Tuesday, July 6, 2010

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

Link to TechCrunch

Is Flattr The New Facebook Like, But This Time With Money?

Posted: 06 Jul 2010 08:48 AM PDT

Flattr is a new startup with an inovative business model, coming out of Sweden. In fact it's the brainchild of a group of people formerly associated with The [infamous] Pirate Bay, including Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi. It's highly ironic that Flattr has sprung from a similar group that refused to pay for content, like movies. But Flattr just might work because there are already signs that the micropayments startup is getting grass-roots traction - and it's still only in closed beta. Flattr is reminiscent of Digg or perhaps Facebook Like buttons - but this time with real money. That could make things very interesting. According to one blogger he has had €875.89 for the month of June from Flattr and the amount has increased steadily upwards. Plus Flattr (as in flattering someone and a flat-rate payment model) is already in use by two major German newspapers, completely unprompted: taz.de and Freitag.de There are also lists appearing of people appearing who are starting to make actual money. Admittedly these are small amounts, but that fact it's even happening is interesting. Flattr has competition in the form of Kachingle but it's fair to say the latter is not getting quite the same amount of buzz. So how does it work?


Magnify Brokers Deals To Run Ads Inside Embedded Videos

Posted: 06 Jul 2010 08:08 AM PDT

From an audience perspective, the ability to embed videos on other sites is what expands their viewership and makes them go viral. But from an advertising perspective, most of that video is the Web equivalent of dead air. “Nobody sells embedded video because nobody knows where it is going,” says Magnify.net CEO Steve Rosenbaum. He has a partial fix for that, a new video advertising product he calls Elastic Inventory (more on that below).

Magnify offers a video aggregation platform that powers the video sections of mid-sized Web publishers such as New York Magazine, Bicycling, and The Week. Magnify lets these publishers upload their own video and mix that with video from more than 20 video sites across the Web such as YouTube, Metacafe, and Dailymotion.

The problem is that those publishers can’t run any pre-roll ads against those “curated” videos. But Magnify is starting to broker deals with the large video-sharing sites, starting with Metacafe, to allow publishers who use Magnify to insert their own pre-roll ads in the embedded videos. Magnify negotiates for the ad inventory on a wholesale basis across its network, allowing a publisher to buy video ads at a $5 CPM, for instance, and sell it at the $15 or $20 CPMs their own video ad inventory goes for. They pocket the spread in between (Magnify does not take a cut, it charges for its white-label video platform instead). The product is called Elastic Inventory because publishers don’t have to commit to buying any of the video ad space until they’ve already sold it. If they don’t sell it, they can continue to run the videos without ads.

The thinking is that advertisers are willing to pay higher CPMs for safe video inventory on what they deem to be high-quality sites. They don’t care if it is user-generated video as long as they’ve been vetted, which is what the editors on these Magnify-powered sites do. They are buying the known audience which visits these publishers and the controlled context in which these videos are shown.

Rosenbaum wants to cut deals for Elastic Inventory across all the major video-sharing sites. Dailymotion is probably next, but I doubt YouTube would ever agree to an arrangement where they lose control of the market for their video ads. And YouTube represents the lion’s share of embedded videos across Magnify-powered sites and elsewhere. Now, Magnify publishers will have an economic incentive to choose videos from other video-sharing sites instead.



Stribe Opens To All And Starts Thinking About Its Own Open Graph

Posted: 06 Jul 2010 08:00 AM PDT

Stribe had a good 2009. The service that aims to make it as simple as possible for any site to add a social network on top of their existing website was first unveiled in September of last year at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco. Shortly thereafter, in December, the service won the startup competition at LeWeb in Paris. Now they’re hoping 2010 will be even better.

Stribe is opening its service to all today after several months in private beta testing. More than 10,000 sites requested access to the beta, but Stribe only let in a few hundred hand-selected ones to make sure the service worked as expected, co-founder Kamel Zeroual tells us. “I now feel our value proposition has become strong enough to be shared with the world,” Zeroual says.

