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- (Founder Stories) Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley: “Stop Sketching, Start Building”
- RIM Finally Sees The Light. Unfortunately, It’s An Onrushing Train – Or Is It?
- Wow. Just… Wow: Facebook Hits Record $75 Billion Valuation On SecondMarket
- Judge Allows Sony’s Request For Identifying Information For Anyone Who Visited Hacker’s Sites
- WordPress.com DDoS Attacks Primarily From China, Possibly Politically Motivated
- IntoNow Hits A Million Shows Tagged In A Month. Two And A Half Men One Of The Shows #Winning
- A Day In The Life Of A Liveblogger
- Foursquare’s SXSW: Version 3.0, Party, Concert, 18 New Badges, And A Genius Amex Deal
- Google To Shut Down Gizmo5 On April 3
- There Will Be Karaoke: SXSW RVIP Goes East Coast Vs. West Coast Vs. Press Vs. Investors
- Instagrams Go Head-To-Head With Pic A Fight
- Twitter Will Shut Off GeoAPI To Developers
- Libya Finds New Way To Cut Off Internet
- Android Market Malware Has Users Begging Google To Remotely Disable Bad Apps
- TechCrunch Giveaway: Tickets to Sarah Lacy’s SF Book Launch Party #TechCrunch
- Keep Track Of All The Apps Launching At SXSW At AppShowcase
| (Founder Stories) Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley: “Stop Sketching, Start Building” Posted: 05 Mar 2011 08:35 AM PST All this week, we’ve been running segments of our Founder Stories interview with Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley (see links at bottom for past episodes, or watch the whole 45 minute interview below). In this final episode (video above), Crowley answers some rapid fire questions from host Chris Dixon. What was his best business decision ever? What does he like least about being a CEO? Who are his mentors? What are his favorite iPhone apps? And what advice does he have for other founders? You’ll have to watch the clip above to find out, but I will tell you his answer to the last question. “Forget about where you want to be and go out and build stuff. Dodgeball came from being bored at work, . . . things happen because you make them happen. Stop sketching, and start building.” Good advice. Crowley also talks about how he is still fascinated with “the idea of having the phone coming alive and telling you what to do,” and other startups he thinks are exciting like GroupMe and Beluga. This is the final installment of the Crowley interview. You can also watch Part I (on Foursquare’s origins), Part II (on building a company), and Part III (on inventing the future), or you can watch the entire unedited interview below. You can subscribe to Founder Stories on iTunes.        
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| RIM Finally Sees The Light. Unfortunately, It’s An Onrushing Train – Or Is It? Posted: 05 Mar 2011 06:11 AM PST
Strange things are afoot in my hometown of Waterloo, Canada, which doubles as Research In Motion’s headquarters. ShopSavvy says that someone there has been running their Android app — on BlackBerry devices. Separately, Bloomberg has reported that RIM’s forthcoming PlayBook tablet will run Android apps. A video from the Mobile World Congress allegedly shows a BlackBerry employee confirming “We’ll also support Android apps.” Their UK managing director refuses to comment on the subject. And if rumours of the mountain en route to Mohammed aren’t enough, there are also reports of Mohammed travelling to the mountain: BGR claims that RIM will soon release their prized BlackBerry Messenger as an Android/iOS app. Thus far it’s all just smoke and rumors, no confirmed fire … which is also how one could describe the PlayBook itself. RIM first announced the device back in September. My very first TechCrunch post in November was in part about how RIM should embrace Android, he said slightly smugly. Since then, Samsung has released the Galaxy Tab, Dell the Streak 7, and Motorola the Xoom; next week, the iPad 2 will emerge — and yet the PlayBook still has no firm ship date. But at least RIM have been busy on the BlackBerry front, right? I mean, in the last four months, they have announced or released … er … exactly zero new handsets. (They have, however, announced three new VaporBooks. I’m sorry, PlayBooks.) Perhaps they were focused on shoring up their inferior app-development tools? Ask this developer, whose caustic and hilarious rant about RIM’s extreme developer-unfriendliness went viral in the hacker community last week. RIM remains highly profitable, and its sales are still increasing—but the same was true of Nokia, which last month leapt off its burning platform into Microsoft’s icy embrace. RIM too seems on the verge of its come-to-Jesus moment. They have a little more time, because the corporate behemoths who have adopted BlackBeries will be loath to abandon them, but the simple truth is that Research in Motion’s products are not remotely as good as their competitors’. BlackBerries have an antediluvian OS, a bad browser, an inferior app ecosystem, and hardware and pricing that is at best on par with Apple and Android. They do have somewhat better email, messaging, and security – but who really cares about that? And before you answer “enterprises,” bear in mind that most of the Fortune 100 have already adopted the iPad. The PlayBook is beginning to look like RIM’s last, lone hope. It’s allegedly a terrific piece of hardware, running their sleek new QNX OS, and I think