The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Your Comments Are Safe With Us
- Does Monster’s Acquisition Of Yahoo! HotJobs Matter If The Internet Is The Job Board?
- Kazaa Takes A Swing At Symantec After Adware Accusations
- Nsyght Releases New Ways To Manage Realtime Social Streams
- Amazon Says No To Blippy
- Piazzza Gives Classmates An Online Forum To Trade Their Knowledge
- The Future of Web Content – HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps
- A Googler Has his Tiananmen Square Moment
- Foursquare Passes 1 Million Check-Ins A Week. Rate Doubled In The Past Month.
- Twitter’s Development History Beautifully Visualized In A Video
- Facebook Flips The Switch On Its Improved Photo Uploader
- EventVue’s Next Event: Deadpool. Co-Founder Shares Mistakes.
- Wolfram Alpha Still Trying To Justify That $50 iPhone App With New Virtual Keyboards
- 2tor Raises $20 Million Series B To Go After The High End Of Online Education
- Google Maps Dips Into Serendipity Suggestions
- Remotely Check-In At The Super Bowl And Trash Talk With Friends With FanPulse
- Skittles’ Colorful, Clearly Drug-Induced, Never-Ending Wacky Website
- Think It’s Hard Being a Woman in Tech? Try It in the 1940s.
- Facebook Takes Over Its Own Display Advertising From Microsoft, Keeps Bing For Web Search
| Your Comments Are Safe With Us Posted: 06 Feb 2010 09:02 AM PST
That allegation on itself is inaccurate, as is most of the rest of the article, so I felt compelled to respond quickly and offer our side of the story. Which, on a sidenote, we weren’t asked for by the person or people behind the blog (at least not to my knowledge). I’ll start with the part that checks out: yes, comments on older blog posts are not being displayed at the moment, although they are still stored in the database on our side. But no, we did not remove them because we were looking to increase our page load time – although we’re constantly looking for ways to do so – and there’s no big search engine optimization conspiracy behind it either. This also has nothing to do with the fact that we actively moderate comments on posts around here – we’ve always welcomed civil discussion and that hasn’t changed. Criticism and disagreement is fine, but we want to keep the comment section a nice place to come for everyone, and those who keep that from happening will see their comments occasionally get moderated out of sight. So why are comments on older blog posts not being displayed? The simple truth is that this is a direct consequence of the widely reported incident that occurred in late January, when we were maliciously hacked. Since then, our technical staff has been hard at work not only plugging the hole but also making sure there are no other security issues that can be exploited, as well as taking the necessary precautions for such an event not to occur again. Truth be told, I have no in depth knowledge of what happened precisely when we were hacked, nor do I have any detailed information about what measures we are taking as a result of the security breach. We’ve always been very transparent about the way things are run here at TechCrunch, so I expect that when I learn more about what happened, you will too. Here’s what I do know, though: no comments on older posts have been voluntarily deleted by anyone here at TechCrunch, and all that were published in the past will be reinstated soon. Your comments are truly valuable to us, they are safely stored, and they will be restored in the near future. Any questions or comments?
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| Does Monster’s Acquisition Of Yahoo! HotJobs Matter If The Internet Is The Job Board? Posted: 06 Feb 2010 07:57 AM PST
Monster's acquisition of Yahoo HotJobs signals a significant landscape change for a job board industry facing significant economic pressure and I believe the deal also marks a "new normal" in how companies are hiring talent. Online recruiting is transitioning away from "the Big Three" job boards. The Internet is becoming the job board. Of course, unloading and closing properties that are not part of Yahoo's strategy going forward is smart. (Though selling a job advertising board smack in the middle of this downturn and extreme unemployment must have been as hard as selling an empty, foreclosed home in Las Vegas right now.)
Increases in unemployment, under-employment and turnover are boosting traffic to nearly all job boards and job search engines – and the number of online applications to resource-depleted recruiting departments. Companies are spending more money sifting through unqualified applications, so they are naturally spending less on job boards and taking advantage of free sites, like Indeed, to post and distribute their jobs. To combat the influx of poor-fit applications, companies are turning to new technologies and online services to target talent and search across the open Web for people who may not be actively searching for a job on a board. This is possible because 42% of working adults in the US now maintain a profile somewhere online—most notably on LinkedIn and Facebook, but also on Twitter and services like Jigsaw, an SF-based, user-generated database of professionals. And the downturn is growing this number. The more innovative recruiters at growing companies like Zappos and Dell are now are using social media to engage prospective candidates in a genuine and inexpensive way: building candidate communities in their career site and blogs, search engine optimizing job listings, distributing jobs through social networks to dramatically drive referrals, and tracking web analytics by job to determine their best sources of talent. To me, the more interesting acquisition was Monster's purchase 18 months ago of Trovix, a Bay Area startup that built a behavioral algorithm for matching jobs and resumes to help recruiters sift through applicants and jobseekers through jobs. But, the irony is that they will be "unveiling" this new technology, dubbed 6Sense, on this weekend's (expensive) Super Bowl, the annual marketing battleground of the big, horizontal job boards. As funny as those ads can be, they are not likely to solve the job boards' bigger marketing challenge: how to convince companies to spend more money "posting and praying" that the best person applies for their job when the broader, open Internet is fast becoming the new, cost-effective "job board" of talent. This week's combination of Monster and Hotjobs isn’t going to solve that problem either. Image via Flickr/Frank Gruber.
