With Twitter down this morning and reports of failure all over the social Web, I figured FriendFeed would be up, if denuded by the Twitter outage. Well, sorta. In fact, FriendFeed searches are down. How the hell does a denial of service attack plague reach into the coolest service no-one will ever use, as former user Mike Arrington once put it. Is the realtime Web screeching to a halt on purpose, did rssCloud have something to do with making things too really simple, or what? For now, I'll Blame FriendFeed. As long as FriendFeed keeps rolling out updates to realtime, FriendFeediots like myself are smug in our uber view that no matter what happens to the rest of the Web, regardless of whether Google buys a patent-safe video codec for HTML 5, not caring whether Apple and AT&T collude to keep Google Voice out of the carrier business, not worried about whether the Sun/Oracle deal is held up for months, etc. — no matter what, FriendFeed will solve all of my social media problems before anybody else does.
Since the early days of the Facebook Platform, Causes has been one of the most popular apps. It’s also big on MySpace, and the company behind it recently announced that they had raised some $10,000,000 for various causes in two years. It makes sense; it’s using the social aspect of these platforms to spread the word on good initiatives. A new venture, TwitCause, from Experience Project, wants to extend that idea to Twitter.
And it’s possible that this idea could work even better on Twitter, given the built-in viral nature of the service. Basically, each week on Thursday, TwitCause has a new cause they support. They ask that you follow the TwitCause Twitter account and then retweet the cause to show your support for it. These tweets contain a link to go back to the site where you can find a place to donate money if you choose to, using PayPal. The number of retweets and the money raised so far are all shown in real-time on the page, as are the most recently tweets about the cause.
The service launched today with the The V Foundation as its launch partner. The V Foundation is a hugely successful cancer research organization named after the late, great basketball coach Jim Valvano. With his foundation attached, TwitCause has already seen tweets go out from several official accounts of NBA and WNBA teams. The hope is to get other high profile athletes like Shaq and Lance Armstrong involved and tweeting throughout the week too.
Going forward, followers of the TwitCause account will be able to nominate other nonprofits and causes that they want want to see supported by the service. Armstrong’s Livestrong is currently leading the pack for the next cause. TwitCause is also hoping that businesses and brands will want to get involved to sponsor causes as well, matching tweets with dollar amounts in support.
As I said, the viral nature of the retweet seems to lend itself well to something like this. Plenty of other sites and services have used Twitter to help raise money or awareness for good causes, such as Blame Drew’s Cancer, which we covered a couple months ago. They are now also working with Livestrong and have seen over 20,000 tweets blame things on Drew’s cancer in support of the cause.
Earlier today I had a debate about the Realtime Web with author Andrew Keen on a Blogtalk Radio podcast hosted by Supernova’s Howard Greenstein. (It is embedded below if you have an extra hour to spare).
Andrew thinks that real time streams such as Twitter are overwhelming and not very helpful for normal people yet. He pulled out the old canard that real time media will never replace traditional media or trusted Websites. I countered that kind of misses the point. The stream—be it Twiter, Facebook, or what have you—is simply a vehicle for directing attention elsewhere via short links and commenting on what is happening now. Those short links usually take you back to regular Websites or news articles, or even documents from years ago which all of a sudden are relevant once again. In that way, even events that happened long ago can be brought into the real time stream. It is like pulling an experience from deep memory and reliving it.
The argument veered into the philosophical (Keen challenged me to explain the difference between consciousness and memory), but fortunately we didn’t get too far down that path before wiser minds stepped in. Before I knew it investor John Borthwick from betaworks and Kevin Marks (who just joined BT from Google) were on the line schooling both Keen and me.
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As an online entity, Google is constantly evolving and improving its products. Some updates are silly, but some are far more serious and meant for good. Its update today to Google Earth to expand its Darfur coverage, is the latter.
Using data from the U.S. State Departments Humanitarian Information Unit and working with the United States Holocaust Museum Memorial, Google now shows more than 3,300 villages (yes, entire villages) that have been decimated during the genocide. Google notes that while the numbers have been known for some time, actually seeing the decimation in more detail than ever before provides a clearer understanding of the devastation.
For example, using the service’s newer historical data feature, you can see before and after pictures of the region. The results are pretty stunning. This feature is available on some 200 of these sites in the region.
All of this data is available in the Global Awareness folder in Google Earth. And Google is urging people to visit the U.S. Holocaust Museum Memorial website to find out more about what you can do to take action about the atrocities in Darfur.
While talk has seemed to die down in recently months about Darfur after the election cycle made it a hot-button issue, it remains a very serious situation. And it’s good that Google is using its long reach to keep the spotlight on it.
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Digg has just announced that it’s going to begin rolling out Digg Ads, the site’s innovative and experimental advertising product that invites users to vote on which ads they like best, over the next week. Digg first announced the new advertising product in June, and they were briefly spotted in the wild in July, though Digg claimed at the time that the ads were limited to an internal test. Digg plans to roll the product out gradually over the next few days to a small subset of users, with plans for a larger deployment over several months.
