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| Nambu Wants $80K-$100K For Tr.im, Considers Shutting Down Its Twitter Client
August 10, 2009 at 9:54 pm
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|  Earlier today, we reported on Bit.ly offering Tr.im parent Nambu Network, a couple of ways to ensure all its links don’t die when the service stop supporting them at the end of the year. Nambu rejected those, as it is instead looking to sell. Now we know the price it’s asking for: As of right now, they’re seeking something between $80,000 and $100,000, three separate sources have told us.
Not surprisingly, all three are balking at that price. After all, the main reason Nambu is giving for folding Tr.im is that it can’t compete against Bit.ly when Twitter is actively promoting and using it as its default link shortener. Still, several other parties have reached out to us to say that they are interested in purchasing the service (though they did not appear to know the price tag). We’re also hearing that Nambu Network is also considering shutting down its Nambu Twitter client, again citing Twitter’s preferential treatment of others. Currently, Nambu has a desktop and iPhone client. Again, Tr.im URLs are going to be supported through the end of the year, so there is still plenty of time for a buyer to step in and scoop up the service. But with so much negativity surrounding it now, and not great numbers to begin with, will anyone? Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| Pics: The Facebook/FriendFeed Deal Signed Under The Cover Of Night
August 10, 2009 at 8:46 pm
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| With all the hoopla over the Facebook’s $50 million acquisition of FriendFeed today, it’d be nice to see how it actually went down. And now we can, thanks to pictures FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, who posted some pictures of the two sides immediately after signing the deal in the wee hours of the morning. As you can see in these pictures, this deal was obviously important enough to Facebook that founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself is there. Also pictured from Facebook is Vaughan Smith the director of corporate and business development. From FriendFeed, there were three of the co-founders Buchheit, Bret Taylor and Jim Norris (Sanjeev Singh, the fourth co-founder, was not there because he was getting on a plane, Buchheit notes). I’m still not entirely sure that these pictures are of the deal signing, and not of the crew getting ready to play a game of pick-up basketball. 
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| The Cost Of FriendFeed: Roughly $50 Million In Cash And Stock
August 10, 2009 at 7:32 pm
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|  Everyone is obviously talking about the Facebook/FriendFeed deal, but everyone wants to know one key detail: How much did Facebook pay? Now we know: Facebook paid nearly $50 million when you add the $15 million it paid in cash with roughly $32.5 million (based on current valuations) in stock, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The stock is the key part of this deal. Its value is derived from the $6.5 billion common valuation after a recent purchase of employee stock by the Russian investment group DST. But what’s really interesting about the stock is that these are options that vest over a set period of time (”several years,” says WSJ), just as employees in the company get. Compared to the Parakey deal in July 2007, in which the company got only cash and no stock, this seems like a pretty nice deal (assuming that Facebook’s stock eventually pans out, of course). Another interesting question about this is what Benchmark Capital, FriendFeed’s outside investor, got? It’s certainly possible that they’re taking the cash, while the FriendFeed employees take the stock. Benchmark invested a small part of the company’s $5 million round in early 2008, so a $15 million exit would be pretty solid. But that’s all just speculation, it’s hard to know what Benchmark is getting for sure. What else is interesting about this $50 million number is that it is 1/10th of what Facebook was apparently willing to pay for Twitter late last year. One big hold up in that deal was that Facebook was offering mostly stock, while Twitter wanted more cash (we heard roughly 20% would have been cash, with the rest coming in stock). Another big problem was that the stock Facebook was offering Twitter was apparently valued based on the ridiculous $15 billion valuation after Microsoft’s investment in October of 2007. The $6.5 billion common stock valuation seems much more reasonable. Too bad for Twitter. [photo: flickr/tracey o]
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 
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| Drama: Zynga Founder Mark Pincus Gets TRO On Old Tribe.net Colleague
August 10, 2009 at 7:29 pm
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Something dramatic is going on between Zynga CEO Mark Pincus and one of his old employees at Tribe.net, a company he cofounded in 2003. Pincus has obtained a temporary restraining order on Darren McKeeman, formerly the IT Director at Tribe. Cisco acquired the company in 2007. Pincus hasn’t returned a request for comment, but the TRO was filed in the Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco. McKeeman is prohibited from contacting Pincus at all, and must stay at least 50 yards away from him. He is also explicitly prohibited from any of the following to Pincus: “harass, attack, strike, threaten, assault (sexually or otherwise), hit, follow, stalk, destroy personal property, keep under surveillance or block movements.” He is also restricted from purchasing guns or other firearms, and must sell or turn in any guns that he owns. McKeeman’s only response so far: “Note to everyone: don’t lie in things you file in court! It will come back to haunt you! I’m quite happy these morons did lie, though.” Someone pass the popcorn. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 
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| Facebook Flips The Switch On Real-Time Search, Goes After Twitter Where It Hurts
August 10, 2009 at 7:21 pm
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Just hours after we broke the news that Facebook had acquired FriendFeed comes Facebook’s announcement that it’s deploying its improved search product to everyone. This improved search functionality, which has been in testing since June, gives users the ability to search through shared media and status updates from their friends and the Pages they follow. And, perhaps more importantly, it lets users search through updates shared to ‘everyone’. The gloves are off — Facebook is going after Twitter where it hurts.