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| Kazaa Takes A Swing At Symantec After Adware Accusations Posted: 06 Feb 2010 03:34 AM PST
The gist of the story can be found on its Wikipedia profile, but what many seem to forget in present times is that the service is still around, serving users an unlimited amount of (licensed) songs for a $20 monthly subscription fee. Recently, a Symantec security program apparently identified the Kazaa desktop client as high-risk, flagging the software as adware. This prompted Brilliant Digital Entertainment, the company that operates Kazaa, to issue a special notice / consumer alert to its customers. And it isn’t pulling any punches. While boasting about the fact that Kazaa is now a legitimate business offering over one million fully licensed tracks to its customers, Kazaa claims Symantec for the second time in recent weeks incorrectly identified it as being high risk. As a result, the company says, a subset of users were unable to use Kazaa because Symantec's security software flagged it as adware. Some of its users were apparently “sufficiently spooked by Symantec's unilateral action” after those warnings that they followed its advice to remove Kazaa. In an angered statement, the company adds:
It continues:
After the Spotify incident (Symantec classified the music streaming service as a Trojan about a week ago), the security software company apologized on Twitter. It’ll be interesting to see how they handle this notice from Kazaa.
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| Nsyght Releases New Ways To Manage Realtime Social Streams Posted: 06 Feb 2010 02:28 AM PST
Nsyght is a startup we broke just before the Christmas vacation which focuses on making realtime streams manageable and is similar in scope to Friendfeed and Cliqset. It currently integrates accounts from Twitter, Facebook, digg, Vimeo, Stumbleupon, Flickr, Delicious, and Last.fm – with other networks planned – and has now introduced a bunch of new features.
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| Posted: 06 Feb 2010 12:15 AM PST
Cofounder Philip Kaplan first mentioned that Amazon had turned off Blippy’s access to the service on an episode of TWiST with Jason Calacanis. I spoke to Kaplan tonight about Amazon’s reaction to Blippy. He says they didn’t block Blippy, but simply insisted that the service stop pulling user purchase data, and erase all historical data they had already collected. They were also summoned to Seattle to speak with a “high ranking executive” of the company. Blippy complied (with both the summons and the demand to stop accessing user data). Kaplan is soft stepping around the Amazon issue, and is hoping to come to some agreement with the company to allow them to access data in the future. He says “We believe our users feel strongly, as we do, that it is their right to access and use their data however they want. We’re optimistic that Amazon will come to the same conclusion.” None of the other thirteen companies Blippy takes data from have complained, Kaplan says. And he notes that users must actually request data to be collected before Blippy begins to do that. There is certainly an issue with how Blippy collects data – by storing user credentials on their own servers. But Blippy says they use APIs to log users in when available. And that may be the issue Amazon has with Blippy. But it doesn’t explain why they’re insisting Blippy delete historical data that’s already been collected. The users have given their permission, and in fact have indicated that they want this data to be moved to Blippy. And it is the users’ data, after all. Amazon would be smart to remember that. Perhaps, and I’m speculating here, there’s a reason Amazon doesn’t want all this data published. They’ve engaged in variable pricing in the past to test the demand curve, for example. They certainly may be using it again.
