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The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Google Apps Marketplace Gets An Education Category
- Tinychat Raises $1.5M From Kutcher, Diddy And Others, Is Just Getting Started
- Notion Ink Adam Tablet User Meta-Review
- Twitter Is Blocked In Egypt Amidst Rising Protests
- MyPublisher Acquires Digital Scrapbooking Startup How Fast Time Flies
- India’s Largest Online Couponing Site, SnapDeal, Raises $12 Million (TCTV)
- Digital Comic Startup Graphic.ly Draws Up $3 Million To Take 2011 “Beyond The Page”
- Travel Planning Startup NileGuide Acquires Local Recommendation Site 10Best
- mySpoonful Is Like A DailyCandy For Indie Music
- Solar Universe Raises $7 Million To Franchise Solar Installation
- Fanboy Email Newsletter GeekChicDaily Raises $1.5 Million
- AWS Launches Simple, Bulk Email Service Amazon SES
- Celtra Raises $5 Million For Rich Media Mobile Ad Technology
- Orange Acquires 49% Of DailyMotion For €59 Million, The Rest To Follow
- Eric Schmidt At DLD11: Google Will Add 1,000 New Employees In Europe
- DLD11: James Murdoch On The Daily, Paywalls, Google And Apple
- Google To Acquire fflick For $10 Million
- Apple Aims To Take NFC Mainstream; Perhaps The Greatest Trick They’ve Ever Pulled?
- The Crunchies: Video Highlights (TCTV)
- SafetyWeb Acquires iHound And myID, Pushes People-Centric Security Solution
- HighNote Is Group Messaging With A Multimedia Twist
- WITN: No, New York Media, It Isn’t 1999 All Over Again (Thanks For Asking)
- What Is Quora’s Biggest Challenge?
- I Feel Like A Kid Again With HeyTell, The Social Walkie-Talkie App With 3 Million Users
- Weekend at Myspace: And Other Upcoming Silicon Valley Movies
| Google Apps Marketplace Gets An Education Category Posted: 25 Jan 2011 08:59 AM PST
Aimed for Google’s 10 million Google Apps for Education users, the category offers over 20 applications from 19 vendors including specialized apps for schools and universities such as social learning game Grockit, grading software LearnBoost, math teaching tool DreamBox, design apps Aviary and more. While the addition of a new segment into the Apps Marketplace isn’t monumental, it does represent a strategy that Google is working towards with the marketplace. As we wrote in our review of the marketplace last Fall, developers found the marketplace to have a lot of noise and tough to differentiate for end users. Clearly, offering highly categorized apps helps users sort through this noise.        
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| Tinychat Raises $1.5M From Kutcher, Diddy And Others, Is Just Getting Started Posted: 25 Jan 2011 08:50 AM PST
Fast-growing video communication and messaging platform provider Tinychat, which started out with disposable chat rooms back in early 2009, has just raised $1.5 million in funding, TechCrunch has learned. The startup has confirmed the financing round, a convertible note, which included capital injections from angel investor Naval Ravikant and A-Grade, the investment vehicle of Madonna manager Guy Oseary, actor Ashton Kutcher and billionaire Ron Burkle). As if that wasn’t enough, Sean Combs (yes, Diddy) also put up some cash, as did other undisclosed individual investors, some of them also famous artists. For Tinychat, this is strategic money, helping the fledgling company get inroads with the Hollywood crowd that could potentially drive much of its further growth. Tinychat co-founder Dan Blake wasn’t too keen on sharing more details about the funding, but did acknowledge that they’ve raised money to scale operations. The startup is in the process of moving its employees, about 10 people give or take, to a bigger office in New York. Blake did share some interesting stats, highlighting the company’s staggering growth. According to Blake, Tinychat currently peaks at around 35,000 concurrent users per second, as many as there are new users signing up every day. The site gets visited about 20 million times per month, and there are 100+ servers keeping the system afloat today. I’m told the company is closing in on an even larger financing round at a hefty valuation, so keep watching this space for more information.        
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| Notion Ink Adam Tablet User Meta-Review Posted: 25 Jan 2011 08:07 AM PST
Notion Ink’s first tablet started shipping last week and is slowly making its way to anxious owners. Notion Ink curiously curated a crazed following of fans with nothing more than constant blogging from the CEO coupled with swanky user interface screenshots. The company managed to sell out of its first round of pre-orders without even showing a picture of the final product. The first live demo hit days after sales started. Well, those who bought-up the first batch are just getting their tablet now receiving their units and posting their impressions to fan sites and forums. Spoiler: It’s mostly bad news bears.        
