The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Google Is Now Selling Signature $300 Designer Scarves
- Scrapblog Raises Another $2.5 Million For Online Scrapbooking
- PayPal Halts Personal Payment Transactions From And To India
- TinyChat Upgrade Brings Etherpad, Whiteboard And YouTube Integrations
- Apple Warns Developers Against Adding Geo Spam To Their Apps
- Citing Lousy Market Conditions, FriendFinder Networks Cancels IPO
- TVGorge Lets You Stream 120+ Popular TV Shows, With No Geo-Restriction
- Facebook’s Project Titan: A Full Featured Webmail Product
- MySpace Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn On His Way Out After 9 Months On The Job
- European Startups Start Their Engines For Plugg
- Europe’s Mobile Premier Awards Showcases Mobile Startups
- An Apology To Our Readers
- Siri’s IPhone App Puts A Personal Assistant In Your Pocket
- As It Celebrates Its Sixth Birthday, Facebook Surges To 400 Million Users
- iPhone Still Dominates Foursquare Usage; Android, BlackBerry Up And Coming
- Huddle Takes Top Prize At Microsoft’s SharePoint SocialFest
- Seesmic’s Latest Android Build Is Dare I Say, iPhone-Like
- Boxee responds to NBC’s Jeff Zucker’s misleading statements to Congress re: Hulu-Boxee relationship
- Betty Goes Boop: Cc: Betty To Be Reborn As Threadbox
- Lost: If Microsofties Can’t Live Together, Microsoft May Die Alone
- Sequential Order Numbers Give Hints On Nexus One Sales
- Facebook Begins Rolling Out Latest Redesign (Pics)
- Armstrong Expects New Content Chief David Eun To “Expand Amount Of Video” On AOL
- Benchmark Capital’s Matt Cohler On Jane Austen, Mobile Penetration And Dodging Questions Like A Pro
- The iPad UI Dissected In Photos
| Google Is Now Selling Signature $300 Designer Scarves Posted: 05 Feb 2010 08:56 AM PST
We all know Marissa Mayer is a tech nerd turned fashionista, and it looks like her taste for designer clothes is rubbing off on the search giant. But unlike the media or mobile industries, the fashion industry appears safe from Google. Google is selling “Google-inspired” scarves and other clothing to the public that were designed by emerging designers. Last year, designers who participated in a Vogue and Council of Fashion Designer program were asked to create a one-of-a-kind item inspired by Google in some way that reflected Google’s aura. Google transformed the finalists creations into iGoogle Artists themes but selected three of the designers to produce and sell their Google-inspired couture. Here’s the description of the scarf:
In case you were wondering about the “several ways” you can wear the scarf, I guess you can wear it as a headband, around your neck, or as an armband as a symbol of solidarity with the Googleplex. I don’t know about you, but to me the scarf aesthetically is not worth $300. I mean, come on, for $200 more I could get an iPad. You can also purchase Peace "Vintage" T Shirt inspired by the point on a Google Map that will set you back by $85. And for any jewelry fans out there, Google is peddling a $200 Old Fashioned Magnifying Glass Pendant, meant to be inspired by Google’s search.
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| Scrapblog Raises Another $2.5 Million For Online Scrapbooking Posted: 05 Feb 2010 07:22 AM PST
Scrapblog, a startup that lets you build rich Flash-based online scrapbooks, has raised $2.5 million in series D funding according to an SEC filing. The startup had previously raised $7.5 million from Longworth Venture Partners and Disney’s Steamboat Ventures. Scrapblog offers an online editor that allows users to decorate their scrapbook with text, images, colorful themes, and other embellishments, which can then be shared on the web or printed out. The startup also launched a new QuickMix tool to allow users to make simple scrapbooks on the fly. Scrapblog recently brought on a new CEO, Jill Braff, to lead the company after startup's founder and CEO Carlos Garcia, stepped aside. Braff most recently led worldwide publishing efforts including licensing, marketing and sales as SVP of global publishing at Glu Mobile. The company was first introduced back in 2006, briefly went offline, and relaunched in March 2007. The site has grown to over 2 million registered users who have created over 4.4 million Scrapblog pages.
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| PayPal Halts Personal Payment Transactions From And To India Posted: 05 Feb 2010 07:09 AM PST
PayPal isn’t working properly in India. eBay’s electronic payment juggernaut appears to be blocking personal transactions to or from accounts of India-based users. It is reversing personal transactions; transactions involving businesses are still allowed. A reader checked in with us yesterday to let us know PayPal notified him that the company had stopped allowing personal payments to be sent to or from India (full e-mail can be found below). This does not appear to be an isolated incident: see here, here and here for more reports, although we gather commercial payment transactions are unaffected at this point. This is the standard notification e-mail people are receiving in their inbox:
Asked for more information, Binary Turf received a meatier but equally vague response from the customer service department:
The wording seems to suggest that this is a temporary decision, but it’s still unclear why the company decided to take such drastic measures with no prior warning on policy changes whatsoever, and why this appears to be occurring in India only. We’ve contacted PayPal and will update when and if we hear back. Update: Anuj Nayar, Director, Global Communications at PayPal tells us:
Guess we’ll have to wait until the issue is addressed. (Hat tips to Jitendra Agrawal and Mahendra Palsule)
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| TinyChat Upgrade Brings Etherpad, Whiteboard And YouTube Integrations Posted: 05 Feb 2010 06:36 AM PST
We’re big fans of TinyChat, a web-based chat startup that has been growing like gangbusters and recently won a Crunchie for best bootstrapped startup. TinyChat started out as a simple IRC-style chatroom app to complement conversations on platforms like Twitter, has been steadily building out its innovative platform to include video chat and screensharing options, live video streaming, and Facebook Connect. Now the platform is making chats more social with the addition YouTube video integration, document collaboration with Etherpad, and whiteboard features powered by the company’s own Flockdraw. The social YouTube feature allows a moderators to pay any public YouTube video for everyone participating in the chat. The administrator can also control were the video starts, pauses etc. The Etherpad integration is as simple as using Etherpad itself (the service’s parent AppJet was acquired by Google last year). With the click of a button, you can activate an Etherpad for your chat, where multiple can collaborate on a particular document. And the Etherpad integration has all of its original features; including the ability to go back in the lifetime of your document, to import and export to a variety of formats, and unlimited sharing options. You can also save your document and reopen it in the chat platform at a later time. The Flockdraw Whiteboard integration is similar to the Etherpad feature, except for whiteboarding vs. document collaboration. The whiteboard options are basic; you can draw, paint, type, and erase. But it’s simple to use and fairly intuitive. These social and collaborative features no doubt bring TinyChat’s functionality to another level. Now that the platform has screensharing, and document and whiteboard collaboration, TinyChat could become a staple for businesses. And TinyChat offers its API for users to build off of its platform. The big bonus: TinyChat is completely free. The chat startup makes money from advertising and has yet to monetize, although its main competitor TokBox has begun to experiment with a freemium model (TokBox also has Etherpad integration). Although the startup has raised no VC funding since its launch last year, TinyChat has continued to innovate and make its platform a compelling offering for chat. In fact, the startup seeing 5 million minutes of usage per day. And along the way, the TinyChat has morphed into a full-fledged collaboration platform.
