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Friday, April 1, 2011

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Report: ‘Peak Bandwidth’ Threatens Global Economy Unless Decisive Action Taken

Posted: 01 Apr 2011 08:08 AM PDT

Sometimes humor is the best mechanism to explain an opaque topic. Public Knowledge, a group that concerns itself with defending consumer rights in "the emerging digital culture," has released a report today entitled "Peak Bandwidth." Keep in mind today’s date, is all I have to say. The report says that the "era of plentiful, low-cost bandwidth is approaching an end. The supply of bits, the raw material of our information economy, is rapidly dwindling… unless mitigation is orchestrated on a timely basis, the economic damage to the world economy will be dire and long-lasting." You hear that, we’re running out of bits!

The bandwidth crisis—and why else would the likes of AT&T have to impose bandwidth caps if we’re not in the middle of a crisis?—has been caused by hogs like "young people" and "cord-cutters." These people have placed an "unbearable strain on our bandwidth supplies," and in effect have clogged the pipes to the point where we now have to ration bandwidth.

Most ominously: "Once bandwidth is gone, it's gone. Used up bits are gone forever. They don't come back and can't be replaced."

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Evoz: Baby Monitoring 2.0 Comes Of Age

Posted: 01 Apr 2011 07:40 AM PDT

Very soon (as in: in the next few days), I’ll become a father for the first time. And of course, as every existing parent seems to know, babies cost money. One of those unbearable things young parents need to purchase without further ado, is a baby monitoring system.

Me and my wife already bought one, but while we were evaluating existing systems I couldn’t help but notice that even the more advanced ones on the market today seem little more than glorified walkie-talkies.

A couple of weeks ago, knowing that I would soon become a dad, Jyri Engestrom nudged me and said he had stumbled upon a fledgling company, Evoz, that set out to build a baby monitoring system for the always-connected generation, and that I should check it out.

A couple of emails with the startup in question later, yesterday I finally got a live demo from the company’s founder Avishai Shoham. The verdict? It’s freaking amazing.

Imagine if you had an iPhone or iPod touch to spare, and that you’d simply install it in a charger in your young child’s room like you would any baby monitor.

Now imagine that an always-on application installed on the device would let you call in from anywhere in the world to hear how your baby is sleeping (or exactly how hard he or she is crying, or if you’re lucky, laughing or playing). Imagine that you could also opt to receive ‘quiet’ alerts by SMS or email whenever your kid cries for longer than, say, 5 minutes, so you can give the babysitter a quick call to see what’s up after e.g. a meeting or dinner.

Imagine that the app also automatically collects data on the sleeping and crying behavior of your child, and that you could analyze that data to see if he or she matches the behavior of children of the same age. And that you could just as easily get in touch with a network of baby health experts or sleep consultants if you have any questions or concerns.

Evoz lets you do all that, and more. The company isn’t quite ready to launch yet, but intends to roll out its service more broadly in the next few months. Shoham tells me the company will eventually support multiple mobile platforms. Also in the works: a proprietary hardware unit so you don’t necessarily need a spare iOS or Android device to monitor your baby (prototypes are already in the wild, however, and you can see what it looks like in the image above).

Early adopters with young children (aged 18 months or less) that own at least 2 iOS devices (iPod touch, iPhone, iPad) and don’t mind testing out an unpolished product and provide feedback to the team can apply for early access to Evoz Monitors here.

Please note that you’re required to fit the above criteria to get in – only 20 fast responders will be allowed access to the private beta service.

Investors, take note: Evoz is in the midst of raising a first round of funding, Shoham says.

Agilyx Raises $22 Million To Turn Plastics (Back) Into Oil

Posted: 01 Apr 2011 07:19 AM PDT

A Portland area startup selling patented systems that turn plastic trash into synthetic crude oil, Agilyx, closed a $22 million series B round, the company revealed on Thursday. The systems (image below) look like the kind of equipment you’d see in a brewery.

Here’s how they work, according to the company website:

Plastic feedstock, a mix of everything from grocery bags to vehicle dashboards and computer monitor cases, are dropped by a crane into a sizable vessel, where they are indirectly heated until they turn into a liquid, and then a gas.

With a series of controlled pressure and temperature adjustments, the gases are pulled through pipes into a central, condensing chamber.

There, the gases cool off, and contaminants are siphoned away. The synthetic crude oil that remains is transferred into a tank. The company can transport these tanks full of synthetic crude, and sell it to oil refineries that make it into heating oil, diesel or gas and more.

The company’s chief executive, Chris Ulum, told TechCrunch that Agilyx sells the crude it generates, through off take deals with large refineries, on behalf of those who install their systems. His was the first company to strike this type of deal, he claims. (off take agreements are reminiscent of power purchase agreements that wind and solar industry players strike with large-scale utilities.) The company also helps prospective buyers to finance their systems.

Investors in the series B round for Agilyx included: Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, the company’s original backers, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) which led the round, along with Waste Management (NYSE: WM) and the investment affiliate of the global oil and gas company, Total S.A. (NYSE: TOT).

A senior vice president with Chrysalix, Brian Wawro, said Agilyx gave him tremendous hope, not just for a successful initial public offering, hopefully by the end of 2012, but also for a solution to burgeoning problems affiliated with plastic and e-waste, globally. He noted:

“Agilyx solves a huge problems on the waste side, and on the energy side.

We have all these plastics that don’t see a high rate of recycling, things like grocery plastics, shopping bags, dry cleaning bags, e-waste, auto shredder residual like dashboards and wiring from a crushed vehicle, and they’re in a single waste stream, most of the time. What you do with that? To dispose of contaminated [and mixed] plastics, now, costs about $400 or $500 a ton, to go to landfill.

Agilyx has a far more economic solution which is to not just dispose of this, but create a valuable end-use product from it — oil that is widely refinable. That’s a very attractive use of waste to everyone from municipalities, to plastic aggregators…

We’ve also talked about the possibilities of using the Agilyx system in some form — putting it on a barge — to deal with things like the Pacific Trash Vortex.”

Several major plastic gyres, or floating, gigantic masses of plastic— one in the Pacific is twice the size of Texas, according to National Geographic — pollute the ocean today.

The gyres, and plastic waste generally in the ocean harms wildlife in several ways. Animals may eat plastic particles, and can die from resulting digestive problems; they may get injuriously tangled in plastic waste; and they suffer from exposure to chemicals released by plastic waste that’s biodegraded in the water, namely BPA (bisphenol A) which disrupts their endocrine systems and negatively effects reproduction.

According to Project Kaisei, an environmental non-profit dedicated to raising awareness about waste in the ocean: “every year, over 300 million tons of plastic are produced, much of it for one-time, disposable use, and roughly 90% never makes it to be recycled.”

So far, all of Agilyx installations have been terrestrial. On land, the company faces a challenge in scaling to the mass market— it must obtain permits, state-by-state in the U.S., proving air emissions from its processes are safe. Agilyx obtained its first such permits in Oregon. Ulum said his company has four pending projects in California, and he expects at least the largest of these to be permitted soon, and operating in full by the end of 2011.

Other plastics waste to energy companies — like Polymer Energy, LLC in Minnesota, or Envion in Washington D.C. — face the same regulatory scrutiny.

