The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- It’s All About Selling for Survival
- The Google Phone: This changes everything (mostly)
- Startup-Hunting at the End of the Earth
- This week on TechCrunch: Le Web (le sigh), RIP privacy, the planet of the apps and more
- Europe’s Seed Investors Huddle-up At The First SeedSummit
- ZOMG The Google Phone Is “Like An iPhone On Beautifying Steroids”
- SCVNGR’s Hunts Finding Plenty Of Customers, Now Cash-Flow Positive
- Photo Booth And Canons With Cheap Lenses Dominate Tumblr
- App Store Apps Finally Gets Prettier Pages
- It’s Raining FAIL. Widespread AT&T Outages Reported In San Francisco.
- eGether: A Social Network For Pitching And Getting Pitched, Without The Email Overload
- Emo Labs Raises $1.5 Million For Invisible Speaker Technology
- CrunchGear In China: Shanzhai Market
- It’s The Google Countdown!
- Yahoo Eyes Asian Market With Chinese Version Of Meme
- Google Suggest Becomes More Universal
- Mint Study Shows That Holiday Shoppers Are Back In Action
- Want Everyone To See Your Credit Card Transactions? Of Course You Do. Meet Blippy.
- VOKLE Launches Live Video Broadcasting Platform
- Friday Contest: Win a Triple-Tuner Moxi HD DVR
- Apple Loosens The Reins A Bit, Sends Handslaps Rather Than Rejections
- Disappointing Gifts, 1986 Edition: The Etch A Sketch Animator
| It’s All About Selling for Survival Posted: 12 Dec 2009 06:56 AM PST
Let me explain why I believe this. I started my career as a geek. I ended up as Chief Technology Officer of Seer Technologies, a software startup which we grew from zero to $120 million in revenue and took public in a short five years. And then I became CEO of my own very successful startup called Relativity Technologies (until I burnt myself out and needed to shift gears). A number of skills helped me through this ascent. I learned a lot about motivating and managing people who were sometimes smarter than me, about understanding markets and communicating effectively, and also a few really boring things like accounting, finance and law. But if I had not learned how to sell then my company would never have made it past three guys in a room with a phone and some laptops. I didn’t believe this in my youth. I thought coding was the exact opposite of selling. I always associated “sales” with hustling and sleazy ways to convince customers to spend money on things they didn’t need. And you had to work fast to get that check before the dupes backed away.
Being a successful project manager meant learning to listen closely to what others thought, to make them feel included, and to give them what they wanted and needed to succeed. It meant constant communication that was honest yet finely nuanced. It was hard work but ultimately very rewarding. I could listen and focus on helping others to achieve their goals and at the same time advance myself quite easily. When I was able to focus on a global view of helping my company succeed, I found it much easier to avoid destructive departmental politics. I rose up the ranks to become a vice-president of technology at one of the world’s five largest investment banks. Then I got the chance to become CTO of a startup which would market technology which my team had built. Selling became an even more important skill. We all were living on borrowed time and the only thing that would give us more time was sales to put money into company coffers. We had a truly amazing product, much better than that of our competitors. But the stark reality was that unless we could really sell well, our competitors had a big advantage. They were a known quantity. They were not going out of business tomorrow. They played golf, went out for beers, and had lunch with our competitors. My guru and mentor was my boss, Gene Bedell. One of the first things Gene did when we launched our company was to put everyone through a sales training boot camp. Gene had run billion-dollar businesses and reached the executive levels in investment banking. He had even convinced IBM to seed our company, a software spinoff from Credit Suisse First Boston. At first my technology team protested at being taught to learn about qualifying prospects and closing sales rather than the latest version-tracking software tools. Within months, we were closing multimillion dollar sales with blue-chip customers across the globe. We did this with only two experienced sales reps and part-time sales support from our development staff. That's because developers with sales training are incredibly valuable as a part of the sales process. They have two essential ingredients that make people persuasive—credibility and trustworthiness (for the most part). So while a prospect may not really believe a salesperson, for example, when he says a system is reliable, they're far more likely to believe a developer they respect. This is a very powerful ingredient in the sales process, and one we used regularly. We would compete with some of the largest software companies in the world—and win the sale almost every time. As CTO, I also took it upon myself to sell strategic partners. My biggest catch was a deal with IBM-Japan worth $8.6 million. With a culture that put customer support and sales above everything else, we grew into a profitable $120-million-a-year revenue machine. Our developers formed long-term bonds and friendships with our customers. They would go to great pains to understand customer requirements and build products that would sell. More often than not, new development projects would be funded directly by customers. Whenever there was a customer-service problem, our top engineers would voluntarily work around the clock and fly all over the globe to personally provide support. So, how do you learn