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| Apple Warns Developers Against Adding Geo Spam To Their Apps Posted: 05 Feb 2010 06:36 AM PST
A couple days ago, Apple put iPhone developers on notice that location-aware ads will no longer be allowed in all apps. Some observers read this as a blanket prohibition, and noted that it looks like Apple might be reserving geo ads for itself through its acquisition of Quattro Wireless. But the notice itself only seems to ban location-based advertising from non-location-based apps. Here’s what the notice on Apple’s Dev Center says:
We’ll see how liberally Apple chooses to apply this new guideline, but the language does not ban all geo ads. It only bans geo spam. If an app does not have a geo component as one of its core features, it can’t serve up irrelevant geo-targeted ads. This seems like a policy aimed to avoid random geo-targeted ads from popping up in games or other apps that try to enable the core location feature for ads and nothing else. Geo-based ads are very promising, and could open up local advertising to the Web in an entirely new way. But Apple needs to set the rules of the road early to make sure that consumers are not inundated with ads that are nothing more than spam and out of context to what they are doing. If you are an iPhone developer whose app was sent back for this reason, please share your experience in comments.
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| Citing Lousy Market Conditions, FriendFinder Networks Cancels IPO Posted: 05 Feb 2010 03:24 AM PST
FriendFinder Networks Inc. (“FFN”) announced today that based on market conditions, it has chosen not to proceed with its planned initial public offering at this time until market conditions improve. With this short statement, FriendFinder Networks has canceled its IPO plans, following a widely reported delay in trading earlier this week. Investors are analysts were wary of the company’s plans to go public (on the New York Stock Exchange, under the symbol "FFN.") in order to repay debt – it was reportedly paying $75 million in interest on operating profit of $45 million last year and carries a massive debt load of $471 million. The internet holding company reported net revenue of $244.4 million in the nine months ended 30 September 2009, compared with $243.9 million in the same period a year ago. Even with this small revenue increase, filings showed sales were flat. Florida-based FFN (formerly Penthouse Media Group) operates sites like Penthouse, Adult FriendFinder, Bondage.com, Cams.com and BigChurch.com and many more. It filed a registration statement with the SEC in December 2008, hoping to raise $460 million in the initial public offering at the time (this was later adjusted to $220 million). Penthouse acquired Adult FriendFinder in December 2007 for approximately $400 million. Question is what will become of the company now, and if it will stay afloat long enough for ‘market conditions to improve’.
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| TVGorge Lets You Stream 120+ Popular TV Shows, With No Geo-Restriction Posted: 05 Feb 2010 03:08 AM PST
Million dollar question is: is it legal? According to its website, TVGorge using searching and indexing techniques to detect and gather content from third-party TV streaming websites around the world. The company says that its proprietary script is capable of detecting the best source for TV shows and automatically compile the information for its database. Each video is said to be manually screened to make sure it is of high quality and functioning properly. TVGorge adds that it does not effectively store video files on its own servers and only links to or embeds existing videos from a ‘variety of sources’. Listed at the bottom of the homepage are partners such as CBS’ TV.com, Hulu, TVGuide.com and TVDuck. The amount – and quality – of the content on TVGorge is nothing short of impressive: all episodes from all eight seasons of 24 are on there, for instance, in addition to dozens of episodes of shows like Californication, 30 Rock, Heroes, Lost, CSI, Mad Men, Grey’s Anatomy, The Simpsons, and so on. I counted 128 TV shows on the site. In its Terms and Conditions, TVGorge claims to fully respect the intellectual property rights of third parties, but somehow I doubt the company effectively has agreements with Hulu, CBS and others regarding the international distribution of its copyrighted video content in place. Something tells me this one won’t be around for long. (Via Twitter and Download Squad)
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| Facebook’s Project Titan: A Full Featured Webmail Product Posted: 05 Feb 2010 02:00 AM PST
Facebook messaging has been the bane of users’ existence for years. My first public gripe was in 2008, when I said that urgent changes were needed. The biggest problem is simply deleting old emails. It takes so long that I have thousands of unread and read but not deleted messages in my inbox. But Facebook messaging is also only indirectly linked to the email, which is still the standard way that people exchange digital messages when not on Facebook. Facebook has occasionally dabbled with improvements to messaging, like adding the ability to search messages. But for the most part it has remained static. And not very useful. Even MySpace moved away from their aging messaging platform to a true webmail service in 2008 (albeit one that lacked POP or IMAP support). But now Facebook is getting itself back in the game. And if the details we’ve heard are accurate, Project Titan, or whatever it’s called when it launches, may be the kind of product people flock to. First, our understanding is that there will be full POP/IMAP support, meaning users can access the account other than through Facebook itself. Your email account name will be your vanity url – vanityurl@facebook.com. Email is all about identity. And Facebook is ahead of everyone else in the identity game via Facebook Connect. Facebook says more than 60 million people log in to 80,000 third party websites each month via Facebook Connect. Tacking a real webmail product on top of those vanity URLs and Facebook connect is something even Google may shudder at. Gmail killer? I don’t think so. But a strong product move nonetheless.
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| MySpace Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn On His Way Out After 9 Months On The Job Posted: 04 Feb 2010 10:12 PM PST
Since joining MySpace, Hirschhorn has gotten a reputation for slashing products that weren’t deemed to be part of MySpace’s core strategy (given how bloated the site was, that wasn’t always a bad thing). But the core product hasn’t really changed all that much, either, which is something that needs to change for MySpace to get back on its feet. But the real problem may have been a lack of chemistry between Hirschhorn and his fellow executives. CEO Van Natta was supposedly hired by Murdoch directly for the job. Hirschhorn and Jones were hired by Digital chief Jon Miller. Since the whole team was brought in at once, Van Natta didn’t have any say at all in the hiring of his two right hand guys. Before joining MySpace, Hirschhorn was president of the Sling Media Entertainment group, a founding partner at TripleH Media Advisors, and Chief Digital Officer at MTV. MySpace refused to comment on this story. An email to Hirschhorn has so far gone unanswered.
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| European Startups Start Their Engines For Plugg Posted: 04 Feb 2010 09:43 PM PST
Since 2008 Plugg in Brussels has become a must-attend fixture on the European startups scene. It was one of the first startups events I attended after just joining TechCrunch and it was a brilliant event, made more fun by the great welcome put on by founder Robin Wauters, who later happily became a TechCrunch writer as well. Every year Plugg gives European startups an opportunity to pitch a large audience composed of entrepreneurs and investors, and an esteemed jury.
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| Europe’s Mobile Premier Awards Showcases Mobile Startups Posted: 04 Feb 2010 09:42 PM PST
Besides the classic MPA in Innovation live 3-minute pitches, this year also features the winners of previous awards. There’ll also be a special keynote from arguably the most successful startup in mobile history, Russell Buckley of Admob, which was recently aqcuired by Google for $750m.
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| Posted: 04 Feb 2010 09:41 PM PST On Monday evening I received a phone call from someone I trust who told me that one of our interns had asked for compensation in exchange for a blog post. Specifically, this intern had allegedly asked for a Macbook Air in exchange for a post about a startup. After an investigation we determined that the allegation was true. In fact, on at least one other occasion this intern was almost certainly given a computer in exchange for a post. The intern in question has admitted to some of the allegations, and has denied others. We suspended this person while we were sorting through exactly what happened. When it became clear yesterday that there was no question that this person had requested, and in one case taken, compensation for a post, the intern was terminated. This was not one of our full time writers, and so the frequency of posts was light. Nevertheless, we’ve also deleted all content created by this person on our blogs. We are fairly certain that most of the posts weren’t tainted in any way, but to be sure we’ve removed every word written by this person on the TechCrunch network. Our attorneys have advised us not to disclose the name of the individual because the person is not a legal adult. We also think that, given the intern’s age, it may not be appropriate to make their identity public. We are all shaken here at TechCrunch – this is someone who was our friend and who we trusted to be honest with our readers. Our hope is that the intern learns something from this experience and grows into the kind of person that will be more welcome in this community. I apologize to each one of you. I promise that we will always maintain complete transparency with you on how we operate, even when it isn’t such an easy thing to do. Update: Daniel, the intern in question, has decided to talk about this situation publicly on his blog. I’m glad that he has. You can read his thoughts here.
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| Siri’s IPhone App Puts A Personal Assistant In Your Pocket Posted: 04 Feb 2010 08:51 PM PST
After nearly a year in development and $24 million in venture capital, Siri is finally ready to bring its personal assistant to the iPhone. Siri brings a conversational interface to the iPhone which allows you to ask it to perform tasks for you such as find a French restaurant nearby and book a table, look up movie listings, order a taxi, or look up the phone number and address of a local business. The app is now live in the App Store (iTunes link; for now it is recommended only for iPhone 3Gs models because it requires more processing power, but a version tuned for older iPhones will be come out by the end of the quarter) You simply speak into the phone with a request like, “Find something to do in San Francisco this weekend.” It turns your speech to text and pushes your request out to an appropriate service on the Web such as Eventful or Citysearch, in this case. It not only attempts to bring you back the appropriate information based on context, time of day, and your location, but with your permission can go ahead and make reservations or buy tickets as well. (Read our extensive first-look coverage from last year or watch this sneak-peak video) Siri combines an impressive array of technologies and brings them together on the iPhone. These include natural language processing and semantic analysis. The underlying technology was developed at SRI with $200 million worth of Darpa grants. Siri was spun off to commercialize it and bring it to consumers. It’s last funding round was led by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing (a fact never disclosed before), who also is an investor in Facebook. In a way, Siri is the “mother of all mashups.” The iPhone app is a conversational interface with Siri’s servers on the Web, which tie into nearly 30 different APIs at launch, with more on the way. These include OpenTable, TaxiMagic, MovieTikets.com, Rotten Tomatoes, WeatherBug, Yahoo Local, Yahoo Boss, StubHub, Bing, Eventful Freebase, Citysearch, AllMenus.com, Gayot, and Wolfram Alpha. The app is free, and Siri gets affiliate fees every time you buy something like a concert ticket or make a restaurant reservation through the app. In addition to helping you do things, it also can be used to set reminders. Simply tell it to remind you by email to make a phone call on Thursday morning, and it can figure it out. The app licenses its speech-to-text engine from Nuance, another SRI spin-off. Android and Blackberry versions are also in the works.
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| As It Celebrates Its Sixth Birthday, Facebook Surges To 400 Million Users Posted: 04 Feb 2010 05:53 PM PST
To celebrate, the company is holding its own version of a party — it’s Hackathon time. That means all of the company’s engineers are about to embark on all night coding sessions. Previous Hackathons have given birth to things like Facebook Video and its new HipHop PHP converter. Zuckerberg also says that we’ll be seeing some new product launches tonight (we’ll be covering them as soon as each goes live). In light of the event, here’s a collection of screenshots of Facebook profiles and homepages from the last few years (Facebook actually put most of this gallery together in honor of its fifth birthday, but it’s always fun to look back at how far the site has come). Also note that the last screenshot in the timeline has its days numberd — Facebook is currently rolling out another redesign. A lot has changed, much of it for the better. But I still miss the glory days when a poke took up a quarter of my screen.         
