The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- TheFunded Ranks The Most Loved VCs Of 2009
- Mobile Barcode Company Scanbuy Raises Funding From Motorola Ventures, Others
- Israel’s Time To Know Aims To Revolutionize The Classroom
- Mobile App Directories Consolidate: Appolicious Acquires AppVee
- Spotify Opens Up In France, Removes Invitation-only Lock
- Apple Demands Removal Of USB Sharing Feature In Stanza iPhone App
- Greystripe Extends Ad Network To Nokia’s Ovi Store
- Twitter Asks Users To Reset Passwords After Possible Phishing Attack
- Aardvark Publishes A Research Paper Offering Unprecedented Insights Into Social Search
- Ustream’s Actual Round: $20 Million Now, An Option For $55 Million More Later
- Andreessen-Backed Makara Unveils Cloud Application Deployment And Management Platform
- Don’t Think Chrome OS Will Compete With iPad? Watch This Video.
- A First Taste Of What The Google Tablet’s Interface Will Look Like (Pics)
- JamLegend Shreds Past 1 Million Members
- Apple Issues (Another) 27-Inch iMac Screen Fix
- Rumor: Apple Has Another Tablet In The Works. More Like A Mac Than An iPhone.
- My God, Google News Is Full Of Stars
- Chegg Warns Rival BookRenter.com It Owns The Trademark To Being No. 1
- Fynanz Scores $6.5 Million For Peer-To-Peer Student Lending Platform
- Looking To Boost Engagement, Meebo Makes It A Lot Easier To Start Using Its Chat Bar
- Unica Continues Shopping Spree; Acquires MakeMeTop
- Fire Outfoxed: Greasemonkey Creator Builds Native Support Into Chrome
- Davos Interviews: Max Levchin Says Slide Now Makes Almost All Of Its Money From Virtual Goods
- Ambient Industries Gets More Funding To Build Out Its StumbleUpon For Location
- AOL Loses Another VP: Ralph Rivera, VP of AOL Games and AOL Latino
| TheFunded Ranks The Most Loved VCs Of 2009 Posted: 02 Feb 2010 08:50 AM PST
Some VCs are getting an early Valentine’s Day gift fromTheFunded, the site where CEOs rate venture capitalists and their firms. Below you will find the top-ranked individual VCs, as determined by their ratings in 2009. What makes this ranking particularly useful to entrepreneurs is that it is ratings by other CEOs, often CEOs who have had direct dealings with the VCs they are rating. While this is still a popularity contest of sorts (for instance, the rankings are not based on individual investment returns), presumably CEOs are smart enough to take investment performance into account. But they also take into account their own personal experiences with the individual VCs. These are the VCs who CEOs love the most, and not just because they are nice but because they help CEOs do their jobs, which is to build great businesses. Topping the list is Terry McGuire, co-Founder of Polaris Ventures and a big life sciences investor. Mark Suster of GRP Partners is No. 2. David Sze of Greylock comes in at No. 7. Brook H. Byers of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers is No. 10. Kleiner’s star investor John Doerr is No.11 Michael Moritz from Sequoia is No. 32.. Anyone who is on this list is well-liked and respected by CEOs. A total of 84 individual VCs (and some angel investors) made the cut out of 17,834 investment pros listed in TheFunded’s directory. To get on the list, each VC had to have at least an average rating of 4 out of 5 and have at least five separate reviews from CEO members of the Funded. (There are 13,480 CEO members). No more than one of the five ratings can be negative (a score of 3 or less). Other VC that made the list include Howard Morgan (No. 28) and Josh Kopelman (No. 39) of First Round Capital, Bill Tai (No. 29) and George Zachary (no. 64) of Charles River Ventures, Roelof Botha of Sequoia (No. 50), Fred Wilson (No. 60) of Union Square Ventures, and angels Mike Maples, Jr. (No. 43) and Ron Conway (No. 61). You can compare this list to the most active VC firms of 2009 to get a sense of the overlap between these rankings and which firms are doing the most deals. Some other insights that TheFunded shared with us: there was a lot of turnover in VC firms in 2009. When TheFunded sent emails to all the investment pros in its directory, 38 percent either bounced back or replied with an automated message saying they’ve left their firms. None of those people are on this list. And about one or two firms a week became inactive, or 9 percent of the 4,005 firms listed in its directory. TheFunded.com is offering 2 free tickets to the Future of Funding () event on February 18th in San Mateo, where many of the award winning venture capitalists will be attending an awards ceremony, for the best comments about the state of venture capital on TechCrunch (as determined by either the author or TheFunded, TBD TC). Top-Ranked VCs by TheFunded
Photo credit: Flickr/le vent le cri
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| Mobile Barcode Company Scanbuy Raises Funding From Motorola Ventures, Others Posted: 02 Feb 2010 08:05 AM PST
Scanbuy’s ScanLife platform provides a way for advertisers to provide digital information to consumers through the use of 2D barcodes and camera phones. That way, advertisers are able to provide consumers with access to information like product reviews, price comparisons and coupon offers simply by having them scan two-dimensional codes placed on product packaging, a magazine ad or other media. Scanlife can scan traditional UPC barcodes as well as popular 2D barcode formats like Datamatrix and QR Codes. According to a statement released by lead investor Motorola Ventures, ‘millions’ of people have used ScanLife on a range of mobile devices running Android, BlackBerry OS, iPhone OS, Java and Symbian to date. Scanbuy also claims to have the largest and oldest patent portfolio of any company in the industry, with over 30 patents granted covering the solution. Noteworthy: Scanbuy’s chief executive is Jonathan Bulkeley, previously CEO of barnesandnoble.com and prior Managing Director of AOL’s joint venture with Bertelsmann Online in the U.K., and AOL's Vice President of Business Development in the United States. This investment follows Motorola Ventures’ backing of Zephyr Technology Corporation, which dates back to June 2009.