Plastics to fuel companies also compete with, when they’re not supplementing the work of, more traditional recyclers, incinerators and land fill businesses, as well as companies that tout the benefits of plant-based plastics, which are not as easily processed and converted back into synthetic crude.

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M&A Activity Down 22 Percent in Q1, But IPOs And Acquisition Amounts On The Rise

Posted: 01 Apr 2011 05:33 AM PDT


DowJones Venture Source has released its quarterly data on venture-backed exists and its appears that M&A activity has dropped in Q1 2011 despite the momentum that venture-backed exits gained throughout 2010.

In the first quarter of 2011, 104 U.S.-based venture-backed companies achieved liquidity, netting $9.8 billion, according to VentureSource. That represents a 21% decrease in exits and a 17% increase in capital raised from the first quarter of 2010 when 131 exits raised $8.4 billion.

So why is M&A activity down? Jessica Canning, director of global research for Dow Jones VentureSource says that despite the fact that companies have plenty of cash on hand, acquirers may feel that rising valuations are making acquisitions more risky.

In the first quarter, corporate acquirers bought 91 companies for $8.9 billion, which is a a 22% drop in M&A activity from the same period last year when 116 acquisitions netted $7.4 billion. Despite the down economy, M&A activity was slightly higher than the first quarter of 2009 when 83 acquisitions raised $3.3 billion. Private equity firms spent $128 million to buy two venture-backed companies in the most recent quarter, down significantly from the same period last year when private equity firms bought seven companies for $260 million.

The median amount paid for a venture-backed company in the most recent quarter was $55 million, which is more than double the $21 million median in the same period last year. To achieve an M&A or buyout, venture-backed companies raised a median of $13 million in venture financing, which is 38% less than the same period last year, and took a median of 4.6 years to build their company, less time than the 5.1-year median in the first quarter of last year. The largest M&A deal in the first quarter belonged to Mountain View, Calif.-based Ardian, a developer of medical devices to treat hypertension, which was acquired by Medtronic for $800 million.

IPO activity is up says, Venture Source. Eleven venture-backed companies went public in the first quarter, raising $768 million, an increase in activity from the eight IPOs that raised $711 million during the same period last year. These include HomeAway, Boingo and others.

Healthcare companies have been driving IPO activity the last six months accounting for 45% of IPOs in the most recent quarter and 57% of IPOs in the fourth quarter of 2010.Currently, 45 U.S. venture-backed companies are in IPO registration. The largest IPO for a U.S.-based company was the $107 million offering by Englewood, Colo.-based Gevo, a provider of biobased alternatives to petroleum-based products.
The median amount of venture capital raised prior to an IPO dropped 44% to $87 million in the first quarter of 2011. The median amount of time it took a company to reach liquidity fell to 6.2 years from 9.2 years in same period last year.

Of course, IPO activity, in terms of both scale and amount, could be on the rise as tech companies like LinkedIn, Facebook, Groupon, Skype, Pandora and a number of other companies are expected to enter the public markets this year.



OfficeDrop Raises $1 Million For Digital Filing And Scanning Software

Posted: 01 Apr 2011 05:30 AM PDT

Digital filing and scanning software OfficeDrop has raised $1 million in angel funding led by White Owl Capital.

OfficeDrop, a finalist in Amazon’s startup challenge a few years back, offers a number of ways users can take paper documents and scan and manage these documents to be stored in the cloud. ScanDrop is a self-serve desktop scanning application for Windows and Macs. OfficeDrop also comes with a digital cloud filing system and OfficeDrop Paper to Go, an iPad application to manage, search and share documents from anywhere. Users can also use OfficeDrop’s sail-in document scanning service to converts paper into Text Searchable PDF.

The new funding will be used to support product development and marketing for the company's digital filing and scanning software. OfficeDrop has seen more than 6,000% growth in customers since evolving its model from a mail-in only service to a combination mail-in and self-service scan-to-cloud software.

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Pixily
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In Baffling Move, The Huffington Post Erects Paywall Solely For NYT Employees

Posted: 01 Apr 2011 04:35 AM PDT

In a move sure to irk at least two or three people who work for The New York Times, The Huffington Post (owned by AOL, our own masters in some degree of command) has put up a paywall that applies only to NYT employees.

In a message to affected potential readers of HuffPost content, founder Arianna Huffington explains that NYT employees can henceforth access only one article for free per month.

If they’d like to read more letters or view some slideshows of cute kittens, they can subscribe to one of the media company’s NYT Employee Digital Subscription Plans®.

According to people familiar with the matter, all people at the NYT building today who try to access The Huffington Post won’t be able to.

Dear New York Times Employee, thank you for visiting The Huffington Post!

We hope you've enjoyed your one free article this month.

As you may know, we are now charging New York Times employees for unlimited access to our content. You can come back next month for another free article or choose one of our NYT Employee Digital Subscription Plans ®.

In our most popular plan, Times employees can view the first 6 letters of each word at no charge (including slideshows of adorable kittens). After 6 letters, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber.

Subscribing is quick and easy.

Unfortunately for those interested in subscribing, the HuffPost’s payment server, curiously named April Fools, is currently unavailable.

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Facebook, Zuckerberg Sued For $1 Billion After Not Removing A Page Fast Enough

Posted: 01 Apr 2011 03:24 AM PDT

I took my sweet time to check if this was an April Fools joke to be put on our exhaustive 2011 list, but it appears to be as real as can be.

Larry Klayman, a renowned American activist, former Justice Department prosecutor, former U.S. Senate candidate and book author, says he has sued both Facebook and founder Mark Zuckerberg for over $1 billion after the social networking giant failed to remove a page calling for a third intifada against Israel’s Jewish population swiftly enough.

The suit was filed yesterday in Washington by Klayman, himself of Jewish origin. The complaint is embedded below.

Klayman, who founded controversial law firm Judicial Watch as well as political advocacy group Freedom Watch, alleges that Zuckerberg and Facebook willfully kept a page calling for a third Palestinian intifada against Jews online to “further their revenues and the net worth” of the company. The page, which was removed on March 29 because, according to Facebook, it indeed made "direct calls for violence" in violation of its policies.

On the page, Palestinians were urged to take to the streets after Friday prayers on May 15, 2011, and commence an uprising in the vein of the first two popular intifadas. “Judgment Day will be brought upon us only once the Muslims have killed all of the Jews,” read the call. The page reportedly garnered more than 340,000 fans.

The removal of the page, which according to Klayman was “begrudgingly” ordered after increased pressure was exerted by himself, the Israeli government and organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, did not stop him from filing suit against the company.

The activist argues that damage has already been done, and that he fears for his life since he’s been “called a Zionist publicly by radical Palestinians and other such Arabic interests” and is “thus a target of this call to kill Jews” along with other prominent public figures.

The complaint alleges assault and negligence, gross negligence and recklessness on Facebook’s part. It reserves the right to be amended into a class action suit and prays for damages in excess of $1 billion, plus an award of attorneys fees and costs.

Amusingly, Klayman bases part of his allegations on the fictional movie ‘The Social Network’:

“While Facebook has accomplished a lot of good, it can, as in this instance, be used for nefarious and evil purposes. Defendants Zuckerberg’s and Facebook’s callous and greedy actions in not taking down the page, but willfully allowing it to stay up for many days, has caused huge damage, for which they must be held accountable, so as to prevent this from ever happening again.