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| Twitter Is Blocked In Egypt Amidst Rising Protests Posted: 25 Jan 2011 07:41 AM PST
Inspired by the recent Tunisian demonstrations against corruption, protesters are filling the streets of Cairo. And like the protests in Tunisia, the Egyptian ones were partly organized on Facebook and Twitter. And now Twitter appears to be blocked in Egypt, according to various Tweets and tips we’ve received. However, so far only the Twitter website itself is blocked (including the mobile site), but people in Cairo are still using Twitter third-party clients to keep on Tweeting. There are also reports of the entire mobile Web being blocked through mobile carriers, but at least one carrier, Vodafone Egypt, denies that it is blocking Twitter, attributing the problem to overloaded networks instead. Update: one tipster says Twitter apps are blocked as well and that the only way to Tweet is by using Web proxies. Update 2: Asked to confirm that Twitter is blocked in Egypt, Google PR points to this Herdict Report, which indicates that it is in fact inaccessible in that country. Facebook is also being used to organize the demonstrations, with groups also popping up around the world to document the uprising and lend its support. For instance, one Facebook Group called We Are All Khaled Said, features up-to-the-minute updates on the protests and photos from the scene. Khaled Said was “a young man brutally tortured and killed by police in Alexandria,” explains Blake Hounshell on the Foreign Policy blog, and his death has become a rallying point for the demonstrations which fall on “Police Day,” a national holiday in Egypt. Update: The Facebook Group is reporting that the police are firing at the protestors with rubber bullets. Increasingly, social media is playing an important role in organizing and broadcasting protests against governments around the world. Unlike television or newspapers, Twitter and Facebook are not so easy to control other than blocking them entirely because of their distributed nature. By the time a regime realizes its only option is to block a service like Twitter, the protests are usually already well under way. And reports keep coming out via these channels anyway, making them the most immediate way to watch the protests (and sometimes subsequent uprisings) unfold. The reports may not always be accurate right away (confusing rubber bullets for “live ammunition,” for instance, but they tend to self-correct quickly. Photo via Facebook  @ircpresidentMohamed ElGohary TWITTER IS BLOCKED IN EGYPT #Jan25  @NasmaBarNasma B The voice of revolution will still be heard. Blocking twitter will not affect a thing. #jan25 #egypt #justsayin  @MideastYouthWe're working hard to get new info out of Egypt. Twitter is blocked all over Egypt, connection very slow, internet on mobiles blocked.  @VodafoneEgyptVodafone Egypt We didn't block twitter – it's a problem all over Egypt and we are waiting for a solution.
       
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| MyPublisher Acquires Digital Scrapbooking Startup How Fast Time Flies Posted: 25 Jan 2011 07:16 AM PST
MyPublisher, which specializes in photography-focused personalized printed products, has acquired How Fast Time Flies, a digital scrapbooking startup. Founded in 2007 by Cathy Bennett, How Fast Time Flies lets people print individual 12 by 12 inch pages using its proprietary digi-scrapbook application. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Bennett will be joining MyPublisher full-time. Carl Navarre, founder and CEO of MyPublisher, said How Fast Time Flies is a “perfect fit” for his company, which has been around since 1995:
       
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| India’s Largest Online Couponing Site, SnapDeal, Raises $12 Million (TCTV) Posted: 25 Jan 2011 06:41 AM PST
Local ecommerce company Groupon recently acquired a small online couponing startup in India called SoSasta (which I’m told means ‘very cheap’). But the real leader in India’s digital coupon space is actually SnapDeal, which currently boasts over 1 million subscribers and has roughly 70 percent market share. I caught up with Kunal Bahl, CEO of SnapDeal’s parent company Jaspers, at the DLD Conference in Germany to learn more about the business. Turns out the company just closed a $12 million investment round, led by Nexus Venture Partners and IndoUS Venture Partners. Now at roughly 300 employees, SnapDeal started out back in 2008 and will now use the funding to more rapidly scale its operations. It’s already live in 50 cities across the country, and boasts about 50,000 retailers in its database today.        
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| Digital Comic Startup Graphic.ly Draws Up $3 Million To Take 2011 “Beyond The Page” Posted: 25 Jan 2011 06:00 AM PST
It was a year ago that the startup, which was originally a part of the 2009 TechStars class in Boulder, CO (though it was then known as Take Comics), raised an initial round of funding, $1.2 million from a group of investors. Today, they’re announcing that they’re going back to the well and drawing up another $3 million. So what will the money go towards? Well, having tackled the concept of an online comic haven in 2010 — more than 600,000 copies of Graphic.ly’s various applications have been downloaded in just 5 months — 2011 will bring an extension of broader ideas behind the company. This means evolving Graphic.ly into more than an online digital comic store, CEO Micah Baldwin says. He notes that it’s about mixing the artwork and story lines with the interactivity and social aspects that the web can provide. The startup currently has relationships with over 150 publishers and comic creators. That includes big guys like Marvel and Archie Comics. More partnerships is undoubtedly a part of the plan, as is probably acquiring more properties like iFanboy, to extend their reach and hardcore user base. This Series A round was led by DFJ Mercury, and participated in by 500 Startups, Dundee VC, Ludlow Ventures, and a bunch of angels.        
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| Travel Planning Startup NileGuide Acquires Local Recommendation Site 10Best Posted: 25 Jan 2011 06:00 AM PST
10Best.com is an online travel guide that provides recommendations on the the most popular attractions, hotels, restaurants, events and more in cities around the world. 10Best Travel Guides cover 457 major metropolitan areas (comprised of 3,748 cities around the globe). For NileGuide, 10Best is another way for the travel site to become the go-to guide for all local travel planning (meaning where to stay, eat, visit etc.). The startup also recently acquired local travel site Localyte to add local expert advice to its platform. Founded in 2006 and based in San Francisco, NileGuide has received $13 million in funding from investors including Draper Richards, KPG Ventures, Austin Ventures, and Tenaya Capital.        
