Posted: 16 Sep 2010 09:00 AM PDT  Time spent watching live video is up 650 percent in the U.S. over the past year, thanks to the proliferation of a number of live video publishers including Justin.tv, Ustream, Qik and Livestream. In particular, Justin.tv has been one of the leaders of the pack, serving more than 130 million live videos over the past year. And a few weeks ago, the startup launched an Android app for broadcasting live video. Today, Justin.tv has added the same functionality to the iPhone, launching a new iPhone app that allows you to broadcast video from the device on Justin.tv. You can download the free app here.The biggest change in the new app, is as we wrote above, the ability to broadcast video on Justin.tv directly from your iPhone, which was not included in the previous version of the app, which was view-only. The app itself is designed to provide a standalone service from the Justin.tv website, allowing users to broadcast immediately after downloading the app without having to visit the website. However, a user’s broadcast videos from the app are archived on the website forever. Via the app, you can share your broadcasts via Facebook and Twitter, chat with friends in real-time, switch between the front-end and back-end camera (for iPhone 4 users), and broadcast in landscape mode Plus, the app adjusts the bitrate at which the video is uploaded, and will switch between Edge, 3G and Wi-Fi without dropping your video stream. Justin.tv says that the Android app has been adopted by 20 percent of the company's unique broadcasters and expects faster adoption of its iPhone application. The live video space, however; is competitive. Ustream and Qik already have mobile broadcasting apps for the iPhone. But even though Justin.tv may have released their app later than their rivals, the startup promises additional functionality with its new iPhone and Android apps, including hardware video encoding, real time chat and more. And CEO Michael Seibel remains confident that Justin.tv will continue to grow, despite YouTube’s entry in the live video streaming space. As he tells TechCrunch, many of Justin.tv’s competitors are focused on partnerships for live streams of events and premium content, whereas Justin.tv is more focused on the UGC realm. This, he says, will help the startup maintain a unique competitive advantage.  |
Posted: 16 Sep 2010 08:59 AM PDT  Over the last few months location-based game SCVNGR has been partnering with a number of major brands and companies, including the Patriots and AT&T, to participate in its rewards program that gives real-world discounts to players for completing SCVNGR challenges (its competitors Foursquare and Gowalla have also landed major deals). This week SCVNGR launched a key new component to its rewards strategy: a self-serve tool that allows local businesses to set up their own rewards. Any business can use SCVNGR’s basic features for free by using the edit functions in the service’s mobile clients to build challenges. But SCVNGR also offers a premium, web-based toolset for $80 a month that makes it easier to build and manage challenges. The new rewards feature is part of this toolset and is pretty straightforward: businesses sign on, enter basic information like the name of their reward, and decide how many SCVNGR points a player must redeem to complete a challenge. Businesses benefit because users have an incentive to come back for discounts down the line, and SCVNGR benefits because people keep checking and engaging with the service to earn more deals. CEO Seth Priebatsch says that SCVNGR sees itself as a nice extension to the group buying model popularized by Groupon, as this rewards ladder can help businesses establish a longer-lasting relationship with the customer (in fact, SCVNGR has been reaching out to Groupon-using businesses to tell them that they should try out the service). To help spur usage of the platform, SCVNGR has been seeding metropolitan areas, reaching out to businesses that have a history of using social media services (like Twitter) to see if they want to use SCVNGR. Priebatsch explains that SCVNGR works best when a metropolitan area reaches a certain critical mass, at which point the service starts to snowball as more business look to get in on the action. The seed program is meant to help achieve this activation energy. Seed businesses get free access to SCVNGR’s premium tools for a year, as well as a bundle of swag, like SCVNGR coasters. Today SCVNGR is launching with 50 businesses in San Francisco (it launched with 50 businesses in Philadelphia yesterday, and 50 more in Boston last week). This is an important move for SCVNGR, as it gives businesses a much bigger incentive to sign up for its premium tools. But it’s still difficult to gauge SCVNGR’s success, because it won’t release user stats. The leader in this space is clearly Foursquare, which also offers self-serve tools to businesses looking to create special deals.  |
