7/22 TechCrunch

As Ning's U.S. Audience Flattens, It Raises Another $15 Million. July 22, 2009 at 12:22 am Do-it-yourself social network Ning has added another $15 million to its coffers from LightSpeed Venture Partners, the company has confirmed to us. This brings the total capital raised to $119 million. Its other investors include Allen & Co., Legg Mason, chairman and co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Reid Hoffman. Ning offers a counterpoint to the uniformity of Facebook, allowing anyone to create their own social network customized to their particular interest or social group. Earlier this year, Ning passed one million social networks created (it is now up to 1.3 million), but the key is how many of those are active and how many people they attract. In the U.S., unique visitors actually declined 10 percent from May, 2009 to June, 2009, according to comScore. Ning had 5.1 million visitors in the U.S. in June (its worldwide audience is about three times as large). The company attributes the decline to "some downtime in June as we expand and optimize our infrastructure to support the growth that we are expecting in the next 12 months." Ning says it is adding 4,000 new Ning Networks every day and one million registered users every 15 days. One month hardly makes a trend, but Ning's fragmented approach to social networks has yet to catch on in the way that Facebook's monolithic strategy has in terms of activity or pure audience reach across the network. Back in April 2008, Ning had a half-billion dollar valuation, and now it's supposedly $750 million. That is getting close to the inflated level Bebo was able to sell itself for, which we now know was too high. And Bebo still has more people using its product. (Even in the U.S., it had 8.7 million unique visitors in June). Ning has been getting its act together, though. Back in December, it expelled adult networks from Ning because they aren't advertiser-friendly. And that worked out well for them. More recently, Ning has been working hard to make its social networks compatible with OpenSocial apps. That effort is going much slower than expected. A public launch was delayed last month because of performance issues with the Ning Apps platform, says one developer who is part of the program. Maybe the new cash will help speed things along. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. Buddy Media Unveils The Ultimate Twitter Client For Brand Management July 22, 2009 at 12:00 am As Twitter becomes a valuable marketing tools for companies, there has been a proliferation of sites and startups that help manage a brand's presence on the microblogging site. Buddy Media, a startup that develops of applications for social networks, including Facebook and MySpace, is throwing its hat in the ring by launching a Twitter Management System for brand advertisers to manage marketing efforts and analytics on Twitter. Buddy Media's Twitter Management System will let marketers measure and identify Twitter trending topics around a particular brand, related topics and competitors. You can also track performance and trends for a brand and entire industry across Twitter with easy to view data on followers, mentions, and re-Tweets. Similar to URL shortening sites like Bit.ly, the tool will let you track volume and frequency of click-through rates in Twitter as well as monitor and analyze the sentiment of Tweets about a particular brand compared to competitors. Within the system you can create various profiles to manage several brands and different Twitter account and schedule Tweets to be published in advance of campaigns. And the system acts as a Twitter client itself, so you can have a centralized place to both Tweet and monitor and graph brands. The system reminds me of PeopleBrowsr, which also offers a comprehensive and useful Twitter management system for brands and companies, except that Buddy Media's application is web-based which in my opinion, has its advantages over Adobe AIR powered clients. And like PeopleBrowsr, Buddy Media's system offers real-time search capability, which can be especially useful to companies wanting to gain insight into the conversations about their businesses taking place on the social graph. Buddy Media is fast becoming a digital branding powerhouse. In addition to its Twitter Management tool, the startup also has a Social Page Management System that to help brands engage their audiences by managing their Facebook pages. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors Rumor: Apple to Launch Tablet With Verizon July 22, 2009 at 12:00 am Here's something to mull over while you get ready for bed. The Street is reporting that Apple will launch the highly anticipated (and rumored) tablet with Verizon. Now, we've heard rumors that Verizon could be getting a CDMA variant of the iPhone at some point in the near future, but no one in China has leaked such a thing. According to Scott Moritz's sources, Apple and Verizon "won't be as tightly integrated" as Apple and AT&T and the rumored tablet has been ready for roughly a year. The kicker here is that, Verizon would subsidize the cost of the tablet without giving potential customers sticker shock. BrightRoll: Q2 Pre-Roll Video Ad Rates Are Down, But Total Revenues Are Up July 21, 2009 at 10:44 pm Video ads are the great hope of brand marketers on the Web. They are easy to understand (it's just like on TV, kinda) and easy to create. That's why pre-roll video ads will never die. Brand marketers love 'em. As the rates for pre-roll video ads on the Web go down, it looks like total video ad revenues keep going up. At least that is what is happening across BrightRoll's video ad network. BrightRoll is one of the largest video ad networks, according to comScore VideoMetrix, with a reach of 51 million unique viewers in May, 2009, which is more than Yahoo's video sites or Hulu. (But it doesn't serve as many video streams as either one). BrightRoll reports that in the second quarter: Avg. Pre-roll CPM: Q209 vs. Q109 – up 3.1% Avg. Pre-roll CPM: Q209 vs. Q208 – down 10.4% So the CPM rate (cost per thousand views) for video pre-rolls is flat with last quarter at roughly $20. But it is down from last year by 10 percent, and they need to go down further to push video Web ads beyond novelty status. Even with CPMs keeping steady, BrightRoll saw network ad revenues double from last quarter: Revenue: Q209 vs. Q109 – up 217% That is quite a jump. And brand advertisers are increasing their the amount of their Web video ad budgets they are spending on pre-roll ads as opposed to other types of clickable units which appeal more to performance-oriented marketers. As more and more professional content makes its way onto the Web, the more "safe" inventory there will be for those brand advertisers. Even YouTube is close to making money. CPMs still need to be cut in half, though. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. The iPod, As We Know It, Is Dying July 21, 2009 at 9:40 pm During its quarterly earnings call today, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer focused a lot of attention on what the company is now calling its "pocket products." That is, the iPhone, the iPod touch and the iPod. You'll notice that Apple has taken to separating out the iPod touch from the rest of the iPod line. And that makes sense, given it shares many more similarities with the iPhone. But it's also for another reason: The iPod, as we know it, is dying. Of the three pocket products, two saw huge year-over-year growth this quarter, one did not. While iPhone sales grew a massive 626% year-over-year, iPod touch sales actually grew just about 130% too. And while Apple may consider the iPod touch outside of the iPod line, for financial purposes, it's still counted with them. So when you hear that overall the iPod family saw a 7% decline year over year, you know that the actual iPod numbers minus the iPod touch, must not be very good at all. And while Apple wouldn't specifically give those numbers, Oppenheimer did note that the iPhone and iPod touch are very much "cannibalizing" the stand-alone MP3 iPod market. Apple still has over 70% of the MP3 player market, but it's probably safe to assume that the overall pie which Apple has 70% of, is going to start shrinking soon (if it hasn't already), at least in the U.S. The way Oppenheimer spoke today about what he calls the "traditional mp3 players" was almost like a eulogy. And for good reason. I'd be fairly surprised if Apple updates its hard-drive based iPod classic ever again. It will likely continue to sell it for a while, and may even do something with the price. But the thought of Apple devoting any time to reworking this dinosaur at this point, seems pointless. The iPod nano, which Apple did a huge revamp of last year, still likely have some life in it — especially if it gets a camera. But the key thing for it going forward is price. If Apple can reduce it even further (to say, $99) and still make money off of it, people will still buy them. Likewise the the Shuffle. If Apple can get it down to about $50 (it's currently $79), that should continue to sell short-term. But again, any tweaks and price reductions will simply be bandages on the iPod's wounded body. Eventually, the "touch" will be the iPod. And yes, we'll likely see a smaller version of it (and the iPhone) eventually as well. It will also need to come down a bit in price, before the traditional iPods can fully go away. But at $229, the low-end iPod touch is already much cheaper than many of the original iPods were the first several years after its release. MP3s players were great, just as CD players and tape players were great before them. But ultimately, technology and expectations evolve. Soon, carrying around a device that just plays music will seem pointless. Everyone's phone will do that. And if someone doesn't want to (or can't) carry around a phone for whatever reason, iPod touch-like devices that not only play music, but play movies, take pictures, run applications, and, most importantly, access the web, will be everywhere. And while the click wheel was great in its day, every time I pick up an older iPod now, I immediately try to touch the screen to control it. Apple is training us that touch and multi-touch will be the preferred method of device manipulation in the future. (Certainly until it makes its shoddy voice controls in the new iPhone 3GS work better.) And so Apple's three "pocket products" will eventually be whittled down to two. And it's likely to happen sooner than you think. Apple doesn't stick with products that aren't selling for too long. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. Probably Not The Palm Pre Chart Roger McNamee Wants To See July 21, 2009 at 8:54 pm "You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone," Elevation Partners (which owns a huge portion of Palm) co-founder Roger McNamee told Bloomberg in March. "Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later." A week from tomorrow is the big day for McNamee's prediction. How's it looking? Not so hot. Okay, awful. Yes, it's still early in the Palm Pre's life. And yes, there is plenty of room in the rapidly expanding mobile universe for more than one device. But it was McNamee who specifically threw down this gauntlet against the iPhone. And that makes charts like the one below, that much more amusing. Now, it has to be noted that the research company providing this data, JNK Wireless Consultant iGR, is said to be fairly new. But that doesn't mean that they did a poor job in obtaining the numbers that they did. This chart comes after they completed a series of checks last week across 50 Sprint stores nationwide in top markets. Further, they have a lot more details of what they found in their checks. Here are the Pre "highlights": No stores this week reported that they had currently sold out of Palm Pre (compared to three stores last week and no stores the week before). Approximately 65 percent of the stores contacted said they had 'plenty' of devices on hand and did not anticipate any shortages. iGR's channel checks again show that Sprint is meeting the current demand for the device with the inventories available in the stores. None of the stores willing to discuss sales reported they had sold significantly more than 25 units this week (down from a maximum of 50 last week). In Week 3, the upper 'ceiling' on sales was 75 units in some stores and this compares with 20 percent of stores that reported selling around 100 units in Week 2. 40 percent of the stores willing to discuss volumes said they had sold less than 10 units this week (compared to 30 percent last week). 37 percent said they had sold 10 - 20 units and another 23 percent said they had sold 20 - 30 units. This week, 95 percent of the stores indicated that Palm Pre sales were a mixture of both new subscribers and upgrades to existing Sprint subscribers. But just one of the stores contacted said that the majority of the Pre sales this week were to new Sprint customers, compared to 7 percent last week and 25 percent the week before. iGR also asked this week about the number of Pre demo units that were available in the Sprint stores for prospective customers - this question was added as a result of stories indicating that customers were having to wait to see a demo unit. As in Weeks 4 and 5, none of the stores contacted had more than 2 Pre demo units on hand (even though all stores had sufficient inventory to meet current demand). 93 percent of stores had a single Pre demo unit in the store - the remainder had just two units. iGR has been tracking the sales of the Palm pre over the last six weeks through these weekly channel checks. It has been clear for the last few weeks that Sprint is now meeting the current demand and that the 'sold out' scenarios common just after launch have ended - if they do occur, they are a temporary scenario while the store waits that day for a new shipment. Finding a Palm Pre at a Sprint store should not be difficult at the current time. Sales are also dropping gradually. By looking at the average number of sales per store, iGR has ESTIMATED the number of Palm Pre sales in the Sprint channel by week (see attached figure). Sales have dropped significantly from the initial launch volumes but also seem to be stabilizing at about 22,000 - 25,000 per week To make sure it got a clearer pictures, iGR also went to Apple stores around the country to check the iPhone 3GS numbers. It ran checks with 52 stores. The story is quite a bit different: All but two of the stores contacted said that sales of the 3G S were strong - the two dissenting stores said that sales were 'steady' from last week. No stores reported that sales had decreased since the launch of the 3G S. Compared to last week when 76 percent said they were frequently selling out of 3G S, this week 43 percent reported frequently selling out. The remainder (57 percent) has some 3G S in stock, although many acknowledged that supplies were limited. Of those stores that were frequently selling out, 45 percent of the stores said they still were using waiting lists to control distribution. 80 percent of stores had data on the number of iPhone purchasers that were new to the iPhone. Of this 80 percent of stores, 15 percent said that 40 percent of sales were to those new to iPhone, 48 percent said that 50 percent of sales were new to iPhone, 35 percent said 60 percent of sales were new to iPhone and just 2 percent said that 70 percent of sales were to new iPhone users. Over all of the stores surveyed, the average number of sales to those new to iPhone was 52 percent. Of those iPhone 3G S purchasers who already had an iPhone, on average 55 percent were coming from an iPhone 2G. The remainder were upgrading from an iPhone 3G. iGR also asked if sales of the existing 3G iPhone has changed since the price dropped to $99. All of the stores reported that sales had increased as a result of the price drop Now again, this data all comes from a sampling of Sprint and Apple stores. But at the very least, the trends seem pretty clear. The iPhone 3GS is selling very, very well (as was further evidenced today during Apple's 3Q earnings call), the Palm Pre? Still pretty ho-hum. And things still seem to be slowing down. "Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later." Yeah. We'll revisit that again in 8 days. But the graph up top does have a nice "L" shape. "L" in this case, doesn't appear to stand for "Love". Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 Test-driving the Barnes & Noble eBook Store July 21, 2009 at 8:25 pm So I just bought House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, by William D. Cohen, from the just-launched Barnes and Noble e-book store. Long story short, it works pretty well, but there sure as heck isn't a hint of polish on this thing. So here's how it worked. I went to barnesandnoble.com, typed in the name "William Cohen," then clicked "Read Now," indicating that I wanted to buy the e-book version. It downloaded to my Desktop (well, Downloads folder). Then I had to download and install the reader software. Update: Pushfix for Jailbroken iPhones Caused Push Broadcast Problems July 21, 2009 at 7:46 pm We have an update on the AIM push problem we wrote about this morning. The problem only affects jailbroken iPhones 2 and 3G running the homebrew app Pushfix. If you are in this sad number please restore to the original firmware or risk seeing your IMs spread far and wide. Pushfix is a homebrew app that "repairs" push functionality on Jailbroken apps. The iPhone Dev Team, the same folks who unlocked the iPhone in the first place, created it to help us lowly users but they left a fatal flaw in the program. It seems they used a single UDID - Unique Device ID - for the fix. This in turn creates a sort of broadcast network of multiple jailbroken phones running Pushfix that report back to the push servers with the same UDID. The result? When you push to one, you push to all. Y Combinator's Picurio Crowdsources Photo Sharing July 21, 2009 at 7:19 pm Picurio, a Y Combinator startup from its Winter '09 session that makes photo sharing between large groups incredibly easy, has