there’s a lot of room in the market for a good little tablet. The Streak 7 and Galaxy Tab aren’t it, but a PlayBook that runs Android apps would qualify — if it didn’t have to tether to BlackBerries. Unfortunately, that apparently remains RIM’s policy, even though it’s like chaining an Olympic swimmer to an anchor and telling her to win a medal. But undoing that horrible mistake still won’t save them. If RIM coerces their devices into supporting Android apps and also releases their superior email and messaging software to the Android Market, then they’re tacitly admitting that their App World is dead. After all, what developer would ever want to write a Blackberry-only app again? And apps are like Dune‘s spice; whoever controls a device’s apps controls its universe. That’s why the Android Market, unlike Android itself, is tightly controlled by Google. So let me speculate. Most people are suggesting that RIM will support Android apps via some sort of emulation mode. Some have arged that they should officially adopt Android, as Nokia considered. But there is one other possibility: might RIM be developing an entirely new handset OS which is a superset of Android? After all, Android is open source; anyone can fork it. RIM could build an Android-plus OS, running on the Dalvik virtual machine atop QNX, able to do everything Android does and offer security and messaging features that Android doesn’t. They couldn’t license Google’s Android apps or Android Market — but if RIM built their own Android marketplace, existing Android developers would surely copy their apps over en masse, and they could replace Google’s browser, maps, and email apps with ease. Again, this is pure speculation, but it could explain most of the strange rumors cited above; it might at long last give people a reason to buy a BlackBerry, other than “the IT department demands it”; and it would set the stage for a titanic struggle between RIM and Google for Android supremacy. Pass the popcorn, and don’t count RIM out yet. Maybe, just maybe, they’re about to get back in the game. Image credit: e27singapore/Flickr        
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| Wow. Just… Wow: Facebook Hits Record $75 Billion Valuation On SecondMarket Posted: 04 Mar 2011 06:53 PM PST
Sure enough, Facebook did hit a $75 billion valuation on SecondMarket this week, a new record. I thought my prediction might be a little too optimistic give that it was at a “mere” $70 billion a week ago. Shares were trading at $28 a share then, after rallying back from a few weeks of actually being down. But they jumped a full two dollars this week, to be trading at $30 a share. With about 2.5 billion shares outstanding, that’s trading at a $75 billion valuation. This blows by the $28.26 and $70.65 billion valuation record set in mid-January. And it puts the valuation a cool $10 billion past the $65 billion valuation that a General Atlantic investment (in private shares) will apparently give the social network. Below, find the full email sent out of the folks buying this stuff up:
       
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| Judge Allows Sony’s Request For Identifying Information For Anyone Who Visited Hacker’s Sites Posted: 04 Mar 2011 05:34 PM PST
The pretense for this wildly overreaching action is that Sony needs this information to prove the case should be tried in San Francisco, in federal court and close to Sony’s headquarters. Why? Because it’s in Sony’s terms of service. This after another judge noted previously that by Sony’s standards, “the entire universe would be subject to [her] jurisdiction.”        
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| WordPress.com DDoS Attacks Primarily From China, Possibly Politically Motivated Posted: 04 Mar 2011 04:50 PM PST
WordPress.com serves 18 million sites, many of them news sites like our own, which lead some to conjecture that the attacks had come from the Middle East, a region experiencing its own Internet issues at the moment. Not so says Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg, who tells me that 98% of the attacks over the past two days originated in China with a small percentage coming from Japan and Korea. According to Mullenweg one of the targeted sites was a Chinese-language site operating on WordPress.com which also appears to be blocked on Baidu, China’s major search engine. WordPress.com doesn’t know exactly why the site was targeted and won’t release the name until it does. Based on the extent of the attacks Mullenweg tells me that they appear to be politically motivated.
While Mullenweg tells me that DDoS attacks are fairly common at WordPress.com but its the strength of its infrastructure (distributed across three data centers in three cities) usually prevents anyone from noticing. The recent attacks have impacted not just WordPress.com sites, other servers in the same part of the network causing the outages. WordPress.com is collaborating with upstream providers to shift the attacks. Says Mullenweg, “Right now there are huge asymmetric risks on the internet because any bad actor, for a few tens of thousands of dollars, has the online equivalent of a dirty nuke and can bring even the largest sites to their knees and silence millions of voices.” WordPress.com isn’t the only one suffering from recent DDoS attacks, a slew of South Korean sites also took a hit during the same time period.        