Posted: 16 Sep 2010 08:09 AM PDT  One thing Hewlett Packard has done well over the last five years since CEO Carly Fiorina stepped down: make money. A lot of that is thanks to Todd Bradley, EVP Personal Systems Group. If you think you’ve seen him before, you probably have. Bradley often speaks at tech events, and he’s the only HP exec I’ve ever seen out in the tech community. At a recent Fortune Brainstorm event in Colorado he was handing out Palm Pre’s to attendees, and was the most popular guy in the room.He was former CEO Mark Hurd’s first high level hire in 2005. Bradley runs the computer group – personal computers, mobile devices, technical workstations, personal storage solutions and Internet services. He grew revenue in his group to $42 billion and took the no. 1 computer manufacturer spot from Dell. Profitability in his group has grown 300% on his watch. He’s also not shy about taking risks. His acquisition of Palm earlier this year put HP in the game at least with a mobile/tablet operating system that developers like. That puts them light years ahead of Dell. The HP board doesn’t have many missteps left before it loses all credibility. Bungling the termination of Hurd, and then watching helplessly as Hurd joined competitor Oracle, was just the beginning. The icing on the cake was this absurd and unwinable lawsuit. And HP is facing a lawsuit of its own over the incident. Consumers need to trust the brands they buy. They haven’t forgotten about the wiretapping scandal of 2005, and all they see is a mess right now at HP. The New York Times ripped apart the HP board a few days ago, calling it “blundering” and that it’s “back to doing what it does best: shooting itself in the foot.” Fortune named him one of the smartest people in tech earlier this year. If I was on the HP board, I’d promote Bradley fast. Before someone else grabs him. See this interview with Bradley at the Fortune Brainstorm conference.  |
Posted: 16 Sep 2010 08:05 AM PDT  Barnes & Noble‘s recently appointed CEO (and former BN.com President) William Lynch this morning sent a long letter to all of its shareholders in connection with the company's Annual Meeting, which will be held on September 28. The company has been embroiled in litigation with private equity firm Yucaipa after the firm's CEO Ron Burkle recently challenged the company's stockholders rights plan. In the wake of a nasty proxy battle, B&N published the letter in an effort to detail its strategy to grow its business and to create shareholder value. Interestingly, Lynch shares a lot of information and numbers about its current and expected future business. You’ll have to forgive me if some of the information was already publicly disclosed in the past, but the letter provides a solid overview of where B&N stands today. On physical booksBarnes & Noble expects an industry shake-out will come shortly, which will result in a consolidation of the physical book business, as there are increasingly fewer bookstore competitors on the market while other retail outlets (mass merchants, drug discounters, etc.) are expected to wind down their book-selling efforts.The company expects the physical book market to contract significantly over the next four years, from approximately $21 billion to $19 billion. B&N adds that it hopes to grow its current share of the U.S book market (18%) to 20-25% over the next three years. On digital booksBarnes & Noble in the letter says every metric they are tracking with regards to its digital business is exceeding its expectations. One year after kicking off its digital content sales efforts, the company already holds 20% of the digital trade book market, they claim.Note: this is in fact a higher share than the 18% of the physical book market B&N claims to possess. One reason why things are headed in the right direction for B&N in the digital space, according to them, is the fact that the company is able to “hand-sell and educate millions of people interested in digital reading, in-person every day” thanks to its network of physical retail stores. Other reasons cited by the company are its digital catalog strategy and its management team (B&N boasts about the fact that they’ve attracted managers and technologists from companies such as Microsoft, Palm, Adobe, Cisco, Apple, Motorola, Travelocity and Time Warner Digital). Barnes & Noble says it now offers a selection of over one million books that can be read on NOOK digital reading software (which supports over 400 mobile devices, including of course its own NOOK eBook Reader). A few months ago, the company debuted the NOOK WiFi at $149, and a new lower price for its NOOK 3G model at $199. Pursuing that strategy, Barnes & Noble says it expects to capture over 25% of the market for eBooks, eTextbooks and Digital Newsstand in total by 2013, projecting over $1 billion in digital revenue by that time. On textbooksBarnes & Noble currently has approximately 15% of the $12 billion U.S. textbook market, and the company plans to aggressively grow that share, although it didn’t project how much market share it hopes to have in the future. |
Posted: 16 Sep 2010 07:58 AM PDT  Trying to communicate an issue or problem with a web application over the phone can be a trying experience for both the consumer and the IT support rep. If a user isn’t tech-savvy, it can be difficult to explain to a customer support rep the exact origin of the issue. Remote connectivity technologies, which allow support reps to log-on to a customers computer remotely, can be very helpful is trying to solve a web or computer problem. Help-desk startup Zendesk has partnered with LogMeIn, a provider of SaaS-based, remote-connectivity technology, to bring remote support to Zendesk’s software. Zendesk essentially offers a Web-based help desk online ticketing system for customer support. The partnership gives IT help desks and support staff the ability to launch remote support sessions with LogMeIn’s technology directly from a Zendesk ticketing interface. Support technicians can collaborate with their customers in real time to quickly diagnose and resolve issues related to their products by viewing and controlling a user's computer or smartphone. And reps can input ticket details from the LogMeIn sessions directly into the Zendesk tickets, including timestamps, chat logs, notes, as well as any custom fields and survey answers. Zendesk, which just crossed the 5,000 customers milestone, recently added additional functionality to its support platform with a deep Twitter integration.  |