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| mySpoonful Is Like A DailyCandy For Indie Music Posted: 25 Jan 2011 05:52 AM PST
mySpoonful is a curated website and email newsletter geared towards indie music fans who are too busy to spend hours trudging through more extensive sites like Pitchfork and Stereogum. Says founder and ex-Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen, “There’s a lot of newspapers and blogs that kids have to read to keep up with the cool kids … I read Pitchfork and Sterogum and a bunch of other sites, want to do in depth reading those are great sites but if you only have the time to read one email a day then we’re the ones.” Offering just a “spoonful” of eclectic music content, the mySpoonful team (which includes Cohen, Stacey Horne and Amos Schwartzfarb) choose a new artist and offer a free song download about three times a week, posting it to the site and sending out the newsletter on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. “We’re like the web version of the employee at the indie record store that always knows what new bands to listen to,” says Cohen. Right now the site has a national focus, but Cohen hopes that they will have local editions and cover specific music scenes like Austin or San Francisco sometime soon. Eventually he’d like to offer deals to their subscriber base a la DailyCandy and Thrillist, selling band merchandise and music. mySpoonful is currently bootstrapped. Cohen plans on advertising on the site and in the email newsletter which already has 25,000 subscribers from a previous incarnation as Spooonful. In the same space as Rcrdlbl, Cohen says there’s still a market to be tapped among casual music snobs, “We’re aiming at a different audience, a lot of people that are busy that are working and that have families but still pride themselves in saying ‘I’ve heard of Pepper Rabbit or Best Coast.’”        
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| Solar Universe Raises $7 Million To Franchise Solar Installation Posted: 25 Jan 2011 05:41 AM PST
The founder and chief executive of Solar Universe, Joe Bono, said he was able to lock in the investment because: “Unlike our competitors, [our business] requires very little capital to scale, a fact that we have proven by consistently performing to plan, and achieving our goals quarter after quarter.” Solar Universe competitors, like SolarCity — which won The 2010 Best Clean Tech Crunchies Award — or Sungevity, generate revenue directly from customers, providing services like: energy efficiency audits for homes, project quotes, solar power systems design, financing help, installation and monitoring. Much like any other franchise, 7-Eleven to Ritz Carlton, Solar Universe generates revenue instead by getting would-be business owners to pay a franchise fee, then to set up shop under its brand umbrella. The company in turn helps franchisees train, generate leads, market their services, distribute solar products, attain financing help for solar projects that their customers want, and provides software to manage their businesses. But the end-product is delivered by the franchisee, which can make quality control a challenge in general.
With its new found capital and franchise approach, Solar Universe hired Kevin Daughtery to run its supply chain, quality control and operations, and Laurie Anthony Baggio to grow its franchisee and installer network, develop new markets and channel partnerships. Daughtery worked previously as SolarCity’s vice president of operations. Baggio was a vice president of franchise development and COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? the paid, waste-haulers and recyclers. Bono said the company expects to hire no more than 20 additional people in the next 2 quarters. Solar Universe’s two dozen solar franchises are currently operating in: California, Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Louisiana. On average, Bono said, each of his company’s 800 customers have generated 1100 kilowatt hours on average, monthly, from Solar Universe installations. In other words, his company helps generate 880 megawatt hours of solar each month. The company also plans to use its capital to reel in would-be solar installation business owners and contractors to its network. While quality control can prove challenging for franchisors in any field, green and clean tech companies are joining Solar Universe in their approach, for example: Dr. Energy Saver, a home energy audit business and Maid Brigade, an eco-minded home cleaning service. It’s just not clear which, if any of them, can achieve the brand recognition and mass market presence of a top franchise like SUBWAY restaurants, or Hampton Hotels.        
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| Fanboy Email Newsletter GeekChicDaily Raises $1.5 Million Posted: 25 Jan 2011 05:31 AM PST
As stated in the title, GeekChicDaily is a fanboy-focused email newsletter that includes content around geek news, technology and pop culture. Launched in October 2009, GeekChicDaily was co-founded by Peter Y. Levin and Gareb Shamus as a way to bring out the inner geek in 18-34 year old men. Its looks like in just over a year, GeekChicDaily has built a solid userbase. We’re told that the startup is sending just under 1 million opted in emails per week.        
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| AWS Launches Simple, Bulk Email Service Amazon SES Posted: 25 Jan 2011 05:18 AM PST
Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing business of Amazon.com has announced a new bulk email offering, called Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES). The cloud-based service is aimed towards developers and businesses who don’t want to build a in-house email product but want to call upon a powerful service to send large volumes of emails. The advantage of using Amazon SES is that it integrates with other AWS, such as hosting service EC2, Amazon S3 and others. The email service if offered for free, but Amazon will charge fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfers. Pricing for Amazon SES is $0.10 per thousand email messages sent. Additionally, a customer can send 2,000 email messages for free each day when these emails originate from Amazon EC2 or recently launched AWS Elastic Beanstalk (data transfer fees may still apply if a customer exceeds their AWS free monthly bandwidth allowance). Amazon SES uses content filtering technologies to scan a business's outgoing email messages to help ensure that the content meets ISP standards. The email message is then either queued for sending or routed back to the sender for corrective action. To help businesses improve the quality of email communications with their customers, Amazon SES offers a built-in feedback loop, which includes notifications of bounce backs, failed and successful delivery attempts, and spam complaints.        
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| Celtra Raises $5 Million For Rich Media Mobile Ad Technology Posted: 25 Jan 2011 05:00 AM PST
Celtra develops a self-service mobile ad platform, called AdCreator, which is a one-stop-shop SaaS for display ad creation, trafficking, tracking and ad optimization. Celtra’s rich media ads can then be integrated into Jumptap, AdMarvel, Amobee, Mojiva, Nexage, Smaato, Sympatico, Pandora and DoubleClick DART. And the platform offers analytics to show brands how users are interacting with their ads. The startup has worked with a number of high-profile brands such as Starwood Hotels, Kmart, NBA and Evian to create rich media mobile advertisements that resemble Apple’s iAd. Of course, Celtra’s ads can be published on both iOS devices as well as Android devices.        
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| Orange Acquires 49% Of DailyMotion For €59 Million, The Rest To Follow Posted: 25 Jan 2011 04:07 AM PST
       
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| Eric Schmidt At DLD11: Google Will Add 1,000 New Employees In Europe Posted: 25 Jan 2011 03:47 AM PST
In the closing keynote of the DLD Conference in Germany, soon to be former Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage, notably less than a week after passing on the reins of the company to Google co-founder Larry Page. These are my live notes from the keynote:
(He’s giving some examples of innovation in computing)
(Schmidt mentions the huge growth of Android and Chrome, which I’m leaving out)
       
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| DLD11: James Murdoch On The Daily, Paywalls, Google And Apple Posted: 25 Jan 2011 03:30 AM PST
James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and currently Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, Europe and Asia, was interviewed on stage at the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany. Murdoch touched on everything from its relationship with Google and Apple, to paywalls for online newspapers, iPad applications and more. These are my notes: Q: When is The Daily going to launch? So first, The Daily is going to be a very exciting digital publication, which I think should be launching in the next few weeks, I hope. It’s going to be a brand new piece of journalism. We want to get out there quickly, at a good price, and I think it will surprise people. I also think it will succeed or fail on the journalism part, not the bells and whistles. You already employ about 126 people on the journalistic side for The Daily, and the price will be 99 US cents. Is that sufficient? Well, we wanted it to have a very good price, affordable for most people, at 99 cents a week. It lowers the barrier for people to enjoy high quality journalism. We realize the pricing models for apps and paid journalism as a whole is still developing, whether it will be bundled or tiered, and so on. What we’re focused on is making the experience super simple, at great value, without stopping us from investing in really unique journalism. You know, as opposed to taking your RSS feeds, cutting and pasting wires like other publications. We want to break out of that. How many The Daily editions do you have to sell to call it a success? We’re taking this milestone by milestone, and we don’t know what pace to expect, and how the dynamics with the weekly subscription will work. We have high hopes for the US marketplace in particular, though. You’re now a big part of management at News Corp. How does it feel to be the future of the company? Not just me – I think a lot of people will be the future of News Corp, but it’s an exciting company, I believe we’re really unique. We’re a mix of media businesses, and we’re truly global. If you look at our breadth of businesses, we’re clearly about storytelling. For digital, this is definitely the best and at the same time most challenging time for the news business. You obviously still deliver news on paper, so what I’m wondering is whether you consider News Corp to be and old economy company or a new economy company? I think the distinction between that ‘old’ and ‘new’ economy needs to be broken down. When we think about our business, storytelling, we don’t see it that way, and it shows in our investments in the space. You’ve talked about apps, where it’s really a mixture of things – games, music, social networks, etcetera. It’s a frictionless environment, and as copyrighted content owners we’re in a really good position there. Also, we see that the cost of distributing those ones and zeros continues to go down. We look at tablets, and for a journalistic product like The Daily, we acknowledge that it’s transformational. In the end, journalistic quality is key to everything. How much of your revenues are digital as opposed to traditional? We don’t break it out that way, but I can tell you that the vast majority comes from digital and paid television. On a combined basis, in Europe for example, over 70 percent comes from our digital TV business. These are new, 21st century businesses, with brand new technologies, in voice, broadband, with content at its heart. The paper-based part of our business is about 15 percent, maybe less. Would you still invest in paper? Well, we are, and yes, I think we will in the future. The Sun just had a record Christmas, and we build on our relationship with our readers and our advertisers, who are still responding really well to paper products. Our books business is thriving as well. Of course, we had the economic crisis, and there’s this perception of decline in the newspaper business. But Big franchises tend to still do really well. The scarcity of great brands is going up, which means the value increases along with it. This is a critical factor. The middleground I think is currently suffering, not the top players or the great niche players. Which areas of this world are you investing in? What are your preferred marketplaces? It depends largely on the business. We like to have thinks like the National Geographic channel in lots and lots of markets. But when we dig in, with big operations and lots of investments, we’re forced to pick and choose. We like market that a big of scale, transparency, little regulatory uncertainties, but also where there’s potential for real penetration. We like India a lot from a profit perspective, but we also like being in Western Europe, and Germany, Italy and the UK in particular. It remains an enormous playing field. In the end, we invest in giving people choice, quality, great storytelling, simple to