The new search will be a breath of fresh air to anyone who has previously tried to search Facebook for, well, anything. Under the old system, users had to browse through clunky categories to find their results, and there wasn’t a way to search though status updates or shared items at all. Now you’ll be able to simply click through different tabs on the left side of the page to jump between different categories, much as your would jump between Friends List on the Facebook News Feed. Another change is the way Facebook lets users ‘Search The Web’ — now these results are shown as a filter, rather than on their own page. And Facebook has also changed the search engine from Live.com to Bing, Microsoft’s rebranded and improved search engine. These changes are especially important because search has long been one area where Facebook fell well behind Twitter. Twitter Search has become an amazing tool for finding the most up-to-date information on a variety of topics, including everything from breaking news to movie reviews. Facebook has slowly been making headway in this area by allowing users to share status updates with ‘everyone‘ (before that only your friends could see status updates). But until now there hasn’t been an easy way to actually search through those public updates, which made the feature useless to most people. Now you’ll be able to jump over to Facebook search, click ”Posts By Everyone” and use it in much the same way you would use Twitter Search. You’ll see a list of matching updates from other users on Facebook, and a message at the top of the screen will update in real-time, alerting you as new updates containing your query come in. For the time being it looks like Facebook isn’t promoting the feature too heavily — the ‘Posts By Everyone’ is the last item in the list of search filters, and I suspect that Facebook has relatively few users who are sharing their updates with the public in the first place. That will likely change soon though, as Facebook is planning to roll out a new suite of privacy options that will suggest that users begin sharing some of their data publicly. Facebook’s 250+ million active users still dwarfs Twitter’s userbase, so even if only a small fraction of them begin using these new features, it won’t be hard for Facebook to become a serious contender in the real-time search race. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors 
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| Benchmark Capital's Big Day
August 10, 2009 at 6:38 pm
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|  If you’re a partner at Benchmark Capital, you’re having a very good day and celebrating two separate portfolio acquisitions. That’s sort of like an unassisted triple play in baseball, it just doesn’t happen that often. Maybe that’s why the team looks so darn happy in their website picture.
The first is Friendfeed, which was acquired by Facebook for an undisclosed sum. Benchmark was the sole venture capital investor in Friendfeed, which raised a $5 million in an early 2008. Benchmark now has stock in Facebook, the hottest IPO prospect in Silicon Valley right now. The second is the much larger deal - VMWare’s $400+ million acquisition of Springsource, an enterprise and web application development and management startup. Benchmark was the biggest investor in Springsource, which raised a total of $15 million in two rounds of financing prior to the acquisition. Benchmark still holds the record for (probably) the best venture investment in history - they turned a $6.7 million investment in eBay in 1997 into $5 billion by 1999. Partner Bill Gurley talks about that deal and Benchmark in general in our video interview with him last year. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors 
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| VMWare Acquires SpringSource
August 10, 2009 at 6:21 pm
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|  Today VMWare has announced the acquisition of SpringSource, a provider of Web application development and management services. The deal closed at a $420 million valuation, with $362 million in cash and equity plus an assumption of approximately $58 million in unvested stocks and options.