They must be not only enjoined but also hit in their purse, which is where they understand matters best. Apparently, the ethically compromised Zuckerberg has no conscience or sense of right or wrong, as depicted recently in the award winning film “Social Network.”

On the off chance that you still think this is a joke (and I’m honestly still a little in doubt myself), know that Klayman isn’t one to kid around when it comes to litigation.

As the founder and former Chairman of Judicial Watch, he attained notoriety through the initiation of 18 civil lawsuits against the Clinton Administration, and subsequently, an unsuccessful lawsuit against Vice-President Dick Cheney in order to obtain information about the White House’s energy task force.

Klayman’s targets have also included OPEC and Osama bin Laden. Most of his high profile lawsuits have been dismal failures, though.

Klayman also authored a book titled ‘WHORES: Why and How I Came to Fight the Establishment’ and regularly writes columns for conservative news site WorldNewsDaily.

Slate in a column titled Nut Watch once dubbed Klayman a “one-man litigation explosion” after word got out that, aside from suing the likes of Hillary Clinton, Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, the Ground Zero Mosque and the Federal Reserve and the Department of the Treasury, he once even filed a lawsuit against his own mother.

Request for comments were not immediately returned by either Facebook or mr. Klayman.


110331-Fbook-Complaint
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April Fools 2011: The Big List

Posted: 01 Apr 2011 12:02 AM PDT

Yes, folks, that’s right. That special, special time of year is upon us. It's April Fools 2011! We take April Fools pretty seriously around here, so we’ll be constantly updating this post with the best April Fools jokes and pranks the World Wide Interwebernets has to offer. All night and all day. As long as it takes. If you find a gem, please share it with us in the comments. Thank you in advance. So, without further ado, here is Aol HuffingtonCrunch’s big list of April Tomfoolery:

The April Foolings

An Airline Finally Offers Child-Free Flights

Ryanair beats most to the punch with an announcement that the Irish airline will be offering child-free flights beginning in October. “When it comes to children we all love our own but would clearly prefer to avoid other people's little monsters when travelling. While half our passengers would like us to divide our cabins up into 'adult' and 'family' areas it is not operationally possible due to our free seating policy, with optional priority boarding”, said Head of Communications Stephen McNamara.

Google Places Filed As Spam

TechCrunch reports that the internal war at Google continues, as Google Places is officially filed under “spam”, and removed from Google search. Google Chief Revenue Officer Nikesh Arora was even spotted on Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt’s yacht, Adsense. Marissa Mayer was even quotes as saying, “Screw the webspam team", and "It's not like people are going to start using Bing".

You Can Take Rosenblatt’s Life, But Not His Yacht

TechCrunch reports that Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt was none-too-happy about Mike revealing details about his yacht, Adsense. Maybe if he had enough sense not to call it Adsense…

Spotify Kills European Service To Go American

TechCrunch’s Paul Carr reports that everybody-not-living-in-America’s favourite music service, Spotify, is officially ceasing all international operations in an effort to fund the company’s American infiltration. That’ll teach ‘em. Sean Parker, one of the company's first US investors, told TechCrunch, “Europe isn't cool. You know what's cool? America."

Atlassian Launches Angry Nerds

Atlassian is launching its own take on hit Angry Birds….Angry Nerds. “What do you do when you have bugs in your code? Send in the Angry Nerds. Consider these issues…resolved.”

ThredUP Launches Clothing Swap For…Dad

Kids clothes and toys swap site thredUP will now be catering to dads with the launch of a paternity clothing swap. Previously the site had been focused exclusively on moms and kids, but is not moving into the Dads market.

Deals4Hipsters

A Groupon Clone, Deals For Hipsters launched as a daily deals site for the quintessential hipster. According to the site, “Nothing is more important to us than taking your money and spending it on material goods of our own. If you ever feel like Deals 4 Hipsters let you down, give us a call and we’ll think about sending you a nice thanks for trying card – simple as that.”

HuffPost Irks NYT

In a move sure to irk at least two or three people who work for The New York Times, The Huffington Post has erected a paywall that applies only to NYT employees.

YouTube Travels Back In Time

Following on its memorable April 1st pranks like, Rick Rolling its entire user base, for example, YouTube will be reverting its videos back to what it would have looked like around 1911, complete with grainy, sepia video footage, no audio tracks (save for piano accompaniment), and title cards in place of the site's normal comments.

Joel On Software Gets Pwned

Software developer Joel Spolsky rants about everything from software to other kinds of software on his blog, Joel On Software. This hilarious parody site, Joel On Coal, was created for April Fool’s Day.

Google Autocompleter

Google begins its April Fools celebration with this job posting for an “autocompleter”. “Every day people start typing more than a billion searches on Google and expect Google to predict what they are looking for. In order to do this at scale, we need your help … As a Google Autocompleter, you'll be expected to successfully guess a user's intention as he or she starts typing instantly. In a fraction of a second, you'll need to type in your prediction that will be added to the list of suggestions given by Google. Don't worry, after a few million predictions you'll grow the required reflexes.”

Gmail Motion

Google introduces Gmail Motion, which allows you to control Gmail with your body. Finally.

Groupon Now Owns April Fools Day

The uncertainty over April Fools Day’s intellectual trademark led Groupon to purchase the rights to everybody’s favorite joke day. You can read Groupon’s patent application here. Groupon has also issued cease and desist letters to all the major violators of its trademark. Watch out, you could be next.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s “People You May Know” contact recommendation engine has gotten a little cheeky on this Fools’ Day of April. LinkedIn has begun recommending people that clearly wouldn’t want to become my professional contacts. Though, Albert, if you’re reading this, feel free to peruse my resume. Some great examples of relativity.

uTest Launches Dating For Software Testers

uTest, a marketplace for software testing services, announced today that they will be launching a dating site, QAdate, for software testers. Even software testers gotta find love, man. Software pimpin’ ain’t easy.

Starbucks

Thank God Starbucks is finally putting its baristas on scooters, as the coffee giant today launches its “Mobile Pour” feature. Watch out, Zaarly. “We’ve even made ordering easy with our Mobile Pour app for your smartphone. Simply download it, allow it to pinpoint your location, select your coffee order and keep walking. Your fresh, hot Starbucks brew will be in your hands before you can say abra-arabica.” Abra-arabica! /gets coffee thrown in face

Google AdWords

This just in from Google AdWords: It seems that many newcomers to display advertising feel that they missed out on the glory days of advertising in the 2000s. So, Google is offering an opportunity to make up for lost time with old school ads in Display Ad Builder. Options include: "Punch the Monkey", "Click here for smileys", "LOLcat", "Dancing .gif", "Pop ups galore", and "Scratch off".

SoundCloud

Music distribution platform SoundCloud today announced it will be adding a righteous new feature that will allow you to customize your profile with some amazing background animations. Because, you see, it’s all about self-expression. You have to express yourself, and there’s no better way to do that than with SoundCloud’s killer new background customization features. Just try not to have a seizure.

Hulu

Hulu seems to have taken a page from YouTube’s April Fools Day Manual, bringing us back in time to when video killed the radio star — except in Hulu’s case we are transported to a time when modems were dial-up, hyperlinks were underlined, and images were grainy. I believe they called it “the mid-to-late nineties”. Whenever that was. All I remember is the bursting of some sort of bubble. Memory goes blank after that.