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| Israel’s Time To Know Aims To Revolutionize The Classroom Posted: 02 Feb 2010 06:41 AM PST
Time To Know is the realization of a single man’s vision to un-root teaching methodologies from their 19th century origins and thrust them into the 21st century. The entrepreneur is Shmuel Meitar, co-founder of Israeli hi-tech posterchild Amdocs. To appreciate Meitar’s commitment, consider this: He is TimeToKnow’s sole investor. That’s right, the $60M the company has taken in funding all came out of his pocket. The basic thesis Time To Know is operating under is that today’s current classroom is following a teaching paradigm designed in the industrial age, i.e., a teacher standing in front of a class, a blackboard on the wall and students at their desks. Think of it this way… Imagine time warping a teacher from the 1800’s and implanting her in a classroom in 2010. She could basically hit the ground running with little to no adjustment in teaching style. Quite scary when you think about it. Time To Know believes there are three main reasons why today’s classroom is ineffective: First, relevancy—or rather, irrelevancy. Kids are living in a digital world with a tremendous amount of stimulus. Expecting them to happily and effectively embrace ‘passive learning’ that requires them to just sit, listen and provide output in exams is simply unrealistic. Second, variance. There no such thing as a homogeneous level of learning and comprehension in a classroom of students. Third, assessment—aka, the feedback loop. In today’s classroom a student could have gotten lost with the material three weeks back, but the teacher would be oblivious to it. Contrary to partial solutions such as computerized tutorials, or digital whiteboards, Time To Know set out to create a holistic solution designed to migrate from instructional to Constructivist Learning in which learning and knowledge are experience driven. Due to the nature of the work environment (the classroom), and the content (curriculum), Time To Know has set certain infrastructure and operational prerequisites schools must commit to. These are: Infrastructure: Every student must be allotted a laptop or netbook with a headset. No more than one student per machine. Every classroom must also be equipped with a laptop for the teacher that is connected to a projector. A WiFi Internet connection is another prerequisite. Ethernet will not do as it restricts inner-class mobility. Support & Professional Services: Schools committing to Time To Know’s curriculum must be able to provide on-premises technical support. This means that if a student’s netbook experiences technical problems, it will dealt with immediately, rather than having to wait for an IT support professional to make a call days after. Schools must also commit to provide their teachers with training and support. This sounds obvious, but if mis-handled it could be the Achilles heal of the entire initiative. These services can be provided by Time To Know itself or by a third party. For all intent and purpose, Time To Know is a software company whose management application, applets and content, all reside on the cloud and are accessible via web browser. There are two main components to the system:
It also allows teachers to customize learning sequences, assign assessments to students, and create reports of student progress. As each student uses a laptop during class, the teacher can monitor individual progress and communicate with each student unobtrusively. The application is quite robust, so here are just a few of its many features:
The Curriculum: Time To Know designs and produces what it calls ‘full digital curriculum coverage,’ which is a complete year’s worth of lesson plans, learning activities, and homework assignments. To grasp just what an immense undertaking this is, multiply these by the four subjects matters Time To Know targets—math, science, language arts and social studies—and now multiply that by 13 year’s worth of education (kindergarten plus 12 formal years of schooling). To put this into perspective, in a single year Time To Know produces animation with a combined length of one and a half feature films. The challenge is daunting not only because of the sheer amount of content that requires to be designed and produced, but also because the curriculum has to fulfill alignment to state and country standards. This means that curriculum which received approval in Texas will require tweaking for approval in New York. This explains why Time To Know employees a team of 350 consisting of 120 pedagogy and instructional designers (aka teachers), 60 graphics artists, illustrators and animators and 80 technologists. To date, Time To Know has produced yearly curriculums for Israeli schools in the subjects of Hebrew, English and math for 4th, 5th and 6th grades. For American schools, it’s produced yearly curriculums for 4th and 5th grades in the subjects of math and language arts. By July 2011, curriculums will be expanded to include grades 3 and 6, with curriculums for science added across all four grades.
Teachers do have flexibility and can mix and match lesson plan modules and exercises. There’s also the ability to add external items such as videos from YouTube for example, or links to sites on the Web. Time To Know discovered from its pilots that American teachers stuck to the structured curriculum, while Israeli teachers took advantage of the flexibility at their disposal and enriched the curriculum with external materials. The curriculum is presented to and interacted with by the students through ‘Rich Exploration Applets’. These provide guided learning sequences intended to facilitate the development of cognitive learning skills in a sequential and spiraled manner. The purpose of the applets is to motivate students to explore, experiment, discover, and discuss the concepts presented under each subject. Doing so allows students to form deeper understandings of these concepts and how they can be extended and adapted to new situations.
If this isn’t compelling enough, the system is also adaptive. A component called PAL, which stands for ‘Practice and Learning’, maps each student’s knowledge in response to answers given in the subjects of math and language arts. As a result, a practice path is then built on the fly to address the student’s specific strengths and weaknesses. Students also have home remote access so they can go over materials that were taught in the classroom, do homework, or review and comment on items in the Galleries. Time To Know has been running pilots in four schools in Texas and ten schools in Israel. The expectation for the 2010/2011 school year is for fifteen pilots in the US and around 50 in Israel. The feedback collected from teachers is quite interesting: 86% reported an increase in instructional time. There was also a decrease in discipline and an increase in individual assistance during class time. Teachers also reported an increased sense of empowerment to guide and support the learning process. Feedback collected from students showed that they perceived the new learning methodologies as fun and relevant. There was also an increase in motivation and positive attitude to subjects taught. Put differently, the kids started enjoying math(!) Another dimension was brought from Israel’s Ministry of Finance and Bank of Israel, which both see TimeToKnow’s approach as being able to ultimately increase the GDP. “LaAsot Kavod LaMedina” is an Israeli expression that sums-up Time To Know’s story. It translates roughly to “to bring national pride” and it’s used to express “bravo, I’m proud to be an Israeli because of ________”. Rarely, if at all, is it used in the context of a startup. In the case of Time To Know though, it fits hand to glove. Respect. T2K: a Paradigm Shift in K-12 Education from Time To Know on Vimeo.
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| Mobile App Directories Consolidate: Appolicious Acquires AppVee Posted: 02 Feb 2010 06:32 AM PST
With the proliferation of mobile app directories on the web, it comes of no surprise that many are beginning to acquire each other and merge their content. Today Appolicious, a comprehensive iPhone and Android app directory with a social twist, is acquiring AppVee, a startup that provides in-depth and comprehensive video reviews of iPhone and Android applications on AppVee.com and AndroidApps.com. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. AppVee was one of the pioneers in the mobile app directory space, and was launched in 2008, shortly after the launch of the iTunes App Store. While AppVee has extensive coverage of iPhone apps, the site’s Android app reviews are also comprehensive. As part of the acquisition AppVee reviewers will continue to write for both sites in addition to Appolicious. The sites will maintain their original style, but Appolicious will add more social benefits, such as the ability for users to create profiles, curate their own list of top apps, import their app libraries, and more. Appolicious, which just raised $1.5 million in funding and debuted an iPhone app, tries to make sense of the 100,000 apps on Apple’s App Store and the 16,000 apps on the Android Market, but with a social twist. So not only can you find apps based on category or topic, but you can share those apps with your social graph on Twitter and Facebook, review apps, and more. Via its technology, the application will scan your iTunes directory for your downloaded app and will integrate them into your Appolicious library. It’s similar in some ways to oneforty, an app directory for Twitter. The site also recently added the ability to create curated lists of apps. Founded in May of this year by former Yahoo VP, Alan Warms, Appolicious is hoping to expand its platform to include Android, Blackberry and other smartphone apps, which will certainly be accomplished party through the acquisition of AppVee. Warms is a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup Buzztracker to Yahoo in 2007.
