A few weeks ago, we wrote about the contest Microsoft’s new search engine Bing was holding to find a catchy jingle for the product. Today, they have announced the winner. “Catchy” is one word for it. Another is “awful.”
Sure, the song will get stuck in your head, but does the sound of seals barking, or cows dying, if you listen to them for long enough. But as bad as the jingle is, the video is much, much worse. It’s some guy in pajama pants doing really bad interpretive dance nonsense with awful effects and a Bing backdrop. The entire time I’m watching this, I’m thinking: So this is what hell looks/sounds like. Cannot believe the guy won $500 for this. And also cannot believe our interns didn’t enter.
Bing, as a product, is pretty solid. This jingle, is not.
“Enjoy” it below.
Update: And why do I already get the feeling that we’ll start hearing talk about how Bing “punked” us all with this video, and it really meant to choose a bad one. It has done similar things before. It wasn’t funny back then, and it isn’t funny now. This is just bad.
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It’s something of a rite of passage for college freshmen. You arrive at your new dorm room and, after a few moments of excitement, come to the unsettling conclusion that you have either A) brought so much junk that your room will soon resemble a rummage sale or B) brought so little that even Steve Jobs would be uncomfortable in your spartan abode. Not exactly the best way to kick off your college career.
A new startup called DesignYourDorm might just hold the answer. The site has built 3D virtual models of common dorm room layouts, allowing new students to figure out what they’ll have room for long before they ever set foot in their dorms. To help figure out the exact room configuration, DesignYourDorm currently has a few hundred 3D models of various common dorm room items, including electronics like TV sets, furniture like beds and desks, and storage containers that you can freely drag and drop into the room. There’s also a selection of bedding, posters, and plenty of things that you might find at Bed Bath & Beyond. And because most people wind up rooming with someone, the site has a collaboration feature that lets two roommates edit their room at the same time.
Of course, virtual decorating is one thing, but that still leaves students with the task of actually going out and buying each item they place. But DesignYourDorm has that figured out too: each of the items you can place in your room is a real product taken from Amazon.com, and the site builds a virtual shopping cart as you go. When you’re done, you can have everything shipped to your university so it’s there the day you arrive. DesignYourDorm generates revenue through Amazon’s affiliate program, but it eventually hopes to work with big-box stores instead.
But the system comes with a few snags. While the site does a good job with its generic floor plans, they only get you so far — you still won’t know how large each cabinet and desk will be, the height of the beds, placement of any windows, and so on.
Fortunately, the startup is hoping to team up with universities across the country to get detailed floor plans for every single room at a given school. It’s currently running a pilot test with the University of Pennsylvania, where it has taken measurements for all room layouts in one of the school’s housing buildings. As part of the partnership, Penn will be promoting the site to incoming students as they get their room assignments, and will in turn get a small cut of the revenue generated by any sales. Interesting sidenote: the startup has a mirrored domain at CollegeRoomCreator.com for its university partnerships, because schools apparently don’t like referring to their housing facilities as “dorms”. Seriously.
All in all, the site seems to have a solid idea and a large market. That said, it still needs to work on its execution. The site’s UI is clunky at times, and sometimes the 3D objects don’t behave as you’d expect (I’m allowed to place a small storage container on top of a bed but not beneath it, even though it explicitly says that it’s meant to fit underneath beds). Likewise, many of the site’s products don’t yet have 3D models, which means you can buy them but can’t place them into the room at all. Co-founder Taylor Robinson says that the company is working on fixing all of these issues (it recently hired a new developer), and that we can expect improvements soon.
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Most of the public Internet companies have reported their second quarter earnings by now. In a research note sent out to clients today, J.P. Morgan provides a few takeaways from the quarter. We already know that the recession continues in overall online advertising (see our chart at right), but even normally-strong search revenue was down. And display advertising shows “no signs of recovery.” Travel, finance, and entertainment remain especially weak advertising sectors.
But even in a down market there can be winners. Both Google and Amazon gained share in search and e-commerce revenues, respectively. Google now commands 72.3 percent of all search revenues, according to J.P. Morgan. Online travel sites are also benefiting from the weak economy, with hotels giving them more inventory.
Here are some key takeaways from the note:
Search revenue was down Y/Y for the first time. We estimate that domestic search rev was down ~2% Y/Y during 2Q as we believe Google's and Microsoft's gross search revenues were roughly flat, while we estimate Yahoo!'s gross search revenue was down ~10%.
Google continues to gain search dollar market share. Despite the launch of Bing, search dollar market share shifts in favor of Google have continued. We estimate that the 2Q'09 gross dollar market share of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft came in at 72.3%, 20.9%, and 6.8% vs. 2Q'08 levels of 70.6%, 22.7%, and 6.6%.
Display advertising is showing no signs of recovery. Yahoo's display revenue was down 14% Y/Y in the quarter on top of 1Q's 13% decline. The declines at Microsoft and AOL were significant
Online travel agents are likely benefiting from increased inventory. Industry sources point to hotel suppliers both domestic and abroad giving more inventory to online travel agents in an effort to increase volume. This quarter, Expedia showed a 26% Y/Y lift in room nights sold, a significant increase from 1Q's 13% growth.
Amazon still gaining market share. 2Q saw Amazon (North America rev. +13% Y/Y) continue to take share from eBay (US non-vehicles GMV -8%), though the ~2,150 bps difference in growth rates was down from ~3,240 bps in 1Q.
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At our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp event last month, one of the most interesting things that was demoed was PubSubHubbub, a new protocol made by a few Googlers in their spare time to improve the speed at which Atom and RSS items travel around the web. As expected, they have a big player on their side now: Google Reader.
The Reader team notes today that it has begun the adoption of PubSubHubbub, starting with the publishing of Shared Items. As you can see in the demo video below, with PubSubHubbub support, when you share an item in Google Reader, it instantaneously shows up on services like FriendFeed (which pull in Reader Shared Items).
While this is just for Shared Items right now, you can imagine that Google Reader will add further support as well in time. It really needs to in order to keep up with the speed at which information is traveling around the web on sites like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed.
And while this is a side project by some Google employees (PubSubHubbub) working on a Google application (Google Reader) and shown off on a service started by a bunch of ex-Googlers (FriendFeed), the main idea behind PubSubHubbub goes far beyond that. They want the fully open protocol to be used by all services/sites that work with feed items to make them more real-time. As one of the creators, Brad Fitzpatrick said during our event, “Nothing in the protocol hardcodes Google as the center of the world, I hate that sort of crap too.”
See the FriendFeed demo as well as the CrunchUp demo below.
This afternoon Facebook’s Open Stream API, which launched in late April, will be getting a few new additions that make the API significantly more robust and easier for developers to integrate.
One feature that will be familiar to Twitter and FriendFeed users is a new ‘via’ attribution, pointing out to your friends how you submitted your latest update. This can add to the virality of applications like Seesmic and web services like Yelp — if you start seeing that many of your friends are using a certain app, you’re probably more likely to check it out for yourself. Before now Facebook had shown the icon of whatever application or site was posting to your profile, but it didn’t actually name it.