Here’s how it works: the more upvotes an ad gets, the less advertisers have to pay, giving them an incentive to produce content that will appeal to the Digg userbase. At this point it’s too early to tell how the ads will fare (there’s a chance Digg users will just launch a bury brigade whenever they see one), but if the screenshot below is any indication they stand a fair chance at being a hit — I’m sure plenty of Digg users would jump at the chance to get a cheap Three Keyboard Cat Moon shirt, and there are plenty of other memes that sites like Threadless could capitalize on. Likewise, I’d imagine electronics companies could see good traffic by promoting discounted video games and equipment.
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As many of you have seen, the Internet entity known as “Cookie Bottom” took exception to my ripping apart of his Bing jingle last night. In response, he made a video attacking me, while at the same time proving just how right I was. As I told him, that video was much better than the Bing one, and maybe he should have submitted that. Still, it was war. And I’m happy to announce that I have won.
Cookie Bottom’s Twitter account has been suspended for what I can only assume is a complete and utter lack of taste. In music, in clothing, in humor — take your pick. Anways, I guess I don’t even need to do a response jingle. I win.
[Just to be clear, I actually have no idea why Twitter has suspended his account. Maybe he was behind the DDoS attack today...I kid, I kid.]
Update: And it looks like my nemesis makes a stunning recovery. I have never seen a suspended account reinstated that fast. I smell a conspiracy.
Update 2: Actually, it looks like someone hacked his account. Hope that wasn’t our fault — sorry Cookie Bottom. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hacked.
Editor's note: The following report comes from Don Dodge, who blogs at Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing and is a business development executive for Microsoft. TechStarsis a startup incubator that selects 10 teams and provides funding of $18,000 per team, as well as free office space, operational support, and mentoring from investors, entrepreneurs and business leaders.
TechStars has now been operating for three years. Three of the original ten companies from 2007 have already been acquired (SocialThing by AOL, Intense Debate by Automattic, and Brightkite by Limbo). Today, TechStars debuted ten new startups from their 2009 class in Boulder, Colorado. The teams presented today to about 150 VCs and Angel investors for the first time. These companies are about three months old and have two or three founder employees. Here are Don's notes on each of the ten startups to present at TechStars today. (He also did this for us last year).
Next Big Sound – Measures the growth and popularity of music groups across major web properties like MySpace,Twitter, Last.fm, and others. Next Big Sound measures things like number of fans, number of plays, and comments. It’s best understood as a sort of Compete.com for bands. The company hopes to be the de facto standard for understanding band related metrics on the web. They currently track about 500,000 bands. They use the "Freemium model" with free basic accounts, and charge for premium services like more advanced reports, social media impact analyses, and other services. Current customers include Jason Mraz and about 30 other bands.
Everlater - This company enters the crowded but very lucrative online travel space with a site that allows users to richly document their travel experiences. Users can upload stories, experiences, photos, and more directly to Everlater or the site can pull items in from external services such as Flickr. There is also an iPhone app that enables offline recording of travel experiences which can be synchronized and shared later. Each user and trip has a unique URL like this one that can easily be shared with friends and family on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. Everlater also allows users to share their travel experiences offline by generating and sending postcards, printing scrapbooks, and photo albums.
Vanilla Forums - Vanilla is a popular open-source application that already powers over 300,000 discussion forums on the web. It’s been around for many years. Today, the company announced that it has released a greatly enhanced Version 2.0 of Vanilla both as open source and for the first time as a hosted solution . Vanilla has a business model similar to Wordpress. They have vanillaforums.org for open source, free download/use, and vanillaforums.com as a hosted service, but with up-sells for things like domain name mapping, removal of ads, and single sign-on integrations. They should get a good bump in initial sales from the 300,000 installed base of free users, some of whom will be happy to pay for the additional services.
SendGrid - SendGrid is an email service that solves the problems faced by companies sending transactional outbound email (emails delivered by software applications such as sign up confirmations, shipping alerts, friend requests, and notifications). By using SendGrid instead of their current outbound email servers, companies can improve the delivery rates and solve scalability problems. SendGrid also solves many of the common problems faced by companies sending transactional email, such as CAN-SPAM compliance, link tracking, open rate reporting, and more. The company already has nearly 100 paying customers and has delivered over 100 million emails on their behalf.
Take Comics - Provides online digital versions of comic books. The company has relationships with comic book publishers and has technology which converts the print format into pixel-perfect digital formats optimized for desktop and mobile experiences. The comics themselves are visually stunning both on the desktop and on devices such as the iPhone. Comics can be purchased directly through the iTunes style application which also includes a variety of social features and content discovery mechanisms.
Rezora - An email marketing service specifically designed for the real estate market. It’s similar to Constant Contact, Vertical Response and many other similar services but it adds many real estate specific capabilities such as MLS integration and local real estate news feeds. The software is sold to agencies for use by their realtors and can track clicks to help realtors understand what properties, areas, and price ranges their clients are interested in. The company has already signed a major client with 1,100 agents.
Retel Technologies - Provides video surveillance analysis for stores and restaurants. It uses security camera feeds to deliver interesting metrics and analyses such as table cleanliness, service times, and employee activities. Many companies have tried to use sophisticated techniques to process daily video streams from security cameras with varying success. What’s interesting here is that Retel has re-thought the process and delivers human tested results using paid micro-tasks on services like Mechanical Turk. This enables the company to deliver sophisticated reports that include data points such as male vs female ratios, instances of theft by employees, and other actions that only humans can get right. The company charges a flat monthly fee per camera for these services. Retel already has some national chains as early customers and is reporting that $550K of a planned $750K raise is already committed.