use but solid technology at a fair price. We tend to choose carefully, but when we look at Europe and Asia, the transparency is the key filter. How do you evaluate chances versus risks? What kind of risks would you not take when entering a new market? What we’d like to do, is making success and failure our own making. If we mess it up, to be able to bet on ourselves to not mess up too badly. But when you depend on other parties, like politicians and regulations, it gets really hard. That part of the equation still remains a mystery for me. What about Turkey? You would know more about that than I do. I think Turkey is a great marketplace, and we’re proud of what we’ve done there so far. Turkey is an exciting marketplace, but the question is which opportunities at which price. The country is reasonably transparent, but you have to layer on top of that: value. Last year at the Monaco Media Forum, you were quoted on your ‘first rule of monetization’: you said “if you’re going to monetize something online, don’t give it away for free”. The Times, and The Sunday Times, now have a paywall. What are your experiences so far? The experience has been pretty good. The point that I was trying to make when I said that, was that you can sell quality content to customers. Today, in europe, 70 percent of our revenue comes directly from the customer. That’s a durable and powerful business, that lets you avoid cycles. Online, this is particularly true, because with all that inventory you lose the pricing power, because it’s impossible to create scarcity. Selling something at a fair price to fewer customers is a better place to be in. The reaction from our readers has been very positive. Obviously, we have the experience with the Wall Street Journal in the US, which has been very successful in selling bundled subscriptions. The Times and Sunday Times come from a different place, as they were free before, so our audience has undeniably contracted, but our readers are happy and advertisers are positive. The numbers are looking very good, we’ll release some of them in a month and a half. The iPad app part of the publication is drawing a frequency of reading that has surprised us a lot. With the app, we’re seeing dedicated readers spending 30-40 minutes, downloading content on a daily basis. Of course, these are the people that stop buying the newspaper, so that’s somewhat of a problem. The substitution is much more stark than website vs. newspaper. Are you going to put The Sun behind a paywall at some point? I think it’s a real question for the big popular papers, on how to tackle this. The customer for that publication is of course very different, so I think we have to be very cautious there. We have another tabloid behind a paywall, and we’re looking at the metrics very closely. You will see the online strategy of The Sun develop very quickly, and I think there will be a strong paid component in it. But we have to take care. How do you see Google? Is it a thief, or a reliable partner for the perfect news kiosk? Look, there are a lot of questions on what Google’s relationship is with copyright owners, and what it will be like in the future. But the company is very engaged, there’s a dialogue – we don’t have any answers yet but negotiations are underway. The question we ask is: how do you get compensated for copyrighted content. That notion of getting paid either a wholesale price relative to how much Google gets paid, or other payment options, these are now on the table. Not too long ago, they weren’t. Today, I think the conversation with Google is much more constructive. Whether it comes to a good conclusion, we’ll see. We’re very happy to work through different structures to see what will work. Maybe it won’t work at all, so then we’ll need to evaluate what we do. But every party at the table wants to get good results, in good faith. The good news is that there’s enough out there to create a good dynamic. The fundamental thing is we need publishers to start asserting the value of copyrighted content much more, in general. Because if publishers end up no longer investing in quality journalism, the media will be up for grabs for governments and oligarchs, and who wants that? Eric Schmidt will soon be on stage here. Anything you wish from him? Wait, don’t I have to talk to Larry now? Let’s move on to Apple, with whom you’ve been working together. Is it a good partner for you? We partner with them in a variety of areas, from iBooks to iTunes for our movie and TV shows business, so we have constant discussions about pricing and distribution methods. The interesting thing is that we create copyrighted content across the board, so we’re all learning our way through in different areas. With Apple, there’s positive engagement, we get a huge amount of support from them on The Daily for example. Obviously, we’ll have arguments with them in the future, on pricing, rules, and so on. But I would call it a positive relationship. When is News Corp going to launch its own tablet? Not right now. What’s the most frightening thing you’ve witnessed in the last six months? I think the most frightening thing for me was press freedom being eroded in the Western world. We see rules getting introduced in places like Eastern Europe, in some regions a system of regulation around libel labs, etcetera. This is encroaching on investigative journalism, with state media taking over in some parts of the world. That needs to be rolled back. How many journalists do you think you will need in the future? Hopefully more. There needs to be an incentive to invest in journalism – I would say professional journalism is more important than ever. It’s really the only way that you can have a true dialog in a democracy.        
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| Google To Acquire fflick For $10 Million Posted: 25 Jan 2011 02:00 AM PST
At this point it’s unclear if Google intends to keep fflick alive, or if this is primarily about the startup’s talent and the sentiment analysis engine that drives its recommendations. The service is pretty straightfoward: you sign in with your Twitter account and are shown a list of top-ranking movies. Next to each film is a set of relevant tweets from the people you follow. You can also choose to browse by sentiment, viewing a stream of positive or negative tweets about each movie. fflick was founded by four former Digg employees. When the company launched last summer it said that movies were only its first vertical, and that it would expand to use its sentiment technology elsewhere down the line.
       
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| Apple Aims To Take NFC Mainstream; Perhaps The Greatest Trick They’ve Ever Pulled? Posted: 25 Jan 2011 12:29 AM PST
Granted, that’s a very big “if” in the above statement. And there are many unknowns from this report, which I’m simply extrapolating out. But there’s also a lot that makes sense, if you think about it. First of all, Bloomberg’s Olga Kharif reports that Apple will build NFC chips into the next iteration of the iPhone. That should be absolutely no surprise — in fact, we reported on it months ago. Plus, given that rival Google has already done this for the Nexus S Android device, it has gone from a no-brainer to a must-do. What is somewhat surprising is first of all that the report only mentions the new iPhone “for AT&T” and not Verizon. And secondly, that NFC is said to be built into the iPad 2 as well. It’s hard to know what to make about the former. Perhaps that’s just a slip up? Or maybe AT&T really will get the iPhone 5 first? The iPad 2 talk is conceivably more straightforward. Typically, NFC is associated with mobile payments, but don’t forget that it can also be used for a host of other short-distance data communications. In fact, it could well be that NFC becomes a staple of most Apple products for beaming information instantaneously and securely over a short distance. Things like photos, movies, etc. Also, imagine if the iPad is in your bag or purse, it could certainly still be useful when it comes to paying for things by sending a signal to a receiver a few inches away. But the key to this is really iTunes. Or more specifically, the payment system within iTunes that is already in use by millions and millions of people around the world. The obvious main reason that NFC hasn’t taken off yet for payments is the lack of hardware support. But one reason that’s been slow to come is that manufacturers likely know that there’s simply no good payment processing system behind any of the current ideas. In fact, the best possible way for things to start moving is probably for the credit card companies to do this themselves and get the ball rolling. But while they are testing the technology, they don’t seem to see the need to disrupt a system that is already working. So why is this becoming a big deal all of a sudden? Well, everyone’s ears perked up when they heard Google would be including NFC chips in the Nexus S. But the same basic problem remains. For all of Google’s strengths, they have not been able to nail a payment processing system. Yes, they have Google Checkout. But customers clearly prefer competitors like PayPal. The situation is so bad that they’ve even had to start including carrier billing options in Android so people will finally start to buy apps on a whim. Users are simply not doing that as much as anyone would like with Google’s current payment structure. And the system is to blame. And the same issues will likely hold up their NFC ideas as well. And we’re already seeing the fact that while the Nexus S has NFC built-in, you can’t do anything with it yet. Enter Apple. The technology giant does have a proven payment system. One with over 100 million accounts set up with built-in credit card access. But those interviewed by Bloomberg for the story suggest that Apple aims to go farther with NFC:
And why would customers do that instead of using a credit card? Because a new piece of regulation may soon make it cheaper to pay via debit rather than credit. Apple could be in the right place at the right time with this. Also from Bloomberg’s report:
In other words, it could be an evolution of the payment system within iTunes to allow for rewards, and other flexibility. But what about the other side of the coin? It’s fine if Apple builds NFC into their devices, but there still needs to be equipment to read them. There’s a bit on this as well:
You can expect Google to do the same. But again, Google doesn’t have the iTunes infrastructure in place to make this happen in a real way. Apple does. If they get a piece of that $6.2 trillion market, there’s no way they could downplay it as negligible revenue, as they try to do with the app and music sales cuts. It could conceivably be one of their biggest money-makers. And it could completely disrupt a number of industries. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, he says 1,000 words later.        
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| The Crunchies: Video Highlights (TCTV) Posted: 24 Jan 2011 11:59 PM PST In case you missed last Friday night’s fourth annual Crunchies Awards, or want to relive the excitement, you can watch the entire show above. The sold-out event was attended by 1,000 people at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Ten times that number viewed the live webcast. Congratulations to all the winners, runnerups and nominees. We’ve edited down video clips for each of the awards and other segments below. Click on the images to view the videos in a new window. Awards Michael Arrington Interviews Additional Videos
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| SafetyWeb Acquires iHound And myID, Pushes People-Centric Security Solution Posted: 24 Jan 2011 11:52 PM PST
They aren’t disclosing the terms of either new deal, other than to say that each deal involves both cash and stock. The company is also on the verge of launching new products based on internal development as well as the stuff brought over from the three acquisitions. And they aren’t just focusing on child safety any longer. SafetyWeb cofounder Geoffrey Arone argues that device-centric security is becoming a commodity, and points to robust and free malware being offered by Microsoft for PCs and Sophos for Macs, as examples. Companies like Norton and MacAfee are squirming to get people to pay anything for their software. SafetyWeb is arguing that People-Centric solutions make better business models. People are concerned about online privacy, identity, reputation and safety today. There are niche products for each category, like Lifelock for identity and Reputation Defender for reputation. But no one has tacked all of these problems with a single subscription product. That’s where SafetyWeb is heading, says Arone.        
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| HighNote Is Group Messaging With A Multimedia Twist Posted: 24 Jan 2011 10:19 PM PST
Aside from being a free Internet Protocol-based messaging app for members, the service (available on the iPhone, iPad, iTouch and Android as of today) is unique in the richness and range of messages you can send and receive. With HighNote you can share music, video, (through iTunes), voice recordings, pictures, maps and pretty much any media that’s fit for a phone. "At HighNote we've recognized the need that has arisen for a new communications medium that captures the simplicity and immediacy of text, but with a far greater degree of message richness designed for a more robust, purposed level of social communication," says CEO Marc Barach. With over 20 customizable greetings like “Check this out” “Congrats” and “On Fire” as well as the ability to change the alignment, color, style and size of your text, HighNote is probably most appealing to those just starting out in their text messaging careers, especially with its ample supply of emoticons. Yes the app is very obviously gunning for the teen market like any other social service. It has a comprehensive “Quick Reply” section (giving you options like “Love it”/”Hate it”) as well as a feature called “Pulse,” that from what I can see lets users opt into quizzes like “Music,”"Sports,”"Celebrity Gossip,” and “Fashion” and is more importantly rife with potential for ad targeting. Rich messaging through HighNote is free for HighNote members. Not as strategically viral as Kik, the app sends a normal SMS with a browser link to the multimedia content combined with an invite to non-members. Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Phone 7 versions should be available shortly. You can view HighNote’s demo below and find the app here.
       
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| WITN: No, New York Media, It Isn’t 1999 All Over Again (Thanks For Asking) Posted: 24 Jan 2011 09:44 PM PST In this week’s Why Is This News, we discuss the latest Silicon Valley bubble. Or specifically, we discuss why there isn’t one – and why New York media has to stop claiming there is every time a company has a high valuation. Yeah, Business Week’s Chris Farrell, we’re looking at you. Video below.        
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| What Is Quora’s Biggest Challenge? Posted: 24 Jan 2011 07:33 PM PST
Editor’s note: Guest author Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, the consumer Internet, and social networks. This is the third and final in a series of articles on Quora (here are the first and second ones). Shah is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semilshah or on Quora here. By now, everyone has an opinion of Quora and is waiting to see if their mom starts following them there, too. In the past week, in addition to winning the Crunchies award for best new startup, it is also the target of growing skepticism. Well-circulated articles have been written about the company's ascent. Katherine Boehret from the Wall Street Journal wrote a review in which she asserts Quora is "uninviting, geeky, and poorly explained." Matthew Ingram from GigaOM wrote about the site's technical growing pains, wondering if one day the site will wish "it had remained small and exclusive." On Sunday, TechCrunch contributor Vivek Wadhwa wrote an opinion column on why he does not buy into the hype around Quora. Quora does face some real challenges, but I believe they are more nuanced than some of the other critics have suggested. In this last post on my series on Quora, I will lay out what I believe to be the short-, medium-, and long-term challenges facing the company and product after using the site for the past six months. The most immediate issue, simply put, is noise. How can it make sure that users are not inundated with discussions they care nothing about? Whereas Quora started with a small group of users, early-adopters' primal fears revolved around maintaining a coveted signal-to-noise ratio. For some, those fears became reality in December, when the site experienced a surge in new users and traffic, and as the system absorbed more questions, answers, and voting and commenting interactions. The company hopes its forthcoming “PeopleRank” algorithm will help readjust current conditions in favor of signal-rich activity. Right now, however, there are are five main noisemakers:
In the medium-term, over the course of 2011, two announcements will signal key strategic moves:
Beyond the noise and the expansion of the product to mobile and as a platform, in the long-term, in my opinion, the key challenge for Quora will be to continue to maintain an environment that fosters genuine, interesting, and fun engagement between real people—not brands or companies. Users will need strong incentives to keep contributing and consuming information on the site. Threads must continually improve over time. That will require the site to continue to be not just useful for users, but a site that helps them discover new knowledge and connect with other people with similar primary and/or secondary interests. Some of this interaction could be social, such as sharing recipes, or it could be educational, or it could lead to more meaningful real-world relationships. Quora will also have to continue to draw the attention of clusters of topical experts in disparate locations, especially outside of Silicon Valley and technology. It must do all of this, of course, as it experiments with some forms of advertising, licensing schemes, or other avenues for making money, given their content will be so structured from the start. These are certainly all big hurdles, and it appears to me that the short-term ones are trickier than the long-term ones, but if Quora can strike the right balance, the opportunity their small team has already created will only get larger. Photo credit: Flickr/Mario Bellucci.        
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| I Feel Like A Kid Again With HeyTell, The Social Walkie-Talkie App With 3 Million Users Posted: 24 Jan 2011 06:33 PM PST
But there’s hope for the walkie-talkie making a comeback. At least in app form. In fact, maybe it already has very quietly. An app called HeyTell already has 3 million users. HeyTell is an app for the iPhone and Android phones that allows you to instantly send short voice messages to other users. Or, as they put it: “push-to-talk, starting at $0.” The app is the brainchild of the husband-and-wife team, Steven Hugg and Jen Harvey, who created the company Voxilate. In the Fall of 2009, the two quit their jobs and decided they were going to focus on building some sort of application based around voice technology. By February of 2010, they had the idea to replicate the fun of a walkie-talkie. So, like any entrepreneurs with an idea, they decided to pack up their things and hit the road for a multi-month road trip across the United States. Wait, what? Yes, oddly, the duo created and launched HeyTell while doing a cross-country trip. They would stop at locations for a few weeks at a time, then pack up and head off again. They started in Washington D.C. and ended in Seattle. Then they headed back — when I spoke to them today, they were in Baltimore. Hugg recalls the time they got the alert that HeyTell had gone live in the App Store — when they were in a customs line after a quick trip to Mexico during their journey. Harvey recalls having to reboot a server from the beach. So how has HeyTell managed to grow so quickly? Mostly from word-of-mouth, the duo say. They haven’t put any traditional marketing dollars into the effort, instead they’re mainly spreading through their method of inviting other friends to check it out via SMS.