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| Spotify Opens Up In France, Removes Invitation-only Lock Posted: 02 Feb 2010 06:28 AM PST
The company says it’s now because they are sure they can “maintain the quality of service for many users.” Despite scepticism from TechCrunch that Spotify is going to have a tough time launching in the US, it seems to be on its way to rolling out across Europe, at least. They blogged (Google translation) today that:
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| Apple Demands Removal Of USB Sharing Feature In Stanza iPhone App Posted: 02 Feb 2010 06:07 AM PST
Like many people, I have the Stanza app installed on my iPhone. Made by Lexycle (acquired by Amazon last year), Stanza is a free app for iPhone and iPod Touch that serves as a gateway to a library of more than 100,000 ebooks for easy reading on the go. Last night, I was prompted to update the app to a new version (2.1), and as usual I checked what the changes were. The accompanying message was pretty brief: ‘Removed the ability to share books via USB’. I thought it was an odd update but didn’t think much about it, and since I didn’t actually use that feature simply downloaded and installed the new version. Just for your reference: the feature enabled users to transfer books in the ePub or eReader format to their mobile devices using a USB cable. This morning, we got some tips from people who were angry or surprised about Lexcycle removing the USB sharing feature from the Stanza app. I looked up the app in the iTunes Store and saw that the update notice now read ‘Removed the ability to share books via USB as required by Apple’. A glance at the forums on the Lexcycle website revealed that users were quite upset about the removal of the app, with only some suggesting that Apple may have had something to do with it and offering explanations why they would have demanded it. I asked Lexcycle if and why Apple had requested the removal of the feature from the iPhone app via e-mail and swiftly received a short response, saying that Apple had indeed demanded that Lexcycle remove the feature from Stanza. I requested more information but was subsequently told by Lexcycle was strictly ‘forbidden from discussing the specifics of our conversations with Apple on this matter’. I’m sure Apple has good reasons to prevent people from being able to transfer files to iPhone and iPod Touch devices using a USB cable, and I believe this isn’t the first time they’ve asked developers of apps with this or similar features to remove them for new users. That said, I’m not 100% certain which rules were broken here, and since Apple requested Lexcycle not to discuss specifics we’re left guessing why Cupertino had an issue with the USB syncing features. Naturally, this event adds fuel to the fire for the many observers claiming Apple is far too controlling, and it also seems rather suspicious that they’re targeting an Amazon company in light of the increased competition between the corporations in the ereader/ebook field. But in my mind, this is a small, non-essential feature they took away, and not updating the app to the new version preserves the USB sharing feature for those who deem it to be important enough to raise hell over anyway. Do you think Apple is going too far in placing constraints on iPhone applications, or do you think they’re well within their right to exercise as much control over the whole process as they do? The comment section is all yours.
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| Greystripe Extends Ad Network To Nokia’s Ovi Store Posted: 02 Feb 2010 05:57 AM PST
The Ovi Store is the centralized application shop for programs fit for Nokia devices that the Finnish mobile device giant launched in May 2009. Greystripe offers rich media ads through its ad network, and has seen considerable success with its iPhone platform, and recently launched support for Android to ride the tidal wave of growth for the device. Greystripe maintains that its rich media full-screen ads generate higher click through rates and are able to generate better revenue to its publishers. Greystripe has created an automated self service web-based portal for developers to ad enable their Java/Symbian apps. Developers can upload all of their fully developed mobile app ports, while the ad client is automatically merged with their application. Greystripe’s ad network will display pre- and post-roll full-screen ads within the app. Currently, Greystripe supports over 1,400 Java handset models, in addition to iPhone and Android. Greystripe will also migrate 1,200 Java titles on its consumer mobile gaming store GameJump into the Ovi App Store. Greystripe has continues to make its ad offerings more appealing and attractive to both developers and advertisers by extending support to various devices and even launching a guaranteed CPM program. The company also partnered with Tribal Fusion to enable online ads to fit on iPhones. It’s unclear how Google’s acquisition of AdMob and Apple’s acquisition of Quattro Wireless will effect the other ad networks in the space. If anything, these networks will now have to compete with two of the largest companies in the world. But Greystripe, which recently received a $2 million infusion from NBC, is wise to continue to innovate and expand its reach and should be able to hold its own.
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| Twitter Asks Users To Reset Passwords After Possible Phishing Attack Posted: 02 Feb 2010 03:20 AM PST
While some people are worried that the e-mails might have actually been a phishing attack, there’s a flood of tweets from users having received the same message after effectively getting denied access to their accounts, so this seems 100% legit. The message, copied here by a blogger, reads:
The message adds:
We’ve contacted Twitter for more information, but for now it may be wise to change your password regardless of whether you’ve received this e-mail or not. Just yesterday, Sophos published a report that showed social networking services like Facebook and Twitter are increasingly being targeted in cybercrime attacks. (Hat tip to Marjolein Hoekstra)
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| Aardvark Publishes A Research Paper Offering Unprecedented Insights Into Social Search Posted: 02 Feb 2010 01:18 AM PST
Aardvark will be posting the paper in its entirety on its official blog at 9 AM PST, and they gave us the chance to take a sneak peek at it. It’s an interesting read to say the least, outlining some of the fundamental principles that could turn Aardvark and other social search engines into powerful complements to Google and its ilk. The paper likens Aardvark to a ‘Village’ search model, where answers come from the people in your social network; Google is part of ‘Library’ search, where the answers lie in already-written texts. The paper is well worth reading in its entirety (and most of it is pretty accessible), but here are some key points:
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| Ustream’s Actual Round: $20 Million Now, An Option For $55 Million More Later Posted: 01 Feb 2010 11:01 PM PST
Update: While Ustream noted the $75 million number, SoftBank has clarified that they’re investing $20 million now for a 13.7% stake in the company with an option to invest up to $55 million more by 2011 — which would make them Ustream’s largest shareholder with over 30% of the outstanding shares. Perhaps even crazier is that the service is saying that additional funding commitments are pending from other investors in the U.S. and Asia, so the round could actually be larger than the $75 million when all is said and done. We’re hearing reports that there was quite a bit of competition to be involved in the round, and apparently all the dust hasn’t settled yet. So why on Earth does Ustream need $75 million+? CEO John Ham says in the release that the money will be used to expand on the other side of the world, particularly Japan (obvious, given the SoftBank involvement), China, Korea, and India. Mobile video is particularly hot in some of the Asian countries where their faster wireless networks allow for more functionality than the comparatively slow ones in the U.S. Ustream will open offices and hire staff in all those countries, apparently. Alongside this new round, we’re also hearing that the founders of the company, Ham, Brad Hunstable, and Gyula Feher were able to sell some shares as a reward. Just a few days ago, Ustream launched a new desktop client to help video producers give their work a more professional feel. Prior to that, in December, Ustream made headlines by being the first big video streaming site to offer that (recording) functionality on the iPhone. Ustream says that its iPhone apps has been downloaded over 1.5 million times to date (it has had other apps before the live streaming one was available too) and notes that 3.8 million people tuned into the service to watch the inauguration of President Obama in January of last year. Update: SoftBank’s investment appears to put Ustream’s value right now around $150 million. However, if they exercise their options, their full investment in Ustream would push its value to around $230 million.