TimZon - Pronounced “Team Zone”, this service is billed as “the easiest way to share visual feedback” and is targeted at virtual teams and customer service organizations. The service allows you to record a visual message that can include screen images, audio, video, and white-boarding /annotation., then easily share it as a URL. Because it requires no software to be installed in advance, this is an easy way for organizations to exchange complex visual feedback. The basic service is free to use, but TimZon provides paid packages for companies that want to systematically collect and organize visual feedback.
Mailana - Helps you share what really matters with the people who really matter. It analyzes your communication patterns from email, Twitter, and social networks to determine your inner circle. It then allows you to share your inner circle with the inner circles of your close connections. The idea here is that existing social graphs are too inclusive to be used to efficiently discover connections and expertise. Mailana aims to simplify this by implicitly generating only your “inner circle” based on actual communication patterns, then exposing that only to your most frequent and trusted connections. In theory this dynamic, current, and accurate social graph will expose the most efficient path to needed, trusted connections. The business model is likely to be something like LinkedIn, meaning advertising, and up-sells for premium services.
Spry - Spry provides insight into software development projects by monitoring all the tools and services used by a project team. Spry analyzes the data in real-time, generates progress reports, and enables clear and consistent communication throughout the team. This helps managers and developers make better decisions throughout the process thereby reducing the likelihood of failure and delay. What Spry is doing is analogous to the activity stream on Facebook, but based on the activity of the development tools and services used on a project. Spry is similar to 6th Sense Analytics which was acquired by Rally Software earlier this year. Spry will use the classic 3 tier (free, pro, enterprise) revenue model, with more features as you move up the scale.
TechStars will also unveil nine additional new companies in Boston (this is the first year for the Boston version of TechStars) coming up on September 10th.
We'll go ahead and make it clear, for the sake of those who missed the headline: This post is not something you want to peruse in your cubicle. We'll try to keep the post itself pretty clean, but clicking through just about any of the links within will lead you to pages packed with boobies, wing-wongs, and hoo-has. And yes, I did just use those words on TechCrunch. Back in March, adult social network AdultSpace (who, we have reason to believe, spent at least 13 minutes coming up with their name) got a hot cash injection of $1.3 million from various angel investors. At the time, AdultSpace disclosed that one of their primary goals was to get into the mobile space. Five months later, that goal has been reached — to some extent, at least.
Our commenters have proven themselves to be a brilliant bunch once again today. Perhaps you saw our best comment ever a few weeks ago. That’s followed-up today by a commenter, tenthings, who has deciphered the code Apple uses to reject apps. Funny, we’ve been led to believe all this time that human beings actually look at the apps and make the call — even though it often doesn’t seem like it — but the script makes much more sense.
Behold, the code:
i just hacked into the App-store approval system. here's what i found (pseudocode):
flipCoin() if (heads) approve app else reject app wait 1 week if (pressCoverage >= lotsOf) rejectMoreApps else if (pressCoverage >= tooMuch) fireBoardMember else rejectAppAnyway
This seems to make a lot more sense then Apple VP Phil Schiller’s long-winded response to one rejection earlier today. And explains Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s removal from Apple’s board of directors perfectly.
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A DDOS attack this morning took Twitter out at the knees and they were down for hours. Rival Facebook faced a similar attack (likely related), but for the most part managed to remain online. Some users couldn’t access the site or post content, but the site remained online for most users.
Facebook’s statement:
Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users. No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users. We're continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they've come to expect from Facebook.
We’ve also heard that Facebook and Twitter are working together to figure out exactly which 15 year olds are responsible for organizing the attack.
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Some people have the thinnest skins. Jonathan Mann, known on YouTube as "The Rock Cookie Bottom," won a $500 contest that Microsoft was holding to encourage people to create a jingle for the new Bing search engine.
Naturally MG Siegler made fun of the jingle (it is, in fact, terrible). Angered, Cookie Bottom fires back today with a new song mocking MG:
So, those that know me, know that I don't often address internet critics. Everyone's got an opinion, no use getting up in arms about it. But MG Siegler's post on TechCrunch was so nasty, and so high profile, that it seemed like I had to strike back. And so I have. I present to you, "I'm MG Siegler", in which I throw his words back at him, and more. One note: The part about him blowing his boss…that's completely made up. I really just wanted to use the rhyme "careington/arrington". Enjoy!
In the words of Cartman, It’s On. And yes, Microsoft, we consider him an official representative of your company now, so you’ve just been dragged into this too. Cookie Bottom and MG will be having a jingle-off at a time and place to be announced shortly.
Really bad first Jingle and really funny and catchy second jingle videos are below:
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A lone messenger has emerged from the impenetrable fortress that is Apple’s App Store, and his name is Phil Schiller. Earlier this week, John Gruber of Daring Fireball wrote a lengthy column detailing the plight of Ninja Words (iTunes Link), a sleek iPhone dictionary that uses Wiktionary as its data source. Gruber wrote that the application had been rejected for including numerous common swear words, going on to write that “Apple censored an English dictionary.” Not so, says Schiller, who is Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing and is widely regarded as one of the more recognizable ‘faces’ of Apple, after Steve Jobs.