XKCD

The great XKCD webcomic is trying to give us a headache, and I think it’s working.

Funny or Die

Last year it was Bieber or Die, when the Thing They Call Bieber decided to buy the site and use it as he pleased. This year, Funny or Die has spawned the Rebecca Black version of the site, which is all Rebecca, all the time. Includes such hits as “Betwixt the Music: Rebecca Black”, “The Top 7 Days We So Excited For”, and “Which Seat Should I Take? W/ Rebecca Black”.

Toshiba

Toshiba, always at the forefront of gadgetry innovation, has announced the world’s first 3D monacle, for all you Monopoly-loving robot guys out there. “Infusing advanced 3D technology into such a small device wasn't easy. Two triangular polarizing lenses were melded in parallel and encased in black-plated tungsten carbide for a lightweight and durable construction. For comfort, the casing was molded into the shape of an average human eye hole, and draped in bonded leather.” Bonded leather?!? Alright!

Newslite’s Facebook Announcement

Newslite is breaking the news that Facebook will soon be rolling out wedding and baby filters, so that users can turn off the incessant chatter of their friends droning on endlessly about upcoming weddings as well as births and all baby-related content. The social network also expects to soon begin preventing all individuals from uploading pictures of their children to use as their profile images. With these updates rolling out, Facebook expects to hit the 1 billion user mark within weeks.

Google Helvetica

A fan of web-safe, browser-compatible fonts, then whatever you do, don’t type “helvetica” into Google search. No, just kidding. You should do it. See what happens. We dare you. It’s comical. Sans comical.

Qualcomm

Qualcomm recently announced its next mobile processor architecture for the Snapdragon family, Krait. Snapdragon is Qualcomm’s platform for smartphones, tablets, and smartbooks. Qualcomm today announced that it will be sending its employees on a “Way of The Dragon Retreat”. Then there’s something involving Kimodo dragons, it’s hard to say really. I do like Bruce Lee, but I’ll let the video explain.

Thumbs Up

Gadget developer Thumbs Up has a fantastic new product that it will be rolling out worldwide this fall — an iPhone controllable wifi Eagle powered by the Sun. Can you believe it? Simply download the free app and transform your machine into an all seeing remote control roving eye. The "RC Eagle i" will be fully compatible with national wifi networks so you can control your precarious bird of prey from hundreds of miles away. How does it stay aloft? Well, the sun of course. What were you gonna say? A battery? Pssh. Americans must stand and salute as this majestic gadget passes overhead. Unfortunately, though, it’s only available in the U.K., but writing your congressman/woman could change that.

A Few From The Vault

Google Goes Nuclear

TechCrunch reports that, as part of its effort to become more green (and to protect itself from outside threats), Google was stepping into nuclear power.

Facebook & Zynga

Jason Kincaid reports that Zynga and Facebook have teamed up to light a fire under digital dating by bringing gaming into the mix. Facebook will be offering a section of the site dedicated to helping users meet potential romantic partner, which will be filled with games designed to "synthesize romance and foster relationships through social gaming mechanics". No better way to get to know a potential mate than by using Farmville to break the ice.

Virgle

Google’s partnership with Virgin, Project Virgle, is one of the more clever April Fools day pranks in recent memory. Sergey, Larry, and Richard Branson announced plans to lead the human population in its colonization of Mars in an “Adventure of Many Lifetimes”. Check out the FAQ.

Spaghetti Trees

Ah, the classic Spaghetti tree hoax of 1957, when the BBC ran a 3-minute short, which told the tale of a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the elusive spaghetti tree. If only spaghetti grew on trees. Or iPads.

Fee Fighters

FeeFighters and the band FooFighters have joined forces, and raised $41 million to fight the evil foes of the world.

An Incubator For Incubators

In a surprising twist of events, Vator News is reporting that angel investors Paul Graham and Dave McClure are teaming up to launch 25 Incubators, a training course for angel investors, a.k.a an incubator for incubators.

GreyScale

A different take on recently launched and well-backed Color, ShopSavvy has launched GreyScale, which allows people who spend most of their time alone to capture and have real-time access to monochromatic photos and videos of themselves — created by themselves, for themselves

Google Friendship

While we know that Google is making a big push into social of late, it appears that the search giant’s Facebook-killer has just launched—Google Friendship. According to the landing page, Google Friendship allows users to discover the new Social Network, Share updates, photos, videos, and more, and Start conversations about the things you find interesting.

Wolfram/Alpha Becomes BieberBeta

Now that computational search engine Wolfram/Alpha is a little older, it’s time to shed the alpha and change its name and logo. hence—BieberBeta.

Google Body Browser

Via a new Labs app called Body Browser, Google is now allowing you to access an interactive view of the insides of a body….of a cow.

ReadWriteWeb

Fellow tech blog ReadWriteWeb has announced a cash infusion of $14 million, from OZJ Investments, a subsidiary of Ozark Jimmy’s Global Enterprises Holding Company. According to the announcement, “OZJ made its bones by pioneering the development and sales of mesquite-flavored Japanese-style toilet bacon In 25-, 50- and 150-foot family spools.”

CollabVille

From Box.net, CollabVille is the latest in social gaming for the enterprise. CollabVille is a best-of-breed GaaS solution with baked-in, transformative, web2.0 collaboration tools.

Angry Birds Pork Rings

Another chachki to add to the Angry Birds family. Angry Birds Pork Rinds are on sale, courtesy of ThinkGeek. From the description, Angry Birds Pork Rinds are the ultimate in high protein snacking. Since the only other green meat we’ve encountered has been a breakfast meat paired with green eggs, we’re calling these “The Other Green Meat.” Much like green ham, you can eat Angry Birds Pork Rinds here or there. You can eat them anywhere. You can eat them with Red Leader. You can eat them from a bird feeder. You can eat them on a date. You can eat them on a Shirt Plate!

Google’s PigLatin Voice Search

Google is bringing Pig Latin to Voice Search! From the blog post: Our Pig Latin Voice Search is even more fun than our other languages, because when you speak in Pig Latin, our speech recognizer not only recognizes your piggy speech but also translates it automagically to normal English and does a Google search.

Facebook Terminated Corporate Development Employee Over Insider Trading Scandal

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 09:18 PM PDT

Facebook corporate development manager Michael Brown (pictured left in happier days) recently and abruptly left Facebook, and the company then hired a senior Google employee to replace him. It was a curious departure and the chatter around Silicon Valley was that there was a lot more to the story.

And in fact there is. Via a scandal that could have far reaching consequences by bringing even more SEC scrutiny onto rampant secondary trading in non-public startups like Facebook and Twitter.

Brown, multiple sources have confirmed, purchased Facebook stock on secondary markets (like those occurring weekly on SecondMarket), which Facebook considers insider trading and grounds for immediate termination. Sources say this is well communicated throughout the company. It’s unclear how egregious the trade may have been. We’ve heard the trade was related to knowledge of the Goldman Sachs investment that value the company at $50 billion earlier this year, and we’ve heard from others closer to the situation that it was just a naive mistake and Brown has paid the price and moved on. One source says the trades were made last September, well before the Goldman deal was in the works. Either way, Facebook took it seriously and no doubt the SEC would too.

