The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- PlaySpan Partners With Gaming Community Nonoba To Power Micropayments
- Apple iPad Available For Pre-Order From March 12, On Sale From April 3
- Mobile App Directory Appolicious Rolls Out Facebook App, URL Shortener And More
- Global Smartphone App Download Market Could Reach $15 Billion By 2013: Report
- Adobe Offers Android Developers Free Photoshop.com Mobile Editor, “Unlike iPhone”
- Slide Lays Off 10% Of Staff, Shutters Short-Lived Games ‘SuperPocus’ And ‘Top Fish’
- Atmosphir Jumps On Unity Platform For Awesome In-Browser Gaming World
- Big In Japan Snatches Snappr From The Grave For Better Barcode Scanning
- Yelp Hit With Second Extortion Lawsuit, CEO Calls It Meritless
- The 10 Billionth (Or So) Tweet
- Steve Ballmer’s Memo To Microsoft Staff: “We Must Move At Cloud Speed”
- With 100 Million Comments, Topix Has Quietly Become The Local Watering Hole
- Yahoo CEO Calls AOL A “Mini Yahoo,” Defines Patchwork Strategy For Success
- Google Wave May Finally Tread Water With Email Notifications
- Chrome Is Rapidly Approaching Firefox In Extension Numbers
- Tawkon Measures The Radiation Spewing From Your iPhone. No Wonder Apple Doesn’t Approve It.
- Yahoo Contacts Gets Facebook Connect
- Netbook OS Maker Jolicloud Switches From Mozilla Prism To Chrome For Web Apps
- Livestream Goes Mainstream With AP Deal To Stream Video From The Oscars Red Carpet
- Foodspotting Is A Location-Based Game That Will Make Your Mouth Water
- YouTube Launches Auto-Captions For All Videos
| PlaySpan Partners With Gaming Community Nonoba To Power Micropayments Posted: 05 Mar 2010 08:00 AM PST
Nonoba’s GameRise allows anyone to develop and manage customized gaming sites within a community. PlaySpan powers micro-payments across over 1,000 video games and virtual worlds and has virtual goods storefronts on Facebook, MySpace, within games and on its standalone site. With the new partnership, PlaySpan will offer Nonoba's 4,000 Flash games to marketplace customers. PlaySpan's microtransactions will also be offered to Nonoba’s developers to allow Flash game developers to monetize their games. With all of the partnerships PlaySpan is racking up, the startup is fast securing its place as a player in the micrpayments space. In December, PlaySpan revealed some telling numbers about the strength of the virtual goods space, reporting that over $30 million was spent on virtual gifts over the holiday season. Last year, PlaySpan acquired micro-transaction app developer Spare Change, which powered micropayments across 700 social networking apps on Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo.      
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| Apple iPad Available For Pre-Order From March 12, On Sale From April 3 Posted: 05 Mar 2010 05:41 AM PST
When Apple unveiled the device a few months ago, we were told it would be available by March. Rumors began to swirl recently that shipment of the devices was delayed until April. According to the release, the Wi-Fi models of the iPad will be available starting April 3, with the Wi-Fi and 3G models rolled out by late April. Starting on March 12, U.S. customers can pre-order the device either online or at their local Apple retail store. The device will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April. Pricing has remained the same, with the basic Wi-Fi enabled model starting at $499. Pricing is as follows: $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB, $699 for 64GB. Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available in late April for $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB. Apple is launching with 12 apps designed especially for iPad and will run almost all of the 150,000 apps on the App Store. The supposed Kindle-killer will debut with an iBooks app, which will be available for free download from the App Store in the US on April 3. Apple’s partnered witha number of publishers including the Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster.
