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- MapCrunch: It’s Chatroulette Meets Google Street View
- Cheep Combines Product Comparisons With Social Shopping
- Could Apple Buy Sony? Absolutely Not
- Amazon Launches Brand New iPad Shopping App Called Windowshop
- Viator Buys Online Private Tour Guide Network OurExplorer.com
- Square Competitor VeriFone Strikes Key Deal With PayPal
- Trend.ly Lands $1 Million To Discover What’s Trending Online In Realtime
- Gowalla Steadily Moves Past The Check-In With City Pages, Business Listings And More
- The Perfect Content Companion For iPad + Instapaper, Longreads Gets A Website
- Photobucket Appoints CEO, Claims Users Upload Four Million Images Per Day
- Cloudera Lands $25 Million For Hadoop Distribution To The Enterprise
- Is That A WiFi Hotspot I See? WorkSnug To Add Skype Access Listings
- Goodbye, MacBook Pro. The New MacBook Air Is That Good.
- Pelican Imaging Snaps Up $10 Million In Series B Funding
- Forget Realtime, Sequoia-Funded Taykey Shoots For Pre-Time
- Digg Faces Accusations Of Gaming Itself
- Lazy Hackers Unite: Firesheep Boasts +104,000 Downloads In 24 Hours
- Damnit Amex, Give Me A Credit Card
- With OS X Lion, It’s No Longer Point & Click, It’s Flick & Swipe
- WITN: “I Don’t Care what a Rich Person in Camden, Maine Says”
- Blue Water Satellite’s Data Diving: A Very 21st-Century Industry
- Ask a VC: The Southeast Asian Edition
- AppMakr Raises $1 Million To Help You Build Custom iPhone Apps
- Tech World Welcomes Digg Refugees With Open Arms
- Ford Earmarks An Additional $850 Million To Build Fuel Efficient Cars
| MapCrunch: It’s Chatroulette Meets Google Street View Posted: 26 Oct 2010 09:17 AM PDT
If Google Street View and Chatroulette mated and gave birth to a lovechild, it’d look a lot like MapCrunch. For the record, this is not a TechCrunch network site, and would have probably been better off with a name like MapRoulette or StreetviewRoulette or something. Either way, if you want to be taken to a random location on Google Street View (in North America, Europe, Asia or Australasia), either by clicking a button or automagically after a couple of seconds, MapCrunch is the mash-up place to be. Granted, it’s a silly little idea and site, but I still find it kind of mesmerizing, at least for a couple of minutes, to watch these random sceneries from all over the world pass by. Big plus: unlike Chatroulette, chances are pretty thin you’ll see some random dude masturbating every few seconds. Pro tip: enable the ‘Slideshow’ feature and just lean back. Here’s a quick and dirty screencast I recorded:
       
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| Cheep Combines Product Comparisons With Social Shopping Posted: 26 Oct 2010 08:00 AM PDT
Through a browser add-on (which currently only works on Firefox or IE), Cheep recognizes when you're looking at a specific product and will show you current price comparisons from around the Web, as well as reviews and ratings. Cheep will appear as a small bar at the top of your screen when you're looking at a product page. The startup has indexed millions of products nearly 200 online retailers, including Amazon, BestBuy and Walmart, so chances are that Cheep will be able to find the product you are viewing within your browser. Beyond the add-on, Cheep is also a standalone social network that encourages users to share their shopping activity, including purchases, wishlists, likes, reviews and more; with other Cheep members. The startup is also creating profiles for millions of products, which users can share on Facebook and Twitter. I doubt I’d really use the online community side of Cheep but the browser add-on could be useful. The ability to receive automatic, contextual information such as alternative reviews or prices for a product without having open another browser tab for a search is appealing.
       
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| Could Apple Buy Sony? Absolutely Not Posted: 26 Oct 2010 07:23 AM PDT
In his earnings call, Jobs said, when asked what they would do with the $51 billion in cash it has lying around:
       
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| Amazon Launches Brand New iPad Shopping App Called Windowshop Posted: 26 Oct 2010 06:17 AM PDT
Amazon has just released a new free iPad app, called Amazon Windowshop that the company says is a complete “rewrite” of Amazon.com specifically for the iPad. Optimized for touch screen tablets, Amazon Windowshop makes it easy to swipe through the store to browse products on the iPad. Similar to Amazon’s website, the app features product lists including "Featured", "Bestsellers", "Recommendations", "New Releases", "Most Wished For", "Most Gifted", and "Movers & Shakers". Amazon presents products via a grid-like interface, but will include pop-outs of specific products with high-resolution images, user reviews, descriptions and videos related to that product (which includes 30 second samples for the music items). For Amazon Prime members, the app will indicate which products qualify for Amazon Prime and include Amazon 1-Click checkout. You can also share products from the app via e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter, save an item for later by adding it to your Wish List, and more. Essentially the app is a suped up version of Amazon.com that is designed specifically for the iPad. It almost feels like a catalog, because of the layout and images. As the holiday season draws near, Amazon is undoubtedly ramping up its online shopping offerings, and capitalizing on the continued growth in the the consumer use of the iPad.