In a public company this would almost certainly violate a number of federal laws. However, say sources, the fact that Facebook is not (technically) a publicly traded company means those laws don’t apply. His actions did violate Facebook’s own insider trading policies, say sources, and he was terminated by Facebook for those violations.

Facebook would not comment on this story, other than to say “we don’t comment on personnel matters.” We also spoke with Michael Brown’s attorney, Edward Swanson, who confirmed that he was representing Brown but wouldn’t comment further.

The size of the trades was relatively small, we’ve heard. But the consequences to Silicon Valley’s newfound love of free-wheeling unregulated secondary market trades may be much larger.

Update: Another source with knowledge of the situation says that Brown purchased the shares in September 2010, well prior to any discussions with Goldman Sachs. His termination, says this source, was for violations of Facebook’s insider trading policies that prohibited the trade(s) themselves, and had nothing to do with the Goldman Sachs transaction. We’re trying to verify this, right now we have conflicting stories from sources. We’ve edited the third paragraph above to include this side of the story.

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NYC Announces BigApps Winners Roadify, Sportaneous, And DontEat.at

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 09:17 PM PDT

New York City announced the winners of its second BiggApps competition tonight. BiggApps is a way to get developers to use city and government data to create useful apps for citizens and visitors to New York City. The prize money was doubled to $40,000 split up among 14 winning apps.

The first prize went to Roadify, an iPhone app that crowdsources information about public transport and parking spots. Users can give or get parking spots, realtime updates about buses and subways, or transit schedules. The parking finder is genius. It shows the spot using GPS on a map. I think everyone who has ever tried to park in New York City has dreamt of an app like this. Now someone actually built it.

Sportaneous is a geo-location app (iTunes link) for pick-up games that is tied into a database of parks, basketball courts, and other sports facilities throughout the city. You can see proposed games near you, sign up for one, and then get notified when the minimum number of players have been reached. And, of course, there are game mechanics rewarding people who play at certain courts or soccer fields the most.

Third place went to Parking Finder, another parking app that maps out parking garages and metered parking spots throughout the city. One of my favorites, however, which won an honorable mention, is DontEat.at, a simple mashup of Foursquare and the city’s Health Department inspection results. Anytime you check into a restaurant that scores above a certain threshold for “serious and persistent violations,” you will get a text message warning you, “Don’t Eat at” that restaurant. Another clever one is Who Is My Landlord?

Mark Cuban Teams With Qualcomm To Bring Augmented Reality To Mavericks Tickets

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 09:10 PM PDT

Thanks to the influence of owner and tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks season ticket holders will be able to enjoy a touch of the technological when claiming their 2011 playoff tickets. The Mavericks have teamed with Qualcomm to add augmented reality to this year’s playoff tickets.

Augmented Reality — or “AR” for those “in the know” — refers to a display in which simulated imagery or graphics are superimposed onto a view of the real world. In the case of these basketball tickets from the future, viewing on your Android will allow you to play an interactive game.

Single-game tickets for the first two Mavericks home games of the first round of the 2011 NBA Playoffs will go on sale April 2nd. Fans that purchase single-game tickets will receive a futuristic, commemorative 2011 Mavs Playoff ticket, and game-day tickets and commemorative tickets will go live when the playoffs begin on April 16th.

How does it work? Get your ticket and take out your Android phone. (This season the tickets will only work with Android, but Cuban said that he hopes to expand in future seasons.) Go to the Android Marketplace and download the “Mavs AR” app. Launch the app, point your phone at the front of the ticket, and voila! You’ll be able to play an interactive mobile game, featuring Mavs’ stars Dirk Nowitzki, Jason Kidd and Jason Terry. You can learn more about the tickets out here.

We’re glad to see Cuban bringing AR to the sports arena, but when the Mavericks launch AR-capable tickets that offer some sort of practical application, like, say, Google Goggles or Word Lens, then we’ll really be clamoring for a Nowitzki jersey.

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‘Know Your Meme’ On What It’s Like To Be An Internet Folklorist

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 09:06 PM PDT

The website and show “Know Your Meme” were swallowed up this week by ICanHasCheezburger networks in a seven figure deal, proving once again that Internet memes are serious business. In light of this news, the Know Your Meme crew, Internet folklorists Elspeth Rountree, Kenyatta Cheese, Jamie Wilkinson, Patrick Davison and Mike Rugnetta actually performed an episode of their heralded show live on stage today at Web 2.0 Expo.

The group spoke in turns and seemed to have rehearsed (just like on their show) when describing the process of creating and documenting what many people consider to be “worthless” Internet culture. They likened themselves to music ethnographer Alan Lomax, who according to them was once told as a boy to burn a transcription of cowboy songs by a teacher because they were useless. Lomax later ended up chronicling the songs and lives of artists Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Muddy Waters.

Key takeaways:

“In digital spaces the tool for communication and the tool for documentation are the same thing, the computer.”

“We are in a constant state of lightweight pervasive self-documentation and media creation.”

“The problem of too little data is nothing compared a slightly newer one, too much data.”

“Good internet culture leaves digital detritus, tweets, likes, comments, retweets, reblogs, news articles, and even the occasional appearance on national television (THE HOLY GRAIL).”

“Culture isn’t just valuable when you can stuff it full of DRM and sell it.”

“Throughout history humanity has struggled to be the first to do meaningless activities.”

Those interested in learning more can support the Know Your Meme Kickstarter book project here.

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Play Him Off, Flugelhorn Feline: YouTube Time Travels To 1911

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 09:00 PM PDT


Head to YouTube after 4AM local time and you’ll notice that it looks a little old fashioned — and not in a 1999 blinking construction sign sort of way.

YouTube is reverting back to what it would have looked like had it been around in 1911, complete with grainy, sepia video footage, no audio tracks (save for piano accompaniment), and title cards in place of the site’s normal comments. Yes, it’s time for April Fools, and the world’s largest video portal is ringing it in once with some video player trickery — a tradition it started in 2008 after RickRolling all of its users.

YouTube has accompanied the gag with a blog post from President Taft, and it’s also put together some 1911-ified memes, featuring the ancestors of Annoying Orange and a certain musically-inclined feline. Even some of the ads are old fashioned.

Earlier today YouTube invited me down to their headquarters in San Bruno to talk to some of the team members who put this year’s trick together so that we could get some of the backstory.

YouTube says that, as with last year’s gag, the 1911 idea was submitted to a system called Moderator and then voted upon by other YouTubers. Once the idea was chosen, it took a whopping 14 employees to put it together (alright, to be fair, YouTube says the large team size can be attributed to the fact that a ton of people just wanted to participate).

The video effects, which include a grain filter and sepia coloring, are being done client-side using the same technology as YouTube uses for its 3D video player (interesting sidenote: last year’s ASCII video trick relied on an older version of the 3D video player — this one uses the new one).

The team ran into few interesting hurdles during the project. Initially, they wanted to have all of the 1911-ified videos play at double speed by adjusting the timestamp in video frame headers. Unfortunately this didn’t make the final cut because the effect was too taxing on CPUs (Macs, in particular, had difficulty with it because of Flash’s poor performance on OS X).