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| IntoNow Hits A Million Shows Tagged In A Month. Two And A Half Men One Of The Shows #Winning Posted: 04 Mar 2011 04:50 PM PST
Just about a month ago, we wrote about IntoNow, a new service that allows you to tell your friends what television shows and movies you’re watching in realtime. But unlike other media “check-in” services, you do this simply by hitting a button and letting your phone listen to what you’re watching. It’s awesome. Really, really awesome. Others seem to agree, as today IntoNow is announcing that they’ve already hit a million shows/movies tagged in a month. They’re seeing an average of about a show tagged each second, with a peak of 17 tags a second during primetime hours, co-founder Adam Cahan says. But the most interesting thing so far about the service may be the data they’re collecting about how people are consuming media. As you can see in the charts above and below, the one million tags have already given IntoNow some good information. For example, 57 percent of users are watching shows time-shifted (meaning recorded and watched later or viewed on-demand). The things not time-shifted are generally news, sports, and events (all of which are obvious). But a ton of people also watch cooking show and reality shows not time-shifted either. On the other end of the spectrum, a ton of sci-fi viewing is time-shifted viewing. Read into that what you will about geeks versus regular folks. Of the IntoNow users, 79 percent are using it for television content versus 14 percent for movies. That shouldn’t be too surprising either though given that IntoNow only focuses on older movies for the time being. More interesting is that a full 7 percent of tags are used to tag commercials. Among TV shows, people seem to love sitcoms. And yes, Charlie Sheen’s former show Two and a Half Men made the cut for most popular shows — but Family Guy is tops overall. Given that rival Clicker was just acquired by CBS today, I asked Cahan for his thoughts on the current state of things. ”The space is definitely exciting/fast moving, and we’ve not seen the end of the combinations. There are some really big industries and companies being impacted. Device/mobile/web/tv are colliding around consumers shifting behaviors,” he says. Cahan also notes that Clicker founder Jim Lanzone will be a great fit for what CBS Interactive is trying to do.
       
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| A Day In The Life Of A Liveblogger Posted: 04 Mar 2011 04:21 PM PST
I hate liveblogging major events. It’s hard. It’s painfully frustrating, and lifespan-limitingly stressful. I also absolutely love it, and it’s one of my favorite parts of this job. It’s something that, from a technical stand point, was next to impossible to accomplish just years ago. It lets us transport our readers from their offices and living rooms to a spot right beside us in the packed auditorium, an experience that post-event recaps and standard news posts just can’t provide. Our liveblog of Apple’s iPad 2 event on Wednesday went well; in fact, the response was probably the most unanimously positive one I’ve seen to anything I’ve ever done here. We’ve received thousands of e-mails, tweets, and comments about it, many of which asked how it all works and what it’s like to do. Rather than respond to each one individually, I’ve put together this post. It is, as best as I can convey, a look at things from the other side. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>        
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| Foursquare’s SXSW: Version 3.0, Party, Concert, 18 New Badges, And A Genius Amex Deal Posted: 04 Mar 2011 03:49 PM PST
A couple weeks ago they gave a hint of what they had cooking: “NEW APP + NEW BADGES + PARTIES + CONCERT + MOAR". Now we know a little bit more. As you can see on this page, the plan is to launch the Foursquare 3.0 app, host a party on Saturday night, host a concert on Monday night, and launch 18 new badges to earn during the conference. But there really is more. Earlier we detailed the fun sponsorship of the RVIP Lounge — a karaoke bus that will travel around throughout the conference and will have a “Mayor Throne”. There will also be a four square (the actual schoolyard game) court they’re doing alongside Pepsi. But that’s kids stuff. The really big deal is the one they’ve signed with American Express. Yes, Foursquare can be tied to your credit card starting next week. The Wall Street Journal has the details of this partnership. There’s no other way to put it: it’s a genius maneuver by both sides. Here’s the basic gist: American Express cardholders will be able to tie their cards into their Foursquare accounts beginning next week. This will allow Foursquare users to get special offers from merchants simply by swiping their cards to pay for things in Austin. 60 local merchants will apparently be involved in the promotion. So what type of deals will Foursquare/Amex users get? The main ones will be “spend $5, save $5″ deals, WSJ reports. There will be other offers pushed out to customers via mobile devices as well. One thing that’s not a part of this partnership: checking-in. You won’t be able to swipe your credit card to check yourself in to a venue just yet, we hear. But eventually, that is a part of the plan as the program evolves. Also not a part of this partnership: money for Foursquare. This isn’t a revenue-generating program for them. Instead, it’s a test of a way to eventually make money. And if it works, there’s potentially a lot of money to be made down the road. Foursquare could become the loyalty layer on top of credit cards. That could be a win for credit card companies, for venues, and for Foursquare. Again, it’s genius.