       
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| Viator Buys Online Private Tour Guide Network OurExplorer.com Posted: 26 Oct 2010 05:45 AM PDT
Viator, which operates a one-stop-shop for researching, planning and booking tours and activities all over the globe via Viator.com, has moved to acquire Sydney-based OurExplorer.com, an online resource for discovering and booking private tour guides around the world. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Founded in 2008, OurExplorer.com has grown into a global online network of professional tour guides who specialize in destinations like London, New York and Paris, as well as more off-the-beaten-path destinations. OurExplorer says it has gathered information on more than 2,000 registered tour guides in more than 500 destinations to date, enabling travelers to quickly locate local guides in the destinations they are visiting. Each registered OurExplorer guide has a personalized profile (example) that details their destination of focus, areas of expertise, years as a guide, licensing and pricing information and ratings by customers. Travelers seeking out a customized local experience in their destination can use the OurExplorer network to find a local expert that will meet their personal preferences and craft a private tour that will complement their activities itinerary. The OurExplorer brand will continue to operate under its existing name.        
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| Square Competitor VeriFone Strikes Key Deal With PayPal Posted: 26 Oct 2010 05:23 AM PDT
VeriFone Systems this morning announced a deal with electronic payments giant PayPal that sounds like bad news for Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey‘s latest venture, Square. VeriFone, which offers solutions that enable electronic payment transactions and related services at points of sale, will extend mobile payments acceptance with PayPal and integrate traditional card payments with its new partner’s Mobile Payments products. In addition, PayPal Mobile App will soon work with VeriFone's PAYware Mobile for iPhone (which is the product Square competes with, as it also enables merchants to accept payments via a software-hardware combo for the Apple smartphone). Furthermore, the PAYware Mobile App will be enhanced to support PayPal Bump technology that enables iPhone users to bump their phones together to transfer money between them. VeriFone will, upon integration, promote PayPal and Bump acceptance to its reseller channel. PayPal, in turn, will co-market VeriFone's PAYware Mobile to its own user base. The integrated capabilities are expected to be available next year.        
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| Trend.ly Lands $1 Million To Discover What’s Trending Online In Realtime Posted: 26 Oct 2010 04:58 AM PDT  A small Turkish startup called lunar technologies has raised $1 million for one of its ventures, Trend.ly, managing director Ercan Yaris tells me. The money comes from undisclosed angel investors, two of them partners in one of the biggest telecom companies in Turkey. Trend.ly is a very basic site any way you look at it. Visitors can go to the site to enter any two-element poll (live examples: love vs. sex and Jessica Biel vs. Scarlett Johansson) and have the community vote on them by 'liking' one of the other. Then again, the site has been live for less than 2 months now. Yes, that's two months.
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| Gowalla Steadily Moves Past The Check-In With City Pages, Business Listings And More Posted: 26 Oct 2010 04:28 AM PDT
Gowalla will now include City Pages for more than 30 metro areas worldwide. For a given metropolis, Gowalla will combine all of the most popular happenings, places, and activities in a single page, courtesy of the network’s Highlights feature. City Pages will also include a map of local activity that shows where the most check-ins are taking place and includes the best spots that are highlighted by other users. Since Highlights launched, more than 10,000 Passport Holders have added 30,000 Highlights worldwide. So for example, the Austin city page will list the top food destinations, the best live music, the most popular places (according to check-ins) and more categories of destinations. The second feature rollout allows businesses and venues to verify and claim their locations on Gowalla, add contact information, location details and more. Verified locations can also customize the messages that appear when people visit their location with Gowalla. Eventually, businesses will be able to add deals and other contextual information to their verified page. Lastly, any verified business or venue in New York, San Francisco or Austin can now purchase custom Passport Stamps that users can earn for check-ins, that will also include a featured listing on Gowalla, similar to an advertisement. Featured listings will include a prominent placement on Verified Business Pages and within the Gowalla mobile applications on iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Gowalla has included this feature for some time, but has been implementing this on a case-by-case basis. Now these custom badges are part of a self-serve platform. While these custom badges previously sold for a few thousand dollars a piece for businesses, Gowalla is will begin charging verified businesses $5 per day for custom badges (the price will go up by $5 as a business publishes more unique badges within a month, says founder and CEO Josh Williams). Eventually this feature will be rolled out to other cities. Via a “Stamp Calendar,” businesses can reserve certain times for their custom badges to be promoted. It’s clear that with City Pages and Business Listings, Gowalla is turning its platform into more of an information destination for locales, as opposed to simply a check-in focused social network. As Williams tells me, “Check-ins are one form of looking at the location but we are exploring ways to move beyond the check-in.” He says that in the near future, Gowalla’s mobile clients will be updated with “significant” new features. But business listings and badges could also represent another move by the network beyond just check-ins: revenue. The self-serve platform that allows businesses to identify their page could be complimented by coupons, deals, and even advertising. And the customized badges could also bring in a steady revenue once Gowalla ramps up the feature across the country.