Another major addition to the API is enhanced functionality for Facebook Pages. Page administrators will now be able to post updates to their Page from third party applications that support the Open Stream API. Before now there were some loopholes that allowed developers to integrate support for Pages, but the API didn’t officially support it. Now, these features are fully baked in.
Finally there’s a new JavaScript version of Facebook’s stream.publish function. Many sites have already been using Facebook’s ‘Share’ feature for some time, which allows you to post a given webpage to your Facebook feed (it’s also extremely easy to integrate). But using Share, developers haven’t been able to specify what those posted stories should actually display — Facebook just scrapes the page for its title and a brief description. Using stream.publish, developers can customize these shared items as they’d like, including messages like “Jason just wrote this comment on TechCrunch” or “Michael just purchased tickets to Hawaii on Orbitz”. Stream.publish has been around since the API launched in April, but now that it’s available as a JavaScript function it will be very easy for developers to implement.
Apple has just pushed out the newest update to its OS X Leopard (10.5) operating system, with 10.5.8. This could potentially be the last Leopard update we see before Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) is released to the public sometime in the next couple of months.
Amazon already has Snow Leopard available for pre-order, with a ship date expected sometime in September, though it warns that date is not set in stone: “Official release date has not been announced by Apple, though they have indicated this product will be released sometime in September.”
The new OS seems to be getting more buzz for its price (29.99) than its features. The emphasis with Snow Leopard is optimizing Leopard, to make OS X run smoother and faster. Remarkably, it will also have a smaller footprint than its predecessor, saving over 6 GB of hard disk space (though that does likely have a lot to do with the fact that it will only run on Intel processors).
Snow Leopard will of course also be coming out around the same time as Windows 7, Microsoft’s attempt to make its users forget Vista. Windows 7 will be out October 22.
So what’s new in 10.5.8? Nothing too exciting on the face of it, here’s a list of highlights:
Upgrades Safari to version 4.0.2.
Improves the accuracy of full history search in Safari 4.
Resolves an issue in which certain resolutions might not appear in the Display pane in System Preferences.
Dragging an Aperture image into Automator now invokes an Aperture action instead of incorrectly invoking an iPhoto action.
Resolves an issue that could prevent importing of large photo and movie files from digital cameras.
Improves overall Bluetooth reliability with external devices, USB webcams and printers.
Addresses an issue that could cause extended startup times.
Improves iCal reliability with MobileMe Sync and CalDav.
Addresses data reliability issues with iDisk and MobileMe.
Improves overall reliability with AFP.
Improves overall reliability with Managed Client.
Improves compatibility and reliability for joining AirPort networks.
Improves Sync Service reliability.
Includes additional RAW image support for several third-party cameras.
Improves compatibility with some external USB hard drives.
Includes latest security fixes.
Update: The following two charts comparing the Windows 7 upgrade path to the OS X Snow Leopard upgrade path are pretty hilarious [via Marco.org and (ds)]:
Last month at The Europas - TechCrunch Europe's version of the Crunchies - a lot of impressive start-ups were honored. But one was clearly cleaning up: Spotify, the sexy online music app that has music lovers in Europe swooning.
Each time the company won, you heard two reactions from the crowd: fan boys screaming with joy and other companies' founders groaning. "Too big for their boots," was a phrase heard muttered a lot.
But player hating is just part of life as a hot start-up right? Of course - but Spotify is living in a particular dual reality. It's caught between the rapture of music lovers who say it's the site they always dreamed could exist and the cruel reality of the online music business.
And that meant there was a lot more drama than immediately meets the eye behind that reported $50 million funding and $250 million valuation. As one investor who ultimately passed on the deal told us, "This was one of those where you hold your nose and just pay up. Before you've done anything the majority of the economics are right out the door to the labels. You need huge scale to pay for all that, and then you're still in bed with a bunch of numb nuts."
Someone in the comments of TechCrunch’s previous Spotify story said it was Europe's YouTube. We don't know if they meant that in a good way or a bad way—but we agree on both. The problem with the comparison? YouTube found Google; a deep-pocketed public company that was also trying to build a video offering online and was willing to pay top dollar for YouTube's streams, and their associated business model challenges.
Several VCs we talked to used the words "leap of faith" over-and-over again in describing the decision to invest in Spotify or not. In reality an investor has to take multiple leaps of faith to do this deal, especially at a $250 million valuation. Looking at those leaps explains why so many VCs who were awed by the product ultimately passed - and yet why a few ballsy investors saw the elusive upside worth the role of the dice. Leap of Faith #1: The Labels Want an Apple Alternative. This seems like common sense, right? But how often do music labels act according to common sense? There's a whole Internet graveyard full of online music start-ups that VCs invested $20 million or more in, cut deals with labels and the labels happily sucked them dry. It's a good sign that the labels have been taking equity investments in Spotify, but that hardly makes it certain they'll support the company. It's common for big public companies to invest an immaterial amount in a promising start-up in order to keep a close eye on it.
According to people close to the company, the deals being negotiated with labels are similar to past subscription deals. There's a minimum in royalties that has to be paid, and once that's cleared there's a more reasonable revenue share. But that minimum bar is so high, that's where most subscription services have died. "The labels are entertaining how to work with them in a way everyone can make money, but they're still clearly taking a pound of flesh," said one person with knowledge of the negotiations.
Leap of Faith #2: Audio Advertising Will Shift from Radio to Online. So far, the money Spotify is getting from audio ads is likely to be “chump change - less than you could earn from those crappy ads at the bottom of instant messenger clients,” according to one industry expert we talked to. For the service to still have a free element, a larger-than-just-Spotify industry shift is going to have to occur where audio ads move from terrestrial radio to the Web in material amounts. We're knee-deep in that shift in print, and only beginning to see it in online video. Will it happen in audio? Probably, but not next year.
Leap of Faith #3: Millions Will Pay for Subscriptions. That means the real opportunity for Spotify to build a business is the subscription model - something no online music company has succeeded at to date. Right now the company claims it has “just under 100,000 users” paying $10 a month. Other sources confirm that it's growing at a fast clip. While impressive, the onerous costs from the labels mean that revenue - $12m a year, before that “crappy” audio ad money - is not nearly enough. For this business to work Spotify needs millions of paying subscribers.
The fact is, Spotify is not only trying to break the online music subscription curse, they're trying to do something few have done on the Web. To date people have shown themselves unwilling to pay for content and premium services en masse. Even the mighty Netflix only has 10 million subscribers; Match.com has less than 1 million. And again, thanks to the pressures from the labels, Spotify doesn't have years to get there.
Leap of Faith #4: Apple Won't Kick Spotify Off the iPhone; Other Mobile Carriers Will Champion it as an iTunes Alternative.Apple isn't open. It's territorial. And with good reason—it owns the dominant mobile Web and music platforms. Why on earth would it allow Spotify’s offline music player app to compete on its own hardware with iTunes?
That leaves other mobile devices to champion Spotify as an iTunes/iPhone alternative. That strikes us as highly likely. What's more: People are more willing to pay $10 a month for a music app that's not tethered to their computers. This would seem to be the company's best bet to solve its business model woes and get enough future investment to hit scale.