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| Piazzza Gives Classmates An Online Forum To Trade Their Knowledge Posted: 05 Feb 2010 07:42 PM PST
Piazzza is still in a private beta and has quite a ways to go before public launch, but we got a sneak peek at its current progress. The site is designed to help classmates share their questions and answers in a format that’s a bit like a mixture between a wiki and a forum. Each class gets its own hub for Q&A, and students can bookmark any questions if they’re also eager to find out the answer. Multiple students can contribute to each answer in a wiki style but there’s a version history that shows what each student wrote. Students are free to independently create Piazzza hubs for their classes, but I suspect the site will get more traction if it gets professors to sign up. When a professor joins Piazzza, their answers are separated from the students’ to make them easier to find. And professors can also look to see which questions have been bookmarked by the most students to gauge which topics they should explain better in class. So far Piazzza has opened to around 600 students across 9 classes, and plans to open to around 50 classes in a few months. Initial response from professors has been quite positive. And I liked what I saw from the service, though I think it needs to build out some technology that would make it harder to reproduce. I also think that Piazzza will really need to get a large number of professors using the service, which will be difficult. Nath says that Piazzza was inspired by her own personal experience. As a student studying computer science at India’s prestigious IIT Kanpur, she found herself to be one of only three female students in a class of fifty. She says she was a bit shy and never really got to know many of her classmates, so when it came time to study, she didn’t get to bounce ideas off her peers. After working at Oracle, Kosmix, and Facebook, she’s now a Stanford MBA student.
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| The Future of Web Content – HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps Posted: 05 Feb 2010 06:45 PM PST
The recent introduction of the new Apple iPad has stirred the discussion over the future of web content and application runtime formats, and shone light onto the political and business battles emerging between Apple, Adobe and Google. These discussion are often highly polarized and irrational. My hope in this post is to help provide some balance and clarity onto this discussion. I have a particularly unique perspective, stake and role in this discussion. My first company (Allaire) was born during the advent of the Web, with the idea that a browser and HTML could form the basis for creating content-rich, interactive software applications, ones that didn’t require native code and could be platform and operating system independent. We built ColdFusion as a way to realize this vision. We later became deeply committed to the world of HTML as a developer format, acquiring and building HomeSite, what was the world’s dominant Windows-based HTML authoring application. In 2000, it became clear to me that web applications and runtimes were not advancing fast enough, and that with the emerging world of broadband internet connectivity that an entirely new realm of rich internet applications would be possible. We (Allaire and Macromedia) merged our companies with the vision that a new class of browser-based applications would emerge, and that we could evolve Macromedia Flash Player from its origins as an animation and motion-graphics engine into a real application platform and rich client runtime that fused media (text, audio, images, video), communications (web services, real-time APIs) and interactivity (rich client-side object model and UI component framework). In March of 2002 we launched the Macromedia MX Platform, anchored around the new Flash runtime, and realized this vision for the transformation of the Web experience and enabling a new class of rich, browser-based applications. For several years, the Flash Platform was unique in its ability to create highly interactive browser based applications. Around 2003-2004 HTML/JavaScript (Ajax) started to meaningfully emerge as a competing approach to building apps on the Web. Meanwhile, as new Flash Players shipped, it’s ubiquity ensured that the birth of the online video industry would be largely built on Flash. This gave birth to everything from YouTube and Brightcove and Hulu, to hundreds of other online video companies. Today, my company sits at the center of these new battles over the future of web content and app formats and runtimes. We work with thousands of media publishers who aim to maximize the distribution, reach and user opportunities with their content. This new re-fracturing of web content runtimes is creating challenges (and opportunities) for us and our peers. A Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Developers (and Audiences!)I think it’s critical to first frame and understand this discussion with the broader political economy of Internet software platforms. Most of the debate and discussion over HTML5 vs. Flash vs. Native Apps has little to do with what is the right technical approach, or whether something is open or closed, it has to do with the expressions of power and control that drive the businesses of the Internet’s dominant platform companies — Apple, Adobe, Google and Microsoft. Each of these companies seeks to create unique runtimes and APIs that provide a strategic wedge that can drive other aspects of their business. At one level this is a battle for the hearts and minds of developers and ISVs, but these developers are merely a means to an end. Gaining broad adoption for their runtime platforms translates into their ability to create massive derivative value through downstream products and services. For Apple, this is hardware and paid media (content and apps) sales. For Google, this is about creating massive reach for their advertising platforms and products. For Adobe, this about creating major new applications businesses based on their platform. For Microsoft, it is about driving unit sales of their core OS and business applications. Web Apps and ContentI’m often asked “Will HTML5 replace Flash?” on the Web. The quick answer is no. However, there is a lot of nuance here and it’s