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- Fly or Die (TV Apps): IntoNow, Yap.TV, FIOS Mobile
- eBay Lands First Mobile Pre-Load Deal With Telefonica’s O2 UK Phones
- Valve Makes More Money Per Employee Than Google Or Apple
- Mobile Tag Raises 6.6 Million Euros For Marketing Solutions Based On NFC tags, 2D And 1D Barcodes
- With The Platform Burning, Nokia Also Talked To RIM Before Jumping Into Redmond’s Arms
- GetJar CEO Ilja Laurs Explains Why They Just Raised $25 Million (TCTV)
- Apple Launches Subscriptions For Content-Publishers On The App Store
- Rumor: iPhone 5 To Have A Larger, 4-Inch Screen?
- Solvate Raises $4 Million For Talent Search Engine
- Coupa Raises $12 Million To Help Companies Spend Smarter
- RadiumOne Unveils Social Ad Format With Likes, Shares And More
- Synaptics’ New Touchscreens Can Detect The Head Of A Pin
- Songkick Raises $2 Million To Help People Track, Catalog Live Music
- Facebook SIMs, HTC/INQ Phones — Facebook’s Phone Project Lingers, But It’s None Of Those
- Zynga’s Reported $7-$10 Billion Valuation Surpasses That Of EA
- Millennial: For The Second Month, Android Leads iOS For Mobile Ad Impression Share
- Nerds Ditch Grammys for New York’s First Music Hackday
- JumpBox Now Offers One-Click Installs On Amazon’s Free Usage Tier
- First AOL Q1 Luge Update Since HuffPo Acquisition: We’ve Got Work To Do (No Kidding)
- Apple Now The Most Valuable Tech Company By $100 Billion; Google Closing In On Microsoft
- OMG/JK: Where There Are Tablets, There’s Love
- Angry Nerds: IBM’s Watson Finishes Night One Of Jeopardy Challenge Tied For First Place
- Jack Ma Flies Thousands of Miles to Palo Alto, Still Doesn’t Want to See Carol Bartz
- Experiments In Realtime News: The Eqentia Streams
- I Just Androidified Myself. Droid’s Never Looked So Good.
| Fly or Die (TV Apps): IntoNow, Yap.TV, FIOS Mobile Posted: 15 Feb 2011 08:59 AM PST Once you start watching TV with your iPhone or iPad, there is no going back. When the big screen becomes boring, you just switch to the smaller screen, where a whole world of Twitter, email, the Web, and apps stand ready to entertain your multitasking mind. In this week’s episode of Fly or Die, CrunchGear editor John Biggs and I look at three TV apps designed to enhance your TV watching experience, not distract you from it. We give each one a “fly” or “die” verdict and, as usual, a founder from one of the companies joins us as a surprise guest to subject themselves to our grilling. The three TV apps we evaluate in this show are IntoNow, Yap.TV, and FIOS Mobile. The first one, IntoNow, is like Shazam for TV shows. It lets you check into a show you are watching by simply listening to the audio signature of the show and comparing that agaianst its database. The app has a high gee-whiz factor, and it really nails identifying the shows with one click. But there is not much to do after that other than see what shows your friends on the app have watched and leave a comment about their bad taste in TV shows. We both much prefer Yap.TV, which lets you navigate shows via an up-to-the-minute program guide or a grid showing trending shows. The whole point of the app is to, well, yap about TV, and not just with people you know. When you click on a show, you see a Twitter stream with all the realtime tweets about that show, along with polls, and a window where you can chat more privately with just your friends. The app goes way beyond the checkin, by giving you something to do related to the show you are watching. The app works especially well for appointment TV, things like the Superbowl, the Grammy’s, or even The Colbert Report, where lots of people are watching at the same time. Through the app, you can have a conversation about what your watching with other people across the country. I call these “apps for lonely people,” but then again as John points out, TV is a lonely medium. Finally, the last app we review is FIOS Mobile, which is a program guide and iPad remote for Verizon FIOS TV subscribers. I am a subscriber, and this app is my new remote control. It lets you tune into any show currently on, or on-demand, through your WiFi network in your house and your set-top box. The app itself is a bit clunky (the program guide takes forever to fully load), but it is such an improvement over the traditional remote control that it is now my default. I can keep looking for something better to watch on my iPad instead of annoying my wife to no end by scrolling through the program guide every five minutes on the TV screen. I just wish it allowed for direct streaming to my iPAd like Comcast’s Xfinity app allows for on-demand movies. If you want to jump to individual segments of this show (the whole thing is 11 minutes), here is where you can watch just the parts about IntoNow, Yap.tv, and FIOS Mobile. Which TV apps do you swear by?        
