| Ooyala Hits Profitability In A Crowded Market, Looking For A New CEO
July 23, 2009 at 12:32 am
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|  Silicon Valley based Ooyala, a service that manages video streaming for websites, hit an important milestone last month - positive cash flow. The company was founded by ex Googlers Bismarck Lepe, Sean Knapp and Belsasar Lepe in 2007 and has raised just $10 million in funding.
And now they're considering the hire of a new CEO, we've confirmed. Bismarck Lepe, the current CEO, says he's actually been looking for his replacement for the last year. This isn't being driven by the venture investor, Sierra Ventures, he says. And in fact the founding team retains stock and board of directors voting control, making their consent a requirement of any CEO change. Lepe just feels as though he isn't necessarily the guy to take the company to the next level, whatever that may be. So he's retained a search firm to find someone better than him to run Ooyala. The company is certainly doing well. We first covered them in late 2008 and they already had big name customers like National Geographic, TV Guide, AOL, and Warner Brothers. Today, Lepe says, they stream 250,000 - 350,000 hours of video a day through partners. One Michael Jackson video last week racked up 70 million views in just 36 hours. The company has a software as a service model that charges users to set up accounts and manage video. There is an additional fee based on hours of content streamed as well. This is a crowded space. Brightcove has raised nearly $100 million in capital, for example. Yahoo paid $160 million to acquire competitor Maven Networks and then killed the business line 17 months later. And most recently Joost announced a strategic shift to focus on this space as well. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| Google Listens, Gives A Friend-Only "Likes" Option In Reader
July 22, 2009 at 11:38 pm
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|  It seems like just yesterday we were complaining about the lack of options for the new "like" functionality in Google Reader. Okay, it was two days ago. And Google has already responded. A new option in the settings menu of Google Reader allows you to "Only show "Likes" by people you follow."
It's not quite the on/off switch that some people wanted for the feature, but I'd bet that eventually we'll see that too. Still, this should ease the pain of those who simply did not care what RSS items random people like. Now, it will only be those users you know, or at least said that you know and want to follow. I suppose if you really want to turn "likes" completely off, you could just unfollow everyone. But that's probably not the social evolution Google was hoping for with the product. [via Mike Knapp]
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. 
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| Someone Please Caption This
July 22, 2009 at 11:21 pm
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This picture is great. And it's just begging for some kind of caption. It was taken today at Microsoft's MGX conference in Atlanta, where Windows President Steven Sinofsky and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took the stage to reveal that Windows 7 was ready to be released to manufacturing. In other words, it's done. But what on Earth are Sinofsky and Ballmer doing in this picture snapped by Microsoft's Brandon LeBlanc, and sent out to Twitter? It looks like Sinofsky might be trying to throw a baseball left-handed (assuming he's right-handed). Or maybe he's asking Ballmer to take his arm and skip? Ballmer looks to be screaming, which is nothing new, or is he yawning? Also, it looks like he just used a CD-ROM to burn a copy of Dave Matthews Band Under the Table and Dreaming, which he either borrowed from the library, or downloaded through Kazaa. (Okay, yes it's the gold Windows 7 RTM disc, but what is he going to write on it?) Are the two men exorcising Windows Vista as Windows 7 rises in the background? Or is Ballmer in the midst of saying something in threes? Maybe they're singing? If so, where and who is the third tenor? We need to know. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 
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| Show Off: YouTube Now Lets You Share Just How Well Your Video Is Performing
July 22, 2009 at 11:02 pm
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|  YouTube has always given you the chance to show off how well your videos are doing, but only to a limited extent. Aside from a star rating, view count, and of course, the infamous comments section, there hasn't been an easy way to share more meaningful data with your audience — something that can make it harder for content partners to attract advertisers on the site. Tonight, that changes: you'll now be able to publicly share select pieces of information from YouTube Insight, the site's powerful analytics tool.
YouTube is currently down for scheduled maintenance to enable the feature, but some videos are already beginning to display the data (you can see a screenshot below, taken from this video). You'll now be able to publicly display information related to your video's performance in various geographical regions and demographics, as well as more thorough information about which sites are driving traffic to your content. Finally, there's a nice graph that displays your video's popularity over time. These new data-points have all been previously available though YouTube Insight to the video's original uploader, but this is the first time they'll be publicly shareable. In a way, the new feature is similar to what Quantcast has done with its 'Quantified' sites, which lets websites publicly share some of their traffic data without having to face accusations of having doctored it. Likewise, YouTube publishers will now be able to basically flaunt just how well their videos are doing — something that could prove very important for publishers looking to attract relevant advertisers. 
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| The iPhone's Competitors Have A Big Problem: Their Games Stink
July 22, 2009 at 10:06 pm
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|  It's no secret that gaming on the iPhone has been one of the main keys to the App Store's success. You know it, I know it, and so you have to believe that all the competitors know it too. And yet, their actions would seem to suggest that they don't know it. Because they keep building devices, operating systems and app stores to compete with the iPhone, that simply can't hold a candle to the iPhone when it comes to gaming.
At the Casual Connect conference in Seattle today, some numbers were thrown out there, talking about just how big gaming is now on the iPhone. Of the nearly 70,000 apps in the App Store, some 20% are games. Yes, that means there are between 10,000 and 15,000 apps that are games, just for the iPhone alone. To put that in perspective, that is more than the total number of apps that all of the App Store's big competitors (Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm's App Catalog, BlackBerry's App World) have — combined. Sure, all of those stores are younger than the App Store, but it's already clear that none are taking hold as true gaming platforms like the iPhone is. At least Palm has already come to that realization early in its lifespan, and has started trying to hire gaming engineers to try and change that. But there are no shortage of questions as to just how well webOS, an OS built on web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, will be able to handle graphic-intense gaming, like the iPhone can. And the competitors have another problem: The games on the iPhone are getting even better.  If there's one trend I've noticed in the App Store over the past few months, it's that every week without fail now there are at least a handful of really, really good games hitting the store. I'm someone who, as I've grown older, has found that I don't have much time or patience for gaming. But there I am on the iPhone at least once a week now checking for the hot new games and downloading them. They're fantastic, and they're not $50 or $60 like current console games are.