SpringSource is a notable proponent of “lean software,” a concept that is gaining traction in the enterprise space as a means of accelerating the delivery of business applications in the cloud. With the acquisition, VMWare and SpringSource will partner with goals of delivering a platform that allows clients to “more efficiently build, run and manage applications in both internal and external cloud architectures.” "VMware has led the modernization of datacenter infrastructures through innovative virtualization and cloud architectures, providing customers with cost savings, agility and choice," said Rod Johnson, chief executive officer, SpringSource. "The SpringSource team and community are committed to revolutionizing the way companies build, run and manage applications. By combining forces, I'm confident that we'll be able to deliver a set of truly remarkable solutions that dramatically simplify enterprise IT." The move comes shortly after a small exodus of talent from Google to VMWare. It is also interesting to note that Benchmark Capital is SpringSource’s largest investor, with Peter Fenton sitting on the company’s board of directors. Benchmark is also an investor in FriendFeed, so the firm is likely enjoying a nice start to the week. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| Facebook Takes FriendFeed To Take On Twitter
August 10, 2009 at 5:36 pm
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|  So, Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. But what does it mean? Well despite the rhetoric of some that this is a minor deal because FriendFeed’s audience was small compared to that of its acquirer Facebook, or even Twitter, this deal should actually have some wide-reaching implications for the future of how many of us use the web socially.
Talent And Features Let’s be clear, from what all involved parties are saying, this was a talent acquisition. Facebook has no need to integrate the entire FriendFeed service into its site which has over 250 million users. Actually, it already has a FriendFeed, its News Feed. But as we’ve pointed out numerous times, Facebook’s New Feed was simply nowhere near as good as the social stream FriendFeed had created. So instead, what Facebook will do is integrate the best features of FriendFeed, with the help of the people who built them. Actually, Facebook had already been basically doing that (whether on purpose or not), something which led me to write in my very first post for TechCrunch back in April (appropriately titled “You Will Be Using FriendFeed In The Future — But It May Be Called Facebook”) the following: But I think it's FriendFeed that Facebook should be more closely following [rather than Twitter], given what it wants to do with its service. That's especially true when even more information starts coming into the site by way of Facebook Connect. Twitter has exploded in popularity because it's so simple — but it's far too simple for everything that Facebook want to do. But FriendFeed seems to be morphing into exactly what Facebook wants to be.
Given that FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor said that there had been talks between the two sides for a while, it would seem that Facebook understood that. The incredible speed at which FriendFeed was developing and deploying new features — features which Facebook should have — was too hard to ignore. Social Feeds And why any of this matters is that an improved News Feed is what Facebook needs to hold off the challenge from the company that once spurned it, Twitter. Twitter is still growing fast, and its more-open nature is turning it into the social platform of choice, something which Facebook used to be. Facebook has a great opportunity to be the web’s central hub thanks to its Facebook Connect product which not only allows users to sign into other sites with their Facebook IDs, but also brings data back into Facebook from all around the web. But as was evident after the last New Feed (and total site) redesign, it has been difficult for Facebook to figure out how to handle and best showcase all that social data coming into the site. FriendFeed has been very good at that, albeit on a much smaller site. But it’s not like these FriendFeed guys are amateurs. Almost the entire team comes from Google, including co-founder Paul Buchheit who was integral in the building of a little service known as Gmail. Messaging Speaking of Gmail, this is pure speculation, but what if once the New Feed has been updated, if Facebook decides to use Buchheit and co.’s services to build a better messaging system? MySpace just completely revamped their system, and Facebook’s is pretty poor. Of course, one could also argue that with a killer social stream, it may just negate the need for a revamping of the email system. After all, FriendFeed does messaging very well right now with its combination of public and private comments and posting. Filtering One aspect that is small but hugely important for the social stream, is filtering. Facebook had been getting better at it with various groups you could place contact into to sort your stream, but FriendFeed was again, much better. Here’s a perfect example. When one of your contacts on Facebook posts and item that you don’t care to see, you have the option to hide