helpful to make the distinction between two broad classes of content applications that are deployed in browsers. First, there are what I would call Web Productivity Apps. These kinds of applications require responsive, cross-platform, desktop like and highly interactive experiences. They often require seamless integration with existing web content and data. For several years, the Flash Platform was the best platform for creating these types of applications (per above). However, in the past several years, HTML+JavaScript (Ajax) and now HTML5 have created a highly compelling framework to build these applications, and for a large number of web productivity apps, the HTML5 approach will become the preferred model. The best examples are Google Apps, Salesforce.com, and even Microsoft’s forthcoming Office Online. There are also a class of Web Productivity Apps where Flash is the preferred runtime, especially those that involve working with and manipulating media such as images, audio and video. We, like many companies, are pragmatic and use both Flash and HTML as the technology needs require. Other examples of this include rich data visualization applications, where Flash has gained prominence inside of enterprises because of its rich data and visualization features. The second broad class of applications are what I would call Rich Media Apps. These kinds of applications include largely consumer-facing, audience and media centric experiences. In particular, this includes online video, rich media advertising and marketing, and online games (casual games). All of these kinds of applications are highly focused on having a great and immersive experience that just works, and the creators of these apps are very focused on audience reach — anything that impedes 100% consumer acceptance is a significant concern. Here, Flash is dominant. The unique runtime characteristics of Flash, combined with its incredible reach, has led these types of apps to become highly dependent on Flash, and massive amounts of the broadband economy are dependent on it. It seems unlikely that HTML5 would be at all positioned to replace Flash for these categories, though it is clearly worth watching how consistent rich media runtimes find their way into the HTML5+ standard. Right now, it is a non starter. The Handheld DisruptionMuch of the above classes of content applications are in reference to the PC/Browser-based Web. The explosive growth in hand-held computing has introduced an entirely new dynamic into the content and app run-time battles which in turn will have a cascading impact on the PC Web. Hand-held computing includes smartphones (iPhone, Android, Nokia, et. al), portable music/entertainment devices and tablet computing devices (iPad and Android devices). In many respects, the successful launch and growth of these devices has created an entirely new and largely blank canvas for content and applications. First, these devices offer new native services and OS-specific features (location, multi-touch UI, local media, wireless networking APIs, cameras, offline) that are giving birth to a massive new class of non-Web Apps that are built using proprietary native-code APIs and runtimes. Because of always-on broadband connectivity and easy to discovery App Stores, there has been rapid adoption of these new “disposable content apps”. Hand-held platforms create a new opportunity for platform vendors to disrupt runtime hegemony from platforms that have seen ascendance on the PC/Web, and controlling these new run-times and developer adoption of these runtimes has a direct impact on these platform vendors ability to own audience relationships and monetization opportunities. For example, a web-centric, HTML5-centric handheld world favors Google because it can leverage it’s existing dominance in search and web advertising. A proprietary App-centric universe favors Apple because it can become the primary gatekeeper to reaching the mobile audience and already has a pole position in integrating payments and advertising into content applications. In the case of hand-held platforms, however, it seems quite apparent that it is not a zero-sum game. Three runtime platforms will gain adoption and often even inter-mingle — HTML5 content and apps, Native Apps (that may contain Flash and HTML content), and HTML5 apps that contain and leverage Flash Player. There is a rich pallet of capabilities emerging, and each developer will need to consider what will be appropriate for their specific audience or application. It is also clear that the adoption of these diverse run-time platforms has the real potential to reconstitute fundamental relationships to audiences and monetization systems. Video as a Cornerstone IssueI’m also often asked “Will HTML5 Video replace Flash Video?”. Posited as a winner-take-all, absolute, the answer is clearly no. But like the nuance of HTML5 vs. Flash on the Web, there is also a very nuanced and complex evolving landscape in the video format world. On the PC/Web, video has gained enormous momentum as a fundamental media type for all content on the Web. This has largely been driven by the adoption of Flash Video, which has approximately 75% market-share for online video. For most web and content app developers, this is fine, it is a great run-time and offers an excellent user experience and Adobe has done a very good job keeping the platform contemporary with the most demanding needs of video delivery and quality. It is the rapid emergence of hand-held devices, however, that is bringing this issue to the forefront. With massive growth in hand-held web browsing from smartphones, iTouch devices and the pending iPad product, this has raised a deeper issue for media publishers who are eager to have their content be accessible to end-users. In particular, it is the show-down between Apple, Google and Adobe over who can control video formats on these devices that is creating challenges. Again, this is not about “what is the right technical solution”, it is about the political economy of who controls the formats that in turn lead to owning downstream audience and monetization opportunities. The basic idea behind HTML5 video is that there would be a common video format that could be placed and rendered into any compatible web browser, conceptually replacing the need for the Flash run-time to render video in browsers. But there