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| Andreessen-Backed Makara Unveils Cloud Application Deployment And Management Platform Posted: 01 Feb 2010 10:58 PM PST
Rather than offer a system management software designed for traditional application environments to the cloud, Makara's cloud-based platform leverages the virtual layer to allow developers to rapidly deploy, scale and monitor applications in cloud environments. The product, which is self-service and self-managing, is available for free on its site. The startup’s platform allows developers to deploy new or existing web applications to a public or private cloud with no code changes. Once the application is deployed, developers can control the application runtime and have cluster-wide visibility into end user response times end-to-end through the entire stack. Makara's offering supports Java, Flex, PHP, JBoss and Tomcat applications and runs on Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, Terremark vCloud Express, VMware ESX, VMware Workstation, VirtualBox and Xen. Makara faces competition from rPath.
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| Don’t Think Chrome OS Will Compete With iPad? Watch This Video. Posted: 01 Feb 2010 08:00 PM PST Late last week, I wrote a post about how netbooks running Chrome OS and the iPad were on a collision course. Some people took exception to that, noting the iPad was only a touchscreen device while Chrome OS was created to be used with more traditional computing form factors, like netbooks and laptops. But there’s a new concept video that has surfaced on a Chromium Project page that very much shows how the two could and should compete head-on in the touch tablet space. Again, this is just a concept video at this point, but it clearly shows what the people building Chrome OS are thinking about for future products. Oh, and in case you’re worried that since Chromium OS is an open source project, this is just some random person making these videos that Google is unlikely to use for Chrome OS, they were made by Glen Murphy, a Googler working on Chrome (with a sense of humor). Clearly, the tablet in this video is bigger than the iPad, but don’t rule out Apple making a larger tablet as well. It’s worth noting that Google’s tablet concept video was uploaded January 25, two days before the iPad unveiling. For more of a taste of what Google has in mind with these tablets, check out the concept pictures as well. Watch the video below.
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| A First Taste Of What The Google Tablet’s Interface Will Look Like (Pics) Posted: 01 Feb 2010 07:57 PM PST
The photos have been posted to the official Chromium site (Chromium is the open source project behind Chrome and ChromeOS). And while Chromium is not actually part of Google, it appears that these mockups were put together by Glen Murphy, Google Chrome’s designer. In other words, there’s a good chance that the final version of Chrome OS will resemble this. Update: Be sure to watch this video to see a mockup of the tablet in action. It’s worth pointing out that there almost certainly will be multiple “Google Tablets”, given that Chrome OS won’t be tied to a single device. That said, Google is working with select hardware partners to ensure that it runs on devices that are up to its specifications, and there may be one tablet device that is designated as the “Google Tablet”, much like the Nexus One is the “Google Phone”. Via TheChromeSource.
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| JamLegend Shreds Past 1 Million Members Posted: 01 Feb 2010 06:45 PM PST
For those that haven’t used it before, JamLegend takes the music-as-a-game formula popularized by games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and brings it to your web browser. Gameplay is pretty simple: a series of colorful dots scroll down the screen, each representing a note or chord in a song, and you rhythmically tap the proper keys on your keyboard to “play” each note. To play a song on JamLegend, it needs to have a note chart. The site offers 630 professionally crafted note charts (and their corresponding songs), and last summer it added support for an automated system that can generate a note chart for any song. In practice the system isn’t perfect, but it’s probably good enough for casual gamers. JamLegend monetizes these songs by restricting how many you can upload at a time — if you’d like to store more than a handful at once, you have to sign up for a premium subscription. Lee says that users have uploaded over 600,000 songs to their virtual lockers. Lee says that JamLegend’s community is playing a strong role in helping it get traction. He says that indie musicians often come to the site and upload their own songs, and then members of JamLegend’s community task themselves with converting those songs into quality note charts. In effect, it’s giving these bands another outlet to get new fans, and Lee says that some of the bands have managed to get more fans on JamLegend than they have on MySpace. One other thing worth noting: while Compete shows JamLegend’s traffic taking a dive over the winter, Lee says that their data is off. Instead, he says that traffic has largely been flat recently, but that it hasn’t dipped. Still, the company is going to have to come up with some innovative features to get to critical mass, especially as options like the Rock Band Network become increasingly enticing to indie bands.
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| Apple Issues (Another) 27-Inch iMac Screen Fix Posted: 01 Feb 2010 05:48 PM PST
While the December 21 update was titled “27-inch iMac Graphics Firmware Update 1.0,” this new update is called “27-inch iMac Display Firmware Update 1.0.” A slight variation, but a big one, as this apparently is altering the display firmware itself rather than that of the graphics card. This update is also about half the size of the previous one. As with the other update, this takes a few minutes to install. Earlier today, it was reported that Apple was halting production of the 27-inch iMacs until it could solve the issues afflicting the line. Aside from the screen flickering issue, other iMacs apparently have a yellow-tinting problem. As reports of troubles kept piling in, indications were that Apple was seeing long wait times for the devices, which some attributed to popularity, while others attributed to these problems. The Apple Discussions forum on the topic now has some 271 pages (up from 191 a couple weeks ago) of comments/complaints and over 500,000 views (up from 400,000 a few weeks ago). It has more views than all the other threads combined — by far. Apple still has yet to say officially what the problem is with the product, and why the original update didn’t fix the issue. Hopefully this update will once and for all.
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| Rumor: Apple Has Another Tablet In The Works. More Like A Mac Than An iPhone. Posted: 01 Feb 2010 03:57 PM PST
By now, we’ve all seen the iPad and know just about everything about it that we possibly can. But did you know that the secretive company may actually be hard at work on a second device already? Now, before I say anything else, take this information with a grain of salt. While it originated from a good source, it was a second-hand source. Meanwhile, I’ve corroborated some the main details with another source, but not some of the smaller ones. That said, from what I’m hearing, Apple is pretty far along on work on second tablet device. A bigger one. And this one may be much more like a Mac than an iPhone. Before the iPad was revealed last week, rumors circulated for a long time that Apple might be working on two different sizes for the screen of the device. Some had the device as small as 7″, others were saying it would go up to 10.6″. (The actual size of the iPad is 9.7″.) But the information we’re hearing is that Apple is thinking much larger for another version of the product, maybe all the way up to the 15.4″ size that it currently uses for one version of the MacBook Pro. If you think that would be way too big for an iPad, we’re also hearing that this other tablet would be quite a bit different from the one revealed last week. Namely, it could run a version of OS X much closer to the traditional version that runs on Macs. If there is any truth to that, we could learn something as soon as Apple’s WWDC event this year, which will likely take place in June (just as it does every year). Apple typically uses the event to show off its new iPhone hardware, but it is first and foremost an event for Mac platform developers, and the past two years have seen OS X as a major component. This included two years ago when Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) made a surprise appearance and developers got a very early peek. There is already talk that WWDC 2010 could bring a similar peek at OS X 10.7. If there are some significant multi-touch components to OS X 10.7, you can expect the rumors to start flying about this new device that I’m talking about (or possibly touchscreen iMacs). As usual, you should also note that Apple likely has a ton of projects in various stages that never see the light of day. It seems certain that at points they were playing with different sized screens for what became the iPad. But one of our sources here puts this new tablet as being released within the next year. While everyone is still debating the uses of the iPad, a larger tablet would probably have a completely different set of uses. For example, it would likely be meant to be more of a straightforward laptop (or desktop) replacement. As such, it would almost undoubtedly come with some sort of external keyboard/stand just as the iPad offers as an accessory, but it would probably be a more integral part of using the device. When undocked, maybe you could use the thing just as you would an iPad (which is to say, holding it or placing it in your lap and using your fingers to manipulate its screen). And maybe while docked, you would even use a bluetooth mouse or touchpad device attached to the keyboard to interact with it.