it. But if they’re constantly posting the same type of item, you can only either hide them each time, or hide that entire user. With FriendFeed there were several more options, including hiding elements from just a certain source, as well as automatically unhiding items if a friend had “liked” it. I could go on, let’s just say FriendFeed’s method is much, much better. And Twitter? Yeah, they badly need filters, pronto. The Open Debate But today’s acquisition also extends beyond that of Facebook’s services. A lot of current FriendFeed users are expressing displeasure with the move because they saw FriendFeed as a true bastion of hope for an open social stream versus Facebook’s closed method. While Facebook’s Chris Cox is saying the right things today about Facebook’s desire to be open, and there has been some progress, the process has been really slow. And plenty wonder if Facebook really wants to be open at all. The same people also see Twitter as more open, but still relatively closed use of the social stream, because its APIs are limited. FriendFeed, which recently launched a new version of its own APIs had the respect of the developer community for their openness, if nothing else. Now, a lot of users are upset at the prospects of a very open service being lured behind a wall. The Twitter Paradox Something else that is interesting in all of this is just how reliant FriendFeed has been on Twitter as a source of its data. We saw this first hand the other day when Twitter went down (and cut off its APIs) due to the DDoS attacks. FriendFeed was much, much quieter without the importing of tweets. Facebook has applications that allow you to import your tweets to update your status as well, but as we’ve seen, neither side seems to particularly care when those applications just stop working for weeks, or break. The FriendFeed team clearly saw the value of Twitter in their ecosystem, but with Facebook, it’s wouldn’t be surprising if the emphasis will be less on Twitter, and more on Facebook’s own status updates. But if Facebook is smart, they may let FriendFeed do to its News Feed exactly what it did to the FriendFeed stream, which is open it up to all those Twitter updates. The reason is that while Twitter itself remains important in that scenario, it’s possible that with Facebook’s 250 million plus users, a lot of the conversation (meaning comments) will start to take place on Facebook (just as it did on FriendFeed). This will slowly devalue Twitter over time as users realized they can have these conversations and cut out the middle man. This happened to a smaller extent when FriendFeed added the ability to post your own messages right to FriendFeed. The Big Picture This acquisition is a very smart move by Facebook to bolster its product, especially as it relates to the real-time web. One thing it does not do however, is make Facebook simpler. I’d still argue that Twitter has an inherent advantage over Facebook because it is so much simpler to use, resulting in a much lower barrier to entry. But naturally, with the complication comes a lot more data, and data is ultimately be the key for a larger battle for the web, so it’s a trade-off. Where this leaves FriendFeed as a service is still up in the air. The team has said FriendFeed will continue to run as-is for the time being, but made no promises about the future. Cox’s comments seem to indicate that FriendFeed will be a sort of farm system for the big league Facebook, which I’m sure will piss off plenty of FriendFeed devotees. Eventually, one way or another, it’s hard to see FriendFeed as it stands now, continuing on. Facebook will begin to take up too much of the FriendFeeders’ time, and it will languish. It’s sad, but that’s the web. Not every service can flourish. There simply aren’t enough users with enough time to use all of them. So this move was also smart in a long-term sense by FriendFeed because it ensure the awesome technology it has fostered with FriendFeed will continue on, and could one day reach a billion people. One thing is for certain, the Facebook/Twitter battle just got a lot more interesting. And those are always fun to watch. [photo: flickr/conerwithonan]
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 
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| First Interview After Acquisition With FriendFeed And Facebook
August 10, 2009 at 4:18 pm
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|  Details on the Facebook acquisition of Friendfeed story that we broke earlier today are still coming in. But we had a chance to talk with Friendfeed cofounder Bret Taylor (pictured right) and Facebook VP Products Chris Cox a few minutes ago to discuss the deal and the product integration plans going forward.
On How the Deal Happened Cox and Taylor won’t talk deal terms or even if the deal was stock, cash or a mix (likely all stock or mostly stock). Friendfeed has raised just $5 million in an early 2008 financing, and is backed by Benchmark Capital. Taylor said “this is an 11th hour deal,” (sounds like it was finalized last week and there was quite a party) but that the two companies have been talking for some time. “Things heated up in the last couple of weeks,” he said, after the two were on a panel together at the Real Time CrunchUp on July 10.
