The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Mediagazer: Techmeme’s Editors Will Help Us Watch The Death Of Print; Find What’s Next
- TweetPhoto Gets More Social With Facebook, Twitter, And Foursquare; Launches Better iPhone App
- Mochi Media Launches $10 Million Investment Fund, Rolls Out Social Gaming Platform
- Forrester Forecast: Online Retail Sales Will Grow To $250 Billion By 2014
- Tilera Grabs $25 Million From Chip Investors
- The Slow-Mo Secrets of the iPad
- Blackboard Buys Mobile Messaging Company Saf-T-Net For $33 Million
- TC50 Finalist DataXu Scores $11 Million More For Online Ad Bidding Platform
- Online Video Distribution Company SeaWell Networks Raises $7 Million
- Brazil: The New Home of Financial Innovation?
- Apple’s New Stance On ‘Cookie Cutter’ Apps: Add More Features Or Perish
- Foursquare Just Made Your Location History A Lot More Interesting
- Betting On The Oscars? Google Has A Super Simple Docs Template To Use.
- The Rise Of Transactional Advertising
| Mediagazer: Techmeme’s Editors Will Help Us Watch The Death Of Print; Find What’s Next Posted: 08 Mar 2010 08:00 AM PST
Today, the people behind Techmeme are rolling out Mediagazer, a new site focused on aggregating and serving up all the best media news from around the web. The timing seems perfect given the level of interest surrounding the slow but interesting death of print media. And the interest around exciting new devices like the iPad, which may or may not reinvigorate the industry. But why chose to focus on media? “Media news has several things going for it: lots of new coverage every day, lots of interlinking, a variety of subtopics (video, blogs, journalism, newspapers, etc.) and (we hope) a potential audience with interest in several of those subtopics,” Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera tells us. Rivera has tried in the past to roll the Techmeme idea to other verticals such as celebrity news (WeSmirch), political news (Memeorandum), and even baseball news (Ballbug). All those sites still exist, but none have gotten the level of interest that Techmeme has. So why will this be different? Aside from the interest in media, this is the first site Rivera has rolled out since switching over to using human editor curation. And actually, Mediagazer will be launched under the control of Megan McCarthy, the first human editor Rivera hired in late 2008. Rivera has since made other hires to round out a full staff that can work around the clock for Techmeme. Says McCarthy, “Media is tumultuous. Some areas are growing, some shrinking, and there’s no clear path of where things are going. There’s talk about the future of journalism, consolidation of media ownership, bloggers, Twitter, etc. It affects daily life (look at how the Oscars were blacked out in New York City and how many people were touched by that). This is an industry that is filled with such disruption — you need to have a way to clearly view the big picture. Mediagazer does that.“ And a bit more about how it actually works from Mediagazer’s about area:
     
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| TweetPhoto Gets More Social With Facebook, Twitter, And Foursquare; Launches Better iPhone App Posted: 08 Mar 2010 07:54 AM PST
TweetPhoto has now added the ability to sign in with Twitter OAuth, Facebook Connect, MySpace OAuth and Foursquare OAuth so that a user of any one of these social networks can use TweetPhoto as a stand alone photo sharing service. The site will also be rolling out LinkedIn support in the next few weeks. In addition to login capabilities across all four of these services, TweetPhoto users can also link these social networking accounts together. Once you link your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace , or Foursquare accounts on the site, your photos uploaded to TweetPhoto can be simultaneously broadcast to all of the networks. Third party applications that use TweetPhoto as the default photo uploader such as TweetDeck and Seesmic’s BlackBerry app, will also include this functionality.
In connection with the new social broadcast features, TweetPhoto is rolling out a new API to include over 35 new API calls. And as we wrote last year, TweetPhoto got into a bit of a pickle over its logo. That combined with Twitter’s trademark of the word “Tweet,” is resulting in TweetPhoto completely rebranding its service. The first step of this effort is a new logo, which we’ve attached above. A new name is forthcoming, says TweetPhoto, and its focus will be much more on the mobile side of things. While TweetPhoto is still not getting the same amount of traffic as the leaders in the space, TwitPic, the site is edging out fellow competitor yFrog, according to January’s Compete numbers. But as TweetPhoto, which met with a little bit of scandal last fall, makes its offerings more social and interactive, the site could even give TwitPic a run for its money.