sales? It's easy. There are literally hundreds of books on selling. The methods vary, but in essence all of them teach you about the basics of understanding customer needs and honing your message. There are also hundreds of "selling seminars" conducted all over the world. Be wary of any which teach you to sell things a customer doesn't want. It is one thing to persuade someone to buy something which they need, it is another thing to con people. My personal favorite book (and I am a little biased here) is one by Gene Bedell himself, titled Three Steps to Yes: The Gentle Art of Getting Your Way. By the way, I’m not the only guy saying this kind of stuff. The high priests of the Lean Startup Methodology, like Dave McClure, Brad Feld, and Eric Ries, all advocate a “get to sales ASAP” approach. "Recovering venture capitalist" Healy Jones blogged about how he was shortchanged with his Wharton MBA. Yet a quick conversation at any networking event in the Valley yields a simple observation that most technology workers don't think that selling is part of their job description. The smartest technology entrepreneurs realize that everyone in the company is in sales and the sooner they embrace that reality, the easier it will be for that startup to grow and prosper. Coder, biz dev, PR, QA—nope. You’re all in sales. It's all about selling for survival. Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| The Google Phone: This changes everything (mostly) Posted: 12 Dec 2009 03:56 AM PST  We don't have much information on the Google Phone just yet. In fact, it sounds more like a party favor than anything else. However, if and when Google starts selling this thing, prepare for some of the strangest - and coolest - times in mobile we've ever experienced. What do we know? It's an HTC phone - probably the Passion, a distant cousin to the beautiful HD2 - with large touchscreen. It's GSM unlocked and everyone at Google has one so whatever the super secret specs are, they won't stay super secret for long. But what if Google starts to sell this thing? This is "a big deal" on the level of Neo learning Kung Fu in The Matrix. This means Google is making hardware.
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| Startup-Hunting at the End of the Earth Posted: 12 Dec 2009 03:40 AM PST
I sighed getting on the plane just four days after I got home from India. Having already traveled to Rwanda, Israel, China and India this year in search of the world's best entrepreneurs, the journey was now quite literally taking me to the end of the earth. The organization that did the arm-twisting is called Endeavor and thanks to the trip they have the not-too-uncommon distinction of having proved me wrong. For a long time, I didn't believe any government or non-profit could really help develop clusters of high-impact entrepreneurs. But Endeavor has in very tangible ways, especially here in Latin America and South America. It started ten years ago to find and help the most promising high-growth companies in emerging markets. It doesn't actually invest in the 270 or so companies it has selected to be "Endeavor companies," and a lot of that "help" is hard to quantify—free consulting, coaching and mentoring, and introductions to potential investors. Indeed, a few entrepreneurs are dubious of how much Endeavor can really do at first blush. But here are a few stats: Endeavor companies have generated some $3.15 billion in revenues, generated nearly 100,000 jobs, and 93% of them are still business. If nothing else, Endeavor has a good eye for talent. (Although you can argue that success rate means they don't back the riskiest bets that may need them most.) A more tangible sign Endeavor has made a difference: Nearly 30 of these entrepreneurs have helped develop startup ecosystems by starting venture funds in emerging countries and a whopping 81% of them have donated cash or equity to support Endeavor. Endeavor pores through hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs and makes its selections at one of five annual International Selection Panels held in far-flung places around the world. I traveled thousands of miles to this one to see the newest collection of South American candidates and also to see up close how the whole process works. The biggest surprise: It does actually work. Well, that and all the Brazilians were nice to me. (Disclosure: I paid all travel expenses and the regular conference fees.) The real strength of the Endeavor model is the local teams. They're staffed by young energetic—and frequently emotional—locals who scour their markets for the best entrepreneurs and nominate them for selection. I’m not quite sure how they find them all. One of the selected companies was Medix, a medical device company that will generate more than $45 million in revenues this year. 77-year-old Jack Cheja—who never even graduated high school and doesn't look a day over 60—used to import incubators and when Argentina placed a ban on those imports, well, he just decided to start making his own models. That came in handy a few years later when his daughter gave birth to premature triplets. Medix now owns 90% of the Argentinean market and is going head to head with giants like General Electric in the rest of the developing world. Cheja is grooming his son, Diego, to take over. The elder Cheja says he didn't even know he was "an entrepreneur" until the Endeavor crew reached out to him. Indeed, when Endeavor founder Linda Rottenberg started the organization there was no real word for "entrepreneur" in most of these countries. (At least none with a positive connotation.) Meeting teams like the Chejas I was struck by a deep cultural difference: In America, we can hardly handle Christmas with our families, but