Leap of Faith #5: US Launch Goes Well. Spotify is saying it will launch in the US by early 2010. That doesn't seem feasible, given their business model challenges and the fact that this round was only 50 million. Investors who looked at the deal confirmed they'd need a much larger war chest to make that happen. Also, there is some confusion over whether the round is even closed at all - with some close to the company saying it’s still open but the company itself saying it has been closed for two weeks.
Much seems to depend on just how much demand there is to invest in Spotify, which is hard to read. The company claims that it got nine term sheets and a 20% premium on what we understand was a requested €150 million valuation. The latter appears to be true, but we know that the bulk of the major European VCs—including names like Balderton and Index that don't normally balk at price if a company is good enough—turned down Spotify or offered a term sheet at a substantially lower valuation, due to all these leaps of faith. And, we contacted six of the top US consumer Internet partners who said they weren't even pitched. This leaves us wondering from where these nine competitive term sheets came. In addition, the deal took a reported five months to close– unusual for a “hot” company.
There are certainly billions in cash in the world of private equity for promising companies, even in this economy. But it's unclear how much more there is for Spotify while all these questions remain.
Leap of Faith #6: If All the Above Fails, Someone Buys the Company for $100 Million. In other words, what are the odds the incoming investors lose money? We think chances are good they'll at least make their money back. After all no one disputes the beauty of the product or how many people love it. That's clearly worth something even in a worst-case, fire-sale acquisition. Any investor worth their salt would have insisted on a liquidation preference given the risks and the high valuation attached to the deal.
It bears noting that while Spotify has been wildly promoting themselves in off-the-record conversations with the press (including us) they have been less than forthcoming with information publicly. In several weeks of reporting this story in the Valley and in London, we talked to more than a dozen people including investors who looked at the deal, people close to the company and other people in the online music industry. We've found a host of troubling contradictions that we tried to comb through for this story, with little help from Spotify.
We sent two emails to the company detailing the discrepancies we were hearing on both sides of the pond and got little back but a note saying the founders "wouldn't comment on financial matters" and "didn't like (our) tone." This after their representatives had been providing us, off the record, with hype about subscription numbers and claims about term sheets and increased valuations.
Given the mass of uncertainties in the business and how many users love the service, it'd be nice to see the company be a bit more forthcoming about its future.
In 2007, Radiohead sent a shock-wave around the music industry when it released its album In Rainbows online, letting the purchaser set the price they wanted to pay for it. Some hailed it as the future of music distribution, others thought it would be a total failure. In reality, it wasn’t really either. While the album found huge success (it was also released in the traditional way later), Radiohead waffled on the idea of using such a distribution method in the future. But today they’re back online with a new single.
“Harry Patch (In Memory Of)” is available today on the band’s website. But there’s a difference between it and In Rainbows — it has a set price. £1.00 (or roughly $1.70) gets you the single in high-quality MP3 format. But don’t mistake this for Radiohead completely abandoning some of its online experimentation ideas, this single has a price primarily because its proceeds are going to the Royal British Legion.
You see, Harry Patch was the name the last remaining UK World War I veteran before he passed away recently at the age of 111. As Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has more about Patch on the band’s blog.
While I’m certainly all for paying a small amount of money to get a song and help a cause, it would have been slightly more convenient if the ban had chosen one of the more popular methods to distribute the song online, meaning iTunes or Amazon. Entering all your credit card and billing information just to get one $1.70 song is kind of a pain. But of course, had they distributed through iTunes or Amazon, it may have meant less money going to the cause.
Now, micro-blogging service Tumblr is getting in on the act with its own toolbar which it is calling TumbleUpon. Could they try to be more blatant in ripping off StumbleUpon? The toolbar has a random Stumble-like shuffle button which randomly takes you through different Tumblogs in a similar way that StumbleUpon’s toolbars do. On the right there is a heart button if you want to “like” a page, a reblog button and a button that takes you to your own Tumblr dashboard.
StumbleUpon’s Su.pr toolbar, in comparison, also has a random shuffle button for discovering pages Websites other people have Stumbled, and a “like” button. But Su.pr is a URL shortener with powerful analytics on the backend, while TumbleUpon is not. It is just a discovery tool which surfaces other Tumblogs of people who have overlapping “likes.”
So is this a joke? Yes, and no. Tumblr founder David Karp tells us:
It was really an experiment to see how a tool like StumbleUpon would work for Tumblr content. Based on the feedback, it seems to be doing a pretty good job. We really like that it’s the first Tumblr discovery tool that shows off all of the pretty user created themes while exploring content. . . .
We might wind up changing the name when we start promoting it in the Dashboard
In a blog post today, Karp also shares some growth stats. He claims that in July, 2009, Tumblr had 50 million visitors, 255 million impressions, 650,000 new posts per day, and 5,000 new users per day.
Tumblr is definitely growing, but comScore estimates a much smaller number of users: only 3.9 million uniques worldwide in June, 2009 and 68 million pageviews. That is a 3X increase in unique visitors over a year ago and a 12X increase in pageviews, but a far cry from the numbers Karp is putting out.
I asked Karp what could explain this disparity. He pointed out that 15 percent of Tumblr’s blogs are on custom domains, and that the 50 million number is for visitors per Google Analytics. The same person can be a visitor more than once. Google counts 20 million unique visitors, and Quantcast counts 13 million worldwide. The site is verified by Quantcast, so I’d go with that number. Any way you count it, though, the service is showing strong growth.
But really, TumbleUpon?
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Google just released a new beta version of its Chrome browser for Windows PCs. The company claims that it is 30 percent faster than the current stable version of the browser (based on V8 and SunSpider benchmarks).
What may be more significant, though, is that this is the first version of Chrome that adds some support for HTML5, including video-tagging capabilities. The latest Firefox 3.5 beta also adopts HTML5, which allows for all sorts of cool things inside Web video like links and other interactive elements. It lets you treat video more like a Webpage. Along with Google’s acquisition of On2 today for its video codec, it looks like Google is getting behind open video in a big way. (Read this post from last year for more on the evolution of HTML).
The new Google Chrome beta is also prettier. Those themes we’ve been telling you about are now fully incorporated. And the new beta also improves the New Tab and Omnibox features.
When you create a new tab, Chrome shows you thumbnails of the sites you visits the most often (just like in Safari). These act as automatic bookmarks. Now, you can rearrange the thumbnails in any order you like by dragging and dropping them, or you can pin one down so that it doesn’t move even if you don’t visist it as much as other sites.
The Omnibox is Chrome’s all-in-one address and search bar. As you type words in, it gives you drop-down suggestions, which now have icons distinguishing between search results, bookmarks, and Websites.
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Ok, so I don’t normally write about online sales applications but one such app comes out of stealth today which made me sit up and take notice. Pipejump is a new sales cycle management startup with drag and drop features aimed at small company sales people and freelancers. It’s a kind of Basecamp meets Salesforce.
It’s deceptively simple to use but actually pretty powerful in its simplicity. Co-founded and developed by Applicake from Krakow (Poland) the venture is bootstrapped but, I understand, has already turned down some investment offers.