In a rare moment of semi-transparency, Schiller has written back to Gruber, on the record, in an attempt to point out errors in the original column. I’ve included an excerpt below, and you can find the full letter in Gruber’s post (it’s well worth reading if you’ve been tracking the App Store closely).
Contrary to what you reported, the Ninjawords application was not rejected in the App Store review process for including common "swear" words. In fact anyone can easily see that Apple has previously approved other dictionary applications in the App Store that include all of the "swear" words that you gave as examples in your story.
The issue that the App Store reviewers did find with the Ninjawords application is that it provided access to other more vulgar terms than those found in traditional and common dictionaries, words that many reasonable people might find upsetting or objectionable.
In short, when Ninjawords initially submitted their application in May, Apple’s representatives objected to the inclusion of some swear words and told the developers to wait until the iPhone supported parental controls. Unfortunately, at that point nobody knew exactly when those would be released, so Ninjawords decided to remove the words in question and resubmit. There seems to be some discrepancy regarding which words Apple objected to — Schiller writes that they were “urban slang” terms, but the App Store reviewers reportedly explicitly identified ‘cunt’, ‘fuck’, and ’shit’. In any case, Ninjawords removed the words on their own accord in an attempt to get to market before competitors, so “censorship” probably isn’t the right word to use here. But Gruber’s points about the App Store’s inconsistencies certainly still stand.
All of that said, I find it totally bizarre that Phil Schiller took the time to write this lengthy explanation without saying anything about the myriad of other problems with the App Store (it is possible that Gruber omitted portions of the letter, though it doesn’t sound like it). No mention of the Google Voice fiasco, nothing on the awful support developers have seen from App Store representatives, nothing on the inconsistent and nebulous approval policies. Schiller’s only allusion to the ongoing problems was his closing paragraph:
Apple's goals remain aligned with customers and developers — to create an innovative applications platform on the iPhone and iPod touch and to assist many developers in making as much great software as possible for the iPhone App Store. While we may not always be perfect in our execution of that goal, our efforts are always made with the best intentions, and if we err we intend to learn and quickly improve.
I realize that Schiller probably has his hands tied to some extent, though he is obviously quite high up on the Apple food chain. And his letter to Gruber is really a breath of fresh air after many months of near-silence from Apple. But at the same time, his statement that Apple’s efforts are always made with the best intentions with hopes of improving quickly are hard to take at face value. Apple has remained mum on these problems for so long now, it’s hard not to think that they’re only beginning to address them publicly after the flurries of bad press have turned into a persistent raging storm. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Apple really has been working hard behind the scenes, but they’ve done nothing to show that that’s the case.
And really, there’s a very easy way for Apple to ameliorate many of these problems long before they’re actually fixed. It’s called transparency. Apple should start a blog about the troubled App Store, just as it did when MobileMe was prematurely released to the masses. It may clash with Apple’s secretive culture, but it’s gotten to a point where Apple is putting livelihoods at stake, and the growing unrest in the developer community is reaching a head. Developers would be far more accommodating to these issues if they had more of an idea about what Apple was doing to fix things. Schiller’s letter is a good first step, but dictionary censorship is a far cry from being the App Store’s only problem.
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When Android made its handset debut on the T-Mobile G1 back in October of 2008, a nasty bout of drama between Facebook and Google kept the former from developing on the nascent platform. 9 months later, Facebook took a look at the ever growing number of Android handsets and decided to move past the politics. Our sources indicated that work on the Facebook Android app had began, with at least one Google engineer lending a hand. Facebook has yet to officially acknowledge that an Android port is in progress, but a series of leaked screenshots suggest that it's well underway.
The timing, really couldn’t be more perfect. Just as no less than Apple VP Phil Schiller has started making comments on the record about App Store rejections, Apple yanks another very popular one from its store. Sex Offender, an app to locate sexual predators in your area, had been consistently in the top 10 paid apps for weeks. And now it’s gone — not just off of the list, but off of the store.
We haven’t been able to get in touch directly with the developers of the app yet, but we’re told that they’re looking into the possibility of filing a suit (presumably against Apple) for the removal. So clearly they feel this removal is unjust. But at we wrote when we covered the app a couple weeks ago, this may have to do with the fact that they were charging for this app. As a couple commenters noted in our last story, “This app is not legal, at least under CA law. Selling the personal information of people (even ex-criminals) for profit is forbidden."
Again, it’s hard to know for sure if that’s the reason why the app was pulled, but it stands to reason that it could have something to do with it. But the bigger picture is that this once again shows a major problem in the App Store (surprise). Why was this app accepted in the first place if it was going to be rejected just a few weeks later? The app is all about tracking sexual offenders, if that doesn’t scream “screen me closely,” I don’t know what does. Yet, it would seem that the app reviewers at Apple didn’t check quite closely enough, again.
There are no shortage of these types of stories: Apps getting approved and then yanked, but usually it happens relatively quickly, and doesn’t involve a hugely popular app. That is not the case here, which makes this interesting. I still have the app on my iPhone and it is still working. We’ll update if we hear more.