Product Integration We’ve heard from one source that, like the 2007 Parakey acquisition, the deal is largely a talent acquisition by Facebook, and less about the Friendfeed product. Friendfeed has 12 employees, and all but one are engineers. Taylor and Cox say that the Friendfeed product will live on independently, and eventually Friendfeed will be merged into Facebook. But the Friendfeed team is not being kept whole. Some employees will now report to Cox, others to engineering head Mike Schroepfer. In my opinion that means, long term, the Friendfeed product itself is unlikely to be a big priority. But Facebook is clearly excited about Friendfeed’s ability to innovate and launch new products. Taylor said “The basic idea is that Facebook doesn’t want to disrupt the product…they’ll take a lot of ideas that work well on Friendfeed and see how they apply to Facebook, and over time they’ll look at how to integrate the products.” He also said that Friendfeed and Facebook agree on a few main philosophical points around openness. “Facebook’s focus on Facebook Connect and openness is also a central tenet of Friendfeed. Some of our ideas on Friendfeed can really accelerate Facebook’s product plans.” Cox agreed, noting that Facebook is focused on being a platform and a service, and not just a destination site. “Friendfeed’s core values, portability and aggregation of content created everywhere, will happen at an accelerated pace at Facebook.” Note that translations are rough, I took notes and I usually can’t read my own writing. Friendfeed will move out of their Mountain View offices and join Facebook at their Palo Alto headquarters shortly, Taylor said. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| Facebook Acquires FriendFeed (Updated)
August 10, 2009 at 3:05 pm
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|  Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, we’ve learned. We’re gathering details now.
At this point details on the acquisition are still very sparse, but it’s clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has “borrowed” quite a few features that FriendFeed popularized, including the ‘Like’ feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates. Obviously Facebook has already built out some of FriendFeed’s functionality so there is some overlap, but there are still numerous ways FriendFeed beats out Facebook’s News Feed setup. One of these is the way stories are ‘floated’ to the top as new users comment on them. And FriendFeed’s system is truly real-time, unlike Facebook’s feed which users have to manually refresh. But the biggest win here for Facebook is the FriendFeed team, which includes an all-star cast of ex-Googlers. Perhaps best known of these is Paul Buchheit, who is responsible for creating Gmail, pioneering some of Google’s early (and incredibly lucrative) advertising products, and coining Google’s “Don't be evil” motto. Other ex-Googler co-founders include Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh. And so begins the next step in Facebook’s assault on Twitter. Update: Be sure to check out our interview with Facebook VP Products Chris Cox and FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor, where they share their thoughts on the future of FriendFeed and its integration into Facebook. Update:
FriendFeed has just posted a note to their blog confirming the announcement. FriendFeed’s Bret Taylor writes that the site will continue operating for the time being, but that the company is still “figuring out its longer-term plans for the product”. Likewise, the API will continue to function for the time being. Update 2 :: Facebook has just issued the following press release: PALO ALTO, CALIF.—August 10, 2009—Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed's four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook's engineering and product teams. "Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends," said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. "We can't wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we've developed at FriendFeed to Facebook's 250 million users around the world." "As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they've built and their desire to have us contribute to it," said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google's "Don't be evil" motto, added, "It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook's engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group." Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they've brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers. "Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.” FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product. Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors 
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| OMG Yahoo Gets OMG.com For Cheap
August 10, 2009 at 2:47 pm
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|  Yahoo has been active in the domain buying and selling space the past few months. Today, it was revealed to be the buyer of OMG.com, which sold last week for $80,000, according to Domain Name Wire.