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| eBay Lands First Mobile Pre-Load Deal With Telefonica’s O2 UK Phones Posted: 15 Feb 2011 08:58 AM PST
The company says the deal will include most Android, Windows 7, Symbian and Bada devices sold by O2 in the UK over the next two years. Telefonica will actually work with device manufacturers to pre-install the application. So why is this a big deal? It’s eBay’s first pre-load deal with a carrier, and Telfonica O2 is one of the largest carriers in Europe. While the apps will only be available on O2 UK’s phones initially, the apps are expected to roll out to other Telefonica markets. The pre-loaded apps will no doubt be able to bring in more traffic to eBay’s apps and sites. Mobile generated $2 billion in sales for eBay last year, and the company expects to double that number in 2011. And eBay’s mobile strategy is already gaining traction in international markets. The UK is the strongest market for eBay in terms of m-commerce in Europe, with an item purchased on average every two seconds through the eBay buyer app in the UK in 2010. And Germany and the UK combined generated nearly one-third of all eBay's mobile sales in 2010. I’m going to take a wild guess here, but I’m sure eBay will be negotiating similar pre-load carrier deals in other countries over the next year.        
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| Valve Makes More Money Per Employee Than Google Or Apple Posted: 15 Feb 2011 08:25 AM PST
Here’s an interesting figure: Valve makes more money per employee than Google or Apple. While we can easily figure out how much the publicly traded Google and Apple make per employee, estimating what Valve pulls in is trickier. Valve has done quite well selling video games – over 12 million copies of Half-Life 2 alone – but Valve is even better at selling everyone else’s games – not just its own – in Steam.        
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| Mobile Tag Raises 6.6 Million Euros For Marketing Solutions Based On NFC tags, 2D And 1D Barcodes Posted: 15 Feb 2011 07:24 AM PST  Mobile Tag, a France-based provider of 2D and 1D barcode marketing solutions, has secured 6.6 million euros in fresh funding. The round was led by S.E.B. Ventures and joined by previous backers XAnge Private Equity and Alven Capital. The company says it raised additional capital primarily to expand its operations in the United States.
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| With The Platform Burning, Nokia Also Talked To RIM Before Jumping Into Redmond’s Arms Posted: 15 Feb 2011 07:21 AM PST  The battle of mobile ecosystems is now a three horse race: Apple's iOS, Google's Android, and Microsoft's Windows Phone. Or so says Nokia CEO Stephen Elop now that the Finnish handset maker has jumped off of a burning platform into Redmond's arms. Conspicuous by their absence - in Elop's analysis - was RIM's BlackBerry or indeed the dark horse in the room, HP's webOS. They are both, of course, vertical platforms (as is iOS) so you'd be forgiven for thinking that licensing either was never a consideration. However, TechCrunch Europe has learned that Nokia did indeed explore a partnership with RIM, which would have seen Nokia smartphones running BlackBerry OS.
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| GetJar CEO Ilja Laurs Explains Why They Just Raised $25 Million (TCTV) Posted: 15 Feb 2011 06:24 AM PST
GetJar, the independent, cross-platform app store provider, this morning announced that it has raised $25 million in Series C funding from Tiger Global Management and longtime backer Accel Partners. The round brings the total raised to $42 million. I caught up with founder and CEO Ilja Laurs at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to talk about how his business has grown since the last time I did a video interview with the charismatic entrepreneur, now almost two years ago. Since then, GetJar has managed to secure a leading position among the top 5 mobile app store operators, playing the same field as giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft and Nokia. In the past year, the number of app downloads Get\jar registers per month has quadrupled, and the company has grown along with it; they now boasts triple the number of employees than last year. I asked Laurs why GetJar needed the extra capital, how he evaluates the competitive landscape in the mobile app store business and what he thinks about the Nokia/Microsoft alliance.        