Based on various patent filing and the general trend of multi-touch enabled devices (Magic Mouse, MacBook trackpads, etc) that Apple has been releasing, it seems that Apple is definitely trending in the direction of touch computing as the future of computing. A larger tablet device could serve as a nice transition device between the traditional laptop and this new type of computing. And just as the iPhone has prepared many of us to naturally use the iPad, the iPad may do the same for this new tablet. And while a larger screen tablet would undoubtedly cost more than the iPad, Apple would have a lot of room to price it if it really was meant to be a laptop-replacement. If that’s the case, anything north of $1,000 wouldn’t seem unreasonable, unlike it would have for the iPad. That said, for that type of price, people are going to expect a machine that is as powerful as a laptop. We’re also hearing that Apple would likely use an Intel chip (just as it uses in traditional Macs) in such a device rather than its new custom-made A4 chip. The problem with that would be power consumption. A larger screen plus a power-hungry chip would likely lead to a battery life well below the stated 10-hour limit for the iPad. Still, if they could bring something like that in with around around 5+ hours of battery, plenty of people would be happy. And Apple has made a lot of advancements in the past couple of years with getting battery life on its laptops well above industry averages. In terms of weight, the iPad is 1.5 pounds, while the MacBook Air is 3 pounds (with a 13.3″ screen). If Apple could remove all the unnecessary parts of the MacBook Air (like the keyboard and trackpad), it could probably keep a device pretty close to the 2-3 pound weight even with a larger screen. But given such a large screen, it would almost undoubtedly have to come with some kind of case to put it in so as not to damage the screen when in transit. In terms of what OS X applications could or would support multi-touch integration, that’s hard to say. Safari is an easy and obvious one, but others would have to be completely reworked for this. But as we saw during the iPad keynote, Apple didn’t need too long to do that with its iWork suite of apps. Third-party developers would likely get a good set of tools from Apple to update their apps as well. Again, take this all with a grain of sale, but look for clues in OS X 10.7. [image: Steve Burg]
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| My God, Google News Is Full Of Stars Posted: 01 Feb 2010 03:50 PM PST
Now, I’ve never been a big fan of Google News. In fact, I think it’s pretty awful in many ways. But this is a great addition. Much like with Google Reader, I can now scan through Google News and pick out the stories I want to save to read later simply by clicking on the empty star icon to the left of the headline. Even better, by using these stars, Google News is actually able to better tailor its news surfacing experience for you. When there is new news about a headline you previously starred, Google News will bold it for you, making it easier for you to find on a quick scan. There are a couple of downsides to this feature. Sadly, you can only star the story that Google News deems to be the most important in the cluster (that it places first). Clicking on a more detailed view removes the option to star any articles. Also, they say that you can only keep track of your last 20 starred items in the new Starred area — that seems pretty low. Also odd is that if the cluster changes after you star it (meaning a different story rises to the top), it appears to also change in your starred items area. Still, this makes Google News much more interesting to me already.
[image: MGM]
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| Chegg Warns Rival BookRenter.com It Owns The Trademark To Being No. 1 Posted: 01 Feb 2010 03:25 PM PST
Who exactly is the market leader in textbook rentals is no longer just an academic debate. Online textbook rental service Chegg recently sent its rival BookRenter.co a lawyer letter (embedded below) demanding that it stop using the phrase “#1 In Textbook Rentals” on its Website. That is Chegg’s marketing slogan, and it even registered the phrase as a trademark in 2008. But how can a company trademark being No. 1, especially in a nascent market that is evolving rapidly? In addition to Chegg and BookRenter, bigger players such as Barnes & Noble are getting into the textbook rental game. Chegg’s trademark isn’t going to do it much good in fighting off such encroachments. And even if Chegg is the biggest online textbook renter, the offline book rental market is much bigger with companies like Follett dominating. BookRenter.com CEO Mehdi Maghsoodnia stands his ground and says Chegg doesn’t have a case. To begin with, there are many ways to define “#1″: customers, revenue, selection, service. “We have the largest selection of textbooks in the U.S.,” claims Maghsoodnia, referring to the inventory of 3 million textbooks that BookRenter can rent out by tapping into partner inventory such as Amazon. Chegg operates its own warehouses, but it claims to offer “more than 4.2 million titles” and has rented out more than 2 million books to students so far. BookRenter.com says it serves 5,000 universities in the U.S.? Okay, Chegg claims 6,400. BookRenter says its revenues are growing 400% annually? Chegg tops it with a claim of 600% growth. Needless to say, none of these assertions are backed by any audited financial statements. The point is that this market is growing fast and Chegg wants no one to question its undisputed number-oneness. Maghsoodnia concedes that in terms of customers and revenues, Chegg is probably five to seven times bigger than BookRenter, which recently passed 100,000 customers. And Chegg certainly has more capital. It has a massive war chest from raising $144 million over the past few years, whereas BookRenter.com only recently raised $6 million. But Maghsoodnia points out that estimates of the total online textbook rental market are $200 million, out of a $7 billion overall market. So for any online player to claim to be #1 in all textbook rentals is laughable. The fact that Chegg is trying to assert its trademark on such a dubious claim, he says, “tells me they are a lot more nervous than their advertising shows.” Regardless, he doesn’t think Chegg can defend its trademark claim on such a common phrase, unless it could establish some sort of secondary meaning in the eyes of the public. At least that is what his lawyers tell him. In the meantime, he is thinking of changing the language on his Website just a little bit to, “We’re Numero Uno in Textbook Rentals!”
Chegg Letter To BookRenter.com
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| Fynanz Scores $6.5 Million For Peer-To-Peer Student Lending Platform Posted: 01 Feb 2010 03:15 PM PST
Fynanz, which launched in 2008, applies the peer-to-peer lending model of starups like Prosper to student loans. Students can apply for loans and participants can help fund these loans. Unlike Prosper or other P2P lending sites, Fynanze guarantees each loan. And since they are qualified educational loans, the students can deduct the interest from their taxes once they start paying back. To reduce its risk, the startup looks at other factors in addition to credit scores when evaluating each student borrower, including grade point averages and what school the student is attending. The loans are co-payable to the school, and Fynanz takes into account tuition and other expenses to make sure students don't take out more than they actually need. The plus for the student is that loans are offered to students with low interest rates, often 0.60% to 1.0% lower than what a student would get from a bank. Fynanz faces competition from fellow student lending platform GreenNote.