are enormous challenges with this, some political, some technical and some based on audience behavior. First, right now, there is a lack of common approach among browser makers on what format to use for the HTML video object. This lack of agreement represents a proxy for broader political battles. Apple promotes MPEG-4/H.264, which it uses for it’s device platforms. Microsoft promotes VC-1, it’s own standard video codec. Google has yet to fully weigh-in on what format to support, which leads me to speculate that they will soon introduce a new format, based on On2 VP8, but under a broad open source license to the format and technology. Firefox, with 24% share of the browser market, proposes to use the open source Ogg Vorbis codec. What few people realize is that while H.264 appears to be an open and free standard, in actuality it is not. It is a standard provided by the MPEG-LA consortsia, and is governed by commercial and IP restrictions, which will in 2014 impose a royalty and license requirement on all users of the technology. How can the open Web adopt a format that has such restrictions? It can’t. Google will make an end-run on this by launching an open format with an open source license for the technology, which according to industry experts delivers almost all of the same technical benefits as H.264. All of this is a long way of saying that there is still significant format tension and that it will take a long time for it to be resolved in next-gen browsers. Second, but related, is the raw reality of browser adoption and churn cycles, and the fact that online video publishers will only adopt standards that have extremely broad adoption. Until penetration rates consistently reach 80%, it will be hard for publishers to switch and adopt a single, new solution. It is more likely that HTML5 Video adoption will reach that critical mass on hand-held devices before it does on the PC/Web. Third, and equally important, is the more practical issue of the massive industry-wide ecosystem support for Flash Video. From advertising formats, to business logic for the interaction of video with ads and analytics, hundreds of 3rd party technology companies who have built solutions around online video that are built on Flash, not to mention high quality design and authoring tools that sit at the center of a large labor market for Flash design and development; all of this creates inertia for Flash and a relatively high industry-wide switching cost. But stepping back and looking at this specifically in the context of hand-held computing, where Apple is politically motivated to block the Flash runtime, it is apparent video publishers will be driven to build and operate solutions that leverage HTML5 Video on mobile and iPad browsing environments. It’s All About ReachWhether on the supply side of content and applications, or on the distribution and run-time side of the equation, what is abundantly clear is that reach is still king. For platform makers, these battles will continue as they all seek to drive sufficient reach for their open and proprietary standards such that they can exploit this distribution for their core commercial goals. Likewise, and more important, whatever standards and models deliver the broadest reach will ultimately drive what is adopted by publishers, developers and ISVs. While it is easy to take a binary position in the future of content applications and run-times, it is evident that the competing interests of platform vendors, consumers and app and content publishers will ensure that this remains a fragmented and competitive environment for many years to come.
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| A Googler Has his Tiananmen Square Moment Posted: 05 Feb 2010 05:24 PM PST
Earlier today I was driving to Google for a product briefing, minding my own business, talking on my Google phone with Google PR and trying to figure out what Google building I was supposed to be driving to. I stopped at a crosswalk for a bunch of Googlers to pass. And this guy, who’s wearing a Google employee badge, decides it’s time to take a stand against cell phone use in cars. So he stands in front of my car and won’t move. That’s right, it was his Tiananmen Square moment. Cars behind me start swerving. I back up to go around him. He steps forward, vigilant in his defense of the law. I’m off the phone now, and snapping this picture didn’t help getting him to move on. The light changes. The light changes again. Cars are now backed up behind me. I’m not sure what comes next in a situation like this. I can either drive over him or park my car. So I put the car in park, open the door to get out and discuss the situation with him. That’s when he ran away. His mission, apparently, accomplished. I’ll note for the record that I was absolutely violating the law. California is one of a handful of states that bans cell phone use while driving, and I was flaunting that law with careless abandon. I am now subject to a $20 fine.
And the cell phone ban hasn’t actually resulted in less accidents. And I’ll end with this. If this Googler feels smug enough about cell phone usage to stop traffic and nearly cause an accident, then of course he’ll be quitting his job at Google soon. Because, frankly, how can he work for a guy who does the same thing that I did? If anyone knows who this is, please let me know so we can send him a TechCrunch tshirt.
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| Foursquare Passes 1 Million Check-Ins A Week. Rate Doubled In The Past Month. Posted: 05 Feb 2010 04:53 PM PST
Yesterday, we got a nice little breakdown of which clients are used most often for the location-based service Foursquare (hint: still the iPhone). Today, the company has some new big news to share via a tweet: they’re now doing over a million check-ins a week. Not even a month ago, Foursquare noted that they were seeing a check-in each second. We extrapolated this out to show that they were getting roughly 86,000 check-ins a day. But if you stretch those numbers out over a week, you get “only” 600,000 check-ins. That means that in under a month, Foursquare’s check-in rate has almost doubled. Actually, it has doubled. As Foursquare also notes in the tweet, the last seven days have seen 1.2 million check-ins. While traffic may be up threefold over the past two months, the check-in rate is growing even faster.