taken the beta label off. While there are an innumerable amount of photo sharing sites and applications out there, Picurio is focused on making photo sharing simple and user-friendly between groups of people. Picurio's site has a similar user interface to Apple's iPhoto, except Picurio is on the web and cloud-based. The idea behind Picurio is that you upload photos to a "room" (which has around 2 GB of storage) where you can then create subfolders of different groups of photos and then invite as many people as you want to see the photos. In order to allow others to see the site, you send them a link, (that can be password-protected for privacy) and then they can upload photos of their own to the "room." As a user, you can share some collections of photos with certain friends and share other rooms with a different set of friends. Picurio also lets you publish and download photos directly to and from Facebook. Ad you can download any pictures from a room into a zip file while you are viewing the page. Picurio is free if you keep adding friends to your rooms. For every friend who joins a room, Picurio will add another two weeks on to the lifetime of a room. There is no limit on the number of albums you can create, or the number of people who can use the room. You can also pay for rooms to be extended; $4.95 adds 30 days to the lifetime of a room. In essence, Picurio is a subset of photo sharing sites like Divvyshot, Photobucket, Flickr etc. which all let you share a basic album. Picurio rooms allows for multiple albums within one room and selective sharing of rooms. Of course, Picurio also features the ability to drag and drop photos, create slideshows and more. It seems that Picurio would ideal for large events where many attendees are taking pictures and need a central, and potentially private online space to store and share photos. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. How Much Is That Apple Tablet Going To Cost? Not $399 Or $499. July 21, 2009 at 6:32 pm There are always good bits of data you can pry from Apple's cold fingers during the Q&A sessions of its quarterly earnings conference calls. Today was no different. As usual, a question came up about Apple entering the "low-end" laptop market, which is a fancy way of saying "netbook" market. Once again, Apple COO Tim Cook reiterated Apple's stance that "Our goal is not to build the most computers. It's to build the best." What he means by this is that Apple has no interest in playing in the low-end market, which is of course also a low-margin market, which would mean Apple's pretty margins taking a hit. But wording is everything, and Cook once again didn't exactly eliminate the possibility of Apple making a new type of portable computing device. He said that no matter what the price point is, that if Apple feels it can build a product worthy of its brand, it will do so. But he also specifically called out two price points that he thought are producing junky products, and implied that such price points will continue to produce junky products: $399 and $499. And so if Apple is working on a tablet computer (or a larger screen iPod touch) of some kind, it will likely be priced above $500. To Apple watchers, that is obvious, but it's still important to hear Cook more or less say it. A follow-up question later on about netbooks, asked if Apple specifically saw a future for a new mobile device with a larger screen? Cook joked that while he never wanted to rule out anything in the future, he also never intends to answer questions about new products. He went on to say that he believes most customers buying portable computers want a full-featured notebook. And many netbooks are slow and run old operating systems. Naturally, he didn't mention Chrome OS. And that just seems to be more proof that whatever big touchscreen device Apple makes, it won't be so much of a netbook, but rather a product that Apple hopes will once again kickstart a new type of market. Whether that will work, who knows. Let's see the thing first. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. First Rule Of Apple Earnings Calls: You Do Not Talk About The $99 iPhone July 21, 2009 at 6:09 pm When Apple announced that it would start selling the iPhone 3G for $99 at this year's WWDC conference, the room buzzed about the possibility. Finally, there would really be an iPhone for under $100. And so not surprisingly, everyone wants to know how it's selling. But don't bother asking Apple about it, because you'll get nothing from them, as we learned on the company's earnings conference call today. Multiple questions were asked of Apple COO Tim Cook about how the $99 iPhone, specifically, was selling. His response? The vague note that the entire iPhone line has seen a "big acceleration in total unit sales." Cook said Apple will not offer a breakdown of how the different versions are selling because it's competitive data. But wait, they've broken them up in the past. Just three days after the iPhone 3GS launch, Apple announced that iPhone 3GS-specific sales had hit a million. Obviously, there's a reason to do that; it's an impressive number. But along those lines, you can't help but wonder if Apple is being coy simply because the $99 sales aren't very good? Certainly, it seems like a great deal, but in reality, the monthly bills of the iPhone 3G and 3GS are the same, so it's basically the difference between $100 to $200 in upfront costs. As the call went on today, more questions came in trying to penetrate the $99 iPhone sales topic. Someone asked if the lower price-point iPhone was helping to get people into store and accelerating sales of the new iPhone 3GS? Again, Cook would only say that they're focused on total iPhone numbers. "It's too early to tell what the ultimate mix of what the products will be," he noted. He went on to say that the breakdowns are a big foggy since the 3GS supply is currently constrained, and it's only in 18 of the nearly 80 countries the iPhone is in. That would seem to suggest that the $99 iPhone should be selling really well — if customers can't get an iPhone 3GS. But Cook, nor anyone else would say that. Odd. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors Apple Sold Twice As Many iPhones As Macs Last Quarter. And It's Closing The Gap On iPod Sales Too July 21, 2009 at 4:51 pm The quarterly numbers are in for Apple. And once again they're very good. It was another non-holiday record quarter in terms of revenues and earnings. But the real number that jumps off the page is the iPhone sales. Let's just say it: The iPhone looks well on its way to being Apple's primary business. Last quarter, Apple sold 5.2 million iPhones. That's a colossal 626 percent growth over the year ago period, when Apple sold 717,000 iPhones. Now, it's important to note that the iPhone 3G wasn't released last year until July, while the new iPhone 3GS dropped in June this year. But still, the difference is huge. And it nearly was the record for iPhones sold in a quarter, which happened in Q4 last year, with almost 6.9 million iPhones sold thanks to the full brunt of the iPhone 3G sales. Again, these new Q3 2009 numbers only include a few weeks of iPhone 3GS sales. And the 5.2 million number is perhaps even crazier when you consider that it's exactly double the number of Macs Apple sold last quarter (2.6 million, a modest rise from basically 2.5 million Macs a year ago). And the 5.2 million number means the iPhone is now more than halfway to the sales of the iPod — and its sales are going the wrong way. Of course, Apple is likely getting ready to drop a new iPod touch in the coming month, which should have a camera. And that will undoubtedly help sales. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 Yahoo's Revenues Drop 13 Percent In Second Quarter (Conference Call Notes) July 21, 2009 at 4:49 pm Yhoo Q209 Earnings Presentation Final View more documents from guest25211b. Yahoo just released earnings for the second quarter. Total revenues dropped 13 percent to $1.5 billion. After paying partner sites traffic acquisition costs (TAC), it's take-home revenue was $1.1 billion. Operating income fell 17 percent to $101 million, and net income fell a whopping 78 percent to $118 million (but much of that difference was due to a $401 million non-cash gain Yahoo took in the first quarter related to its stake in Alibaba, which had an IPO). CEO Carol Bartz is still trying to reign in costs. Yahoo also announced a new round of layoffs, which will affect 5 percent of its workforce (around 675 people out of 13,500). Those affected will be notified within the next two weeks. This is becoming aregular habit for her. During her first earnings call last quarter, she also tried to please Wall Street with 5 percent layoffs. Correction: Yahoo DID NOT announce new layoffs. The initial earnings release I downloaded was from the first quarter due to a bad link. My apologies for alarming any Yahoo employees. Yahoo's search advertising revenues on Yahoo-owned sites declined 15 percent to $359 million, while display advertising on owned and operated sites declined 14 percent to $393 million. Yahoo announced a deal with AT&T to sell local online ads. The earnings call just started. My live notes are below. Carol Bartz: Considering the economy I am pleased with our results, revenues above midpoint of our expectations, upside coming from currency fluctuations. Less fear from advertisers. But so much conflicting info form the market, too early to call. 1. great team (hired CFO) 2. great experience (mobile, social, advertising) have to make sure ads are more relevant, less irritating to users. 