The team also wanted to change the thumbnails presented alongside each video to sepia, but this also proved challenging because there isn’t an easy way to do it crossplatform with CSS3. However, it does work for one browser: Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, and 9 all have a special CSS property that allow YouTube to introduce this effect on thumbnails. As one YouTube team member put it, this is one of the first times a YouTube feature has actually worked better in IE.

There’s also some neat technology related to the meme videos. YouTube is experimenting with a new system that can identify “interesting frames” for its thumbnails — these typically consist of frames without any blur, and may contain faces or other interesting content. The technology is still a work in progress, but YouTube used it to generate the thumbnails for each meme video (it didn’t work well for one of them — the team hand selected the thumb for the buggy video).

Oh, and the YouTube team dropped one other hint: if you look at the 1911 videos, you’ll notice that they include the parameter &vintage=1911. Turns out there are a few other years that also work, so try experimenting.


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Video Curation Is Growing Up, ShortForm Hits One Million Visitors

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 06:56 PM PDT

With 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, the Google-owned video behemoth would be the second largest search engine were it standalone site. Web video has become a powerful medium. But, I think it’s also fair to say that this powerful medium is in serious need of curation. What if you’re just looking for a quick laugh, a short video, and don’t want to wade through billions of videos — what if you want to create your own, personally curated streaming video channel? Hmmm? Thankfully, content curation has come to video: ShortForm shows it’s here to stay.

The San Francisco-based startup allows users to create personalized channels of web video content, easily pulling clips from YouTube and other video sites. You can play videos back-to-back to create a stream of video, not unlike the TV viewing experience. Creating custom channels is simple, and I would say the UI is more user-friendly (or at least more attractive) than that of YouTube.

ShortForm curates its own videos, but the real focus is in encouraging its users to become VJs (video jockeys), curating their own channels. And with the recent addition of an embed-able widget, publishers can embed their own video player and curated channel lineups on their site. This means that the channels you create on ShortForm are available anywhere. It’s these kind of additions that pushed the startup past the one million users mark.

So ShortForm has all these visitors, but how is it going to make money? The startup is planning to place interstitial ads between videos. The Interstitial ads will be in the camp of video promotions that feel more like content and are fun to watch, ShortForm CEO Nader Ghaffari said, and they’ll be targeted based on channel context, so sports channels will get sports related video promotions. The cool part, though, is that even though the interstitial ad model will be rearing its annoying head, the startup plans to share its ad revenue with its VJs. After all, it’s the VJs who create the channels.

“When it comes to mixing the world’s videos into channels, we want our VJs to have all the tools at their disposal to make VJ-ing channels fun and easy”, Ghaffari told me. “We are integrating with Vimeo in the coming weeks, for example, so our VJs can mix YouTube and Vimeo videos, and soon we’ll be adding new features for VJs to further personalize their channels”.

ShortForm also has a leaderboard that lets VJs see how their channels are doing relative to other VJs, and viewers can scan it to find channels of interest to subscribe to. ShortForm also plans to provide VJs with more social feedback on their channels, like who has watched, shared, liked, and subscribed, for example, and VJs will be able to add commentary into their channels.

But, as you are probably readying your comment for the comment section, I should say that ShortForm isn't the only video curation startup in the game. VodPod lets users share collect and share videos with their friends and Magnify.net allows website publishers to make video channels for their sites. ShortForm differs from its competitors in that it, unlike VodPod, it enables back-to-back streaming, and, unlike Magnify, is focused on the consumer rather than enterprise.

The startup is also teaming up with CollegeHumor (one of my favorites) this week to launch a best video contest on Facebook, which will allow users to watch and vote for their favorite videos on CollegeHumor. Once a vote has been registered, a leaderboard can be accessed that shows the leading vote-getters. Check it out.

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Tech CEO Approval Ratings: Schmidt Goes Out On A High, Donahoe Climbs, Bartz Falls

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 06:25 PM PDT

A survey taken over the last year by Glassdoor, a jobs and career community that allows users to anonymously share an inside look at jobs and companies, confirms that Eric Schmidt looks better when he’s on his way out. As the Google big whig prepares to step down from a decade of service as chief exec, his employee approval rating is at an all time high.

On the flip side of the popularity coin, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz is seeing her honeymoon period come to a close. In what is likely unsurprising news, among tech CEOs, Bartz saw the biggest decline in her approval rating in the past year, compared to the 12 months prior. Between March 2009 and March 2010, she held a 77 percent approval rating among her employees, whereas compared to the following year, her approval rating dropped to 50 percent. Granted, this is still 16 percent higher than that of her predecessor, Jerry Yang. Yang had a 2008 George Bush-like approval rating of 34 percent when he stepped down as CEO.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer saw the second biggest decline among the 12 CEOs evaluated. During March 2009 and March 2010, he held an average 46 percent approval rating, before dropping to 40 percent. Maybe IE9 will be enough to right a foundering ship?

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Oracle’s Larry Ellison both dropped four points during the same period to 83 percent and 73 percent, respectively, while eBay’s John Donahoe went on a hot streak. Between March 2009 and March 2010, the eBay CEO held a 24 percent approval rating among employees, whereas between March 2010 and March 2011, he held a 46 percent approval rating. Go Johnny go.

Lastly, always worth noting is that Apple Man Steve Jobs remains as popular as ever, though his approval rating did drop from 98 percent to 95 percent. I’m sure when the iPhone 5 comes out, he’ll be right back on top.

As to how Glassdoor CEO approval ratings are calculated, the site takes the pulse of a company’s employees similar to the way in which presidential approval ratings are tallied. Employees are simply asked, “Do you approve of the way your CEO is leading the company?”

TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde? 110 percent approval rating. And Aol CEO Tim Armstrong, he’s not too shabby himself.

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+Like Browser Extension Pretty Much Eliminates The Need For Google +1

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 04:43 PM PDT

Google launched the +1 feature of its social layer yesterday and if you’re like most tech journalists you probably likened the move to attaching a Facebook Like button to Google search results.

Well now someone has gone and done exactly that, no joke. Meet +Like, a Firefox, Safari and Chrome extension that lets you see how many people have liked a specific Google search result on Facebook as well as which of your Facebook Friends have recommended a specific piece of content, whether or not that action took place on Google search.

When you “like” something on +Like it gets posted on Facebook as well so you can share content you’re into with your social graph, sort of like what Google is trying to attempt with its Google Profile revamp and +1.

Said creator Koby Menachemi, “We built this extension after reading about +1 on TC . We couldn’t understand why [it's] not just putting the two things together (Google searches + Facebook’s Likes).” It took Menachemi and co-founder Shmueli Ahdut 3-4 hours using their own Crossrider framework to make the cross-browser extension.

Now Google +1 has key advantage over Google +Like in that you can also use +1 to like Google ads (and presumably monetize them). But seriously if I was Google, +Like would have me shaking in my boots.

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Spotify Announcing US Launch; Closing European Service To Fund It

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 04:10 PM PDT

(Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on TechCrunch Europe)

I’ve been more skeptical than most about Spotify's promise to launch in the US, but it looks like Europe’s favourite music service is ready to make good on all of its hype.

We’re hearing from multiple sources today that licensing deals are finally in place with major US record labels and the company’s Valley investors are ready to provide the additional cash needed to pay for costly music licenses. Absent any last minute hiccups, the company’s US service is ready to go live as early as next week.