Posted: 16 Sep 2010 06:00 AM PDT  5min has struck a deal with Dailymotion to bring 200,000 how-to videos about sports, fashion, health, travel and more to the Paris-based video sharing site. This follows 5min’s recent deal to power Answer.com’s newly launched Video Answers. 5Min is one of the largest how-to video networks, with more than 110 million video views a month and 30 million unique visitors across 800 partner sites. 5Min syndicates videos from about 1,000 online video producers, including CBS, Hearst, Scripps, and WatchMojo. Dailymotion’s audience will now have access to 5min Media’s library of more than 200,000 videos organized across 21 verticals including 5minSports, 5minTravel, 5minVideo Games, 5minFashion and 5minHealth. 5min Media's content on Dailymotion will be categorized within branded channels. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Dailymotion, which has a large user base in Europe, has tried to distinguish itself from competing online video offerings (Namely, YouTube) by providing a mixture of user-generated content and advertiser-friendly professional video, such as independent films. Of course, YouTube and others have more recently begun posting professional and premium content, encroaching on Dailymotion’s territory. As of last fall, Dailymotion was profitable (and some thing that the site will soon be acquired). |
Posted: 16 Sep 2010 05:56 AM PDT  Ku6 Media, which operates a popular online video portal in China, has reached content cooperation agreements with Sony Pictures Television and another undisclosed Hollywood studio. The reason I think this is significant is because it makes Ku6 the first Chinese local video site to acquire legitimate copyright content from major studios. The deals that were struck enable Ku6 to acquire the internet broadcasting rights in mainland China for several hundreds of Hollywood features and TV episodes. As Ku6 CEO Kevin (Shanyou) Li quite straightforwardly puts it: “That content will please our users and will enhance our brand as we build a major media platform to provide differentiated marketing services to our advertising partners.”Ku6 claims it was the first Chinese video portal operator to delete pirated content posted by its users on its premier online brands, ku6.com and juchang.com, which it started doing in December 2009. The company also established the “International Film & TV Co-Acquisition Fund” with Sohu.com with an initial funding of $10 million. So yes, there are online video companies in China that know things like intellectual property rights exist, and even manage to respect them.  |
Posted: 16 Sep 2010 05:22 AM PDT Environmental organization Greenpeace has released a video harshly criticizing Facebook's use of coal-fuelled electricity in its Oregon-based data center, singling out founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The organization calls Facebook a “so coal network”.  Greenpeace's Executive Director, Kumi Naidoo, had earlier expressed his concern with the Oregon data center in an open letter to Zuckerberg, kicking off a campaign – on Facebook – to create awareness for the company’s use of “dirty energy”.  The Facebook group attracted over 600,000 people, which Greenpeace says all call for the social network company to seek renewable energy and look for places that have an abundance of fresh, sustainable options for its data center(s). Facebook's director of policy communications, Barry Schnitt, elaborately responded to the letter (see comments), pointing out the company does what it can to safeguard the environment as much as possible. Some choice quotes from his response: “It's true that the local utility for the region we chose, Pacific Power, has an energy mix that is weighted slightly more toward coal than the national average (58% vs. about 50%). However, the efficiency we are able to achieve because of the climate of the region minimizes our overall carbon footprint.”Schnitt also subtly points out Greenpeace's own infrastructure challenges. The organization runs a number of servers in a rented data center in Northern Virginia, which in turns runs 46% on – you guessed it – coal. The back-and-forth continued, with Greenpeace responding to Schnitt’s statements and saying Facebook should wield its power to demand more renewable energy resources where it’s building its data center. They also point out companies like Google and Yahoo are doing a far better job. And now there’s the video, embedded above, which in my opinion focuses far too strongly on Zuckerberg as a person and boasts some obviously flawed assumptions about his past and present thinking. I mean, what’s the point of making fun of him for being a “nerd”? There’s nothing green or peaceful about ad hominem attacks if you ask me. The timing of the video’s release is likely not coincidental, either, as it comes just a week before the premiere of The Social Network – a film written by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin about the origins of Facebook (which also features a lot of fiction). In short, while I applaud much of what Greenpeace is doing as an organization, I’m not entirely sure releasing this type of video now is the right way of building a constructive relationship with Facebook, which in my mind would be far more beneficial for both. Thoughts?  |