Stribe’s promise lies in its 5-minute set-up from scratch, and in its one line of code you need to add to your site to get things working. From a conceptual perspective, it’s similar to what the Meebo Bar offers, but Stribe is striving to be a bit more robust. Here’s the list of features they promise:

  • Customizable profiles including user-specific photos, status updates and community information
  • User modules to show who is online, and let users chat and send messages
  • A Newsfeed where users can create new topics and share with the community
  • Facebook and Twitter Connect to let any visitor of a website sign-in and join the community
  • Badges to reward most active users and websites
  • RSS sharing to distribute and provide more news for visitors
  • "Widget" size to make integration easier
  • Stribe in White Label: webmasters can now customize their Stribe social network widget with the look and feel of their website.

On top of those, Stribe has a new feature they’re launching today alongside the public roll-out: “Meta Social Network.” Basically, they’re allowing sites to group themselves with similar sites to create larger overall networks. These networks will reside on stribe.com and site owners should be able to leverage them to drive more traffic from people interested in specific topics.

It's also our take on what should be the Open Graph for websites — a way to freely access and share content, visitors, links and more in communities of blogs and websites sharing the same interests,” Zeroual says.

Much of Stribe’s core features are free, but there are some premium modules such as metric tracking that they charge for.



MySpace UK Traffic Is Half What It Used To Be (And Morale Is Down, Too)

Posted: 06 Jul 2010 06:45 AM PDT

The number of visitors to MySpace UK has halved in the last six months, TechCrunch Europe has learned, leading to a fresh round of layoffs at the London office of the social networking site. According to internal figures that we've seen, monthly visits to MySpace UK are down from a peak of just under 10 million at the start of the year to around 5m as of the end of June 2010. If indeed this is the case - and we have every reason to believe the stats are authentic - it would appear to show a pretty staggering decline. MySpace declined to comment on the details of this story aside from issuing the following statement: "We don't publicly share internal data but these figures aren't accurate." However, we stand by our well placed sources.


Augmented Reality Demo: Junaio Takes Advantage Of IOS 4 Camera Access

Posted: 06 Jul 2010 05:56 AM PDT

A while back, I posted a bit about a new augmented reality game called Zombie ShootAR. It is a shooter game where you kill zombies that appear only in the augmented reality of your mobile phone’s viewfinder. The game relied on some imaging technology that “watched” for horizon lines and therefore effectively planted the creeping zombies on the ground or in exact places (instead of having them float around in space if you moved your phone suddenly). It worked pretty well actually and I heard many responses about that game inquiring why it was only available for Symbian OS and not for iPhone. As it turns out there was a pretty good reason. Low level access to the iPhone’s camera data, which is necessary for that kind of imaging technology, had been suppressed by Apple…until now.

Read more…



Freelancer.com Spots Massive Increases In Demand For HTML5, Geolocation Jobs

Posted: 06 Jul 2010 04:59 AM PDT

Online marketplace for outsourcing Freelancer.com, formerly known as GetAFreelancer, this morning announced their findings on the fastest growing online outsourcing jobs in Q2 with the release of the Freelancer 50.

Freelancer.com now caters to a user base of 1.6 million small and medium-sized businesses (up from 1 million in October 2009) and says it has outsourced more than 725,000 projects to date. Looking at the projects and comparing jobs posted on its website in the first quarter 2010 to those posted in Q2, the company has drawn a number of conclusions about what’s hot in the online job market.

Surprise, surprise: all jobs related to geolocation, cloud services, HTML5 and mobile application and website development are gaining ground quickly.

Geolocation, no doubt driven by the buzz surrounding and early successes booked by companies such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt and of course Twitter, grabbed the number one spot this quarter.

Freelancer.com spotted a whopping 909% increase in geolocation jobs online. As a result of what the company dubs the ‘Apple effect’, Freelancer.com also saw a significant 721% boost in HTML5 jobs.

Amazon Web Services came in as the number three fastest mover in Q2, denoting the continued popularity of cloud computing. Up 446% from the previous quarter, anything related to hosting services over the Internet has seen an impressive increase (also note Salesforce.com related jobs took the number 5 spot).

Also reflected in the data provided by Freelancer.com: the global appetite for mobile apps. Mobile phone jobs rose steadily, up 282% from Q1 2010, and jobs related to portable devices like the iPad and Amazon Kindle are also two of the top 10 fastest growing online outsourcing jobs.