3. Better business processes. Want to be a better company to work for and with. CFO Tim Morse: Pageviews up 7% Rev: $1.573 billion (down 13%) Search revenues down 15% display revenues down 14% encouraging sign: guaranteed display inventory increased on a sequential basis growth in health and travel Affiliate business (primarily search) down TAC was 28% of total revenue, rising slightly listings revenue down 21% OCF (operating cash flow) $385M free cash flow $266M savings at the low end of our expecations due to cost savings. Planning on hiring new sales peopel, invest in branding efforts to seize growth opps that will come as economy recovers. $365M restructuring charge, real estate related and $25M related to headcount reduction $67M pretax gain from sale in Gmarket. Carol Bartz: Biggest content site. Lead in news, sports, finance, and other categories. Yahoo homepages leads all others. brags about a single link from Yahoo home page to NYT, creating 9M pageviews. "We work with publishers, not against them" (subtle dig at Google) Yahoo mail, open features, improvements in speed and performance and engagement. Talks about annoying ads, calls them a "detriment," "cheapening the Yahoo brand." Will be trying to get rid of blaring ads. Initiative around improving ad experience Talks about mobile search deal with cell phone carrier in Taiwan to displace Google [she's digging deep there] expanded relationship with AT&T to sell Yahoo local inventory by AT&T advertising salesforce. Yahoo's salesforce with its advertising partners is now 13K strong. Q&A: Q: Carol, what is your first impression on Bing? Seeing any user behavior changes? Carol: I think Bing is actually a good poduct. Experimentation around search instead of thinking just a standard blue link. only a month in, hard to understand if it is just curiosity or if they will gain share, but I think they have done a nice job. Q: Search business seems to have deteriorated, display shows sequential improvement. Where is the bets ROI, display or search, since you will prob. have to choose one or the other? Carol: Search did decline Q over Q, that is not a meaningful trend. Our volume was healthy, more that there was RPS pressure. The whole idea is to keep to optimize and drive relevancy for advertiser's ROI. Advertisers being smarter, chose less keywords. At the end of the day, our investment priority is in the user. If we can increase our audience, which we know we can, we can drive both search and display revenues. We can provide both, but what we really need to provide ad partners is an engaged audience. Tim: CPCs not that different, more a mix in the queries. Q: Do you get renumerated for links to Facebook or Gmail? Carol: No, it is really about giving consumers an experience on Yahoo without having to leave Yahoo. To be the center of their online life. Not about money, about helping them organize their online life. Q: Ebitda margins lowest guidance since 2003. You said you would be ramping spending in Q, how should we think about margins? Carol: When we gave the guidance last Q we told you we were going to to layoffs to have room to put the same cost into the system to reinvest into the business. Pretty much on target with that. Marketing spend for 3Q is in the additional cost already ($75M?). Adding people into product, engineering, sales people. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors Microsoft/Yahoo Search Deal Today? Not So Fast July 21, 2009 at 4:05 pm There is absolutely no doubt that Microsoft and Yahoo are in the final stages of some sort of search/search marketing deal. And lots of Yahoo'ers are buzzing that the big announcement is today along with Yahoo's quarterly earnings report after the markets close. But our sources are saying that while the deal is imminent, it won't be announced today. But Yahoo sure is being secretive about what they are announcing today. Some people who usually have access to the earnings call script are out of the loop, our sources say. Yahoo has been one of the leakiest companies in the last couple of years (remember this?), and CEO Carol Bartz may finally be trying to put the hammer down on some employees suspected of facilitating those leaks. Is something unusual being announced today? Perhaps, say our sources inside Yahoo. But they can't say what it is besides speculation about a Microsoft deal. But back to those Yahoo/Microsoft negotiations - sources say that a search deal is imminent. But they are also saying that Yahoo continues to push for an outright acquisition. Microsoft, after pulling their acquisition offer last May, never again expressed any real interest in buying the company. The search deal is the next best thing, and Yahoo has to take it. With Google unable to partner with Yahoo over search, there's no one else ready to step in. The Microsoft/Yahoo search deal would apparently put Microsoft's new favorite child, Bing, behind Yahoo's search product, which has a much higher market share than Microsoft's. The deal would supposedly see Yahoo get paid $3 billion upfront, as well as pretty much all of the revenues (after traffic acquisition costs) that its searches provide over the first few years of the deal, 24/7 Wall Street reported the other day. There is also talk that Yahoo's relatively strong display advertising business would be put in place for both companies. We've previously written about what a deal like this could mean for both companies, but things have changed a bit since Microsoft completely revamped its search product. It's still too early to tell if Bing will make any meaningful inroads against market leader Google. (And in fact, it looks like Bing may be stealing share from Yahoo, rather than Google.) But the general consensus among users seems that they at least like Bing — something which cannot often be said about consumer-facing Microsoft products. And that has to be seen as good news if Microsoft can combine its search product with Yahoo, giving it nearly a 30% market share. There are no shortage of rumors flying around today given Yahoo's earnings, but remember that Microsoft also announces its earning on Thursday after the market closes. Yahoo's stock fell 1.5% during regular trading today, but has already fallen another 2% in after-hours trading leading up to earnings. Their call is set for 2PM PT, we'll be listening in. CrunchBase Information Yahoo! Microsoft Bing Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. Read Between The Lines: YouTube Monetizing At Least 12% Of Views July 21, 2009 at 3:04 pm Yesterday, YouTube posted an update to its Biz Blog in which it detailed and attempted to dispel some of the oft-spoken myths about the world's most popular video portal. The blogosphere's reception to the post was generally skeptical, with a number of reporters complaining that it was overly vague and lacking any concrete numbers about YouTube's monetization efforts. But it seems that everyone missed a few nuggets of gold in that post that actually reveal quite a bit about YouTube's performance. Like the fact that the site is likely monetizing at least 12% of all videos streamed in the United States — a huge jump over the numbers that had previously been reported. You see, a little math and some reading between the lines reveals that things actually are going quite well for YouTube, even if the site isn't willing to explicitly say so. Up until now, YouTube's standard line about its monetized views has been that it was selling ads against "hundreds of millions of views each month". But the post yesterday had a subtle change: YouTube is now monetizing "hundreds of millions of views each week". That one change is very significant, and given that the post was written by two members of YouTube's PR team, you can be quite sure it was deliberately worded. "Hundreds of millions" can generally be taken as a minimum of 200 million views per week, or 800 million per month. We can further support that stat by turning back to the Biz Blog post, which says that "monetized views have more than tripled in the past year". Last summer, it was reported that YouTube was monetizing approximately 3-5% of its videos, or around 250 million monetized views out of a total of 5 billion in July 2008. Multiply that 250 million figure by three, and we arrive at at least 750 million monetized views currently. From there, it's a simple matter of determining how these monetized views compare to those that aren't monetized. Last April, AdAge reported that YouTube was placing ads against at least 8.7% of its US video streams after a YouTube spokesman confirmed that the site was monetizing more views than the total number of videos streamed (both monetized and not) by Fox Interactive. Based on that month's ComScore data, Fox Interactive had 463 million views, while YouTube had a total of 5.3 billion views. By dividing the former by the latter, we arrive at the 8.7% figure AdAge derived. Using similar calculations to those above, we can see how YouTube's monetized videos have grown: ComScore's latest report states that YouTube is now seeing 6.8 billion views overall. If YouTube is monetizing 800 million of those, that would mean that the site is now monetizing 11.8% of its views — a marked increase over the 8.7% statistic from April, and more than double the 3-5% stat that the YouTube 'mythbusters' were hoping to dispel. YouTube's Biz Blog post also offers some explanation as to where the growth is coming from, stating that "as we're adding partner content very quickly and doing a better job of promoting their videos across the site." YouTube declined to comment on this story, but given that the original "hundreds of millions" quote came from the horse's mouth, we're confident about these stats. And remember, these numbers are all based on the minimum amount of 200 million views per week — the actual numbers could be significantly higher. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 DiggBar Changes Permanent - No Longer A Short URL Service July 21, 2009 at 2:55 pm Those changes to the DiggBar that we noted on Sunday are, apparently, permanent. We expect Digg to make an announcement about those changes later today. We first heard about the DiggBar in February, and the product launched in April. At that time Digg was calling it a short URL service, meaning users could convert long URLs into short ones that are better suited to services like Twitter and Facebook. Unlike other services, Digg kept their own toolbar at the top of the page with Digg stats on the story as well. The underlying URL was shown in an iframe. Some sites weren't pleased to have their content framed around Digg stats and blocked the service. Digg capitulated and did a full redirect for non-logged in users, so people who don't use Digg were simply sent to the underlying site. Everyone seemed happy with the service from that point on. Except Digg, it seems. The tool was no longer sending new users to the Digg.com site, since those users didn't see the Digg wrapper when they clicked on the URL. The changes noted last Sunday reversed how non-Digg users were treated. Instead of a redirect to the original URL they are sent to the Digg story about that URL. Effectively a bait and switch. Digg founder Kevin Rose, fresh back from vacation, wasn't aware of the change to the service. He Twittered out links to some pictures using the DiggBar link and was surprised to see the story auto-submitted to Digg. He followed up asking people to bury the story, and then Twittered once more saying he "was not aware" of the change. And then just to add to the confusion, he Twittered yet again that he did know of the change, he just didn't know when it was being rolled out. DiggBar is no longer going to be described as a URL shortening service, we've heard, and Digg intends to make these new changes permanent. We've also heard that they will treat old links created with the DiggBar under the old rules to avoid being accused of hijacking that traffic to their own site. These changes aren't all that meaningful on their own. But it does show that Digg isn't interested in competing with Bit.ly and other services that are seeing massive data flows from useful URL shortening services. The fact that Bit.ly intends to compete head on with Digg via those data flows isn't non-trivial. Two days ago I predicted Digg would realize this and quickly reverse the policy changes. But I was wrong. Digg does fully realize the competitive landscape. But it seems they don't care to compete in the short URL space. Instead, they are going to grab the short term traffic benefits from redirecting these URLs to their home page. That seems shortsighted to me, and it is certainly not the best user experience. But Digg is clearly looking to become profitable this year. Sometimes the users suffer somewhat as tough choices are made. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. Microsoft Officially Retires Soapbox, The Poor Man's YouTube July 21, 2009 at 2:55 pm Microsoft's YouTube clone Soapbox is officially shutting its doors, according to reports today. Soapbox, which was launched in 2006 as a hub for downloading and sharing user-generated videos, was never able to be a viable competitor to YouTube. MSN corporate vice president and chief media and technology officer, Erik Jorgensen, said that Soapbox delivers less than 5 percent of the overall 480 million video streams worldwide on MSN Video each month. In June, MSN Video posted its best month ever, with 250 million streams. But this nothing compared to YouTube's streams which top around 1.2 billion per day. Earlier this month, Microsoft hinted that it may be reevaluating Soapbox as a property and possibly be scaling back the site. Even this past week, Microsoft chose to use YouTube for its Bing Jingle contest. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 Another Yahoo Exec Departure: Chief Scientist Mobile Marc Davis Out July 21, 2009 at 2:08 pm Yahoo Chief Scientist for Mobile and VP of Early Stage Products Marc Davis has left the company, we've heard from multiple sources, marking yet another of countless executive departures over the last couple of years. Davis first joined Yahoo in 2005 and had the enviable job description of being able to sit around and think up products that hundreds of millions of people may want to use. The only problem - in tough times, those are the jobs that are easiest to cut. From his own bio: Marc Davis is Chief Scientist and VP of ESP (Early Stage Products) of Yahoo! Mobile. His work focuses on creating the technology and applications that will enable the billions of daily media consumers to become daily media producers. His research encompasses the theory, design, and development of sociotechnical systems that leverage contextual metadata and the power of community to enable people around the world to produce, describe, share, and remix media, and to connect to each other in new ways. As Chief Scientist and VP of ESP at Yahoo! Mobile, Marc and his team invent and help realize the future of mobile, social, media, monetization, and platforms. ESP has been involved in innovative products from Yahoo! Mobile such as oneConnect, which reinvents mobile communications by aggregating a user's social networks and communications tools into a socially connected address book. This is not yet confirmed - we've reached out to Davis for comment and have not yet heard back. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. Reznor Bites The Hand That Feeds Him. Deletes His Twitter Account. July 21, 2009 at 2:01 pm The drama between Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and Twitter continues. Well, actually, it may be over for real this time, as Reznor has deleted his Twitter account. Last month, we noted that Reznor was half-quitting the service, as he was fed up with trolls using aspects about his personal life that he was too open about, against him. Reznor said no more personal updates would be coming, but said he would keep the account open to still get relevent NIN information out there. Apparently, he doesn't want to do that anymore either. It's an interesting move as many artists and celebrities seem to be tripping over themselves to set up Twitter accounts (or having their assistants/PR people do it) as a way to get more publicity. While it was clear that Reznor was legitimately using his own account to provide insights into his life, he also used it to get word out about his concerts and his music. Twitter is becoming an increasingly popular way of doing things like that. Not that Reznor has ever cared about what's popular, or is best from a marketing standpoint. He has long stood up against the big music labels that he considers to be greedy, and freely offers advice for any artists to sell (or give away) their own music on the web. Reznor also had a bit of a falling out with Apple, after they rejected an update to his iPhone app for a ridiculous reason. But that was eventually resolved. This spat with Twitter, doesn't look like it will be anytime soon. As silly as all of this may sound, there is a real issue here: Famous people sharing their personal lives in a very public forum. While it's nice to think that they can give mundane updates about their love lives like the rest of us, there are no shortage of creepy people out there on the web who will try to exploit that information. Reznor apparently found that out the hard way. And now he's gone. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors Vinod's New Fund: A No Brainer Investment July 21, 2009 at 1:33 pm Forbes has a story today that Vinod Khosla is closing on $1 billion in new venture funds, $250 million for seed stage deals and $750 million for larger deals. There's concern that these larger deals will largely go towards bailing out Khosla's investments from the last fund that are struggling. That's highly unorthodox in venture capital circles– VCs usually reserve at least half of their fund for follow on investments because new LPs frown on their money bailing out deals that didn't work the first time around. Khosla got around this by proposing a review committee for any follow on investments done out of the new fund. But there's a better reason Khosla's LPs shouldn't worry: This is Vinod Khosla we're talking about. I don't say that because he's Vinod Khosla. I'm a big believer that picking winners in the 1990s, when information technology and the Internet were exploding with greenfield opportunties, doesn't exactly make you a great investor today. Rather, as we've written before, it's precisely Khosla's willingness to be unorthodox that makes him such a good venture capitalist in these times. In case you've missed it– the industry is in serious danger of 10-year returns dipping below the S&P 500 once stellar returns from 1999 and early 2000 fall off. What do most industries do when they're under that kind of threat? Play it safe and hope they do just well enough to slip under the radar. Good deals are almost never made out of survival mode, especially in a business like venture capital where it's the insane homeruns not the basehits that repay your investors. Simply put: Too many VCs are investing like they have too much to lose. Khosla invests like a guy who has nothing to lose. Khosla runs his own firm so he doesn't have to kowtow to partners, and he already donates 100% of his general partner profits to charity. So he's not working for someone else, and he's certainly not playing for money. What does still motivate him? Maybe it's ego, maybe it's legacy or maybe it's just the intellectual thrill of proving he can still build another Sun Microsystems or Juniper Networks. But each of those things incents him to take huge risks. As a result Khosla is one of the few people in the hightech foodchain that is unabashedly investing in unproven science. Big companies certainly aren't. Even in the biotech space, big pharmaceutical companies mostly snap up smaller companies' research on the cheap and usually only for drugs that can become huge blockbusters. The government has greatly curtailed research for the sake of research, although Barack Obama has talked a good game about getting that going again. And in the board rooms of Sand Hill Road, nothing can kill a partner's deal faster than calling it "a science project." So what does that mean for Khosla Ventures? It'll have spectacular flame outs, particularly amid the 30-or-so risky cleantech deals. But those flame outs will get it closer to finding a scientific breakthrough that does work. And in the venture business, it only takes one big home run to make everyone rich. CrunchBase Information Khosla Ventures Information provided by CrunchBase CrunchBase Information Vinod Khosla Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. "World's Sexiest App"? Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Models Now Clutch Themselves On The iPhone. July 21, 2009 at 1:13 pm The print magazine business isn't doing so hot right now, but Sports Illustrated might just have found a new business model: selling an iPhone app featuring models from its 2009 Swimsuit Issue. Although the Swimsuit issue came out in February, the app just hit the iTunes store today (iTunes link). Marketed as the "World's Sexiest App" with a 17+ age rating, it costs $2.99. I'm sure it's going to make a mint. What do you get for $2.99? Photos of 20 models including Brooklyn Decker and Danica Patrick in various states of bikini nothingness and "breathtaking bodypainting videos." There are also other "intimate" videos for each model. Does Playboy have an iPhone app? It might save them too. Oh yeah, and there's also a sports calendar that sports fans keep track of up to six different pro and college teams, featuring a different Swimsuit model each month. Azuki Systems created the app for Sports Illustrated. BlackBerry owners will have to wait until August for their swimsuit model fix. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. It's Bulk Facebook Photo Tagging Time with Face.com Photo Tagger (Invites) July 21, 2009 at 12:10 pm Face.com made a splash when it launched Photo Finder it's first Facebook app back in March. The app employed some pretty impressive facial recognition that scanned Facebook photo albums to discover untagged photos of users and their friends. Even though it was labeled an 'Alpha' release the app worked remarkably well, identifying individuals in photos impaired by bad lighting, low resolution and obstructions such as sunglasses. Since its launch Photo Finder has scanned more than 1.5 billion photos, identifying more than 2.3 million faces—not too shabby at all. Today Face.com goes a step further by launching another Facebook application called Photo Tagger, which harnesses the company's core facial recognition technology and gives it a productivity spin: bulk name tagging made easy. We have 300 invites to give away, but be warned, Photo Tagger falls squarely into the "time vampire" category—so don't say we didn't warn you. Get your invite here. The purpose of Photo Tagger is a simple one, to speed-up tagging of faces in Facebook photo albums. While ideal for users that upload large amounts of photos, it's also a perfect fit for plain users that are just too lazy to add the name tag meta-layer. You know who you are folks… Luckily, no matter what category of user you fall under, Photo Tagger is a snap to use and much like Photo Finder, works really well. You begin by selecting an album which can either be your own or that of your friends'. You can both browse for an album, or search by username or for a keyword featured in an album title (i.e. birthday, vacation, bar, etc.). That's when the facial recognition kicks in and the app will begin its attempt to recognize individual faces. All of this happens pretty fast and by my testing took no longer than 30 seconds, even on albums with over a hundred photos. Once scanning is complete, Photo Tagger presents a results page with a summary header that displays stats regarding the tagging progress, and a "Save to Facebook" button (more on this in a moment). The Faces view below the summary displays faces grouped by similarity—both ones the app was able to recognize and those it could not. There's also an "Ungrouped" section on the bottom with faces that the app could not match to others. Now it's time for the productivity aspect to kick-in. There are a couple of ways to accept or change the photo tags: The first, in a sweeping manner that applies to the entire group, performed by selecting the Approve or Change All buttons. The second, by dealing with each photo individually using buttons overlaid upon each thumbnail. Back to the "Save to Facebook" button. All approved Photo Tagger tags can be turned into official Facebook tags. The condition however is that it must be accepted by the album owner. If the current user isn't the owner, a request is sent asking the owner approve the tag. This by the way is standard stuff enabled through Facebook's APIs. When a tag is accepted through Photo Tagger its thumbnail's frame will go green. If and when it's accepted as an official Facebook tag, a small Facebook logo will appear in the corner of the thumbnail. All of this is pretty clear when used in the app. Face.com's CEO Gil Hirsch explains that Photo Tagger is a result of his team's ability to add new face-clustering technology on top of their core facial recognition. He went on to tell me that with each album scanned, Photo Tagger will get better at identifying faces already tagged. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 Spotify Adds Two Million More Tracks As It Preps For US Launch July 21, 2009 at 10:02 am Spotify, the music streaming service, has announced a deal with IODA, the Independent Online Distribution Alliance. IODA brokers agreements for independent labels and artists and helps them out with marketing and distribution. Thus, the Spotify/IODA deal brings 2 million new indie tracks - meaning you'll now be able to stream The Prodigy and Bob Marley, among others. IODA's international partners, including Bonnier Amigo Music Group, are on board too. The move is clearly ahead of a planned US launch. Upcoming Android and iPhone apps are also being readied. It'll be interesting to see how all this plays out: although Spotify plans to launch in the US before the end of the year, there's the small matter of Microsoft's upcoming music streaming service to factor in. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. iPhone Push Problem Broadcasts Your AIMs to Random Recipients, Could Affect Jailbroken/Unlocked Phones July 21, 2009 at 9:08 am Till Schadde, founder of development house Equinux, has discovered an exploit - a broadcast error, really - that sends your AIM messages to random recipients without your knowledge or consent. The problem seems to happen in unlocked/jailbroken iPhones and results in a alert appearing on a recipients home screen bearing your message. Till tested the service by sending an AIM from the OS X desktop using iChat to his iPhone. He then received a reply back from a random recipient. It is clear that this is a Push problem in the message addressing - each iPhone is assigned its own identifier and receives messages from a central server operated by Apple - although this may change. Playdom Extends #1 MySpace Game 'Mobsters' To The iPhone July 21, 2009 at 8:58 am It's been just under one year since social-gaming startup Playdom launched Mobsters, which has grown to become the #1 game on MySpace with 13.5 million total installs. Now, the company is taking the incredibly popular game mobile with its first iPhone App, dubbed Mobsters: Big Apple (iTunes Link). And while it may not be the first such mafia-related game on the iPhone, it still has a few tricks up its sleeve that could turn it into a major hit. Now, Playdom isn't close to being the first mover here — we covered iMob back in January, and we've seen competing social gaming companies like Zynga and SGN launch similar games based on the Mafias, Vampires, and a number of other themes. But Playdom has one advantage that the others don't: it has directly hooked Mobsters Big Apple into its counterpart Mobsters game on MySpace, which means millions of players will be able to begin playing with the account that they've spent the last year building up on the social network. SGN and Zynga both offer Facebook and MySpace games with similar themes to their iPhone games, but for whatever reason they haven't linked them together, which means gamers have to begin anew if they start playing on the iPhone. Aside from a large existing user base, Playdom also has the benefit of being able to use much of the same content from its well-established MySpace game on the iPhone, which means the new mobile app has access to 65 missions and plenty of items. And because both games use the same backend, the company can continuously add new content to both games. The iPhone app can't currently connect to Playdom's Facebook game, but the company says support is coming. As with other games in this genre, gameplay largely revolves around completing missions and becoming more powerful by acquiring better weapons (there's also a time constraint that forces you to keep coming back for more). It may not sound particularly appealing until you've tried it out for yourself, but once you do it's easy to quickly become totally addicted. Playdom has done a good job enhancing the experience with audio clips (you'll hear things like "Magnifico.." when you complete a mission), and assorted art assets. Now we'll just have to wait and see if Zynga and SGN strike back with their own web-connected updates, or if there's a reason why they made the decision to hold off on adding that functionality. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors Gaming Software Company Arkadium Acquires Advergame.com July 21, 2009 at 8:25 am Arkadium, an NYC-based company that markets gaming software for brands, ad agencies, casino operators and online game websites, has bought Advergame.com for an undisclosed sum and has revamped its gaming portal GreatDayGames with a number of additional features to boot. According to the company, customized advergames offer a fresh approach to exposing consumers to a brand and "keep them coming back for more". Kenny Rosenblatt, CEO of Arkadium says: "The majority of display ads shown to gamers today are irrelevant to the player and worthless to the publisher. Casual gamers spend thousands of hours playing online and are highly receptive to relevant advertisements." Hence them betting on advergaming as a concept to find widespread adoption among marketers worldwide and creating some brand awareness by purchasing the relevant domain name / business Advergame.com. Arkadium says it currently boasts an online network of more than 250 Flash-based games that attracts over five million monthly unique users and is running a profitable operation, servicing big name clients Warners Bros., CBS, NBC, General Electric, Reader's Digest, Mattel and Hasbro. The company also claims it serves more than 120 million page views each month within its game Arenas, with users spending an average of 20 minutes each session. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors FanDuel Turns Premium Fantasy Sports Social — And It's Legal July 21, 2009 at 6:55 am The people that brought you HubDub, the prediction site that effectively turns news content into a game, have had a new idea. FanDuel is a premium, paid-for game focused on fantasy sports. Running in private beta for the last month, the game opens up today concentrating on baseball and NFL to begin with. Although the competitive space for daily fantasy sports is fairly new, there's clearly an opportunity there - some 20m people play fantasy games, making it a $2bn industry. Currently big players such as Yahoo, CBS and ESPN dominate the market. But if you play Mafia Wars and other social games on Facebook, going back to playing traditional fantasy sports on CBS feels like going back to when dinosaurs walked the earth. Plus fantasy sports require a lot of time commitment as you have to play for the whole season. FanDuel addresses this problem by letting users play and win in a day. The game is integrated with Twitter and Facebook, and books revenues from taking a 10% commission on each of the match-ups. But hold on just a second - how is this all legal? Condé Nast Sheds Men.Style.com, Hires Consultants For More Cost-Cutting July 21, 2009 at 6:54 am Nearly three months after shedding glossy business magazine Portfolio, publisher Condé Nast has hired external consultants from McKinsey to assist in some serious cost-cutting continuation, Yahoo-style. First online property to go after the word of the hire got out: Men.Style.com, the media company's web-only brand for - you guessed it - men. In a memo that got republished all over the web yesterday, Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend told his staff that it is time to "rethink" the entire business, warning that the company must "realign to be a successful business in an emerging economy that is now predicted to be painfully slow in recovering." In this environment, it's indeed not the best choice to keep three men's fashion titles on the web, as Condé Nast Digital president Sarah Chubb admitted to Advertising Age: "It didn't really make sense to do so because lifestyle content from GQ was already the main traffic driver for Men.Style.com. Further, the view among Conde Nast execs is that a unified print-web brand will be an easier sell to brand advertisers." After the launch of both sites, Men.Style.com - launched back in 2005 - traffic will refer to GQ.com and the original staffers will move along with it. According to Condé Nast's internal numbers, Men.Style.com saw 1.7 million unique visitors last month, up nearly 50% from the same month last year. The umbrella website, Style.com, had 2 million monthly UVs. ComScore paints a different picture, putting Men.Style.com at 386,000 unique visitors and Style.com at 656,000 in June. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. Best Buy Goes All Twitter Crazy With @Twelpforce July 21, 2009 at 5:30 am This is an interesting one: consumer electronics retailer Best Buy is encouraging hundreds of employees to handle online customer service and company promotions via Twitter, even airing commercials not mentioning their own website but merely the URL of the profile they created on the micro-sharing service (two spots embedded below). The new service, dubbed Twelpforce, was debuted over the weekend but so far hasn't garnered a lot of online buzz, let alone followers on Twitter (currently at around 1350). I'm sure that will change soon enough. Tweet the Twelpforce, they're here to twelp Leaving aside the brutal misuse of the 'tw' in Twitter for their own use of names and verbs, the concept is pretty well thought-out. Best Buy employees can use their company and Twitter ID to register for the service here, after which tweets from the lot of them will be displayed in a single stream on the same page. Once registered, tweeting Best Buy employees from across all operations can send messages from the @Twelpforce account, and if they add the hash-tag #twelpforce, their messages will automatically show up under the twelpforce handle with a credit to their proper Twitter account. This is similar to how we handle the auto-posting of TechCrunch posts on our Twitter account. R-e-s-p-e-c-t I like that the 'Tips & Expectations' part targeted at interested Best Buy employees is made public (right here). An excerpt: The promise we're making starting in July is that you'll know all that we know as fast as we know it. That's an enormous promise. That means that customers will be able to ask us about the decisions they're trying to make, the products they're using, and look for the customer support that only