most of Endeavor's teams are like the Chejas—father-son, mother-son, or brother-sister duos. Diego Cheja even joked their succession problems were solved for the next generation too, pointing at his son snoozing away in a stroller. That DNA-based succession planning can be a good thing and a bad thing. Many candidates are struggling with the transition from family-owned businesses to high-growth startups. For instance, the Argentinean Martinez family has roasted and sold coffee for generations. While most people consider the smell of coffee vaguely comforting, for Marcelo Salas Martinez and his brother Mauro coffee smells like his parents, his grandparents and home. But that warm and fuzzy feeling is also knotted up with a lot of ambition. The brothers are expanding the business by building a chain of cafes in Argentina, and Here's how Endeavor's selection process works: A panel of experts—investors, former Endeavor entrepreneurs, executives at high growth companies— pair off and grill the entrepreneurs for a day. Then the next day in sometimes-contentious sessions, they vote on who should be selected. There's no quota—they can select all or none of the companies. But the vote has to be unanimous. This is where the emotion comes in. Many of these entrepreneurs have no access to mentors, capital or basic how-to's of building a high-growth venture, so becoming an Endeavor company means a lot to them. But put the entrepreneurs themselves aside for a moment—the local Endeavor teams have investing months researching and coaching these entrepreneurs by this point, and no one wants any of their entrepreneurs turned down. They sit in the corner struggling to be quiet like nervous stage mothers. That pent-up emotion can give way to relentless lobbying if an expert is planning on voting against a company. I'd argue this is actually a negative in the process, as some panelists said they felt bullied to change their votes. But I have to admit, I even started getting upset watching the deliberations. Delightfully, Endeavor cuts this tension with a 24-hour open bar, evening karaoke parties and 1 a.m. pool parties. The night after their pitches, the Martinez brothers lead the room in a rousing, boozy, Spanish rendition of "I Only Want to Be with You." Just like at a winning soccer game, one of the brothers half-ripped his shirt off at the end. It may sounds like a junket; actually it was anything but. These were intense sessions of tough-love advice, and I was impressed at how many entrepreneurs took it in the right spirit, dutifully jotted down notes and asking follow up questions, even seeking the experts out for follow-up conversations if they weren’t selected. There was none of the defensiveness that you frequently see during pitches at US conferences. In a future post I'll write more about my favorite company I saw in Puyuehue, but now, I've got to catch a flight home. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| This week on TechCrunch: Le Web (le sigh), RIP privacy, the planet of the apps and more Posted: 12 Dec 2009 03:17 AM PST
This time last year, while I was still at the Guardian, I stumbled back to my Parisian hotel room at the end of the first day of the conference and fired off a thousand words rounding up the highs and not-insignificant lows of the event. Those words, along with the title my editor added to them - Freezing cold, no internet, boring: it’s a French web 2.0 conference! – have followed me around ever since. The truth is, I’m bored with Le Web. I’m bored with the expectation that I’ll be reviewing it again this year. I’m bored with Loic’s clever (and relatively successful) ploy to get me on-side by asking me to moderate a panel called The European Gang. And most of all I’m bored with Maslovian jokes about heat, food and wifi. But fortunately this year I’m not at the Guardian. And fortunately twenty-seven-thousand of my TechCrunch colleagues were in attendance at LeWeb 09 to provide proper coverage of the event so I don’t have to write an entire column about it. Was it worth going? Sure – I was in London anyway, I didn’t pay for my ticket or accommodation (I stayed in a friend’s family apartment) and it’s always fun to dick around in Paris with my friends. Should you have been there too? That depends. If you’ve ever been to a conference in the Valley then you’ve seen most of the stars – Marissa Mayer, Jack Dorsey et al before, so probably not. All of the big announcements – the PeekFon, Jolicloud’s netbook OS, Twitter’s upcoming Chirp conference, and the company’s imminent acquisition by Google – were covered by TechCrunch Europe. If you live in Europe and can’t justify a trip west, then sure. It’s was a really professionally-put-together conference, with A-list speakers, giving a taste of America without having to get on a plane. You’ve probably already had to make the same decision about Eurodisney. Beyond that, there’s not really much I can say – except that the administrative problems from last year were resolved (kudos Geraldine and Loic) – if anything it was too warm, and the only wifi problems were in the speakers’ hotel. The only speakers I saw were Yossi Vardi who looked like a mad old uncle who had just discovered YouTube, and Queen Rania of Jordan whose speech was my highlight of the conference – not for the content (which was clearly written by someone else) but rather for Loic’s brilliantly obsequious “fank you your majesty” response. Good to see the French bowing and scraping to royalty again. That can only end well. Nothing to declare of the week: Back in San Francisco, the CrunchPad saga continues to rumble on, and I continue to be banned from writing about it by The Man. You can read The Man’s take on it