Perhaps the most surprising entrant in said top 10 list is … Google Buzz, with an increase of 126% compared to Q1 2010. Where are those coming from?

Anyway, here are the top 20 fastest growing online outsourcing jobs, according to Freelancer (you can find the top 50 here):



Now Google Backs TechHub, The London Base For Startups

Posted: 06 Jul 2010 04:58 AM PDT

Google has now joined global publisher Pearson to become one of the first founding sponsors of TechHub, a new co-working space and innovation centre for technology start-up companies in central London. The space has a launch party on Friday and officially opens on Monday 12 July. It would appear Pearson came on board to tap into startup talent, but for Google the TechHub project is clearly of interest as a way to enliven the developer scene. Google's Reto Meier, Android developer advocate, says Google is supporting TechHub's aim to provide developers and budding tech entrepreneurs with "an affordable, buzzing and creative working environment." It can't hurt that TechHub will play host to developer meetups and there are plans for a device room / hackspace with lots of goodies in it. TechHub launches next week on July 12 and has finally revealed its location: the ground floor of 76-80 City Rd, 10 seconds from the Old Street Tube station, here, slap bang in London's "Silicon Roundabout" cluster of tech companies.


TweetUp Buys Android Twitter Client Twidroid And News Aggregator Popurls

Posted: 06 Jul 2010 04:08 AM PDT

Twitter search and advertising platform operator TweetUp this morning announced that it had acquired Twidroid, creator of the popular Twitter client for Android phones. The new owner will rename the app Twidroyd to avoid legal trouble with Lucas Films, trademark owner of the term "droid”.

TweetUp is also buying news aggregator service popurls, which has long been placing the most popular items from the NY Times, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, YouTube, Flickr and other news and social media sites on one handy page (it’s also one of my personal favorites on the Web).

Combined, Idealab-owned TweetUp hopes Twidroid and popurls will provide it with a distribution network on which to test and refine its platform for finding the world's best tweeters. Terms of the acquisition(s) were not disclosed.

Twidroid and popurls weren’t incorporated as such – they were operated by a startup called tomatic, founded by Austrian serial entrepreneur Thomas Marban. The acquisition represents a score for Ralph Zimmerman, and for Marban it’s a coup in a series of three – he has now sold all 3 of his most recent ventures, the longest one he held on to being software company Celum, which was acquired back in 2007 after he co-founded it in 1998.

Here’s a complementary quote from TweetUp CEO (and original Overture founder) Bill Gross:

"Acquiring Twidroyd provides TweetUp with a number of strategic advantages. Twidroyd is widely considered the best Twitter client for Android phones and it leads in market share, so its growing base of users will be a valuable source of well-informed feedback on TweetUp search on mobile devices. In addition, the popurls website, which attracts users looking for a convenient guide to the most popular sites, news, videos and blogs on the Internet, will be a natural spot to display TweetUp search results and gain user feedback.

This combination should enable us to more rapidly refine our offerings, generating better user experiences for distribution partners and for users searching for the world's best tweeters regardless of their choice of devices."

Coinciding with the acquisition announcement, Twidroid Twidroyd has released version 3.4.0 of the Android app, which incorporates a good number of new features.

In April, TweetUp opened registration for its bidded marketplace for real-time search, and in May the company launched its search capabilities on a number of sites at the TechCrunch Disrupt event, including here at TechCrunch, Topix.com, and Businessinsider.com.

TweetUp's search algorithms and marketplace aim to address the needs of both users and tweeters in a single search mechanism. In addition to algorithms that combine a variety of factors to determine relevance, tweeters will soon be able to bid on keywords in a marketplace very similar to what now occurs at search engines.

It’ll be interesting to see if Gross can make even half the impact he did with GoTo / Overture (acquired by Yahoo 7 years ago almost to the day), which pretty much invented the sponsored search model.

TweetUp has revenue-sharing agreements in place or in the pipeline with a number of partners, including Twitter clients TweetDeck, Seesmic, and Twidroyd but also players like Conduit, Netvibes, TwitterFeed and Klout. Most if not all will be online over the next few weeks.

TweetUp claims the grand total reach of the clients and web sites will bring its search results to more than 40 million unique users per month and serve more than 100 million impressions per month. Which means it’s off to a pretty good start (but still faces a long road ahead).

(Hat tip to Justin Hubbard for the heads up)



Wall Street Journal Throws A Softball To MySpace

Posted: 06 Jul 2010 02:10 AM PDT

I’m sort of scratching my head at the Wall Street Journal’s article (mostly behind a paywall) that MySpace is in negotiations over some kind of new search advertising deal.

“News Corp. is in discussions with Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. about replacing MySpace’s crucial search-advertising partnership with Google, which expires next month, according to people familiar with the matter,” says the WSJ, which is also owned by MySpace parent News Corp.

Well, yeah. Their deal with Google is ending. Supposedly in August, although the Google agreement I read said it ended in June 2010. Everyone knows MySpace has been trying to figure out a way to replace that $300 million/year in revenue. And everyone knows it isn’t going to happen.

But anyway, here are some interesting things that the WSJ left out of their article:

First, Fox Audience Network, which serves most of the ads on MySpace, is supposedly on a tear with their self service platform. Our understanding is that News Corp.’s goal is to grow FAN to the point where MySpace doesn’t need an outside partner for search advertising.

Second, FAN is definitely up for sale by News Corp., and at least one bidder – Silver Lake Partners (they own part of Skype, and made a failed bid to invest in Facebook) – has made an offer. If FAN is sold, it’s a solid bet that MySpace will quickly be sold, too. The two companies live off each other.

Third, the WSJ says MySpace thinks it can carve a niche for itself by exploiting Facebook’s privacy weakness (good idea, but way too late now). Apparently there will also be a new logo.

MySpace is apparently still counting on artists and bands to keep users happy - “A band, for instance, could use MySpace to share music with fans and get feedback, as well as adjust their touring schedule to add concerts in Texas, for example, if the musicians see their MySpace fan base is heavily from that state.” But sometime this year, probably sooner rather than later, MySpace is going to turn off their free music streaming and move to a subscription model.

A related point – MySpace Music was driving most of the searches that made up the massive page view obligations that MySpace had under the Google Agreement. With free music going away, those page views will go away, too. Meaning a search deal is even less lucrative.

There’s no real news at all in the WSJ article, although it will certainly help ensure that Microsoft, Google and Yahoo all know that the other guys are maybe looking at a deal, too. I think the far more interesting questions around MySpace have to do with what’s going on with FAN, and what will happen to their music business, none of which was addressed in the article. Far be it from me to say that there’s a conflict of interest in this story given that the WSJ and MySpace are owned by the same company – I’ll let others say it instead. A more critical approach may have been a better choice.



Woot To The AP: Nice Story About Our Sale — You Now Owe Us $17.50

Posted: 06 Jul 2010 12:11 AM PDT

Gotta love those guys at Woot. They just sold to Amazon for $110 million, but that’s not stopping them from calling anyone out as they see fit. In this case, we particularly love it because they’re calling out the AP — and they’re doing so right on their highly trafficked homepage.

You see, Woot noticed that the AP covered the story of their sale five days ago. But in doing so, they also noticed that the AP used a number of quotes from CEO Matt Rutledge’s blog post about the sale. According to the AP’s own ridiculous rules for using quotations, Woot figures that the AP owes them $17.50.

The AP has been banned on TechCrunch for two years now because of this ridiculous rule. In fact, we’re breaking our own rule here by acknowledging they even exist. But this is too good to pass up — and it’s actually similar to something we did a couple years ago, trying to charge the AP $12.50 for their usage of quotes from us. To my knowledge, we’re still waiting for that check.

But Woot is more forgiving than we are. They’re willing to cut a deal:

But, hey. We're all friends here. And invoicing is such a hassle in today's paperless society, are we right? How about this: instead of cutting us a check for the web content you liberated from our site, all you'll need to do is show us your email receipt from today's two pack of Sennheiser MX400 In-Ear Headphones, and we'll call it even.

Yes, Woot is letting the AP skip out on the money they owe if they simply buy a couple of the featured products today on Woot. Good idea. And they’re backing it up: “Don't force us to pass this matter to a collection agency,” they write.

Best of luck with those jokesters, Woot.

Below, find the key blurb from Woot’s message to the AP, which hopefully they won’t charge us for since we don’t try to enforce the same ridiculous rules the AP does:

The AP, we can't thank you enough for looking our way. You see, when we showed off our good news on Wednesday afternoon, we expected we'd get a little bit of attention. But when we found your little newsy thing you do, we couldn't help but notice something important. And that something is this: you printed our web content in your article! The web content that came from our blog! Why, isn't that the very thing you've previously told nu-media bloggers they're not supposed to do?

So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we've used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we've figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create.

[thanks Anurag]



Employees Challenged To Crack Facebook Security, Succeed (Updated)

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 11:15 PM PDT

Apparently Facebook noticed the slap down that the FTC gave Twitter in June because it “failed to prevent unauthorized administrative control of its system.” Shortly afterwards one of the senior engineers at Facebook responsible for SRE (site reliability engineering) challenged Facebook employees to try to compromise him and gain access to Facebook’s administrative system via information obtained from him.

They succeeded.

It took a couple of weeks though. Employees supposedly got in via his home WiFi network, says our source. The details aren’t entirely clear, and Facebook isn’t talking. What I’ve heard is that they were able to intercept data from his home network after capturing his WPA password by luring him into logging into a rogue WiFi SSID that appeared to be his own router. See here for some details on how easy this is to do.

Once his home network fell, the Facebook employees were able to monitor all his Internet activity and obtain clear text passwords, etc.

The Twitter hacks last year began with compromised personal email accounts and unfolded from there.

It’s absolutely a smart thing for Facebook to do this, and other companies should too. But if a security engineer at Facebook was compromised, even though he knew it was coming, imagine how trivial it would be for other people to get hit, too.

Now excuse me while I go camp out in Mark Zuckerberg’s back yard for a week or two and try to set up a rogue WiFi SSID. Wish me luck.

Update: Facebook engineer Pedram Keyani, who was behind the challenge, has responded in the comments. He says that the challenge actually demonstrates how secure Facebook is — while the team could access his account, they were unable to compromise Facebook’s administrative/corporate systems.

I’m the engineer who made the challenge and I want to clear up some
misunderstandings. First, we perform tests on the integrity and security of
our site all the time. Second, in this particular case, the challenge
demonstrated the effectiveness of Facebook’s security systems, not the
opposite, Despite months of work and hundreds of hours of effort by a team
of specialized security engineers, the team was NOT able to access
Facebook’s administrative or corporate systems. While they were able to
access my personal Facebook account, they were not able to use this
information to access any other account on Facebook. Finally, challenges
like this are a great way for us to apply our best thinking and skills to
identify risks to our systems. We think our efforts should give users
greater confidence in Facebook and its administrative systems, not less.



Um, Why Exactly Is The NBA Paying Twitter To Promote LeBron James?

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 03:53 PM PDT

It’s already fairly impossible to escape hearing about basketball star LeBron James these days. It seems that no matter what TV channel you put on, what website you read, or what social media site you’re on, talk of him is rampant as the world awaits his decision on which team he’ll sign with. That’s why it’s a little odd that the NBA decided they needed to pay Twitter to promote James a bit more. Yes, he’s the latest Promoted Trending Topic on the service.

If you look at the right hand column on twitter.com, you’ll see LeBron James’ name at the bottom of the Trending Topics section highlighted by a big yellow “Promoted” icon. At first, I thought James himself may be paying for the promotion (which would be kind of funny in the ultimate vanity kind of way), or that perhaps his main sponsor Nike was doing it. But no, it’s actually the NBA itself which is paying Twitter to promote James’ name — as you can see when you hover over his name.

So why on Earth is the NBA paying to promote just one player? Well, if you click on the topic, you’ll see the tweet they’re also paying for along the top. “For all your LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh and other NBA Free Agency updates check out Decision 2010 on NBA.com” which is then followed by a link to nba.com.

It’s actually a pretty savvy move by the NBA. Had they just promoted something like “NBA Free Agency,” I doubt as many people would click on the trending topic (and subsequent link). But LeBron James draws crowds both in real life and virtually. So the NBA is piggybacking off of the name of their biggest star. Smart.

Promoted Trending Topics are the latest Twitter money-making idea being tested out. They began appearing last month, when Disney/Pixar promoted Toy Story 3.

Humorously, the NBA has also managed to get upstaged in the promoted tweet arena by popular Twitter user Conan O’Brien. He currently has a top tweet (meaning it has been retweeted a ton of times) under the “LeBron James” topic that reads, “I don’t care where LeBron James ends up… As long as it’s not at 11pm on TBS.”



Gowalla Focusing More On Beauty With iPhone 4 — Will Users Be Attracted?

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 03:09 PM PDT

As iPhone apps push out their updates to be compatible with the new iOS 4, most are focusing on adding simple fast app switching capabilities. Many are also giving their apps a quick new coat of polish to make them look a bit nicer on the new Retina display found on the iPhone 4. The location-based service Gowalla is focusing heavily on the latter.

Version 2.2 of Gowalla, which just went live in the App Store, is the first version of the app that is iOS 4 and iPhone 4-compatible. In the update notes, Gowalla, which has always been more design-oriented compared to its competitors, remarks on their excitement for the new Retina display:

The beautiful Gowalla experience you’ve come to love has been pixel-polished for the iPhone 4′s new (unbelievable) Retina Display. This is just the first step, though. We’ll be updating Stamps, Pins, and items regularly behind-the-scenes until every bit of Gowalla truly shines. If you’re using the iPhone 4, we think you’ll be amazed. If you are using a previous iPhone or iPod Touch, though, you’ll still see the same lovely Gowalla you expect.

There is no question that Gowalla’s iPhone app continues to look much nicer than the one made by main rival Foursquare. With the Retina display, Gowalla is clearly going to try to widen that gap, hoping it will help differentiate their app. But so far, the beauty advantage hasn’t helped much. After their showdown at SXSW in March (which was a pretty even fight), Foursquare appears to be growing more quickly (they did a million check-ins on July 3) and now has more funding ($21 million versus just over $10 million for Gowalla).

Something else interesting in the notes of the new Gowalla app is that they say they’ve “made improvements to how Gowalla handles location.” This doesn’t appear to have anything to do with background location (at least not in the same way that Loopt is currently using it), but we’ve reached out to Gowalla to try to clarify that.

One thing definitely fixed is the location issues Gowalla was having with users who updated to iOS 4. Gowalla apologized for those issues, which, in some cases, forced users to open the Maps app before Gowalla to make sure location was working).

This latest version also makes it easier for new users to sign up for Gowalla right from the app. Notably, you can now pre-populate much of the data to need to fill out by selecting your entry card in your iPhone address book — it’s a nice, simple touch.

You can find version 2.2 of Gowalla here. It’s a free download.



UberCab Takes The Hassle Out Of Booking A Car Service

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 12:15 PM PDT

Finding a cab, especially during peak travel times or in less-traveled areas, can be an incredibly frustrating task. But car services are often much more expensive than the average cab ride. Enter UberCab, a new service that offers an on-demand car service via an iPhone app or SMS.

After signing up for an UberCab account and downloading the free iPhone app, can then you can then set your location and request a car service from the application. The app will determine your location and you can set your exact pickup location. UberCab will then send your request to their network of drivers who happen to be in the area.

The driver will accept your request and you can then input your end location. The driver will alert you when arriving, and once you entire the car, you hit begin trip on your app to begin your fare. The driver also has a connecting app, which he will use to input the end of the trip. At the end of the trip, your pre-set credit card that you input when you set up your account will be charged and you won’t have to dole out any cash.

Of course, convenience has a price. You may pay any where from one and a half to two times the price of a cab fare (but two times less than a traditional car service fee). But you are receiving better service, a nice black limo and an on-demand solution.

UberCab calculates the cost of your trip based on milage and time in the car, similar to the way other limo companies calculate fares. However, the startup says you are able to get better fares because its drivers perceive these on-demand trips as extra money in addition to their regular full-priced trips to and from the airport. Interestingly, UberCab asks that both passengers and drivers rate each other, Yelp-style. This helps UberCab ensure that passengers and driver are using the system properly.

Unfortunately, UberCab is only available in San Francisco (although UberCab’s site says it will also be beta tested in Chicago). That being said, if UberCab were in the city that I live in, Id probably use it. I’d definitely be willing to pay a little extra to ride in a nice car with the convenience of door to door service. And initial reviews from local San Francisco users on Twitter seem fairly positive.

UberCab as a technology will compete with Cabulous, which displays cabs in your area, tracking them in real time, and TaxiMagic.

UberCab Demo from UberCab on Vimeo.



Posterous Growing At More Than 700 Percent a Year

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 11:10 AM PDT

Somewhere in between full blogging platforms like WordPress and the 140-character limit of Twitter, true microblogging sites like Tumblr and Posterous are taking off. I call these true microblogging sites because they are designed for quick hits but can support photos, themes, and other more blog-like features. Tumblr has been around longer and is getting quite big (23 million monthly unique global visitors, according to Quantcast) , but the younger Posterous is also seeing some decent growth.

According to Quantcast, Posterous has 5.3 million monthly unique global visitors, with 2.2 million in the U.S. (Both Posterous and Tumblr are directly measured by Quantcast). If you look at the Quantcast chart above, you can see the different growth spurts Posterous has gone through. The first year after its launch in June, 2008, it’s growth was pretty gradual. But then, almost a year ago, it introduced an iPhone app which allows users to post their photos and thoughts directly to their Posterous blogs. One of the main uses of Posterous is to share photos with some commentary.

Then earlier this year it started integrating more tightly with Twitter through its Post.ly service, and kept steadily adding new features throughout the year.

Currently the company is trying to fuel growth through a switching campaign targeted at 15 competing services such as Ning and Twitpic, which is getting it in some hot water.

Even taking the more conservative estimates from comScore, which shows Posterous with only 2.5 million worldwide unique visitors in May, 2010, the site is up 700 percent since comScore started collecting data 11 months prior. It is safe to assume that the annual growth is north of 700 percent. Tumblr, by comparison, is up 174 percent during the same period (off a much larger base of users, which comScore estimates 10.7 million worldwide unques in May, 2010). Both are growing spectacularly because when you lower the barriers to publishing, the posts (and audience) will follow.



Twitter Is Missing Some @Replies

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 10:35 AM PDT

Yesterday, users and developers started complaining of missing @replies in Twitter streams. At first Twitter infrastructure engineer John Kalucki wrote in the forum that the mentions timelines were updating with additional latency but the issue should be fixed. However, developers and users continued to not see missing @replies on the network.

Twitter just confirmed that @ replies have disappeared from some timelines for no apparent reason and are currently working on a fix for the problem. According to the recent post: Some users are experiencing an issue in which they're not receiving all of their @ replies; we're working on a fix.

It’s unclear what the cause of the issue is but Twitter has been experiencing major downtime due to increased traffic from The World Cup. However, it seems that @replies started to go missing yesterday, a day which didn’t include any major World Cup games. Last week, the network even slashed its API rate, taking the default limit from 350 and cutting it to 175 for third party developers. And the network just rescheduled its ‘oAuthcalypse’ thanks to the downtime.



How Steam Stopped Me From Pirating Games And Enjoy The Sweet DRM Kool-Aid

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 10:16 AM PDT

Note: A reader sent us this interesting take on Steam and DRM, but requested to stay anonymous due to the nature of the article. We of course obliged.

Up until a few weeks ago, the last PC game I purchased and didn’t pirate was Team Fortress 2 via the digital download service, Steam. The last PC game I purchased in a retail box was Half Life 2. Yet like many, I’ve still managed to play every PC hit over the last decade. I simply couldn’t justify spending $50 on a game when pirating offers so many real benefits verses owning a legit copy.

Part of my motivation was that it’s just so damn easy to pirate a game. It’s like three clicks of the mouse to download a torrent and even less on Usernet. The files download as fast as my cable modem allows and I have the full game with simple cracking instructions a few minutes later. Why in the world would I want to drive to a store and give them $50 for the same thing?



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