we can give. And with Twitter, we can do that fast, with lots of opinions so they can make a decision after weighing all the input. It also lets others learn from it as they see our conversations unfold. When you start, remember that the tone is important Above all, the tone of the conversation has to be authentic and honest. Be conversational. Be yourself. Show respect. Expect respect. The goal is to help. If you don't know the answer tell them you'll find out. Then find out and let them know. Practical tips include identifying oneself as a Best Buy employee, not asking for personal customer information (even in direct messages), don't be pushy in trying to convince someone to buy consumer electronics from Best Buy, apologize for any delays and misunderstandings, etc. Having launched last Sunday, Twelpforce has reportedly been in test with more than 700 registered employees, with more of them signing up daily. Fantastic or spamtastic? Personally, I think this is a phenomenal way to engage with Twitter users and social media in general. I'm sure that a lot of people will find it intrusive if a Best Buy employee suddenly starts talking to them after they tweeted out something random like "I could use a new flat-screen TV for my condo", but looking at the advice provided by the company I think they actually 'get it' and are not looking to be overly pushy in selling you stuff. If the response is friendly, personal and not clearly coming from someone interested only in trying to make a sale rather than being proactive about giving knowledgeable advice, I wouldn't mind to be contacted by Best Buy employees on Twitter at all. Judging by the public stream of tweets, I'd say that this is exactly what they are doing, so kudos to them and Best Buy for thinking differently about online customer service. More of this, please. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. Google Wave Begins To Swell With Developers; Wider Release This September July 21, 2009 at 3:01 am Google Wave, the search giant's incredibly ambitious new Email/IM hybrid that was announced in May, is quickly picking up steam. As of last week the service was open to around 6,000 developers (most of whom had attended conferences like I/O), and Google is planning to send out an additional 20,000 invites over the next month. It looks like a big batch of them just went out, as we've received a number of tips about new invitations, and Twitter is currently abuzz with excited developers thrilled to finally get in on the action. One other piece of news that will be very interesting to non-developers eagerly waiting to try out the service: Google is planning to release Wave to 100,000 users beginning on September 30th, using the service's main wave.google.com hub rather than the developer site (we can likely expect a Gmail-like limited invitation system). By this time we can likely expect there to be a rich variety of Wave widgets — the site already boasts plenty of them, including a RickRoll widget and more practical things like a weather forecast — but you can't try them out without a Developer Sandbox account. Thanks to Noah Hendrix for the tip. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. Venture Capital Dollars Stabilize in Second Quarter at Mid-1990s Levels July 20, 2009 at 11:58 pm Venture capital dollars going to startups in the U.S. stabilized in the second quarter at $3.7 billion, according to the latest MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. The venture money invested in the quarter is still only about half of what it was a year ago (when it was $7.2 billion in the second quarter of 2008), but is 15 percent above the low point in the first quarter of 2009 (when it was $3.5 billion). All in all, VC investments are trending at mid-1990s levels, which isn't such a bad thing. The average deal size came up a little bit to $6 million, from $5.3 million last quarter. Seed and early stage investing picked up after venture capitalists fled to the perceived safety of later-stage investments in recent previous quarters. The rebound, if you want to call it that, hasn't hit the Internet sector yet. Internet deals brought in only $524 million in the quarter, down from $593 million the quarter before and $1.7 billion a year ago. Clean tech isn't doing so hot either, with only $274 million invested during the second quarter compared to $911 million a year ago. Most of the action came from biotech and medical devices, which saw bigger jumps in funding during the quarter to $88 million and $628 million, respectively. Remember, this is only one source of data (most of it from Thomson Reuters). We actually measured nearly twice the dollar amount of venture deals during the quarter on CrunchBase, which we'll share more fully soon. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors Digg User Voted Ads In The Wild. Mmmmm, IHOP July 20, 2009 at 11:55 pm A TechCrunch reader submits the screenshot above showing a user voted Digg advertisement for IHOP. As far as we know, this is the first time this has been seen in the wild. The ads were first announced last month as a new type of advertising platform. The more users who digg on the ad, the less the advertiser has to pay. The more it is buried, the more the advertiser has to pay, eventually pricing it out of the system. Here's the interesting thing. Digg says they are internally testing Digg Ads and confirm that IHOP is one of the ads Digg employees see. But no one outside of Digg's offices are supposed to see them yet. They give no explanation as to why this person sees the ad, but do confirm it is an accurate screenshot. They've been working on this product for a long time - we first reported rumors of it in late 2008. Anyone else see these? Send a screenshot to tips@techcrunch. Thanks, Mohamoud, for sending this. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. Adobe Unveils New Open Source Initiatives Targeted Towards Media Companies July 20, 2009 at 11:50 pm Adobe has rolled out two new open source initiatives aimed specifically towards developers for media companies and publishers. Adobe's Open Source Media Framework lets developers build more robust, feature-rich media players optimized specifically for the Adobe Flash Platform. The second initiative, the Text Layout Framework (TLF), will help developers create sophisticated typography capabilities to Web applications. OSMF basically lets developers easily build media players for the Adobe Flash Platform. Adobe says the structure of OSMF lets developers leverage plug-ins for advertising, reporting metrics and content delivery along with standard video player features such as playback controls, video navigation, buffering and Dynamic Streaming. The OSMF source code and software components are available under the Mozilla Public License. Adobe is also partnering with content delivery service Akamai to create a cohesive standard to support Adobe media players that support Flash. TLF lets developers layout text on web applications with support for complex languages, bidirectional text, multi-columns and other advanced typographical features and controls. TLF is an ActionScript library built on top of the text engine in Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5 software. Similar to OSMF, TLF is available as open source under the Mozilla Public License. Adobe's product manager for Flash, Tom Barclay, says that these new initiatives are mainly targeted towards media companies who want to leverage typography technologies and rich media players off of the Flash and Adobe AIR platforms. The New York Times TimesReader 2.0 and The Boston Globe's GlobeReader are both powered by TLF, and leverage the typography features of the open source code. Barclay says that Adobe saw an opportunity to open code to Flash applications that could prove to make interactive rich media applications. In the past, Adobe has also opened up the Flex Platform and launched the Open Screen Project. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 SlideRocket Raises $5 Million For Online Presentation Platform July 20, 2009 at 11:15 pm SlideRocket, a startup that helps create online presentations, has raised $5 million in Series B funding led by Azure Capital Partners with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners participating. This new round of funding brings SlideRocket's total funding to $7 million. The company also announced that Chuck Dietrich, former General Manager and Vice President at Salesforce.com, has joined the company as CEO. SlideRocket is an online presentation application that produces media rich slideshows that rival PowerPoint presentations. SlideRocket says it will use the funding to grow the company by adding more hires and help continue innovation of the product. SlideRocket took the beta label off last fall and added collaboration tools to let users share slides and other assets between presentations and turn on a conference mode similar to WebEx, allowing users on different computers to view the same presentation simultaneously. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors