Tuesday, February 15, 2011

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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Fly or Die (TV Apps): IntoNow, Yap.TV, FIOS Mobile

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 08:59 AM PST

Once you start watching TV with your iPhone or iPad, there is no going back. When the big screen becomes boring, you just switch to the smaller screen, where a whole world of Twitter, email, the Web, and apps stand ready to entertain your multitasking mind. In this week’s episode of Fly or Die, CrunchGear editor John Biggs and I look at three TV apps designed to enhance your TV watching experience, not distract you from it. We give each one a “fly” or “die” verdict and, as usual, a founder from one of the companies joins us as a surprise guest to subject themselves to our grilling.

The three TV apps we evaluate in this show are IntoNow, Yap.TV, and FIOS Mobile. The first one, IntoNow, is like Shazam for TV shows. It lets you check into a show you are watching by simply listening to the audio signature of the show and comparing that agaianst its database. The app has a high gee-whiz factor, and it really nails identifying the shows with one click. But there is not much to do after that other than see what shows your friends on the app have watched and leave a comment about their bad taste in TV shows.

We both much prefer Yap.TV, which lets you navigate shows via an up-to-the-minute program guide or a grid showing trending shows. The whole point of the app is to, well, yap about TV, and not just with people you know. When you click on a show, you see a Twitter stream with all the realtime tweets about that show, along with polls, and a window where you can chat more privately with just your friends. The app goes way beyond the checkin, by giving you something to do related to the show you are watching. The app works especially well for appointment TV, things like the Superbowl, the Grammy’s, or even The Colbert Report, where lots of people are watching at the same time. Through the app, you can have a conversation about what your watching with other people across the country. I call these “apps for lonely people,” but then again as John points out, TV is a lonely medium.

Finally, the last app we review is FIOS Mobile, which is a program guide and iPad remote for Verizon FIOS TV subscribers. I am a subscriber, and this app is my new remote control. It lets you tune into any show currently on, or on-demand, through your WiFi network in your house and your set-top box. The app itself is a bit clunky (the program guide takes forever to fully load), but it is such an improvement over the traditional remote control that it is now my default. I can keep looking for something better to watch on my iPad instead of annoying my wife to no end by scrolling through the program guide every five minutes on the TV screen. I just wish it allowed for direct streaming to my iPAd like Comcast’s Xfinity app allows for on-demand movies.

If you want to jump to individual segments of this show (the whole thing is 11 minutes), here is where you can watch just the parts about IntoNow, Yap.tv, and FIOS Mobile.

Which TV apps do you swear by?



eBay Lands First Mobile Pre-Load Deal With Telefonica’s O2 UK Phones

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 08:58 AM PST

eBay’s mobile reach in Europe is about to expand exponentially. The e-commerce giant has just announced it first ever mobile pre-load deal with Telefonica, which will equip most smartphones and feature phones sold by the Telefonica via its O2 brand with eBay's mobile app or a link to eBay's mobile page pre-loaded.

The company says the deal will include most Android, Windows 7, Symbian and Bada devices sold by O2 in the UK over the next two years. Telefonica will actually work with device manufacturers to pre-install the application.

So why is this a big deal? It’s eBay’s first pre-load deal with a carrier, and Telfonica O2 is one of the largest carriers in Europe. While the apps will only be available on O2 UK’s phones initially, the apps are expected to roll out to other Telefonica markets. The pre-loaded apps will no doubt be able to bring in more traffic to eBay’s apps and sites.

Mobile generated $2 billion in sales for eBay last year, and the company expects to double that number in 2011. And eBay’s mobile strategy is already gaining traction in international markets. The UK is the strongest market for eBay in terms of m-commerce in Europe, with an item purchased on average every two seconds through the eBay buyer app in the UK in 2010. And Germany and the UK combined generated nearly one-third of all eBay's mobile sales in 2010.

I’m going to take a wild guess here, but I’m sure eBay will be negotiating similar pre-load carrier deals in other countries over the next year.



Valve Makes More Money Per Employee Than Google Or Apple

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 08:25 AM PST

Here’s an interesting figure: Valve makes more money per employee than Google or Apple. While we can easily figure out how much the publicly traded Google and Apple make per employee, estimating what Valve pulls in is trickier. Valve has done quite well selling video games – over 12 million copies of Half-Life 2 alone – but Valve is even better at selling everyone else’s games – not just its own – in Steam.

Read more…



Mobile Tag Raises 6.6 Million Euros For Marketing Solutions Based On NFC tags, 2D And 1D Barcodes

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 07:24 AM PST

Mobile Tag, a France-based provider of 2D and 1D barcode marketing solutions, has secured 6.6 million euros in fresh funding. The round was led by S.E.B. Ventures and joined by previous backers XAnge Private Equity and Alven Capital. The company says it raised additional capital primarily to expand its operations in the United States.


With The Platform Burning, Nokia Also Talked To RIM Before Jumping Into Redmond’s Arms

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 07:21 AM PST

The battle of mobile ecosystems is now a three horse race: Apple's iOS, Google's Android, and Microsoft's Windows Phone. Or so says Nokia CEO Stephen Elop now that the Finnish handset maker has jumped off of a burning platform into Redmond's arms. Conspicuous by their absence - in Elop's analysis - was RIM's BlackBerry or indeed the dark horse in the room, HP's webOS. They are both, of course, vertical platforms (as is iOS) so you'd be forgiven for thinking that licensing either was never a consideration. However, TechCrunch Europe has learned that Nokia did indeed explore a partnership with RIM, which would have seen Nokia smartphones running BlackBerry OS.