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| Twitter’s Development History Beautifully Visualized In A Video Posted: 05 Feb 2010 04:21 PM PST Twitter just recently launched a new Twitter Engineering blog, and to kick things off, one team member, Ben Sandofsky, decided to share a video he made representing Twitter’s development history. The video was made using Code Swarm, a software tool used to visualize data. As Sandofsky notes, “it isn’t exactly scientific, but it still goes to show Twitter’s explosive growth mirrored in engineering.” More importantly, it looks awesome. You can see the shift in Twitter development from Jack Dorsey in the early days (2006) to Blaine Cook to Alex Payne to Twitter’s now large team of developers. Each team member is represented in the video by their Twitter avatar. Watch it below. It’s mesmerizing. Twitter Code Swarm from Ben Sandofsky on Vimeo.
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| Facebook Flips The Switch On Its Improved Photo Uploader Posted: 05 Feb 2010 03:36 PM PST
The new plugin includes a new photo navigator that should make it easy to choose the photos you want. And once you’ve started the upload process, you can browse to another page — the plugin will keep uploading the files in the background. This plugin has actually been available for the last few months in Facebook’s Prototypes section, and has even been rolled out to a very small number of users before now. Starting today it’s getting released to everyone, though the rollout will take a few weeks. Before now Facebook has offered an upload plugin based on Active X and a Java applet, but the company says this one was built entirely in-house. One important thing to note: because this was built by Facebook, the company could potentially add more functionality in the future, including things that aren’t related to photo uploads. Of course, there are plenty of other ways to upload photos to Facebook. The functionality has been integrated into iPhoto, you can download a Picasa Uploader, and there are plenty of unofficial apps available too.
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| EventVue’s Next Event: Deadpool. Co-Founder Shares Mistakes. Posted: 05 Feb 2010 03:36 PM PST
In an overlay message that appears now on the main site, co-founders Rob Johnson and Josh Fraser write:
Fraser let us know about the shutdown himself via email and wrote, “hopefully other entrepreneurs can learn from our mistakes.” The Boulder, CO-based EventVue was a TechStars company in 2007, and shortly after that got its first round of angel funding. In his lengthy and heartfelt farewell post, Johnson lays out a number of mistakes the company made over the years that led to the shutdown today. The key ones he highlights are:
He ends the post on an upbeat note, “EventVue has been a fun journey. Thanks again to everyone who has supported us over the last few years. You should follow us (Rob, Josh) to see what's next.“
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| Wolfram Alpha Still Trying To Justify That $50 iPhone App With New Virtual Keyboards Posted: 05 Feb 2010 02:58 PM PST
Today, they launched their first major update to the app, version 1.1, which brings with it one new feature: new keyboards. Specifically, Wolfram Alpha now has a “default” keyboard, a “math” keyboard, a “Greek” keyboard, and a “symbol” keyboard. As they describe it, “the specialized keyboards that greet you when you first open the Wolfram|Alpha App, have been painstakingly constructed to ease the burden of entering queries.” Fair enough, these are definitely nice to have for advanced queries. But do they justify the $50 price yet? Nope. To be fair, Wolfram Alpha also launched some updated graphics and tables with the new version of the app, but it’s still all the same data you can get on the website — again, for free. And while they slyly removed the iPhone-optimized version of the website in an attempt to try and get people to buy the app, that still doesn’t appear to be happening in droves. In fact, the smartest calculation they’ve made was slashing the price down to the more reasonable $19.99 for the holidays (it’s now back at $49.99). When compared to the just-released $1,000 iPhone app, BarMax, Wolfram Alpha may seem like a steal. But for the third time, all the Wolfram Alpha data is available for free on the web. And you can access it on your iPhone through the browser, it just won’t presented as pretty. I’m not saying they shouldn’t charge for the app; they should. But something a lot less than $50. BarMax may actually be worth the $1,000, but only because it’s replacing a program that costs $3,000 to $4,000. Still, if keyboards are your thing, find the $50 Wolfram Alpha app in the App Store here.