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| iPhone Still Dominates Foursquare Usage; Android, BlackBerry Up And Coming Posted: 04 Feb 2010 05:36 PM PST
The main Foursquare account tweeted out stats today that give a nice breakdown of usage. It’s just over a seven day span, but given that the service is now finally on platforms such as BlackBerry, is probably a good sample. As you may expect, the iPhone still dominates, with 67% of usage. Coming in second with 13% is Android, which was the second native app Foursquare launched. In third is the just-launched BlackBerry version with 11%. In fourth is the mobile web, which has 7%. Palm is in fifth with 1.5%, and SMS comes in last with less than 1%. A few interesting things to note: When the service launched just about a year ago at the SXSW festival, it was iPhone and mobile web only. Whoever wrote the tweet on the Foursquare account added “still?!?” when noting the mobile web’s 7% usage, so clearly they think there are better options out there. And with the just unveiled Windows Mobile client, there are now apps for all the big platforms except for Nokia (which is also in the works). Also interesting is that SMS is in last place on this list with less than 1%. Foursquare is similar to co-founder Dennis Crowley’s last startup, Dodgeball, which sold to Google in 2006 — but the difference is that Dodgeball heavily relied on SMS. It’s interesting that Foursquare is seeing the growth it is in spite of this lack of SMS usage. SMS was a big reason why Twitter exploded, and it still is a major part of the service in other countries. That’s something Foursquare might want to consider as it continues to expand.
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| Huddle Takes Top Prize At Microsoft’s SharePoint SocialFest Posted: 04 Feb 2010 05:34 PM PST
Here’s a video with Lynda Ting, Microsoft’s Director of Business Development, Emerging Business Team, explaining the goals of the program: Cortex Intelligence Calinda Software Confer Huddle Leverage Software Liaise Loqu8
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| Seesmic’s Latest Android Build Is Dare I Say, iPhone-Like Posted: 04 Feb 2010 04:46 PM PST
The latest version brings a few new features, but none is bigger than multi-account support. Finally, if you have more than one Twitter account, you can set Seesmic to remember both, and easily switch between them. Perhaps more notably, you can also cross-post messages between different accounts at the same time. Even my favorite Twitter app, Tweetie for the iPhone, doesn’t allow you to do this. And if you’re worried that you’ll be bombarded by notifications, whatever account you set as your default one will be the one you just get notifications from, we’re told. Another new feature allows Seesmic to remember where you were in your tweet stream when you exit or switch out of the app. That way, when you open it again, you can resume where you left off. Again, this is a feature that’s pretty standard on many Twitter iPhone apps, but has been lacking on most of the Android ones. Perhaps most impressive to me are two subtle changes though. The scroll speed of the tweet streams has been greatly increased and seems much more fluid. Also, Seesmic has added the ability to double-tap the top of the app to auto-scroll back to the top — again, another feature that’s pretty standard on iPhone Twitter apps. Here are some other new features that have been added:
Seesmic recently noted that it was a featured app alongside some Nexus One advertising by Google. Thanks to that, the app is closing in on 100,000 downloads, founder Loic Le Meur says. This update is scheduled to hit the Android Market any minute now. Watch more in the video below:
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| Boxee responds to NBC’s Jeff Zucker’s misleading statements to Congress re: Hulu-Boxee relationship Posted: 04 Feb 2010 04:35 PM PST
The world’s worst manager, Jeff Zucker, who just so happens to be the president of NBC Universal, was on Capitol Hill today trying to persuade lawmakers to allow the proposed merger with Comcast go through. Interesting to note his take on Boxee’s relationship with Hulu, which, you’ll recall, has been something of a mess. Boxee adds Hulu compatibility, Hulu breaks said compatibility, Boxee re-works its code so that Hulu works again, Hulu breaks compatibility again, etc. And on and on and on. Anyhow, here’s the relevant exchange, as carefully jotted down by Boxee’s point guards.
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| Betty Goes Boop: Cc: Betty To Be Reborn As Threadbox Posted: 04 Feb 2010 03:53 PM PST
In an email to customers, Cc: Betty has disclosed that it’s changing its name to Threadbox. And actually the entire service will be morphing into a “new and improved product.” The changes are the result of 10 months of beta testing. From the email:
This new Threadbox product will officially launch this Spring. In the meantime, they’re allowing some of their most active users a change to demo Threadbox right now. Those interested can sign up for the waiting list here or on their new site. Cc: Betty raised $500,000 in December of last year, and has $2 million in total funding now. As we noted during the last funding round, Threadbox has been the name of a project that founder Michael Cerda had been working on — but what wasn’t known is that Cc: Betty would become Threadbox. Cc: Betty will continue to operate until Threadbox is ready to go. And at that time, they’ll offer a way for users to migrate their data over. Learn more about the new Threadbox in the video below (also note how they make fun of Google Wave).