Some, like FlightControl are simple and addictive. Others like Rolando 2, make perfect use of all the iPhone's capabilities like multi-touch and the accelerometer. Some rival fun I have with console versions, like Tiger Woods an Peggle. Some bring a feeling of nostalgia for the old NES days (with better graphics), like Castle of Magic. I could go on — StoneLoops of Jurrasica, GloBall, Tap Tap Revenge 2, Moonlights — these are all great games. And these are just games I've gotten in the past few weeks. And now, with the launch of the iPhone 3GS, there is hardware that will be able to handle even more impressive gaming. While Apple's competitors are busy trying to build phones to dethrone the iPhone, Apple has built a device that not only is still running laps around them, it's also taking on devices like the Sony PSP and the Nintendo DS.  And naturally, with success, a lot of developers making games for the iPhone are making a lot of money off of the platform. SGN's Shervin Pishevar says his top games are seeing 25,000 to 40,000 daily installs. If those games are $9.99, that's $250,000 to $400,000 a day (before Apple's 30% cut), just for one game, as VC Jeff Clavier points out.
Now, not all developers are having such success. But that's partially due to the fact that there are so many of them now making games. And the fact that the iPhone has turned into a gaming platform has attracted the big boys, like EA. "Every day, the gap with Apple gets wider and wider," Sling Media co-founder Blake Krikorian told Bloomberg today refering to the iPhone's competitors. He had bought a Palm Pre when it came out, but switched back to the iPhone three days later because he couldn't live without Tiger Woods. I completely understand. I just don't understand why the iPhone's competitors don't seem to. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 
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| CrunchBoard: Content Associate, PHP Developer, Search Specialist
July 22, 2009 at 10:04 pm
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Its CrunchBoard time, so let's take a look back at the recent job news. Super Secret startup MOBshop is looking for some serious coding guns for hire. They say MOBshop "will hit the intersection of mobile and physical worlds." If your looking to get your name out there and do some networking, Card.ly lets you create some cool online business cards. It's time to get yourself a presence online, cause you know, this internet thing is here to stay. And we're all about that business card dying thing. Things still don't look good for the print media industry as the Condé Nast layoffs continue. They've hired consultants from McKinsey to help with the cuts, with the first casualty being their web brand for men. Well, atleast they're hiring somebody. Here is our layoff tracker, which is updated regularly. If your on the hunt for a new job, CrunchBoard may be the place to find a new opportunity. Check out a snapshot of the jobs available below: For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard. Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors 
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| Softball: Marc Andreessen Talks Tech At Fortune Brainstorm
July 22, 2009 at 9:13 pm
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|  Fortune's Adam Lashinsky is interviewing Marc Andreessen in an evening session of the Fortune Brainstorm in Pasadena, CA. Unfortunately Lashinsky didn't ask any hard questions (um, Ning worth $750 million?). But among the softballs were a few interesting responses.
Lashinsky starts the talk off on venture capital, of course, given Andreessen and Ben Horowitz's new $300 million venture fund called Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen, rehashing old material, says the goal is to be one of the few venture capitalists who are able to survive. He says that only a handful of startups do well enough to really make the returns for a VC, and he says his connections and reputation are solid enough to attract those startups to his fund. His focus: consumer Internet, business Internet (cloud computing, "software as a service"), mobile software and services, software-powered consumer electronics, infrastructure and applications software, networking, storage, databases, and other back-end systems. On the economy in general: "We had a big breakdown in how western capitalism works," Andreessen says, adding that "there needs to be a tremendous amount of deleveraging." But it's also an opportunity for entrepreneurs to disrupt some of the affected industries. Insurance, finance, etc. are very hard industries to enter, he says, and you have to compete with government subsidized entities. He seems to think the bailouts were a terrible idea. Lashinsky does ask one solid question at the end - Would you invest your new venture fund in Ning at a $750 million valuation, he asks? Andreessen says he loves Ning and would have taken a hard look at it. I'm not sure if that actually qualifies as an answer. That was quite possibly the worst interview of Marc I've ever seen. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors 
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| Billboard Hopes Its API Will Be A Cornerstone For Music Mashups
July 22, 2009 at 8:46 pm
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|  Earlier today came news that Billboard, the well known music analytics company, was repositioning its homepage to serve as a consumer-friendly destination for music fans rather than the B2B hub it had been before. Alongside the release, the company has informed us that it's planning to make its API more accesible to developers, with the hopes that it will spur a new wave of music-related applications built around the data. Developers can access the API at developer.billboard.com.
Billboard has been churning out charts featuring popular music since the 1940s, with its most well known chart, the Hot 100, making its debut in 1958. These vast volumes of data can be used in any number of ways, from tracking overall trends to charting the success of an individual artist over time (you can see an example use of the data in this piece on Michael Jackson in the New York Times). In short, the data is something of a goldmine for data-hungry music fans. Billboard is hoping that the new API will serve to make the site one of the foundations that music mashups are built around, in much the same way the Google Maps API has become a cornerstone for countless mashups. That's much easier said than done, of course, and I doubt that the data will be as broadly useful. Still, we can likely look forward to some very cool projects in the near future. Billboard actually opened its API early this year, but up until now it has done a minimal amount of marketing around it (the company was still primarily concerned with its B2B offerings). Today's news was also a major win for Lala, the very cool music startup that may have finally found the right formula for actually making money. The service now powers Billboard's site-wide music player, offering immediate playback of many of Billboard's top songs. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors 
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| Patent Defense Play RPX Closes Series B From Index, Kleiner, And Charles River
July 22, 2009 at 8:26 pm
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Defense Play RPX, a defensive patent aggregator, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series B funding led by Index Ventures with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Charles River Ventures participating. The company also raised an undisclosed Series A round of funding in September 2008 from Kleiner Perkins and and Charles River Ventures. RPX first launched in November 2008 as a way to help companies defend themselves specifically against patent trolls (organizations that buy up patent portfolios with the express intention of forcing other companies to license those patents or face a lawsuit). RPX buys up its own patents, or strikes licensing deals on behalf of its members, and the charges companies $35,000 to $4.9 million a year for perpetual licenses to those patents. The deal is that if companies pay up, any patents in RPX's portfolio can't be used in litigation against a member company. The company says that it has purchased nearly $90 million in patent rights in the mobile, Internet search, telecommunications, consumer electronics and RFID markets to date. RPX will use the funding to try to surpass its goal of acquiring $100 million in patents during its first year of operation, which means that the company has raised (via venture funding, debt, credit lines etc.) over $100 million. Not too shabby for a startup that launched during a recession. RPX's membership already includes many of the world's largest technology companies, including HP, Nokia, Sony, Samsung, LG, Panasonic, and Seiko-Epson. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors 
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| Guess Who Lost Big on the Zappos Deal?
July 22, 2009 at 6:14 pm
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|  The Zappos deal is widely viewed as a win-win-win. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh gets to stay in charge with deeper pockets to keep building the company for the long term. Amazon expands its ecommerce dominance by snapping up the one company online shoppers may love more than Amazon itself. And Sequoia Capital gets to lock in a near-$1 billion win at a time when the rest of the venture industry is on the ropes.
But there is one big loser in all of this: Draper Richards. Sources close to Zappos tell us that Draper Richards– a firm that is frequently listed as a Zappos investor– actually holds no shares in the company. They lent Zappos about $250,000 in its early days, and when the dot com bubble burst demanded repayment. Zappos was strapped for cash, so they tried to convince Draper Richards to take stock at a discounted conversion rate instead, but the firm insisted on loan repayment. (Draper Richards confirmed they were only a lender, not an equity investor.) I don't have enough detail to know exactly what they would have netted today, but our source says they would have been Zappos' largest– and no doubt happiest– shareholder. Sometimes it's the deals a firm makes– or doesn't make– in a crash that matter most. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 
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| Skype Unleashes A "Super-Secret" Project: A Cheap Headset
July 22, 2009 at 5:28 pm
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|  Skype is great, but it's also kind of a pain in the ass if you're talking to someone that has a crappy microphone. And Skype realizes that, so it put its engineers to work on a "super-secret" project: A headset that anyone could use, anywhere.
And today the company unveiled the FREETALK Everyman headset, a USB super wideband audio headset. While first and foremost the goal was to ensure great call quality, Skype also notes that this headset is, "lightweight and folds flat so you can throw it in your bag with your laptop." This roadtest review gives a full overview of how it works. Their conclusion? It's good, but the best part is the price: $22.88. Good-quality headsets usually cost much more than that. Of course, this super-secret Skype project did not solve the problem of looking like a huge dork when you are wearing a headset talking to a computer screen, but it's a start. You can buy the FREETALK Everyman headset here. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| Bypass Loading Facebook By Emailing In Your Pictures And Videos
July 22, 2009 at 5:17 pm
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Facebook has fast become one of the leading photo and video sharing sites on the web. The social network already lets you upload photos via MMS or through Facebook apps on the iPhone, Blackberry and other mobile devices. Today, Facebook is giving users another way to share photos immediately— via email. Facebook now lets you create a unique upload email address where you can send photos and videos from anywhere you have email access on your mobile device. When you attach a photo or video to an email, you can include the comment to the photo in the subject line of the email. But if there is more than one image or video attached to the email, the caption will apply to all the attachments. Facebook says that your email provider determines the file size of how many videos and photos you can send in one email, but the social network doesn't have any restrictions on how many images can be uploaded via one email. Images uploaded via the email will be placed in the "Mobile Upload" photo album (where photos from MMS and apps go) and will follow the privacy settings of that album, according to Facebook. This sounds a lot like Flickr's option to upload via email. Similar to Facebook, Flickr gives you a unique email address that you can use to add your photos to your Flickr photostream. This move shows how important photo and video sharing is to the social network, which saw 1 billion video views last month. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors 
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| Windows 7 Passes The Test, Is Ready For Manufacturing
July 22, 2009 at 4:37 pm
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Microsoft's newest version of its operating system, Windows 7, is finally in the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) stage, so the OS will soon be preloaded on new computers. Though not officially released yet, Windows 7 is expected to be a hit. For instance, after just eight hours on Amazon UK, Windows 7 pre-orders outpaced the total number of pre-orders for Vista over a period of 17 weeks. According to Microsoft, Windows 7, which offers seven different versions of the OS, has undergone significant testing, quality assurance and validation required to get to the RTM stage. Independent software and hardware vendors will be able to download Windows 7 RTM as early as August 6th. Microsoft will be rolling out Windows 7 to other partners in mid to late August. Enterprise customers and developers will be able to download Windows 7 RTM in English starting on August 7, with additional language functionality for Windows 7 released shortly after. For the plebes/consumers, Windows 7 will be in retail stores and shipping on new PCs starting October 22nd, which we already knew. After receiving an overwhelming response from beta testers, Microsoft is also offering a "family pack" for Windows 7 that will allow installation on up to 3 PCs. The company has also officially released the new version of Expression 3, the set of tools Microsoft offers for developers to build applications off of Silverlight. Of course, the official RTM release of Windows 7 comes at a time when Microsoft's stranglehold of the operating system is being challenged by the recent announcement of Google's Chrome OS. Google is scheduled to release the open source code for Chrome OS later this year, which perhaps could conveniently fall around the October launch of Windows 7. The first Chrome OS computers won't launch until next year. While Google says the Chrome OS is targeted towards netbooks at the moment, there is definite potential for Google's OS to expand to the other types of computers, giving Microsoft something to mull over. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| Amazon Buys Zappos
July 22, 2009 at 4:21 pm
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| News has just broken that Amazon.com has purchased hot ecommerce up-and-comer Zappos for 10 million Amazon shares or $880 million. Zappos employees also will get $40 million in cash and restricted stock. And Zappos management will remain in place. This is a great exit for Zapoos' investors, including Sequoia Capital and Venture Frogs, who put in $47 million in four rounds. I'm digging around for details now but here's a video Jeff Bezos did that just went to Zappos employees. The post by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is here. In a letter to employees he writes: We plan to continue to run Zappos the way we have always run Zappos — continuing to do what we believe is best for our brand, our culture, and our business. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are switching out our current shareholders and board of directors for a new one, even though the technical legal structure may be different.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| Bing, Twitter, And A Backpack Full Of Cash (Hopefully For Beer)
July 22, 2009 at 3:09 pm
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|  You gotta hand it to the Bing guys, they just don't stop coming up with kooky ideas to drive interest in their little search engine (or whatever you want to call it) that could. The latest is a new contest starting tomorrow on Twitter that will see one winner a day walk away with a Bing backpack and a $500 Visa cash card to use for back-to-school shopping.