     
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| Mochi Media Launches $10 Million Investment Fund, Rolls Out Social Gaming Platform Posted: 08 Mar 2010 07:54 AM PST
Mochi Social allow developers to build social features into their games such as inviting friends, sending gifts, or posting to an activity stream. Mochi Social allows for the ability to broadcast in-game notifications to deliver news about game updates, friend activity or challenges.The aim of incorporating these features, allows for a game to transcend one social network by plugging into users social graph across all of their social media identities. The platform currently integrates with Facebook, MySpace and Twitter with more sites to be added in the near future. Currently in private beta, Mochi Social will be rolling out its first enabled game "Kingdoms at War" by A Thinking Ape next week. A joint effort between Mochi Media and parent company Shanda Games, Mochi GAME Developer Fund is a $10 million fund that will help promising Flash and social game developers support their games through sponsorship, licensing and publishing deals. The fund will be used to assist indie Flash game development studios and game developers. Participating developers will gain access to technical, design and testing resources from Shanda Games, as well as development tools and distribution to nearly 40,000 websites from Mochi Media. Initial investments will be as much as $100,000 per game title. It’s nice to see Mochi using its backing from Shanda to good use. And the addition of social features to Mochi’s development platform will no doubt be useful to game developers. As of June 2009 100 million people were playing games that included Mochi Media. The company also launched a payments platform for game developers last year.      
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| Forrester Forecast: Online Retail Sales Will Grow To $250 Billion By 2014 Posted: 08 Mar 2010 07:09 AM PST
Online retail sales aren’t growing at the torrid pace they once were, but they continue to grow steadily. Forrester Research put out a new five-year forecast today predicting that e-commerce sales in the U.S. will keep growing at a 10 percent compound annual growth rate through 2014. It forecasts online retail sales in the U.S. will be nearly $250 billion, up from $155 billion in 2009. Last year, online retail sales were up 11 percent, compared to 2.5 percent for all retail sales. In Western Europe, Forrester expects a slightly faster 11 percent growth rate for online retail sales, going from $93 million (68 million Euros) in 2009 to $156 million (114.5 million Euros) in 2014. Forrester’s estimates exclude online sales of autos, travel, and prescription drugs. Some other stats from the U.S. forecast:
While $155 billion worth of consumer goods were bought online last year, a far larger portion of offline sales were influenced by online research. Forrester estimates that $917 billion worth of retail sales last year were “Web-influenced.” It also estimates that online and Web-influenced offline sales combined accounted for 42 percent of total retail sales and that percentage will grow to 53 percent by 2014, when the Web will be influencing $1.4 billion worth of in-store sales. Yet there is a lot of room for improvement in helping consumers go from doing online research to in-store purchases. Only 61 percent of consumers who cross over from one to the other are satisfied with their buying experience, compared to 82 percent for those who end up buying online. Forrester draws the lesson that retailers need to do a better job appealing to online consumers in their physical stores. I come to a different conclusion: avoid going to real stores and buy online whenever you can. You will be happier.
     
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| Tilera Grabs $25 Million From Chip Investors Posted: 08 Mar 2010 06:19 AM PST
Tilera says the funding will be used to expand sales operations and for product development. Founded in 2004, Tilera designs multicore embedded processors for networking, digital multimedia, and wireless infrastructure markets. The company offers multicore processors for processing and power requirements, multicore software development tools, and boards. Its products include TILEPro, a multicore processor, which delivers the performance computing for embedded applications. Tilera investor and semiconductor giant Broadcom just closed the acquisition of chip developer Teknovus for $123 million. |
| The Slow-Mo Secrets of the iPad Posted: 08 Mar 2010 06:13 AM PST  Neil Curtis has a lot of time on his hands. Rather than just accepting the wool being pulled over our eyes by the Man, he decided to get totally Zapruder on the new iPad commercial and found all sorts of problems with the video, including a number of messy little transitions (the main actor, for example, turns from female to male) and UI interactions (items still moving after they've been released). If Apple expects us to accept the world as it appears to their sinister ad team, they have another thing coming. Neil and others like him will crack their lies wide open, whether they want it or not. Good thing Apple didn't try a moon landing or we'd have their heads.