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For several months now, Ustream has had an iPhone app that allows you to view video from the service. But “view” is the keyword there. You could only watch it, you could not record and send your own video back from the iPhone. But starting today, you finally can.
The new Ustream Recorder is a free application available in Apple’s App Store that allows you to send video from your iPhone to the web. Unfortunately, despite long-standing talk that it might be able to send live video from your iPhone to the web, that is not the case. Instead, Ustream appears to be attempting to use some spin by calling it a “live-to-recorded video recorder” — um, okay, isn’t all video at some point technically recorded live? Yes, it is.
Mentioning “live” was not necessary here because this app does not stream video live. Not that it’s Ustream’s fault, it’s Apple that doesn’t currently allow apps that do that in the App Store. So instead, this app records video and then uploads it to the web. The problem is that there are already a number of other apps out there that do this, like Kyte and 12cast. But Ustream wants to challenge them on the iPhone by offering more options.
The app gives you the option to share you videos to Ustream, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or Ustream on Facebook. This makes the app much more flexible than its competitors when it comes to deciding where you want to send your video. Ustream also promises high-quality video from the app, which isn’t a surprise given the quality that Kyte’s app outputs.
Also interesting is that the app allows edit and manage videos that are already up on Ustream, even if they weren’t recorded with the iPhone. You simply pull download them to edit them.
But the reason why Ustream isn’t too bummed about its app not offering live-streaming is that they envisioned it used in another way, with another new service they’re launching.
Called “Media Stream,” it’s a functionality that basically allows broadcasters to pull in other video clips to supplement their own streams. Imagine it this way: Say you’re watching the CrunchCam, but one of the TechCrunch reporters has just shot a cool video and uploaded it. Assuming they had the correct privileges, that video would then show up as a thumbnail below the live feed. And if a user clicked on it, they could watch it.
Again, that is pre-recorded video being sent in from the iPhone, but such a use-case actually sounds pretty cool. And for publishers it’s fairly flexible. You can accept videos from anyone that submits them if they use a hashtag that you set (to be able to identify the right videos). You can then choose to accept certain videos into your feed on a case-by-case basis. Or you can approve certain users ahead of time so that their videos will definitely show up in your stream.
The functionality works on Ustream and on embeds.
It’s disappointing that the app doesn’t offer live video streaming, but again, that’s not Ustream’s fault (Qik can only do it by bypassing the App Store with an Ad-Hoc install method). But a nice set up upload options and this new Media Stream capability should make Ustream’s app a good option in an increasingly crowded iPhone 3GS video app field.
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In another fascinating move by the App Store acceptance team (Motto: Lunch is tasty! Is that a butterfly? We like cake.) the Ninjawords pocket dictionary, a $2 app, has been given an 17+ rating after being censored by Apple. This ensures that tittering schoolboys won't scroll through the app and discover bad words like "tits," "micturition," and "enough with this wanton disregard for your customer's intelligence, Apple. Do you only hire barely literate, rule-cleaving sub-morons with no judgement skills to police your damned App Store?" Warning: Some saucy language after the jump.
Twitter is being sued again, and this time it isn’t some angry baseball manager who doesn’t like people impersonating him on the service. This time it is a little more serious. Twitter is being sued for patent infringement by TechRadium, a Texas-based technology company which makes mass notification systems for public safety organizations, the military, and utilities.
TechRadium is basically claiming that it thought up the whole concept of mass notifications first, and points to three issued patents: Nos. 7,130,389,7,496,183, and 7,519,165. According to the lawsuit, which was filed yesterday on August 4, 2009 in Houston, Texas (full document embedded at bottom of post):
TechRadium develops, sells, and services mass notification systems that allow a group administrator or "message Author" to originate a single message that will be delivered simultaneously via multiple communication gateways to members of a group of "message Subscribers." A member of a subscriber group can receive such message in their choice of any combination of voice message, text message e-mail and so on. This technology is patented by the Plaintiff, TechRadium, and marketed under the trade name "IRIS"™ (Immediate Response Information System). Among other things, the patented IRIS™ technology eliminated the need for an Author to send multiple identical messages, and allowed Subscribers to select the most convenient form of notification for them.
Twitter works across text messaging and e-mail, but not voicemail (yet). The very concept of unifying different message communication systems is what is in dispute here. Whatever the merits of the lawsuit, you can’t say Twitter didn’t see this one coming. Way back in a February, 2009 strategy meeting (see Twitter Papers), the company discussed potential legal threats.
Legal
• We will be sued for patent infringement, repeatedly and often.
• Should we get a great patent attorney to proactively go after these patents (We need to talk about this more, we are unsatisfied)
I hope it hired that “great patent attorney” because this could just be the beginning.
Washington DC based LaunchBox Digital, an early stage investment firm and incubator founded in 2007 by John McKinley, Sean Green, and Julius Genachowski (now the new head of the FCC and divested from LaunchBox), just wrapped up its second annual 12-week program. Modeled after Y Combinator, LaunchBox invests seed capital of around $20,000-$25,000 into teams, and provides them with 12 weeks of education, mentorship and access to a small army of advisers.
Drawn from a pool of over 275 applicants, eight teams were selected to make up the class of 2009. (For the class of 2008, read last year’s post). Below is a brief description of each with notes written by LaunchBox founder John McKinley, as well screencasts of their products and links to their websites.
SEC Watch deals with a big problem facing individuals interested in research and investing—a mountain of invaluable data exists in SEC filings, but those filings are really difficult to deal with as an information source.
Most people are dealing with filings many hours after they are issued, letting those with real-time access have first mover advantage
The sheer volume of filings each day is massive (in 2008 alone, there were over 1MM filings, totaling 15 million pages )
The search experience offered online by finance sites and the government is very crude in functionality
There is no easy way to collaborate with others on the analysis, and share comments/observations
Why does this all matter? Well, if you had looked at AIG's filings, for instance, you could have found information about their sub-prime mortgage exposure almost a year before things blew up. It was just buried in a footnote.
SEC Watch brings state of the art search technology, combined with user annotation and sharing capabilities to the problem, and has crafted a compelling product that both retail and professional investors and analysts can use. It is easy to track companies and keywords (e.g., "subprime","litigation", etc.), and get automated results in near real-time when filings are posted that match your criteria. You can then dive down to the relevant sections, and annotate a given filing for your own personal use, your team's use, or to share with the public.
Bandsintown addresses a big shift in the whole economics of the music business. Nowadays, 70% of a band's income comes not from music sales, but from touring. That's up from 20% only four years ago. Ticket sales have never been more important, but the marketplace for tickets has become incredibly fragmented. There are 70+ separate ticket marketplaces on the web. That makes for a bad experience for a fan, but also a bad experience for music sites trying to encourage ticket sales for all the different artists they feature.
Bandsintown has dealt with this problem by building interfaces to 62 different ticket marketplaces, and then exposing all ticketing information as a simple to use API that music sites can integrate. They have increased their traffic to over 500K monthly unique visitors in the five months since they launched their API, and have a global partner base (including Spotify, the Hype Machine, and PureVolume among others).