     
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| Mobile App Directory Appolicious Rolls Out Facebook App, URL Shortener And More Posted: 05 Mar 2010 04:59 AM PST
Fresh off the acquisition of AppVee, social mobile app directory Appolicious is releasing a few new features including a Facebook App, an Appo.me URL Shortener for links to apps, and a Twicker ad model, which allows users to view tweets and offers from sponsors on the site. Appolicious, which just raised $1.5 million in funding and debuted an iPhone app, tries to make sense of the 100,000 apps on Apple’s App Store and the 16,000 apps on the Android Market, but with a social twist. So not only can you find apps based on category or topic, but you can share those apps with your social graph on Twitter and Facebook, review apps, and more. The Appolicious Facebook app allows users to access Appolicious’ recently launched Curated App Lists, which are recommended lists of apps from users based around hobbies and interests. The startup also launched Twicker, an ad format where advertisers send customized messages to the Appolicious audience via Twitter. The Tweets are seen on a ticker at the top of the site’s page. Sponsors pay a monthly fee to advertise via the Twicker. Additionally, Appolicious is rolling out the Appo.me URL shortner, which gives the ability to easily create, grab and share a shortened URL that links directly to an app. You simple type in the name of an iPhone app and Appo.me automatically completes the app name and will give you a shortened URL for the link to the app in the iTunes store and its landing page on Appolicious’ directory. Appolicious’ Facebook app will compete with the mPlayit, a Facebook-based mobile app directory. But the feature I find most compelling is the URL shortener, which makes it dead simple to find and link to any app on Apple’s App Store. Founded in May of this year by former Yahoo VP, Alan Warms, Appolicious is hoping to expand its platform to include Blackberry and other smartphone apps. Warms is a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup Buzztracker to Yahoo in 2007.      
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| Global Smartphone App Download Market Could Reach $15 Billion By 2013: Report Posted: 05 Mar 2010 04:04 AM PST
Research reports forecasting future market sizes should always be taken with a grain of salt, but it occasionally helps to see the estimates of research organizations in order to gain some perspective on the current and upcoming trends for those markets. With that in mind, let’s take a look at what research2guidance has to say about the worldwide smartphone application market, which it estimates will grow from $1.94 billion in 2009 to $15.65 billion by 2013. The big surge in applications will be driven by a fast-growing number of smartphone users, which the research company estimates will increase from about 100 million last year to nearly 1 billion by 2013. There’s a ton of opportunity for corporations to tap into this vast audience with mobile apps, research2guidance adds, because according to its research only 10% of Fortune 2000 companies are targeting their customers with a smartphone application to date. Still according to the agency’s findings, the vast majority of them have published applications to give access to their core products or for promotional purposes (91%). Only a minor share (9%) use applications as a stand-alone product. If you’re interested in the full report, you can purchase it here. Does your company offer mobile applications for smartphones? On what platform?      
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| Adobe Offers Android Developers Free Photoshop.com Mobile Editor, “Unlike iPhone” Posted: 05 Mar 2010 01:27 AM PST
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| Slide Lays Off 10% Of Staff, Shutters Short-Lived Games ‘SuperPocus’ And ‘Top Fish’ Posted: 04 Mar 2010 06:52 PM PST
This is a somewhat surprising move, because Slide only launched the two Facebook applications last fall. The magic-themed SuperPocus launched in October, and Top Fish, a virtual aquarium app, launched in early November. Both games were designed to turn into virtual economies that revolved around virtual gifts. Clearly Slide has a ’sink-or-swim’ attitude with regard to its applications, and it’s ready to cut its losses quickly. Slide VP of Strategy and Business Development Keith Rabois says that the company is continuously evaluating its games based on their growth, user retention, and monetization, and that the two games weren’t reaching their goals. Rabois says that the company intends to release a new project later this month. Slide has dabbled in quite a few areas related to social gaming and online communities over the years. It is behind some of Facebook’s most popular games, as well as other entertaining apps like SuperPoke. The company used to generate most of its revenue through advertising, but the majority of its income now comes from virtual goods.      
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| Atmosphir Jumps On Unity Platform For Awesome In-Browser Gaming World Posted: 04 Mar 2010 06:43 PM PST
Atmosphir, a game platform and world by Minor Studios, was first unveiled to the world at TechCrunch50 in 2008. It’s an ambitious project – users can create their own games, block by block, release them on the platform and then play and share them with others. Players create and customize a single avatar and use it to play the various games that others have created. In the initial beta users needed to download software to build and play Atmosphir games. Last year the company decided to move to the Unity platform to allow for in-browser game creation and playing. Unity does require a plugin, but the experience is significantly lighter on the client. Game creators have nearly unlimited freedom to create worlds from whatever they imagine. Games can be combat or puzzle based (or both), multi-user or not, and an audience of users will jump in and try out whatever new levels/games are built immediately. This is still a beta project with a long waiting list, and the company is just starting to move existing users to the new platform. But if you’re a game designer and want in now, we have ten designer accounts to give away. Just let us know in the comments why you think you’d be a good choice for one. Check out the video below for an idea of what Atmosphir is all about.
     
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| Big In Japan Snatches Snappr From The Grave For Better Barcode Scanning Posted: 04 Mar 2010 05:43 PM PST
Big In Japan is best known as the app production house behind ShopSavvy, the mobile shopping utility. It has long been one of the cooler apps on Android, and recently it became available for the iPhone too. With it, you can simply scan a barcode in a store and find out information about a product — most notably, if you can find it somewhere else for a cheaper price. Snappr, meanwhile, deadpooled in late 2009, but was an early player in 2D barcode scanning (particularly QR codes) with smartphones. With the acquisition, Big In Japan picks up Snappr’s technology, which they will integrate into ShopSavvy. And Snppr founder, Philip Stehlik, will join Big In Japan’s board of advisors. Snappr’s former website already redirects to a new Big In Japan holding page. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but again, this is a company that was already deadpooled, so it was most likely a pretty cheap pick up of some technology by Big In Japan.      
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| Yelp Hit With Second Extortion Lawsuit, CEO Calls It Meritless Posted: 04 Mar 2010 04:58 PM PST
The suit claims that Yelp removed 13 out of 14 positive reviews about the Day Spa. But Stoppelman writes that the Spa has admitted that it solicited the reviews in question, which the site has repeatedly instructed businesses not to do. The suit confirms that the spa did solicit the reviews:
Stoppelman also writes that this is a “copy cat” suit, driven by lawyers looking to jump on the bandwagon. From Stoppelman’s post:
It’s worth pointing out that even if the reviews on Yelp were admittedly solicited, that doesn’t necessarily mean the case is dead in the water — the spa can still look to prove that Yelp offered to overlook these potentially fraudulent reviews if the spa purchased ads (or that Yelp removed more reviews when the spa declined). Update: Yelp has reminded us that they’ve explicitly denied that they ever offered preferential treatment in exchange for money.
     
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| The 10 Billionth (Or So) Tweet Posted: 04 Mar 2010 03:36 PM PST
According to the site Gigatweet, we are about an hour away from the 10 billionth tweet sent since the dawn of Twitter. More incredible, this milestone comes less than 5 months after the 5 billionth tweet. The only problem? It’s not an exact science. Gigatweet isn’t counting to an exact number, but rather is extrapolating out when the 10 billionth tweet will hit based on previous tweet data provided from a range of sources. Most recently, we do know that Twitter is seeing about 50 million tweets per day now, because the service released that information. Other than that, it’s kind of a crapshoot. To determine when the 5 billionth tweet would happen, watchers were looking at the numbers appended on to the URL of each tweet when it’s sent. The same is true this time around. For example, this recent tweet has the number 9996229078 in the URL. So yes, it would seem that is tweet number 9,996,229,078, but the problem is that Twitter has altered these numbers several times over the years, notably to move up the so-called Twitpocalypse (both 1 and 2). As Twitter employee Ryan King notes, “Though its more numerology than math, it still scares me that this is my job,” followed by a link to Gigatweet. What he means is that no, it’s not exactly right, but it’s kind of cool, and perhaps close enough. An interesting side note: the guy who sent tweet number 5 billion, Robin Sloan, now works at Twitter. Who will be number 10 billion? We’ll know in about an hour. Update: And here it is — but apparently, most of us can’t see it because that user has a protected stream. What a buzzkill. Update 2: According to Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, the whole team was watching for the tweet on the “big board.”      
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| Steve Ballmer’s Memo To Microsoft Staff: “We Must Move At Cloud Speed” Posted: 04 Mar 2010 03:09 PM PST
     
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| With 100 Million Comments, Topix Has Quietly Become The Local Watering Hole Posted: 04 Mar 2010 02:06 PM PST
In fact, Topix is the number one result for a ton of small towns across the country. That’s what happens when you’ve been aggregating local news for six years. But the site has never garnered much attention in the startup scene because back in 2005 (before TechCrunch even existed — our initial coverage was in 2007), it took a majority equity investment from three of the largest media firms in the U.S., Knight Ridder, Tribune and Gannett. Since then, the focus has been all about getting the business to work. And while Topix has been through some permutations throughout the years, the focus has always been on local and yes, topics. Aggregation was the key to all of this for a while, but in recent years, the community that uses the site has been largely responsible for a lot of the content. And that’s more clear than ever as the site is about to cross 100 million posts (comments). The milestone should be hit at some point today, as the site is getting about 125,000 comments a day now. That’s on top of 120 million average monthly pageviews from 8.8 million unique visitors. All huge numbers for a site that hardly anyone talks about. But that’s the thing, people are talking about it, you just may not realize it unless you’re in one of these smaller towns. For these people, Topix is a gathering spot to discuss the local news. Many of these cities (like Pepper Pike) may not have a daily local newspaper or website that makes it easy to discuss issues. That’s exactly what Topix does. And perhaps even a little too easy as the site has to remove some 45,000 comments a month due to things like hate speech, CEO and co-founder Chris Tolles tells us. Not just that, Topix gets about 10 subpoenas a week due to comments, Tolles says. That’s a pain, but it’s the price you pay for having such an active community. Why not ban anonymous commenting? Tolles has thought about this a lot, and done internal studies. But all conclude that it wouldn’t be good for the site. For example, while you’re 50% more likely to get a crappy comment from anonymous commenter, you’re also going to get five times the number of comments when you allow for anonymous ones. And if there’s a situation where a person feels the need to call out a local official, doing so anonymously allows them to feel protected, Tolles says. So, Topix has all these comments, and all this content — but the challenge has been how to monetize it. While Topix has deals with seveal big players, including CNN, the real money remains in advertising. So Tolles has spent much of the past year building up an ad sales team. And following the ad collapse last year, it’s finally starting to pay off. Topix is seeing $4 eCPMs, Tolles says. If that keeps up, he thinks the site can turn a profit relatively soon. Something else interesting about Topix: mobile usage is huge. While the service has had (what Tolles considers to be currently a sub-par) iPhone app for a while, it’s the mobile web that people seem to be taking to to use the site. And something like 75% of the people who are actively commenting on a mobile device are visiting from an iPhone. That may seem somewhat surprising given Topix’s focus on small towns and communities, but it seems to speak to the iPhone’s appeal to the masses. The big time commenting numbers also apparently speak to Topix’s appeal to the masses.
     
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| Yahoo CEO Calls AOL A “Mini Yahoo,” Defines Patchwork Strategy For Success Posted: 04 Mar 2010 01:19 PM PST
She touched on the topics we covered in our post last week, The Steady, Efficient Decline Of Yahoo. Specifically, she’s counting on an improvement in the economy to drive Yahoo growth, and she claims to have made significant advances in display advertising tools, targeting and analytics. “People still have to display their brand in a more descriptive way than just keywords,” she told Advertising Age. When asked if Yahoo was any different from AOL, she responded “Generally it’s not different, we’re just a lot bigger. The fact of the matter is, what they’re trying to do at AOL — and I shouldn’t speak for AOL, they’re very capable of speaking for themselves — but I think it’s like a mini Yahoo.” AOL draws 110 million monthly unique U.S. visitors, says Comscore, compared to 164 million for Yahoo (January 2010). Bartz also says Yahoo will be making acquisitions to drive content. “This year it’s about what technologies: Do we need to fill in the blanks, what analytics, what tools?” she said. She added “Well just imagine whether it’s acquiring an audience — a group of female bloggers, or whether it’s acquiring some better analytics tools that help us guide campaigns with our partners, or whether it’s technology.” And “social” says Bartz, doesn’t begin and end with Facebook: “You know, social is a word that has almost become too narrow. And I think with Facebook’s immense success, all of the sudden that’s the only definition of social. But if you think back to the finance chat rooms, [those] were the beginning of social and people could actually interact. … As we look at social we want people to be on the Yahoo site and have tweets come in and have their Facebook postings come in, so that it’s a very personal place to be that helps them understand what’s going on in their social world.” In Bartz’s social world, it seems, people are reading Twitter and Facebook messages on Yahoo. But this patchwork strategy of taking a little of this, a little of that isn’t going to excite users and encourage them to spend much time on Yahoo. Despite their massive reach, time on site isn’t going anywhere. But at least we know where Yahoo stands on things. Little or no product innovation, little or no risk taking. And like I said before, a long, slow, steady decline. And despite Bartz’s last words in the interview, copied below, there is nothing exciting or crazy going on at Yahoo.
     
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| Google Wave May Finally Tread Water With Email Notifications Posted: 04 Mar 2010 12:41 PM PST
Wave is finally turning on email notifications to alert you about new and updated waves. From the Inbox menu, simply select the new “Notifications” option to set how often (if at all) you’d like to receive them. The Wave team recommends that if you’re not a heavy user of Wave, you should get notified “immediately” upon a change. For more active users, the team seems to have a smart approach:
While Google Wave and Buzz are completely different, they do share some similarities, and are fundamentally about Google pushing newer, more social ways to communicate. Of course, with Wave, Google didn’t shove it into the massively-used Gmail, so it seems that Wave hasn’t been able to gain the footing that Buzz has — even though Buzz arguably needs more work than Wave right now. As of December, Wave had sent out a million invites, but there are probably several times more people already using Buzz — again, just because of the Gmail thing. The Wave team notes that this feature is still a work in progress and that there are some bugs (the ones listed don’t seem major).      
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| Chrome Is Rapidly Approaching Firefox In Extension Numbers Posted: 04 Mar 2010 11:56 AM PST
The exact number of add-ons for Firefox is a bit unclear. If you go by the category counts on the add-on site, there are 11,623. But it’s hard to know for sure if there is any overlap between the categories (I couldn’t find any, but I’m not sure there isn’t). More significantly, if you go by Mozilla’s statistic site where they tout their numbers, they claim to only have around 6,000 add-ons. To quote them, “Over 6,000 free, community contributed Add-ons for Firefox – more than for any other browser“. And in case you think this data is out of date, notes other 2010 milestones, such as the launch of Firefox 3.6. On its add-ons page, Mozilla notes that there have been over 1.8 billion add-ons downloaded and over 170 million in use. But neither of those numbers are the total number of add-ons, just how often they’ve been downloaded in total and the total (including the same ones) currently in use by people. Both of these numbers would blow away the still much smaller Chrome, obviously. So, depending on what number you go with, Chrome already has either half or one quarter the number of extensions Firefox does — in just a few months. Why? Well, certainly there’s a lot of excitement around Chrome right now, which was just released in beta for Mac and Linux at the end of last year. In fact, certain statistics have it as the only major browser that grew in size last month. But for extensions specifically, the rapid growth is likely due to just how easy they are to make for Chrome and maybe more importantly, submit to the extension gallery. Mozilla has done a number of posts recently on its Add-ons Blog to talk about the add-on approval process (here’s a good one from last month). Much like Apple App Store, Firefox add-ons much be reviewed and approved before they can go live. Chrome Extensions, on the other hand, go live immediately except for a handful that access things such as files on a users computer (those are flagged to be reviewed). Almost all of the extension developers I’ve talked to prefer Google’s method, and most of them develop for both. The quick rise in number of extensions for Chrome seems to speak to that. Mozilla is trying to do something about the ease of development too. Its new Jetpack project allows developers to create add-ons using HTML, CSS, and Javascript — exactly how developers create Chrome extensions. So if this method of development catches on, it could help Firefox maintain its extension lead.      
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| Tawkon Measures The Radiation Spewing From Your iPhone. No Wonder Apple Doesn’t Approve It. Posted: 04 Mar 2010 11:50 AM PST
Here we go again . . . Apple App Store Fail No. 5102928. A few weeks ago stealth Israeli startup Tawkon gave me a sneak-peak developer build of what I believe is the most important app on my iPhone. What does it do? It analyzes the cellular radiation your iPhone emits at any given moment, at any given location, whether in standby mode, or within a call. Sounds like science fiction, right? Well, that’s where Israeli hardware and software engineering prowess come into play (more on that in a second). Sadly, Israeli military training may have met its match . . . the infamous iPhone App Store approval process. The purpose of Tawkon’s app is to provide the user with an indication—or “prediction” as they call it—of the radiation level being emitted by the iPhone. This level changes based on environmental conditions, distance from cell towers, and even the manner in which the device is held. To illustrate: the iPhone’s antenna is located at the bottom of the device. If the user cradles the phone too tightly in the palm, the antenna has to work harder, thereby increasing radiation. The 3GS models have improved chipsets, so radiation would be lower on them compared to previous versions, and Tawkon takes this into considering when calculating its prediction. When launched, the app instantly provides users with an indication of the radiation level in the iPhone’s stand-by mode. A green/orange/red pulse makes this dummy-proof. For example, radiation levels in my office are minimal, but are much higher in the men’s room which is deeper in the building, where more concrete forces the iPhone to work harder to hold a connection to the nearest cellular base station.
So how does Tawkon do it? Algorithmic magic analyzes your phone’s dynamic SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) levels, location, environmental factors, as well as unique smart-phone capabilities such as bluetooth, accelerometer, proximity sensors, GPS and compass. The level of radiation a person is exposed to during calls is determined by analyzing several dynamic parameters, including the impact of environmental factors such as distance from cellular towers, network and weather condition, terrain, antenna’s proximity from the body, antenna orientation (if the user is holding the phone vertically or horizontally) and travel speed. It’s perfectly natural to be skeptical about Tawkon’s app, so let me lay out a couple of things to set the record straight: first, Tawkon is not looking for controversy. They contacted me weeks before they submitted the app to the App Store with the sincere hope of not being stonewalled. Ironically, were this a gag app, not only would there have been no controversy, the app’s revenue potential may actually be higher. Second, I have no way of testing whether the app’s output is actually correct. However, I took the time to meet the three founders and feel comfortable stating that they struck me as serious, highly capable hardware and software engineers who’ve spent 18 months developing a technology they believe holds real compelling value for users. They claim the app has gone through lab testing to ensure its output is correct. For what it’s worth, I take their word for it. Tawkon’s app has been in the approval process for a couple of weeks with the App Store denying approval on the grounds that a diagnostic tool of this nature would create confusion with iPhone owners from a usability perspective. This reasoning was communicated by an App Store representative on a phone call with the Tawkon team. I find this claim questionable as I’ve been using the app and there’s nothing problematic about it in this respect. Tawkon is keeping optimistic, holding hope that Apple will approve the app which they intend to sell for between $5-$10. In the mean time, it’s plugging ahead in its development of Blackberry and Android versions.      
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| Yahoo Contacts Gets Facebook Connect Posted: 04 Mar 2010 11:35 AM PST
Now Yahoo allows you to add your Facebook friends’ email addresses to your Yahoo Contacts via Facebook Connect. In the Import Contact landing page of your Yahoo account, you’ll be able to select Facebook (importing from Gmail and Hotmail already exists). Once you authorize the connection with your Facebook credentials, your friends' email addresses from their Facebook profiles will be added to your Yahoo Contacts. Yahoo will scan the imports and delete any duplicates. As we’ve written in the past, Yahoo’s move with Facebook shows that the company has given up on leveraging the existing social connections among Yahoo email, address book and messenger users, and thus, weakens its ability to monetize this social graph. And Yahoo also just added Twitter integration to its products as well. While Google’s Buzz may have its problems, at least Google is making an effort to try to develop technologies that use its communications products to build a social graph. Perhaps Yahoo CEO shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds her.      