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| Blackboard Buys Mobile Messaging Company Saf-T-Net For $33 Million Posted: 08 Mar 2010 05:56 AM PST
AlertNow's technology delivers voice, e-mail and emergency SMS messages at a rate up to 2.5 million per hour to parents, students and school administrators. The company, which sent 25 million message in February alone, has over 2000 schools using its product and will be used to Blackboard’s mobile technology. Saf-T-Net will also help Blackboard further its dominance in the the K-12 market; Blackboard’s software has been used predominantly by colleges and universities. Currently, Blackboard provides software for 5000 educational institutions. The company recently boughtTerriblyCleverDesigns, a startup that helped create iPhone and other mobile apps for colleges and universities, for $4 million.      
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| TC50 Finalist DataXu Scores $11 Million More For Online Ad Bidding Platform Posted: 08 Mar 2010 04:59 AM PST
The company, which was a finalist at last year’s edition of the TechCrunch50 conference and startup launchpad, raised the additional capital from Menlo Ventures and prior investors Atlas Venture and Flybridge Capital Partners. The DataXu platform creates campaign-specific data models and algorithms that value, purchase and optimize ad placements across all major ad exchanges (including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s) and other ad inventory sources – all while taking into consideration media context, consumer profiles and choice of creative. The startup launched its demand-side platform at TC50 in September 2009, and says it will now use the extra funds for new product development, sales and marketing, and international expansion.
     
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| Online Video Distribution Company SeaWell Networks Raises $7 Million Posted: 08 Mar 2010 03:36 AM PST
The round includes the conversion of prior seed funding. Founded in 2008, SeaWell says it is currently developing a solution, based on video compression standard H.264 scalable video coding (SVC), that not only enables content providers to deliver a TV-like viewing experience online but also reduces the cost of delivering that content to any screen or device in HD quality full-screen resolution or in lower resolutions for low-bandwidth mobile devices. For more information on SVC, you can request a white paper from SeaWell. The goal of the solution is to enable organizations to stop “over-provisioning” their existing delivery networks in order to address the quality and scalability challenges created by the increasingly surge in online media traffic. Nazmin Alani, Managing Director BDC Venture Capital and previously VP, Consulting with Gartner, has joined SeaWell Networks’ board of directors.
     
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| Brazil: The New Home of Financial Innovation? Posted: 07 Mar 2010 06:37 PM PST
Yes, it's a growing country with a young and stabilizing democracy that has a long way to go in terms of technology, modernization and bridging a quality of life between very wealthy and very poor. In that sense, it shares enough in common with emerging markets that Wall Street, at least, tosses it in the "BRIC" bucket. Indeed, Wall Street has had a way bigger crush on Brazil to date than Silicon Valley. Crivo has developed a way to do lightning-fast, three-second credit checks. Its servers pull information from a variety of sources, including all the places you’d expect but but also sources like utility records to verify an applicant’s address or ensuring that their phone number doesn’t just go to a payphone. "Even a single piece of information can be useful in detecting fraud," says Daniel Turnini, one of Crivo's founders. (Pictured above, on the right, with his co-founders.) There's nothing like a FICO score in Brazil so, in the past, credit decisions were made based on negative data and positive data. In other words you are "good" or "bad" in the bank's eyes. There's little record for positive data in Brazil, because the wealthiest people don't want how much they paid for a house or a car in public records. It's a security issue, Turnini says. That only leaves negative data. So if there's no information about you, it's assumed you're a good credit risk. But miss one payment and you have a "dirty name," Turini says. It's a flawed system. Many good credit risks (indeed I'd bet most people) have missed a payment before, and it's a huge assumption to make that someone with no credit history would be a good borrower. In recent years there have been banks, insurance companies, and similar institutions vying to cash in on Brazil's emerging middle class and increasingly wealthy upper classes, but had no real way of knowing how to extend credit. Sound like great timing? It would have been if Crivo wasn't started in 1998. Back then, few banks in the US would have been early adopters of something like this, let alone banks in Brazil. (Ok, most banks in the US still wouldn't be.) Nailing that first customer was near impossible. The founders kept thinking they were on the right track because potential customers would freak out when they saw how quickly the software worked, but they’d never quite pull the trigger on a purchase. Always hoping things would finally click the next year, the founders kept bootstrapping the company. Finally, it did. Toyota's Brazilian financial arm bought their software and used it to rapidly approve people for loans, beating other car