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| Lost: If Microsofties Can’t Live Together, Microsoft May Die Alone Posted: 04 Feb 2010 03:38 PM PST
Brass’ comments have caused such a fuss, that Microsoft’s vice president of corporate communications was even forced to respond on their official blog. And while obviously Microsoft’s PR team is going to downplay some of Brass’ comments, and refute others with counter examples, the post completely ignores what I see to be Brass’ main point: that Microsoft has become a place with dozens if not hundreds of civil wars going on within the company. One example Brass cites is ClearType, which he worked on. While, as Microsoft counters, ClearType now is a part of Windows, Brass says it should have and would have been implemented much sooner had other groups within the company not “felt threatened by our success.” He further elaborates that the vice president of pocket devices went as far to say that they’d support it only if his group gained complete control over it. He also notes the head of Office being opposed to it. And that’s interesting because it’s also the head of Office that he also blames for helping to kill the tablet PC concept Microsoft started all the way back in 2001. As Brass tells it, the VP of Office products refused to modify his software to work properly with the tablet. This is exactly the opposite of what Apple showed off at last week’s iPad event, as Steve Jobs brought the iWork team out on stage to show how they reworked the software specifically for the new product. Now, iWork is not Office, obviously. No matter what you think about the two products, iWork is a very small part of Apple’s big revenue picture, while Office is a large part of Microsoft’s. But that’s exactly the point. As Brass notes, Microsoft’s is making a ton of revenue, but almost all of it comes from two places: Windows and Office. Because of that, those two branches undoubtedly have a huge amount of power, and his two examples showcase that. The problem with this is that if Google (and to a lesser extent, Apple) has their way, both Windows and Office will be less important going forward. Obviously, that’s far from a sure thing, but the trends of everything moving towards mobile and/or to the web are very clear. And Microsoft would not be investing so much in its online division, if they didn’t agree. But despite the investments, things aren’t going too well for Microsoft in the online realm from a revenue perspective. In fact, they’re going horribly. And from the way Brass tells it, here’s why:
Microsoft is not Apple. That is to say, their employees will often talk about their experiences working for the software giant. And to say that many of them echo Brass’ points about teams working against one another (and in some cases, people in the same team working against one another) is an understatement. In fact, I would say that most of them concede to this being a major problem within the company. Even if they say it’s not a problem within their actual group, they’ll admit that in other groups within the company it is a huge problem. That’s a management problem. And if it involves certain divisions getting priority or resources over others, it’s an upper management problem. Microsoft supporters are always quick to point back to the revenues as if to say, “things can’t be going that badly if we’re making all this money.” And the bottom-line is obviously important, but it doesn’t address any underlying problems. Nothing lasts forever, and that includes Windows and Office. And to rest on those while innovative new products suffer, is foolish. Another ex-Microsoft employee, Don Dodge, has been quick to criticize the company in recent months as well on some of these issues. Here’s what he had to tell VentureBeat recently:
The fact of the matter is that the two hottest things being talked about right now are mobile and tablets. Microsoft was heavily involved in both of those very early and yet somehow either managed to completely fail (tablets) or let their product bleed to death in an age of bandages (Windows Mobile). It doesn’t seem to be a lack of vision, it’s a lack of execution. So what’s the root cause of all this infighting? Are those in power at Microsoft too old (one Microsoft-watcher has pondered that twice now). Is the entire company just too big (at least one Microsoftie thinks so even after 5,000+ layoffs). Is it a lack of enthusiasm among workers? More importantly, what is Microsoft going to do about it? As ABC’s hit show Lost enters its final season, it’s basically been impossible to avoid the commercials about it for weeks now. But one of them somewhat reminds me of this situation at Microsoft. Maybe the company needs a Jack Shephard-type leader to gather them all together and say, “if we can’t live together, we’re gonna die alone.” [image: ABC]
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| Sequential Order Numbers Give Hints On Nexus One Sales Posted: 04 Feb 2010 03:18 PM PST
But a reader who purchased two phones a few days apart noticed that the order slips that came with his phones have what appeared to be sequential order numbers. The orders all start with “501″ and then have a six digit number following that number. We’ve gathered two more order slips from other readers to add to the data set. Here’s what we have so far: 1/09/10: 501172214 If the orders increase sequentially by one (and there is no reason to think that it does, just a guess), these slips suggest that 83,791 Google Nexus One phones were sold between January 9 and January 25. That’s 4,929 of the devices per day. We want to gather more slips from readers to help us refine the data, so please send a photo of your slip to tips@techcrunch.com if you have one. Potential problems with the data: - The slips are all showing sequential orders by date, but Google could be increasing the order numbers by more than 1 on each order. It’s also possible they’re increasing the order numbers in a different way. More slips, particularly from the first day or two, would help us understand this. - It’s possible that 256,005 of the phones were sold as of 1/25, but that requires the additional assumption that the order numbers started at 501000001. Early sales slips will help confirm that one way or another. - We believe that all four of these phones were the unlocked non-subsidized versions of the phone. T-Mobile purchases may have different order numbers. If anyone has a slip for a t-mobile Nexus One, it will help us figure that out. Also, Google has now changed their order numbering system, perhaps after reading my tweet yesterday asking for people to contact us with their packing orders. We purchased another Nexus One yesterday to see the order number, and it now starts with “610″ and has additional digits: 610811985997083. So this won’t work as an estimate tool going forward.
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| Facebook Begins Rolling Out Latest Redesign (Pics) Posted: 04 Feb 2010 01:49 PM PST
The design also includes some UI enhancements, like the ability to send messages direct from your homepage using a pop-over window, rather than having to visit a separate page. There’s also a new emphasis on search — note how much larger the search box is, and its more centered placement on the page. It also looks like the News Feed filters and friends lists have been removed (or at least no longer take up the entire left side bar). And the naming of the two different homepage streams — Live Feed and News Feed — have changed: they’re both part of the News Feed now, with the live updates under a “Most Recent” tab and the highlights under “Top News”. The new design isn’t a huge surprise — Facebook has been testing out variations of the design for some time. And they announced back in October that they would be moving many of the navigation elements over to the left side of the screen. I haven’t gotten to try out the design for myself yet, but I’m liking it a lot. It looks cleaner and easier to use than the old design (I’ve never been a fan of the ‘Applications’ menu concept). Also note the way it handles submenus, keeping navigation elements consistently in the left panel as opposed to arbitrarily scattered in each app. One slightly odd change though: it looks like videos are now actually part of the Photo application. Twitter user Lwatkins84 tweeted this photo: And Mathew Sanders has put together a gallery showing off some of the screenshots — note the changes to the Photos application: 
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| Armstrong Expects New Content Chief David Eun To “Expand Amount Of Video” On AOL Posted: 04 Feb 2010 01:31 PM PST
No executive job is safe in Tim Armstrong’s AOL, where he is still cleaning house and putting his own team into place. Even Bill Wilson, the architect of AOL’s let-a thousand-blogs-bloom content strategy which is a cornerstone of AOL’s new approach, is now being replaced as president of AOL Media by Armstrong’s former New York City Google colleague David Eun. “In a turnaround situation we are doing whatever is necessary to make the company successful,” Armstrong told me in a brief phone conversation. At Google, Eun most recently was in charge of content partnerships for YouTube and Google overall. At AOL, he will be president of AOL Studios as well, which comes from AOL’s recent acquisition of StudioNow. Armstrong expects Eun to bring more video to AOL sites. “You will see an expanded amount of video,” he says, “video we produce ourselves and video partnerships.” In particular, Armstrong wants Eun to “supercharge” content partnerships. Eun will also oversee Seed, AOL’s content management system. Armstrong says he has no more plans to make more changes to AOL’s top ranks. He’s been putting his own team into place since he took the job, bringing in Brad Garlinghouse as president of Internet and mobile communications to replace longtime exec David Liu and more recently hired former Google engineer Jeff Raynar to head up engineering in New York. At the same time, CTO Ted Cahall and many other vets have departed. And AOL is still in the middle of laying off a third of its workforce, so the executive turmoil might not be over. Wilson will remain through May. “Bill has done a great job,” says Armstrong, “and I will continue to lean on him.” Wilson was in charge of the AOL homepage and its 80 Mediaglow properties, including Engadget, DownloadSquad, and Joystiq. But the new properties have not grown fast enough to account for the decline in the homepage traffic. AOL’s overall visitor numbers have done pretty much nothing all year, ending at 111 million U.S. unique visitors in December, 2009, versus 110 million a year ago. And that was only after a nice uptick in December (see comScore chart below). “The key metric for our content organization is unique visitor growth,” says Armstrong. Will Eun do any better? Armstrong sets expectations low, warning that the overall numbers “may show up or down in terms of trading properties in and out,” but that what he will be focussed on is winning audience in the right categories.