But reading over the fine print, it doesn't appear that you need to use the money for back-to-school shopping. And in fact, the rules state that you have to be over 18 to enter the contest, so unless parents are doing it for their kids, or it's all college kids entering, it doesn't really seem all that student-friendly. And that's good, because it will increase my chances of winning and using the $500 on something more desirable than protractors — like maybe beer. Here's how the contest works: Starting tomorrow, the Bing Cashback Twitter account will start tweet out a trivia question. Anyone who @replies back the correct answer within an hour, is then eligible to win the money for that day. This is a good idea by Bing because the trivia will be Bing Shopping and Cashback-related, so basically you have to use Bing to find the answer. And you are required to use the #cashbackpack hashtag in your public tweet to ensure others will start following the content. Not to mention that you will have to be following the @bingcashback account closely all 7 days to see when it asks its question. Unfortunately, this contest is only open to those in the U.S. Come on Bing, beer me. [photo: flickr/elvissa] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 
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| Plot Multiple Searches On Google Maps
July 22, 2009 at 2:54 pm
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Google Maps is an incredibly useful tool for searching for pretty much anything in a specific geographic area, but I used to find it annoying that I would have to conduct multiple, separate searches in Google Maps for various items along a route or point of interest. Now Google has added a feature that lets you conduct multiple searches within one search for directions. This feature lets you add visual layers to a particular map as you add more search parameters. So let's say you are searching for a particular route to get from one destination to another. You can now search for several restaurants and bars within that route. As you conduct multiple searches, you'll see a blue bar at the bottom of the left side of the Maps page. You can click on it to expand the widget, which will list the searches that you have made. You can also turn searches on or off by clicking on the box to the side of each search. And each search is color coded, so you know which is which. Google also recently added another helpful feature to its Maps product—the What's Here option. If you right-click somewhere on a map, it will bring up a menu with a bunch of options, including "What's here?" Google will then show you information about what is actually at the location you're pointing at.  Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| iLike Negotiating A Reorganization; TicketMaster May Be Flushed Out
July 22, 2009 at 2:21 pm
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|  We've confirmed from multiple sources that San Francisco/Seattle based music service iLike, which has been profitable since 2008, is raising new capital in an unusual transaction designed to push out Ticketmaster, an investor since 2006.
The company has raised a total of $16.5 million from the founders, Scott Banister, Bob Pittman, Vinod Khosla and Ticketmaster to date. But their last round of funding was in 2006, where Ticketmaster put the bulk of the capital in via a third round of financing that valued the company at a whopping $53.2 million. In Q4 2008 Ticketmaster wrote down a number of their venture investments, including a $5.8 million charge for iLike. Internally, they valued that $13.3 million investment at just $7.5 million. Now, we've confirmed, the founding team plus a new investor is offering to buy out all or some of Ticketmaster's stake in the company. Founders Ali Partovi, Hadi Partovi and Nat Brown, all with significant personal fortunes, will invest part of the new round, with the new investor taking the rest. The company isn't commenting on this story. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 
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| Post Royalty Rate Agreement, Wowza Seeing A Big Uptick In Streaming Radio Interest
July 22, 2009 at 2:15 pm
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|  After years of uncertainty and talk of shutting down, Internet streaming radio finally got the break it needed a few weeks ago. SoundExchange, the group responsible for setting the listening rates being charged to the Internet radio services, agreed to cut its proposed rate hikes in exchange for trade-offs such as a higher guaranteed rate. The most visible company affected by this Pandora, but it's hardly the only one. One company we spoke to, Wowza Media, tells us it started seeing a jump in interest in its Flash-based streaming solution for content providers in anticipation of such a deal.
Technically, Wowza is a Flash media server company. That means that it competes with the likes of Adobe and Microsoft to offer up streaming media solutions for all types on content, including streaming Internet radio. While the company has long seen success in this field outside of the U.S., where the royalty rates aren't as imposing, it was a tough sell in the U.S. with the rates being proposed. But with the new deal in place, the company sees a whole new range of possibilities. Wowza, which has over 25,000 licenses around the world, notes that a lot of online radio is still being served through the likes of software like WinAmp. But it sees a clear trend towards doing everything with Flash, as the installed base is something like 98% just through the web browser. And it says it can easily convert stations that were going through solutions like WinAmp to be done in Flash. The hope is obviously that there will be more successful web radio services like Pandora — which is, of course, easier said than done. But getting Internet radio streaming companies to come aboard and use its Flash streaming solution is just the first step the company envisions. Its service has also been extended over the years to provide solutions for Quicktime, Silverlight, and a host of other formats. This means even more opportunities to reach other kinds of devices, such as the iPhone, for example. As we all know, the iPhone doesn't play Flash content, but it does play Quicktime files. The way YouTube and some others get their Flash content on the iPhone is to covert it to H.264 to play in Quicktime. That's a solution Wowza offers as well. Expect to see a lot more interest in Internet radio with the new royalty deal in place. And that, in turn, should lead to some other interesting opportunities for companies. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| Covestor Now Lets You Trade Alongside Its Top Amateur Investors
July 22, 2009 at 12:36 pm
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The end game for many social investing sites is to create their own investment management products that link member's brokerage accounts to the trading data generated by the top portfolios on each site. Today, Covestor is the first major social investing site to launch a stock trading product. It is called Covestor Investment Management (CVIM). Covestor had to become an SEC-registered investment adviser (like competitor kaChing did last December, although kaChing still has yet to launch an investment product). Covestor has seeded CVIM with ten of the top traders on its site, representing a variety of investment styles from growth to value to market timing. You can see their portfolios on Covestor, but the ones they trade on CVIM are different and you get only an aggregate view of their returns and top holdings. Once you subscribe to them, you get a full detailed view. What Covestor is actually selling is investment data. Each of the ten "portfolio managers" are trading for their own accounts. They never hold any of your money. CVIM merely links their trading data to a brokerage account you set up either with TD Ameritrade or Interactive Brokers. You select which accounts you want to follow, and CVIM automatically instructs the linked brokerage account to mimic the trades in proportional amounts. Covestor charges a management fee of about 1.5 percent of your assets being managed, or $12.50 per month (whichever is greater), which it splits with the investors being tracked. You also end up paying the fees for each trade to your brokerage (up to $17 per trade). Covestor CEO Perry Blacher argues that at least you know exactly what you are paying and that this can turn out to be less than investing in a mutual or hedge fund: With a mutual fund or hedge fund you absolutely pay per trade. It is another transparency issue. The mutual fund does pay commissions, they pay fees to the broker that sells stock to them it is just you don't know how much commission they paid as it is reflected in your own performance. In other words they may have bought a stock at $11.25 but it will appear as if it were bought at $11.13. They wrap the commission into the cost of the security/securities.