Posted: 16 Sep 2010 04:36 AM PDT  NRG Energy, owner and operator of one of the United States’ largest and most diverse power generation portfolios, this morning announced that it has agreed to acquire Green Mountain Energy Company, a retail provider of clean energy products and services, for $350 million in cash. Green Mountain, which was founded in 1997, will be run as a standalone business within NRG. The company offers consumers and businesses the choice of clean electricity products from renewable sources such as wind and water, as well as a variety of carbon offset products. With the purchase of Green Mountain Energy, NRG Energy says it is “poised to become the clean energy provider of choice for Americans who want to make a difference for the environment”. NRG states that the acquisition, with an anticipated annual EBITDA contribution of $70 million, is immediately accretive to EBITDA and free cash flow. The company anticipates funding the deal with cash on hand upon transaction close, which is expected by mid-November.  |
Posted: 16 Sep 2010 04:33 AM PDT  Once again I’m teaming up with Yael at the Tel Aviv Beer Tweetup to join you guys in some merriment on Thursday, September 16 (TONIGHT) from 7:30pm – 11:30pm at the Inbal Hotel in Jerusalem. You can RSVP here on Facebook or email rsvp at crunchgear dot com with the subject line “TWEETUP.” Read more…  |
Posted: 16 Sep 2010 04:13 AM PDT  Motorola this morning announced that it has bought Aloqa, a privately-held startup that develops location-based software and technologies designed to enable the discovery of relevant web content by mobile smartphone users. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Aloqa was venture-backed; the company raised $1.5 million in Series A funding from multiple angel investors and VC firm Wellington Partners a little over a year ago. Motorola says it will use Aloqa’s expertise to enhance MOTOBLUR, which delivers customized content to mobile device homescreens, with a context-aware platform and related services. Aloqa will be folded into Motorola Mobility, which is comprised of Motorola’s Mobile Devices and Home businesses and is expected to be fully spun off from Motorola in the first quarter of 2011. It sounds like all Aloqa employees will be retained. Christy Wyatt, corporate vice president of software and services product management for Motorola Mobility, had this to say about the acquisition: Aloqa is an exciting addition to Motorola Mobility as its specialized engineering talent and location-tracking technology will significantly accelerate the release of our context-aware mobile services platform.Aloqa’s technologies and services utilize the user’s context (location, identity and social relationships) to proactively inform them of places, events, bargains and the like. For example, if Aloqa’s software recognizes the user is in a certain region, it will offer him the top events of the day or special offers of leading discounters in the vicinity. There’s a demo video on the startup’s homepage if you want to learn more about Aloqa. Aloqa distributes its product as a mobile application for multiple smartphone platforms, including iOS, Nokia and Android, and it says more than one million users have already downloaded its software. On a sidenote: Aloqa was led by CEO Sanjeev Agrawal, former Global Head of Google Product Marketing and subsequently VP Products at TellMe Networks (acquired by Microsoft).  |
Posted: 16 Sep 2010 03:30 AM PDT If you are vaguely familiar with the Middle East startup scene, it’s impossible to escape the name Fadi Ghandour. From his office in Jordon, Ghandour has had a heavy hand in laying the foundation of the Arab world’s rising tech scene. As a fresh-faced graduate of George Washington University, Ghandour returned to Jordan as a young man to start Aramex in 1982. It took 16 years for his transportation and logistics company to get the proper licenses to operate in the region, but by 1997, Aramex was ready to go public, becoming the first Arab company to hit the NASDAQ. In the last two decades, Ghandour has also become a prominent angel investor in the region. Notably, he was one of the first investors in Maktoob— the Arab internet portal that was sold to Yahoo last year for $164 million. Recently, he’s made 14 other investments, including bets on Asuaq, Jeeran and Twitvid. On this week’s episode of Entrepreneur To Entrepreneur with Shervin Pishevar, the founder of SGN talks to the man he calls the “Ron Conway of the Middle East” from his Aramex office in Jordan. Ghandour discusses the region’s investment climate, how Aramex was an incubator for Maktoob, what he’s buying now and why he says “until today, I never even knew i was an entrepreneur.” Videos below: Part I: Meet The Ron Conway Of The Middle East Part II: Gambling In The Middle East Part III: Tour Of Ghandour’s Office For your viewing pleasure, here are all the episodes back to back: Previous episodes: Episode 1: The New Kitchen Of The Middle East Episode 2: Yahoo's Former Chief Data Officer On Their $800 Million Mistake                |
Posted: 16 Sep 2010 12:21 AM PDT  The whole “flash sale” phenomenon is interesting. Traditionally, the idea of “impulse buying” has been viewed as a somewhat bad thing. Purchases are supposed to be thought out and studied — made only after you’ve considered things for a while, right? The Internet has flipped that idea on its head. But that’s not a bad thing.Bloomspot is one of the newer players in the flash sale scene. Launched in January of this year, they currently cater to three cities: San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. But unlike competitors in the space, they’re not all about as moving as much of a product as possible in a short amount of time. Instead, they’ve about creating relationships between clients and customers. The features (they don’t call them “deals”) are simply the first step to facilitate this relationship. And Bloomspot also differs in that they’re going for a very specific type of both client and customer: luxury hotels, restaurants, and spas that cater to more affluent, mature clientele. And now Bloomspot has just raised a $9 million Series A round of funding to further pursue this market. I sat down with Jasper Malcomson, Bloomspot’s CEO and co-founder (and a former manager of travel and commerce at Yahoo), to talk a bit about the service today. He has very clear vision for what he wants the company to go after. They’re not trying to be Jetsetter, selling people dreams of traveling around the world on a whim. They’re trying be cater to the more practical-minded but still affluent audience who perhaps just want a weekend getaway. Bloomspot is focusing on places people want to go already — such as a winery in Napa Valley — but hesitate for whatever reason. These aren’t places across the world, these are places relatively close by. By giving them a limited-time offer attractive package, it pushes them over the edge. It’s not so much about deeply discounting rooms as it is about adding experiences on top of the price (such as spa treatments, etc) that make it that much more appealing.  This idea is important because Bloomspot isn’t aiming to become the way that everyone can experience luxury cheaply. They just want to entice the people who would likely be suited for these types of places, to go. The venues love that because they know that these type of people will fit in with the overall experience and will still be willing to spend the money on other things like food once they’re there. In other words, they won’t be cheap. And, if those people enjoy the experience enough, the likelihood that they’ll come back greatly increases. In that regard, Bloomspot is almost like an interactive advertisement or a try-before-you-buy service for these venues. “The long term way to attack the space is customer quality,” Malcomson says. In group buying, that doesn’t matter because a merchant doesn’t care who buys an article of clothing as long as it’s sold. It’s different with these more experience-oriented clients that Bloomspot deals with. And Bloomspot offers them a way to help move unsold slots if it’s a slow time of the year or business is down for whatever reason. Bloomspot just needs a few days to put a new feature in place. Malcomson says that 68 percent of Bloomspot’s audience is 30 years old or older. You can compare that to group buying sites where around 70 percent of customers are 18 to 35. Again, affluent and older, that’s what Bloomspot is going for. Bloomspot gets a 30 percent commission on sales pretty much across the board, no matter which feature they’re selling, Malcomson says. This means that they’re already pulling in a fair amount of revenue, though they are not yet profitable. While Bloomspot is currently live for the three aforementioned cities, they will also be launching in Boston and Washington D.C. on October 3. After that, Chicago, Dallas, and Houston are up next. This Series A round of funding was led by Menlo Ventures with participation by seed investors True Ventures and Harrison Metal. This $9 million is on top of the $2 million seed round from March 2009 that included investors Jeff Weiner (CEO of LinkedIn), Erik Blachford (Chairman of TerraPass and former CEO of Expedia Inc.), and Brad Garlinghouse (President at AOL, Consumer Applications Group).  |
Posted: 15 Sep 2010 09:00 PM PDT  One Kings Lane isn’t just a hot flash commerce site. It’s a hot commerce site that has been backed by Kleiner Perkins, First Round Capital and Reid Hoffman. And cofounder Ali Pincus is married to Mark Pincus of Zynga fame.The site launched in May 2009 and offers users deeply discounted high end home furnishings via daily sales. Like Groupon most of the inbound traffic comes from daily emails sent out to registered users. And repeat buyers are basically camping out on the site, driving 80% of total orders. The really rabid ones don’t even wait for the email, they just hit the site at 8 am to buy stuff before it sells out. Revenue is nicely up and to the right, up 500% over last year. New CEO Doug Mack started in May when the company had 30 employees. Today they have 65 and are hiring like crazy. They’ll announce three new executive hires tomorrow – Ed Komo as vice president of engineering, Jim Liefer as vice president of operations and Yulie Kim as head of product. This group has experience from Walmart.com, eBay and Hotwire…and in the case of Ed, the dreaded Jigsaw. I’m a customer of One Kings Lane, and have made a few purchases for my new house. They always have really interesting curated stuff for sale at every price range, and they buying process is simple. Like Groupon and Gilt they seem to have found a business model that really works. It works so well, in fact, that it isn’t out of the question that the Pincus household could have not just one but two IPOs in the coming years – Zynga and One Kings Lane. Mack is aggressively building out his executive team, he tells me. They are recruiting a VP Marketing and a CFO right now. So if you’re looking, they may be the right fit for you.  |
Posted: 15 Sep 2010 08:19 PM PDT  One month ago, Facebook unveiled Facebook Places, its long-awaited location feature that lets friends check-in to real-world venues. Unfortunately, Facebook’s main website still hasn’t quite caught up to the new feature — for example, there’s still no way to get an at-a-glance view of where your friends are. Places also has a few shortcomings that normal users might not have noticed, including the fact that adding an application to a Facebook Place Page is a pain.It’s possible to do it: Facebook is willing to port over the apps you have installed on your normal Facebook Page once you provide it with documentation proving you own the venue in question. But Facebook hasn’t done anything to showcase which applications actually make sense to include on a Place Page, and it’s unnecessarily difficult to find the option to install an application to a Place Page yourself. TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Appbistro wants to help. Appbistro offers a marketplace for Facebook Page applications, allowing developers to charge for their apps (which Facebook doesn’t facilitate) and for users to review the apps they’ve used. Today the site is launching a section dedicated to applications that are suited for Facebook Places — at this point, there is no comparable section in the official Facebook Directory. Note that you can actually install any application to a Place Page, but many of them don’t make sense, which is why Appbistro is curating them. Appbistro is also making the flow for installing an app to a Place page a little easier than it currently is. Normally, it’s pretty straightforward to install an app to a Facebook Page directly from Facebook: you find the application and hit the ‘Install to my page’ button. But there isn’t currently an ‘Install to my Place Page’ button, which means you have to go through a roundabout process of navigating the directory using a link at the bottom of your Facebook Places Page. Yeah, it’s extremely confusing. The install flow for installing an app using Appbistro is a bit more straightforward, mostly because you don’t have to go hunting for the directory. That said, it’s not perfect — at one point you have to click an “Install on Facebook” button in two different places, which isn’t intuitive.   |
Posted: 15 Sep 2010 06:52 PM PDT  In yet another executive departure, David Ku, who’s been with Yahoo since 2002, is leaving the company. His most recent title was SVP, Advertising Products.Yahoo confirms the departure: Yahoo! confirms that David Ku, SVP for Yahoo's advertising products group, has decided to leave the company. He'll be working very closely with Mark Morrissey, who will expand his current role as SVP of the Search Alliance transition to include this group.This isn’t just another run of the mill departure. Like Ash Patel, who left Yahoo earlier this year, Ku was both a long term Yahoo’er and was known as a guy who gets things done. I can’t imagine what morale must be like over there right now.  |
Posted: 15 Sep 2010 06:34 PM PDT At this morning’s launch of IE9, Microsoft tried to reignite the browser wars with its latest iteration of Internet Explorer. You can test drive it yourself by downloading the beta version on BeautyOfTheWeb.com, but if that sounds like too much effort, you can also sit back and watch our video tour with Senior Director of Internet Explorer, Ryan Gavin. Video above.  |
Posted: 15 Sep 2010 05:59 PM PDT  A post has just gone up on Diaspora’s blog revealing what the project actually looks like for the first time. While it’s not yet ready to be released to the public, the open-source social networking project is giving the world a glimpse of what it looks like today and also releasing the project code, as promised. At first glance, this preview version of Diaspora looks sparse, but clean. Oddly enough, with its big pictures and stream, it doesn’t look unlike Apple’s new Ping music social network mixed with yes, Facebook. A few features they note:
The team notes that the public alpha of the project is still on course for October, and will include Facebook integration off the bat, as well as data portability. “Getting the source into the hands of developers is our first experiment in making a simple and functional tool for contextual sharing. Diaspora is in its infancy, but our initial ideas are there,” the team writes today. “Much of our focus this summer was centered around publishing content to groups of your friends, wherever their seed may live. It is by no means bug free or feature complete, but it an important step for putting us, the users, in control,” they continue. Diaspora is a particularly interesting project because it was first unveiled at a time when Facebook was facing a lot of user backlash due to privacy issues and changes being made. This helped the project raise over $200,000 in crowd-sourced funding via Kickstarter. Of course, Facebook continues to grow and is now well past 500 million users, as much of the controversy that existed a few months ago has died down — as expected. The project also faces the hurdle of trying to popularize an open source project — these projects often sound great on paper, but doesn’t work too well in practice. That said, Diaspora is still interesting, and we’re rooting for these guys to pull it off. Developers, get building — you can find the code on github here. But note their warning: Feel free to try to get it running on your machines and use it, but we give no guarantees. We know there are security holes and bugs, and your data is not yet fully exportable. If you do find something, be sure to log it in our bugtracker, and we would love screenshots and browser info.      |
Posted: 15 Sep 2010 05:42 PM PDT  Earlier this year we wrote about Grogger, a CMS that would allow blogs to crowdsource their content. That product didn’t work out — publishers didn’t want to have to change to a new CMS — but the company has now pivoted to tackle a related problem, and it’s got a new name: Kapost. Today the company is announcing that it’s closed a $1.1 million Series A round led by High Country Venture and Highway 12 Venture, with Zelkova Ventures, Kal Vepuri, Tango, David Tisch, Jason Kiefer, and David Cohen participating (the company was also a part of the TechStars Boulder program).So what exactly is Kapost? CEO Toby Murdock describes it as a newsroom platform that publishers can use to manage content submitted by a large number of contributors. Murdock explains that many online publishers that feature content from many contributors, like The Huffington Post, have to build their own custom systems for managing, editing, and eventually publishing this incoming content — Kapost wants to fill this niche. And unlike Grogger, which required publishers to tie a new CMS into their workflow, Kapost will integrate with existing CMS solutions. At this point the product is still pretty early — it includes core functionality like assigning stories to authors, but some of the more advanced features, like distributing payments to contributors and editorial calendars, are still in development. We’ll have more Kapost as it continues to build out its featureset.   |
Posted: 15 Sep 2010 05:15 PM PDT  While the new design of Twitter.com itself is big news, just as big is what it means for the Twitter ecosystem. I’m not talking about the third-party clients that have similar features to the ones Twitter just rolled out, but rather the partners that Twitter is (or is not) working with to bring more content directly into their environment.Specifically, I’m talking about Twitter’s initial 16 partners: Dailybooth, DeviantArt, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, Twitvid, USTREAM, Vimeo, Yfrog, and YouTube. Each of these services now has content which can be viewed directly from Twitter.com — potentially taking pageviews away each of them. Why on Earth would they agree to that? Some of those companies have already given their diplomatic answers — that this way will be better for the end users. That’s undoubtedly true, but many of those sites rely on the advertisements they show alongside the media they host. Such ads will not be shown on Twitter.com. So again, why agree to do this? I spoke with Jason Goldman, Twitter’s Vice President of Product, yesterday after the announcement about this. His answer was fairly interesting. He notes that many of the major picture and video companies early-on started showing the value of having their media embedded elsewhere. YouTube and Flickr were two examples he cited. “Those strategies increased the value of their brands,” Goldman said. And while obviously, YouTube and Flickr don’t need too much help expanding their brands any more, the smaller players could certainly benefit from this. If you see a friend sharing a picture on Twitter via Twitgoo or Dailybooth, you might decide to sign up for those services yourself so you can do the same, is the idea.  Goldman reiterated that Twitter wasn’t going to allow these partners to show their own ads next to the pictures in the new right-side pane on Twitter’s site, but thinks the pictures themselves are almost like a great branding ad for the services themselves. He also noted that they’re not going to stop YouTube or the other video service from running pre-roll or post-roll video ads in their embeds — so the videos services will retain one way to monetize this embed view. Obviously, Twitter is open to doing more of these deals with different content partners as well. The Kickstarter and Kiva deals are particularly interesting because they don’t involve embedded media, but rather embedded content. Expect to see a lot more of those. In fact, I’m going to not go out on a limb and guess that a lot of the location services will start showing content in the right-pane on Twitter.com shortly. Foursquare is already integrated in a similar way into Twitter’s iPhone app. In their quest to make Twitter.com a more seamless experience for users, Twitter is also creating a new sort of mini platform. Previously, their platform was entirely off-site, with the right-side pane, it’s now on-site as well. I suspect we may see some interesting ideas spring up around this.   |