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| Apple Launches Subscriptions For Content-Publishers On The App Store Posted: 15 Feb 2011 05:42 AM PST
Here’s the revenue breakdown: When Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing. We’ve pasted the release below. Apple also says that if publishers are selling a digital subscription outside of the app, that same subscription offer must be made available, at the same price or less, to App Store customers (which we had previously reported). In addition, publishers may no longer provide links within their apps that would allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app. From the release, it’s unclear if any publishers (besides The Daily) have signed on to use the new model. And it should be interesting to see how magazine and newspaper companies react to this new model. The new model will also possibility have an impact on subscriptions from video content companies like Netflix and Hulu, as well as Amazon’s Kindle apps on the App Store.
       
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| Rumor: iPhone 5 To Have A Larger, 4-Inch Screen? Posted: 15 Feb 2011 05:36 AM PST
The rumor is, in short, this: that Apple will increase the iPhone screen size to 4 inches, up from 3.5 inches. According to “upstream component suppliers,” this change should come in the next iteration of the phone.        
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| Solvate Raises $4 Million For Talent Search Engine Posted: 15 Feb 2011 05:30 AM PST
Solvate is essentially a Talent Search engine that aims to match companies with consultants and freelancers. Solvate has a network of 1,000-plus independent professionals who have been pre-qualified, and catalogued. Businesses can search Solvate’s database for talent and the the startup will provide online time tracking tools and will handle both payment collection and disbursement. Services include marketing, sales, business development, IT and more. Solvate says that the new investment will be used to enhance the company’s user interface and expand its marketplace of clients and talent. Since August 2009, Solvate has facilitated thousands of remote work relationships on its platform.        
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| Coupa Raises $12 Million To Help Companies Spend Smarter Posted: 15 Feb 2011 05:02 AM PST
Coupa’s software suite allows companies of any size to maintain better control over costs by keeping tabs on purchases, suppliers, existing contracts etc. and automatically looking for ways to spend budgets in a cost-saving manner. The web-based e-procurement program also helps streamline communication between all employees and executives over financial and business matters. It’s sort of like an Amazon.com (for procurement) meets Mint.com (for personal finance) to help companies manage their finances, purchases and inventory. Other features include the ability to tweet from the platform, automated expense report scoring, expense line notifications that thank employees for "being frugal" when the expense is well below the category average (and warn them when those expenses "seem a little high"), integration to Salesforce.com, Google Maps and more. Coupa's customers include Michaels Stores, Pandora, Williams Sonoma, and others. And overall active users on the platform grew eight-fold in 2010, says the company.        
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| RadiumOne Unveils Social Ad Format With Likes, Shares And More Posted: 15 Feb 2011 05:00 AM PST
Called the "R1 Like Button," the new button can be placed on the add to allow users to Like an ad. Of course, it’s not a Facebook Like button and the actual act of “liking” an ad doesn’t really do anything but help RadiumOne serve you more relevant advertisements. Advertisers can also choose to include a “Share” button on an ad, which will allow consumer to share the ad through Facebook, Twitter, e-mail and other social media sites. And RadiumOne is claiming that uses are more likely to interact with the social ad formats. In early testing, the R1 Like Button generated a clickthrough rate of .12% and a Like button click rate of .18%; the Share rate was .02%. In addition, lead requests increased by 45%. That data impressive but I’m still dubious that many users will actually “like” an ad they see on a publisher site. While this works for Facebook, RadiumOne is testing this on publisher sites where users may not be as engaged in “liking” objects on a page that aren’t involved with a Facebook “like.” I think consumers will need more of an incentive to interact with an online ad. What would be interesting is if RadiumOne allows advertisers to give users incentives to “like” an advertisement, i.e. you could receive a discount at a restaurant for ‘liking’ the ad.        
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| Synaptics’ New Touchscreens Can Detect The Head Of A Pin Posted: 15 Feb 2011 04:40 AM PST
       
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| Songkick Raises $2 Million To Help People Track, Catalog Live Music Posted: 15 Feb 2011 02:21 AM PST  Songkick is in the process of raising $2 million, an SEC filing reveals. Songkick indexes a host of ticket vendors, venue websites as well as local newspapers to create a database of concerts happening around the world. This provides people with a centralized way of keeping track of live performances by their favorite bands and artists. In addition, Songkick is trying to build an extensive online catalog of live concert recordings.