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| Looking To Boost Engagement, Meebo Makes It A Lot Easier To Start Using Its Chat Bar Posted: 01 Feb 2010 02:24 PM PST
I spoke with Meebo Senior Director of Product Chris Szeto and Director of Business Development Daniel Bernstein about the changes. They say that one big misconception people have about the Meebo Bar is that while it has a very broad reach, that doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of people are using it — people who visit a partner site see the bar even if they never touch it. The Meebo team says that engagement is higher than you might expect, and that 32% of its users are authenticated. But that stat comes with one big caveat: up until now, the majority of authenticated users have been on sites like MyYearbook and Justin.TV, which already have their own authentication systems in place. In other words, publisher sites that don’t already have their own social graphs haven’t been seeing the chat feature get much traction. Meebo is hoping today’s changes will fix that.
The problem so far has stemmed from the way Meebo prompts users to start using the service. If you go to MyYearbook and sign in as usual, you’ll see your MyYearbook friends show up in you Meebo Bar buddy list. If you go to a publisher site that doesn’t have a friend system already, Meebo will still let you chat through third party services like Facebook Chat and Google Talk. But up until now, in order to do that you’d have to first sign up for a Meebo account. Only after that was done would Meebo let you start using AIM, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, and the others. But most people didn’t make it past the first hurdle of signing up for a Meebo account — why sign up for a new account just to access the ones you already have? With today’s change, Meebo is getting rid of that hurdle. Now you’ll be able to enter the credentials of whatever service you want to start using from the get-go. Meebo will lose out slightly because it will no longer be getting people to sign up for its own Meebo accounts, but few people were signing up for them anyway so they’re not missing out on much. The plus side for Meebo is that they’ll likely see their authenticated user stats increase even further. When a user is authenticated with the Meebo Bar, it means that they’ve logged in and Meebo is presenting them with a list of their chat buddies, which makes it one metric to measure engagement. Even if a user doesn’t start chatting, Meebo benefits from having an authenticated user because it learns some key demographic information, like age and gender (which it can use to serve better ads). Obviously it’s in their interest to get more people authenticated and chatting. I think this will help the Meebo Bar on publisher sites, but engagement on these sites will still trail the social networks Meebo is integrated with. On community sites that already have established social graphs, there’s an inherent sense of community that prompts chatting and sharing that you may not get from a standalone publisher site. Users may eventually get used to the idea that nearly every site can be social, but it will take time. Update: Meebo points out that while the authentication stats for publishers have been low, they’ve still seen “very good” share activity through Facebook, Twitter and other services (you have never needed a Meebo account for these).
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| Unica Continues Shopping Spree; Acquires MakeMeTop Posted: 01 Feb 2010 01:34 PM PST
Marketing software company Unica has made its second acquisition of 2010. The Nasdaq-listed company is buying up UK-based MakeMeTop, a UK-based search bid management technology. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Earlier this year, Unica acquired Pivotal Veracity an email marketing startup, for $17.8 million. MakeMeTop’s technology will be branded as Unica Search OnDemand. MakeMeTop will help Unica to allow online marketers to automate and optimize their keyword buys across search engines including Ask, Baidu, Google, LookSmart, Microsoft’s Bing, Miva, Yahoo, and Yandex, while also manage their bidding and reporting across multiple currencies and languages. Unica’s enterprise marketing management software companies to manage web marketing efforts, including web and customer analytics, search marketing, email marketing, and website marketing/personalization. With the acquisition of MakeMeTop and email marketing provider Pivotal Technologies, Unica is trying to build a on-stop-shop marketing offering that automates most of the tasks for for optimizing web, email, search ad, display ad, and offline channels.
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| Fire Outfoxed: Greasemonkey Creator Builds Native Support Into Chrome Posted: 01 Feb 2010 01:08 PM PST
As Google engineer Aaron Boodman (who also happens to be the creator of Greasemonkey) writes today on the Chromium blog, on the popular site userscripts.org there are over 40,000 scripts alone. While he notes that not all of the user scripts written for Greasemonkey will work seamlessly with Chrome immediately (because of the differences between Chrome and Firefox), that should only affect 15%-25% of those over 40,000. He also notes that Google will continue to work on issues on their end to improve compatibility with these Greasemonkey scripts. While neither side is likely to admit it, this is another big blow to Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Boodman wrote Greasemonkey in 2004 specifically for Firefox, and now he’s just helped a rival browser implement the majority of these scripts natively. And in fact, the native support works so well that Chrome actually treats these user scripts just like regular Chrome Extensions, so you can install and disable them in the same way you do with regular ones. Boodman cautions users who choose to install these user scripts to be careful, as they can potentially access private data you’re browsing on a website. He notes that you should read the comments and descriptions on a user scripts’ page to figure out exactly what it’s doing before installing it. Still, there are a ton of very useful Greasemonkey user scripts out there, and this makes Chrome even better. While obviously, Chrome 4 is only officially launched for Windows, the beta versions available for both Mac and Linux are also version 4. And actually, the newer dev builds across all platforms are already onto version 5, so these user scripts should work fine on all of them.
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| Davos Interviews: Max Levchin Says Slide Now Makes Almost All Of Its Money From Virtual Goods Posted: 01 Feb 2010 12:35 PM PST Continuing his series of Davos interviews, Michael talks to Slide CEO and founder Max Levchin in the video above. Levchin discusses the ” shift from advertising to virtual goods” and reveals that most of Slide’s revenues now come from sales of virtual goods, whereas it was the reverse a year ago. Slide makes some of the most popular apps on Facebook and other social networks, and the fact that it is no longer focussed on advertising says a lot about the prospects for social ads. Last year was a huge transition for Slide, made possible by the fact the company has raised a total of $78 million. Levchin is now steeped in the dynamics of virtual goods and how to get people to pay for them, which he discusses at length in the interview. He makes a distinction between buying virtual goods as a “consumption decision” (because you want to level up in a game immediately, for instance) and an “investment decision” where you spend to improve your standing in a community. He believes there are “less diminishing returns” in getting consumers to make see spending on virtual goods as an investment rather than just consumption. Levchin also says that Slide is working on the ability to allow consumers to create (and sell) their own virtual goods. You can also watch Mike’s other Davos interviews with Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, MySpace CEO Owen van Natta, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Russian DST investor Yuri Milner, and a run-in with Michael Dell. Transcript courtesy of PhoneTag: Mr. MIKE ARRINGTON: Mike Arrington here, I’m here with a very tired Max Levchin, CEO and founder of Slide. How are you? Mr. MAX LEVCHIN (CEO, Founder of Slide): Good. Mr. ARRINGTON: You're wearing a suit today. You never wear suits. Mr. LEVCHIN: I never wear suits. Mr. ARRINGTON: Kind of a world economic forum thing. Mr. LEVCHIN: It is. Mr. ARRINGTON: No sleep at all? You’ve been up late working? Mr. LEVCHIN: Up late working but some sleep. Just the sleep depriviation several days that’s what gets to you. Mr. ARRINGTON: It adds up. Mr. LEVCHIN: Yeah. Mr. ARRINGTON: So, tell me, I haven’t talked to you in a while, tell me about Slide, how things are going and where it is going. Mr. LEVCHIN: We're doing well. We’ve