GetJar CEO Ilja Laurs Explains Why They Just Raised $25 Million (TCTV)

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 06:24 AM PST

GetJar, the independent, cross-platform app store provider, this morning announced that it has raised $25 million in Series C funding from Tiger Global Management and longtime backer Accel Partners. The round brings the total raised to $42 million.

I caught up with founder and CEO Ilja Laurs at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to talk about how his business has grown since the last time I did a video interview with the charismatic entrepreneur, now almost two years ago.

Since then, GetJar has managed to secure a leading position among the top 5 mobile app store operators, playing the same field as giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft and Nokia.

In the past year, the number of app downloads Get\jar registers per month has quadrupled, and the company has grown along with it; they now boasts triple the number of employees than last year.

I asked Laurs why GetJar needed the extra capital, how he evaluates the competitive landscape in the mobile app store business and what he thinks about the Nokia/Microsoft alliance.



Apple Launches Subscriptions For Content-Publishers On The App Store

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 05:42 AM PST

As we heard at the Daily’s launch a few weeks ago, Apple was planning to launch a new subscriptions model for content-publishers on the App Store. And today, Apple is officially announcing the new service for magazines, newspapers, video, music and more on the App Store.

Here’s the revenue breakdown: When Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing. We’ve pasted the release below.

Apple also says that if publishers are selling a digital subscription outside of the app, that same subscription offer must be made available, at the same price or less, to App Store customers (which we had previously reported). In addition, publishers may no longer provide links within their apps that would allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.

From the release, it’s unclear if any publishers (besides The Daily) have signed on to use the new model. And it should be interesting to see how magazine and newspaper companies react to this new model. The new model will also possibility have an impact on subscriptions from video content companies like Netflix and Hulu, as well as Amazon’s Kindle apps on the App Store.

Apple Launches Subscriptions on the App Store

CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Apple® today announced a new subscription service available to all publishers of content-based apps on the App Store℠, including magazines, newspapers, video, music, etc. This is the same innovative digital subscription billing service that Apple recently launched with News Corp.'s "The Daily" app.

"Our philosophy is simple — when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing"
Subscriptions purchased from within the App Store will be sold using the same App Store billing system that has been used to buy billions of apps and In-App Purchases. Publishers set the price and length of subscription (weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, bi-yearly or yearly). Then with one-click, customers pick the length of subscription and are automatically charged based on their chosen length of commitment (weekly, monthly, etc.). Customers can review and manage all of their subscriptions from their personal account page, including canceling the automatic renewal of a subscription. Apple processes all payments, keeping the same 30 percent share that it does today for other In-App Purchases.

"Our philosophy is simple — when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app. We believe that this innovative subscription service will provide publishers with a brand new opportunity to expand digital access to their content onto the iPad, iPod touch and iPhone, delighting both new and existing subscribers."

Publishers who use Apple's subscription service in their app can also leverage other methods for acquiring digital subscribers outside of the app. For example, publishers can sell digital subscriptions on their web sites, or can choose to provide free access to existing subscribers. Since Apple is not involved in these transactions, there is no revenue sharing or exchange of customer information with Apple. Publishers must provide their own authentication process inside the app for subscribers that have signed up outside of the app. However, Apple does require that if a publisher chooses to sell a digital subscription separately outside of the app, that same subscription offer must be made available, at the same price or less, to customers who wish to subscribe from within the app. In addition, publishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a web site, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.

Protecting customer privacy is a key feature of all App Store transactions. Customers purchasing a subscription through the App Store will be given the option of providing the publisher with their name, email address and zip code when they subscribe. The use of such information will be governed by the publisher's privacy policy rather than Apple's. Publishers may seek additional information from App Store customers provided those customers are given a clear choice, and are informed that any additional information will be handled under the publisher's privacy policy rather than Apple's.

The revolutionary App Store offers more than 350,000 apps to consumers in 90 countries, with more than 60,000 native iPad™ apps. Customers of the more than 160 million iOS devices around the world can choose from an incredible range of apps in 20 categories, including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork, and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple is reinventing the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced its magical iPad which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.



Rumor: iPhone 5 To Have A Larger, 4-Inch Screen?

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 05:36 AM PST

Apple has taken its own sweet time adopting functions and features that many phone users now take for granted. Unfortunately, as Android phones up the ante in terms of screen screen size and processor speed, the iPhone is starting to lose a few comparison tests and, barring all other stats, screen size makes for a great in-store tie-breaker. Luckily for Apple, there’s a new rumor on the block; this time from Digitimes, and it’s about the next iPhone’s screen size.

The rumor is, in short, this: that Apple will increase the iPhone screen size to 4 inches, up from 3.5 inches. According to “upstream component suppliers,” this change should come in the next iteration of the phone.

Read more…



Solvate Raises $4 Million For Talent Search Engine

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 05:30 AM PST

Solvate.com, a platform that helps employers and independent professionals find each other and work together in the cloud, has raised $4 million in Series B financing from Michael Paolucci (Solvate’s CEO), RRE Ventures and DFJ Gotham. This brings the startup’s total funding to $6.3 million.