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| Facebook SIMs, HTC/INQ Phones — Facebook’s Phone Project Lingers, But It’s None Of Those Posted: 15 Feb 2011 12:04 AM PST
Nor are the phones that HTC may be releasing tomorrow at Mobile World Congress. (Update: Yep.) PocketNow was apparently able to snag some images of these Android-powered HTC devices that carry a special Facebook button at the bottom. Again, potentially cool and useful, but not the Facebook Phone. And that INQ-built Facebook phone? Also cool, but also not the Facebook Phone. Now, the only thing we know for absolute certain is that Facebook hates talking about the concept of a “Facebook Phone”. We’ve had this argument with them in the past. They seem to think that a Facebook Phone with a capital “P” would only be a device with both hardware and software designed and developed by them. Or, at the very least, an OS written by them from the ground up. They’ve stated time and time again that they’re not working on such a project. At least not yet. And we buy that. What we don’t buy is that they don’t have some sort of project to take Google’s open source Android OS and inject it with Facebook DNA. That’s what we believe the Facebook Phone is going to be. And from what we’re hearing, it’s still coming. Ever since we wrote the first Facebook Phone story last September, whispers have not stopped about what Facebook is doing. In particular, we had heard that two key employees, Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos, were working on the project. But we’ve since heard that Facebook’s head of mobile, Erick Tseng, has taken command of the project. And that yes, it continues to be a project to customize Android to make it, and the apps that run on it, more social at their cores. “Instant personalization” and all that. You may remember Tseng as the senior Android manager who jumped over to Facebook last May. We’re also hearing that Tseng is pushing a team within Facebook, perhaps Platmobile, to be ready to have something to show off at Facebook’s f8 conference later this year. Judging from previous years, this should take place in April. You may recall that the Platmobile team is the one that was hard at work on eliminating the need for mobile password entry. Clearly, any Android Facebook Phone project would feature this as a hallmark. You may recall the rumors that Facebook was working with Apple to bring this deep level of social to the iPhone last year. That project was apparently very real and may have been codenamed “Spork”. But apparently, that project was scrapped — perhaps after Facebook and Apple could not come to an agreement on terms for such features. Whatever the reason, work began on the Android project shortly thereafter (which was around the time we first heard about it). So, Facebook apparently continues to not work on a phone in the same way that Google was not working on a phone for all those years. Will we see the fruits of such non-labor at f8 this year? Perhaps. Will it be a physical phone? Unlikely. A totally new OS made by Facebook? Probably not. But instead, we may see a version of Android with very deep Facebook integration. One that phone-makers would be welcome to use. A Trojan Horse for Facebook to make smartphones truly social.        
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| Zynga’s Reported $7-$10 Billion Valuation Surpasses That Of EA Posted: 14 Feb 2011 11:53 PM PST
Then today Bloomberg piggybacked on the news, naming names in terms of players in the talks, including Fidelity investments and T.Rowe Price (who coincidentally also has signifigant shares in gaming company Electronic Arts). Bloomberg also reiterated the same price for the round at $250 million and bumped the valuation range up to “close to ten million,” continuing down the well worn path of hinting at market exuberance by running down the checkpoints signifying a tech industry investment bubble, er frenzy: Facebook now at $52 billion, Groupon at $15 billion, Twitter at $8 – $10 billion as well as the laundry list of IPO filings including Demand, LinkedIn and Pandora. Last time the media concretely checked in on Zynga’s valuation it was at $4 billion, when it filed papers issuing new stock. The Bloomberg article states that Zynga’s valuation on secondary market Sharespost is currently equal to about $6.2 billion versus NASDAQ’s $6.2 billion market cap for console and PC gaming giant Electronic Arts, which was once rumored to be considering Zynga as an acquisition prospect. A quick glance today shows those numbers are about $6.15 billion on Sharepost versus $6.17 billion on NASDAQ respectively. This means, that even when you put aside the overlapping valuation range reported by Bloomberg and the WSJ, the market is willing to pay more for Zynga than traditional gaming company EA right now, however incremental. Venturebeat’s Dean Takahashi pointed out in October that EA’s estimated $3 billion in revenue for 2010 runs laps around Zynga’s $850 million (with $400 million in profit), but as we’ve seen again and again with Facebook, the market is not gaging in multiples of current revenue, it is gaging in perceived opportunity with regards to potential audience and ad spending. The metrics for what constitutes a gaming hit have changed since Super Mario Bros. According to AppData, Farmville and CityVille now have between 96 million and 51 million monthly users respectively. In contrast, it took a decade for a best selling EA title like the The Sims to pass125 million units sold. Zynga has its sights set much higher than moving units or in its case virtual currency, it wants to to be the Google a.k.a the entrypoint of gaming. The company now has 275 million active monthly users across all its titles, numbers higher than the traditional video game industry has ever seen. It has acquired 9 companies in just as many months and has offices in 6 countries. User numbers are comparable to half the population of Facebook (valuation: $52 billion). Divide the current Facebook valuation numbers being tossed around by two and you’ll understand the company’s ambition. In the meantime I’ll leave you with a pro tip that is perhaps the scariest part of living in the frenzied now: The easiest way to get people to shut up about skyrocketing valuations is to say, “It’s what the market will bear.”        