       
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| Google To Shut Down Gizmo5 On April 3 Posted: 04 Mar 2011 03:03 PM PST
Since acquiring the startup, Google has integrated Gizmo5 technology into Gmail/Gtalk, which has allowed users to make phone calls directly from their Gmail inbox since August of last year. It’s a great feature — particularly if you’re using Google Voice — but it can’t do everything Gizmo5 can. For example, using a supported SIP application, Gizmo5 allows users to make/receive phone calls using their Wifi connections on their mobile phones. Google Voice still has yet to enable Wifi calls. Gizmo5 also offers more flexibility in terms of hardware setups. It hooks into SMB PBX systems, allowing businesses to tap into the service, and it also supports analog telephone adapters — you can hook a landline phone into the Gizmo5′s VoIP network using the appropriate adapter. And Gizmo5 offers desktop applications that users can leave open 24/7 without having to worry about keeping a browser tab open to receive calls. Google was also working on a desktop client for Google Voice based on Gizmo5 technology, but that project has been scrapped in favor of the Gmail/Google Talk browser plugin. Here’s one of the emails that Google is sending to users:
       
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| There Will Be Karaoke: SXSW RVIP Goes East Coast Vs. West Coast Vs. Press Vs. Investors Posted: 04 Mar 2011 02:26 PM PST
This year’s RVIP has attracted four big sponsors: Foursquare, Andreessen Horowitz, Get Satisfaction, and Wired. And each sponsor represents a faction at the conference that will be battling for respect, to the death… of their voices. East coast startups will be represented by Foursquare. West coast startups by Get Satisfaction. Investors by Andreessen Horowitz. And lastly, the press by Wired. When you board the RV this year, you’ll be asked to choose to side with one of those four teams. Performances “and the general ability to ‘bring it’” will earn points that go on the RVIP Leaderboard. These points will be dished out by the audience subjected to the singing in the RV. On Monday night, March 14, there will be a finale. There, the four sponsors will be represented by the following people:
As if that weren’t enough to get you on board, Get Satisfaction will have a “Wheel of Satisfaction” on the RV to help you pick songs and make drinks. Foursquare will be highlighting the mayor of the RV for all to see — and they’ll get priority pickups by the van. Best of all though, they’ll get access to the “Mayor’s Throne”. I’m assuming that’s not a toilet, but we’ll see. And apparently, Andreessen Horowitz is promising “magic carpet rides” — I have no idea what that means either, but it should be fun to watch! So if you’ll be in Austin next week, be on the look out for the RV. Apparently it will be “one million times more visually stunning than previous years,” we’re told. You’ll be able to follow the RVIP Lounge on Twitter to get location updates throughout SXSW. The awesomeness on wheels also made it to TED and AFI in the past year. It’s the brainchild of actress and musician Kestrin Pantera, product manager and startup founder Jonathan Grubb, and Walt Disney Imagineering CTO Scott Watson.
       
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| Instagrams Go Head-To-Head With Pic A Fight Posted: 04 Mar 2011 02:01 PM PST
Notifo co-founders Paul Stamatiou and Chad Etzel have built Pic A Fight, a combination of Facemash and Instagram which allows you to vote on the aesthetic value of Instagram photos in a side to side comparison. The concept behind Pic A Fight is super simple, just click on the pic you think is better. If you’d like to add or battle your own photos you can log in with Instagram and Pic A Fight will upload your pics and give you a profile, like this. To battle your friends’ photos just visit their profiles. Says Stamatiou on the inspiration behind the site, “I was thinking of cool ways to use the Instagram real-time API, and having a constantly updated pool of pictures competing against each other seemed like a fun idea. Doing it HotOrNot/FaceMash style seemed the easiest way to see it come to life.” Like Facemash, Pic A Fight uses the ELO ranking system for the pics and the highest scoring overall make the Top Pics page. In a little over four hours since launch the site has had 48,000 battles and 8300 Instagram pics loaded, with the most popular filter so far being X-Pro II. “Everyone was building websites that were just simple Instagram clients for the web. We wanted to make something more creative and entertaining,” says Stamatiou. The co-founders plan to hit up PicPlz for integration next.        