It’s a great domain, and a really, really great price especially considering the image-centric TMZ.com-rival it has called yes, OMG. (Note: I had no idea it actually existed, at least partially because it didn’t have the omg.com domain — well, and also cause I’m not into celebrity gossip. But supposedly, it’s big.) Of course, Yahoo has a history of obtaining good domain names and doing nothing or next to nothing with them. It sold contests.com in June for $380,000 after sitting on it for many years. It also sold WP.com to WordPress parent Automattic in April of this year. Given the numbers for recent sales, it does seem like Yahoo scooped OMG.com for a bargain basement price. As we said, it sold contests.com for $380,000, which also seemed cheap at the time when you compare it to something like candy.com, which sold for $3 million in June. And in February, toys.com sold for $5.1 million. Sure, “OMG” is not even really a word, but it has become a common phrase in pop culture and would seem to be worth more than $80K in a world where candy.com sells for $3M — especially since it’s only 3 letters. [photo: flickr/quinn.anya] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors 
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| Too Much Time Behind the Computer? Kankles Hurt? Try the Vibram Five Fingers
August 10, 2009 at 2:26 pm
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|  I thought I'd share this review with the TC audience because you seem like a fit lot and interested in the outdoors. Correct me if I'm wrong. So, we begin: I swore I'd never wear them. We called them the Five Fingers of Suck a few years ago and I was sure they were crazy. Friends, I'm here to tell you I was wrong. And I'm sorry. Here's my story: I ran a marathon a few years ago. I got plantar fasciitis and couldn't run after the marathon. Then I ran worked through the inflammation but by the time I was ready to run again I had gained thirty pounds. Wham. Shin-splints. So I was a fat former runner with leg problems. The prognosis wasn't good. So I tried a few things - the elliptical, weight training, losing some freaking weight - but the thing that saved me were these shoes. 
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| Tr.im Cuts Off Bit.ly's 301works Idea, Wants to Sell
August 10, 2009 at 2:01 pm
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|  Yesterday, upon hearing that the URL shortening service Tr.im was shutting down, Bit.ly, the largest URL-shortener, stepped in with a proposal. The offer wasn’t to buy the service, but rather to propose that Bit.ly host Tr.im’s URL-mappings indefinitely, or that they join the 301works.com project, a sort of archive for shortened web links. Tr.im parent Nambu Networks has rejected that ideas, and instead wants to sell the service, Bit.ly writes today.
And that’s too bad, because while the idea wasn’t a perfect solution, it would have at least saved many of the URL’s shortened with Tr.im that are now scheduled to stop working by the end of the year. Bit.ly’s idea behind 301works is essentially to let all of the URL-shorteners bulk-upload links every week, which would then be stored on that service. “We thought this was a useful idea — something that was inexpensive to execute and important for the industry,” Bit.ly writes. But when the idea was first proposed back in April, Tr.im and the other URL-shorteners turned it down initially. The main problem is thought to be privacy (some shortened-links are private on some services). But Bit.ly also thinks the reluctance to get on board may be related to one company ruling all of this, so it has reached out to some non-profits in the hope that they can take over. The reason why Bit.ly wants this 301works service should be pretty clear. There’s a large uproar right now following Tr.im’s demise on whether or not anyone should actually be using URL-shorteners just in case something like this happens. Even the all-powerful Twitter-endorsed Bit.ly could go away some day, is the thought. But an archive of these links that is maintained outside any one service could help put people’s minds at ease. Bit.ly says that using Amazon’s servers, it could have 301works up and running in a matter of weeks. Again, this all sounds nice, but if the other guys don’t get on board, which Tr.im clearly isn’t ready to do, it’s kind of pointless. Bit.ly says that if someone does buy Tr.im and wants to use 301works, to let them know. Clearly, Bit.ly has no interest in buying the service. [photo: flickr/russeljsmith] Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| Who Needs Spy Satellites? Google Earth Pinpoints Where Missile Targeted Taliban
August 10, 2009 at 11:28 am
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|  The leader of Pakistan’s Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, may or may not be dead after a CIA missile hits his father-in-law’s home in the remote “Zangarha area” of the country. But now we can see exactly where that missile hit, and we don’t even need access to a spy satellite. Thanks to Google Earth, we get the image above. Stefan Geens pinpointed the location on his blog Ogle Earth using location information gathered from news accounts. He also figured out where the supposed burial ground was. A decade ago, only a handful of people would have had access to such satellite imagery. Today, anyone can download it for free. CIA and military satellites are still higher resolution, but it makes you wonder how fast the geo-information gap between governments and citizens is closing. We’ve also seen recently how the Untied States Holocaust Memorial Museum is using Google Earth to graphically document the ongoing genocide in Darfur. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to hide from Google Earth, which makes us all Big Brother in a sense. That’s a good thing (better us than a single government or corporation). Unfortunately, Google Earth is only retrospective. You can’t see what is happening across the globe right now. Maybe one dayit will be closer to real time. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. 