It’s enough money to keep the team the pair self-employeed and focusing on expansion. Hugg says they have the infrastructure in place now to scale to about 100 million users. And they’ll be focusing on international expansion soon in an attempt to get there. Harvey says that users are sending about 1.5 million messages a day now on average. And that at the peak times, 35 messages are sent a second. And while the group messaging apps like GroupMe and Beluga are getting a lot of love at the moment, HeyTell is much larger than either. And they’ve also been cited as one potential app that could be big at this years SXSW festival. Hugg says that the app is perfect for organizing a gathering or talking to your relatives while seeing where they are on a map. But the key is that messages are quick. There’s no need for a formal “hello”, he notes — the idea is to get to the point. Hugg says this fits in with how people tend to communicate these days. It’s not long phone conversations, it’s quick burst messages. “Young people are our big demographic,” he notes. To company is completely self-funded for the time being, but Hugg acknowledges that given their growth, they’ve had a lot of interest from potential investors. But the two would like to keep the company to themselves for a while, to see how big they can get it. They note that they’re happy to be iPhone and Android-only for the time being, but they’re considering other mobile platforms as well. You can find HeyTell in the App Store here. Or search for it in the Android Market.        
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| Weekend at Myspace: And Other Upcoming Silicon Valley Movies Posted: 24 Jan 2011 05:29 PM PST Whether the audience agreed or not, our favorite part (of ours) of the Crunchies was the movie posters bit. Inspired by the success of the Social Network, we’d brainstormed a few ideas for Silicon Valley themed movies of our own, complete with promotional posters to help with the pitch. In case you missed seeing them live, here they are. The first is “Weekend at MySpace” - a remake of weekend at Bernies, starring MySpace as Bernie… Then there’s “Google’s Self Driving Car goes Bananas“… Angelgate made big news this year and so it’s inevitable that it would get the Hollywood treatment. Sure enough, here’s our Dave Mcclure vehicle: “Honey I Colluded to Artificially Shrink the Valuation“… (It’s hard to tell from the poster, but that’s Clavier in the dog costume.) Finally, the one we’re most excited about: a big budget remake of High Noon relocated to tech town and starring our own Michael Arrington and Engadget’s Joshua Topolsky…
       
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A little less than a year ago, Google 
Our 
Among all the various passions, it’s hard to think of any that have loyalists more passionate than comic book fans. And that’s exactly why the past decade or so has been a bit awkward. As all content has been shifting away from print variations, “comic books” seem ripe to also move beyond the “books” aspect and embrace online. That transition is exactly what 
Solar Universe — a company building a franchise of solar installers across North America — raised a $7 million series b investment led by 
Bono says his company’s most advanced offering is not a clean technology, but: “[Our] end to end software platform that covers all major areas of the solar installation business: lead capture, proposal generation, front & back office functions, permit assembly, invoicing, financing through partners and customer loyalty.”
Mobile advertising startup 
Rumors have been flying around for the last week about a possible acquisition of 
Bloomberg has an interesting report tonight, but they have the headline all wrong. 
Best Internet Application: Pandora
Best Social App: Dailybooth
Best Social Commerce App: Groupon
Best Mobile App: Google Mobile Maps for Android
Best Location Based Service: Foursquare
Best New Device: iPad
Best Technology Achievement: Google Self-driving Cars
Best Design: Gogobot
Best Touch Interface: Flipboard
Best Bootstrapped Startup: Addmired
Best Enterprise: Buddy Media
Best International: ViKi
Best Clean Tech: SolarCity
Angel of the Year: Paul Graham, Y Combinator
VC of the Year: Yuri Milner, DST
Founder of the Year: Mark Pincus, Zynga
CEO of the Year: Andrew Mason, Groupon
Best New Startup or Product of 2010: Quora
Best Overall Startup or Product of 2010: Twitter
Interview with Yuri Milner
Interview with Andrew Mason
Interview with Dick Costolo
What sets group messaging app 
When I was a kid, there were few things cooler than a walkie-talkie. I recall spending many a night running around hotels causing havoc as my friends and I pretended we were on some sort of secret mission, talking to each other back and forth over these devices. Then cell phones came along and changed everything. For a short amount of time, push-to-talk technology in some phones replicated the idea. But smartphones quickly put an end to the fun.
And the app has been bringing in revenues for the couple since day one. Part of that is the in-app add-ons you can buy, such as voice masking effects and the ability to communicate with large groups at once. But a bigger part is advertising in the app, Hugg says.
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