       
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| The Perfect Content Companion For iPad + Instapaper, Longreads Gets A Website Posted: 26 Oct 2010 04:00 AM PDT
I’ve been in love with the simple bookmarking service Instapaper for a few years now. The release of the iPad has made it even better. You see, my daily routine now involves using the Instapaper app on the iPad to read all of the longer articles I don’t get to while sitting at my desk. But quite often, it’s hard to find longer articles. That’s where Longreads comes in. As a service on Twitter, Longreads has actually existed since April 2009. Over 7,000 people follow the account to get between three to five long article recommendations a day from various publications around the web. And today, the man behind the project, Mark Armstrong, is finally launching a website for Longreads. The idea, he says, is to create a sort of “Techmeme for long stories”. But it’s also broader than that, Armstrong says. “The Longreads community is growing as people continue to look for material that’s perfect for their iPhone, Kindle and iPad. And these devices are changing the way people write for the web — it’s no longer just about short, snackable blog posts consumed at work when the boss isn’t looking; it’s also now about immersive, in-depth storytelling for people to enjoy during commutes, airplane flights and while sitting on the couch at home,” he says. So what kind of articles appear on Longreads? Posts longer than 1,500 words, but shorter than 30,000 words. What’s nice is that Armstrong also breaks these down into approximately how long it will take an average person to read them. For example, a 4,000-word post may take 16 minutes. That’s perfect if you know you have about 15-minutes to kill. The main purpose of longreads.com is to serve as an aggregator and archive for the service. Notably, it has a nice big search box that lets you search for long articles by topic or source. And you can filter articles based on what length you’re looking for. Armstrong notes that he hopes Longreads will also help publishers better organize their longer content in a way that readers are going to demand going forward. And he’s clearly not the only one that thinks this type of demand is there. Amazon just announced their “Kindle Singles” — electronic content between the size of short articles and long books, between 10,000 and 30,000 words.
       
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| Photobucket Appoints CEO, Claims Users Upload Four Million Images Per Day Posted: 26 Oct 2010 04:00 AM PDT
It’s been over a year since we’ve last written about Photobucket, when the former News Corp. / MySpace property merged with Ontela. Apparently, the Photobucket that came out of the merger didn’t technically have a chief executive at the helm, although CFO Tom Munro served as acting President. The company this morning announced that Munro has now been officially appointed CEO after an executive search was initiated by Steamboat Ventures, the Disney-affiliated venture capital firm backing Photobucket. Prior to Photobucket and Ontela, Munro was CFO of Vallent, a $70 million software company that was acquired by IBM in 2007. Before Vallent, he served as CFO of Quotesmith.com during their initial public offering. Photobucket isn’t exactly the first site that springs to mind (not to mine, at least) when it comes to sharing photos and videos online, but the company claims it’s still one of the leaders in this space. The company claims over 100 million registered members upload over four million images and videos per day via the Web and their smartphones or connected digital cameras. Earlier this month, Photobucket announced that it has inked a deal with T-Mobile USA to incorporate automatic photo and video upload functionality in the pre-installed Photobucket Mobile Application on the T-Mobile G2.        
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| Cloudera Lands $25 Million For Hadoop Distribution To The Enterprise Posted: 26 Oct 2010 03:15 AM PDT
Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google's published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop, and provides practical services around the technology, similar to what Red Hat does for the Linux framework. Cloudera has steadily launched a number of applications around its technology including Cloudera Enterprise, which includes authorization management and provisioning, integration configuration and monitoring and resource management. Via Cloudera, Hadoop is currently used by most of the giants in the space including Google, Yahoo, Facebook (we wrote about Facebook’s use of Cloudera here), Amazon, AOL, Baidu and more. The company’s founder, Christophe Bisciglia, left Cloudera earlier this year. The new funding will be used to for further product development and services to promote the adoption of Hadoop. In February of this year, Cloudera’s CEO Mike Olson told GigaOm that the company could have the legs for an IPO down the line. It should be interesting to see if the company can make a solid business out of commercializing an open source framework, or if a bigger technology company makes Cloudera a better offer for an exit.        
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| Is That A WiFi Hotspot I See? WorkSnug To Add Skype Access Listings Posted: 26 Oct 2010 03:04 AM PDT  In what looks like a very good fit, location-based service WorkSnug is partnering with Skype to help mobile workers locate Skype Access-supported WiFi locations in coffee shops using its augmented reality app for iPhone. Skype Access lets users pay for WiFi on a per-minute basis using their Skype credentials and credit at 200,000 hotspots, provided by the likes of BT Openzone, Boingo, and Barnes & Noble. While WorkSnug's iPhone app and service helps mobile workers locate potential working spaces – coffee shops, libraries, formal co-working spaces etc. – and provides ratings on such things as Internet connectivity, "community feel", power sockets, and, more to the point, the quality of coffee. 
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| Goodbye, MacBook Pro. The New MacBook Air Is That Good. Posted: 26 Oct 2010 01:41 AM PDT
Last Wednesday, I got my hands on one of the new MacBook Airs. I haven’t touched my MacBook Pro since. It’s six months old. RIP. I know that sounds outrageous. Or like hyperbole. But it’s not. When I wrote up my initial thoughts, it was after only a few hours of usage. I hadn’t even used it outside the house yet. But now I have. I’ve used it almost everywhere I’ve been for just about a week now. There’s no question in my mind that this has replaced my MacBook Pro as my go-to machine. But here’s the really crazy thing. It’s not just the size of the thing that I love so much (I have the 13-inch model) — which is amazing — it’s the speed. This thing boots up in less than 15 seconds, ready to go. My i7 iMac with 8 GB of RAM takes something like 2 minutes. My i7 MacBook Pro takes at least 30-45 seconds, and it has an SSD drive. Applications seem to load quicker. Files transfer quicker. The thing shuts down in about 3 seconds. Macworld has the initial benchmarks. They don’t lie. It just screams. And by speed, I also mean “power”. Remarkably, for the first time that I’ve used one, this MacBook Air doesn’t feel underpowered. At all. Again, for the past 6 months I’ve been using a combination of an i7 iMac and an i7 MacBook Pro. Judging from processor, clock speed, and amount of RAM, both should be significantly faster than this Air. For certain tasks, they undoubtedly are. But for pretty much everything I’ve done this past week — basically, my regular work and play habits — I really can’t say I notice a difference. This definitely surprised me. Again, Macworld’s initial benchmark numbers seem to at least partially back up such a crazy claim. I have the baseline 13-inch MacBook Air with a 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, and a 128 GB flash storage hard drive. Their tests have this thing performing better than the 13-inch MacBook Pro with a faster Core 2 Duo processor and double the RAM. And it’s not that far off from the i5 Pro model.