here. Non-prospering cheat of the week: Moving swiftly on – Apple has stamped down on a lying, cheating developer by removing over 1000 apps from its App Store. The apps, built by ‘Molinker’, had attacked a sea of positive reviews, almost all of which appeared to be written by people associated with the developer. iPhone blog iPhoneography smelled a rat and emailed Apple VP Phil Shiller with their suspicions. Days later the apps were removed. Cheats, after all, never prosper. Planet of the apps of the week: December 7th 2009 will be remembered for many things – the 68th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the 30th anniversary of my birth – but most importantly of all, for the launch of Google Goggles – the moment when the Internet gained the power of sight. Make no mistake; when your great, great grandchildren sit in their computer-controlled prison cells, breaking digital rocks for their robot overlords, wondering when it all went wrong, this will be the moment they’ll rue. The moment when their ancestors’ Droid phones were first able to identify words and basic shapes and begin to plan their escape. Dystopian future? There’s an app for that. (Still, at least we can watch it all happen in real time.) Privacy is dead of the week: More evil-ness, this time from Facebook which has rolled out a new set of privacy controls. Jason sums it up neatly, thus: “Facebook is spinning the news as a win for users. They're supposedly getting more control than ever over what they're sharing, and it's easier than ever to control it. But that's not the real story. Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb has nailed it: this is Facebook's move to push people to share with the public.” Arrington and Andrew ‘amateur hater’ Keen had an argument at Le Web over whether (as the former claimed) ‘privacy is dead’. Between Facebook and this week’s launch of Blippy – a service that allows you to broadcast your credit card transactions – it’s certainly not looking well. And finally of the week: And finally, Friendster has been bought by Malaysian Payments Company MOL Global. I give precisely as much of a shit about the news as you do. Have a great week! Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Europe’s Seed Investors Huddle-up At The First SeedSummit Posted: 12 Dec 2009 12:45 AM PST
Held at the offices of NESTA in London, the event was outlined by Seedcamp’s Saul Klein on his blog. Attendees included around 60 people, including high profile investors like Jeff Clavier, Martin Varsavsky, Brent Hoberman, Lukasz Gadowski, Stefan Glaenzer, Dave McClure, Andy Philips, William Reeve, Robin Klein, Jyri Engestrom and Sherry Coutu. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| ZOMG The Google Phone Is “Like An iPhone On Beautifying Steroids” Posted: 11 Dec 2009 11:06 PM PST
We noticed a Twitter message from a Google Program Manager, who writes “Stuck in mass of traffic leaving work post last all hands of 2009. ZOMG we had fireworks and we all got the new Google phone. It’s beautiful.” Another guy, Jason Howell, says he had his hands on the device, which he says is made by HTC and is running Android 2.1: “The new Google Phone runs on HTC hardware. I saw it w/ Android 2.1. Homescreen has new visual enhancements like animated desktop wallpaper.” “Supposedly, Google employees were given tons of these phones today. unlocked,” he adds. And one last one: “A friend from Google showed me the new Android 2.1 phone from HTC coming out in Jan. A sexy beast. Like an iPhone on beautifying steroids.” It looks to us like Google may have handed out a lot of the new Google Phone devices today to employees, and naturally they’re showing it to friends.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| SCVNGR’s Hunts Finding Plenty Of Customers, Now Cash-Flow Positive Posted: 11 Dec 2009 07:02 PM PST
SCVNGR now has over 400 clients, including dozens of large universities (Princeton, Yale, Duke), who often use them for orientation activities. Major companies like MetLife and HSBC use them for team building. And conferences have used the platform to create event-specific games. Also impressive: SCVNGR reports a 91% client repeat rate. You can see a longer list of the site’s clients here. At its peak the platform has supported over 7,000 concurrent players, who were simultaneously engaged in 24 ongoing games spanning two different countries. That’s simultaneous usage, mind you — SCVNGR says that number is far higher if you look at the number of players who participate over the course of an entire weekend. Looking forward, CEO Seth Priebatsch says that the company will be exiting beta this Feburary, and will soon roll out an API to help encourage further development. SCVNGR may not be as sexy as games like Foursquare and Gowalla, but it sure seems to be carving out a nice niche for itself. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Photo Booth And Canons With Cheap Lenses Dominate Tumblr Posted: 11 Dec 2009 04:51 PM PST  The Tumblr staff has done an interesting little breakdown of the metadata on Tumblr blog photos. I'm sure you guys have seen Flickr's equally-interesting Camera Finder page, which is used as a sort of talking point by Apple fans due to the iPhone dominance; this was a similar examination, though with seriously different results. Tumblr's analysis also takes a look at the lenses being used by the Canon users, a metric more interesting to gearheads than tech buffs. This kind of information is a dream come true for people who like to transmute raw data into conclusions. They call themselves analysts, but it's more alchemical than analytical, isn't it? At any rate, the data are interesting to anyone interested in photography or blogging, so take a look.