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You always remember your first time, right? That heady rush, the embarrassment that turns into passion, that sense that this, this moment right now, is what you're living for. You could stay this way forever or die today - it didn't matter. I think Bryan Adams said it best when he wrote:
I got my first real RFID sensing smartcard reader Bought it on the Internet Coded 'til my fingers bled It was summer of '69
I just experienced that rush with the Touchatag and I'm ready to shout it from the rooftops: "Look out, world! I am using near-field technology to trigger actions on my Mac or PC using simple, web-based software and a small piece of fairly well-made hardware."
Remember that video contest Google announced back in June to try to get people to make videos showcasing the icon for its Chrome browser in creative ways? No? Well, the entries are in
It’s all part of a plot to get you to recognize the Chrome browser icon. (That wouldn’t be so much of a problem if more than 2.6 percent of you bothered to use it).
Most of them are lame, I gotta say. You can check them out here. I much prefer the commercials the pros made for Google. But there are a few gems. Below are three of my favorites. (What’s with Japan and its love of Transformers, by the way?)
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Guess where Office Web (or whatever it’ll be called) be hosted soon?
While both istartedsomething and Download Squad report that the domain name was owned by Belgian startup ContactOffice before the transfer, the truth is that the domain name was owned by a U.S. resident and simply operated by ContactOffice, which markets virtual office solutions, under a revenue-share agreement. (I know this because I used to consult for ContactOffice, full disclosure).
No word about how much the former owner fetched for the attractive domain name, but I know for a fact he had been holding on to that one for a long time now, so likely the man is smiling all the way to the bank right now.
Most certainly a direct response to Google Apps, Microsoft is rolling out lightweight, FREE, Web browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. All based in the cloud, the web-based versions of these products have fewer features than their desktop cousins but still give users basic tools to edit and change documents.
Do the prices people are willing to pay for a phone app depend on the device or the type of app? A comparison of July prices in the iPhone App Store and the Android Market by app analytics firm Distimo found that across broad categories such as entertainment, navigation, and tools the average price for the Top 100 paid apps was very similar for both mobile computing platforms.
There were a few exceptions. The average price for a paid reference app on Android is close to $9, which is more than twice the average price for the same category on the iPhone. This disparity is mostly due to some dictionary apps on Android priced between $15 and $30 (mostly from Paragon Software). I’m not sure those are big sellers, but it bumps up the average. Finance and social networking apps are also slightly more expensive on average.
Games are on average about the same as on the iPhone, around $2.50. But if you look at the price distribution, that tells you a different story. While most of the top paid games on the iPhone go for $0.99, on Android many more games are priced between $1.99 and $4.99.
Are Android games better than iPhone games? Hardly. This might just be a function of the relative immaturity of the android Market. Early on, iPhone apps were priced all over the place, but then they started to drift en masse towards the golden $0.99 price point. I suspect the same will happen with Android apps as the devices hit a critical mass of users this year.
Over time, these prices revert to the mean. Look at what has happened to the average price of the Top 100 apps in the iPhone app store in just the last month (see chart at right). When OS 3.0 came out for the iPhone at the beginning of the month month, many app developers took advantage of the new features and prices fluctuated as they experimented to see if they could charge more as a result. So we saw prices rise, especially among navigation apps.
But the average price quickly came back to the norm. Even when a pricey app breaks into the Top 100, it doesn’t stay there for long. For instance, the $69.99 MobileNavigator North America, caused a spike in the average price for the month, but when it dropped out of the Top 100 paid apps on July 27, so did the average. Over time, mobile app prices keep coming back towards $0.99. Call it the Steve Jobs effect.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Yesterday I wrote about new startup Listia, which has an innovative way to help people give and get free stuff that works better than Craigslist. The idea is that you use “credits” to bid on items, which helps the giver by auto-selecting the winner and getting the item to the person who values it the most. I’m using the service, for example, to give away a used Nokia N95 phone. They also have a great viral distribution mechanism by giving credits to people for spreading listings on Facebook and Twitter.
Today, though, we received an email from an angry competitor, Freenapkin. That site, which looks to have been designed on Geocities and presents first time visitors with a giant copyright violating cat asking them to create a listing, currently has about 10,000 monthly U.S. visitors. And it doesn’t have the unique auction capabilities of Listia. Still, that didn’t stop them from complaining that the Listia guys ripped off their idea:
From: [removed]@freenapkin.com Date: August 6, 2009 1:48:50 AM PDT To: tips@techcrunch.com Subject: inaccurate posts
It has been brought to our attention that your news post about listia was inaccurate and was in fact taken from us. We are freenapkin.com founded in February 2008. We were the first ebay of free and have been using the phrase freely since Feb 2008. Our site was the only site on the web since 2008 to post all free auctions. Gee Chaung and his other counter part are just copying freenapkin.com. Matter of fact Gee Chaung has and is a member of freenapkin and registered in December of 2008. His idea is not spur of the moment and this post about ‘ebay of free’ for free auctions needs more attention.
Y-Combinator funded a plagarized website.
Thanks
My first thought - don’t disclose personal information on your users, like if they are members and when they signed up. My second thought - both sites stole the basic idea of giving free stuff away from Craigslist, who stole the idea from people who leave crappy couches out on the sidewalk with a “free” sign sitting on it. So in other words, stop complaining and be more careful with user information. Besides, we just linked to you.
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It’s no secret that group collaboration services like WebEx can be a major pain, particularly when they require proprietary browser plugins (some of them don’t even support Macs at all). Team Apart, a new startup launching in private beta today, is joining the fray of startups looking to offer an easier solution. If you’d like to try the service out, you can grab one of 100 invites for TechCrunch readers here.