They largely credit the flash storage hard drive. And that’s undoubtedly a huge part of the performance. But another part is likely that previous MacBook Airs have run underclocked to deal with heat issues. That doesn’t appear to be happening with these models. So they can purr along at full speed. And it shows. Earlier tonight, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber wrote a post wondering where this new Air fits into Apple’s MacBook lineup? It is a good question considering the base model is the same $999 price as the base MacBook model. He thinks it might fit in as a secondary computer. I agree — for now. There is one thing holding back the Air: storage space. Thanks largely to Apple themselves, we live in a world where we have digital music, photos, movies, and TV shows that take up dozens, if not hundreds of gigabytes of storage. Because of this, a 128 GB hard drive isn’t enough for many people these days if they’re going to be using the Air as their primary machine. Increasingly, even 256 GB isn’t enough. Hell, I’m nearing 1 TB of media on my iMac. But. We all know that Apple has aspirations to move all of this media to the cloud. If they can do that and cut the chains around these machines, they’re going to fly. Off the shelves. In a hurry. Here’s how I see it: if storage didn’t matter, I think this 13-inch MacBook Air would almost immediately be Apple’s best-selling Mac. It’s that good. I can’t speak to the 11-inch model, as I haven’t used it, but it’s getting rave reviews as well. The 13-inch model I’m talking about here is the base model which is $1,299. The 11-inch models start at $999. It’s funny that I haven’t really even talked about the size of the machine yet — that’s the glittering lure that ropes people in. But the Air has always had that. What it didn’t have previously was a great price and killer performance. Now it does. Just in the past six days, five people that I’ve showed this thing to have already bought one. That’s the stuff iPhones and iPads are made of. It has the “wow” factor.
And regardless of if storage capabilities hold it back or not, I have no doubt that the Air does point to the future of the MacBook lineup. They’re soon all going to lose their optical drives, gain flash storage drives, and work for hours on end. In fact, the only machine I can think of that I might enjoy more than this one is one that lasts even longer. To get that, I’d accept a model that’s slightly larger (15-inches), slightly heavier (maybe 3.3 pounds), but had 10 hours of battery life. That’s the future MacBook Pro right there. Speaking of battery life, again, this thing shines pretty nicely in that category as well. Apple says it will get 7-hours, and based on my usage, that’s close. I’m usually seeing between 5 and 6 hours depending on what I’m doing and screen brightness. A couple times I have gotten about 7 hours. As for the supposed 30 days of standby time? It’s hard to imagine me not using this thing for 30 days at a time, but I will say that I’ve gone to bed with it at 50 percent power and woken up several hours later with it at 49 percent power. And yes, the thing wakes up from sleep instantaneously. The only thing you have to wait for is for your WiFi to connect. As for the screen? Again, I thought it would be an issue switching from a 15-inch MacBook Pro to this, but it’s really not. This thing has the same 1440-by-900 resolution as the standard 15-inch MacBook Pro screen, so, there you go. People also can’t seem to believe when I tell them it doesn’t run hot. But it doesn’t. The only times I’ve felt it getting a little bit warm is when I’ve run — surprise, surprise — multiple Flash movies. But the heat doesn’t come close to my MacBook Pro. That that doesn’t come close to my old MacBook Pro which was an upside down stove at points. It’s hard to know what else to say. This is the computer I’ve been waiting for. It makes me feel foolish for spending almost three grand on a brand new souped-up MacBook Pro six months ago. I just can’t think of a time I’ll ever want to or need to turn it on again. Goodbye, MacBook Pro. Your candle burned out long before your hard drive ever did.
       
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| Pelican Imaging Snaps Up $10 Million In Series B Funding Posted: 26 Oct 2010 01:40 AM PDT
Previous investors Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners and IQT, also joined this round. All told, Pelican has now raised north of $17 million in the last two years, after a $7 million Series A round in August 2009 and a strategic investment from IQT in July 2010 (for an undisclosed amount). According to Pelican Imaging, it specializes in “computational cameras.” In layman’s terms, the startup has been working on hardware and software technology to help smartphone cameras effectively balance compact design and the need for high resolution images. Its suite of solutions (which includes patent-pending algorithms and specialized sensors) apparently addresses issues like “low-light sensitivity, dynamic range, white balance, anti-shake, near focus, and low-power photography,” the company says on its site. "Pelican Imaging's computational camera addresses the key pain points associated with conventional camera phones – the height of the camera module, poor image quality and a limited user-experience – targeting a rapidly growing market that currently exceeds $4 billion," Globespan’s co-founder and executive managing director Barry Schiffman said in a statement. With this latest round, Schiffman will also join Pelican’s board of directors.        