Posted: 15 Sep 2010 05:08 PM PDT  While the phone itself launches in October, Seesmic has just posted a preview video of what the Seesmic app will look like on the Windows Phone 7 platform. Seesmic recently launched Seesmic Desktop 2 and hinted that there would be a Windows Phone 7 app coming shortly. The above video highlights some of its features including Dashboard, Search and Spaces.            |
Posted: 15 Sep 2010 04:40 PM PDT  Pew Internet has just completed a survey of nearly 2000 mobile users in the US and has come up with some not particularly startling statistics about phone and app usage. Still, it’s good to have some cold hard numbers to look at, even if the sample size seems a bit small.Here’s the gist of the survey and writeup, which is rather wordy. Continue reading this article…  |
Posted: 15 Sep 2010 03:56 PM PDT  Recommendation engine Hunch is rolling out partnerships with seven large sites to provide personalized recommendations for their products, services, or content. Interactive Corp's Gifts.com, Bluefly, Buzzfeed, Heyzap, ShopStyle, Milo and FanBridge are the initial partners, and Hunch says more will be announced shortly. “These companies will either build applications that reside on Hunch.com, embed Hunch functionality within their own sites, or both,” says Hunch. The partners will us a rebuilt-from-the-ground-up API to show personalized recommendations to users, says Hunch CEO Chris Dixon. The Hunch website itself is built using the same API that is being made for partners. This also gives Hunch a potentially lucrative revenue model. There will be a free version of the recommendation engine that most partners will use, But ecommerce sites will share revenue generated from purchases recommended by Hunch. “Our whole business is centered around the API,” says Dixon. Dixon says that the company spent the first year or so after launching in learning mode, building out the data and finding connections. Now they have enough data, and 20 billion “connections” to be confident in making recommendations to people on just about anything at all. Cofounder Caterina Fake made similar statements when I interviewed her earlier this year.  |
Posted: 15 Sep 2010 02:46 PM PDT  Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins has a theory about the Third Wave of computing: first came the PC, then the Internet, and now we are adding a third wave which is a combination of social, mobile, and commerce. It’s become the informal theme of TechCrunch Disrupt (buy tickets here). So who better to kick off Disrupt in San Francisco on September 27 than Doerr himself? At our first Disrupt cnference in New York last May, Doerr was interviewed by Charlie Rose. This time we are turning the tables and letting him do the interviewing. On the other side of the table will be Zynga CEO Mark Pincus and Bing Gordon, the founder of Electronic Arts and now the partner at Kleiner who sits on Zynga’s board. Zynga, of course, is the social gaming company behind hits such as FarmVille, FrontierVille, and Mafia Wars. It’s revenues are estimated to be anywhere from $500 million on up this year, going to $1 billion next year.  Doerr has told us, “Zynga is the fastest growing business Kleiner Perkins has ever invested in.” Faster than Amazon, Google, AOL, Compaq, Netscape, or Electronic Arts. In a sense, Zynga is the new Electronic Arts, but Zynga doesn’t make video games. It makes social games. It studies what makes players addicted and what make them keep coming back. It tweaks its games, watches what happens, and then tweaks some more, until it finds the sweet spot that resonates with hundreds of millions of people. It builds Internet treasures that become better the more other people cherish them. How do you create Internet treasures today in this Third Wave? Doerr will try to tease this out from Pincus and Gordon. It will be a fascinating conversation to listen in on.  Our goal with the Disrupt, in addition to launching two dozen companies at the StartuP Battlefield, is to create these interesting discussions, bringing the world’s best venture investors like Doerr or Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz, who is also a speaker, together with the entrepreneurs who are riding the Third Wave. We’ll be announcing more speakers and the full agenda later this week. But get your tickets now. We’ve extended the early bird ticket price until Monday since we are a little late in getting the agenda out.  |
Posted: 15 Sep 2010 02:10 PM PDT We’ve learned that super stealth advertising related startup AK Networks has closed an $8 million round of Series A funding. A SEC Form D filing reveals that the round was co-lead by True Ventures’ Jon Callaghan and DCM’s Dixon Doll and that the company, founded in March, is based out of New York (with the distinction of a Park Avenue address, even). About.com founder Scott Kurnit, listed on the filing as executive and director, is CEO. We’ve confirmed that the plethora of other investors in this round included Spark Capital, betaworks, First Round Capital, the New York Times, Lerrer Ventures, David Cowan, Stan Shuman, and Kurnit himself. The New York Times investment is particularly notable as Kurnit’s previous venture, About.com comprises a large proportion of its online revenues. Oh and guess what? They’re hiring! Thanks: FormDs  |
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