As with similar collaboration services, Team Apart revolves around voice and audio chat, along with document sharing and editing. Alongside the video chat, you can edit a notepad and free-form whiteboard (multiple people can edit the same thing at once, and it’s updated in real-time). You can also upload documents and photos, which will become visible to everyone else in the meeting in a matter of seconds. Entering a meeting involves simply clicking a link — there’s no plugin needed (it’s based on Flash) and the service is free.
Team Apart says that its service is meant for ‘many-to-many’ calls where everyone is particpating rather than a one-to-many call, where one person does most of the talking and everyone else listens. Unfortunately that ‘many’ part of the phrase still needs some work — you’re currently limited to only four simultaneous participants, though that number may increase once Team Apart leaves beta. My biggest concern about Team Apart, though, is that there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot differentiating it from the myriad of other free (or close to free) collaboration services out there, which include Fuze Meeting and DimDim. Given the market size for this kind of collaboration tool there is certainly room for multiple companies to do well (especially as ‘virtual offices’ become more common), but Team Apart still needs to do something take separate itself from the rest of the pack.
The Team Apart founders were members of Y Combinator’s class of Summer ‘08, though the company has moved on to an entirely new project than the one they were initially working on while at YC.
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I know what you're thinking, old man: "These kids today with their space rockets and their Yoo Hoo and their customizable notebooks! When I was their age I had a Trapper Keeper with cars on it (the Transformers ones were always sold out) and I didn't have a service that allowed me, for the relatively outrageous sum of $15.99 for a 100 sheet 8x11-inch notebook and $10 for a 5.5x8.5-inch model, to customize my notebooks with lenticular photographs of my friends." Well suck it, Grandpa, because this is 2009. Snapily is one of those companies that lets you print stuff. They're a dime-a-dozen right now but look at what you can print, people! Lenticular freaking notebooks for kids. You can upload an image or a illustration and have your custom notebook sent to your house.
OLX and hi5, both challengers to dominating juggernauts in their respective fields (online classifieds and social networking), have teamed up to expose each others’ admittedly vast but geographically spread audience to one another. OLX says it currently boasts 70 million unique visitors each month across 90 countries, largely thanks to existing partnerships with services that have historically seen most of their growth in Latin-America and Asia (Friendster, MySpace Lat-Am, Fotolog etc.), while hi5 claims 60 million monthly unique visitors from 200 countries.
Even with a reasonable amount of overlap accounted for, these are significant numbers, albeit in countries where potential advertising income is generally much lower than it is in the U.S. and Europe.
OLX (a competitor to Craigslist in the United States) and hi5 (a competitor to the likes of Facebook and MySpace on a global level) claim the fresh partnership serves to consolidate both companies’ hold on the Latin American market, while making way for accelerated growth in the rest of the world.
As part of the agreement, hi5 will implement OLX features that include the ability to display ads on a user's profile page and to see friends' ads, as well as a feature to tell friends about their own ads via newsfeeds. OLX will also allow users to include videos and pictures in classified listings, comment, post/view listings in over 39 languages and 90 countries, and access the site from mobile devices. The latter two features are clearly meant to appeal to a large international user base.
Oodle, another major player in the online classifieds space, has been scoring similar deals recently with social networking services and portals like Facebook, MySpace and AOL.
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Sorry, but social networks simply aren't cool anymore among the 15-to-24-year-old crowd. I'm 23, and have all but quit Facebook (I stopped tweeting a few months ago), but that's more of a function of me being an anti-social cad than anything else. Why? It seems the older crowd—people 25 and older—has given social networks the unmistakable stench of being not cool. Why would an 18-year-old kid want to mimic the lifestyle of a 30-year-old? Now, while I'm thrilled to read this news, there are a few caveats. It's not like 15-to-24-year-olds are not using the Internet anymore. (No, they're using YouTube to listen to music, and using Rapidshare to download TV shows.) And a lot of those older users (25+) are responsible for the growth of Twitter of late.
Twitter has been down for about 40 minutes now (since about 6 am California time), and counting. No word on their status blog about the outage at all (Update: they now say“Site is down - We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.”). Update 2: It’s a denial of service attack. Twitter’s status update says: “We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.”
Since most of you spend your entire work day screwing around on Twitter (luckily I actually get paid to do this), you may be left wondering what to do now. No worries, we have a list. Meanwhile, I can’t Tweet (TM) that it’s raining here in Palo Alto, or go on a 140 character rage over PG&E shutting off my electricity for no reason at all yesterday, forcing me to come into the office at 4 am this morning.
Twitter declared their scaling problems over in early 2007, well before the serious problems even started. And as much as the Great Twitter Outages of 2007 and 2008 frustrated early adopters (there were so many outages that we just started reporting uptime instead), these outages are much more serious. 45 million people worldwide now rely on Twitter as a communication platform. If they want to be the “Pulse of the Planet,” it’s time to scale.
Of course, even the largest sites still have occasional outages. Yahoo suffered 15 minutes of systemwide downtime yesterday, we’re still trying to get their comment on why that happened.