Bandsintown automatically plugs into music players such as iTunes, last.fm, Pandora and other sites to learn your artist preferences, and then lets you track your favorite artists (and related ones) and receive alerts when events of interest are coming to your area. They are also preparing to release a new iPhone app (it's awaiting approval from Apple) that lets you see local concerts based on your musical tastes and geo-location— think of it as Urban Spoon for live music.
There is lots of other good stuff too, like live event twitter integration to allow you to easily track both yours and others' concert experiences. If you love live music, you'll love Bandsintown.
Social Collective addresses the huge market of conferences and corporate meetings. There are an incredible 1.2 million conferences and corporate meeting in the US each year. It is a huge industry—close to $11 billion is spent worldwide. The problem is that in these tough economic times, revenue for event producers is down, and the demands from attendees and sponsors is up, as they want more for their dollar.
Social Collective is a browser-based service targeted at event marketing and the enhancement of the event experience for both attendees and sponsors. They powered SXSW this year, as well as the Oracle Open World and other big events.
They bring innovation to a pretty under-served industry by allowing things like crowd-sourced agenda design, social graph importing for attendees to reach out to friends and associates attending the same event, marketing tools for pre and post event awareness building by conference organizers, and tools for vendor communications and networking with attendees.
The service has been great in helping both long-standing events re-invigorate themselves, as well as first-time events get their word out to the marketplace. They have both web and mobile experiences covered, and do some really nice things like allowing you to build your own tailored agenda for an event, and then import it into your online calendar. (FYI, this custom-agenda function was very popular at SXSW, with over 60% penetration).
TapMetrics is a tool designed by a team of iPhone application developers that brings together sales data, user feedback, software metrics, and other information into a consolidated dashboard to allow developers to manage a portfolio of applications quickly and easily.
The whole experience starts with a dashboard that lets you view important information about how your application portfolio is performing, and then lets you drill into each application to investigate any issue that is highlighted. The nice part of the TapMetrics solution is that while it does a great job on the business metrics of running an iPhone application, it does just as good of a job serving the needs of the engineer. Everything from detailed environmental data (which iPhone/Touch hardware is being used, which OS level, which release level of the application), to detailed crash reporting, to application messaging/event logs, and session tracking are supported within the integrated TapMetrics experience. That integration of both business and technical data (including session-level tracking) in a single dashboard is something no one else does today.
They also have a free iPhone app called TapMini that you can use to track sales data for your applications. If you are trying to get more out of your iPhone application portfolio (both in terms of improving the consumer experience and making more revenue), this can be an essential tool.
Unblab is trying to attack the email overload problem by answering the question "What emails should I be reading"? They are approaching this by building a cloud-based service that uses common and user-specific rules to identify and prioritize important email messages. Think of it as attacking the email overload problem from the opposite end of the spectrum as the anti-spam vendors, but using similar technologies.
The latest productivity studies have white-collar workers now spending 4 hours a day in email-related activities, and the volume of legitimate inbox messages increasing 10% per year. The challenge is how to approach better management of that legitimate traffic.
Unblab has two products it is deploying initially to help refine its algorithms and demonstrate the value of its ranking system, which it calls “Importance ranking.”. One product is a Gmail add-on called GTriage, and the other is a mobile app called iTriage. The goal is to get early-stage learnings on the differences of what's "important" when you are on a mobile device with limited real estate as compared to when you are using a pc-based webmail experience.
The API for the service will be opened up to developers to define their own user experiences (and to allow additional training events/algorithmic enhancements).
KeepFu is a simple note-taking and organization tool to help manage consumer-defined "projects" like trip planning, event planning, and important purchases. The team has built a good Evernote-like note taking tool called Ubernote, and while they got some decent initial traction, they realized there were some key unmet needs that the whole web note-taking space was failing to serve.
Feedback from their own user based shaped this next-generation offering. This new product, KeepFu, is addressing the organization of information, not just the collection of it. KeepFu collects data through one-click and passive data collection while a user reads an email, visits a website, IMs with a friend, or send a Tweet. It then supports a quick drag and drop experience to organize these information snippets into community-created project templates (predefined file folders specific to an activity, like planning a trip). These projects are then easily published or shared.
The goal is to allow information capture without forcing a user to change context and leave the experience they are engaged in, and then support automated and manual classification and organization of the information when it is appropriate, a bit like the weekly photo tagging activity of Facebook users. Simple collection, organization, and sharing is what KeepFu is all about.
Keen Guides started from the personal experience of its founder, a hearing-impaired woman who was visiting a very popular museum in Washington, DC and wanted to have her own tour experience. They handed her a dog-eared pile of paper, and sent her on her way. Trying to come up with a better experience, she went home and made a sign language version of the commentary as video clips she then viewed the next day on her iPod as she toured the Gallery. It was a transformative experience for her, and that's when Keen Guides was born.
The goals of the company are simple: Leverage new platforms (especially the iPhone) to replace outdated audio wands as content delivery tools. Create self-paced custom tours, based on prior visitor feedback, what time you have available, and your unique interests. Encourage social interaction and sharing of comments, photos, etc., by tour participants. Support access by all, including hearing and vision impaired visitors, as well as non-English speakers.
They are using the iPhone as their initial tour delivery platform, and will support tour content creation (and monetization) by both themselves as well as third parties like DC By Foot. Initial deployments include museums, city walking tours, and college campuses (for orientation tours.).
Legal River is focused on providing a marketplace for matching small businesses with legal professionals. Looking at search queries, you see a lot of businesses searching for uniquely skilled legal professional in areas like patent law, contract disputes, and other specialties.
While there are numerous directory sites for lawyers, they don't encourage the concept of competing for a given business's project, and do little to give prior client feedback and other useful data that would help a business owner to make an informed decision.
Legal River has created a marketplace where a business can anonymously post a given project and get competitive bids from multiple subject-matter experts. The system allows easy side-by-side comparison of credentials, prices, and prior client feedback on similar projects. The net result is a better, more transparent process that serves both the business owner as well as the legal professional, who gets access to high-quality local leads.
Legal River has signed distribution deals with a number of sites to both get their service offering in front of small business owners, as well as qualified local lawyers.
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Online advertising marketplace TRAFFIQ today announced it has closed a $10 million Series B round of venture funding from Grotech Ventures, Greenhill SAVP and Court Square Ventures.
The New York-based company, which operates a management platform designed to connect buyers and sellers of online media, had previously raised $7 million from the latter investor and says the extra capital will be primarily used to enhance its TRAFFIQ platform and accelerate the company's sales and marketing efforts.
TRAFFIQ positions itself as different from ad networks or exchanges, in the sense that they offer an end-to-end platform that is capable of consolidating planning, RFP distribution, order execution, optimization and billing. Its solution is targeted primarily to larger ad agencies like Havas Digital, IMRE and AdStrategies and publishers like WhitePages.com, Scripps Network and ContextWeb. The service also boasts the inclusiong of reporting and free ad serving tools, as well as integration with common third-party ad-serving technologies like Atlas and DoubleClick’s DART.
The company claims “millions of dollars of campaign demand and billions of impressions” are currently available on its TRAFFIQ platform, although it didn’t go into specifics.