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| 2tor Raises $20 Million Series B To Go After The High End Of Online Education Posted: 05 Feb 2010 02:22 PM PST
Every year as broadband reaches more people, online education keeps growing and growing. So far, though, most online education focusses on vocational courses, test preparation, or supplemental tutoring. One startup trying to bring entire degree programs online is 2tor, which just closed a $20 million Series B funding at a rumored valuation of around $100 million. Highland Capital Partners led the round, with previous investors Redpoint, Novak Biddle, and City Light Capital participating. Last June, the company raised $10 million in a Series A. “What is unique about 2tor is they are the first online education program to go after the high end—elite programs at elite schools,” says Paul Maeder, a founder and general partner at Highland who will be taking a board seat. 2tor was founded by John Katzman, who previously founded test-prep giant Princeton Review. Originally, he wanted to start 2tor as a division of the Princeton Review, but it goes after such a different part of the education market that he decided to pursue it as a standalone startup instead. In partnership with universities and graduate programs, 2tor designs and produces fully-accredited online degree programs, and even recruits the students as well. The first school to use 2tor is USC for its Masters of Art in Teaching. USC faculty teach the course, which they help design, and 2tor provides the technology platform. Students from all around the country can take classes online, watching high-quality video lectures, check assignments, sign up for online office hours, and use online chat to talk to other students. “It is more like Facebook than like Blackboard,” says Katzman, (Blackboard is one of the more established online learning platforms). “What’s great about a great university are the other students. You want a platform that at its core is conversation,” says Katzman.” The USC graduate program in teaching has about 75 students on campus, but almost 750 online who all pay the same tuition. “The notion that if you are a professor there you can help dozens of students in southern California is great,” says Katzman, “but the notion that you can help thousands of students across the country is even better.” The promise of online education is that schools are no longer constrained by physical location or classroom size (although each online class itself can be smaller in number of students). Katzman is in negotiations with more universities to open up two or three more programs this year. Initially, he is concentrating on graduate programs for nursing, MBAs, and possibly engineering. Each program is designed in partnership with the faculty who come up with the curriculum and teach it, with 2tor then acting as the producer, student recruiter, and IT shop. Revenues for each class will be split between the universities and 2tor. “Education is an enormous market still being delivered by and large the way it was by Socrates,” says Maeder. “It is a mediocre educational experience to lock people in a room and talk at them for an hour and a half.” He thinks 2tor can help change the way people learn.
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| Google Maps Dips Into Serendipity Suggestions Posted: 05 Feb 2010 02:20 PM PST
Google Maps has just launched a new and nifty feature: suggestions of similar places to your search query in maps. So if you search for Best Buy in your designated area, Maps will suggest (in the more information tab) nearby businesses and places that might be of interest to you, such as other Best Buy stores in the area. Apparently, suggestions to places aren’t based on a specific characteristic. Google uses a “broad set of signals” to deliver recommendations. Google says they are working on the technology and from my experience, it’s definitely rough. For a search for Best Buy in Chicago, I received recommendations for any businesses that had the terms “Best Buy” in it. Once the feature’s technology is streamlined, it should be a pretty useful addition to any search. It would be especially useful when searching for hotels, restaurants or bars in a given area. Google Maps will also be rolling out another compelling feature soon: Store Views. Similar to street views, Google Store Views will allow people to visually walk into the store from Maps.
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| Remotely Check-In At The Super Bowl And Trash Talk With Friends With FanPulse Posted: 05 Feb 2010 02:03 PM PST
And the app comes at a perfect time, as of course, the Super Bowl is this weekend. If you’re unable to watch the game with some of your friends, FanPulse offers an interesting way to interact with them about the game in realtime. If you check-in to the Super Bowl between the Colts and the Saints, it will show up on your friends’ main Pulse stream within the app. If they click on that item, they’ll be taken to an area where they can also check-in to the game. From here you, and any other friends that join the area, can chat about it as you watch the game. Yes, it’s sort of like setting up an online chat room or group IM session, but the app has other benefits. First, it’s on the iPhone, so you don’t need your computer out to chat. Second, the app gives you Push Notification updates for the game, as well as other games you may be interested in following — so you can multitask. Third, by “shouting” (their word for sending a message), you can also send these messages out to Twitter or Facebook with one click to update your statuses on those networks. The app is most similar to Hot Potato, which allows you to connect with your friends around events. But the emphasis with FanPulse is only on sports, and the interaction is different because it’s more IM-like rather than leaving comments. And obviously, there’s very much an emphasis on interacting in realtime. When you sign up for FanPulse, you tell it the teams you’d like to follow. This allows the app to serve up news items about those teams in the Pulse area, as well as suggest games you might want to check-in to. There are also the usual mechanisms for finding which friends from other networks (Twitter and Facebook) are also using the service. Or you can find them by accessing your iPhone’s address book. FanPulse was built out of Pier 38 in San Francisco, also known as the Dogpatch Labs. The company was started by Vishwas Prabhakara, a former BD at Digg. You can find FanPulse in the App Store here for free.