makers who were flooding into the growing market. The company has been on a sharp growth rate for five years now. They did roughly $12 million in revenues last year, and expect that to double in 2010, Turini says. Crivo says it has more than 80 employees and 100 customers today. There are clear ripple effects if Crivo does well. More people getting credit cards helps grow spending and ecommerce, more small businesses can get loans, and more people who can't afford to pay in cash can buy houses – to name just a few advantages. We've seen the benefits of "greenfield markets" when it comes to innovation in telecom and even physical infrastructure, like roads and trains. Might Brazil be able to come up with some greenfield solutions for finance? It's easy to see how a FICO score could be improved on and, ahem, really easy to make the argument that way too much credit has been extended in the US in the last ten years. But while we have a system in place, who is going to upend the apple cart and force widespread-adoption of a newer, smarter system? It's South Korea and telecom all over again. And there's another benefit to an emerging market that plays host to lots of finance and consulting multinationals. While countries like Israel and India have gotten a raft of talented coders thanks to US outsourcing, their own startups struggle when it comes to finding locals with sales and management expertise. Those jobs are usually kept in the US or done by transplanted Americans. And just as Intel, Cisco, Oracle and Google have trained thousands of engineers in emerging markets, so the big consulting, finance and CPG companies are training hundreds of potential managers in Brazil. Yes, I realize that to many tech entrepreneurs, the idea of a country amassing an army of An example was Diego Simon of VivaReal (pictured right, working in his tiny home office), a broad Latin American real estate portal that has increasingly been focusing on Brazil. Neither of the founders are Brazilian – or even live in Brazil – so finding someone like Simon was essential. Entrepreneurs from other South American countries say selling to Brazil as an outsider is harder for them than selling to China. That makes Simon exactly the Droid any company like VivaReal is looking for: He had experience running his family's business, worked a stint for a multinational but left because he wanted to do something vaguely entrepreneurial – although he didn't know exactly what. I've never been particularly bullish on real estate portals, but if VivaReal does well, it will be in no small part due to Simon criss-crossing Sao Paulo in his Fiat extolling the virtues of online listings under the auspices of a common culture and language. The problem is—like in China and India—the allure of the multi-national paycheck and prestige is strong in Brazil. The management expertise may be there in greater numbers, but convincing someone to take a gamble on an unproven startup for stock is as hard as it is anywhere in the emerging world.      
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| Apple’s New Stance On ‘Cookie Cutter’ Apps: Add More Features Or Perish Posted: 07 Mar 2010 03:33 PM PST
Between the developers I spoke to, the consensus was this: Apple doesn’t appear to be opposed to ‘app generators’ and templates per se, but in the last month or so it has started cracking down on basic applications that are little more than RSS feeds or glorified business cards. In short, Apple doesn’t want people using native applications for things that a basic web app could accomplish. For some of these services that’s bad news, because that’s exactly the sort of application they produce; any new applications they submit are going to get rejected. But all hope isn’t lost for them, provided they can make their apps more useful. Unlike the ’sexy’ app ban that took place a few weeks ago, when Apple gave developers no options to keep their apps on the store, over the last month the company has been reaching out to at least a few app building services to suggest what they should be doing. The founders of Appmakr, which has been used by publications like The Atlantic to build iPhone applications, say that the process has been quite positive (though they are quick to clarify that applications built with their tools are more full-featured than the basic RSS apps described above). After some suggestions from Apple, the service is integrating new features like in-app purchases, instant notifications, offline access, and landscape viewing modes to their app templates. Another developer mentioned that they might include a tip calculator for restaurant apps. Appmakr’s hope (and one that I’m sure is shared by other developers) is that applications generated using their tools will eventually be given an accelerated path through the App Store’s approval process, because Apple is familiar and happy with the kind of apps they produce. However, from what I’ve gathered not everyone is having as much luck as the Appmakr team. Multiple developers mentioned that they’d heard of some app vendors that Apple wasn’t being nearly as accommodating towards — I suspect services offering the most basic templates are getting hit hardest. That said, the developers I spoke to said that they’d only heard about Apple blocking newly submitted applications, and that there wasn’t an indication that Apple is going back and removing all of the overly-basic apps they can find. So why is Apple doing this? Here’s what Medialets CEO Eric Litman had to say, which I think perfectly summarizes the situation.