In the end, nobody is going to care about the fees. It is the performance of each portfolio that matters. I'm not convinced that really good amateur investors can do any better than professional investors. Over time, they nearly all get beaten by the S&P 500. If you take a look at how each of the ten Covestor "model managers is doing, some are beating the S&P 500 this month, but none are beating it over the past three months. I'd definitely want to see some outperformance before I put any money behind these guys. But I like the fact that Covestor is leveling the playing field for smart investors to virtually manage funds and compete with the institutional establishment. 
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| Video: Kevin Spacey Tries to Explain Twitter to David Letterman
July 22, 2009 at 11:56 am
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|  This is a video featuring Kevin Spacey. He's a man who gets paid millions of dollars to pretend to be other men, for entertainment. And here he is on the "Late Show With David Letterman" trying to explain Twitter, the pulse of the planet, to Mr. Letterman. Key points to remember: Twitter is free; you type with your thumbs; it's "a waste of time." Mr. Spacey: "And now, I'll get, in about an hour, lots and lots of people saying 'hi' back." Mr. Letterman: "That really is a miracle." 
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| On the Apparent Apple Suicide
July 22, 2009 at 9:24 am
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|  Every once in a while you get a story so strange and horrible that it takes a while to sink in. I'm talking about the suicide of a Foxconn employee who was caught doing something with an "iPhone prototype" and jumped out of the window. Matt wrote: So the story goes that a 25-year-old man at Foxconn - where iPhones are born - was to send 16 iPhone prototypes to Apple from the Chinese factory, but one was lost somewhere. The Foxconn security department then proceeded to illegally search the man's apartment and interrogated him. But that was too much for the man that might be responsible for leaking a prototype of the next iPhone. A few days ago on July 16, he jumped from a 12-story building because of the incident. It's probably not out of the realm of possibilities that he not only was roughed up, but also lost his job even though that's not mentioned in the report. This means two things: that there is an iPhone prototype floating around (a highly dubious proposition considering that they would not have "mailed" any prototypes to Foxconn nor does Foxconn particularly need prototypes from Cupertino - they only need plans and someone from Apple to supervise the manufacture) and that the CE industry is built on false promises and exploitation. It's financial exploitation, physical exploitation, and psychological exploitation and we're all part of it. 
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| Cautiously Optimistic: CrunchBase Q2 Report Shows Upticks In VC Funding and Exits
July 22, 2009 at 9:24 am
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Is the worst behind us? The broad worldwide recession hit the venture capital and startup communities hard last year. Memories of the NASDAQ meltdown and venture capital "nuclear winter" earlier this decade sent everyone into a tizzy as they feared a repeat performance—venture dollars froze and hundreds of thousands of tech workers were laid off. But it appears that the worst is over for now. Or at least, the broad indicators suggest that venture and entrepreneurial activity has stabilized and may in some cases be trending up. In Q2 2009 we tracked via CrunchBase a total of 400 estimated new startups founded, $6.4 billion in new venture capital financings and $15.8 billion in merger and acquisition activity. (Download the full report here for $195) And we only tracked 20,000 new layoffs, just 10% of the 200,000 we saw let go in Q1 2009. Of course this could just be the calm in the eye of the storm, with significant additional turbulence up ahead. Venture capital returns continue to flatline—there are simply too many venture firms investing too much money, and the IPO market for startups remains effectively shuttered. We either need a path towards liquidity for startups or a much smaller venture capital market. But the Q2 CrunchBase numbers make us cautiously optimistic. For one thing, we estimate a rebound in the number of start-ups being founded (always a good sign). There were already 191 companies in CrunchBase founded in Q2 2009 (at the time we did our final data run) . We expect that number to reach more than 400 as a result of a normal lag in self-reporting. 
Venture investments are also coming back. They increased 19% from $5.4 billion in Q1 to $6.4 billion in Q2 2009. This compares to $5.3 billion in Q2 deals counted by Dow Jones VentureSource and only $3.7 billion by Thomson Reuters in the MoneyTree Report which came out last night. (Each report is based on its own set of data and different methodologies). Although the trend is up from last quarter, our Q2 2009 data is 24% lower than Q2 2008. The number of deals we tracked in the quarter was 516, a bit lower than the 560 in Q1, but the average deal size went up. Also, we saw a greater appetite for early stage investing, with the money going into Series A investments increasing 83 percent to $900 million. Series B investments still dominated with 104 deals totaling $1 billion. The average deal size was $12.4 million, with the median deal size at $5.5 million. 
The M&A action is also starting to pick up. CrunchBase counted 214 exits totaling $15.8 billion for Q2 2009. Aggregate M&A volume is 50% higher than the Q1 total of $10.3 billion, though still down 40% from $25.8 billion a year ago. About half of that total, however, comes from a single transaction: Oracle's $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems (announced during the quarter, but still pending). Other large M&A deals included Glaxo SmithKline buying Stiefel for $3.8 billion, Intel acquiring Wind River for $884 million, OpenText snatching Vignette for $310 million and Intuit buying PayCycle for $175 million. 