Solvate is essentially a Talent Search engine that aims to match companies with consultants and freelancers. Solvate has a network of 1,000-plus independent professionals who have been pre-qualified, and catalogued. Businesses can search Solvate’s database for talent and the the startup will provide online time tracking tools and will handle both payment collection and disbursement. Services include marketing, sales, business development, IT and more.

Solvate says that the new investment will be used to enhance the company’s user interface and expand its marketplace of clients and talent. Since August 2009, Solvate has facilitated thousands of remote work relationships on its platform.



Coupa Raises $12 Million To Help Companies Spend Smarter

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 05:02 AM PST

Coupa, the developer of a cloud spend management (CSM) platform, has raised $12 million in Series D funding led by Mohr Davidow Ventures with
El Dorado Ventures, BlueRun Ventures and Battery Ventures participating. This brings Coupa’s total funding to $27 million.

Coupa’s software suite allows companies of any size to maintain better control over costs by keeping tabs on purchases, suppliers, existing contracts etc. and automatically looking for ways to spend budgets in a cost-saving manner. The web-based e-procurement program also helps streamline communication between all employees and executives over financial and business matters. It’s sort of like an Amazon.com (for procurement) meets Mint.com (for personal finance) to help companies manage their finances, purchases and inventory.

Other features include the ability to tweet from the platform, automated expense report scoring, expense line notifications that thank employees for "being frugal" when the expense is well below the category average (and warn them when those expenses "seem a little high"), integration to Salesforce.com, Google Maps and more.

Coupa's customers include Michaels Stores, Pandora, Williams Sonoma, and others. And overall active users on the platform grew eight-fold in 2010, says the company.



RadiumOne Unveils Social Ad Format With Likes, Shares And More

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 05:00 AM PST


RadiumOne, an online ad network that aims to combine social and intent data to serve ads, is unveiling a new ad format today that aims to bring social elements within the actual display ad. Spawned from gWallet, RadiumOne mines social data, uses this information to identify relevant consumers for brands, and then serves advertisements to this audience based on this data.

Called the "R1 Like Button," the new button can be placed on the add to allow users to Like an ad. Of course, it’s not a Facebook Like button and the actual act of “liking” an ad doesn’t really do anything but help RadiumOne serve you more relevant advertisements. Advertisers can also choose to include a “Share” button on an ad, which will allow consumer to share the ad through Facebook, Twitter, e-mail and other social media sites.

And RadiumOne is claiming that uses are more likely to interact with the social ad formats. In early testing, the R1 Like Button generated a clickthrough rate of .12% and a Like button click rate of .18%; the Share rate was .02%. In addition, lead requests increased by 45%.

That data impressive but I’m still dubious that many users will actually “like” an ad they see on a publisher site. While this works for Facebook, RadiumOne is testing this on publisher sites where users may not be as engaged in “liking” objects on a page that aren’t involved with a Facebook “like.”

I think consumers will need more of an incentive to interact with an online ad. What would be interesting is if RadiumOne allows advertisers to give users incentives to “like” an advertisement, i.e. you could receive a discount at a restaurant for ‘liking’ the ad.



Synaptics’ New Touchscreens Can Detect The Head Of A Pin

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 04:40 AM PST


Synaptics is the company whose products you probably interact with every day without knowing. They’re always advancing the science of haptics and touch-detection, and their latest work is the most impressive yet. What they’ve done is integrate the touch controller (basically, the tiny chip that detects and reports touch activity) with the display driver. This means they can rule out a lot of the noise that the display creates with the touch sensors — the result is vastly improved sensitivity, even when using something non-conductive like a glove or stylus.

Read More



Songkick Raises $2 Million To Help People Track, Catalog Live Music

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 02:21 AM PST

Songkick is in the process of raising $2 million, an SEC filing reveals. Songkick indexes a host of ticket vendors, venue websites as well as local newspapers to create a database of concerts happening around the world. This provides people with a centralized way of keeping track of live performances by their favorite bands and artists. In addition, Songkick is trying to build an extensive online catalog of live concert recordings.


Facebook SIMs, HTC/INQ Phones — Facebook’s Phone Project Lingers, But It’s None Of Those

Posted: 15 Feb 2011 12:04 AM PST

Facebook wants to be everywhere. They’ve made this very clear. They want to be on your desktop, on your laptop, on your smartphone, on your tablet, and on your dumbphone. The latter, they directly addressed today with a new SIM card made in conjunction with Gemalto which magically gives basically every dumbphone — aka “feature phone” — a simple entry point to use the social network: SMS. It’s a great idea, and very cool for emerging markets. In fact, you could make a case for it sort of being a “Facebook Phone”. But it’s obviously not the mythical one which Facebook absolutely wants you to believe doesn’t exist.

Nor are the phones that HTC may be releasing tomorrow at Mobile World Congress. (Update: Yep.) PocketNow was apparently able to snag some images of these Android-powered HTC devices that carry a special Facebook button at the bottom. Again, potentially cool and useful, but not the Facebook Phone. And that INQ-built Facebook phone? Also cool, but also not the Facebook Phone.