The catch? Those same sources tell us that in order to finance the cost of a US launch, Valley investors have demanded the company shut down its European service, effective noon on Friday (GMT). The brand new ‘Spotify USA‘ — unavailable to users in Europe — will launch on Monday morning.

Read More…

Richard Rosenblatt: Seriously, Leave My Yacht Out Of This

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 03:23 PM PDT

Earlier this afternoon, Mike posted an exclusive story about an internal war raging within Google.

In the post he mentioned that Google revenue chief Nikesh Arora had recently returned from a two week jaunt in the Caribbean with Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt aboard Rosenblatt’s yacht, ‘The Adsense‘.

A few minutes after the post went live, Rosenblatt called the TechCrunch office and left a voicemail. Boy is he pissed. Not at any of the other details of the story — which he doesn’t deny — but about Mike revealing details of his yacht.

We understand that, in these piracy-infested times, the super-rich are rightly protective of their yachts — but come on dude, it’s called ‘The Adsense‘. That’s news!

Voicemail below.

Update:

Movie Studios Approve $30 Rental Plan, Theater Owners Mightily Upset

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 03:00 PM PDT

It must be an absolute nightmare being a Hollywood executive in 2011. Four big studios (20th Century Fox, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros.) have announced plans to introduce a premium video-on-demand service, to debut on DirecTV next month as "Home Premiere," that will screen movies a mere 60 days after their theatrical debut. Renting such a movie will set you back $30. And if you think you’re angry about that, just imagine how theater owners must feel.

AllThingsD already has a scenario where the $30 price tag probably isn’t as high as you might initially think, particularly if you’re trying to have a "mommy and daddy need to go to the movies alone for once" night. Once you pay for a baby-sitter, parking, movie tickets, a little popcorn and maybe a soda you’re well past the $30 barrier.

The studios made the announcement at an industry convention in Las Vegas. Oh: they never bothered to tell movie theater owners about this ahead of the big announcement.

Read More

Google Inadvertently Classifies Google Places As A “Content Farm” And Removes From Search Index

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 02:09 PM PDT

Power struggles within Google’s executive team, which have been brewing since the announcement of long time CEO Eric Schmidt’s departure, are apparently bubbling up to the surface.

Case in point: In an extraordinary move to illustrate its independence, say sources, the Google webspam team actually classified Google Places as spam and a content farm, and temporarily removed it from search results.

Rewind to February 24, when Google announced major revisions to its search algorithms to reduce the amount of “content farm” and other low quality content appearing in Google search results. Google specifically targeted “sites that copy others' content and sites with low levels of original content.” See for example, a blog post by Matt Cutts, who leads Google’s webspam team, here.

The changes were targeted at the huge content farms gaining notoriety on the Internet – Demand Media, Yahoo (via Associated Content), Huffington Post, etc. Google was just settling in to the changes when those sites fired back via even more complicated SEO ploys, say sources. And then Google made yet more changes to the way they classify spam and other low value sites.

That’s when everything fell apart.

The Google webspam team has made extraordinary efforts to explain that they are completely independent of other parts of Google. The fact that most content farms generate the large majority of their revenue from Google Adsense ads placed around their content has been a problem for Google. Cutts has been unequivocal on Google’s policy: “Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google” he said back in January on the official Google blog.

That has angered Google revenue chief Nikesh Arora, who has reportedly lashed out at the webspam team privately at various sales events for targeting some of Google’s most valuable partners. Tellingly, Arora recently returned back from a two week jaunt in the Caribbean with Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, reported TMZ, where the two spent time on Rosenblatt’s new $40 million megayacht pictured left and called (I’m not kidding), The Adsense. Demand Media, worth around $2 billion, generates approximately 100% of its revenues from low quality content wrapped in Google Adsense ads

And now Cutts has earned the ire of another longtime Google exec, Marissa Mayer. Mayer controls Google Places, a service that gives information about local businesses and aggregates reviews from sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, among other properties. Google Places, like many other Google properties, automatically show at the top of search results. The content aggregated by Places from third party sites is found, if at all, much lower in results.

Google’s new algorithm changes automatically classified Google Places as spam, say sources inside Google, and for a few hours most Google Places results were inadvertently stripped from Google search results.

The fact that many Place pages only contain content scraped from third party sites and little or no original content was a key factor in the automatic change, say sources. This has been a source of constant tension between Google and the sites they scrape. See, for example, the drama between Google and Yelp last year as Yelp content on Google Places was purged and then re-added.

Place pages were quickly restored to Google search results over loud objections from Cutts and the webspam team.

Cutts refused to comment specifically on this story, although he did say in an email exchange that Google absolutely does not use humans in determining search results and that the algorithms make ranking decisions based on a proprietary blend of a variety of signals, such as how much revenue Google generates from the results. “If Google were to determine that Google properties were not providing high quality results, it would not matter whether or not those Google properties were displaying Google ads,” he said. “It wouldn’t matter for what?” I replied, “I’m not sure you actually said anything.” He has not responded to that last inquiry.

Mayer, for her part, was even less forthcoming. In an off the record phone conversation she said “Screw the webspam team,” and “It’s not like people are going to start using Bing.”

Update: Rosenblatt responds to yacht issue.

Facebook Now Has 250 Million Mobile Users (And A New Unified Mobile Website To Match)

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 02:04 PM PDT

For years now, Facebook has offered quite a few ways to access the site from mobile devices, and they’ve proven immensely popular. In February 2010 the site had 100 million mobile users per month — today it’s announcing that it’s up to 250 million. To coincide with the growth stats, Facebook has some other news to announce about mobile.

We hear most often about Facebook’s native applications available for iPhone, Android, WebOS, and other app platforms, but a significant majority of mobile users actually access the site from the web. And up until now Facebook’s web setup has been a bit complicated: users on smartphones like Android and iPhones have been directed to touch.facebook.com, which is optimized for large touchscreens. And users accessing the site from a featurephones (and there are a lot of them) would be directed to the more plain-looking m.facebook.com. Today, that’s changing: Facebook is merging touch.facebook.com and m.facebook.com into the same site.

But don’t worry — you touchscreen users aren’t about to be downgraded to the other version. Facebook Head of Mobile Products Erick Tseng explains that up until now having two versions of Facebook’s mobile website has led to issues, because the site’s engineers would have to rebuild the same features twice, leading the two sites to rarely reach feature parity. Now Facebook has launched a new framework based on XHP, Javelin, and WURFL that uses the same underlying codebase, while tweaking UI elements on the fly depending on what device you’re accessing the site from.

In other words, Facebook’s engineers only have to implement a feature once on their backend, and if your phone supports it, it’ll show up. In addition to paying attention to a phone’s hardware capabilities (if your phone doesn’t support location, you wont’ be able to use Places), Facebook is also optimizing graphics on the fly — you can see three different versions of the Share button in the graphic below.

The new site started rolling out last night, and will be live for everyone in the next few weeks.


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GameStop Acquires Game Streaming Startup Spawn Labs And Distribution Platform Impulse

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 02:04 PM PDT

Video game and software retailer Gamestop has acquired TechCrunch50 company Spawn Labs, a startup that develops game streaming technology. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In addition, GameStop also announced the acquisition of game distribution platform Impulse, which is a division of software company Stardock.