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| Forget Realtime, Sequoia-Funded Taykey Shoots For Pre-Time Posted: 26 Oct 2010 01:30 AM PDT
One route was to comb the earth for mutated humans and exploit their gift, but Taykey took the other route – algorithms. Watch out, Agatha. Taykey spent the first two years of its life developing algorithms that crunch extraordinary amounts of user-stream data, to determine trends, before they happen. The company is founded by Israeli intelligence corps graduates so rest assured that there’s true trending analysis and prediction technology inside. Also, Sequoia’s investment implies to me a diligence process that looked beyond vaporware and buzzwords and found real IP instead. Before Taykey starts analyzing and predicting, it must first collect user-generated-data from across the web. It does this by monitoring real-time stream sources like Twitter’s and MySpace’s data hoses, diggs, items publicly posted, liked and shared on Facebook, location data through check-ins, what users are watching on YouTube, and Wikipedia updates. It also keeps tabs on what it deems to be ‘leading blogs,’ and news sources to see what’s new and what people are commenting about. All of this is fully automated and happens continuously, in realtime. At this point a ‘Privacy’ flag should be popping-up in your head. In this respect it’s important to note that Taykey neither ‘cookies’ users, nor does it save any personal data. It says it cares exclusively for the public data, with no significance as to which individual contributed what. Here’s how Taykey forecasts a trend before it actually happens: data such as videos being posted on YouTube, Likes and Tweets about something called ‘Susan Boyle,’ all flow into Taykey. Within a matter of minutes, their algorithms determine that there’s something new going on—an object—called ‘Susan Boyle”. Taykey then analyzes and employs mathematical matching history upon the volume, the destinations and the duration between each engagement with this new object. Doing so allows it to tell just how big this ‘Susan Boyle’ trend will become, which demographics are and will be engaging with it, and that it’s related, in this case, to music. And this is where the commercial side of things become really interesting. Taykey includes granularity for micro-trend forecasting. Let’s say you’re a fashion retailer and want to target 16 year olds. Taykey knows that right now this demographic is talking about Justin Bieber so it would place a first set of ads along side such mentions in order to create a psychological association. However, Taykey already knows that, in five hours, users in this very same demographic will be talking about Lady Gaga and it would then show a second set of ads next to Lady Gaga mentions. Think about this for a moment: Taykey basically claims to be aware of what the user will be talking about before the user does. Taykey’s reporting includes benchmarking, enabling advertisers to constantly quantify the lift it provides by running a trend-based ad vs. an “old-fashioned” demographics-based ad. From a business model stand point, Taykey is basically a Demand Side Platform (DSP). When it recognizes a trend, it goes out and buys the relevant audience for the relevant amount of time. It then charges advertisers a premium CPM to deliver the ads, and uses arbitrage to maximize its cut. All this talk about forecasting makes me wonder… Can Taykey forecast the future success of its own technology? Might want to call back Agatha for that.        
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| Digg Faces Accusations Of Gaming Itself Posted: 26 Oct 2010 12:44 AM PDT
The 159 dummy accounts, which were given pathetically anonymous names, seem to have contributed systematically to submissions from Digg publishing partners, including TechCrunch. The suspicious activity seems to have started after the algorithm revision of October 15th, after which time a number of submissions (though by no means all front-page stories) were blatantly promoted by these accounts.
Here’s the kicker; I was skeptical, or at least willing to forgo judgment, until I read this. This activity was monitored by Digg user LtGenPanda, who kept all this information completely private while he parleyed with Digg over a possible response. He emailed them the information at ~5:33PM CST. After receiving no official response (or rather, a stalling response, which was understandable but also understandably frustrating), LtGenPanda let the information go live at a little after 6:30PM CST. The last activity among the dummy accounts? 5:31PM CST. What does it mean? Well, whether Digg is indeed behind these unbelievably poorly hidden bots, or merely complacent with them (there’s no way they could have missed this in their analytics for over a week), it’s not going to be a good Tuesday. Following hot on the tail of layoffs and the disastrous redesign, this potential scandal could be yet another nail in Digg, or at least in the Digg I knew and loved, before I moved to Reddit. Perhaps there’s a perfectly good explanation for all this, but the evidence really is convincing. We’ll surely hear more about this before the morning, and will update accordingly. If you are interested in the methods or data used, LtGenPanda’s blog post has all that and more. It’s on Digg now after a notable absence.        
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| Lazy Hackers Unite: Firesheep Boasts +104,000 Downloads In 24 Hours Posted: 25 Oct 2010 09:49 PM PDT
In roughly 24 hours, Firesheep has been downloaded more than 104,000 times, as would-be-hackers — or the merely curious— downloaded the Firefox extension to test the exploit. As we reported on Sunday night, Eric Butler’s Firesheep allows users on a public Wi-Fi network to effectively spy on others, by giving Firesheep users access to sensitive information (via cookies) that lets them log into their victim’s accounts on unsecured sites. The Firesheep extension is wired to identify a few dozen popular sites that are vulnerable to attack on public networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and Yelp. On Monday night we got a chance to catch up with Butler, who has been pretty overwhelmed by the attention. Although he opened Pandora’s box expecting to spark controversy and discussion, he repeatedly asserts that his aim was fundamentally altruistic. Butler argues that this HTTP vulnerability was being exploited by moderately sophisticated hackers, and therefore, by making it dead simple to the average joe it would raise awareness and compel sites to raise the bar on security:
Butler says he will release a new blog post in the next few hours that will help users protect themselves— apparently, he says, since the launch there has been significant misinformation floating on the web. We will update this post when it goes live. In the meantime, if you’re curious to learn more about the extension (without actually downloading it) Butler recommends this YouTube video:
UPDATE: Butler’s latest blog post is live, click here. (Image: Flickr/nettsu)        
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| Damnit Amex, Give Me A Credit Card Posted: 25 Oct 2010 08:46 PM PDT
Tonight though the pitch was a little more interesting. Credit Karma, a startup we first covered late last year, now has more than 2 million members. Revenue is “8-10X higher than last year,” but without a hard number and my understanding that last year they had zero revenue makes that somewhat less impressive. But the service is really cool. I have recently been in credit card hell. Chase dropped my credit limit on my United card to absolutely nothing for no reason at all last year, and won’t increase it. I’ve also been declined by American Express, repeatedly, for a Starwood credit card. Yeah, I know. Boo hoo. But the point is I need a credit card for travel and to otherwise live my life. I’m too lazy to ever check my credit score, but Credit Karma made it easy enough even for me. I gave it just about all of my personal data and hit submit. Then, zap – I see that my credit score is 748, which is considered “excellent” and in the 78th percentile. “Given that you have a high credit score lenders should be able to conclude that you are capable of repaying your debts,” says Credit Karma, and I wholeheartedly agree. There’s more. I can also see a detailed report on how my credit score is calculated. Open Credit Card Utilization: 0%. That’s bad, and I get a “C” If I owned a bank, and I hadn’t yet embezzled all of my customers’ money and moved to Brazil, I’d definitely give me a credit card. All the bad stuff is that I’m not actually using credit, or have too few credit accounts, and don’t have any debt. I mean seriously Amex. Give me a damn credit card. Whatever you’re using to figure out who gets one is really broken. Update: Hilarious.