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| Twitter Will Shut Off GeoAPI To Developers Posted: 04 Mar 2011 01:43 PM PST
When Twitter bought Mixer Labs in December, 2009, it inherited the startup’s then-recently launched GeoAPI, which offered a platform for building geo apps. The GeoAPI combined a places database of 16 million businesses with a reverse-geo-coder and support for geo-coded Tweets, Flickr photos, and even an iPhone SDK. Twitter kept the GeoAPI going after the acquisition—but that ends at the end of March. According to a developer who used to build his product on the GeoAPI, Twitter is shutting it down for outside developers. It is too much of a hassle to maintain, apparently. Twitter will still use it internally for its own apps. (Note that this GeoAPI is not the same as Twitter’s more limited Geotagging API, which is still fully functional). So far no announcement on this. It’s going in the deadpool. I’ve reached out to Twitter for a comment. Of course, Twitter has no obligation to keep maintaining the API. But the shutdown may be taken by developers as yet another sign that Twitter is not to be relied upon, and doesn’t have their best interests at heart. Oh well, there still SimpleGeo and Factual. Update: Originally I reported that the GeoAPI was shut down yesterday but Twitter just got back to me and clarified that it will shut down on March 31. Twitter also says it already migrated most of the functionality over to the Twitter API, but the developer I spoke to decided to swap it out for a competing API because of the lack of support. If you are a geo developer, what do you think? Is Twitter API as good as the old GeoAPI or competing geo APIs? Enlighten us in comments. Here is the email Twitter sent to developers last December:
       
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| Libya Finds New Way To Cut Off Internet Posted: 04 Mar 2011 12:23 PM PST
Here we go again: After a six hour shutdown about two weeks ago, traffic monitors are once again reporting that Libya has lost internet connectivity, most notably that search queries to Google from Libya have flatlined starting around a day ago. Unlike the last time Libya went offline and the process used to shut down the connectivity in Egypt (where Internet service providers simply shut down their servers) someone has come up with a more technologically advanced way of taking the country offline this time. According to Rensys the routes in Libya are still up, but there is no data packet traffic on the still open routes as the traffic is “blackholed” right before it enters the Libyan netspace. “It’s like a post-apocalyptic scenario where the roads are there, there just isn’t any traffic,” Rensys’ James Cowie told IBT, “Every time I think that someone has a way to shut down the internet they come up with a new way.” From the Rensys blog:
Interestingly enough Libyan traffic to YouTube, a service popular with dissidents, had been increasing right before the shutdown according to Google. This shutdown comes ahead of planned protests in Tripoli calling for the ousting of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Image: Google Transparency Report        
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| Android Market Malware Has Users Begging Google To Remotely Disable Bad Apps Posted: 04 Mar 2011 10:35 AM PST
       
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| TechCrunch Giveaway: Tickets to Sarah Lacy’s SF Book Launch Party #TechCrunch Posted: 04 Mar 2011 10:01 AM PST
Michael Arrington promised an awesome party if her book, Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How The Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos, hit number one so that is exactly what we are going to go. The party will start at 6:00pm PST on Wednesday, March 9th at SWIG in San Fransisco. If you are one of our 5 winners, your ticket will include an open bar, lots of free food, and a signed copy of Sarah’s new book. If you want to join us, just do the following! 1) Fan our TechCrunch Facebook page: 2) Then do one of these two things: - Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TechCrunch hashtag) The contest will end tomorrow, March 5th at 7:30pm PST. Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will contact the winners this weekend with details. Anyone can enter, but please note this is a giveaway for tickets only, and does not include airfare. See you at the party! Photo by Adam Jackson        
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| Keep Track Of All The Apps Launching At SXSW At AppShowcase Posted: 04 Mar 2011 09:45 AM PST
The dedicated SWSW app store is powered by AppBistro’s AppStores.com, which launched as a a white label platform to create app stores on the fly. Appbistro launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, as a Facebook Page app marketplace. AppBistro says many of the apps on the AppShowcase have custom SXSW integrations, while others are specific to Austin. The startup is also asking for developers to submit their apps to be added to the AppShowcase here. And anyone can suggest an app to be included in the store. Current apps listed include SXSWGo, Lanyrd, and Yobongo.
       
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