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| App Store Apps Finally Gets Prettier Pages Posted: 11 Dec 2009 04:39 PM PST With the launch of iTunes 9, Apple revamped many of the areas of the iTunes online store so that they were rendered with WebKit, the open source web layout engine (which browsers like Safari and Chrome also use). Alongside this, the whole store was redesigned. But one area that remained untouched were the pages for individual apps in the App Store. Today, those are finally starting to be revamped as well. While the new layout isn’t live for all apps yet, it is for plenty of them. As you can see below, the new pages look much nicer. Instead of being text-heavy by default, the new pages have much of the text area collapsed, and the emphasis is clearly on the images. Instead of just one app screenshot being shown, there are now 3. It’s just much, much nicer. It will be interesting to see how this change affects the way app developers do their descriptions. Now that the emphasis is clearly on the first few sentences of the description, developers should be more concise in describing their apps, since that’s all that shown by default. If you click the “…More” link, the area will expand to show all the text, but again, that’s not the default look anymore. [thanks Paolo] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| It’s Raining FAIL. Widespread AT&T Outages Reported In San Francisco. Posted: 11 Dec 2009 03:56 PM PST
Calls are working sporadically, but the AT&T data network in San Francisco seems to be completely borked right now. There is obviously a lot of talk on Twitter about this right now. Everyone, it seems, has the same problem, “Could not activate cellular data network.” I should mention that it’s raining in San Fracisco today, so perhaps that’s to blame. I know how hard it is for AT&T to be reliable on a regular day, so rain is apparently completely out of the question. This outage comes just a couple days after AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega made comments that the company was hard at work on improving the service in cities like San Francisco and New York. Talk about bad timing. His comments were also controversial as he said things like, “What’s driving usage on the network and driving these high usage situations are things like video, or audio that keeps playing around the clock. And so we’ve got to get to those customers and have them recognize that they need to change their pattern, or there will be other things that they are going to have to do to reduce their usage.” The emphasis is mine there. To be blunt, as paying customers, with contracts, we don’t need to change shit. What we need is a reliable network. We’re all paying around $100 or more a month for a service that remains unbelievably unreliable. Blame the iPhone, blame whatever — that doesn’t change the fact that we’re still paying for a service, and all-too-often, you’re not delivering. It’s unacceptable. Speaking of timing, Fake Steve picked a perfect day to take his shots at AT&T, it seems. I’ve reached out to AT&T for comment on this, and will update if and when I hear back. Though it clearly won’t be over the phone. Update: You know the situation is bad if AT&T has yet to respond (normally they are very quick with that). Here’s something that someone in San Francisco (who apparently has phone service to make a call) was able to get:
A day to two days of no data or SMS. Fuck you very much AT&T. Update 2: Okay, an AT&T rep has finally gotten back to me, here’s what they had to say:
Update 3: AT&T has just reached out again to say that services should be restored shortly:
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| eGether: A Social Network For Pitching And Getting Pitched, Without The Email Overload Posted: 11 Dec 2009 03:31 PM PST
eGether was founded by Vincent Nguyen and Ewdison Then of SlashGear, a rapidly growing gadget site, so they know a thing or two about some of the problems with the standard Email pitch. Nguyen says that the site combines elements of many social sites, like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, to create a social network that’s optimized for efficiently submitting or reading pitches, as well as for learning about the people behind them. Like Facebook and Twitter, the site lets you update your status, which you can use to share articles you’ve found interesting or converse with other members using an @reply system. These updates have a 144 character limit, and are shown in a Twitter-like stream. There’s also a second class of update: The Pitch. These are longer updates that allow members to upload text, documents, images, entire media kits, and more. In effect, they’re much like the Email pitches many PR people send out every day. But they’re limited to a maximum of 999 characters. That’s not much — the previous two paragraphs come out to just over 900 characters. But that’s exactly why eGether is imposing the limitation. Anyone who has read many press pitches knows that they can become overly verbose, filled with unneeded backstory, explanations, and quotes. It can be struggle to tell what exactly a company does when that information is buried in a full page of text. And that problem is only magnified when there are dozens of other pitches coming in every day. eGether forces users to condense their pitches to the most important material. You can see a sample pitch in the shot below.  Of course, tech press aren’t the only people who want to get pitched. When you register on eGether, the site asks you what type of user you are: PR, Author, Consumer, Analyst, or Press. It can use this to break out users out into their own networks based on their field. That means an author could write a pitch for their book that would only be read by a literary agent or publisher rather than the entire site. eGether has some solid ideas, but it’s going to face the classic chicken and the egg problem: it needs to get press, agents and other people looking for pitches onto the platform. Otherwise, it won’t be very appealing for PR people and authors to submit their pitches in the first place. That said, I don’t know many press who aren’t willing to try out an alternative to their mountains of Email, so eGether may not have such a tough time generating interest, after all. Disclosure: CrunchGear editor John Biggs assisted Nguyen with some of the site’s functionality. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Emo Labs Raises $1.5 Million For Invisible Speaker Technology Posted: 11 Dec 2009 03:05 PM PST Startup Emo Labs, which creates invisible speaker technologies, has raised $1.5 million in funding according to an SEC filing. The startup, which presented at this year’s DEMO conference, previously raised $16 million in funding. Emo Labs was a co-winner of the top prize at DEMO, winning a shared $1 million in advertising. Emo Labs’ flagship product, enabled by the company’s Edge Motion technology, provides invisible, zero-footprint speaker systems. The speaker systems, which is a plastic device, aims to transform the screen of a flat panel display product into a stereo loudspeaker. Here’s a demo video that where Emo Labs’ CEO Jason Carlson demos the product. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| CrunchGear In China: Shanzhai Market Posted: 11 Dec 2009 02:22 PM PST  The cellphone market in Shenzhen is like a flea market where everyone is selling the same thing. If it looks like an iPhone, it's here. There are hundreds of models, hundreds of odd names, and hundreds of people arrayed along the inside of a huge room. There are four or five floors of this mess. This is the Shanzhai market. Shanzhai is a strange amalgam of counterfeiting, national pride, and Robin Hoodism. The word itself means "mountain fortress" and suggests a romantic image of brigands working together to outwit the rich and powerful. It's been called a reaction to the cellphone monopoly but in reality it's a sort of personal test, more akin to the piracy "scene" than anything else. Shanzhai products are, in their early stages, more like graffiti tags than anything else. Every fake iPhone is someone's way of saying "I'm here, I did this, and I beat the big guys."