Now, the only thing we know for absolute certain is that Facebook hates talking about the concept of a “Facebook Phone”. We’ve had this argument with them in the past. They seem to think that a Facebook Phone with a capital “P” would only be a device with both hardware and software designed and developed by them. Or, at the very least, an OS written by them from the ground up. They’ve stated time and time again that they’re not working on such a project. At least not yet. And we buy that. What we don’t buy is that they don’t have some sort of project to take Google’s open source Android OS and inject it with Facebook DNA. That’s what we believe the Facebook Phone is going to be. And from what we’re hearing, it’s still coming.

Ever since we wrote the first Facebook Phone story last September, whispers have not stopped about what Facebook is doing. In particular, we had heard that two key employees, Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos, were working on the project. But we’ve since heard that Facebook’s head of mobile, Erick Tseng, has taken command of the project. And that yes, it continues to be a project to customize Android to make it, and the apps that run on it, more social at their cores. “Instant personalization” and all that. You may remember Tseng as the senior Android manager who jumped over to Facebook last May.

We’re also hearing that Tseng is pushing a team within Facebook, perhaps Platmobile, to be ready to have something to show off at Facebook’s f8 conference later this year. Judging from previous years, this should take place in April. You may recall that the Platmobile team is the one that was hard at work on eliminating the need for mobile password entry. Clearly, any Android Facebook Phone project would feature this as a hallmark.

You may recall the rumors that Facebook was working with Apple to bring this deep level of social to the iPhone last year. That project was apparently very real and may have been codenamed “Spork”. But apparently, that project was scrapped — perhaps after Facebook and Apple could not come to an agreement on terms for such features. Whatever the reason, work began on the Android project shortly thereafter (which was around the time we first heard about it).

So, Facebook apparently continues to not work on a phone in the same way that Google was not working on a phone for all those years. Will we see the fruits of such non-labor at f8 this year? Perhaps. Will it be a physical phone? Unlikely. A totally new OS made by Facebook? Probably not. But instead, we may see a version of Android with very deep Facebook integration. One that phone-makers would be welcome to use. A Trojan Horse for Facebook to make smartphones truly social.



Zynga’s Reported $7-$10 Billion Valuation Surpasses That Of EA

Posted: 14 Feb 2011 11:53 PM PST

My friends over at the WSJ have been knocking it out of the park lately, reporting last night that social gaming phenomenon Zynga is raising a new $250 million round of funding that values the company at between $7 – $9 billion according to, eh hem, sources.

Then today Bloomberg piggybacked on the news, naming names in terms of players in the talks, including Fidelity investments and T.Rowe Price (who coincidentally  also has signifigant shares in gaming company Electronic Arts).

Bloomberg also reiterated the same price for the round at $250 million and bumped the valuation range up to “close to ten million,” continuing down the well worn path of hinting at market exuberance by running down the checkpoints signifying a tech industry investment bubble, er frenzy: Facebook now at $52 billion, Groupon at $15 billion, Twitter at $8 – $10 billion as well as the laundry list of IPO filings including Demand, LinkedIn and Pandora.

Last time the media concretely checked in on Zynga’s valuation it was at $4 billion, when it filed papers issuing new stock. The Bloomberg article states that Zynga’s valuation on secondary market Sharespost is currently equal to about $6.2 billion versus NASDAQ’s $6.2 billion market cap for console and PC gaming giant Electronic Arts, which was once rumored to be considering Zynga as an acquisition prospect. A quick glance today shows those numbers are about $6.15 billion on Sharepost versus $6.17 billion on NASDAQ respectively.

This means, that even when you put aside the overlapping valuation range reported by Bloomberg and the WSJ, the market is willing to pay more for Zynga than traditional gaming company EA right now, however incremental.

Venturebeat’s Dean Takahashi pointed out in October that EA’s estimated $3 billion in revenue for 2010 runs laps around Zynga’s $850 million (with $400 million in profit), but as we’ve seen again and again with Facebook, the market is not gaging in multiples of current revenue, it is gaging in perceived opportunity with regards to potential audience and ad spending.

The metrics for what constitutes a gaming hit have changed since Super Mario Bros. According to AppData, Farmville and CityVille now have between 96 million and 51 million monthly users respectively. In contrast, it took a decade for a best selling EA title like the The Sims to pass125 million units sold.

Zynga has its sights set much higher than moving units or in its case virtual currency, it wants to to be the Google a.k.a the entrypoint of gaming. The company now has 275 million active monthly users across all its titles, numbers higher than the traditional video game industry has ever seen. It has acquired 9 companies in just as many months and has offices in 6 countries. User numbers are comparable to half the population of Facebook (valuation: $52 billion). Divide the current Facebook valuation numbers being tossed around by two and you’ll understand the company’s ambition.

In the meantime I’ll leave you with a pro tip that is perhaps the scariest part of living in the frenzied now: The easiest way to get people to shut up about skyrocketing valuations is to say, “It’s what the market will bear.”



Millennial: For The Second Month, Android Leads iOS For Mobile Ad Impression Share

Posted: 14 Feb 2011 08:45 PM PST

Millennial Media has released its monthly mobile report this evening, and it looks like Android has continued its reign at the top of the network in terms of mobile ad impression share, after overtaking iOS for the top spot in December 2010. Millennial, whose ads reach 63 million of a total of 77 million mobile web users in the U.S., or 81 percent of the U.S. mobile web; is reporting that Android ad impression share increased by 8 percent month-over-month to capture 54 percent of the network’s ad impressions in the U.S. in January. iOS trailed behind with 28 percent of mobile ad impression share, which is decrease of 4 percent. RIM followed with a 14 percent impression share, down 2 percent from last month.