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Global mobile advertising network operator mKhoj shall henceforth be known under the name InMobi, which is infinitely easier to pronounce in the Western world. The company felt the rebranding was necessary given that it will be shifting more of its focus to Western Europe - where its services are currently already live in the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain - after gaining sufficient scale on the Asian and African mobile markets.
The startup is certainly performing pretty well in a very crowded market.
Based on our understanding of their eCPMs and monthly ad impressions (which range up to 2 billion per month and growing), it looks like they are currently grossing over $1m in mobile ad revenues per month.
That’s not too shabby, and if you consider that the eCPM rates they informed us about are based on averages from their operations on the Asian and African mobile markets, it’s conceivable that they’re looking at multiplying that revenue soon.
That is, if they manage to get traction in Europe, where eCPMs are generally much higher. If they book some early success, the company says it will be on track to become cash-flow positive later this year.
The company’s mobile advertising service - which is targeted more to the mobile web than applications - is currently available in over 23 countries and cites advertisers like Reebok, Yamaha, Cricket Nirvana and MakeMyTrip.
mKhoj InMobi has offices in Palo Alto, India and Singapore. The company raised a total of $7.6 million to date, starting out with a $500k seed round from a group of angel investors and followed up by a multi-million financing round led by Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures (the VC firm started by Ram Shriram, early backer and founding board member of Google).
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Google and On2 Technologies jointly announced today that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Google will acquire On2, a developer of video compression technology. The acquisition is expected to close later this year. On2 markets video compression technologies that power high-quality video in both desktop and mobile applications and devices and also holds a number of interesting patents.
Some of its codec designs are known as VP3, VP4, VP5, TrueMotion VP6, TrueMotion VP7 and VP8. Its customers include Adobe, Skype, Nokia, Infineon, Sun Microsystems, Mediatek, Sony, Brightcove, and Move Networks. On2, formerly known as The Duck Corporation, is headquartered in Clifton Park, NY.
Under the terms of the agreement, each outstanding share of On2 common stock will be converted into $0.60 worth of Google class A common stock in a stock-for-stock transaction. The transaction is valued at approximately $106.5 million.
According to the release, $0.60 per share represents a premium of approximately 57% over the closing price of On2’s common stock on the last trading day immediately prior to the announcement of the transaction, and a premium of approximately 62% over the average closing price of On2’s common stock for the six month period immediately prior to the announcement of the transaction.
Important to note is that On2 once had a market cap in excess of $1 billion at its peak, after going public on the American Stock Exchange in 1999 following a merger with Applied Capital Funding (which was already listed at the time). Before its entry on the public market, The Duck Corporation had raised $6.5M in venture capital funding from Edelson Technology Partners and Citigroup Ventures.
Back in 2001, On2 made waves by releasing their VP3 compression technology to the open-source community, including their patents on the technology. The technology lives on in the form of (Ogg) Theora. You can find more information about this here.
The agreement is subject to On2 stockholder approval, regulatory clearances and other closing conditions.
Google is reluctant to dive into specific regarding the product plans until after the deal closes, although it’s conceivably related to its immensely popular video service YouTube.
“Although we’re not in a position to discuss specific product plans until after the deal closes, we are committed to innovation in video quality on the web, and we believe that On2 Technologies’ team and technology will help us further that goal.
We’ll update everybody when we’re able to share more information. In the meantime, nothing will change for On2 Technologies’ current and prospective customers.”
If would be great if Google decides to open-source On2’s VP7 and VP8 video codecs and free them up as the worldwide video codec standards, thus becoming alternatives to the proprietary and licenced H264 codecs. On2 has always claimed VP7 is better quality than H264 at the same bitrate.
Also noteworthy: Google could use the VP8 codec for YouTube in HTML5 mode, basically forcing its many users to upgrade to HTML5-compliant browsers instead of using Flash formats.
Smart move by Google, and possibly great news for innovation in web-based video viewing.
Expect updates if and when we learn more.
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New Y Combinator funded startup Listia launched this morning, and I already love it. It’s a really smart way to give stuff away for free.
We tend to give away a lot of the random stuff people send us at TechCrunch. Some of it is trivial - stickers, tshirts, etc. But sometimes it’s decent electronic stuff - we get a lot of iPod touches with demo apps to review, for example, and usually the company doesn’t want them back so we give them away to people. Earlier this week I gave away a wireless Google-branded mouse on Twitter, and pondered setting up a Twitter account just to give away all the test stuff cluttering our office.
But Craigslist isn’t a perfect solution, since you will get a mass of emails and need to deal with everyone. And often the winner doesn’t show up. And most charities and churches aren’t really interested in getting actual stuff that they then need to sell for cash. They’d rather just get the cash.
Listia makes it all a lot better. Users don’t bid cash for items, rather they bid points that they get for free for signing up, listing items and referring friends. That means the winner is the person who wanted the item the most and was willing to bid the most points. The lister doesn’t have to deal with a lot of emails, and the no-show risk is minimized.
And if a user really wants an item but doesn’t have enough points, they can buy more. That’s where the business model comes in, and the value to charities.
Points can be purchased at a rate of $5 for 50 points. And if a lister decides to donate the proceeds to charity, the charity gets 60% of any paid for points used by the winner.
If it sounds complicated, just see this listing that I created this morning giving away a Nokia N95 phone and donating the proceeds to the American Red Cross (yes, you can get that phone for free if you hurry).
The service is fully working now but a lot of features are still baking. The selection of charities is very limited (more being added soon, the company says). And soon Listia will let you add other charities, give accumulated points to charity, etc. It’s a no brainer for charities to encourage their supporters to use something like this to donate actual items, and Listia says they are busy creating features to accommodate that.
Google Radio, the Internet search and advertising giant’s online radio ad buying service, has been sold to online ad and media management software firm WideOrbit for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition was first reported by PaidContent back in July before the deal was closed, but rumors of a possible sale were circulating since February this year.
As expected, WideOrbit is taking over several assets of Google’s radio business, namely Google Radio Automation, Maestro and SS32 automation products. The company, which is backed by at least $34.5 million in venture capital, commented on the closing of the deal saying that it was looking to expand its product portfolio and taking over Google Radio’s assets was a key step in that process. In the released statement, the company added that 3,600 customers were currently using Google Radio Automation.
WideOrbit, founded in 1999, claims to help manage over $12 billion in online advertising from about 1300 cable networks, TV and radio stations, as well as managing advertising for movie theaters, mobile devices, and digital display networks. It boasts clients such as NBC, Telemundo, Hearst Television, and Gannett, among others.
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Ever since Netflix’s awesome vacation policy was revealed to the public (basically, there is no policy, it’s take the time you think you need), the company’s work policies have been of interest to people. A new 128-page presentation called “Reference Guide on our Freedom & Responsibility Culture” was recently sent around the company, and then put on SlideShare, where the blog Hacking Netflix found it.
The presentation, which you can see for yourself below, is as interesting as any 128-page document can be. If you read it over, about half-way through, you’ll probably start wishing you worked for Netflix. This was meant to be an internal document for employees to read, but it’s also one hell of a recruitment pitch.