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| Skittles’ Colorful, Clearly Drug-Induced, Never-Ending Wacky Website Posted: 05 Feb 2010 12:24 PM PST
Say what you want about Skittles’ branding on the Internet, but at least it’s never boring. Following the decision last year to change the Skittles.com homepage into a Twitter Search page, which led to to things from racial slurs to pedophilia talk showing up, they’ve now redesigned again. And the result is once again interesting. Titled “Experience The Rainbow,” Skittles.com is now a never-ending (it auto-refreshes to keep going as you scroll down) page of trippy, odd, and colorful images. For example, the first image is a clown dressed as an astronaut. As you keep scrolling down, you get a mixture of this weird stuff alongside fairly clever marketing and statistics for the candy. As a weird sumo wrestling graphic shows, Skittles currently has over 3,600,000 fans on Facebook, but only 272 followers on Twitter (because they just started their Twitter account yesterday along with this website). In fact, the entire site is clearly a ploy to gain more Facebook and Twitter followers. As you scroll, the one constant is the ability to hop over to Skittles’ Twitter or Facebook page at anytime. Also, each entry has a Facebook, Twitter, and email link to easily share any item. And the ploy appears to be working, as there is no shortage of talk on Twitter about the new site. The wackiness even goes so far as to include a bunch of ASCII art images in the HTML source code for the page.
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| Think It’s Hard Being a Woman in Tech? Try It in the 1940s. Posted: 05 Feb 2010 12:01 PM PST
I don't mean to sound insensitive. There are definitely times my life has been harder as a woman just writing about this scene. But wake me when there's something new to say. Still want to obsess about it? Then you should start by reading the new book "Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age," by Kurt W. Beyer. (Chance to win a free one below!) Hopper was the third programmer on the world's first computer and lived her life presaging the future. She broke down three gender barriers as a woman in the 1940s: Ivy League academia, the Navy and the business world. You want badass? Hopper was the first woman to get a doctorate degree in mathematics from Yale. In a business that describes an easy UI as something "even your grandmother could understand" Hopper got most of her notoriety looking the part of a central-casting little old lady, knitting needles and all. You may have seen this older Hopper on 60 Minutes or Late Night with David Letterman, but Beyer tells the story of Hopper's younger years—demons, challenges, triumphs and all. The book was a painstaking seven-year project for Beyer, who was stunned when he moved to Silicon Valley in the late 1990s and so few people knew of Hopper's contributions to the tech world. (There's more from Beyer in the clip below from Press:Here.) At the taping, I twisted his arm to give us 10 free copies of the book to give away to readers. Leave the name of your favorite unsung tech hero in the comments (male or female) and we'll pick the ten most heartfelt or original for a free book.
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| Facebook Takes Over Its Own Display Advertising From Microsoft, Keeps Bing For Web Search Posted: 05 Feb 2010 09:37 AM PST
When it comes to display advertising on its own site, Facebook is taking full control of its inventory away from Microsoft. Even prior to Microsoft’s initial $240 million investment in Facebook in 2007, the two companies had an advertising partnership giving Microsoft the ability to serve display ads on the social network. That was a three-year deal which was up for renewal. The two companies just finished renegotiating it, and Microsoft will no longer be serving up display ads on Facebook. However, Bing will still power Web search on Facebook and will serve up search ads. The relationship with Bing will actually be expanded to be global (before it was just U.S.) and to include smart answers and other guided search features within Facebook. Expect Facebook’s Web search to start looking a lot more like Bing. As far as social search goes, however, Facebook continues to develop its own search technologies which return realtime results from your personal stream. Handing over a large chunk of its display advertising to Microsoft made sense three years ago, but now that Facebook generates more pageviews than Yahoo or Microsoft it doesn’t need to split ad revenues on its own site with anyone. Facebook is still trying to figure out what kind of advertising will work on a social site, but it has so much inventory that its revenues are believed to be growing quickly. Traditional display ads, especially the remnant ads Microsoft was serving up, never really paid off on Facebook or any other social network. (Google also famously had trouble making its ad deal on MySpace work financially). The failure of social ads has caused social startups to embrace virtual currency as their next salvation. So far social ads have only worked for Facebook because it operates at such a massive scale that all those pennies add up. In theory, Facebook should be able to target ads to your specific interests and demographic because it knows so much about its 400 million members. The problem is that people don’t want to see ads when they are hanging out with their friends online. But it is not hard to imagine Facebook turning Facebook Connect (which reaches 60 million people and growing) into a highly targeted ad network that puts ads on other sites.
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