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| Netbook OS Maker Jolicloud Switches From Mozilla Prism To Chrome For Web Apps Posted: 04 Mar 2010 11:20 AM PST
Jolicloud, the French startup founded by well-known European entrepreneur Tariq Krim that produces a custom Linux-based operating system for netbooks, has just announced on its blog that it will be releasing a solid beta version of the OS later this month. In a fairly surprising move, the company also announced that it is ditching Mozilla Prism in favor of Google Chrome to power the back-end of its app platform. All Web applications currently in the App Center – more than 600 by now – will automatically be converted to Chrome. The move is interesting because many believe that Google’s own upcoming operating system, Chrome OS, will overshadow Jolicloud’s effort in a huge way. If that’s your line of thought as well, check out Michael Arrington’s recent interview of Krim on that very subject. Jolicloud says the reasons for the switch, which was decided upon after evaluation of “different technologies and opportunities”, were Chrome’s speed (courtesy of its V8 JavaScript Engine), better memory usage, support for multiple authentication technologies right out the gate (Facebook Connect, Twitter Connect, etc.) and enhanced HTML5 and Web sockets support, among others. However, Jolicloud is quick to point out that the move will not its commitment to Firefox, which will still be the default browser. The startup says the upcoming version of the Jolicloud OS will feature a new desktop mode adapted for all screens larger than 11 inches and be compatible with 100% of Intel-based netbooks (see second screenshot below). In addition, an entirely new release of Jolicloud Express for easy installation on Windows netbooks is on its way. (Full disclosure: Krim will be showing off the new version of Jolicloud next week at Plugg, a conference I organize. I didn’t know that for sure until after his blog post went up).
     
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| Livestream Goes Mainstream With AP Deal To Stream Video From The Oscars Red Carpet Posted: 04 Mar 2010 11:04 AM PST
Live video streaming on the Web is finally going mainstream. Livestream, the NYC-based live video streaming startup, just landed a one-year partnership with the Associated Press to power all of the AP’s live video streams on the Web. The first event to be streamed live under the new deal will be video from the red carpet at the Oscars this Sunday. The video will be hosted by Livestream at APLive, where viewers can log in to chat with their Twitter or Facebook IDs. It will also be available on Facebook, where viewers will have to become a fan of APLive in order to watch. (APLive only has 1,271 fans right now). The Oscars will be the first of many live video events Livestream will power for the AP. Under the deal, Livestream and the AP split revenues associated with the APLive video. Revenues can come from licensing (AP-affiliated publishers can embed the video on their news sites) or advertising (partners can embed the video for free with the APLive branding, which comes with pre-roll plus overlay ads sold by the AP and Livestream jointly). Consumers and fans can embed the APLIve player for free on their blogs or Facebook pages as long as less than 500 people watch concurrently from any one page. Livestream is seeing significant growth in live video viewership overall. In February, it streamed 1.1 billion unique viewer minutes, compared to 650 million last August (or nearly double in six months). CEO Max Hoat says Livestream is showing videos to 17.5 million people a month across its embedded player network, with 3 million of those on its own Website. Other partners include ESPN, NPR, Fox, Scripps, and National Geographic. Its biggest competitor, Ustream, is also growing rapidly and just closed a massive funding round. Will this be the year live video on the Web goes legit? Livestream recently issued a public challenge to its competitors to do more to fight piracy on their networks. It is clearly gunning for mainstream, and media company, acceptance.      
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| Foodspotting Is A Location-Based Game That Will Make Your Mouth Water Posted: 04 Mar 2010 10:47 AM PST
Foodspotting is an application that allows you to take picture of a food, say what it is, and pin it (with geolocation) to the restaurant where you got it. You may wonder who would use such an app — but just think for a second about how many of your friends on Twitter tweet out pictures of food. People have been doing this long before Foodspotting, this app just gives them more of an incentive to do so, and let’s them organize it. It’s also one hell of a new food discovery tool. And that’s exactly why the team behind it, Alexa Andrzejewski and Ted Grubb, hustled to get the official iPhone app done in time for the SXSW festival, which starts next week in Austin, Texas. With it, you’ll be able to use the “Guides” to easily find (and contribute to) the best foods in Austin. The Foodspotting team put together a few of these guides (including a scavenger hunt, and a street food one), but other users have already created others as well. From these guides, you can easily mark which foods you “want” to bookmark them for later. You can also note which foods you’ve already eaten (“nommed”). Of course, you can also use the app to search for a particular food or restaurant. Or simply scroll through the pictures on the main screen to see a stream of food (which can be sorted by “latest,” “nearest,” “best,” etc). And yes, you can use a map view to see the food too. When you yourself spot a food, you can tweet it out to your followers. Or, thanks to Foursquare’s