       
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| With OS X Lion, It’s No Longer Point & Click, It’s Flick & Swipe Posted: 25 Oct 2010 07:59 PM PDT
It feels like we’re on the verge of something — “feel” being the keyword. Personal computing has more or less been the same for a few decades now. It’s the mouse, the keyboard, the monitor, and the machine. With things like notebook computers, this has been altered a bit, but it’s the same basic idea. But with the rise of smartphones and now tablets, the whole concept is finally starting evolve. And it looks like OS X Lion will be a key to this transition. On stage last week during their Back to the Mac event, Apple gave a sneak peak at some of what they have in store for the next version of OS X. Of note, CEO Steve Jobs made it very clear that it has been born out of the concept of “OS X meets iPad”. In other words, OS X meets iOS, Apple’s touch-based operating system. Jobs also made it clear that Apple wouldn’t be creating touchscreen Macs anytime soon. Noting that these concepts “give great demo”, he also said that extensive testing over the years have proven that touching a vertical screen just isn’t ergonomically sound. Instead, Apple has committed itself to developing products that will allow them to use touch elements on the screen, without actually touching it. In their MacBooks, the multi-touch trackpads are built-in. For their desktops, the Magic Mouse and the Magic Trackpad were created to bring multi-touch to all Mac users. Obviously, neither of those products was an accident. As we’ve noted before, Apple is ushering in an era of touch, and each of these things are key for such a transition. Now, with the features in OS X Lion, we’re going to see touch concepts fully baked into the traditional operating system for the first time. Sure, Apple has included certain multi-touch options in OS X for some time now; first for MacBook users with multi-touch trackpads, then for Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad users. But all of these are basically tacked-on shortcuts of sorts for stuff you normally do with mouse clicks. Some of these newer OS X Lion features appear to be fully thought-out with multi-touch in mind.
As Apple VP of OS X, Craig Federighi, demoed on stage last week, to navigate new features such as full-screen apps and Mission Control, it’s no longer point & click, it’s flick and swipe. It’s a two finger flick to the left or right to travel between full-screen apps — and back to your desktop. Interestingly, it’s also now a two finger flick to the left from your desktop to get access to your desktop widgets (it would appear that they’re no longer overlaid on your actual desktop). To enter Mission Control, it’s a three finger swipe down. To get a preview of many open windows in Mission Control, it’s a two finger swipe up. Yes, pointing and clicking can still be involved for some of this, but it seems that it’s more of the fallback now. Undoubtedly, there will be keyboard shortcuts as well, but again, as a fallback/power user option. And I can’t help but wonder if the trackpad “Tap to Click” option will become the norm one day in the not too distant future. And as you may have noticed during his demo, Federighi had trouble a few times launching into Mission Control on the Magic Mouse. Part of that was because he was nervous, but part of that is also because while multi-touch is a nice feature on that device, the surface isn’t big enough for more advanced gestures. But the Magic Trackpad (and MacBook trackpad) is perfect for those. Remember that there are now more Mac laptop users than Mac desktop users. This trackpad multi-touch manipulation is the future. Given the little we know about OS X Lion so far, I’m already much more excited about it than I was for OS X Snow Leopard. To me, it seems clear that Apple is going to use this new OS to begin the transition to the golden age of touch computing. I can’t wait.
       
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| WITN: “I Don’t Care what a Rich Person in Camden, Maine Says” Posted: 25 Oct 2010 06:22 PM PDT
Which is great because while he was outside the Valley he was eligible to be a guest on Why Is This News. In this week’s episode, then, he talks about his highlights of the conference and elaborates on his comparison between it and TED. Meanwhile Sarah finds herself in the unusual position of being the one defending TED. Video below.        