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| Get angry: AT&T Changes Contract to Prevent Class Action Lawsuits
August 10, 2009 at 10:53 am
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|  When was the last time you read your AT&T contract? If you answered "never," then may I suggest you take two minutes to look this over. That's right, unbeknownst to you, you just lost the ability to enter into a class action lawsuit against the mobile phone carrier. High five! 
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| Despite All The Angst Around Its Demise, Tr.im Will Hardly Be Missed
August 10, 2009 at 9:53 am
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For all the angst around the demise of Tr.im, the fact is that there are way too many URL shortening services in the world and inevitably more will fall by the wayside. There simply is no need for more than a dozen services to make long URLs shorter (and that doesn’t even count services such as Su.pr or the Diggbar which incorporate a URL shortener as a feature). Already, the market is consolidating around bit.ly, largely thanks to it being the official URL shortener adopted by Twitter (which switched from competitor TinyURL back in May). Currently, bit.ly makes up 79.6 percent of the short URLs on Twitter, according to stats kept by Tweetmeme. It is followed by TinyURL (with 13.75 percent), is.gd (2.47 percent), ow.ly (2.26 percent), and FriendFeed’s ff.im (1.92 percent). On Friday, before it shut down, Tr.im was no. 4 on the list, even with ow.ly. So when I say that Tr.im is not going to be missed I do not mean that it was not loved by some users. It was even moderately popular. But as you can see from the market shares above, it is hard to compete against bit.ly since it is Twitter’s default URL shortener. Twitter should just buy it already and put all the other ones out of their misery. Until it does that, it is in Twitter’s interest to keep a few alternatives in the wings. If it ever chose to switch to another default service, that one would grow to 70 to 80 percent of all short links within a few months as well. In other words, if bit.ly ever slips on the innovation front, it can easily be replaced. But bit.ly is more than a URL shortening service. All of those links hold valuable data. Collecting that data plays into its grander plans to show users deep analytics and the most popular links being shared at any given time. Tr.im didn’t have any such plans. It was an afterthought of Nambu, whose main focus is to make a killer stream reader. If making URLs short (and mining the resulting data) is not your main business, it is hard to compete against startups who do nothing else. Many developers and others find Twitter’s favoritism maddening, but that is how standards are created (right or wrong). As for Tr.im users who are afraid they will lose their data or that all of their short links will be broken, bit.ly has offered to create a short-link redirecting archive at 301works. Nambu should take them up on the offer. What happens to those links is really what we should be worried about. Broken links mess up the Web. All URL shortening services should make a directory of all of their short links available where anyone (especially search engines) can look up the underlying long link where each one redirects. Maybe this is 301works or some other non-profit repository, but having all of these non-standard short links proliferate will just create more problems down the road when other URL shorteners inevitably fail. And fail they will, which is another reason for publishers to use their own custom URL shortener (we use Awe.sm) and always control their data. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 
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| Who's bad? Claim Says Michael Jackson "Bought" Twitter Followers
August 10, 2009 at 8:56 am
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|  According to controversial “paid follower” service uSocial.net, Michael Jackson (or, more likely, his people) attempted to buy 25,000 followers for his Twitter account before he died.
"I can’t admit that we dealt with Michael Jackson directly, though we were in touch with someone in his family recently who tasked us with conducting a Twitter campaign on an account relating to him," said uSocial.net CEO Leon Hill. "It was exciting to say the very least to conduct work with such a big name." This doesn’t mean anything, besides the fact that whoever was looking after Michael Jackson’s Twitter account was an idiot. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors 
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| Buildabrand Offers Full Blown Branding For Price Of A Domain
August 10, 2009 at 7:41 am
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|  Every now and again, you come across a service that promises to disrupt and change the entrepreneurial landscape. Buildabrand could possibly do just that. The service provides high quality “strategically correct” branding for startups for about the same price as domain registration, effectively bypassing what is a traditionally expensive and time-consuming process with ‘brand expert’ agencies.