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| Posted: 11 Dec 2009 01:41 PM PST Here’s a nifty little Google Easter Egg on this fine Friday. If you go to the Google homepage and click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button with no query entered, a countdown timer will appear below the buttons. As of right now it stands at 1765472, with each second ticking off the last number in that sequence. Some quick math (with Google’s help) tells us that 1,765,472 seconds equals a little over 20 days. What happens in 20 days? It could be the end of the world, when Google becomes self-aware, or 2010. You decide. To make sure, we went ahead and switched our system clocks to trick it into thinking it was December 31, and sure enough, the countdown ends at January 1 at midnight. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a payoff when the timer hits zero. Maybe Google will add that later. That is, if they got it done before the code freeze. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Yahoo Eyes Asian Market With Chinese Version Of Meme Posted: 11 Dec 2009 01:05 PM PST  The opportunity for microblogging platforms in Asian markets is substantial in terms of users; and tech giants and startups are taking the potential of this market seriously. Twitter rolled out a Japanese version (with Digital Garage) of its platform long before it added French, Spanish and Italian versions. Microsoft recently launched a microblogging-like platform in China, called MSN Juku, which based off of Windows Live Messenger. It looks like Yahoo is making a venture with its recently launched take on microblogging, Yahoo Meme, by launching a version of the platform in Chinese. Yahoo Meme, which was launched in Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of Indonesia, not too long ago, lets users post their own content (including text, photos, videos, links and more) and repost the content of others with one-click publishing, allows users to follow other Meme users (via one-way connections, no friend authorization is required) and comment on their posts. Meme's content limits are higher than Twitter's—the limit is 2,000 characters. The Chinese version seems to be a clone of the other versions of Meme, which include sites in English, Spanish and Portuguese. According to IDG, about 124 million people, or one in three of China’s Internet users, currently use social-networking sites. But while China serves as a potentially lucrative market for microblogs, the Chinese government restricts citizens from accessing certain parts of the Internet. This year, China blocked access to Twitter and Facebook, as well as to micro-messaging site Plurk, which has a significant user base in East and South Asia. But Yahoo won’t have to struggle with just censorship, the site will also face stiff competition from MSN Juku and Twitter. This is pure speculation, but it doesn’t seem like Meme has taken off virally yet.This latest version of Meme was rolled out without any fanfare or press, which isn’t surprising considering that all other versions were stealthily launched. Yahoo also launched an API of Meme to jumpstart third-party applications built off of the platform. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Google Suggest Becomes More Universal Posted: 11 Dec 2009 12:41 PM PST Search is getting more visual. Today, Google is adding universal search elements to Google Suggest, the drop-down list of suggested keywords that appear under the search box as you type. Now you may find suggestion box filled with results from universal search, which may include weather, flight status, definitions, calculations, currency conversions, and more. Universal results tend to have a visual component, such as the sun-and-cloud icons that appear for weather-related searches or the clock for time-related searches. Google says it is all about making search even faster. It is also releasing a new extension for Chrome called Quick Scroll which helps you find the part of a web page that triggered a search result. So when you do a search and then click through to a results page, a black box pops up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen which will take you exactly to the place on the page which most closely matches your search query. Once again, this is designed to get you to the information you are looking for faster rather than just using the “find” function in your browser. Google engineers Ruth Dhanaraj & Matias Pelenur explain in a post:
Search Everywhere, so to speak. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Mint Study Shows That Holiday Shoppers Are Back In Action Posted: 11 Dec 2009 12:15 PM PST
So where does this data come from? To your everyday consumer, Mint is great for a lot of things — it can help you manage your budget, find deals on credit cards, and plenty of other other good stuff. But Mint can also look at aggregate spending trends to see how the economy, and even individual retailers are doing. Mint didn’t do much with this merchant data for a long time, but last August it leveraged it to show how grocery stores were weathering the downturn (unsurprisingly, high end stores like Whole Foods took the biggest hit). They generated a report for Black Friday, and have used similar methods for today’s infographic. Of course, this data has much more lucrative potential uses, and you can be sure that Mint’s new parent company Intuit is exploring them.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Want Everyone To See Your Credit Card Transactions? Of Course You Do. Meet Blippy. Posted: 11 Dec 2009 12:00 PM PST