evolved as a business in a pretty cool way. I think a year and a half ago we made, all the money that we made is from advertising. At this point, we make almost all the money that we make through sales of contents to consumers which is a pretty huge transformation for a business at our scale and is a relative success. We have expanded our product line. We've realized that some products weren't going to last so we changed them. But, the most interesting is really the shift from advertising to virtual goods. We’re going to do that more. Probably the most interesting wrinkle in virtual goods that we have is, we also think once we enable our users to create the goods as opposed to us which we believe in a scalable model and we’re going down that road pretty well. Mr. ARRINGTON: You always sell toward cash. You don’t do much in a way of offers other than some stuff with flowers or something like that, right? Mr. LEVCHIN: We've done exactly one offer. Mr. ARRINGTON: The one with flowers? Mr. LEVCHIN: Yeah. Actually it was pretty cool. It was a… strange people… Mr. ARRINGTON: You know that guy whispered "thank you" in my ear because he was filming us, he was filming me filming you. I wonder who it was. Mr. LEVCHIN: That’s very meta. Mr. ARRINGTON: He was behind me. Is that what he’s doing, he’s filming me filming you? Mr. LEVCHIN: He’s doing more than that, probably more than that. Anyway, yes we’ve done exactly one offer type of thing which was really demand discovery as opposed to demand generation. Demand generation is very tricky. It’s really easy to create from demand generation to lead generation which is an easy thing to drive towards pretty unethical behavior is a slippery slope. Demand and discovery is a lot easier to deal with but it’s also a lot harder to execute. And so, we've done one experiment (unintelligible). Mr. ARRINGTON: If you buy flowers for somebody… Mr. LEVCHIN: Yeah, if you’re getting something already. Mr. ARRINGTON: But you didn’t like it, you didn’t like the financial results. You felt it was a slippery slope or… Mr. LEVCHIN: No, no, from the moral compass perspective, it was pretty - Mr. ARRINGTON: It’s clearly okay? Mr. LEVCHIN: Yeah, absolutely. In fact I would recommend it to others. This is neither something I’m ashamed of nor do I think it’s a bad business; it’s just hard to do well. If you’re looking for scalable direct to consumer sales behavior where you’re making things or somebody’s making things and they’re selling through the users and it’s a smooth process creating a really nice smooth demand discovery is hard because then you say, alright, well, it’s Mother’s Day, so we should do flowers. It’s pretty manual labor. It ultimately winds up being about as lucrative as just direct sales merchandising. So, ultimately it's neither cannibalistic nor massively mass improvement over just direct sales which offers certainly is massive improvement because all sorts of people had said, I will never spend money, pretend spend, through that, which is how you wind up on a slippery slope. Mr. ARRINGTON: What percentage of customers can you convert to giving you money – single digit, couple percent, five percent? Mr. LEVCHIN: I think we are well within the industry average. So, it's – between one and three percent. I think 3 percent in the Western markets is fantastic and I always certainly say it's fantastic for us. Below half percent is what most people I think can get to and we tend to float substantially better than the lowest and well within the best. Mr. ARRINGTON: What happens to the other 97 or whatever percent? Are they there to get other users and to have some ads reserved? Is that basically their use? Mr. LEVCHIN: We don't do much ads or in fact, we've really cut down our advertising efforts by quite a significant margin. Not that we don’t think advertising is a bad business. We do think that commodity advertising is a bad business. So, if you're in a world of just click on this banner and just get more, it's hard to get privacy well accounted for. So, a large scale pure reach, just give me anyone or even some modest marketing, low price CPM advertising I think is a declining business in general, but certainly within the world of social networks. Because, in that case, the only differentiating feature is reach and reach is firmly in the hands of Facebook and MySpace. So, at any one time, the only way you can compete if you're a social advertising network or platform or whatever, is on price. And that is just – that's another slippery slope I'd like to not be on. Now, slipping around to a high-end or brand advertising where the audience is uniquely predisposed towards the brand or towards the transaction being promoted, that's an excellent business model. You look at, before the current, our times, the mortgage refinancing ads, I think, went for like $60 CPM and still probably go for similar amounts of money on sites that have to do with personal finance. Same exact ads on the front page of some random gaming portal will probably go for very little because they're just pure (unintelligible). So, having the extremely targeted advertising is still a lucrative business even on social networks. An even better version of this and which is what we're interested in is what is essentially product placement. If you can work a brand successfully into the narrative of your product, then it's really cool. Then people actually take the brand up and say, my positive experience in your product is directly connected and influenced by this brand and that worked great. Mr. ARRINGTON: So, in a virtual world, having a can of Coca-Cola should have been an ad sitting and having fun. Mr. LEVCHIN: If Coca-Cola is listening, I'd love to have their cans in my virtual world. Mr. ARRINGTON: Do you find, this is a little off topic, back to the old topic. Do you find that users that pay, their friends are more likely to pay? Or that statistically they're only three percent likely to pay? How do you find those ones that actually pull their wallet out? Mr. LEVCHIN: I think the best predictor is their commitment to the product. You can predict whether they will or will not pay both to backing up for a second, there are two ways we think of virtual goods and this is possibly leading to us but I think it's one good way to split up. One is the consumption decision, one is an investment decision. The consumption decision is if you're playing a game and you've got to level up and you just can't wait another 24 hours for your crops to mature, for your fish to be sold or whatever, and so you pull out a dollar and say, oh look, I used to be level 15, now I'm level 16 which is great. It works and it is a true consumption decision. It is like watching a movie, you don't really expect anything in return but you had a lot of fun. Investment decision is where you are involved in a proto community or perhaps a real community and their conversations, they're not necessarily on the game topic or a topic of whatever the community was originally formed around, where your standing in the community matters, where you have a voice where people care for who you are and how you differ from others and most of all, you care. If you're really committed, you start caring a lot. In fact, you're willing to invest in your standing and personality within that community which is the other way in a virtual-based goods become relevant where your avatar or persona or whatever term is somebody actually are willing to actually invest in cash. The ones I'm most interested in are the latter because they are ultimately a more scalable model in a sense that people are less likely to say diminishing returns. I graduate from level 15 to 16 for a dollar, grow to 500 to 501 for a dollar. Why would I possibly give out in two to 503? And some people are very happy to keep going but on average, I believe, there's diminishing returns which just has to be. Most people don't level up to over 500 on anything. On the other hand, in a real world, as people gain standing and status in their community, they actually do invest more in it. You can join in a parent teacher's association, next thing you know, you're donating money to it and helping with the after-school activities. And that's very possible. So, the investment type, virtual goods I think are probably somewhat more sustainable although they do have their shelf life and their lifespan. The predictor of that behavior is commitment. Will you join the PTA? Are you going to go post on the feedback forum or are you going to help others get better at this game? So, that's what we found to be the best way to predict that. The thing that you first referred to, my friend is spending money, maybe I should spend money follows naturally from that second type of behavior. It also does sort of follow from the first type of behavior but that's competitive. You're level 15, I'm still level 14, if I got to beat you, I got to beat you. I think most people in social gaming or social