I also ran into YouTube founder Chad Hurley at the Fuze offices, who was meeting with the Best Buy team along with the execs from the new U.S. Formula 1 Racing team USGPE (previously US F1).
Hurley is “the big investor” in USGPE said Best Buy Chief Marketing Officer Barry Judge, and it looks like Best Buy is also looking for ways to get involved in the project. There are also rumors that YouTube will sponsor the car.
USPGE, which was founded by Ken Anderson and Peter Windsor, has 20 employees, is slated to make its Grand Prix debut in 2010. The car is being produced in Charlotte, North Carolina and may be finished by October 2009.
Twitter was featured on the BBC’s Newsnight programme last night. There weren’t any great revelations about the service, however the confirmation from the CEO that London remains the top Twitter-using city in the world is pretty interesting. This was indicated last year, but it is surprising that, a year on, London has retained this top slot, which just goes to show how popular it is in the UK overall.
Prior to a pre-recorded interview with Ev Williams, CEO and co-founder of Twitter, they ran a report in which the editor of Wired UK said he didn’t know what the business model of Twitter was. He obviously hasn’t been reading TechCrunch.
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WPP subsidiary Millward Brown Optimor has released its highly regarded annual brand ranking BrandZ Top 100 (PDF), which identifies the world’s most valuable global brands as measured by their dollar value.
Topping the list are Internet giant Google, whose brand was valued at a whopping $100 billion, and rival Microsoft which comes in second with a $76.2 billion valuation. The report shows Google’s brand value is up from $86 billion last year (an increase of 16% in value), while Microsoft’s rose only 8% in value over the past year.
Note that this is the value of the brand and not the company, and we mustn’t forget Google tends to put its name in all its products so would conceivably get more exposure as Microsoft, which markets far more brands than just one (Windows, Bing, etc.). Then again, Microsoft has been around a heck of a lot longer than Google, as has Coca-Cola which came in third with a brand valuation of $67.6 billion.
Just for reference, I took a look at both tech companies’ stock listings to see how they relate to the brand value pegged by Millward Brown’s ranking. Google today has a market cap of $142.82 billion, while Microsoft’s amounts to $212.16 billion, or an approximate 1.5 ratio in Redmond’s favor.
Other valuable top brands in technology, according to Millward Brown’s fresh ranking, include IBM ($66.6 B), Apple ($66.1 B), Vodafone ($53.7 B), Nokia ($35.1 B), Blackberry ($27.4 B), HP ($26.7 B), SAP ($23.6 B), Intel ($22.8 B) and Oracle ($21.4 B). Just outside the top 25, we find Amazon at the number 26 spot, but the company can pride itself in having the most ‘brand momentum’ - a measurement predicting short-term growth prospects - this year.
For the full lists and report, click here (again, it’s a PDF file).
The report also breaks down brand valuations in categories, so allow me to publish the top 3 for those categories you’re likely most interested in:
GAMING CONSOLES
1 Nintendo DS - $9.65 billion 2 Nintendo Wii - $8.25 billion 3 Microsoft Xbox 360 - $4.68 billion
MOBILE OPERATORS
1 China Mobile - $61.28 billion 2 Vodafone - $53.72 billion 3 AT&T - $20.05 billion
“Whoever manages to change the nature of content display on the Web from a search problem to a recommender problem will reap tremendous rewards.”
That quote, by Greg Linden, the man behind Amazon’s recommendation system, is the dogma of Directed Edge, a new Y Combinator-backed startup in the recommendation space. Amazon, of course does product comparisons, but there’s no reason recommendations shouldn’t be a part of news consumption, music consumption, social networking, basically everything we do on the web. And while there are no shortage of companies out there that focus on some of these different fields specifically, Directed Edge has developed a system that can be plugged into all kinds of different sites.
And for sites that implement its system, it does the recommendations in real-time. “We can take data sets with millions and millions of data points and figure out what’s related to a given item in a few milliseconds. Most recommendations engines pre-compute stuff rather than generating the recommendations in real-time like we do,” Directed Edge co-founder Scott Wheeler tells us.
Wheeler claims they can do this because of the graph database they created in-house after they realized the off-the-shelf options just weren’t good enough for what they wanted to do. And much like Linden’s quote, Directed Edge truly believes that we’re about to see a shift on the web away from search and towards recommendations. And real-time is crucial to that. While we’re starting to see that trend take off in the social space right now, Wheeler believes it will spread to the rest of the web shortly. “Fundamentally we believe that shift is coming, and we want to be a big part of it,” Wheeler says.
Despite the recommendation system being fairly complex, they claim that a person running a site can get Directed Edge’s service up and running in just 15 minutes. And obviously, to be useful such a system would have to work with the data you already have, and that’s exactly what Directed Edge does thanks to its binding system that recognizes a wide range of web languages.
It may be hard to imagine a web where search isn’t the utterly dominant way we interact with everything, but it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility that something like recommendations could become a big part of it. We’re seeing large sites like Digg also putting a lot of focus on recommendations. And then obviously there’s the Netflix Challenge, which just ended. That’s the web Directed Edge wants to see.
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Over the last few months we’ve been tracking a lawsuit between online marketing guru Jeremy Schoemaker and a Google employee named Keyen Farrell. This week comes news that Schoemaker has settled the case with Farrell, though details are scant. Money changed hands (in Schoemaker’s favor), but Schoemaker signed a confidentially agreement as part of the settlement that forbids him from discussing the matter further. You can see his full statement below.
