We’re big fans of JibJab, the popular comedy site that offers an arrary of original parody videos and Ecards, most of which you can customize with goofy pictures of your friends. The site has previously Elfed the TechCrunch crew, stuck our editors into a Pepsi Ad and more. But tonight, JibJab is really outdoing itself, adding an extra boost of star power that takes its videos to the next level: it’s letting you appear in a music video with parody song legend Weird Al.
Scoff all you want, but the man really is quite brilliant (for the record, I’ve had Amish Paradise memorized for the last 13 years). He’s also got quite a following, with 950,000 followers on Twitter. The JibJab video is notable for being among the first officially licensed music videos that let fans customize the action using their own photos. The official video is available for free for anyone to watch at JibJab.com (it’s also the same video that will be distributed to iTunes, MTV, etc.), but if you want to personalize using the ‘Staring You’ feature you’ll have to become a paid member. Memberships run $15.99 per year, or $7.99 per month.
This kind of video has proven very popular for JibJab — since launching the Starring You feature in August 2007, the site has seen 122 million streams from its homepage (the number of streams from embed likely puts that number over 200 million).
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A short post on the Google News blog today revealed a big number: Google recently quadrupled the number of newspaper articles in its News Archive Search. You may recall that at TechCrunch50 last year, Google’s Marissa Mayer demoed this powerful news tool that can search the text of publications far back in time — some over 200 years old.
The recent update saw Google add a bunch of new publications, including some from different parts of the world. And it even has a newspaper in the archives from 1753 now. The fact that it’s searchable is fairly insane.
Google launched with “millions” of searchable articles, so now we have to assume it has millions times four (Google didn’t give an exact number). But this along with its book scanning efforts are getting impressive in their size and scope (but the book scanning is not without controversy).
Of course, why Google primarily cares about archiving these old publications is not just for information, but also for the fact that it can sell contextual AdSense ads against them. Look at this article from the Manila Standard about a volcano eruption, it features an ad to get an emergency management degree.
Last month, we were first to report that Google Engineering Director Mark Lucovsky was leaving the company to join VMware. Lucovsky was with the company for nearly 5 years and was very instrumental in its APIs. And now they’re losing another long-time employee who worked in a similar capacity — and yes, he’s also going to VMware.
Derek Collison has been with Google since 2004, most recently serving as a Technical Director working on its search APIs (specifically the AJAX ones) much like Lucovsky. Now he’s joining his once and future colleague at VMware, where he’ll apparently be working directly with him again.
Collison tweeted out the news of his departure today, and engaged some of his former co-workers on FriendFeed as to what his role will be with VMware. “Joining up with Vadim and Mark Lucovsky for a bit at VMWare to do some cloud computing stuff,” he wrote. “Vadim” is Vadim Spivak, who formerly worked at Google as a Gmail engineer before, yes, leaving to go to VMware.
Certainly, three people out of thousands is not a pattern, but it is interesting that all these of these guys left Google, where they had been for a long time, around the same time, to go work together at an already established company. Plenty of Googlers leave to go to startups, places like Twitter and FriendFeed, no doubt dreaming of riches and more control, but VMware IPOed in 2007.
After going a year with nary a venture-backed IPO in sight, here’s more proof that things are finally beginning to perk up: Ancestry.com, a genealogy service that allows user to map out and search for their family history, has filed for a $75 million IPO. You can see the full SEC filing here.
Ancestry.com offers some basic functionality for free, but to tap into the site’s vast library of historical records, which includes billions of documents and photographs, users have to sign up for a premium subscription. The company claims nearly 1 million subscribers, with an average revenue of $16.50 per subscriber. With monthly churn of 4.1% and a acquisition cost of $67.30, the company can make its money back in four months for each subscriber. In the last six months, Ancestry has made $107 million, with profits of $8 million and a run rate of $200 million.
Back in October 2007 Spectrum Equity Investors led a $300 million buyout of Ancestry.com’s parent company, The Generations Network (which now calls itself Ancestry.com Inc). But it wasn’t a complete buyout, with employees and possibly some outside investors retaining equity in the company.
Ancestry has been on the web for over twelve years, but its roots extend back to 1984, when the company published family history books. The company now employs more than 600 people.
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Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half. -John Wanamaker Advertising and branding are very complicated and very unpredictable fields, and success can be measured according to any number of metrics. Modernista, the ad agency behind the soft-talking-lady ads that only occasionally seem to be talking about phones, seems to be measuring success based on attention. Of course, the attention is almost entirely negative, but that doesn't faze them. In an article in Ad Age, Executive Creative Director at Modernista, Gary Koepke, discusses the oft-maligned "Ms. Hope" spots.
The Pre is probably being talked about more than other phones right now because of the marketing and advertising, and that's a good thing. Could the ads work harder to show exactly how the phone works? Yes, but we knew it would be polarizing people to have a woman not shout at them and tell an interesting story.
"Polarizing" is industry-standard code for "universally mocked," in case you're confused.
iPhone app developers who choose to go the free route typically try to make money by placing ads in their apps. But now there are so many mobile ad networks competing to serve those ads that iPhone app analytics startup Mobclix is creating a mobile ad network exchange. App developers sign up with their ad inventory and ad networks bid for the spots based on age, gender, location, and other factors. The ads being served change automatically, based on which ad network is bidding the highest to reach the users of that particular app.
Mobclix wants to provide one dashboard for app developers to track and monetize their apps. It also lets advertisers buy across a variety of apps based on demographic, geo-targeting, and behavioral characteristics. The idea is to aggregate both apps and advertising to reach scale.
The exchange supports 20 mobile ad networks at launch, including Google, Yahoo, Jumptap, and VideoEgg.
One ad network that is missing, however, is AdMob. As perhaps the largest mobile ad network, AdMob’s absence is noticeable. But AdMob does not support the mediation layers required for Mobclix to talk to its servers. (If you are the biggest mobile ad network, it is not in your interest to make it easy for developers to switch). AdMob also offers its own quasi-exchange where app developers can swap ad inventory for traffic with each other.
In the end, app developers will go to wherever they can get the highest price for their ads, while advertisers will gravitate to the ad networks or exchanges with the most inventory. At this point maybe only an exchange that ropes together multiple ad networks can compete with AdMob.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
You’d think in the midst of a recession domain name sales would become less common and be negotiated for far less than the high-priced .com acquisitions we remember from the late nineties and during the dotcom boom.
The reality, however, is that we’ve been seen a remarkable amount of high-profile, generic domain names go at fairly high prices for the past 8 months or so (e.g. Toys.com, Candy.com, YP.com, Vibrators.com, etc.).
Maybe professional domainers and regular companies with an attractive portfolio are more willing to sell now that cash is in shorter supply than it was before the economy collapsed, or maybe these are all calculated bets made by companies that have the capital required to purchase / invest in quality domain names. Most likely, it’s a combination of both.
Either way, we haven’t seen the end of it: earlier today, server.com was sold for a healthy $770,000 by domain brokerage house Sedo, reports DomainNameWire. Currently parked, the domain name averages only about 12K unique visitors per month according to Compete. Hence why I think this is a decent deal for the owner - an individual from Boston, MA - although a lot of professionals from the sector will argue that he could have fetched a lot more for this one.
No word on who actually bought it, but that information will likely surface sooner or later.
More domains were auctioned off today by Sedo (listed here) but the most apparent ones were definitely server.com, jesus.net ($124,337), omg.com ($80,000) and enlargement.com ($56,000).
Well, Twitter didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize for its role in getting the word out about the Iran election protests earlier this summer, but it did gain about 7 million new visitors in the month of June. Twitter’s website attracted a total of 44.5 million unique visitors worldwide in June, 2009, according to comScore.
Twitter’s worldwide audience grew a healthy 19 percent from May, 2009 (and an even healthier 1,460 percent from June, 2008, when its worldwide audience was just 2.9 million).
With 20 million of its visitors coming from the U.S., Twitter’s audience is now 55 percent international. ComScore now counts it as the No. 52 largest site in the world (bigger than ESPN, just shy of the BBC and Craigslist).
These estimates only count traffic to Twitter.com. Since more than half of Twitter users don’t even go to the Website, and instead use Twitter apps to consume and publish Tweets, Twitter’s total audience is even larger. But comScore provides a consistent measure of its growth.
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The massive Google billboard campaign underway now to promote Google Apps is the best spoof opportunity since the comic book announcing Google Chrome last year (here was our effort). And the first ones are starting to roll in. Here’s the spoof, followed by the official version. Can you do better? We want to see it.
Spoof:
Official:
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If you’ve been paying attention to the tech news at all over the last week, you’re already very familiar with the outrage that Apple has sparked over its rejection of Google Voice for the App Store, and its ban of all third-party applications that tap into the service. But now the fallout of the Google Voice debacle is having an impact on even more independent developers — Apple is apparently holding off on approving applications that could even be tangentially related to Google Voice.
The application is question is Line2, which was built by Toktumi, a startup that specializes in helping small businesses use their mobile phones and computers to create office-grade phone systems, even when their employees are scattered across the country. Line2 would allow users to use two different numbers with their iPhones — one which they could hand out for business calls, and the other for personal. This setup would allow employees to keep their personal numbers private, and also allows businesses to set up professional features on the business line, with features like an phone directory (”Press 1 for sales…”) and a single support number that calls the mobile phones of multiple employees. Given how many businesses are adopting the virtual office approach, there’s little doubt that this technology could prove very popular (the recently-released BlackBerry version is already starting to gain traction).
Unfortunately, Line2 is currently sitting in App Store limbo. The app’s developers intitally submitted it on June 5th, and it sat for weeks waiting for approval with no information other than Apple’s automated “this app is requiring unexpected additional time for review” messages. Finally, on June 23, Toktumi learned that the application had been rejected because it required people to pay through its website rather than Apple’s subscription services that are integrated with the iPhone 3.0 update. Toktumi attempted to point out that Salesforce was allowed to offer an application that conducted transactions through the web, but in the end it decided to simply modify the app to comply with Apple’s requests.
The company submitted a new version of the Line2 app on July 13, at which point it was asked to submit a demo account for testing (the company had already submitted one). To no one’s surprise, they got another Email a few days later stating that the process would require additional time. And then the Google Voice bomb dropped. Apple removed every related app on the App Store, citing the rationale that they duplicated existing iPhone functionality and would confuse users.
CEO Peter Sisson was understandably concerned. Line2 doesn’t have anything to do with Google Voice, but it does make use of so-called “virtual numbers”, which relay calls made to one number (like your business line) back to your iPhone number. And it also offers other telephony features that ‘duplicate’ what’s offered by the iPhone. So Sisson reached out to Philip Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing, who has previously dealt with developers on an individual basis when application approvals have taken unusually long. Sisson sent his Email to Schiller on July 27th — nearly two months since the app was originally submitted.
Schiller responded, stating that he would get back to Sisson by July 29th. That didn’t happen. Sisson sent another message to Schiller with a number of reasons why Line2 was actually good for Apple (it encourages small businesses to use the iPhone) and also pointed out why it wouldn’t cut into AT&T’s revenues (the app doesn’t offer any SMS functionality at all, and all calls are still performed using standard AT&T minutes). Schiller hasn’t responded, and Apple has gone almost totally silent on the matter with no other response than that the application is “still in process”.
At this point, I doubt Sisson will be getting a response any time soon. If Apple did grant approval to the app, it would show that duplicating functionality wasn’t really Apple’s reason for banning Google Voice (of course, countless other apps mimic portions of the iPhone’s functionality). That kind of inconsistency would be nothing new to the App Store, but now that the FCC is launching an inquiry into the marketplace’s approval processes, you can be sure that Apple isn’t keep on taking any chances.
The problem, of course, is that Apple has never established consistent guidelines for developers to follow. That may change soon: the FCC inquiry may force them to change their ways, especially if the process is revealed to be as chaotic as most developers suspect. Until that happens though, we’re only going to keep hearing of more casualties of the App Store’s black box.
So, by now you’ve probably heard that Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple’s board of directors this morning. You’d think that this would be the end of the FTC investigation into the close ties between Apple and Google, right? Wrong.
The FTC has released a statement commending Schmidt and Apple’s mutual decision for him to step down, but it warns that the investigation is not over yet. Here’s their exact wording:
"We have been investigating the Google/Apple interlocking directorates issue for some time and commend them for recognizing that sharing directors raises competitive issues, as Google and Apple increasingly compete with each other," said Bureau of Competition Director Richard Feinstein. "We will continue to investigate remaining interlocking directorates between the companies."
So what gives? Well first of all, Schmidt is hardly the only tie between the two companies. Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson remains on the board for both Apple and Google. While his conflict is obviously not as big as Schmidt’s was, it wouldn’t be all that surprising to see Levinson leave one of those board seats now that Google and Apple have businesses that are increasingly overlapping.
Also interesting is the tie between former Vice President Al Gore with Apple and Google. While he resides on Apple’s board, he also serves as a senior advisor to Google. And he’s a partner at Kleiner Perkins which has ties to both Apple and Google.
And that’s just the overlap in people. What this really boils down to is what, if anything, the two companies are doing with regards to their products to be anti-competitive.
There has been no shortage of talk and speculation that Apple and Google have worked together behind the scenes on some key deals. One of those was multi-touch support in the Android operating system. Google has so far not included it in Android, and it was supposedly done because of an agreement with Apple.
Also, Google recently revealed that it had made a Google Latitude app for Apple’s iPhone, but that it instead turned it into a web app at Apple’s behest. The reason was that Apple said it too closely resembled its own Maps application — which Google also helped create.
And now we have the whole Google Voice situation. Apple rejected the Google Voice app and removed all the related apps that it had previously accepted. And things get even more complicated when you consider that while AT&T is issuing what appear to be non-denial denials. A few sites, including this one, have heard that AT&T played a role in that. The FCC is looking into the matter separately from the FTC, but obviously, it’s at least somewhat related.
So what’s the fallout from this continued investigation? Probably not too much. As we said, Levinson may have to choose a side and step down from one board. But it seems like if that happens, Gore could be safe, since he’s not technically a part of the “interlocking directorates,” as the FTC puts it.
And as we wrote back in May when the FTC first launched this investigation, Schmidt was probably safe at the time, and it was more of a warning shot. And given his statement about having no plans to leave Apple’s board a few days later, he clearly thought so too. But then Chrome OS happened, and that changed everything. Schmidt was already excusing himself from the part of Apple meetings where they discussed the iPhone (because of Google Android), and now he would have likely had to do the same with OS X (because of Chrome OS). That’s what Apple CEO Steve Jobs more or less said in his statement this morning.
But it seems like it’s this Google Voice business that really pushed the situation over the top. Not only was the FTC looking into the relationship between the companies, but now the FCC is. The fact that the FCC investigation was launched on Friday and this news comes to following Monday, seems to say a lot. Schmidt was always going to have to leave Apple’s board because of Chrome OS, but that is still months away. The FCC investigation seems to accelerate the departure process.
The main goal of the FTC investigation was obviously Schmidt, which is why it released the statement today. But unless they find evidence of collusion in continuing the investigation, its part of this should conclude. But the FCC investigation will remain a very interesting one to watch.
The founders of photo sharing site Photobucket, Alex Welch and Darren Crystal, are leaving News Corp./Fox, we’ve confirmed. The two sold Photobucket to Fox Interactive in May 2007 for around $300 million. Welch and Crystal will leave the company at the end of August.
Photobucket attracted 53 million worldwide visitors in June (Comscore worldwide) and remains one of the most popular photo hosting sites on the Internet. The site first launched six years ago.
The two aren’t commenting on the timing of their exit or what they plan to do next. The earnout on the acquisition ended in May 2009, and it isn’t unusual for founders to leave once the acquisition has been fully paid out. Given their history, I’m sure they’ll be starting something new shortly.
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There’s a mad rush of tips coming into us right now that PayPal’s online purchasing service is down for the count. While the site itself appears to be loading (though very slowly), numerous buyers and venders are reporting that sales are not going through. A quick scan of Twitter tells the same story. And it looks like it has been down for something like an hour and a half now.
[Update below, it looks like after something like 2 hours of downtime, the service is starting to come back.]
Here’s what PayPal is officially saying on its developer site:
EVENT DETAILS ——————– Service: Live Site
During the time listed below you may have or currently are experiencing the following: Buyers may experience error “Sorry - your last action could not be completed” on trying to login to www.paypal.com. Payments via API are intermittently unavailable.
Affected Product(s): - Website - PayPal APIs
Start Time: Aug 03, 10:15 AM PDT (Aug 03, 6:15 PM BST)
End Time: On-Going
Our technical teams are working diligently to resolve the issue. We will provide updates until the issue is resolved.
We apologize for any impact caused by this incident.
Sincerely, PayPal Merchant Technical Services
So there you go, both the main site and the all-important PayPal APIs are not working. Not good.
It will be interesting to see how PayPal follows this up. A lot of merchants undoubtedly lost a lot — and I mean a lot — of money today. When Rackspace had its recentfailures, it noted that it would likely have to reimburse customers to the tune of millions of dollars. eBay, which owns PayPal, could be looking at a similar situation.
Update: As of noon PT, things are starting to come back online. Here’s the update from PayPal:
Update: This notification is to inform you that we have started recovering. Some intermittent issues remain which we are currently addressing.
One big story today is that Netflix added ABC content to its streaming service (it actually did this a couple days ago when episodes of Lost started appearing). But there’s a potentially hotter Netflix streaming rumor floating around out there right now: That it’s coming to the iPhone.
Multichannel News wrote a story a few days ago that Netflix’s Watch Instantly streaming service would soon have an app in Apple’s App Store as well be available on the Nintendo Wii, citing an industry executive familiar with Netflix’s plans. Both of these devices would seem to play well into Netflix’s strategy of getting its service on as many consumer devices as possible (already it’s on the Xbox 360, Blu-ray players, the Roku box and built into a few TVs). But this rumor is interesting for a few reasons.
First, Netflix on the iPhone would be awesome, but you have to wonder if Apple wouldn’t worry about it cutting into services it already provides. That has been the basis for a few app rejections, and it would seem that with on-demand movie streaming, it would remove at least some of the need to buy movies for your device through iTunes.
Second, talk of the service coming to both the iPhone and the Wii is interesting because of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings‘ position on Microsoft’s board of directors. While I’m sure Netflix’s overall agenda is outside the influence of Microsoft, remember that Netflix streaming is currently only available on Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and none of the other gaming consoles. This is a big advantage for it in terms of being a living room entertainment hub (which all of the consoles aspire to be).
And one would have to imagine that Microsoft would love to see a Netflix streaming app on its Windows Phones (the artists formerly known as Windows Mobile phones) before it sees it on iPhones. I’m not saying that will happen, but that it may come up between Hastings and Microsoft.
Third, and most importantly, if such an app were to exist, it would undoubtedly bring up the AT&T bandwidth restriction debate again. While AT&T and Apple allow apps like MLB At Bat to stream video over the network, other apps, like SlingPlayer, are restricted to stream video over WiFi only. AT&T has stated that it doesn’t want all this video streaming to further clog its pipes, which is also why it would likely restrict a Hulu app that was rumored a few months ago.
But streaming over WiFi is significantly less interesting than being able to do so over 3G. If a Netflix streaming app were to be released and limited to WiFi, you can be sure it wouldn’t dampen the booing of AT&T that has been going on recently. The fact of the matter is that eventually apps such as this are going to need to work over cellular networks and not just WiFi.
Again, the existence of a Netflix streaming app on the iPhone is very much a rumor based on one source, but it is interesting for the potential can of worms it opens.
Over the past few weeks, Apple has been much-maligned for keeping apps such as Google Voice off the App Store. These weren't some random garbage apps; there was no farting, or baby shaking. Google Voice apps are utilities which many have come to rely on, and thus many (including TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington) are none too happy with Apple's blockade. But what if Apple deleted a completely useless app from the store? What about 900 useless apps - all from one developer? Apple has decided to test those waters: it has revoked the developer's license of one of the App Store's most prolific developers, Khalid Shaikh, founder of Perfect Acumen.
Anyone see Funny People this weekend? One of the best movies I’ve seen this year, despite the 10 minute MySpace commercial in the middle of it.
The two main characters, Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen, visit MySpace for a $300,000 paid comedy gig. Among a variety of “f**ck Facebook, In the Face” jokes (said two or three times. really) was some really good material, including Rogen asking “I wonder if Tom and Craig from Craigslist would ever get in a fight….Who’s tougher? Tom has more friends…Craig has weirder friends though. Craig has friends that are willing to do a lot more for cash, I’ll say that.”
Sandler also says“They say the more friends you have on MySpace the less friends you have in real life.”
MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson was also on set and part of the movie, and has now officially been mixed up with another Tom Anderson on IMDB. Overall it was an amazing commercial for MySpace. The company says they did not pay for the placement.
It really was an excellent movie, and it was no. 1 in the U.S. over the weekend with $23.4 million gross. At 140 minutes long, though, you need to be prepared for a long one.
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Over the past few years we’ve seen 3-D panoramic photographs become popular on the Web. These are photos taken with special 360-degree cameras and stitched together to mimic the experience of moving through space. If you’ve ever used the Google Street View feature in Google Maps, you know what a 3-D still photo looks like. But what if Google Street View used video instead of still photos? You’d end up with YellowBird.
YellowBird is a startup in the Netherlands which has developed its own interactive 3-D video technology, including a 360-degree video camera, software to take the data captured by the camera and stitch it together, and a video player that allows anyone to navigate the video by dragging their mouse around. I’ve embedded an example video below. The controls can sometimes be a little overly sensitive, but you’ll get the idea. It is a much better experience than navigating through still photos. It really gives you a sense of walking through a crowd and swiveling your head around.
The startup wants to custom develop 3-D immersive videos for marketing campaigns, and that is probably a good way to make money right now. But eventually it might be better off creating a platform so that anyone can make similar videos with standard off-the shelf cameras and software.
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What happens when the enemy of your enemy is no longer your friend? You cast him out, as Steve Jobs seems to have done to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who today resigned his seat from Apple’s board. An alliance which began with a mutual distrust of Microsoft is now under strain because of a mutual distrust of each other. Google is not so much the enemy of Microsoft as it is the enemy of the old model of device-centric computing which both Microsoft and Apple represent.
The announcement comes on the heels of an FCC investigation into Apple’s iPhone App Store that was announced on Friday evening. The subject of that investigation is nominally the rejection of a Google app, Google Voice, from the App Store, but it is really an investigation into the closed and arbitrary nature of how apps get approved for the iPhone.
In other words, Google brought down the disapproving scrutiny of the FCC onto Apple on Friday night, and on Monday morning Schmidt resigned. It is difficult not to make a connection between these two events. The FCC investigation, of course, is never mentioned in the press release (that would only invite more pesky questions from the FCC). Instead, what Steve Jobs does say in the press release is that Google’s entry into mobile operating systems with Android and desktop operating systems with Chrome OS is increasingly becoming a “conflict of interest” for Schmidt. As a result, Schmidt had to go. It also says that both executives “mutually decided” it was time for Schmidt to resign. (I can only imagine how that conversation went. Jobs: “You are going to have to resign.” Schmidt: “Okay, but can I say it was my idea?”)
Regardless of how the resignation came about (maybe it was the other way around with Schmidt telling Jobs that the two companies were increasingly coming at odds with each other), what made the two men come to grips with reality all of a sudden? If nothing else, last Friday’s letters from the FCC was a wake-up call to Apple that Google stands on the opposite side of the fence when it comes to the evolution of the mobile Web. Google wants the mobile Web to be as open as the Internet. It’s entire mobile strategy is predicated on open access for all apps, devices, and services because that creates a larger, more vibrant, and more searchable mobile Web.
Apple is not about being open. It never has been. Every app on the iPhone (all 50,000 of them) must be approved individually, for instance. This difference in approach wasn’t a problem until Google started to have mobile aspirations of its own. Asked to choose between furthering Apple’s mobile agenda or Google’s, Schmidt must choose Google’s. It is his fiduciary duty. That conflict is only going to grow. And that is perhaps why Jobs says his “effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished.”
Schmidt had to go. Not just because of the dust-up with the FCC and the Google Voice app. But because Google has a different set of agendas which already are putting strains on the relationship. Google wants to diminish the importance of any single computing device in favor of Web apps which sit in the cloud and are accessible from all devices—mobile phones, Macbooks, Dell laptops, or whatever. As much as is physically possible, it wants to replace the operating system with the Web.
Ultimately, that is a bigger threat to Apple than Microsoft ever was.
Lots of people will be arguing today that this was inevitable, but the news comes faster than expected. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is no longer going to sit on Apple’s Board of Directors, nearly 3 years after accepting a seat.
Apple today announced that Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, is resigning from Apple's Board of Directors, a position he has held since August 2006.
"Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple's core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric's effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest. Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple's Board."
Update: Google has provided us with the following statement from Schmidt:
I have very much enjoyed my time on the Apple Board. It’s a fantastic company. But as Apple explained today we’ve agreed it makes sense for me to step down now.
Hardly surprising, and it’s good to see both come clean on the situation: you can argueall you like, but Google’s foray into the mobile and computer operating systems, the two products mentioned in the statement (not to mention Chrome in the browser space), must have been quite the thorn in Apple’s and Jobs’ side. And I’m quite certain that the whole Google Voice App / FCC debacle only made the process a bit speedier.
Many people have always found it strange that Schmidt was on Apple’s board, but back in August 2006 when he took the seat Google had virtually nothing even remotely competing with Apple’s core products and services. It’s only in the last 20 months or so that possible conflicts of interests really became an issue, and we can’t forgot that Schmidt was consequently asked to leave board meetings when critical things were shared about Cupertino’s plans for the iPhone and the App Store.
Twitter is getting a ton of spam tonight for the hashtag #sept2nd along with vague sounding warnings about something bad happening on that date. There’s also a YouTube video and a Digg story that is just starting to get clicks.
What is it? Some 4Chan users are trying to stir up some good old fashioned fear. A message urges readers to “Write “9/02/09″ on flyers, stickers, currency, walls, etc. and put them EVERYWHERE….Tweet with the hashtag #sept2nd. Get it into the trending topics….Help get the youtube video into the popular section (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT6N_PZuY-Q)…Spam Google with “9.02.09″”
This is much more likely to create a big annoyance for everyone rather than the intended effect of “its gonna be hilarious seeing everyone freak out.” Traditionally 4Chan has been much better at just raining on parades than than creating any serious mayhem.
But there’s an upside, too. All those people twittering out that hashtag make up an excellent and tidy block list.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
News broke last week that the latest developer builds of Chrome include support for themes. And a few sites even found a couple of them that you can easily install right now using special links. But links are a less than ideal way of installing these themes since you can’t see what they look like before you turn them on. Luckily, Google appears ready to launch a theme directory for the skins.
The site, which will reside here, is not live yet. But on the default new tab/new window page, the one with the thumbnails of your most visited sites, if you click on the “X” to remove some of them, a themes page shows up as a thumbnail (see included screenshot).
When you click on the thumbnail, it takes you to the not-live-yet page. But the thumbnail clearly shows this page will have a bunch of themes for Chrome. My superior counting skills tell me there are 24 themes shown in that thumbnail alone.
This little trick to get the themes directory thumbnail to show up works in the latest developer builds of Chrome for both Windows and Mac (I haven’t tried it on Linux).
Speaking of Chrome for Mac, it continues to come along nicely, with limited support for Flash just being added recently. We’re told it’s working in the Linux build as well. Alongside themes, improved support for extensions is included in this new Chrome build.
Themes have been available on Chrome for a while, but they used to require you to download files and know which folder to drop them in. It was also hard to revert to the original one. This latest build allows for push-button skinning and an easy way to revert. You can find two of the Chrome themes on this page (theme.crx is “Camo,” theme2.crx is “Snowflake”). Click on them and then click “download” on the next page from within the new build of Chrome to install them.
[thanks Brinke]
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Microsoft and Google have seen their rivalry kicked up a notch in recent weeks. First, Google announced Chrome OS, the company’s first operating system. Then Microsoft announced the new version of Office with major cloud app support. Then Microsoft announced its deal to take over Yahoo’s search business. Starting today, Google is back on the offensive, with a major promotional campaign to get the word out about organizations switching to Google apps for their daily computing needs.
The campaign, called “Going Google,” has a very clear target: Microsoft Office. A series of advertisements [disclosure: including on this blog] will begin touting how and why some 3,000 organizations are signing up to use Google apps each day. But the crown jewels of this campaign will be billboards on four major U.S. highways that will give a new message about Google apps everyday for a month.
The billboards will be placed on the 101 in San Francisco, the West Side Hwy in New York, the Ike in Chicago, and Mass Pike in Boston. Google says that the vinyl being used to create these new messages each day will be recycled or reused into either computer bags or shopping bags.
Google says that so far over 1.75 million businesses, schools and organizations have signed up to use the various combinations of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and the other Google apps. But that is of course a drop in the bucket compared to the number of companies that use Microsoft Office and its other enterprise solutions. Now, Google is clearly trying to be proactive in telling people why its solution is better before Office goes online in a big way with the 2010 version.
Google is also attempting to use the viral message platform of choice these days to spread the “Going Google” message: Twitter. At the bottom of its blog post on the matter, Google urges people that use its apps to “Tweet your story” and provides a link to auto-populate a tweet with the #gonegoogle hashtag. You can also follow the GoogleAtWork Twitter account to follow the Gone Google stories.
It has also set up a site to “Spread the word” about Going Google. This is similar to what Mozilla has long been doing to promote Firefox — and it’s worked to the tune of over a billion downloads. The site has a range of options for letting your company or organization know that you want it to “Go Google,” including things like fliers and pre-populated emails to send out.
And Google is also promising to give away “goodies” each week in August to users who have Gone Google and fill out a Google Doc describing their experience.
Will any of this work? Who knows. But I know that I can’t wait to see how Microsoft responds in this back-and-forth war. “Stay With Office” blimps, perhaps?
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