The full 35-page second-quarter report (including 29 interactive exhibits in excel and 33 PDF graphics) is available for $195 as a download here. This quarter, we added all our raw data and tables into excel files so readers can easily cut-and-paste charts into their own reports and slice-and-dice the data for their own use. We've also included a number of graphics that readers can use for third party publishing, linking is appreciated. Of course, you're also welcome to grab the data free of charge through our CrunchBase open API. See the report table of contents and a list of exhibits here. BUY the Q2 2009 Report
$195 BUY the Annual Subscription (2008 Year In Review, Q1 2009 Report, Q2 2009 Report plus the Q3 and Q4 Reports sent to you as soon as they are issued)
$495 Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. 
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| Why Did Google Let Yahoo Run Off With Xoopit?
July 22, 2009 at 9:24 am
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|  Yahoo has acquired e-mail startup Xoopit for a reported $20 million according to multiple reports. The deal, which was first reported to be in the final stages of closing earlier this morning by the Wall Street Journal, is expected to be announced at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference as early as tomorrow.
Xoopit essentially offers an easy way to organize and manage e-mail, having invented an indexing architecture similar to web search engines that helps users retrieve content from their archived e-mail, including attachments. The startup raised a total of $6.5 million to date, securing seed funding amounting up to $1.5 million back in December 2006 and raising $5 million more from Accel Partners and Foundation Capital in April 2008. Ever since its public launch, the startup has been focusing a lot on 'upgrading' Gmail, bringing an enhanced media search feature and direct Facebook connections to Google's free webmail service. In fact, their focus was so clearly set on Gmail that the startup's 'About' page currently speaks of nothing but the webmail service and how it improves its users' experience in terms of e-mail management. 
Sure enough, Xoopit was also a featured app on the Yahoo Mail applications platform since the latter debuted last December, but I can't help but thinking it should have been Mountain View pulling in Xoopit instead of Sunnyvale. Think about it: Gmail and by extension Google Apps are core products for Google, which is in essence a search engine company. Xoopit enhances the search functionality of their web-based e-mail service. You'd think it's a no-brainer for Google to go after the startup if they knew its management and investors were open to a sale. And if the selling price was really only $20 million, it's not the money that would make Google think twice. With a bottom line like Google's, an acquisition of this size is basically pocket change for the company, and yet they'd be picking up an agile startup creating a product that's highly relevant to their core service offering. Furthermore, it'd make for a great talent buy, if only for the startup's founders Bijan Marashi (ex-Telecom Italia, Inktomi and Microsoft) and Jonathan Katzman (former exec at TellMe Networks and also an ex-Softie). Kudos to Yahoo for snapping up Xoopit - I realize it makes sense for them too - but why didn't Google make this move? Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. 
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| Raptr's New Chat Client Helps Friends Get Their Game On
July 22, 2009 at 9:23 am
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|  It's clear that online gaming is quickly becoming much more social, with companies like Zynga reportedly bringing in nine figures and the casual gaming market continuing to skyrocket. But there's still one major problem that's holding everything back: it's often impossible to monitor which games your friends are playing and when, especially when they're playing on entirely different platforms. Today Raptr, the social network built around gaming, is releasing a multi-protocol chat client that's looking to solve this problem.
The new client is based on AIR (which means it will run on Mac and PC) and integrates support for all major chat protocols, allowing gamers to keep in touch with their friends from a single app. Raptr isn't anywhere near the first desktop multi-protocol chat client — I've been using Adium for Mac for years, and Windows has programs like Trillian available, both which support protocols like AIM, MSN, and Yahoo Messenger. But what Raptr can do that the others can't is monitor whatever game you're currently playing, be it a full-fledged PC game like StarCraft or one of the many casual games found on Facebook and MySpace. Overall, the service can recognize over 32,000 different games, including stand-alone Flash games that you'll find embedded on countless sites across the web. Raptr's client also includes support for some game-specific protocols, like Xbox Live. This information is broadcast to your friends as your current away message/status (something like "Jason is playing Counter-Strike"), which is visible to anyone using a standard IM chat client. But the service is even more powerful if your friends are also using the Raptr client, as you'll have the ability to automatically join whatever game they're playing with one click, with the application handling all the relevant server settings. Interestingly, the new application means that Raptr is competing to some degree against Xfire, the company that Raptr founder Dennis Fong co-founded and later sold to Viacom. Xfire also offers a chat service for gamers, but Fong says that Xfire is geared more towards hardcore gamers, and doesn't offer support for other IM protocols or the ability to detect browser based games, like those that might be played on Facebook. Alongside the new chat client, Raptr is launching a 'Game Manager', which brings much of the service's social network functionality to the desktop. Using the manager, you'll be able to access your Raptr profile, view the achievements of other players, and see which games have been recommended to you based on your past preferences. There's also a listing of all of the games installed on your desktop (you can update them directly from the Game Manager), and a library of popular Flash games that Raptr has included with the software bundle.
 Raptr can expect the new products to be adopted quickly, primarily because the service is now being heavily promoted in many popular PC games. Raptr has scored some major deals with game publishers, including Activision/Blizzard, THQ, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE), NHN USA, Gamescampus, and Gala-Net. These publishers are behind some of the world's most popular video games (Blizzard is behind a little game called World of Warcraft, along with a slew of other very highly regarded titles, and SOE made the reknowned EverQuest series). So why are publishers so eager to integrate the service? Raptr adds a viral channel to gaming that has not previously existed before — when I go to play World of Warcraft, all of my friends know that I'm playing, which may prompt them to start playing as well. And in an age when paying for and installing a PC game can be done without leaving your desk through services like Steam, the ability for a game to go viral becomes even more powerful. It's a symbiotic relationship, and it puts Raptr in a very good position. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. 