It’s been a long road to get here. Schoemaker originally filed suit against Farrell last April, when Farrell used Schoemaker’s trademarked term “Shoemoney” in his ad copy — a breach of Google’s terms of service. The case was interesting not just because of Schoemaker’s notoriety, but because Farrell is an employee working out of Google’s New York office. Given his position, it was feasible that Farrell had used his access at Google to somehow bypass the system’s trademark filters (among other things), though Google denied this and attributed the fault to human error.
Farrell subsequently filed an affadavit stating he didn’t know that the term was trademarked and blamed a failure of Google’s text filters. In June, Farrell then went on to counter-sue Schoemaker for defamation. Farrell dropped half of the counter-suit a month ago, and soon thereafter approached Schoemaker about a settlement.
Yesterday, Schoemaker posted the following to his blog:
For those that have been following my lawsuit against the Farrells, there have been several developments. A few weeks ago, after originally withdrawing half of their defamation lawsuit against me, the Farrells withdrew the other half and completely abandoned their counter-suit against me. I was then approached about the possibility of accepting a settlement offer in exchange for me dismissing my trademark infringement case against the Farrells. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to write about the nature of the settlement talks or the amount of money that was offered because the settlement offers that were made required confidentiality. I can say that my lawsuit against the Farrells was settled. This has been a real educational experience for me. I was looking forward to getting my day in court, but I can also say that I am very happy with the final result. There is not a whole lot more I am allowed to discuss.
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Coupon site Savings.com just got a redesign and a new board member: Mahalo CEO (and TechCrunch50 co-host) Jason Calacanis. “They’ve broken $10 million in revenue after just a couple of years,” says Calacanis, “and are crushing it in the deals space. Obviously this is a great place to be in a recession.”
The redesign is aimed at making the site more social for those virtual coupon clippers (hey, don’t laugh, we should all be trying to save more money these days) who want to just live to tell everyone they know about the great deals they found.
The site offers coupons from about 2,000 merchants, including the Gap, Restoration Hardware, and even the San Diego Zoo. The site is basically a coupon search engine, organized by brands, stores, and shopping categories. The new design is much more social—as far as a coupon site can be social. Each deal can be voted up, commenetd on, or shared (via Twitter, Facebook, Digg, reddit, delicious, or email). And members can submit their own deals.
Hardcore members and get reputation points based on how many coupons they vote on, how many they add, and whether or not the ones they add become popular.
There are tons of coupon sites out there, such as RetailMeNot and CouponChief. CEO Loren Bendele says he is trying to stand out from the crowd by creating a good user experience so that peopel stick around and want to come back instead of just keeping up bad deals or expired coupons which draw SEO traffic but little else.
Bendele expects to pull in more than $10 million in revenues this year and drive more than $200 million in sales for participating merchants. That is not a bad little business. (The company has raised $6 million in ventiure capital, most recently in October, 2008 from US Venture Partners.
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With Twitter down this morning and reports of failure all over the social Web, I figured FriendFeed would be up, if denuded by the Twitter outage. Well, sorta. In fact, FriendFeed searches are down. How the hell does a denial of service attack plague reach into the coolest service no-one will ever use, as former user Mike Arrington once put it. Is the realtime Web screeching to a halt on purpose, did rssCloud have something to do with making things too really simple, or what? For now, I'll Blame FriendFeed. As long as FriendFeed keeps rolling out updates to realtime, FriendFeediots like myself are smug in our uber view that no matter what happens to the rest of the Web, regardless of whether Google buys a patent-safe video codec for HTML 5, not caring whether Apple and AT&T collude to keep Google Voice out of the carrier business, not worried about whether the Sun/Oracle deal is held up for months, etc. — no matter what, FriendFeed will solve all of my social media problems before anybody else does. 
Since the early days of the Facebook Platform, 
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We'll go ahead and make it clear, for the sake of those who missed the headline: This post is not something you want to peruse in your cubicle. We'll try to keep the post itself pretty clean, but clicking through just about any of the links within will lead you to pages packed with boobies, wing-wongs, and hoo-has. And yes, I did just use those words on TechCrunch. Back in March, adult social network 
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Some people have the thinnest skins. Jonathan Mann, known on YouTube as "The Rock Cookie Bottom," 
A lone messenger has emerged from the impenetrable fortress that is Apple’s App Store, and his name is 
When Android made its handset debut on the 
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We speculated about this when we 
Yesterday I 
I know what you're thinking, old man: "These kids today with their space rockets and their Yoo Hoo and their customizable notebooks! When I was their age I had a Trapper Keeper with cars on it (the Transformers ones were always sold out) and I didn't have a service that allowed me, for the relatively outrageous sum of $15.99 for a 100 sheet 8x11-inch notebook and $10 for a 5.5x8.5-inch model, to customize my notebooks with lenticular photographs of my friends." Well suck it, Grandpa, because this is 2009. 
Sorry, but 
Yesterday I had an informal meeting with Best Buy executives at the 
Twitter was featured on the 
WPP subsidiary 
“Whoever manages to change the nature of content display on the Web from a search problem to a recommender problem will reap tremendous rewards.”
Over the last few months we’ve been tracking a 
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