Overall, this will almost certainly result in a better experience for users as they have to deal with fewer spammy apps. But, as I wrote when Apple launched its war on sex apps last month, the policy change may also scare developers. After effectively sending a message to developers that basic applications were okay, Apple is again changing its mind. Some developers may be hesitant to build their businesses around the iPhone, knowing that at any moment Apple could have a change of heart and cut off their only mode of distribution. Thanks to Robert Strojan for the tip      
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| Foursquare Just Made Your Location History A Lot More Interesting Posted: 07 Mar 2010 02:48 PM PST
As has been made abundantly clear to me over the past two weeks, just about every location-based service is planning big things for the SXSW festival, which starts later this week in Austin, Texas. A few of the players have already started rolling out small changes, such as aesthetic upgrades. But a new, subtle update by Foursquare may have much larger implications. As we noted last week, Foursquare has begun revamping the “history” area of its website. This is likely part of the larger goal to completely revamp the website itself (which isn’t very useful right now), and this data also ties in to the new Foursquare iPhone app set to launch later this week. But another update makes the history area show not only where you checked-in, and the category of the venue, but also who you checked-in with. Basically, Foursquare has just turned on a new layer to your location history data. And this layer is very interesting because it goes back in time to show you who you were with at a certain venue when you were there. Now, to be clear, it only shows you the friends you were with — not all Foursquare users. (But this means that they have that data as well.) Still, this data paints a clearer picture around your location history and potentially enriches your social graph. It’s one thing to say you’re “friends” with someone on a social network, but another to have checked-in to the same venue at the same time over and over again. Either you’re torturing yourself, or you really are good friends with that person. This is a huge part of location as the bridge between social networking and actual social activity. Foursquare has highlighted similar data for a while on the stats page, showing you who you check-in with most often. But this new history data takes that to the next level. And while the data right now only seems to go back to last December or so, Foursquare plans to implement it all the way back to 2003 — yes, 2003. That’s because before Foursquare, co-founder Dennis Crowley ran a similar service called Dodgeball, which Google bought in 2006, and deadpooled last year. But users were able to import their old Dodgeball data before it went under, so Crowley now hopes to build a full location history social graph going back that far for long-time users. “We gotta backfill some of the data (easy, but for those who imported their Dodgeball history before Google took the site down, we can give you a good idea of the trends around who you’ve been hanging out w/ going back to 2003.) It’s awesome awesome awesome,” Crowley writes in an email to us. Something else Crowley is excited about is the potential for the visualization of this data. While this location history + friends isn’t yet in the API, it definitely will be, he notes. Depending on how that data is shared, that may raise some privacy issues, but Foursquare has made it clear that they’re well aware and very serious about the issues surrounding the sharing of location data. Even on the most basic level, this new layer of location history data should be interesting to people. It’s great to look back and see not only where you were on a certain date, but who you were there with. That’s what social data is all about.      
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| Betting On The Oscars? Google Has A Super Simple Docs Template To Use. Posted: 07 Mar 2010 12:41 PM PST
While the show is almost always way too long, one way to get into it is to have an Oscar pool, where everyone picks who they think will win in each category. Google has set up a special Google Docs template that allows you to easily create this pool and send it to all your friends. It’s so simple, that you can even set it up to be filled out right within an email. When you send the email to a friend, they’ll be asked to enter their name, and then simply select who they think will be the winner in each category. Google has already populated all of this data in the template, so there’s really nothing more for you to do. When they send this information back, it will be imported into a Google Spreadsheet, so you can compare the data from all your friends. You can also see a more visual “summary” of the data. Categories such as “Best Short Film (Live Action)” also ensure that this can be a pretty fun drinking game, as well. You have a few hours til the show, get picking.
     
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| The Rise Of Transactional Advertising Posted: 07 Mar 2010 11:30 AM PST
The marriage of brand advertising and free content is facing peremptory annulment. There is no shortage of punditry around "the death of the media company" and whether it is a just dessert or a societal travesty. But that's looking at it from the media company and consumer viewpoint – what do advertisers think about all of this? Where is online advertising headed and what does that mean for free content? Making content free was not a well thought out business model. Rather, before the days of Sirius XM and DirecTV, there was no more of a way to charge for freely accessible radio waves than there was to charge for air or sunshine. Making content free, and charging for advertising interspersed in that free content, was pretty much the ONLY business model back then. And it worked pretty well, because supply (advertising "units") was limited by the amount of content produced and, more importantly, by the narrow "channels" where such content was made available. With such low supply, high demand, and massive reach, it was easy to reach large swaths of the populace. The advertisers couldn't really quantify their results, but they came up with a wide variety of methods to attempt to do so. Market research firms such as ACNielsen flourished to fill the need for "metrics." But, as I argued in my last piece, brand advertising doesn't really work – or, perhaps better put, is superseded by "transactional advertising." The old logic went like this — people were more likely to buy Coca-Cola versus Carbonated Dark-Colored Sugar Water X because Coca-Cola had a brand (which Coca-Cola has spent billions on). What's the value of Coca-Cola's brand? Pure math – it's the Net Present Value (NPV) of the difference that consumers will pay for Coca-Cola versus, say, RC Cola, for the lifetime of the consumer and duration of the brand. When you pay $1 for a Coke versus $.50 for an RC Cola, the $.50 difference is chalked up to the "brand." (Yes, perhaps there are differences in taste, too – but even with an identical formula and taste, I would argue RC Cola wouldn't sell as well as Coke). Multiply $.50 times billions upon billions of cans of Coke, and you see the power of brand. I don't disagree with this notion, but I would argue that it is becoming largely irrelevant for a large class of goods and service providers (think soda or television set, not Rolex or BMW), and that the "brand" advertising money can be better spent, thereby imperiling expensively produced, freely distributed content. To wit: what if Walmart refused to stock Coca-Cola, instead stocking just RC Cola? Granted, Walmart stocks Coca-Cola because consumers demand it, and consumers demand it because of the brand that Coca-Cola has created, but that can easily be reversed. If Walmart decided to stock only RC Cola and expel Coca-Cola from its shelves, this would change RC Cola's fortunes, and harm Coca-Cola, quite a bit. Preferential placement of a good or service at/near the point of a transaction is something I call "transactional advertising," which I predict will expand as a category in the coming years. Transactional advertising describes a clear food chain of brand and positioning; the titans at the top are Google, Amazon, Walmart, and other "aggregators" who themselves hold considerable brand equity and/or organic traffic. Smaller players exist in niche fields: BankRate, Shopping.com, Edmunds.com, Lending Tree, even Diapers.com have become destinations that steer consumer decisions. These have potential to be the new "media" companies in a transactional advertising universe, odd as that might sound. This form of transactional advertising exists today, although you might not know it. Proctor & Gamble spends great effort and expense (though it pales in comparison to their brand advertising spend) to ensure eye-level placement wherever its products are sold. Many retailers "charge" for shelf-space, with the clear understanding that better merchandised goods have a better chance of ending up in consumers' shopping carts. Today you see very little in the way of transactional advertising online; rarely does one brand pop up in another brand's checkout experience. There's a good chance that will change in a major way in the near future. If old media companies can figure out how to attach themselves to more transactions, they have a fighting chance of sticking it out online.      
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To many in the industry, 
First 
TweetPhoto’s new, free iPhone app, called 
Fresh off an 
Boston-based 
In the wake of Apple’s sudden decision to 
Tonight is the 82nd annual 
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