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| Millennial: For The Second Month, Android Leads iOS For Mobile Ad Impression Share Posted: 14 Feb 2011 08:45 PM PST
Apple iOS ad requests increased 47% month-over-month, with Android requests growing by 32% month-over-month. RIM requests remained relatively flat month-over-month, Symbian requests increased 24% and iPad requests increasing by 43% from December. Smartphones increased 10% month-over-month in January and accounted for 66% of the Smartphone, Feature Phone & Connected Device Impression Share on the network. iOS continues to dominate the Connected Device category, largely due to the popularity of the iPad. Apple continues its reign as the leading device manufacturer on Millennial’s network, with 26 percent of the Top 15 Manufacturers impression share in January, a 24 percent increase month-over-month. But Android manufacturers are continuing to grow as well. HTC grew 36 percent in January to claim the number two position and Samsung moved to the number three position, with the the Samsung Epic and the Samsung Galaxy 5 entering the Top 30 Mobile Devices for the RIM continued its domination in terms of the number of devices on the list, wth five of the Top 30 Mobile Devices with a combined impression share of 10 percent in January While last month’s report certainly favored Android in terms of growth, January’s Mobile Mix report indicated that iOS is still growing, and beating Android, in terms of ad requests. According to a new IDC report, Millennial is the third largest network behind Google AdMob and Apple’s iAd, so data shared on Millennial’s network is certainly indicative of the state of mobile advertising. But there’s no hiding that Android is continuing to grow in terms of both reach and sales, and that means that more users are interacting with advertising on the platform.        
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| Nerds Ditch Grammys for New York’s First Music Hackday Posted: 14 Feb 2011 07:49 PM PST
With more references to Justin Bieber than a Valentine’s day party at an all-girls Canadian middle school, Music Hackday rolled into New York City this past weekend. Event organizers John Britton and Dave Haynes noted this had been the biggest Music Hack Day yet, with 72 demos. Hundreds of hackers showed up and a waiting list of hopefuls swelled to 300. Hacks included invisible iPhone instruments, Kinect hacks, web-based sequencers and SMS valentines day tributes. Hundreds of devs and tech cognoscenti made the event a win for the burgeoning tech scene in New York as well as event host, General Assembly - Music Hackday marked the first public event of New York’s latest, plushest tech coworking space. Sponsorship even had some local flavor with equipment and prizes offered by beloved Mac shop Tekserve, as well as startups ExFM, Hunch and Boxee. The audience soldiered through the two and a half hours of demos, selecting three winners via a Twilio sms voting system. A list of winners and favorites follows. Winners Invisible… Stuff Tim Soo – An “invisible” violin played by bowing with a Wiimote and fingering with an iPhone. Video here. Djtxt Dan Aminzade – Set up a crowdsourced party playlist in one click. Stringer - Aidan Feldman, Tyler Williams, and Alex Chen – A virtual string instrument played with a Kinect 3d camera More interesting hacks Automatic DJ Ben Gleitzman, Brian Brennan – Clever hack that uses facial recognition to build and play a custom music playlist based on the taste of the people recognized. Boxee Music Quiz John McCann, Roberto Osorio-Goenaga – Parse a user’s iTunes db and create a Boxee playable quiz based on questions custom generated from the music library. Snowball Colin Raffel – Hilarious. A web app to create “hype” for a new music release by aggregating relevant emails of music bloggers and sending them download links which require them to help spread the word. Screaminator Uri Nieto – Another crowd favorite. iPhone app that determines whether you are screaming or not. Scream, Rate, Share. MashMe Jon Gottfried - A personalized music mashup generator using Hunch and EchoNest. JSONloops Marak Squires, Elijah Insua, hij1nx – Fruity Loops in a webpage. Fans Forever and Ever Greg Sabo – Auto create Geocities-like “fan” pages for any artist replete with weird poetry, quotes and ominous warning signs. Familiar.js Arkadiy Kukarkin – Easily Enter your favorite microgenre Witch House Bandnames into any search field.        