Apple iOS ad requests increased 47% month-over-month, with Android requests growing by 32% month-over-month. RIM requests remained relatively flat month-over-month, Symbian requests increased 24% and iPad requests increasing by 43% from December.

Smartphones increased 10% month-over-month in January and accounted for 66% of the Smartphone, Feature Phone & Connected Device Impression Share on the network. iOS continues to dominate the Connected Device category, largely due to the popularity of the iPad.

Apple continues its reign as the leading device manufacturer on Millennial’s network, with 26 percent of the Top 15 Manufacturers impression share in January, a 24 percent increase month-over-month. But Android manufacturers are continuing to grow as well. HTC grew 36 percent in January to claim the number two position and Samsung moved to the number three position, with the the Samsung Epic and the Samsung Galaxy 5 entering the Top 30 Mobile Devices for the
first time in January.

RIM continued its domination in terms of the number of devices on the list, wth five of the Top 30 Mobile Devices with a combined impression share of 10 percent in January
Smartphones accounted for 23 of the Top 30 Mobile Devices with a combined impression share of 55 percent, up 15 percent in January.

While last month’s report certainly favored Android in terms of growth, January’s Mobile Mix report indicated that iOS is still growing, and beating Android, in terms of ad requests. According to a new IDC report, Millennial is the third largest network behind Google AdMob and Apple’s iAd, so data shared on Millennial’s network is certainly indicative of the state of mobile advertising.

But there’s no hiding that Android is continuing to grow in terms of both reach and sales, and that means that more users are interacting with advertising on the platform.



Nerds Ditch Grammys for New York’s First Music Hackday

Posted: 14 Feb 2011 07:49 PM PST

With more references to Justin Bieber than a Valentine’s day party at an all-girls Canadian middle school, Music Hackday rolled into New York City this past weekend. Event organizers John Britton and Dave Haynes noted this had been the biggest Music Hack Day yet, with 72 demos. Hundreds of hackers showed up and a waiting list of hopefuls swelled to 300. Hacks included invisible iPhone instruments, Kinect hacks, web-based sequencers and SMS valentines day tributes.

Hundreds of devs and tech cognoscenti made the event a win for the burgeoning tech scene in New York as well as event host, General AssemblyMusic Hackday marked the first public event of New York’s latest, plushest tech coworking space. Sponsorship even had some local flavor with equipment and prizes offered by beloved Mac shop Tekserve, as well as startups ExFM, Hunch and Boxee.

The audience soldiered through the two and a half hours of demos, selecting three winners via a Twilio sms voting system. A list of winners and favorites follows.

Winners

Invisible… Stuff Tim Soo – An “invisible” violin played by bowing with a Wiimote and fingering with an iPhone. Video here.

Djtxt Dan Aminzade – Set up a crowdsourced party playlist in one click.

Stringer - Aidan Feldman, Tyler Williams, and Alex Chen – A virtual string instrument played with a Kinect 3d camera

More interesting hacks

Automatic DJ Ben Gleitzman, Brian Brennan – Clever hack that uses facial recognition to build and play a custom music playlist based on the taste of the people recognized.

Boxee Music Quiz John McCann, Roberto Osorio-Goenaga – Parse a user’s iTunes db and create a Boxee playable quiz based on questions custom generated from the music library.

Snowball Colin Raffel – Hilarious. A web app to create “hype” for a new music release by aggregating relevant emails of music bloggers and sending them download links which require them to help spread the word.

Screaminator Uri Nieto – Another crowd favorite. iPhone app that determines whether you are screaming or not. Scream, Rate, Share.

MashMe Jon Gottfried - A personalized music mashup generator using Hunch and EchoNest.

JSONloops Marak Squires, Elijah Insua, hij1nx – Fruity Loops in a webpage.

Fans Forever and Ever Greg Sabo – Auto create Geocities-like “fan” pages for any artist replete with weird poetry, quotes and ominous warning signs.

Familiar.js Arkadiy Kukarkin – Easily Enter your favorite microgenre Witch House Bandnames into any search field.

Full list of all hacks



JumpBox Now Offers One-Click Installs On Amazon’s Free Usage Tier

Posted: 14 Feb 2011 07:15 PM PST

Last October Amazon launched a feature that’s exciting for developers: a free usage tier that provides a limited amount of access to EC2, S3, and Amazon’s other cloud products free of charge. It’s a big deal because it lets developers roll out new projects without any upfront cost (they only have to start paying when their project takes off). But it hasn’t been particularly useful for average consumers, who don’t know how to set up projects on Amazon’s Cloud.

Now JumpBox, a startup that offers ‘Open Source as a Service’, has launched a feature that makes this free usage tier accessible to just about anyone. The feature supports one-click installs for WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, and Joomla — you enter your Amazon secret key, create some JumpBox credentials, and you’re off and running. JumpBox benefits from getting exposed to new customers (who may also opt to install other apps at a premium) and Amazon benefits because these users may eventually hit the limits on the free usage tier and switch to paid plans.

The good news for JumpBox is that this feature is now being promoted on the AWS free usage tier homepage (you can see the promotion widgets at right). However, I’d expect many of the people arriving at that site know how to install WordPress or Drupal on their own servers already. Also note that this isn’t the only service to provide one-click installs on cloud platforms — we’ve previously written about Standing Cloud that offers some similar functionality.



First AOL Q1 Luge Update Since HuffPo Acquisition: We’ve Got Work To Do (No Kidding)

Posted: 14 Feb 2011 06:16 PM PST

It’s rare that we get access to insider information as AOL employees here at TechCrunch HQ, so we have to rely on our mad reporting skills and the strength of our inboxes in order to figure out the goings on over in Dulles and at 770 Broadway. We’ve received this “Winter Luge and HuffPost Quick Update” email multiple times today, but none through any legitimate AOL channels. So I guess this means we can take off our AOL hats and just repost it (yay pageviews!).

In the email, AOL head honcho Tim Armstrong welcomes content maven Arianna Huffington to the AOL family with colorful exaggerated reference to the over 4000 articles written about the AOL/Huffington Post acquisition last week, apparently signifying an AOL comeback. The email goes on to explore how close we are to our very ambitious Winter Luge Q1 goals which are indeed very very ambitious.

The prognosis? Not so close. We’ve got a lot of work to do AOL Lugers! There’s a lot of juicy stuff here, but for the sake of brevity let’s just take on our goal of double the pageviews to the AOL homescreen by March 31st.

The email trumpets a 6% traffic increase of 50 Million homepage pageviews from December to January. Working backwards based on those numbers, the AOL Homepage got approximately 833 million views in December, 883 million views in January, and we’re aiming to hit around 1.66 billion monthly views in just two months. (I’m assuming these are internal AOL analytics since the Comscore numbers for the AOL Welcome Screen actually show a decrease in views.)

Damn. Is this in any way possible to achieve? Well we could amp up IRL marketing, pick Huffington’s brain on maximizing search traffic and social while we wait about a month for The Huffington Post’s HSR to clear and work on redirection among all branded properties (Hi Josh). But even if we increased at rate of 10% a month, for the next six months, we still wouldn’t hit that number.

Sprechen sie AOL Way?

Full email below.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Armstrong, Tim
Date: Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 1:23 PM
Subject: Winter Luge and HuffPost Quick Update
To: “Armstrong, Tim”

AOLers -

We are on the comeback and if the 4,000 articles on AOL and The
Huffington Post over the last week didn't send that message, nothing
will. As we discussed last year, opportunities are opportunities
because not everyone can see them and we now have an even bigger
opportunity in front of us. Arianna Huffington and the team at The
Huffington Post see the same vision we see and we will accelerate
together.

Staying right on course, AOL is aiming to be the largest high-quality
content producer for digital media – locally, regionally, nationally,
and globally. By producing great content for consumers and offering
differentiated advertising solutions (Project Devil and Local), we
will have a profitable, growing, and sustainable business model built
for where the web is going. This week, there are a number of areas we
will begin planning this week in connection with the deal closing, and
as an employees-first culture, we wanted to share some of the areas of
opportunity we will be looking at:

· Journalist / Creative Culture Investment: We have a big
opportunity to create the next evolution of the content culture.
Creativity has been a big part of the AOL comeback and it will be an
even bigger part of the future with The Huffington Post Media Group.

· Local to Regional to National to Global: We can help
consumers and marketers from the world they live in to the house they
live in. AOL and The Huffington Post are uniquely structured to
create the new way information gets shared across the globe and across
your town. AOL's large, local reach and focus/investment in mobile
platforms are extremely powerful when coupled with The Huffington
Post's global reach.

· Video: AOL has invested in video production and distribution
around the globe over the last year and we have strengthened our
position in many markets. The Huffington Post was about to invest
heavily in video—now our combined company has the ability to create a
video version of The Huffington Post and continue growing video across
AOL properties; this offers our partners many valuable options.

· Brand Advertising: Project Devil went live on the AOL.com
homepage yesterday and we are just beginning to see the impact of the
brand ads movement online. The Huffington Post and AOL have combined
audiences that index very high on education and affluent income levels
and we can have a significant offering in the advertising market. If
you want to reach the most valuable consumers one-on-one, we'll be the
place. It's time for brands to step into the web and we have the
first and best step for them to make.

· Culture of Help: AOL's number one value is to help others
and we have done a great job of that with our volunteer days and our
homepage cause marketing support. The Huffington Post has provided a
platform for many of the causes and cause leaders to blog and has a
full-time cause marketing team and many partnerships. Together, we can
help drive the civic-minded solutions the world needs.

· North Star Goals: Our goals are still the same and will be
accelerated by this deal – grow unique visitors, grow brand
advertising, scale locally – and underline those three goals with
video and mobile.

Over the course of this week, we will start to sketch out the future
of the combined companies. Our executive team and Arianna's team are
working closely together on planning the integration of the two
companies and we would expect to move quickly with any changes once
the deal is closed.

We need to all remain laser-focused on our Winter Luge goals. We are
at the halfway point in our ambitious plan for the winter and I wanted
to give you a quick status update on what we have achieved so far:

Grow ad sales revenue by a double-digit increase—Entire sales and
sales support team has been trained on AOL Way for Advertising and
presales has been reorganized to line up to the top 100 accounts.