Spawn Labs launched in 2009 as a Slingbox for video games. Via, Spawn Labs appliance and computers apps transmit HD-quality (720p) content over the Internet so that players can use the peer-to-peer game streaming service to play games simultaneously.

The Spawn Labs team will work closely with GameStop's existing R&D group to further develop the product, according to a release. Once the Spawn Labs integration and testing on a new consumer interface is complete, users will have immediate access to a wide selection of high-definition video games on demand on any Internet-enabled device.

Impulse’s platform allows users to access to a library of more than 1,100 games to be downloaded. Impulse also provides content publishers DRM and copy protection tools and allows developers to enable achievements, account management, friend lists, chat, multiplayer lobbies, and cloud storage within their games. GameStop says that it will maintain Impulse as a business and will integrate the platform with its own site in the next few months.

GameStop has been on a bit of a shopping spree. Last year, the company bought Kongregate, a social gaming destination and community site for gamers. For GameStop, these acquisitions are the mechanism by which the retailer is pushing its digital strategy in the gaming space.

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OMG Someone Just Found An Embeddable Google +1 Button – And It Works!

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 11:45 AM PDT

A day after Google unveiled its “+1″ product, someone has already taken a close enough look at the code to track down an embeddable +1 Button.

Said button wasn’t supposed to be public yet – they essentially let people recommend any online content on Google search.

Indeed, for now the button appears only next to search results once you’ve switched +1 on, but Yvo Schaap, after some sleuthing, “in a stray piece of JavaScript” found what appears to be buttons that can be embedded on any site just like a Facebook Like, Tweet This or, well, Add to Google Buzz button.

Google in a blog post said they were still working on such a button:

But the +1 button isn't just for search results. We're working on a +1 button that you can put on your pages too, making it easy for people to recommend your content on Google search without leaving your site. If you want to be notified when the +1 button is available for your website, you can sign up for email updates at our +1 webmaster site.

A couple of caveats: +1 not only has to be switched on but you also need an active Google Profile and be logged into it. Schaap says you need to be located in the United States, too, but it – occasionally – works for me and I’m in Belgium.

According to Schaap, the button as such actually functions fine, and interestingly its layout can be modified to be positioned horizontally or vertically. Clicking it makes recommended pages appear in the appropriate tab on your Google Profile page.

There are some live buttons on Schaap’s blog or in the side bar of Fanity. Here’s an example of a direct URL.

UPDATE: Google issued this statement on the button: While we’re thrilled that publishers are anxious to integrate the +1 button into their sites, we’re still working things out and aren’t quite ready for this to be publicly available just yet, so we’re disabling this in the code. Webmasters and other publishers interested in using +1 on their sites should get in touch with us here.

For interesting takes on +1 outside of the TechCrunch network:

Search Engine Land: Meet +1: Google's Answer To The Facebook Like Button
NewsGrange: Why Google's +1 Can't Compete With Facebook's Like
GigaOm: Sure, I Could Join a Google-Based Social Network — But Why?

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Boxcar Pushes Its Way Onto The Mac

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 10:23 AM PDT

My love of Boxcar should be pretty clear at this point. Because I’m an information junkie, it’s probably the app I use the most on my iPhone/iPad besides Safari. And earlier this year, they brought the notification goodness to the web as well. Now they’re taking the next step: native Mac support.

Yes, Boxcar is here for the Mac. The app resides in your toolbar and when clicked shows a drop-down with all of your notifications as they come in in realtime. You can set it so a sound goes off with every new message and if you have Growl installed you can get a visual notification as well.

“This is another step in offering Boxcar wherever you’re at. We believe in delivering messages to people – not devices. We want to deliver messages to you, wherever you’re at. That will be on your phone, tablet, desktop, TV or car. It doesn’t matter to us, as long as it gets to you,” creator Jonathan George tells us.

He also notes that even though notifications are not as vital on a traditional computer with more robust multi-tasking capabilities, people have been using the Mac version to get away from things like a full-fledged Twitter client which can distract you. Instead, Boxcar only notifies you when they must: when you have an @reply or DM, for example.

One interesting thing about Boxcar for Mac is that they’re not releasing it via the Mac App Store. George says they want to use this initial release as a large-scale beta of sorts, and Apple’s requirements for their store make some of what they want to do difficult. Instead, a release through that store will likely come down the road.

So for now, you can find Boxcar for Mac on their website here.

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Why Salesforce Overpaid For Radian6

Posted: 31 Mar 2011 10:12 AM PDT

As you may have heard, yesterday Salesforce announced the $326 million purchase of social media monitoring company Radian6, the CRM company’s largest acquisition to date. While we know that Salesforce has been actively pushing its social strategy with the debut of a Twitter and Facebook-like Chatter and the Service Cloud 3, $300-million plus is a lot of money for the CRM giant to shell out for a single company. In a press call with Salesforce executives and analysts yesterday, the company’s CEO and founder Marc Benioff said that Radian6 currently has a revenue run rate of $35 million and is expected to add $40 to $50 million in revenue to Salesforce’s top line this year.

At $326 million, Salesforce paid nearly ten times Radian6′s revenues, which is rare. So why did Salesforce want Radian6 so badly? First, Salesforce is aggressively pushing a social strategy and it’s a dog eat dog world in the social enterprise space with a massive number of companies trying to capture marketshare for social applications. Salesforce is actively marketing Chatter but the Yammer and Jive competitor isn’t a clear cut leader in the space. Radian6 boosts the company’s footprint in social, and provides an established set of well-known clients, such as Dell, GE, Kodak and UPS.

Salesforce has already stated its intention to integrate the two applications to ‘create the bridge between public social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and online communities, and Salesforce Chatter, the private, secure social network for the enterprise.’ According the company, ‘Chatter feeds will no longer just contain the activity happening within the walls of a company, but will be filled with real time insights from fans on Facebook pages, followers on Twitter, comments on blog posts and more.’

Another reason why Salesforce bought Radian6 (and paid through the nose) was that it was in a rush to add social media monitoring to its family of products. When an analyst asked Benioff why Salesforce didn’t just develop the technology in house, he said that he needed to move quickly as more competitors move into the world of social enterprise. Salesforce CMO Kendall Collins said it would have taken at least three years for Salesforce to build the technology in-house.

Collins tells us that the company looked at entire space of social media monitoring companies, but narrowed it down to a few select companies. In the end, he says, Radian6 was the leader in terms of technology, clients and talent.

Clearly, Salesforce is making it known that it is willing to pay the big bucks for social. Even the company’s latest investments, including Seesmic and HubSpot, have been made in social applications for businesses.

And for social media monitoring, this exit is probably the largest acquisition to date. Lithium bought ScoutLabs for $20 million to $25 million last year and Jive bought Filtrbox for an undisclosed (and probably small) amount.

It’s unclear if Salesforce’s massive bet will pay off in the end. Yes, it will have a social media monitoring application within its comprehensive portfolio of products. But what’s to stop a competitor (i.e. Microsoft or IBM) from buying a smaller (and less expensive) but equally as feature rich app like HootSuite or ViralHeat?

Photo credit/Flickr/blatantnews

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at 9:11 AM

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