said he had a terrific time working at MySpace but decided that the Magento gig was a better fit considering his background as consultant at Sapient, and was excited to join a fledgling but fast-growing company that operates on the intersection of B2B and B2C. His tenure at MySpace was surprisingly short though, so I suspect there were other things at play too, but we’ll give Schulz the benefit of the doubt because he sings nothing but praise for the company and its executive team. Schulz also recently launched a tech blog dubbed TrendSlate, which he hopes will compete with TechCrunch some day. What can we say, Tim? We hope Magento keeps you super busy. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Nexus One, The Google Phone, Captured In The Wild (Picture) Posted: 12 Dec 2009 10:59 PM PST
Cory O’Brien, a San Francisco-based blogger, got his hands on one tonight and tweeted out that picture. He also notes that, “Google Phone = iPhone + a little extra screen and a scroll wheel. Great touch screen, and Android.” As you can see, the Google Phone, which is apparently being called the “Nexus One” (for more on that, see here), does look exactly like the HTC Passion, which everyone was including in their posts earlier. You’ll also notice that there’s a key difference: It’s not HTC-branded at all. [thanks Alberto] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Best Man Rigs Newlyweds’ Bed To Tweet During Sex. Not Kidding. Posted: 12 Dec 2009 08:54 PM PST
This man, who is choosing to stay anonymous, has set up this Twitter account for the sole purpose of automatically tweeting when the newlyweds are having sex. I’m not kidding. Read the entire tweet stream from the bottom up if you want the full story. But basically, this guy was watching his friend’s house while they went on their honeymoon and he placed a device under their mattress. This device, which is similar to the one found here, is a pressure-sensitive pad that tweets out when sexual activity starts, when it ends, the force of the “action,” and a “frenzy” rating. December 9 saw the first such action. This is the first report:
And then it was over — 3 minutes later:
But alas, that was just a test of the guy jumping on the bed to make sure it would work. It did. So the real first action is as follows:
22 minutes later:
Before everyone goes crazy over this, remember that all of this is being done anonymously. Neither the friend nor the couple are known. In fact, who knows if this is even real, and who cares, it’s hilarious. Still, the man claims he will let his friend in on the fun soon. “What you will NEVER know is who they are. Or who I am.I figure I'll tell my mate in due course that he's had an audience.So spread the word!,” writes the anonymous man. Consider it spread. So why’s he doing this? “BTW – he stitched me up something rotten when he was my best man so I reckon this is reasonable payback Oh Twitter, the joys never end. What will they think of next? [photo: twitter/pnoeric] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Venture Capitalists Ron Conway And Sean Parker Battle For Charity Posted: 12 Dec 2009 04:25 PM PST
So far Parker is in the lead, with more than $15,000 raised (he’s tying it to his 30th birthday party tonight). Conway, who started later, has nearly $7,500. They’re both using Causes on Facebook, one of Parker’s companies, to raise the money. Causes cofounder Joe Green answered our question on who he thinks will win: “Luckily because it’s for charity, with 2 great causes: Malaria No More and UCSF Child Life Services, they both win. And that is what Sean and I are after in creating Causes, getting people involved where everyone wins. This is an epic showdown between Sean, a pioneer in social networking, and Ron, the “Godfather of Silicon Valley.” This is pretty closely matched, but Vegas has Ron as a 3:2 favorite. Though it’s usually not a good idea to bet against that Parker kid.” Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| TEDxSV: Reid Hoffman On Philanthropic Movements On The Web Posted: 12 Dec 2009 11:09 AM PST We’re at TEDxSV, a Silicon Valley outpost of TED’s conferences on innovation, which is taking place today at Stanford University. First up is LinkedIn founder and angel investor Reid Hoffman, who is addressing the concept of iMovements on the web. I’ll be live-blogging his remarks. Hoffman says that one of his ambitions is to be a public intellectual, to be able to influence millions of people with innovations and change. Hoffman thinks that the internet, which is scalable and low-cost, is the optimal platform for cause-based organizations. The web is more about people than technology, Hoffman asserts. When Hoffman invests in a startup, he looks at three things: scalability, margins and the structure. These three attributes are the same things that make web-based causes or philanthropic movements more effective. Three types of cause-based organizations have developed on the web because of this potential, which are non-profits (Hoffman highlights micro-lending platform Kiva.org as an example of this), hybrid infrastructure organizations such as Mozilla or Creative Commons, and companies developing their own cause-based movements on the web. One of the things that Hoffman finds interesting is that corporations, because they have the reach of millions of people, they can make cause-based initiatives part of their web based platform. This is exemplified by Facebook’s Causes application. The causes that success capitalize on the internet “peer play” says Hoffman. So how do you coordinate the actions of millions of people in the world to make social change? Hoffman says that micro-groups on the internet can help organize these causes effectively. The key part of the future of cause-based movements will be the boiling up of problems and issue and the coordinated intelligence and collective ideation on how to tackle these problems. There is a value in the crowdsourcing of ideas to help make social change, concluded Hoffman. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| WordPress Makes Blogging On The Fly Easier, Integrates With Twitter API Posted: 12 Dec 2009 10:32 AM PST This morning, a blogging platform and a microblogging platform have become more symbiotic. WordPress has enabled posting and reading the blogs the platform powers via the Twitter API. This means any Twitter app that supports a custom API URL can be used to either post updates to your WordPress.com blog, or to read updates from blogs you’ve subscribed to. Tweetie 2, an iPhone and desktop Twitter client, will be one of the first third party apps to implement this. As Twitter’s traffic continue to grow, WordPress sees its growth also rising. It makes sense to become more symbiotic with the Twitter ecosystem, considering the rapid growth of the use of third party applications. In fact, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg told ReadWriteWeb recently that WordPress was trying to develop more ways for Twitter and its platform to overlap. The integration of WordPress functionality with Tweetie is actually pretty cool. All you need to do is add your WordPress account to Tweetie’s settings and you will then be able to post a status update to your WordPress.com blog and also have it displayed in the blog reading view. You can also enable geotagging to show the location of your status update. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| The Google Phone, Unlocked (Confirmed And More Details) Posted: 12 Dec 2009 09:47 AM PST Last night, we started seeing some Tweets from Google employees and others about a new Android-powered Google phone that was apparently handed out at an “all hands” meeting. Now Google is confirming that it is indeed “dogfood” testing a new Android device with employees around the world. But this isn’t just another Android phone. Very trustworthy sources who have seen the phone say that it is the Google Phone we first wrote about last month (despite the uninformed saying we were dreaming). It will be branded Google and sold by Google as an unlocked phone, which could change everything. As we wrote in our original post:
The phone itself is being built by HTC, with a lot of input from Google. It seems to be a tailored version of the HTC Passion or the related HD2 (Unlocker scored some leaked pictures back in October which are of the same phone). Update: Here is a more recent picture. Here are the details we know so far about the phone: It will be called the Google Phone (update the official name is “Nexus One”) and will launch in early January, 2010. It won’t be sold by any one carrier, but instead will be an unlocked GSM phone. In the U.S., that means T-Mobile and possibly AT&T, whose exclusivity deal with the iPhone is about to run out. It will be running Android 2.1 The phone is “really, really fast,” says someone who has seen one in action. It runs on a Snapdragon chip, has a super high-resolution OLED touchscreen, is thinner than the iPhone, has no keyboard, and two mics. The mic on the back of the phone helps eliminate background noise, and it also has a “weirdly” large camera for a phone. And if you don’t like the touchscreen keyboard, a voice-to-text feature is supposed to let you dictate emails and notes by speaking directly into the phone. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| The Medium Is No Longer The Message, . . . You Are Posted: 12 Dec 2009 09:34 AM PST Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Seth Goldstein (@seth), the Co-Founder of socialmedia.com, which is building the first ad server based on people not pages. Its platform provides authoring, serving and reporting across different types of social media. All of its ads are real messages from real people. Seth is also the Co-Chairman of the IAB’s Social Media Committee. Social Media and Identity We are witnessing a profound change in the media and advertising industries due to the emergence of social media. Companies that did not exist ten years ago, like Facebook and Twitter, have captured significant share of the attention economy from traditional publishers. Underscoring this trend is the fact that at the same time that Businessweek was selling for less than $5 million (plus assumption of debts) to Bloomberg, Foursquare's pretty cousin Gowalla drove up Sand Hill road and collected $8.4 million for a minority stake. Amidst this disruption, media companies are chasing after "their" audience in order to continue to broker the attention of that audience to marketers. But just at the moment that media has mastered the art of blogging, search engine optimization and CPM yield management, they are now faced with a new set of consumer behaviors that elude their programming faculties: mobile devices, location-based services and the social graph. Driving this change in consumer behavior is the emergence of social media as a means of content production. Social media started more than ten years ago with online personal communications tools such as Evite, Shutterfly and Blue Mountain Arts. Since that time, systems have been built to support broader and more subtle social interactions. This has been achieved primarily by the introduction of new creative formats that make it easy for individuals to express information about themselves (such as status updates, tweets and check-ins) and new distribution models that enable this personal information to be shared easily among friends and followers. Social media's ascent has led to an Internet experience based less on pages and more on people. As a corollary to this (and counter to Marshall McLuhan's thesis), the medium is no longer just the message. The permanence of words and images and their meaning in context has long been promoted as a foundation of media theory. In an increasingly real-time environment, however, content gives way to identity, and traditional contextual analysis gives way to dynamic social interactions. The medium is the message . . . is the member. This is why there can be no discussion of social media without a simultaneous discussion of identity, and why the growth of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are one and the same with the growth of identity systems online. There are a number of technology and business trends that are converging around this thesis. Here are some that seem to be of particular importance as we head into 2010:
So what are media companies and advertisers to do as the former audience use their social identity as a fulcrum for content creation? To prepare for this change in the media economy, companies need to establish an identity framework that integrates Facebook Connect and/or the Twitter API. And in order to profit economically, startups might want to address one of the agency, publisher or advertiser challenges listed above. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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Old media loves nothing quite so much as writing about their own impending death. And we always enjoy adding our own two cents – the 
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When a man in the UK was asked to be the best man at his friend’s wedding, he was touched. So touched, that he promised not to pull any pranks before or during the wedding. After the wedding though, that’s another story.
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