Early on, a lot of it deals with workplace efficiency, and not being afraid to let someone go if they’re not doing their job. The idea is that if someone just wants to do mediocre works, that’s fine, they’ll get a nice severance package. It extends this into an emphasis on effectiveness over effort — the company doesn’t want to necessarily reward people who stay late versus those who don’t, but get the same amount of work done. It then turns to some internal policies including management best practices. And then to retention practices — making sure the company pays the top people a high enough salary that they’ll never want to leave.
There’s a big emphasis within the company on salary, rather than stock options and bonuses. The thought is that you should give the employees as much money as possible up front and let them decide what to do with it.
This is all pretty interesting stuff for a fairly large, publicly-traded company. The emphasis is obviously not to act like other big companies do. Given Netflix’s recent successes, it would seem that the strategy is working. And yes, there is stuff in there about the vacation policy.
Close to half of Europeans use the internet every day but one third have never used the web, according to a new report (PDF) published by the European Commission. The study, which took a deep dive into the digital landscape in Europe over the last five years, demonstrated that new technologies are spreading fast across the continent but deep divisions remain and that particularly the elder and unemployed remain largely unaware of the existence of websites such as TechCrunch and FAILblog.org. The commission's study showed that 56 percent of Europeans had become regular Internet users by 2008, a jump of one third since 2004. Forty three percent of EU citizens currently use the web every day, while 75 percent use it regularly ("at least once a week") compared to only 43 percent in 2005. Half of all households and more than 80 percent of businesses had a broadband connection last year and with 114 million subscribers the EU is in fact the largest world market for fixed broadband access.
This is just kind of odd. Look at the picture below. See the picture of some guy in place of the “X” button? Yeah, that’s this guy.
Apparently, one of Google’s Chrome UI designers, Glen Murphy, has inserted his face into the latest nightly build of Chrome. Specifically, this is the Linux build, which is meant for developers and testers (we haven’t been able to see it on the Mac or Windows versions).
Our tipster was pretty surprised when he downloaded the nightly build and saw a person’s face staring back at him, so he asked around on the Chromium irc channel, and found out it was Murphy (who you can see in a picture here from SXSW three years ago).
Apparently, the next update will remove Murphy’s face. Oh those Googlers, always messing around.
Google is clearly enamored with the netbook space. We already know that it’s serving as an entry point for the new Chrome OS, but Google isn’t just going to sit around and wait for that, it’s starting to optimize its experience for netbooks already.
Tonight, Google has just released a small new feature in Gmail Labs so that users can optimize their email service for viewing on netbooks. It’s a small, but noteworthy setting as netbooks have become popular, yet most still run sites just as full-sized laptops would. Gmail’s engineers apparently had a problem with that, so they launched the new “Remove Labels from Subjects” feature.
Basically, this does exactly what it says, removes the labels that are normally in front of subject lines in Gmail. The idea is that this will save a lot of screen real estate, especially on netbooks.
While a lot has been said recently about the growing differences between Apple and Google, this attitude towards the netbook is as good of an example as any. While Apple has said time and time again that it isn’t interested in the netbook space (at least as it’s currently comprised), Google is clearly thinking about it a lot.
Google also notes that using its Chrome browser in full screen mode is a good solution for netbooks. That is, of course, until Chrome OS is released.
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When it comes to flight information, or to be more accurate, flight statuses, push notification can be a godsend. Case-in-point, Worldmate Gold (iTunes link), one of the first iPhone travel apps to utilize the new OS 3.0’s push notification capabilities. The downside? It’s $20 (well, $19.99).
If you do much traveling this is one iPhone app you may actually be delighted to pay that $20. Also, there’s also a free version (iTunes link), although that version does not have push, the compelling feature of the app. If you’re quick though, you can grab one of the 40 free copies of the Gold version WorldMate is giving away to TechCrunch readers. Simply email techcrunch@worldmate.com and they’ll contact you if you’ve won.
WorldMate begins winning you over in the itinerary building stage. It offers a couple of ways to automatically build it for you. One way is to enter the info directly on WorldMate.com. The second is by email—manually, or using an Outlook toolbar. WorldMate is able to parse confirmation emails from over a hundred travel agencies, airlines, hotel chains, and car rental agencies. Once it has automatically pieced together all of your trip details and stored key data such as confirmation numbers, phone numbers and seat numbers, the itinerary is synced over-the-air to the iPhone app.
This is the point where the app’s killer-feature begins to shine. Having integrated with various data sources such as GDS, airline systems (including low-cost airlines that are not on GDS), the FAA and airports, WorldMate is able to monitor flight statuses for over 350 airlines worldwide. This allows them to send out immediate push notifications when flights are delayed, canceled, diverted, and even when there’s a gate change.
Now it’s certainly of value to know that changes to your flight have occurred, but it’s even better to be able to react to them, and the WorldMate app lets you do just that. For example, say your flight has been canceled, the app will help you find alternate flights to the destination. It will also assist you to book a hotel room. Here’s something pretty cool: WorldMate uses heuristics to sort the results so if it’s after 10pm, they’ll recommend a hotel near the airport, otherwise they’ll recommend a hotel near a choice of city landmarks.
The rest of the hotel hotel booking features available in both the free and premium versions are pretty useful as well. There are three ways to search for a hotel: Itinerary Location, for example, ‘Find hotel near my meeting with TechCrunch HQ’, Current Location, which utilizes the iPhones embedded GPS, and finally Standard Search, by specifying city, times, etc. Hotels are ranked according to the user’s preferences which are saved for future re-use. These include budget, brand, and amenities, which are all rated by importance to the user.
There are also some basic features that round off WorldMate as the Swiss army knife of apps for the business traveler. These include a self-updating exchange rate calculator for over a hundred currencies, worldwide weather info, home and travel destination clocks and a tip calculator.
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It’s a match made in real-time heaven. StockTwits, a popular site that lets you track real-time discussions about stock information on Twitter, is now featuring a live feed of real-time news provided compliments of SkyGrid, the powerful real-time financial news aggregator.
SkyGrid will now embed a widget on StockTwits pages, showing a stream of incoming news for whatever company you’re currently looking at (you can also see a broader stream of news if you haven’t visited an individual company page). In effect, the site will now let you monitor both the news and the conversation around it in real-time, making the site even more useful for investors. And if you’re only on the lookout for good news (or bad news), you can filter by that too: SkyGrid uses semantic text analysis to determine if each incoming article is deemed positive, negative, or neutral about a given company.
At this point the SkyGrid widget is only available on StockTwits. However, I’d be very surprised if we don’t start seeing it pop up on more publisher sites soon, though it may be some time before anyone is able to grab the widget.
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Tonight Aneesh Chopra, US Chief Technology Officer and Associate Director For Technology, spoke at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View during his first trip to Silicon Valley since he took office in an event that is being put on by the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Churchill Club, and TechNet.
Chopra kicked off the evening by stating that this is the first of many visits to Silicon Valley, where he hopes to continue an onging dialogue throughout his tenure as CTO. He then began exploring some of the ways that technology is having a major impact on our personal lives, briefly describing some of the ways he and his wife have used the Internet to help seek advice in raising their child. But while we’re doing a great job leveraging technology in our personal lives, he says this hasn’t translated to “global competitiveness” and public policy.