Answer a few questions about your business and buildabrand will provide a selection of brand identities: logos, fonts and so on. You can then apply that branding (after customizing it, if you choose) to downloadable graphics, stationery, website templates and even - eventually - merchandise like pens and, er, beach towels. You just pay for the items you order or download. The service requires no creative skills from users. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| Bloglines On Life Support. This Story Needs An Ending
August 10, 2009 at 4:53 am
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|  If you were a Bloglines user, consider yourself old school. Most people moved on to Google Reader long ago, and then bailed on RSS entirely for the Real Time Gang (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc.).
The once-great feed reader, bought by IAC in February 2005 for around $10 million, has been on life support for a couple of years now. A two year old beta site with new features remains in beta and has never been launched on the main domain name. A band aid was put on the problems the service had a year ago, but not a single new feature of note has launched since then. Repeated attempts to sell the service for next to nothing went nowhere. And recently, we’ve heard, IAC strongly considered simply shutting it down. The team ultimately decided not to, but they are clearly looking for a long term home for the project. Competitor Newsgator recently threw in the towel and suggested users port their feeds over to Google Reader. Something interesting needs to happen at Bloglines at a product level, or they will, inevitably, be deadpooled. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| Digg Is On A Roll
August 10, 2009 at 2:43 am
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Digg’s been busy lately adding new features—some loved, some not—but they seem to be having a positive effect on overall. In June, comScore estimates the site brought in 8.8 million unique visitors in the U.S alone, up 31 percent over the preceding three months. What accounts for the change all of a sudden? Well, by Digg’s own admission, once it introduced the Diggbar it saw an initial lift in visitors just as a result of people passing around short links. And it’s been getting even more aggressive on that front lately, having to reverse itself at times. But it’s not just the Diggbar. The site launched a decent search feature in April (which always helps generate more traffic) and Facebook Connect in May. Its recently-introduced Digg Dialoggs with people like Al Gore, Trent Reznor, and Marissa Mayer have also been popular. Users can suggest and vote on questions of be asked during a video interview conducted by Digg founder Kevin Rose. What do you think is the biggest source of new visitors to Digg? Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. 
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| Microsoft Unloads Razorfish To The French For $530 Million
August 10, 2009 at 1:03 am
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More than two years after buying advertising network aQuantive for $6 billion, Microsoft finally unloaded the digital advertising agency that came with that deal. It sold Razorfish to French advertising conglomerate Publicis Groupe for $530 million in a combination stock-and-cash transaction. The price was 1.4 times Razorfish’s 2008 sales of $380 million. Microsoft has been shopping Razorfish around all summer. It was reportedly hoping to get $600 to $700 million, but the advertising recession didn’t help. Microsoft settled for a slight discount to that. But at least now Microsoft is out of the people-heavy ad agency business (Razorfish has 2,000 employees), and can concentrate more on its automated search and display ad platforms. Razorfish remains one of Microsoft’s preferred ad agencies (it came up with the Bing ads). And as part of the deal, Publicis agreed to purchase both search and display ads from Microsoft on behalf of its clients. Maybe that is where Microsoft will make up the difference between the $530 million and its original asking price. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 
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| Source: Dell Mobile Phone Launching In China Within Days
August 9, 2009 at 11:57 pm
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|  A source with knowledge of the situation tells us that Dell is launching (or at least announcing) a mobile phone in China in the next day or two. We are trying to verify the information and gather more details on the hardware and operating system now.
Our sources on new hardware coming out of Asia tend to be spot on (we broke the news of the second and third generation Amazon Kindles, the launch of the Palm Pre and the existence of the second Palm WebOS phone and generally have good information on sales figures for iPhones, Kindles and other devices). But in this case the information we’ve received is extremely thin. There have been reports of Dell launching a phone in the Chinese market in recent months, with rumors of the carrier partner being China Mobile in one case and China Unicom in another. There is also wide speculation on the operating system, but we’re guessing it’s Android. Dell has also been working with Google on an Android-powered tablet computer in recent months. But in April Reuters had a report that Dell may be creating a proprietary operating system with China-based software maker Red Office. What we’ve heard on the hardware: iPhone-like, touchscreen, no physical keyboard. that’s it for now. Keep an eye on the Dell China site. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 
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