Double homepage traffic—Grew monthly PVs on AOL.com by 50MM (6%) in
January vs. December and late night grew 212%. Minutes per visitor per
month have increased 33% yoy to 40.4 minutes in January—this leads all
competitors (MSN – 36.5 minutes; Yahoo – 32.9 minutes; NYT – 30
minutes); we still have a lot of work to do, but this is a huge win.

AOL Way for Media—Entire media team has been trained on the AOL Way
and the operations team has created great reporting tools to track our
progress.

Achieve 99.9% reliability for email—Thoroughly analyzed all components
of the mail system and have started implementing a series of fixes and
process improvements. The team is working on the V2 architecture for
long term reliability and functionality improvements.

Double Patch engagement—Visits/UV grew 6% in January while UVs grew 32%.

Ads/Content Platform + Devil everywhere—Only 24 Blogsmith migrations
remain; Seed 2.0 in Alpha; Dynamic ad sizing for Devil 2.0 in
production. We are now focusing on implementing AdLearn 5.0, improving
our DSP solution, and making booking an ad campaign 70% faster

Close partnership / M&A deals inline with our strategy—GoViral and
Huffington Post deals signed; also partnerships with Everyday Health,
SportingNews and Move.com signed.

Culture luge—We have made great strides in growing our culture of
performance and accountability, we have celebrated our successes with
the weekly Attitude Alerts and Accelerator Thursdays and are
furthering our culture of teamwork as we moved the New York office to
sit in their teams and towns.

Recruit top talent—Job applications for open positions have gone WAY
up, the world is watching and is noticing the huge cultural shift; we
have filled 33% of the top 12 open positions.

We have accomplished a lot in the Winter Luge in the first half and
need to maintain this sharp focus through the end. Let's finish the
Luge strong!

As we discussed at the all-hands meeting a few weeks ago, we have a
long-term vision for this space and we will continue to move AOL into
a leadership position in the digital content business. The comeback
is on and we're going to deliver to our consumers, customers,
partners, shareholders – and most importantly – you. Let's keep
getting it done and have fun doing it. Go AOL

- TA

Image above from actual AOL Luge event.



Apple Now The Most Valuable Tech Company By $100 Billion; Google Closing In On Microsoft

Posted: 14 Feb 2011 05:56 PM PST

It’s hard to believe that it wasn’t even a year ago when I wrote the following post: What Happens When Apple Passes Microsoft In Value? Yes, When. It’s even harder to believe just how many people thought I was crazy for saying that — it happened just two months later! And while plenty seemed to think that the passing of the torch to Apple as the most valuable tech company would be short-lived, let’s look at where we are today. As of market close this afternoon, Apple is now a full $100 billion past Microsoft.

Yes, Apple is the most valuable tech company in the world by $100 billion dollars. To put that in some perspective: the market cap of HP is $105 billion. Apple is now worth an HP more than every other tech company.

When I wrote the initial post last March, Apple’s market cap was at $208 billion, while Microsoft stood at $261 billion. By the time Apple passed Microsoft in May, both had market caps around $227 billion. As of today, Apple’s market cap is now $330 billion while Microsoft’s is $228 billion. In these past 9 months, Apple has gained $100 billion in value. Microsoft? $1 billion.

In fact, not only is it clear now that Microsoft will not be re-taking the crown as the most-valuable tech company any time soon, but they’re flirting with being knocked down to the number three — or even number four spot. In the past year, while Microsoft’s stock is down slightly, Google’s is up nearly $100-a-share. This has allowed the search giant to surpass the $200 billion market cap themselves. And they’re now just $28 billion away from Microsoft.

To put it another way, Google is much closer to Microsoft in terms of market cap than Apple was when I wrote that post last year. Another killer quarter and Google may be able to take them down as well.

Meanwhile, IBM is a little bit closer at $202 billion. Their stock is up nearly 40 points in the past year. They have a shot of passing Microsoft too.

And just to pre-empt all the “market cap doesn’t mean anything” comments that are inevitable, time has proven that it may mean something. When Apple passed Microsoft last year, Microsoft was still comfortably ahead of Apple in terms of both revenue and profit. Wall Street didn’t care. Investors saw the writing on the wall. Sure enough, by October, Apple rocketed past Microsoft in revenue for the first time about two decades. This part quarter, Microsoft was able to hold a narrow edge in profit, but that is very likely to fall next quarter as well. Apple is the most valuable tech company for a very good reason.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering, Apple is still a little over $90 billion away from becoming the overall most valuable public company in the world. Exxon’s market cap stands at $422 billion — and the stock, much like Apple’s, continues to be on a tear.



OMG/JK: Where There Are Tablets, There’s Love

Posted: 14 Feb 2011 05:19 PM PST

There’s no better way to spend your Valentine’s Day than a new episode OMG/JK (I’ve been practicing my rhyming). So grab some chocolates, pull up a chair, and hold your laptop close as you sit back for this week’s show.

This episode is all about tablets. From rumors about the iPad 2 (and 3!) to HP’s upcoming WebOS tablets, it’s been a big week. We also touch on the new relationship between Microsoft and Nokia, and how it might affect the smartphone market.

Here are some posts relevant to this week’s show:

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Angry Nerds: IBM’s Watson Finishes Night One Of Jeopardy Challenge Tied For First Place

Posted: 14 Feb 2011 04:47 PM PST

Did you all just see that? The IBM Jeopardy Challenge kicked off tonight, and Watson, the IBM-developed artificial intelligence absolutely more than held his own against his human competition. Mechanical men!