Yes, I know this is a controversial idea — that’s part of what makes it potentially a great one. Imagine being able to see everything your friends buy with a credit card as they do it. This not only tells you what kind of things they’re actually into (rather than someone just saying they like something), but also other information like how cheap they are, as well as where they actually are at a given time. There is actually a lot of data tied into the transactions we make, and Blippy takes that and makes it social. Obviously, there will be some transactions you don’t want published for all to see on the Internet. That’s why one of the core ideas behind the service is that you’d only have one credit card (most people have many these days) that is your “Blippy card.” That is to say, you’d have one card that you know all the transactions you do on it get published. That itself creates some interesting social dynamics, as maybe you’ll start manipulating your spending habits on your cards to show just a certain side of yourself. And just imagine the fun everyone will have if you accidentally make an embarrassing purchase on this Blippy card. The service hopes to alleviate that fear by doing something like giving users a sticker to put on the card that’s their Blippy card, so they remember the transaction they’re about to make will be broadcast. That’s also an interesting way to spread the service naturally, when others see that sticker on your card and look into it. “The big question that Blippy answers is ‘What are your friends buying?‘,” co-founder Philip Kaplan (also known in the tech circle as “Pud”) explains. That is of course a take off of Twitter’s question “What are you doing?” — which was recently replaced by “What’s happening?” The key to all of those questions is simplicity. And despite being a concept that you have to think about the ramifications of, Blippy is perhaps even more simple because it employs what Kaplan dubs “passive sharing.” Again, you aren’t explicitly sharing anything via something like a message, your actions (buying things with your credit card) are being automatically pushed to the web. “Blippy provides transparency into normal everyday things,” Kaplan continues. This actually fits in perfectly with something Twitter CEO Evan Williams recently tweeted: “Many of the great businesses of the next decade will be about making information about our behaviors more visible.” That is exactly what Blippy is doing. Interestingly, Blippy also seems like a perfect compliment to Square, the new project by yet another Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey. Square creates the potential for anyone to be able to take credit card transactions with their mobile device. Imagine paying for something from a local street merchant, and it immediately showing up in your Blippy stream. But for now, the service is focusing on some of the bigger transactions you make. For example, when you buy something on iTunes, you can not only see how much the purchase cost, but also a detailed list of what was bought. The people that follow your Blippy stream can then comment on and “like” these transactions. This type of deep integration is only available for a few services right now, like iTunes, Amazon, and Zappos (other transactions, you can only see the place and the price, not the actual item), but you can see that eventually this is where they’d probably like to go. Just imagine the potential affiliate fees alone! And because the actual purchase prices are made visible, there are other interesting dynamics. For example, imagine being able to tell if you’re getting ripped off with what you’re paying for a gym membership or on your Comcast bill when compared to what your friends are spending on the same things. There’s also the potential to have private accounts that maybe a businessman would only share with his assistant to let them know what’s being purchased and explain things a bit better in the comments. Again, yes the idea is controversial, but there are a lot of interesting things that could come of it, if people are willing to be this transparent. And yes, the plan is eventually to have an API as well, so things will get even more transparent. Imagine if a restaurant could see how many times you’ve been there simply by how many times your purchases show up in Blippy data — it’d be the death of those stupid punch cards. Sure, they could probably do that now, but that’s a hassle, and a potential invasion of privacy. But if you’re openly sharing this information online… The idea was so compelling to Kaplan that he actually left his role as an Entreprenuer In Residence at Charles River Ventures to join fellow co-founders Ashvin Kumar and Chris Estreich in the venture. Kaplan is best known as the guy who started FuckedCompany at the end of the first Internet bubble, and went on to start AdBrite. I had a chance to meet with Kaplan to talk about the service and shot the video below of him explaining the core concept of Blippy. Again, Blippy is launching as an invite-only private beta today. Visit their homepage for a way to sign up to be notified when they start letting other people in. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| VOKLE Launches Live Video Broadcasting Platform Posted: 11 Dec 2009 11:55 AM PST After many months in private alpha, VOKLE is officially launching its live video platform to the public. VOKLE is an embeddable application that allows users to broadcast their live video and audio to a virtual auditorium of viewers and take live video calls and text questions from the audience. While being all web-based, VOKLE gives hosts the option to broadcast live video questions, text questions, and Twitter questions from the audience. It also can easily assign remote co-hosts, screeners to approve video callers behind the scenes, and an editor to cut between single or multi-shots in real-time. Unlike Ustream, Justin.tv, and Livestream, what VOKLE is focusing on is more town hall style video broadcasts with lots of audience participation which sites like Digg and The Huffington Post might use for their community interaction and town hall style meet-ups. In a market that is already crowded with both computer streaming services and mobile streaming services, it’s hard to see VOKLE getting that much traction. After all, everything is web-based, and inside the browser — no pop ups. Some may say that’s a good thing, but in my opinion, I would like the controls of the stream in a separate window. What VOKLE does really well is its live, one-click editing. You have the ability to go from one camera, to another, or both in the matter of one to two clicks. Being able to pull viewer questions and video on the live broadcast is a feature that really makes VOKLE unique, but I guess over time, we’ll see how the live video market evolves. VOKLE is announcing the following performers will be using VOKLE over the next few weeks for their shows and broadcasts: Alex Albrecht, the Creator/Co-host of The Totally Rad Show and co-host of Diggnation; Eisner award-winning MF Grimm, who will be joined by Spawn comic creator / producer Todd McFarlane; comedy troupe Reckless Tortug;, music band The Rest; and popular voice-actor Rob Paulson. VOKLE originally demoed their product at the DEMO 2009 conference, and is based in Santa Monica, CA. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Friday Contest: Win a Triple-Tuner Moxi HD DVR Posted: 11 Dec 2009 10:24 AM PST  Sure, all the cool kids are ditching cable and satellite these days, but us normal folk still pay for our TV. If that's you, then you need a DVR and Arris wants you to have a brand new Moxi HD DVR this holiday season. And yup, you get the new triple-tuner model that allows you to record three cable stations at once. The Moxi HD DVR doesn't have any subscription costs, can record up to 75 hours of HD, and is packed full of features. You'll love it, but you have to win it first.
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| Apple Loosens The Reins A Bit, Sends Handslaps Rather Than Rejections Posted: 11 Dec 2009 09:49 AM PST It’s tough at the top. When you’ve got tens of thousands of developers vying for your acceptance, your every decision is scrutinized and criticized. Such is the case with Apple; if they approve a thousand applications and deny one, that one that got cut off will be the one you hear about. It looks like Apple might be making moves to loosen up their restrictions, if only ever so slightly. Earlier this week, Apple finally let a live video broadcasting app through the gates, after apps of that genre sat on the review backburner for months. Today, they’ve willingly approved another application that calls upon one of Apple’s private (and generally blacklisted) APIs. Read the rest of this post at MobileCrunch >> Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Disappointing Gifts, 1986 Edition: The Etch A Sketch Animator Posted: 11 Dec 2009 09:22 AM PST  Gather 'round, kids. Gather 'round. I'm going to tell you the story of a disappointing Christmas gift from back before many of you were born. With every blog on the internet doing year-end and best-of lists, I thought I might try to shake things up a bit by telling you about an overhyped and underwhelming technology product from a long, long time ago.
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The one skill which entrepreneurs need is something they don't teach in business school—selling. Yes, I know that "selling" conjures up negative images of used-car salesmen peddling clunkers. But the ability to persuade people to believe in you is a necessity. That’s because sales is not just about selling things for money. Selling is about life. Convincing the perfect soulmate to go out on a date is a sales job. Enticing your children to eat their vegetables is a sales job. Negotiating a raise with your boss is a sales job. And, yes, selling your company to Google is definitely a sales job. A sales job in that you are listening to others, finding out what they want or need, and giving it to them in a form that they appreciate. And guess who the best salespeople in tech companies are? Your developers.
One day I was promoted to project manager. After thrashing through a few uncomfortable meetings, I quickly understood that running a good project required a form of selling to my peers and managers. I also realized that perhaps sales was not so simple. In fact, convincing my staff that the ideas I had made sense was far more difficult than writing clean code. And persuading management to supply sufficient staff and funding to implement my ideas was harder still.
I'm sitting in Buenos Aires now, but last week I was in Puyuehue. Yeah, I had no clue where that was either when I got talked into embarking on a 20-something-hour day of travel to get there. If you look at a map of South America and trace your finger to the very bottom of Chile, that's roughly where I was.
potentially other areas of South America. But the path is unclear: Building their own stores is expensive, but franchises haven't always worked out either. That's one reason they welcomed Endeavor's advice. "Sometimes in a family business, you need fresh air," Marcelo said. (Pictured right, with his mother in his grandparents’ original roasting plant.)
I don’t want to write about 
Yesterday some of Europe’s most influential and active seed/angel investors got together in London for a ’summit’ organised by 
Today started out like any other, which is to say, the AT&T connection on my cellphone was somewhat working, depending on where I was positioned in my apartment. 
Feel like this holiday season is a bit cheerier than last year’s? You’re not alone. According to some new data from personal finance site 
As the Internet matures, slowly but surely everything we do in the real world is going social. But there’s a limit to how much information we can explicitly share on all the various services. A new service, 
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