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| Apple's Mesmerizing Window Display, Featuring An Infinite Flurry Of iPhone Apps
July 22, 2009 at 9:23 am
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Earlier this evening I was walking down the streets of Palo Alto near TechCrunch HQ, when I stumbled across what is likely the coolest window display I've ever seen, unsurprisingly housed at the Apple Store. The display features a giant wall of apps flying by, accompanied by a massive iPhone that briefly displays a handful of featured apps for a few seconds apiece. As far as I know this is new, though it's possible that it has appeared in front of other stores before now. In any case, it's damn cool, and reminds me of the incredible App Wall that Apple featured at this year's WWDC. Check out the video above. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| MySpace Music Appears To Be A Hit, Increases Traffic Tenfold Year-Over-Year
July 22, 2009 at 7:31 am
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|  MySpace may not be the hottest thing in social networking any longer, with visitor numbers and page views decreasing at an alarming rate, but apparently its free music streaming service MySpace Music is still something of a hit.
According to Nielsen data (PDF) for June 2009, traffic to MySpace's music subdomain has grown 190% since its launch in September 2008 and year-over-year traffic to the URL has increased a staggering 1,017%. This traffic includes at least one visit by our own MG Siegler, who was happy to learn Pearl Jam's new single premiered exclusively on the service. New MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta may be convinced users are not sure if the service is a destination for music or not, but if these numbers are correct it would make sense for him and the recently announced executive team for MySpace Music (which is a joint-venture with some major music labels and thus an independent entity) to dedicate a good deal of attention to it. Not that they're haven't been doing that up until now - in fact we mentioned earlier that the service has much improved since its unveiling and according to a recent Telegraph article the service is slated for a September launch in the UK. Going back to the Nielsen report, the estimated 190 percent increase in traffic since the service's debut translates to growth from 4.2 million unique visitors to 12.1 million in June 2009, with traffic to the subdomain having increased 1,017 percent year-over-year. When comparing unique visitors for MySpace Music to other sites within the music category, it ranked third only behind AOL Music and Yahoo! Music but ahead of other popular music sites like MTV Networks Music, MSN Music and Pandora. 
According to Nielsen, people between the ages of 12 and 17 were 2.4 times more likely than the average active Internet user to visit MySpace Music on the subdomain. Visitors between 18 and 24 were 2.2 more likely than the average Internet user to visit the site in June. 
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 
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| Facebook Video: Now Serving 1 Billion Views A Month, Including This Amazing Zuck Impression
July 22, 2009 at 6:07 am
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|  For the last few months Facebook has been regularly posting promotional videos to its Career site, introducing prospective applicants to all the neat things that go on behind the scenes. Today they've uploaded one that's particularly interesting, detailing the launch of the company's Video feature. It's been known for some time that Facebook Video was the result of one of the company's famed Hackathons, but getting the chance to watch some of the first clips to appear on the platform is pretty darn cool. There's also one nice piece of data tucked away in the video: Facebook saw over 1 billion video views last month. That's still far less than that 1.2 billion YouTube sees every day, but it undoubtedly makes Facebook one of the top video sharing sites on the web (it's also the largest photo sharing site).
Of course, the best part of the video comes from a Facebook engineer named Putnam as he describes Mark Zuckerberg's initial reaction to the Video idea. Just watch the clip below.
Also be sure to check out the full video, though beware of the ridiculously sappy piano music playing throughout.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 
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| XING Launches OpenSocial App Assault On LinkedIn
July 22, 2009 at 5:34 am
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|  Despite being virtually unknown in the US, and still somewhat hemmed in by its core German speaking market, XING, the LinkedIn competitor, refuses to lie down. And like a scene from the Rocky movie, it's going into training to become better, quicker and faster than the LinkedIn machine. Although let's face it, it has it's work cut out as LinkedIn is now worth over $1bn and has 43 million members to XING's 7.5 million. XING however is worth $213m and is publicly traded. And today XING launches a partner ecosystem based on 16 (count'em) OpenSocial applications from 13 partners, in 7 countries. LinkedIn currently has 9 applications.
Some XING apps will be be familiar to LinkedIn users: they will both have SlideShare and online workspaces from Huddle. But XING has has sourced heavily from European sources with apps from Doodle, Dopplr, Deutsche Welle, MindMeister, spreed, travelload, Tungle, sueddeutsche.de, Wallstreet:Online, WELT ONLINE and ZCOPE. The applications spread from news and project management through to travel planning and data sharing. As data protection and security are much more of a consideration in the EU, this is the world's largest completely SSL-encrypted https installation of OpenSocial. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors 
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| Tech Investor News Delivers Exactly What You Assume It Would
July 22, 2009 at 5:11 am
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|  As a writer covering the tech industry, there are a couple of websites and services that I would classify as downright essential for my job, including some VoIP/IM communication tools and my e-mail application of choice (Gmail).
Apart from those, I consider an RSS reader to be such a vital tool for me as well, both on a private as a professional level. As I wrote before, I quickly fell in love with Streamy for that particular aspect of sifting through mountains of information on a daily basis, partly because it allows me to both track blogs and news sites I subscribe to and keep track of what Twitter and the people I follow on there as well as on Facebook and FriendFeed are buzzing about. Add to that Techmeme, which has an algorithm in place designed to weed out the best and/or most talked about news stories related to the tech industry out there, and you can tell I have a pretty solid set of tools readily available that enable me to keep tabs on what I want and need to be tracking closely. Techfuga was another one, but it recently ground to a halt. New to the arsenal of tools at my disposal free of charge is Tech Investor News, which despite its not-so-sexy name is exactly what it sounds like: a news site that investors in tech companies - plus industry pundits and reporters - should be made aware of. Glad to be of service. TIN complements the websites and services described above perfectly, and competes with neither one of them. If anything, it saves me a lot of time and rids me of the pain of going to Google News / Blogsearch all the time to learn what the most recent stories in tech or centered around a company in particular are. What I like about it? The big fat stock quote in the upper corner, the fact that you can filter down to 20 of the most discussed tech companies (note the Google Investor News screenshot below), the decent search function and the speed with which it updates news feeds (every 15 minutes or so, with some human editing involved). But what I also like is the fact that you can narrow your news consumption down to a specific set of categories which makes it very easy to find specific information (for instance, you can opt to display only stories about 'Steve Jobs' or 'Rumors' when browsing for news on Apple). TIN is a project bootstrapped by a self-described 'media nut' / investor called Frank Cioffi, who spent decades working in such media as radio and television and turned to the internet after many years of consulting and trading stocks. Cioffi got the idea for Tech Investor News to scratch his own itch, and that's always a good way to start something that other people - like me - could also find interesting. Bookmarked! 