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| JumpBox Now Offers One-Click Installs On Amazon’s Free Usage Tier Posted: 14 Feb 2011 07:15 PM PST
Now JumpBox, a startup that offers ‘Open Source as a Service’, has launched a feature that makes this free usage tier accessible to just about anyone. The feature supports one-click installs for WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, and Joomla — you enter your Amazon secret key, create some JumpBox credentials, and you’re off and running. JumpBox benefits from getting exposed to new customers (who may also opt to install other apps at a premium) and Amazon benefits because these users may eventually hit the limits on the free usage tier and switch to paid plans. The good news for JumpBox is that this feature is now being promoted on the AWS free usage tier homepage (you can see the promotion widgets at right). However, I’d expect many of the people arriving at that site know how to install WordPress or Drupal on their own servers already. Also note that this isn’t the only service to provide one-click installs on cloud platforms — we’ve previously written about Standing Cloud that offers some similar functionality.
       
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| First AOL Q1 Luge Update Since HuffPo Acquisition: We’ve Got Work To Do (No Kidding) Posted: 14 Feb 2011 06:16 PM PST
It’s rare that we get access to insider information as AOL employees here at TechCrunch HQ, so we have to rely on our mad reporting skills and the strength of our inboxes in order to figure out the goings on over in Dulles and at 770 Broadway. We’ve received this “Winter Luge and HuffPost Quick Update” email multiple times today, but none through any legitimate AOL channels. So I guess this means we can take off our AOL hats and just repost it (yay pageviews!). In the email, AOL head honcho Tim Armstrong welcomes content maven Arianna Huffington to the AOL family with colorful exaggerated reference to the over 4000 articles written about the AOL/Huffington Post acquisition last week, apparently signifying an AOL comeback. The email goes on to explore how close we are to our very ambitious Winter Luge Q1 goals which are indeed very very ambitious. The prognosis? Not so close. We’ve got a lot of work to do AOL Lugers! There’s a lot of juicy stuff here, but for the sake of brevity let’s just take on our goal of double the pageviews to the AOL homescreen by March 31st. The email trumpets a 6% traffic increase of 50 Million homepage pageviews from December to January. Working backwards based on those numbers, the AOL Homepage got approximately 833 million views in December, 883 million views in January, and we’re aiming to hit around 1.66 billion monthly views in just two months. (I’m assuming these are internal AOL analytics since the Comscore numbers for the AOL Welcome Screen actually show a decrease in views.) Damn. Is this in any way possible to achieve? Well we could amp up IRL marketing, pick Huffington’s brain on maximizing search traffic and social while we wait about a month for The Huffington Post’s HSR to clear and work on redirection among all branded properties (Hi Josh). But even if we increased at rate of 10% a month, for the next six months, we still wouldn’t hit that number. Sprechen sie AOL Way? Full email below.
Image above from actual AOL Luge event.        