relatively new API, you can also check-in to a venue simply by foodspotting (yes, the service hopes the name becomes a common verb). It’s one of the most interesting location-based plays that will be on display at SXSW — a conference that will be rife with location-based services. But Foodspotting is a bit different because they’re not aiming to be a location platform like Foursquare or Gowalla. Instead, they’re happy to use location to augment their own reality-based game. That is, after all, essentially what Foodspotting is. Just like with the other two aforementioned location services, you earn some badges for tagging certain types of foods in pictures (they called them “Expert Badges”). And you earn others for participating in the Guides. And, of course, there are points for doing all of this. While the “lite” version of the app has been available in the App Store for a few months, the team has done little to promote it, waiting instead until the full version, which launches today in the App Store. Still, the lite version (and the very nice-looking website) proved that there’s a demand for this service. Already, Foodspotting has seen over 15,000 foodspottings. Top cities include San Francisco, New York, and Honolulu. So how do you make money off of this idea? That’s a question the Foodspotting team has had to answer a lot recently, as they’re currently in the process of raising a seed round of funding. The natural idea is to become popular enough that restaurants and brands want to partner with the service to promote themselves. ”It’s kind of like pumping a scent out of your bakery window to draw people in,” Andrzejewski says. Already, the service is teaming up with 7×7, an insider’s guide to food in San Francisco to show how a partnership could work (it’s a non-paid partnership, for now). The iPhone app, created for Foodspotting by EGG HAUS, Inc, is available today in the App Store for free. Find it here. Eventually, the plan is to expand to the other mobile platforms as well.
     
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| YouTube Launches Auto-Captions For All Videos Posted: 04 Mar 2010 10:32 AM PST
Walk said that a few years ago, accessibility meant giving users more ways to access their content (for example, through their mobile phones). Now, the company is focusing more on making its content accessible to even more people. Google software engineer Ken Harrenstein then took the stage to walk through some of YouTube’s initiatives on this front. Harrenstein walked us through YouTube’s past feature launches, including the launch of captions and subtitles. In November of last year, the company began to roll out auto-captions on a limited scale, which use speech recognition to automatically transcribe what’s said in a video. And now, it’s going to enable the feature for all videos uploaded to YouTube where English is spoken.
This makes the videos accessible not just to deaf people, but also to viewers around the world, who can translate any video that’s in English to another language. However, Harrenstein took time to point out that the captioning isn’t perfect, showing how the words “SIM card” got transcribed to “salmon”. Here are some of the details for uploading videos:
Google researcher Mike Cohen then took the stage to talk about Google’s Speech Technology. The ultimate vision, he says, is to provide accurate captions for all videos in all languages. But that comes with many problems, including a massive vocabulary, issues with poor recordings and background noise, and accents. And every language comes with its own unique challenges. YouTube hasn’t yet run all of its videos through the new transcription service, but video owners will be able to manually request that their older videos get transcribed more quickly through each video’s options screen. Harrenstein, who is deaf, retook the stage to tell a personal story. When he was at MIT, he didn’t go to many of his lectures because he was unable to understand the lectures (which weren’t signed). Now, he can watch MIT lectures on YouTube, with captioning enabled. Next, some students from the California School for the Deaf in Fremont, and their instructor Joey Baer, took the stage to thank YouTube for the launch. Check out their enthusiasm in the video below. Really, this is quite amazing.
     
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Apple just 
Using the combination of camera and software on today’s smartphones to read barcodes is becoming increasingly popular. Want proof? Look no further than Google, which is building it into their own Android devices. And Microsoft, which is even offering such software on rival phones by Google and Apple. Today, one of the big players in this space, 
Last week, we 
Earlier today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave a 
I’m from a relatively small city in Ohio called Pepper Pike. If I want to find out news about it, the easiest thing for me to do is Google “
Yahoo CEO 
Remember 
It was only December when Google officially launched extensions for its Chrome browser. Almost immediately, there were 
Last December, Yahoo 
The idea was a way to show people the best food in Japan beyond sushi — to literally show them, in picture form. Then the thought morphed into writing to a book, where the best food in the world was shown. But that’s a lot of travel for one person. So the thought became, why not crowdsource it? That’s 
I’m here at YouTube’s office in San Bruno, where the company is holding a press conference to discuss the launch of auto-captions. YouTube Director of Product Management Hunter Walk kicked off the event by discussing some of YouTube’s goals through the years — one of which is accessibility.
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