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 
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| LocalBunny Gives Businesses Custom Twitter Bots, But It Longs For Old @Replies System
July 22, 2009 at 4:14 am
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|  Twitter has turned into a fantastic way for businesses to connect with fans, so it's no surprise that we've recently seen a number of local establishments begin to actively promote their Twitter accounts to customers. It's a win/win situation: customers can get in on special deals and discounts, and businesses get a direct line to their customer base to remind them that they still exist. Unfortunately, as businesses become more popular these Twitter accounts can become difficult to manage. LocalBunny, a new Colorado-based startup launching tonight, is looking to help.
The problem LocalBunny solves is fairly straightforward: small businesses with relatively modest followings can usually respond to all of their fans without too much trouble, but as Twitter continues to grow, this is is going prove more difficult. Celebrities have long dealt with the same issue, but it's hardly a big deal if someone like @johncmayer fails to respond to my tweets. The same can't be said about businesses, where a missed response could well lead to a lost customer. So LocalBunny automates these responses. To get set up on the service, businesses create a Twitter account they'd like to use to represent their business (as an example, I'll use @SFwidget). They then make a list of keywords that users will be able to send, along with the auto-respones that LocalBunny should send back. For example, I could set it so that if a user tweeted "@SFwidget hours", they'd get a response listing off my business's hours of operations. Likewise, restaurants could include keywords that would send out their daily specials, and bars could send out 'secret' passwords that could entitle you to a drink special. If you'd like to try it out for yourself, try tweeting "@crunchbasedemo company apple", which will query CrunchBase for information on Apple Inc.  It's a good idea, but unfortunately it's going to have a much harder time going viral than it would have a few months ago, before Twitter severely handicapped the way @replies worked. There used to be an option that allowed users to see all @replies sent out by the people they were following — an option that was popular for 'power users', as it served as a great way to discover interesting people, and also helped them stumble upon neat new services like this one. Unfortunately, Twitter killed off that option in May, making it so that you can only see @replies when you are following the person to whom the message is directed (yes, it's confusing). In effect, nobody is going to be seeing your queries to the local businesses unless they're already following that business on Twitter, which isn't likely. There's also one other problem that the startup has at launch: there's no quick way to check which keywords a given business is supporting. Founder Kevin Cawley says that you'll soon be able to simply include the word 'help' in your outgoing message to get a directory of available terms, but that isn't live yet. For the time being, the service includes a number of suggestions when you initiate contact with it. One other potential knock against the company: LocalBunny is charging $99 per month to operate on a single Twitter account with 25 supported response keywords, with a 'deluxe' package available with unlimited responses (you have to call in to get the price). That seems a bit steep for a service that is still pretty foreign to most people, but as Twitter to continues to pick up steam there's a chance it will prove to be well worth it. 
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it's time for you to find a new Job2.0 
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| MindTouch Upgrades Collaborative Platform With Video And Developer-Friendly Tools
July 22, 2009 at 3:46 am
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Opensource wiki developer Mindtouch today has launched several new features in its opensource, wiki-like collaboration platform for enterprises. This includes the ability to add video to MindTouch wikis, package applications built in MindTouch for distribution, and stage content on wikis. MindTouch's platform connects teams, enterprise systems, web services and Web 2.0 applications with IT governance enabling users to access, publish and organize data and systems. Customers include Mozilla, Microsoft, Intel, Intuit, The Washington Post, US Army, EMC, Harvard, Timberland, and The United Nations. MindTouch has partnered with open source video platform Kaltura, to let MindTouch users collaborate, edit, publish and syndicate video within a MindTouch wiki. End users can record video and have multiple parties edit within a MindTouch page. The company's new application packaging feature allows developers to create a compressed file for import into other MindTouch instances, letting enterprise users install add-on applications easily. This addition represents MindTouch's ambitions to become an application platform where installing applications are as easy as adding Firefox addon. MindTouch is clearly trying to make it as simple as possible for developers to build applications on top of the MindTouch platform. MindTouch has steadily been adding features to its platform aimed towards developers, including the ability to build rich applications off of Mindtouch's platform. MindTouch's wiki-like platform is appealing to businesses both big and small, and the open source ideation seems to provide for an innovative product that simplifies complex interactions, especially for developers. Competitors to MindTouch include Socialtext and pbworks. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| TechCrunch Europe Events And Initiatives Moving On
July 22, 2009 at 3:45 am
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|  As you may have noticed, over the last 6 months or so TechCrunch Europe has been running a fairly intense events programme across Europe. With our own, curated panel discussion and startup pitch competitions we hit Barcelona, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin and Helsinki, among many others. Some events attracted as many as 300+ people and each one was live video streamed, usually putting at least as many more people "into the room". In addition, we're exploring the idea of a co-working space in London for European startups - if you're interested please go fill out our survey. We're also expanding our writers. But over the next year we're pulling things together to get more co-ordinated and to help European startups along. So if you'd like to join the players energizing the scene by sponsoring any of our events then get in touch.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| Another Mainstream Media Castoff Joins TechCrunch: Welcome Paul Carr
July 22, 2009 at 2:30 am
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|  Two weeks ago the venerable UK newspaper The Guardian, facing budget cuts, fired new media columnist and author Paul Carr. Their loss is our gain - he now works for TechCrunch.
Most recently Carr wrote a weekly column for The Guardian called Not Safe For Work. He's known for his bitingly sarcastic enthusiasm for tech companies. A classic post was this summary of last year's Le Web conference in Paris (he and organizer Loic Le Meur are somehow now good friends). Carr has also written numerous books. His most recent, Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions Of A New Media Whore, is a bizarre story of his not-entirely-successful attempt to become a famous Internet billionaire. He is also working on his next book, which he says "is about the year I spent living virtually as a digital nomad. Think Down And Out In Paris And London meets Fear And Loathing In, well, everywhere." Carr will write a weekly column for TechCrunch and TechCrunch Europe each Saturday morning. Look for his first post at the end of this week. You may also see his name pop up from time to time on other posts as well. Welcome, Paul. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. 
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