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| Benchmark Capital’s Matt Cohler On Jane Austen, Mobile Penetration And Dodging Questions Like A Pro Posted: 04 Feb 2010 11:58 AM PST Here’s the last of our Davos Tech Interviews: Former Facebook exec and current Benchmark Capital general partner Matt Cohler sat down with me for twenty minutes on the last day of the event to talk about Facebook (no comment), Twitter (no comment), LinkedIn (no comment) and Zynga (nada, and he’s not even a stockholder in that one). Frankly, he was much more forthcoming the last time I interviewed him, on the day he left Facebook and joined Benchmark. See The Matt Cohler Exit Interview from June 2008. In another year or so he’ll be ready to go into politics. He can dodge questions like a pro. But Matt did answer some other questions, and that’s where things got interesting. He’s made just one direct investment at Benchmark so far, Asana, which was founded by former colleague and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. But Matt is also involved in Benchmark’s other investments, including a February 2009 investment in Twitter. The most interesting part of the conversation was near the end, when we talked about mobile social networks like Gowalla and Foursquare. After passing on my first question, I rephrased and we dove right in:
Matt’s argument is that it’s still too early to start declaring winners in mobile social networking because smartphone penetration is still only 20% in Europe and North America. Until that increases, there’s still plenty of time to wait and get things right. I also learned that the movie Clueless was an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma:
MA: But do you think the Gowalla/ FourSquare model is the right one? Do you think that they have found, yknow, you sort of check in, there's games, they get you to pull your phone out when you places and do things. Do you like that model? Do you think that's a winner? Because two years ago people were still messing around with Dodgeball, which you know is the Foursquare guys, Loopt has been messing around with it, and I think it's BrightKite, none of them really took off. And there was one last gem at the end. Matt says Android phones will eventually outnumber iPhones:
The full transcript is below: Michael Arrington: I'm here with Matt Cohler, a partner at Benchmark Capital, hello Matt. Matt Cohler: Hey Mike. MA: Thanks for joining me. MC: Sure, thank you. MA: So this is the first time I've interviewed you at Davos. I usually am able to talk to a few of the people from Silicon Valley have been sitting down with me every year talking about the conference, and also what's going on with things back home. So, I appreciate you doing that. MC: Sure. MA: So, I actually interviewed you when you left Facebook. MC: You did. MA: Which was a year ago, a little over a year ago. MC: Just over a year ago, yeah. MA: And you left Facebook, left some stock on the table I assume, you were one of their earliest employees and you left to become a partner at Benchmark Capital, one of the top firms – Venture firms in Silicon Valley. Possibly best known for investing in eBay, at – what was it? – five thousand percent return. MC: I don't know… MA: They never even cashed the check, did they. MC: So the story goes. MA: We talked about this – was it Bill Gurley? – we talked a little bit about that. But obviously Benchmark has come a long way since then as well. What's it like being a venture capitalist? MC: It's great. It's awesome. It is! It's a lot of fun. It's not for everybody, for sure, but I always thought it was for me, and I still think it is. It takes a long time to figure it out, I've been doing it for a little over a year, ugh, the cycles are long cycles because you see a company through from the very days until everybody is much more mature, so I don't think that I have a full picture of it after just a year. But so far I'm having a great time. As with everything in life, it's all about the people that you're with every day, and it's a great group of people. MA: What's it like at Benchmark? It's one of, or the only firm, that's completely communist, right, in the sense that they split evenly the management fee, and the carriet (?) and everything. If you're a partner, all partners are equal, and these are guys that have been doing this for twenty years now, right? MC: Right. We're all General Partners of the fund, and we're all managing members of a management company. MA: It must be great. MC: Ya, it's terrific. MA: A young partner at another firm, even top firms, you're still fighting for a long term position, and sometimes they shed partners. Benchmark just seems like you're sort of stable. MC: Yep. MA: Sorry, I'm getting a few messages here. My Nexus One is … MC: I like mine. Its… MA: The Nexus One is your phone? MC: I have it… it's one of my phones. MA: What's your go-to phone? MC: Blackberry. MA: What's a day like at Benchmark? MC: I want to answer your last question too. Because it is a unique model, you're right. And I think it's great because it really enables us to stay focused on the one thing which really matters for us, which is – MA: Making money? MC: No- helping entrepreneurs to build great companies. MA: Yeah. MC: I mean, really. That's what gets us up in the morning, that's why I do what I do, and that's why all my partners do what they do as well. So, it makes for a great day-to-day working environment, but it also means we can put all of our energies into finding great investment opportunities, finding great entrepreneurs, and helping those entrepreneurs to build great companies. MA: So Benchmark isn't an investor in Facebook, although I assume you still hold stock in Facebook. MC: Benchmark is a small investor in Facebook, now, through the FriendFeed acquisition that occurred back in… MA: Oh yeah, of course. MC: Benchmark is not – was not an early venture investor. MA: Right. But Benchmark is a major investor in Twitter. MC: Right. MA: And you're not the board member for that, but I assume that – What do you think of Twitter, you know, as an investor – you guys got in, was it the last round? The billionth round? MC: The prior round. MA: Twitter was valued at, what was it, 300 million. MC: I can't comment on that. MA: But they announced it. The rumor was that that was a round at a 300 million dollar valuation, something like that. What do you think of the business? MC: I think it's a great company. Ev is here, so you should talk to him about the company. If you haven't already! Maybe you already interviewed him this week. MA: I don't know if you remember last year, I posted some documents from Twitter. And Evan and I are now talking again, but it's not like we're BFF and picnicking together, so, but you know, the question I'm asking isn't what's the revenue or anything, it's – let me ask it a different way. What do you think of Twitter, really compared to, say, a Facebook, in terms of, is it Facebook without pictures? Is it – how is it different, is it competitive? MC: Ev asked us to (mumbled) this sort of questions. MA: To not answer them at all? MC: To turn them over to him. So I'm gonna direct you back to him. MA: Oh that's right. MC: I want to be a good partner to the company. So you should talk with Ev, he's here. But it's a great company. MA: Do you think Facebook and Twitter are competitors? MC: I don't think Facebook ever