In a recent report put out by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, it was found that the US, while doing well with regard to innovation in terms of an absolute measurement, was seeing very little growth compared to other countries. Likewise, our growth in E-Government has been stagnant, as have our improvements in higher education and improving the next generation of our workforce. Even in areas that we’ve done well in, we’ve largely failed to continue improving, setting the stage for the Unitied States to fall behind in the future.
To deal with these problems, and others, Chopra says that his job is to balance long term policy making with near term changes.
Chopra says that part of the problem we’re dealing with involves figuring out the ‘verbs’ — we know what tools could possibly help (the ‘nouns’), but we need to decide what we’re going to actually do with those tools. He recalled a story from his time serving in Virginia, when the school board was looking to update its old physics text books. Going through normal procedures, updating the text books would take as much as four years. Instead, Virginia assembled a team of scientists throughout the state and the US to write chapters for the book for free. Scientists and professors accepted to task, and managed to write and have a book up for approval within a year.
Some of the tasks we have to undertake will be years in the making, but Chopra pointed out a few ways that we’re already making headway. On June 30, the government launched the Federal IT Dashboard — an extension to the government spending site that had been previously launched. The site allows citizens to see how their tax dollars are performing relative to IT investments. Since launching, the site has seen 30 million hits.
Likewise, Chopra talked about a new product being undertaken to help modernize the Citizenship and Immigration Service, which is not known for being particularly customer friendly. The service will soon be launching a new online site that will allow for online checking of application status, as well as alerts via SMS, Email, and the website.
Chopra says it’s “not the easiest thing to bring innovation to Federal government” (a statement that brought more than a few chuckles). But he and his team are working to find open government platforms for blogs, wikis, and peer collaboration tools that could be easily deployed to multiple agencies throughout the government.
Q&A: Q: One of the initiatives for the Obama administration is digitization of medical records. But there’s resistance in the industry and privacy concerns, legistration that imposes restrictions. A: The president was very clear when he annouced his cybersecurity policy that as a nation we have to maintain the openness of the web while at the same time addressing the cyber security threat. It isn’t a question of one or the other — it’s if we get the cybersecurity framework right, it can fuel the next wave of growth. I would say the same is true for healthcare. If we can get the privacy and security frameworks right, it would fuel a set of product innovations. The President has also been clear that we need payment reform as part of digital migration for health. Incentives today aren’t designed to encourage prevention activity. Many peole say that doctors don’t like technology. But I don’t know a doctor who doesn’t use a product called Epocrates. That gives me confidence that if we build better products, they’d use them. Q; I teach IT. What kind of values should I start to instill in my students? A: We must listen to customer need. IT and ‘business people’ can speak different languages, we don’t listen very well. We need to ask better questions. Put IT thorugh customer experience design workshops. Q: How are going to change culture that keeps government organization behind the times? A: There are tools today in Washington that we don’t use very well. The Defense Department has defensesolutions.gov, where they can take any idea and turn that into a process that would get looked at. For example, the DoD wants a ruggedized forensics kit for the field. Anyone in the valley could submit an idea. We need to use the tools better. We also need to push the envelope for other tools (X Prizes) we haven’t really embraced them in all. We do need procurement reform, we have leadership at DoD looking into it and other organizations. Q: When you’re trying to do innovation you run against existing software. A lot of software in government is old. I was wondering whether you’ve begun to look at this troubled systems, come up with strategies? A: I will say in defense of a number of agencies, there are some reasonably well architected solutions in place. I am a big fan of open collaboration, not specifically open source though. I have no problem with people purchasing Oracle or Microsoft, the challenge is that a lot is spent developing on that stack afterwards. So when we adopt a financial system, we have to put in provisions for snow plow accounting, because it doesn’t come with that but our state needs it. But while we have to do that custom stuff, we’re trying to improve sharing which could let that module be shared between states.
Q: Talking about cyber security, we thought it would boost innovation. But given recent resignation of Melissa Hathaway.. A: When Obama made annoucment about cybersecurity coordination he was explicit that they would work together with me and our CIO to bring policies in line with our federal government. Depsite her resignation, we’re working fast and furious. Q: There’s a conundrum: the more private info you put on the web, the more it helps, but it’s subject to various abuses. How we square this circle? Is more government regulation the answer? A: We have policy framework around privacy. I will not lead the debate on that, but I’m very sensitive to the choices. My belief is that consumer preference will be a leading driver of policy. Q: You’ve talked a lot about Health IT. What are the verbs.. you’ve talked a lot of about nouns A: Two words that matter: meaningful use. Congress is making incentive that require that doctors are meaningful users of technology. There is a set of public commmittes, you can download draft version of what “meaningful use” should look at, there are verbs about simplifying admin costs. Making sure you track your presecription uses. Make sure you can identify cholesterol, and so on. Q: Higher education is tough. It’s easy to do courses online. It’s hard with the fractured structure. We don’t have interstrate highway of credentials, etc. Terminal systems done on local basis. A: My impression is that community college foundation will probably the most leveerated opportunity. The system is very keen to adopt technology.
Here’s a video of the event recorded by Robert Scoble:
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A few weeks ago, 
At our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp event last month, one of the most interesting things that was 
This afternoon Facebook’s Open Stream API, which 
Apple has just pushed out the newest update to its OS X Leopard (10.5) operating system, with 10.5.8. This could potentially be the last Leopard update we see before Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) is released to the public sometime in the next couple of months.
Last month at 
In 2007, Radiohead sent a shock-wave around the music industry when it released its album In Rainbows online, letting the purchaser set the price they wanted to pay for it. Some hailed it as the 
Ok, so I don’t normally write about online sales applications but one such app comes out of stealth today which made me sit up and take notice. 
For several months now, 
Called “Media Stream,” it’s a functionality that basically allows broadcasters to pull in other video clips to supplement their own streams. Imagine it this way: Say you’re watching the 
In another fascinating move by the App Store acceptance team (Motto: Lunch is tasty! Is that a butterfly? We like cake.) the 
Online advertising marketplace 
Global mobile advertising network operator 
The startup is certainly performing pretty well in a very crowded market. 
If it sounds complicated, just see this 
Google Radio, the Internet search and advertising giant’s online radio ad buying service, has been sold to online ad and media management software firm 
Ever since Netflix’s awesome vacation policy was 
Close to half of Europeans use the internet every day but one third have never used the web, according to a 
Google is clearly enamored with the netbook space. We already know that it’s serving as an entry point for 
When it comes to flight information, or to be more accurate, flight statuses, push notification can be a godsend. Case-in-point, 
Now it’s certainly of value to know that changes to your flight have occurred, but it’s even better to be able to react to them, and the WorldMate app lets you do just that. For example, say your flight has been canceled, the app will help you find alternate flights to the destination. It will also assist you to book a hotel room. Here’s something pretty cool: WorldMate uses heuristics to sort the results so if it’s after 10pm, they’ll recommend a hotel near the airport, otherwise they’ll recommend a hotel near a choice of city landmarks.
Tonight Aneesh Chopra, US Chief Technology Officer and Associate Director For Technology, spoke at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View during his first trip to Silicon Valley since he took office in an event that is being put on by the 
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