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| Apple Now The Most Valuable Tech Company By $100 Billion; Google Closing In On Microsoft Posted: 14 Feb 2011 05:56 PM PST
It’s hard to believe that it wasn’t even a year ago when I wrote the following post: What Happens When Apple Passes Microsoft In Value? Yes, When. It’s even harder to believe just how many people thought I was crazy for saying that — it happened just two months later! And while plenty seemed to think that the passing of the torch to Apple as the most valuable tech company would be short-lived, let’s look at where we are today. As of market close this afternoon, Apple is now a full $100 billion past Microsoft. Yes, Apple is the most valuable tech company in the world by $100 billion dollars. To put that in some perspective: the market cap of HP is $105 billion. Apple is now worth an HP more than every other tech company. When I wrote the initial post last March, Apple’s market cap was at $208 billion, while Microsoft stood at $261 billion. By the time Apple passed Microsoft in May, both had market caps around $227 billion. As of today, Apple’s market cap is now $330 billion while Microsoft’s is $228 billion. In these past 9 months, Apple has gained $100 billion in value. Microsoft? $1 billion. In fact, not only is it clear now that Microsoft will not be re-taking the crown as the most-valuable tech company any time soon, but they’re flirting with being knocked down to the number three — or even number four spot. In the past year, while Microsoft’s stock is down slightly, Google’s is up nearly $100-a-share. This has allowed the search giant to surpass the $200 billion market cap themselves. And they’re now just $28 billion away from Microsoft. To put it another way, Google is much closer to Microsoft in terms of market cap than Apple was when I wrote that post last year. Another killer quarter and Google may be able to take them down as well. Meanwhile, IBM is a little bit closer at $202 billion. Their stock is up nearly 40 points in the past year. They have a shot of passing Microsoft too. And just to pre-empt all the “market cap doesn’t mean anything” comments that are inevitable, time has proven that it may mean something. When Apple passed Microsoft last year, Microsoft was still comfortably ahead of Apple in terms of both revenue and profit. Wall Street didn’t care. Investors saw the writing on the wall. Sure enough, by October, Apple rocketed past Microsoft in revenue for the first time about two decades. This part quarter, Microsoft was able to hold a narrow edge in profit, but that is very likely to fall next quarter as well. Apple is the most valuable tech company for a very good reason. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, Apple is still a little over $90 billion away from becoming the overall most valuable public company in the world. Exxon’s market cap stands at $422 billion — and the stock, much like Apple’s, continues to be on a tear.        
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| OMG/JK: Where There Are Tablets, There’s Love Posted: 14 Feb 2011 05:19 PM PST There’s no better way to spend your Valentine’s Day than a new episode OMG/JK (I’ve been practicing my rhyming). So grab some chocolates, pull up a chair, and hold your laptop close as you sit back for this week’s show. This episode is all about tablets. From rumors about the iPad 2 (and 3!) to HP’s upcoming WebOS tablets, it’s been a big week. We also touch on the new relationship between Microsoft and Nokia, and how it might affect the smartphone market. Here are some posts relevant to this week’s show:
       
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| Angry Nerds: IBM’s Watson Finishes Night One Of Jeopardy Challenge Tied For First Place Posted: 14 Feb 2011 04:47 PM PST
       
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| Jack Ma Flies Thousands of Miles to Palo Alto, Still Doesn’t Want to See Carol Bartz Posted: 14 Feb 2011 04:11 PM PST
Ma was spotted dining with Taobao CEO Jonathan Luk and other Alibaba executives at Fuki Sushi in Palo Alto last night, and a spokesperson for the company confirmed they were in town for meetings. Another source close to the company, who requested anonymity, said Alibaba was here to meet with several big Silicon Valley companies about potential partnerships with Taobao– and that a meeting with Yahoo was specifically not on the agenda. Ma’s issues with Yahoo and desire to buy back Yahoo’s shares in Alibaba have been well documented. Also documented is Ma’s desire to explore other US partnerships, even though the one with Yahoo has turned sour. His ecommerce and epayment properties are so dominant in China that international expansion is the natural next step. A lot has changed since the last time Ma was in negotiations with Silicon Valley. Back then it was companies like Yahoo that were surging, while China seemed an uncertain gamble. Today, two of the five largest Internet companies are Chinese, and TaoBao and payments company Alipay are two of the hottest private assets on the global Web. As we saw with Tencent’s purchase of Riot Games this month, a decade after most Valley companies failed to do well in China, China is getting more aggressive about expanding in the US. Carol Bartz’ loss seems to be John Donahoe’s gain. eBay’s CEO Donahoe was cozying up to Ma in China last fall, appearing on stage at a conference together, and apparently swapping caricatures. Donahoe called Ma a good friend, and Ma said, “We have the same dream, the same purpose, face the same group of SME clients… This is the case today, and even more so tomorrow. I believe Alibaba team and Taobao team are always cooperating with the eBay team, and I think in the future we will cooperate more closely.” If you catch a sighting of the two, drop us a note at tips@techcrunch.com. [Update: Yahoo PR notes that Bartz is in Barcelona, which is interesting but seems to miss the point of the post. Alibaba has still made a point to come here looking for Valley partnerships and not meet with the one company with which it has a partnership. There are certainly other members of the board and management team who aren't in Barcelona, and considering Alibaba is one of the main forces propping up Yahoo's stock price, you'd think they'd be open to a meeting if Ma were interested. The bad blood between the two is well documented by this point. I've asked Yahoo PR for any sign that's changed. No word.]        
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| Experiments In Realtime News: The Eqentia Streams Posted: 14 Feb 2011 04:00 PM PST
When it comes to realtime news, the prevailing wisdom these days is to let your friends tell you what to read through Twitter or Facebook. Instead of editors, people are using these social stream sto filter their news, and a whole bunch of apps (like Flipboard) are tapping into that to present your social news feed in more appealing ways. But a Toronto startup called Eqentia is approaching the problem from a different angle. It indexes 100,000 articles a day across blogs and news sites, puts them through a semantic engine to categorize them into every topic imaginable, and only then does it look at how much social attention each article is getting. Social comes last, not first. What you get is a personal news page organized by topics and sub-topics that you want to follow (business, technology, iPad news, mobile web, cloud computing). Headlines can be sorted by time, social attention, or preferred sources. Eqentia is designed to create a competitive intelligence dashboard were you can create essentially an alerts page for specialized news about any micro-topic, but these also roll up into broader topics. Each topic page shows recent tweets about that topic in a sidebar widget. The news search is also pretty powerful because of all the implicit categorization and content mining that Eqentia does. Eqentia has been around a couple of years, but it recently cleaned up its design and launched a few new features, including a personal news stream that syncs with your Twitter favorites and Google Reader shared items. Any Tweet with a link that you favorite on Twitter will appear in your personal stream, along with starred and shared items in Google Reader. Eqentia also offers a browser bookmarklet that lets you start tracking news about topics simply by highlighting them in your browser page. If you make your personal stream public, others can follow it, opening up the service to social curation of the news. Some of the topic streams can be delivered to other news readers such as Flipboard if you don’t like its user interface. The site could still use some streamlining in terms of making it easy for people to jump in and start using it, but there are some powerful technologies under the hood.
       
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| I Just Androidified Myself. Droid’s Never Looked So Good. Posted: 14 Feb 2011 03:30 PM PST
Today Google released a fun new app called Androidify. It’s not exactly useful, but it’s a fun diversion: fire it up and you can choose from a variety of body types, outfits, and accessories to make your own custom Android robot (if you’ve ever created a Mii on Nintendo’s Wii, this should be pretty familiar). Once you’re done you can send the avatar to various social networks, change it to your phone’s wallpaper, a buddy’s contact icon and so on. The application was created by Google’s Creative Lab in tandem with Larva Labs. You can find the app right here on Android Market (remember, this is the new web version of the Market, so you can send the app directly to your phone). For bonus points, make one of these for your Valentine and film their reaction.
       
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eBay’s mobile reach in Europe is about to expand exponentially. The e-commerce giant has just announced it first ever mobile pre-load deal with Telefonica, which will equip most smartphones and feature phones sold by the Telefonica via its O2 brand with eBay's mobile app or a link to eBay's mobile page pre-loaded. 
As we heard at the 
Apple has taken its own sweet time adopting functions and features that many phone users now take for granted. Unfortunately, as 
Facebook wants to be everywhere. They’ve made this very clear. They want to be on your desktop, on your laptop, on your smartphone, on your 
My friends over at the WSJ have been knocking it out of the park lately, reporting 
Last October Amazon launched a feature that’s exciting for developers: a 
Did you all just see that? The 
By now you’re probably familiar with Google’s friendly green Android robot, who pops up at Android events and in various press material (a giant version also sits in front of the Android building on Google’s campus). And, if you’re like me, you’ve always wished there was a way to remake this robot in your own image — I know I often find myself doodling glasses and messy dark hair on the robot whenever I see it. But now there’s a better way.
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