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| Blue Water Satellite’s Data Diving: A Very 21st-Century Industry Posted: 25 Oct 2010 06:00 PM PDT
At Disrupt we saw an impressive toolset for social data provided by DataSift. Those guys surely have a rosy future if only because they’re getting in early to the web data-diving game. Similarly, Blue Water Satellite (BWS) has a very specific mission at the moment, but the way they’re branching out, they hope to be a leader in the growing business of satellite and environmental data analysis. Providing a unique and powerful way to visualize or interpret a huge amount of data is turning into quite the business model. The core concept at BWS is detection of cyanobacteria. It’s a microorganism found all over the world, and which can be dangerous above certain (disputed) concentrations. A pigment found in these creatures, phycocyanin, makes them susceptible to satellite surveillance, but only with the right tools. Traditionally, it’s tested by actual boats dipping into test waters and sending the actual water to an actual lab — a time-consuming process BWS estimates to cost around $300 per data point (that is, per dip), which limits the amount of testing that resource management organizations (think parks departments, the EPA, farmers, industrialists) can or are willing to do. A large lake or series of lakes in a state park might need several launches and a hundred data points several times a year, the costs of which add up for cash-strapped services and nonprofits. With the aim of improving the entire water monitoring industry (and others), BWS researchers spent two years doing the traditional method, so they could compare it with their own, newer method: by performing a complicated and patented algorithm to raw Landsat imaging data (including, but not exclusive to, visible spectrum), BWS is able to detect cyanobacteria with far greater precision, speed, and range than traditional boat-based methods. It’s a bit like they made a way to Google your lake for the stuff. It’s also far cheaper: around $0.40 per data point, by their estimate. With that kind of improvement, it seems like only a matter of time before this method is the de facto standard.
I spoke with Milt Baker, Blue Water Satellite’s CEO, about the possibilities and limitations of their business. Coming off reading a number of articles about water scarcity, I asked whether this type of technology was applicable to monitoring municipal watersheds, industrial waste, and so on — things that could be applied internationally to improve the treatment and availability of potable water. Milt said that because the Landsat data is global, and their job is to perform analysis on it, there’s really no geographic limitation to their work. He noted that a lot of governments are under pressure to comply with increasingly stringent water standards, and waste and global warming are causing cyanobacteria and other dangerous elements to spike; the old methods of testing aren’t effective enough. China, for instance, is approaching a water crisis due to the rapid expansion and ineffective regulation of industrial plants, and chances are they’d see a cost-effective method of outsourcing water testing like this tempting. The scale of the job, too, isn’t an obstacle. He described a job where they had surveyed a 730,000-acre watershed for around 2% of the $500,000 the governing organization had estimated it would cost. That level of savings could be a lifesaver for strapped governments that need to perform due diligence on their water supply, but can’t spare $50 million in yearly operational fees. The amount of data provided by Landsat (at 16-day increments, going back to the 80s) and in turn, the amount of data BWS can provide to its clients, is formidable. Milt compared this change to the change that occurred when ocean temperature mapping went from ship-based to satellite-based. The amount of information provided, the cost of that information, and the ease of accessibility made for a revolution in environmental science, and Milt hopes something similar will occur with the monitoring of accessible water. BWS is already capable of detecting phosphorus concentration in land, a useful statistic for agribusiness, and there is R&D going towards detection of animal herds, oil fields, and all the rest of the information hidden in the vasty depths of satellite imagery. As I said earlier, I find this to be at once a very old and a very new industry. The art of meta-analysis and consulting has been around since the first shamans and chiefs, who used their experience to condense and organize knowledge based on their superior and seasoned understanding. And throughout history it has been incumbent on scholarly authorities to do the kind of obscure analysis that either yields great insights or confirms there were none to be had. Think tanks have lately put powerful minds to work for private money. Now, the volume and variety of information being produced is so immense that it has become a business model to simply specialize in the extraction of a very specific kind of knowledge from that information. Imagine if Facebook were to make a year’s worth of data on their users available to psychologists, sociologists, and epidemiologists — they would all find different values and trends, all find different ways of making the same set of numbers and characters useful to others. Raw information is becoming like a natural resource, but one which cannot be depleted, or even reached exactly, but rather must be looked at from different angles, with different lenses. Blue Water Satellite has one very specific lens through which we can view the increasing concentrations of toxic bacteria in our waters due to global warming and other factors. Google might take the same data and put our water sources in context with human infrastructure and cross-correlate population growth, political trends, and traffic data. Connecting the dots has become a major industry, and the more dots there are, the more there is to connect between them. Hopefully more businesses like BWS will appear and thrive, directed towards increased awareness and knowledge of our planet and social system, and less directed at (as is the current trend) vanity and convenience. More information can be found at Blue Water Satellite’s website, where you can learn more about cyanobacteria, BWS’s methods, and view a sample report.        
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| Ask a VC: The Southeast Asian Edition Posted: 25 Oct 2010 05:26 PM PDT
First up is James Chan of Neotany Labs– best known as Joi Ito’s fund. Neotany is a $5 million Asian VC fund, and while Ito is based in Dubai, the futuristic hub of the Middle East, Chan is based in Singapore, the futuristic hub of Southeast Asia. Chan is showing me “his Singapore” this afternoon, and I’ll be asking your questions about Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, China– whatever you want to know. But ask quickly! My driving tour is in a few hours. If you miss the deadline for Chan, send your question anyway. Later in the week my victim will be the partners of East Ventures, who I mentioned here as one of the only early stage firms I’ve been able to find that invests in Web startups in Jakarta. Anyone wondering about the mysteries of Indonesians crashing your servers or wondering how tiny, natural resource-less Singapore has become one of Asia’s fastest growing economies, now is your time to ask the experts. As always email questions to askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com.        