Read more…



Jack Ma Flies Thousands of Miles to Palo Alto, Still Doesn’t Want to See Carol Bartz

Posted: 14 Feb 2011 04:11 PM PST

Burn! According to sources, Alibaba Group’s CEO Jack Ma is in town and he’s not even paying a courtesy call to his estranged partners at Yahoo.

Ma was spotted dining with Taobao CEO Jonathan Luk and other Alibaba executives at Fuki Sushi in Palo Alto last night, and a spokesperson for the company confirmed they were in town for meetings. Another source close to the company, who requested anonymity, said Alibaba was here to meet with several big Silicon Valley companies about potential partnerships with Taobao– and that a meeting with Yahoo was specifically not on the agenda.

Ma’s issues with Yahoo and desire to buy back Yahoo’s shares in Alibaba have been well documented. Also documented is Ma’s desire to explore other US  partnerships, even though the one with Yahoo has turned sour. His ecommerce and epayment properties are so dominant in China that international expansion is the natural next step.

A lot has changed since the last time Ma was in negotiations with Silicon Valley. Back then it was companies like Yahoo that were surging, while China seemed an uncertain gamble. Today, two of the five largest Internet companies are Chinese, and TaoBao and payments company Alipay are two of the hottest private assets on the global Web. As we saw with Tencent’s purchase of Riot Games this month, a decade after most Valley companies failed to do well in China, China is getting more aggressive about expanding in the US.

Carol Bartz’ loss seems to be John Donahoe’s gain. eBay’s CEO Donahoe was cozying up to Ma in China last fall, appearing on stage at a conference together, and apparently swapping caricatures. Donahoe called Ma a good friend, and Ma said, “We have the same dream, the same purpose, face the same group of SME clients… This is the case today, and even more so tomorrow. I believe Alibaba team and Taobao team are always cooperating with the eBay team, and I think in the future we will cooperate more closely.”

If you catch a sighting of the two, drop us a note at tips@techcrunch.com.

[Update: Yahoo PR notes that Bartz is in Barcelona, which is interesting but seems to miss the point of the post. Alibaba has still made a point to come here looking for Valley partnerships and not meet with the one company with which it has a partnership. There are certainly other members of the board and management team who aren't in Barcelona, and considering Alibaba is one of the main forces propping up Yahoo's stock price, you'd think they'd be open to a meeting if Ma were interested. The bad blood between the two is well documented by this point. I've asked Yahoo PR for any sign that's changed. No word.]



Experiments In Realtime News: The Eqentia Streams

Posted: 14 Feb 2011 04:00 PM PST

When it comes to realtime news, the prevailing wisdom these days is to let your friends tell you what to read through Twitter or Facebook. Instead of editors, people are using these social stream sto filter their news, and a whole bunch of apps (like Flipboard) are tapping into that to present your social news feed in more appealing ways. But a Toronto startup called Eqentia is approaching the problem from a different angle. It indexes 100,000 articles a day across blogs and news sites, puts them through a semantic engine to categorize them into every topic imaginable, and only then does it look at how much social attention each article is getting. Social comes last, not first.

What you get is a personal news page organized by topics and sub-topics that you want to follow (business, technology, iPad news, mobile web, cloud computing). Headlines can be sorted by time, social attention, or preferred sources. Eqentia is designed to create a competitive intelligence dashboard were you can create essentially an alerts page for specialized news about any micro-topic, but these also roll up into broader topics. Each topic page shows recent tweets about that topic in a sidebar widget. The news search is also pretty powerful because of all the implicit categorization and content mining that Eqentia does.

Eqentia has been around a couple of years, but it recently cleaned up its design and launched a few new features, including a personal news stream that syncs with your Twitter favorites and Google Reader shared items. Any Tweet with a link that you favorite on Twitter will appear in your personal stream, along with starred and shared items in Google Reader. Eqentia also offers a browser bookmarklet that lets you start tracking news about topics simply by highlighting them in your browser page. If you make your personal stream public, others can follow it, opening up the service to social curation of the news.

Some of the topic streams can be delivered to other news readers such as Flipboard if you don’t like its user interface. The site could still use some streamlining in terms of making it easy for people to jump in and start using it, but there are some powerful technologies under the hood.



I Just Androidified Myself. Droid’s Never Looked So Good.

Posted: 14 Feb 2011 03:30 PM PST

By now you’re probably familiar with Google’s friendly green Android robot, who pops up at Android events and in various press material (a giant version also sits in front of the Android building on Google’s campus). And, if you’re like me, you’ve always wished there was a way to remake this robot in your own image — I know I often find myself doodling glasses and messy dark hair on the robot whenever I see it. But now there’s a better way.

Today Google released a fun new app called Androidify. It’s not exactly useful, but it’s a fun diversion: fire it up and you can choose from a variety of body types, outfits, and accessories to make your own custom Android robot (if you’ve ever created a Mii on Nintendo’s Wii, this should be pretty familiar). Once you’re done you can send the avatar to various social networks, change it to your phone’s wallpaper, a buddy’s contact icon and so on.

The application was created by Google’s Creative Lab in tandem with Larva Labs. You can find the app right here on Android Market (remember, this is the new web version of the Market, so you can send the app directly to your phone).

For bonus points, make one of these for your Valentine and film their reaction.




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