thinks of itself in terms of other companies out there on the market, and I think Twitter is probably the same way. MA: Can we talk a little about how you see Twitter becoming a billion users, a 500 million users? MC: I don't want to talk about it at all, I'm sorry. MA: Okay, let's change gears, then. Talk about the investments you've made so far. I know you've made at least one. Talk to me a little about those, and what you think of those companies. MC: Right. So first, at Benchmark, because of the way we're set up, we all do everything as a team, so we don't really think about investments in terms of my investments, and Peter's investments – MA: Are you on any boards? MC: I'm on a board. Ya. So I'm on the board at Asana, which is a new company started by Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein. Dustin was a co-founder of Facebook, the true co-founder of Facebook, I know him very well and we've worked together for four years. Dustin was an engineering manager at Facebook and I've worked closely with him as well. MA: Benchmark invested in that round. MC: That is correct. We led that round. MA: And tell me about that company, let me know what you think. MC: Yeah. That's a great company, it's still very early. They raised a relatively large venture round early in their life cycle simple because there was a lot of interest in the company from the venture world. But what they're trying to do is create a fundamentally better – an order of magnitude better – approach to enabling enterprises and organizations to collaborate. So it's a reinvention from the ground up, starting with the technology, up, of how people communicate with one another and collaborate with one another in organizational contexts. And the company's very early. A lot of people have said 'is it in stealth mode, is it .. yknow, it's really not in stealth mode, it's just early in its life cycle and early in its development. But they've already developed some really compelling technology, and they're going to be talking about that in the near future, and I'm really excited to see where it's gonna go. MA: So just one formal investment that you've made since you joined. MC: Well I've helped out with all the investments that Benchmark has made since I've joined, but that's the only board that I'm on. MA: I've heard that venture capitalists can usually handle about 10, 12 board seats at a time, I mean, do you see, do you think that in a couple years you'll be up to that? You really think, one or two a year – MC: You know, as great opportunities come, and to the extent that I can … MA: You don't have a quota. MC: No. No, there's no… MA: Benchmark sounds like they're a pretty frickin' cool place to work. MC: Oh, I'm very lucky. MA: Can I .. do you think they need an official blogger? Can I be a partner there? MC: I think you're doing just fine with what you're doing. MA: I think what you've got going on is a little better than what I've got going on. MC: I don't know. That's a great question. MA: You've never started your own company. MC: I have never started my own company. MA: You were at LinkedIn? MC: Yep, that's right. MA: Where were you before LinkedIn? MC: I was at McKinsey in Silicon Valley before LinkedIn, and then I was at a startup in Beijing China before that. I was at McKinsey in 2001 and 2002 during the nuclear winter of Silicon Valley – MA: Good times. MC: Oh yeah, great times. No traffic on the 101, that was a huge plus, but other than that… MA: Of course, I didn't know that because I moved out of Silicon Valley because we sold our company and I'd moved to England for a few years which, it wasn't much better there. MC: Yeah. What you said is right. I've never started a company. That's part of why I became a General Partner is Benchmark is that I've never really been a founder, I've always joined startups, I joined LinkedIn, I joined Facebook, before either company had raised any venture money, and then just sort of helped out as they got older as an advisor to the entrepreneur, do whatever needed to get done to help build the company, I think that's relatively close to what venture investors are supposed to do as well. So I couldn't imagine a better place to be than Benchmark. So I assume that if they'll put up with me, this is a great place to continue to do really the same sort of thing that I've been doing. For an indefinite period of time. How long is that? How long is life? Who knows? MA: What's Benchmark's current fund? How much money are they playing with right now? MC: The current fund is roughly a half billion dollars. MA: And you're making investments, I mean, you guys make investments in super early stage, or later stage, with Twitter I'd call that later stage, I don't know, some of them would still look at that as early stage, you guys are just out there looking for the right opportunities, it doesn't matter, like it could be a month before going public or two days old. MC: Ya, we're opportunistic. And that said, if you look at the three dimensions which define venture investment decisions, stage, sector and geography, we're essentially kind of 80 to 90% Series A, Series B, Ninety percent Silicon Valley, ninety percent information technology, and that's the whole information technology, from semiconductor IP up to companies like Twitter, um, but that other ten, twenty percent, if we think there's a really compelling upside opportunity in the company, we think there's still a ten to hundred X opportunity in the company and there's still really exciting company building to do and we really believe in the entrepreneur then we absolutely make exceptions from time to time. MA: Without disclosing any information that you have privately and I know you wouldn't anyway, but I assume you don't, who goes public first, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Zynga? Just asking an expert. MC: I have no idea. MA: You think all three will be public within twenty four months? MC: I have no idea. MA: Do you see the public markets opening up a little bit? MC: That is an interesting question. There's chatter about it, y'know, investment bankers are talking about it nonstop, now they obviously have an incentive to talk about it nonstop, so I don't know what to read into that and what not to read into that. I'll say this: There's a lot more talk about public markets opening up then there are S –ones getting funded. So until more S1's are filed, we'll see. There's more S1's being filed, and we had a portfolio company Open Table go public in 2009, which I think was a very successful IPO, so I think there's cases here and there where… MA: What's Open Table's market capital? MC: I don't track it on an hour by hour basis, but I think it's roughly in the fix, 600 million dollar range. MA: Do you think Facebook has waited too long to address FourSquare, or do you think … MC: I'll point you back to Sheryl on that one. MA: I know you can't answer some of these questions because you're a shareholder. MC: And I'm an advisor to the company. MA: Yeah, I'll ask it differently. How important do you think Foursquare-type, Gowalla – do you think this is a real trend or a fake trend that we're seeing with people using these services. MC: I think it's a real trend, and I think it's an instance of a broader trend that is the emergence of mobile, which is something we've been talking about for a decade. And I actually don't think we're there