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| AppMakr Raises $1 Million To Help You Build Custom iPhone Apps Posted: 25 Oct 2010 05:18 PM PDT
We’ve written about AppMakr a few times in the past — the startup launched in early 2010, allowing users to put together an iPhone application with a surprisingly small amount of work involved. COO Daniel Odio says that applications built using AppMakr now represent around 1% of the apps on the App Store — or around 3,000 applications. Earlier this year, AppMakr and the rest of the services in this space faced a new obstacle: Apple itself. As the huge number of submissions to the App Store continued to grow, Steve Jobs and company decided to start cracking down on so-called ‘Cookie Cutter’ applications that were excessively generic and didn’t offer much more than a glorified RSS reader. AppMakr dealt with this by establishing an “App Quality Index”. When you build your application, AppMakr will analyze the likelihood that it will be rejected by the App Store review team based on the thousands of AppMakr apps that have been submitted in the past (it analyzes things like the number of tab options your app has and how much content they include). If the likelihood of being accepted is too low, AppMakr will tell you to improve the app before you can submit it to Apple. Odio says this has been a collaborative process with Apple, and that it’s worked well so far. One reason why AppMakr has gained such a following is its price tag: it’s free. When it launched in January it had a flat fee-based model, but the company has now gone fremium, where you can build basic applications free of charge with a variety of premium upgrades available. These premium upgrades include push notifications and the ability to convert your Ning Community into an iPhone app, and there are more features in the pipeline. AppMakr is actually part of PointAbout, a consulting firm that builds custom iPhone apps for major brands like Disney. PointAbout has around 28 employees in total, but the majority of them work in the consulting arm — the AppMakr team is around eight people. Another popular startup in this space is Mobile Roadie. One other thing to note: Odio says that the VentureHacks AngelList played a very helpful role in AppMakr’s fund-raising process. He conducted the interview below with AngelList founder Naval Ravikant:        
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| Tech World Welcomes Digg Refugees With Open Arms Posted: 25 Oct 2010 05:00 PM PDT
This morning most of us woke up to the disappointing news that social news site Digg, once a promising destination for Silicon Valley talent, was losing 37% of its staff as well experiencing key executive departures. While the usual armchair Twitter quarterbacks responded to the what the layoffs mean for the ailing site, another more positive trend was also evidenced; People making it clear that the kind of top tier engineering talent that worked for Digg was welcome at a spectrum of high profile startups and full fledged techcompanies. As I’m hearing that the talent pool of experienced engineers in the Bay Area is currently in short supply, this layoff might be a boon for local startups looking to add skilled staff. Some of the companies that have already expressed interest in hiring include Twitter (above), Groupon, GDGT, O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, IGN, Styleseat, various First Round Capital portfolio companies and AT&T Interactive. It looks like SimpleGeo founder and former Digg Lead Architect Joe Stump is curating the tweets and offering support and introductions help to the 25 people laid off. If you hear of anyone else who is tweeting about hiring, please link to them in the comments.
       
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| Ford Earmarks An Additional $850 Million To Build Fuel Efficient Cars Posted: 25 Oct 2010 04:43 PM PDT
On Monday afternoon, the Dearborn, Michigan based company announced that it will invest another $850 million into the development of more fuel efficient cars and technology. That cash, which is earmarked for 2011 to 2013, is still contingent on whether the Michigan Economic Development Council approves a robust package of incentives (due for consideration later this week). According to reports— if the package gets the greenlight— Ford will benefit from roughly $400 million in state incentives. Upon passage, Ford plans to create as many as 1,200 jobs across the state concentrating that growth in several key plants, including Van Dyke Transmission, Livonia Transmission, Sterling Axle and its Dearborn Truck Plant. Overall, the goal is to renovate facilities, beef up the workforce and invest in technology that will lead to the production of more fuel efficient cars. In its statement, the automaker says a significant portion of this investment will go towards the production of six-speed transmissions, with the hope that in three years Ford’s entire fleet will feature the new technology. The company has been trying to make the six-speed transmission more standard, recently making it available in its entire line of full-size pickup trucks. While many cars on the road feature four-speed automatic transmissions, the six-speed is superior when it comes to fuel economy because the extra overdrive gears keeps the engine speed low. For those keeping score, the $850 million investment is in addition to the $950 million Ford has already committed for the overhaul of its Wayne, Michigan Assembly Plant, which will be tasked with churning out many of the company’s electric and hybrid models in 2012. Although Ford’s road to recovery has been far from easy (and there’s still a way to go with consumer remaining fragile), it’s fared better than its domestic peers. Just last week, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu singled out Ford for recently passing Toyota's rating in initial owner defects and its growing traction among consumers (citing a NYTimes article). The automaker, which reports on Tuesday, is expected to showcase encouraging numbers with analysts looking for record (yes, record) third quarter profits of $1.37 billion (versus $997 million for the year ago period). Another quarter in the black will mean a string of six profitable quarters for Ford.        
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There are a vast amount of product comparison sites on the web and a number of social shopping sites that allow online shoppers use their social graph to share purchasing decisions. Today video search engine 
First, call me a negative Nancy but the rumors that Apple could buy Sony – Lord knows Sony needs some better management – are false. This sort of thing seems more like a solo Steve Jobs move than a move by Apple proper. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at where all this speculation comes from.
What makes 
The darkest fears of every Digger (or, as is increasingly common, former Digger) may be coming true: some very compelling data mining by a concerned user has 
Well, that was fast.
Just about every evening investor 
As he explains 
At first glance, 
With car sales starting to inch higher and the threat of bankruptcy only faintly visible in the rear-view mirror, | You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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