entertainment in general are on average not as competition driven as they are driven by other means. And community is one of them but also escapism, the desire to have complete control over the process to understand in real life but don't have full control in their own world, e.g. people play – there's farming games I think in a big way because it's something I understand, is very complex and they could never accomplish in the real world, but having a farm that sits there and just produces revenue even if it's completely virtual is pretty awesome, you can control it. Mr. ARRINGTON: How long does it last, those types of games? How long does the user last, a month on average, less? Mr. LEVCHIN: I think it really depends on the game. But there are several different retaining factors. One is content. If the game designer produces more content than he can consume per month, some fraction of the people will say more quests, more tests, more challenges, more whatever and they will be compelled by it. There are diminishing returns there as well. At a certain point he will say – well, this challenge is kind of like the one from last month and I already solved that one. The other retention factor obviously is the community. If you play with your friends and they're still playing, you'll probably have higher odds of playing. There are lots of other things and they all add up to some sort of retention curve. That retention curve, it drops down to zero within 30 days then you have a – 30 days of their attention. I think it really – I will only go as far as claiming that from most products their retention curves are not too similar. I mean there are products that have incredibly high retention, and incredibly low retention. Mr. ARRINGTON: So what about this year for you? What's going to happen to Slide this year? Any new big product launches that you're excited about, you want to talk about now? Raising good money that you want to talk about? This is the one like (unintelligible) easy questions. Mr. LEVCHIN: Right. There are some product launches that I'm excited about, that I'm not willing to talk about. Mr. ARRINGTON: New games and applications. Mr. LEVCHIN: Yes. Mr. ARRINGTON: And this is all still Facebook, MySpace focused? Looking at mobile at all? Mr. LEVCHIN: On mobile, there are several questions in there so I'll choose which one I want to answer. The mobile view that we have is as follows. It's a fantastic extension of a committed community or committed group that exists on the web, and whether it is from the Facebook or MySpace or on any destination site or – it doesn't really matter that much. But given the distribution cost and dynamics on the web versus the same on mobile, makes a great deal of sense to tell someone to take your favorite game with you versus discover your favorite game on mobile even if mobile is in some cases certainly is more compelling or more lucrative or whatever, just the footprints that it needs to get to, to become financially interesting is much easier achieved as a buyer instead of the people from a Facebook game extending it to their iPhone than a hundred percent of people discovering it through the App Store, for us. I think there are many companies that have mastered the App Store distribution to the point where they can get to a similar financial footprint, but I don't think that's a core competence for Slide. Probably it isn't likey to change this year although hoping to do that one if I can figure out how to do it, I'll definitely try. Mr. ARRINGTON: Anything else? Mr. LEVCHIN: Pretty exciting here for us. I think so. A lot of really interesting maturation that will happen in the overall industry. I think many different assumptions will be challenged. Mr. ARRINGTON: You want to expand on that a little bit, like which assumptions? Mr. LEVCHIN: Assumptions of – assumptions of what it means to have a successful social app and possibly the assumption of what categories are going to be successful in social apps. I think this may be the year where things start becoming more blurred about what's a game, what's not a game. Mr. ARRINGTON: Interesting. Mr. LEVCHIN: How do I delete that part? It's way too vague, even I think it's vague. Mr. ARRINGTON: It's vague but it sounds like it's begging to be unpacked a little more. For instance, are you talking about taking Slide social tools and extending them over to platform to other things? By things I mean other apps for other people, other sites, other… Mr. LEVCHIN: I think what we're trying to get to is in effect a platform where some of the content is created by the users and… Mr. ARRINGTON: Yeah, they create a shirt and then other people sell it or something. Mr. LEVCHIN: Or they create a shirt and then they sell it. Mr. ARRINGTON: Right. But even other people could theoretically. Mr. LEVCHIN: Sure. Mr. ARRINGTON: I mean, you know, I'd love to have, you know, there's virtual gifts on Facebook, occasionally I give one. I'd love to be able to create my own gift and give it. It would be really cool if it was so popular other people will give it. That's the kind of thing you're talking about? Mr. LEVCHIN: That's certainly a big part of what we think we're going to do. And if you look at the historic expertise of our company, it is in the tool-making skill of enabling consumers making something out of practically nothing. And I don't mean to disrespect the occasionally fabulous but mostly just nice and sentimental pictures that people have but combined with our now five-year-old slideshow product… Mr. ARRINGTON: Has it been that long? Mr. LEVCHIN: Maybe it's been four-and-a-half years, four years, but it's been around and it's helped at this point millions of people who go from regular expected to pretty awesome and I think in some cases that pretty awesome becomes financial lucrative. So, we try to think of ourselves as enablers of that. Mr. ARRINGTON: Right. That sounds like that's all you're going to give me right now. You've been generous with your time. I'd love to hear more about these when you guys are ready though. Mr. LEVCHIN: Sure. Mr. ARRINGTON: Thanks, Max.
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| Ambient Industries Gets More Funding To Build Out Its StumbleUpon For Location Posted: 01 Feb 2010 11:43 AM PST
Flook is a location-based service that has both a web app and an iPhone app. It can probably best be described as a StumbleUpon for location-based discovery, as that’s pretty much how you use it. On the iPhone app, which launched a few weeks ago, users create “cards,” which contain a title, a picture, and a caption. You then tag the card in the correct category (“funny,” “art,” “food & drink,” etc) and when you upload it, Flook tags your location to it, so that others will find it. Users browse these cards on the main screen either by simply scrolling through cards near them or cards from people they follow on Flook. The cards you like the most, you can “collect” to view later. Here’s a list of the newer features of the application being announced alongside the funding:
Flook is an interesting way to find a variety of location-based information. It doesn’t emphasize the popular check-in model like Foursquare or Gowalla, or the game-heavy model like MyTown, and instead focuses on visual aspects. The new Flickr import ability seems like a great idea to extend this usage. Two of Ambient Industries founders, Roger Nolan and Jane Sales, are perhaps best known for their work at Psion, where they contributed the code that would eventually become the Symbian OS. See more of Flook in the video below or find the free app in the App Store here.
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| AOL Loses Another VP: Ralph Rivera, VP of AOL Games and AOL Latino Posted: 01 Feb 2010 11:31 AM PST
In the midst of massive headcount cuts, another AOL exec is departing the newly-independent company. Ralph Rivera, previously the Vice President of AOL Games and AOL Latino, where he was responsible for AOL’s portfolio of online casual games and helped expand its international reach, is leaving to become President of Major League Gaming, Online. MLG is a small but growing professional competitive video game league. Rivera will be tasked to lead digital strategy and online product development for the growing company. Major League Gaming has shown strong growth in the past few years. The company claims 10 million unique visitors per month, more than double from a year ago, and 6 million video streams. The company has taken $46 Million in funding since inception and have recently landed Doritos and Hot Pockets as advertising partners. Rivera believes MLG is at an “inflection point” and hopes to help it scale into a larger property. He joins a growing list of long-time executives to jump ship as AOL begins to purge 1/3 of its workforce. As the churn continues, many AOL vets are starting somewhere else instead of building up the ‘New AOL’.
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