yet, but it's really close. MA: You don't think we're there yet because of the hardware, the phones aren't there yet, or that they haven't quite gotten the model of checking in? MC: The market adoption isn't there yet. So when you think about what you need to have that really be a compelling user experience in several dimensions, to just look at a couple of them, location and 3G — Let's just look at 3G as kind of the lowest common denominator, there's only about twenty percent 3G mobile handset penetration in Western Europe and North America today. The good news is about twenty percent… MA: But in certain communities it's a hundred percent. MC: In certain communities it's a hundred percent… MA: But in Silicon Valley, the people we hang out with… MC: Absolutely. But if you're building social products you really need a mass market to have access the platforms that those social products are built on. MA: Meaning the door is still wide open, theoretically, for others. MC: I think we're going to see many of the companies that are leaders on the web also become leaders in mobile, and I think the distinction between "web" and "mobile" is going to blur. MA: It already is for me, personally. MC: It already is, ya. MA: But do you think the Gowalla/ FourSquare model is the right one? Do you think that they have found, yknow, you sort of check in, there's games, they get you to pull your phone out when you places and do things. Do you like that model? Do you think that's a winner? Because two years ago people were still messing around with Dodgeball, which you know is the Foursquare guys, Loopt has been messing around with it, and I think it's BrightKite, none of them really took off. MC: I think it's too early. I just think it's too early. MA: You think it's too early because of market penetration, but… MC: I think, both Gowalla and Foursquare, there's really a stream of momentum there, they're interesting companies, they have slightly different approaches to – the problem that they're basically trying to solve is, how do we create the right set of dynamics for people to want to check in. MA: And to create content, basically. MC: Well that's a form of content. And so both of them are answering that question, basically, with more game dynamics. They have different approaches to how they address those game dynamics. But Josh is a great designer, a great product designer. And Dennis is a great entrepreneur too. So it's fascinating to see what's going on with both of those products, but as an instance of the sort of thing that is going to be possible when everybody has mobile. It's really very exciting. The thing about these social products is that there's a dynamic that tends to happen where they flip from being socially awkward to socially necessary. And if you think back to the US in the late nineties, it was sort of a stigma to carry around a mobile phone. If you remember the movie Clueless, which is an amazing movie… MA: One of my favorites. MC: Yeah. An adaptation of the Jane Austen novel Emma, and there's a recurring joke in the movie about the fact that these kids have mobile phones, have cell phones. It's like, ha ha, isn't that funny, they have cell phones. Today it's just assumptive that you have a cell phone in your pocket all the time. I was in Asia in the late nineties when I came back to the US.. When I was in Asia, everyone was already using a cell phone. When I came back to the US, all my non-tech friends were mocking me for having a star-tac in my pocket. MA: Nobody was text messaging in the US because you couldn't. MC: You couldn't, exactly. Not even interoperability between two carriers. There was also just very little market adoption. And at that point it was basically socially … MA: I loved that star-tac phone, by the way. MC: Yeah, it was a good phone. MA: Twenty minute battery life. Literally. Twenty minutes. MC: Oh yeah, I remember. MA: Do you think that there will be more Android phones than iPhones at some point in the next couple of years? MC: At some point. I don't have a crystal ball, I don't make kind of sweeping predictions about the future. I think it's highly likely that there will be more Android devices in the market than iPhone and iPod touch devices in market at some point in the foreseeable future, be that six months, twelve months, twenty four months, thirty six months, I have no idea. MA: Thank you for your time. MC: Sure, absolutely.
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| The iPad UI Dissected In Photos Posted: 04 Feb 2010 11:45 AM PST
Speirs has made a Flickr set in which he dissects screenshots of the iPad from the promotional shots and videos Apple has released. On each photo he adds his own notes of things to take notice of. But rather than go for most of the obvious elements, Speirs focuses on a lot of UI elements that the majority of people will overlook while watching the videos. This is important because as any good fanboy will tell you, it’s often the subtle things Apple does in its UI work that make its devices stand apart. And with the iPad, Apple has a number of new UI ideas it’s putting out there. As Steve Jobs made clear during his keynote, the iPad was built to be equally as good in either portrait or landscape mode. This is already different from the iPhone which, while full of plenty of nice landscape UI elements, is still going to be used in portrait mode most of the time. But on the iPad, there are elements such as a left hand pane that is visibile in the Mail app only when the device is horizontal. Turn it vertical, and it only shows the message area, and there are new overlays that you activate to navigate in this view. And that’s probably the most obvious example of elements Speirs points out. If you’re really chomping at the bit to get your hands on an iPad, Speirs’ 53 photos should be right up your alley.
[via Finer Things In Mac]
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Yes, it’s perfectly possible to watch 
Facebook is completely rewriting their messaging product and is preparing to launch a fully featured webmail product in its place, according to a source with knowledge of the product. Internally it’s known as Project Titan. Or, unofficially and perhaps over-enthusiastically, the Gmail killer.
MySpace Chief Product Officer 
Registration for the 
The 
It’s been six years to the day that Facebook launched, and the company’s massive growth is showing no signs of slowing down. Minutes ago, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a note to the site’s 
Last week, Microsoft invited seven 
Perhaps the 
As a product, 
There’s a very interesting op-ed piece in The New York Times today entitled 
There hasn’t been much data on sales of the 
Facebook has just started rolling out a new homepage design to a small number of users, and will be deploying it on a wide scale in the near future. The design takes the navigational elements that have previously been tucked under the “Applications” menu and returns them to the left sidebar of the page (which is actually where they were a long time ago).
Following its unveiling last week, everyone continues to debate Apple’s iPad. Some are certain that it’s doomed to fail, while others are sure it’s the future of computing. The truth is that, like the iPhone, it’s hard to make any kind of accurate judgement about it until you’ve actually 
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