The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Calling All Designers: Weebly Gives Users More Variety With New Theme Community
- Get Satisfaction Turns To Facebook To Socialize Customer Support
- Mobile App Directory Mplayit Adds Recommendations From App Gurus
- The Field Guide To Modern 3D Glasses
- The Facebook Imperative Cannot Be Stopped
- Radian6 Launches Powerful Social Media Engagement and Monitoring Console For Brands And Agencies
- Brazil: Copy Cats? What Copy Cats?
- Kyte Now Offering Broadcast-Quality Live Video Streaming Backpack
- The Yahoo Cycling Team Is Going To Love This New Google Maps Feature
- Quote Of The Day: MySpace Co-President? “Hell, Yeah”
- More Talent Walks Out The Door At MySpace: Three Key Employees Go To Gravity
- Comscore Study: Social Gamers Want Marketing Offers For Currency
- In The SXSW Location War, Loopt Hopes The Correct Weapon Is Events
- Google Apps Marketplace: Instantly Connect Your App To 25 Million Users, Profit.
- Web-Based Productivity Suite Zoho Finds A Place In The Google Apps Marketplace
- Socialwok Takes A Stroll In The Google Apps Marketplace
- MetaLab Accuses Mozilla Of Plagiarizing Its Design (Updated)
- Live: Google Apps Marketplace Launches At Google Campfire One
- Amazon Wields $25 Gift Certificates To Pacify Frustrated Comic Book Fans
- SXSW Interactive: Because hell doesn’t have enough promotional stickers
- Twitter Starts Routing All Links Through New Anti-Phishing Service
- SV Angel Partner Brian Pokorny Now CEO Of Dailybooth
- Google’s Chief Economist: “Newspapers Have Never Made Much Money From News”
- Tweetie 2 Gaining Native Foursquare Support
- Chomp Closes In On 300,000 Users, Launches App Review Site And Chomp Connect
| Calling All Designers: Weebly Gives Users More Variety With New Theme Community Posted: 10 Mar 2010 09:02 AM PST
This is a pretty big deal for Weebly. Up until now, users have had around 80 themes to choose from, which pales in comparison to the number of themes available for some other site building platforms, like WordPress. You’ve always been free to use your own custom CSS styling, but many of the site’s users are using Weebly specifically because they don’t want to have to deal with that sort of thing. Now they’ll have a lot more variety to choose from, with no mucking around in CSS required. At launch, Weebly’s theme gallery is still only going to consist of the 80 themes that already exist, since it’s just opening to submissions for the first time today. But CEO David Rusenko expects that to change quickly, in part spurred by the design competition the site is holding. He also believes that designers will be compelled to create themes for the site because of the large audience it reaches — Weebly now has 3.5 million site building users, who see 80 million page views per month from 17 million unique visitors. And he says that traffic is growing 20% month over month. It’s a bit surprising that it took this long for the site to roll out the feature (Weebly launched back in 2007), but Rusenko says that they “wanted to get it right”. Fair enough.
Users will be able to access the themes both through the site’s editor (which has been revamped a bit to accommodate the new gallery) and from this page, which you can view even if you aren’t a Weebly member. Themes won’t include attribution in their footers, but the gallery itself will allow designers to build up their own profiles, allowing users to see all of the themes they’ve submitted. At launch, all themes will be free, but Rusenko says that the site plans to begin allowing designers to sell premium themes in the future. The design competition has a submission deadline of April 30, is open in any country where such contests are valid, and is being judged by Michael Cronan, Scott Thomas, Jason Putorti, Andrew Wilkinson, Dustin Curtis, and Rob Martin.
     
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| Get Satisfaction Turns To Facebook To Socialize Customer Support Posted: 10 Mar 2010 08:59 AM PST
As companies turn to Facebook Fan Pages to connect with customers, consumers are increasingly voicing their issues with a particular product or brand on the brand’s Facebook page. But often these complaints or opinions can get lost in the stream. That’s where Get Satisfaction comes in. The startup now allows brands to create a tab on their fan pages, which can be a portal for consumers to express their opinions, complaints or issues with the brand or product. With the Facebook Social Engagement Hub, Get Satisfaction creates a tab (that can be labeled with any brand-specific name) on the brand’s Fan Page. Here customers can begin wall discussions in the form of four topic types: Ask a Question, Share an Idea, Report a Problem, or Give Praise. When customers begin to post a question, Get Satisfaction searches for and suggests similar threads to give consumers instant answers to commonly asked questions. All questions, comments, and answers are discoverable via Google and other search engine. People can respond to any thread — i.e. voice a similar problem, suggest a remedy, emerge as an advocate in response to another’s complaint, or offer a new twist to a product suggestion. Community members can also make their experience heard by simply clicking ‘me too’. In turn, any question, idea or problem posted on a brand’s hub on Facebook will be automatically imported into the brand’s Get Satisfaction web interface, allowing marketers and customer support reps to access the conversation from their Get Satisfaction site. Get Satisfaction’s co-founder Lane Becker says that the new offering is a part of helping brands distribute the conversations where the conversations are actually happening. And with 400 million users worldwide, Facebook is definitely a place where the conversations are taking place. Becker says that the startup is particularly focused on the idea of the “social CRM” and helping clients connect the conversations taking place regarding customers support on social media sites with CRM applications like Salesforce and Zendesk. Get Satisfaction currently has free app on Salesforce’s app exchange. The Facebook offering is a paid feature and Get Satisfaction will have a number of pricing options. Today’s rollout is more targeted towards bigger brands, but a more scaled down offering will be introduced soon and will cost SMBs $99 per month. Get Satisfaction recently raised $2.3 million in funding, which Becker says is being used to scale out its team. With only 20 employees, Get Satisfaction currently has 20,000 customers (10,000 of which are paid customers). Zappos, Mint.com, Procter & Gamble, and Nike have all created customer support communities on the site. Currently there are over 25,000 communities that have been created on the platform. Example: Mighty Leaf Tea uses the Get Satisfaction Social Engagement Hub to engage with its loyal customers, driving both word of mouth marketing and peer advocacy. Link: http://bit.ly/buxE6B Get Satisfaction's Web 2.0 customer service and support platform launched in 2007 and has grown exponentially. More than 35,000 company communities have been created on Get Satisfaction, and upwards of 20,000 organizations are actively engaging with 1.4 million community members. Organizations of all stripes — from Nike to Four Square — engage in conversations with their customers, increasing loyalty, retention, collaboration, and customer-driven innovation, while reducing repetitive support costs.      
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| Mobile App Directory Mplayit Adds Recommendations From App Gurus Posted: 10 Mar 2010 08:56 AM PST
Last year, Mplayit launched its Facebook app that allows users to discover, share and recommend a variety of mobile apps back in November and covers apps available for the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Mobile (Java) devices. Mplayit's directory of apps includes a dedicated page for each app where Mplayit will post videos of the app (created either by the developer or pulled from YouTube), a detailed description of the app and reviews. You can also click to buy the app from various app markets, including Apple’s App Store and the Android Market. Once you start clicking on various app and downloading apps, Mplayit will begin to recommend apps to you based on your behavior on the site. With the feature, consumers on Mplayit will be able to see a feed of real-time activity of the Gurus within the app. Guru's can also rank apps on a scale of one to five and apps rated by at least two Gurus with ratings or four or five stars get the top accolade, a "Guru Approved" badge. App Gurus include IntoMobile, iPhone Arcade, Androidandme and Stuart Dredge. The feature is similar in some ways to competitor Appolicious’ curated lists of recommended mobile apps. Mplayit also faces competition from AppsFire, 16Apps and others.      
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| The Field Guide To Modern 3D Glasses Posted: 10 Mar 2010 08:30 AM PST
 You might want to take a different approach when shopping for a 3D TV than a standard HDTV. Instead of just looking at the picture quality, you should also take a serious look at the brand's 3D glasses. Some show some clear advantages to purchase that brand's 3D TV and until there's a standard format for 3D glasses, each brand requires its own unique glasses, thereby locking you into that manufacturer's products. Yeah, it's a bit messy right now. Click through for details on all of them.
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| The Facebook Imperative Cannot Be Stopped Posted: 10 Mar 2010 07:35 AM PST
Two weeks ago on TechCrunch I posted "The Facebook Imperative," which posed a simple question, "Why isn't all enterprise software like Facebook?" It was the next iteration of the question I asked in 1999 that spawned salesforce.com, "Why isn't all enterprise software like Amazon.com." If you have read my book, Behind The Cloud, you are well aware how that one question launched a company, and a movement. Its been an exciting decade. But the real excitement is just starting. Frankly, I've been amazed by the huge amount of responses, tweets, and comments (aka "the ruckus across the blogoshere," as Joe McKendrick calls it). It only strengthens my conviction that we are about to see the greatest revolution in enterprise software, ever. Well, really, the most exciting revolution in computing, ever. It will create more value for users, customers, and vendors by an order of magnitude over what we saw in the last wave. And, it's really starting to happen right now. It is realtime. It is social. It is mobile. And, it is about time. Literally, it is about productivity. I'm energized by the excitement I see for a new generation of collaboration software in the enterprise to replace antiquated Microsoft Sharepoint servers and IBM's Lotus Notes. I've enjoyed seeing my observation—that Lotus Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg—reverberate around the web. But, the reality is the Facebook Imperative contained more than a funny line. It hit a nerve. We are all responding—debating—a question that is an imperative because we all need to take software to a new level, and now is the time. Microsoft and IBM have maintained the status quo on enterprise collaboration software too long, and it's time for a change. There are an overwhelming number of you who agree that its time to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. We are betting salesforce.com’s future on it. Approximately 40% of companies are already deploying or planning to deploy a social computing platform, a number that's expected to rise, says Irwin Lazar of Nemeretes Research. Not everyone agrees, mostly the vendors that are milking their cash cows. But, make no mistake about it, this generation of social platforms is very different than the last. Charles Zedlewski emerged from a long blogging hiatus to argue that Facebook is designed for entertainment—not productivity. Well, that's not surprising given that he works for SAP, one of the companies I have previously referred to as “innovationless”—in my view they remain the Anti-Cloud. Their actions speak for themselves. Still, I'm astounded that more enterprises haven't figured out how to tap into the real collaborative power of Facebook and Twitter, and the new social models that they have pioneered. I consider Facebook and Twitter—and the ability to tap into my network of friends and followers—one the most productive ways I can start my day. Using these new Internet phenoms, I've tested new ad campaigns and elicited great customer responses, promoted my book to a large audience of people who cared, and with the help of my network, even named new products—all before I sat down for breakfast. I'm not alone; ask Vinnie Mirchandani for a sneak preview of his new book and read how Starbucks, Avon, and Pepsi are using these new social services to increase productivity in their enterprises. Or, look at how Causes, one of Facebook's most popular apps, is having a fascinating impact on the future of philanthropy. While my admiration for Facebook is no secret, the fact is that the Facebook Imperative—much like The Amazon Imperative of 1999—is just a metaphor. Like all metaphors, they are terrific catalysts to introduce an idea and orient people. They are rooted in inspiration, but they do not funnel down to the granular details. And, there are details that make this movement entirely new in practice. The power of this new model is to create the next level of productivity, collaboration, and learning in the enterprise. And, I see it happening now in our own company. For years we've been reading about the potential for institutional memory to transform a corporation into a learning organization. But, have we seen it happen beyond very few unique organizations? A true paradigm shift occurs when the barriers of entry are removed for everyone. That is changing fast. With these new social models, there is a way to immediately leverage the knowledge of an organization. People with expertise and relevance are instantly looped in, can participate in the conversation, collaborate, and make contributions more simply than ever before. That will be the catalyst of this new productivity revolution—delivered through these new social enterprise platforms. We have deployed Salesforce Chatter internally through our own beta program, and we are now using the social models proven by Facebook and Twitter to run our company. Our new social enterprise is built atop our existing business information and applications. It's not partitioned off from other enterprise applications, but is an integrated part of it—offering a new view of the data that is more productive and easier to use. Through enterprise sharing models, filtering and discovery tools, users have full flexibility over which people and data they follow—allowing them to fully maximize the value of their own feeds and eliminating the risk of "pollutants" some critics fear.
I have learned more about my own company in the last three weeks using Salesforce Chatter than I have in the last three years. It reminds me of the time we went live with http://ideas.salesforce.com. The awareness I have today of what is happening with our employees, our customers, our products, our customer service escalations, and even the deals we are closing is spectacular. Social computing for the enterprise is about seeing what matters to your company, what is happening with your products, and among your people. It's about the information you need to make decisions finding you. I’m amazed at the potential of this technology. There is just no way I can explain it to you in writing, so here is an actual screen shot that I took off my desktop to give you an idea of the flow (click to enlarge): It is time to let go of the past and start to create a compelling future for the software industry. I'm energized by the skeptics. It's familiar. They all eventually convert to what's important to customers, or become increasingly irrelevant. You don't have to look any farther than last week when Steve Ballmer spoke to the University of Washington telling them Microsoft was finally "All-In" the cloud. Well, that only took a decade or two. No more software plus services, now they are 100% cloud too. Sure. I'm living in the post-PC revolution. I'm in a desktopless world that is about feeds and profiles running in all my browsers and mobile devices, and interacting in exciting new ways. It doesn't matter if I am in the office, at home, or at Starbucks—I am productive wherever I am. The enterprise is not just going to the cloud, it's now going social, and it's going mobile. Facebook and Twitter have shown us the way. Like Microsoft, and IBM, not everyone has to get it yet, but eventually they all will. As they say: Shift happens.      
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| Radian6 Launches Powerful Social Media Engagement and Monitoring Console For Brands And Agencies Posted: 10 Mar 2010 06:07 AM PST
A desktop client built on Adobe AIR, the engagement console lets your both track and engage in the conversation taking place on blogs, videos, forums, boards, Twitter, Flickr, Google Buzz, LinkedIn, Facebook fan pages, public discussion groups, and mainstream news sites. The site also allows for assigning of tasks from within the platform, enabling users to access workflow from within the client. You can customize a tracking grid of social media sites by breaking out your conversation into stacks by broad or specific topics, tagged customer lists, or even user assignment. Stacks can also be separated out by media type. Th workflow feature allows you to tag, assign, and route posts to team members, and track the status of the assignments. Any conversations a user engages in, whether it be on Twitter, Facebook or with a co-worker, will be recorded for both the user and the administrator. And of course, the console allows you to Tweet, reply, retweet, and send direct messages, shuffle through user profiles, and follow new contacts right from the platform. Similar to many of the consumer focused social media clients out there, Radian6 allows for unlimited accounts and includes a URL shortener. With respect to Facebook, the client allows users to respond to status updates, wall posts, comments, and "likes". Users can also view news feeds for Facebook friends, and see new photos or videos that have been uploaded from within the console. The dashboard also provides analytics from within the console, such as post volume, and engagement stats. Radian6 has had considerable success in terms of serving big-name clients. The company is currently helping over 10,000 brands track social media sites, including Comcast, MTV, Dell, UPS, GE and Microsoft. And this engagement console has all the bells and whistles to make any brand marketer content. The console, we are told, will be in private beta until April. That being said, there are plenty of other offerings for companies and agencies to track social media and this is a competitive space. Radian6 faces competition from a number of startups including Scout Labs, Visible Measures, Viralheat, HootSuite and PeopleBrowsr.      
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| Brazil: Copy Cats? What Copy Cats? Posted: 10 Mar 2010 05:18 AM PST
But whatever the reason I saw fewer "We're-the-fill-in-the-blank-Web-company-of-Brazil" ventures than I have in any other market to which I've traveled in the last few years. Many Brazilians I spoke with said it's just part of their nature, that they're not competitive (tell that to fans of opposing soccer teams), and that they'd rather chase "green field" – or, as they say, “blue ocean” – opportunities. See, they don't even use the same color to describe opportunities. No matter the reason, after nearly 30 weeks of emerging market travel it was refreshing to go to a country and see things that are unequivocally new, even if risky and a bit, well, wacky. To make the point, here are three of my favorites: Companies that make bugs, houses and diamonds. The World's Ickiest Factory: Bug is one of most aptly-named companies in the world. This company makes bugs. No really, I saw the factory: Millions of eggs, and jars and jars of larvae and cocoons. There's a "cook" on staff who makes up the peanut-buttery solution these bugs feed on and each room is kept at an optimal temperature for that stage of bug development. Like something out of a sci-fi movie, the company is growing natural predators for common agricultural pests, so that farmers can move away from pesticides in accordance with a growing wave of worldwide safety regulations and the organic food movement. It's combating a caterpillar with a wasp—like nature intended– but rather than selling live wasps, it sells wasp-infected caterpillar eggs and cocoons. Think of them like thousands of little Trojan horses being dropped into Brazil's sugar cane, tomato, and soybean fields. Brazil is the second largest agricultural country in terms of exports and the largest pesticide user in the world, recently overtaking the United States. The company is only doing a few million in revenues but is hugely profitable. That's the good thing about growing something found in nature—it's pretty cheap once you figure out the optimal way to do it. But even without all that, I would love this story because Heraldo Negri, one of the co-founders, is just obsessed with bugs. Since he was 19-years-old he's photographed pictures of bugs in every stage of life. He has albums and albums of them and even started a niche publishing house to produce his bug books for the masses. He doesn't seem to think this is weird at all. When he handed me a stack of his books on bugs he exclaimed, "Your husband will love these!" (Note: My husband has a horrible fear of spiders.) That's Negri above, standing on the left. What you can't see from the picture is that he's holding two fistfuls of larvae. Here's a close-up….
Negri—a former college professor who lives several hours outside of Sao Paulo— always wanted to be an entrepreneur but says he never quite had the guts to take the plunge. But the sheer obsession with the idea and technology drove him to take a sabbatical (which he intends to be permanent) from his university teaching job to run this company full-time. Bug is funded by Fundo Criatec, a government-sponsored venture fund. It's one of its hottest companies and Francisco Jardim (standing to the right in the main photo), who's in charge of the fund's deals throughout the state of Sao Paulo, drives out to Piracicaba meet with them several times a month. Bug was a risky investment deal in a country that doesn't take a ton of venture risk. The technology was there, but several VCs walked from negotiations because the company didn't yet have local certification to sell to farmers. Now, it is one of the only ones that does, and its biggest problem is meeting demand, so it's investing in better, larger bug-growing facilities. (Right now they're largely using a series of houses and an old supermarket.) Certification is a process that takes several years, and tellingly, some big multinationals and other upstarts recently applied for certification, Jardim says. How to Build a House in One Day: It doesn't take much travel to see that millions of people in the emerging world need better housing—hell, you could just watch "City of God," "Slumdog Millionaire," or earthquake footage from Haiti. Or just visit 16th and Mission in San Francisco. Much of the emerging world is living in makeshift structures that are missing walls, doors or decent ceilings. That's what makes BS Construtora so potentially exciting not only for Brazil but the entire emerging world. BS Construtora was started 14 years ago and for many years was just a small business known in agriculture sectors for its ability to build structures Today the company can build a house in 24 hours. It’s currently building a whole city complete with 1,600 houses, electricity, phone lines, Internet access, schools, a hospital, a police station, a fire station and a shopping mall in the Amazon for a crew building a hydroelectric dam. The photo of the village I saw looked eerily like where "The Others" live in Lost, but a house built on the cheap in 24 hours isn't for show—it's for necessity and speed. And there's a ton of need in the world for this product. The company is meeting with governments of South Africa, Ghana, other parts of Latin America and Asia to talk about expansion. The problem is thin margins. So far BS Construtora has been financing itself mostly through working capital while trying to dramatically increase capacity. It can build 20,000 houses in a year and CEO Marcelo Miranda wants that up to 30,000. In another year, the company will start looking at raising some funding to help grow faster, he says. For now, he wants to give the valuation some time to build, given all the growth the company is seeing. The houses go for between $15,000 and $140,000, for nicer-non-Lost-like models. The company is also developing some new four-story models to get farther into the commercial market. BS Construtora gets a few big corporate or government funded projects like the village described above—a $120 million-plus project—but the bulk are developed and sold on the real estate market. The former is likely lower margin but less volatile, and the latter is the opposite. Between the two, though, the company generated an impressive $100 million in revenues last year – made all the more impressive by the fact that this is a startup that hasn’t received any external funding, operating in an emerging market. In a decline-of-America-side-note, Miranda recently completed Stanford’s Sloan Program for management which is like a mini-one-year MBA. He got 13 other job offers upon graduation, including some impressive ones to head up multi-national divisions in Brazil. (He asked me not to disclose specifics.) He gutsily chose to take this rather uncertain post at BS Construtora last year—at nearly half the pay he was offered elsewhere– despite the fact it was mostly an idea with little execution. Why'd Miranda go back to Brazil? Part of it was a desire to build something in his homeland. Part of it was when he interviewed at companies in the US they intimated that there was pressure to hire only Americans. "It was the wrong time to be there," he says. "The feelings were not good for a foreigner like me." Looks like that brain drain isn't limited to India and China. Drilling Your Teeth the P-Diddy Way: Another Fundo Criatec investment is CVD. (I know, it's not nearly as well named as Bug.) This company makes man-made, multi-crystal diamonds, with technology spun-off from the Brazilian equivalent of NASA, INPE. Aeronautics was big during the dictator days and there was a need for super-hard materials that were durable and wouldn't corrode, so it started experimenting with growing diamonds and using them in space. Much like the early days of NASA gave American things like the EKG and Tang, Vladimir Airoldi (left) is working to make this diamond technology applicable to everyday life.
The hope is to turn CVD into a platform company that can spin out lots of these ideas, and partner with others to take them to market. Obviously, the challenge here will be the latter. The technology is there, and Airoldi, a CalPoly grad who got his ideas about tech transfer from his experience in California, can come up with dozens of use cases of the top of his head. Focus is going to be a key for this company. But, like Bug and BS Construtora, CVD is trying to introduce new technology into industries that many other entrepreneurs have forgotten about. If that's going to be the new green field – or blue ocean—opportunity, Brazil is a good place to bet.      
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| Kyte Now Offering Broadcast-Quality Live Video Streaming Backpack Posted: 10 Mar 2010 05:00 AM PST
Live video streaming on the web is becoming more and more popular, and for news organizations and brands who don’t want to shell out thousands of dollars a day for a satellite truck there is another option. At SXSW, Kyte is going to release a new product called Kyte LivePro Unwired with Spin magazine. LivePro is a computer in a backpack connected to six data cards all uploading live video at the same time, balancing the load across three different carriers (Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon). It is made by LiveU and Kyte will be reselling it to its larger customers. (LiveStream uses the same technology in its Livepack). Kyte CEO Daniel Graf came by my office the other day to show me the technology (see video below). It is incredible that a backpack can now replace a satellite truck. You won’t get HD quality, but you can get broadcast-TV quality, and it is certainly better than uploading video from your mobile phone, which Kyte also allows. He says that typical livestreaming rates with the backpack are 700 kilobits to 1 megabit per second. Some customers using Kyte’s online video platform include Fox News, MTV, and Calvin Klein. Graf says Kyte is now streaming 100 million videos a month across its network, up from 50 million last summer.      
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| The Yahoo Cycling Team Is Going To Love This New Google Maps Feature Posted: 10 Mar 2010 12:44 AM PST
Google is announcing tomorrow at the National Bike Summit in Washington, DC that Google Maps will now include biking directions in the U.S. Apparently, this was the most-requested feature for the service, as some 57 million Americans ride bikes. Thousands of miles of bike trails have been added to the maps. And there is also step-by-step directions, much like you can see for driving or public transportation directions in the maps. There is also a new layer that shows bike trails and bike-friendly areas on roads. Yes, it’s a bike-lover’s dream. To make this new feature happen, Google partnered with Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, a nonprofit group that converts old rail lines into bike trails. The group have given Google information on some 12,000 miles worth of trails in the U.S. To coincide with the launch, Google also has a cycling contest. To enter, you simply have to tweet with the hashtag #bikewithgoogle. The randomly selected winner will get a voucher for $2,500 to be used at American Cyclery. I fully expect that hashtag to be dominated by members of Yahoo’s cycling team tomorrow. Find out more about the new feature in the video below.
     
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| Quote Of The Day: MySpace Co-President? “Hell, Yeah” Posted: 10 Mar 2010 12:18 AM PST
– Former MySpace Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn’s reaction to the abrupt firing of his boss and his promotion to co-president of MySpace.      
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| More Talent Walks Out The Door At MySpace: Three Key Employees Go To Gravity Posted: 09 Mar 2010 11:11 PM PST
We covered Gravity’s launch in December 2009. The three MySpacer’s are Chief Software Architect Chris Bissell (we previously reported Bissell’s resignation), Chief Systems Architect Dan Farino and Development Manager Robbie Coleman. All of these employees approached Gravity on their own, says our source. But MySpace’s somewhat zealous legal department isn’t shy about engaging in the occasionally ridiculous turf war. We’ve also heard that the best MySpace employees continue to head for the door, and companies that know which employees actually get things done aren’t going to turn away good people. MySpace declined to comment on this story, other than to confirm that the three employees are no longer with the company. Gravity also declined to comment.      
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| Comscore Study: Social Gamers Want Marketing Offers For Currency Posted: 09 Mar 2010 10:44 PM PST
The study was conducted by Comscore, sponsored by Offerpal, and included responses from 799 Comscore panelists who play games on social networks at least once per month. 54% of panelists play games at least daily. This is good news for game developers who’ve had their monetization choices somewhat fenced in over the last few months. Gamers 25-34 are the most likely to earn virtual currency for marketing actions, according to the study – 71% of panelists in that age group said they are “very likely” to consider this. The study also showed that about 30% of panelists don’t have the ability to pay cash for virtual currency. But more than half of all panelists, including a majority of those that can pay cash and a majority of those that cannot pay cash, were willing to consider marketing actions. The bottom line of the study is that even users who have the ability to pull out their wallet want options when it comes to social games. And as long as they don’t get scammed along the way, we’re just fine with it. Watch a video in exchange for Zynga points? That’s a better deal than the credit card.      
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| In The SXSW Location War, Loopt Hopes The Correct Weapon Is Events Posted: 09 Mar 2010 09:11 PM PST
The latest version of the app, due to hit the App Store tomorrow will feature a new Pulse tab. Here you’ll find events populated from a ton of sources including the live music tracker SonicLiving (SXSW is first and foremost a music event, after all) and most notably, Facebook. This pre-population is important, because it means the events will already be in the system so users won’t have to do anything other than share it with friends, or check-in if they’re going. The feature also uses you current location to show which events are happening around you at any given moment that a lot of people are at. As you might expect, you also also tell who is already at the event, and which of your friend is supposed to be going. The later feature works with Facebook Connect. You can RSVP to an event right from within Loopt and see who else is scheduled to go. Calling it the “best event ever from an app,” Loopt founder Sam Altman believes they’ll have every single event taking place at SXSW in their system. A newer startup, the recently funded Plancast (started by TechCrunch alum Mark Hendrickson), may have something to say about that statement as they’ll be debuting their own events-based iPhone app at the festival as well. And like this new Loopt feature, a key Plancast component is Facebook event integration. Gowalla, meanwhile, has a full list of events straight from SXSW itself — which is highlighting the app on it’s main site. Gowalla is Austin-based. Loopt was one of the original hot players in the location space, launching an iPhone app alongside the App Store launch in 2008. However, their initial bet was on always-on location updates, which the iPhone cannot do because it will not allow third-party apps to run in the background. Loopt found a loophole (see what I did there?) to that through AT&T, but by then the momentum has already swung to the check-in based location services like Foursquare and Gowalla. Last year, Loopt pivoted its app to be more predicated around check-ins. Look for the latest Loopt app tomorrow in the App Store. Disclosure: Loopt offers a TechCrunch branded version of the service here      
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| Google Apps Marketplace: Instantly Connect Your App To 25 Million Users, Profit. Posted: 09 Mar 2010 07:00 PM PST
Tonight, Google has unveiled their Google Apps Marketplace. This is an app store for enterprise apps in the cloud. Using a set of APIs, these third-party apps can deeply integrate their products within Google Apps, which already some 25 million people are using. And that also includes over 2 million businesses ranging from startups, to small businesses, to Fortune 500 companies. For customers, this means a one-stop shop for a variety of applications that their business or organization can use. And it’s extremely simple to get started with apps in the marketplace — it just takes 4 clicks, Google says (though that initial click will have to come from your domain admin to approve the use of the app). For developers, particularly small startup developers, it means instant access to more users than they can likely imagine. It also potentially means something more important: money. Like the popular mobile app stores (Apple’s App Store and Google’s own Android Market), Google is allowing developers to sell their apps through this Marketplace. And they’re actually offering a better deal: Google will keep just 20% of the revenue, while the developers keep the other 80% (compared to a 30/70 split with the Android Market). The reason for this better split is that Google believes the B2B market is a bit different, and they want to entice developers to join on board. And instead of Apple’s App Store, which charges a $100 yearly fee to developers, Google is charging a one-time fee of $100 to enroll in the program — and that’s for as many apps as you want to create. As for what Google will do with their 20% share, they’re not entirely sure. “We don’t know what will happen with the revenue, but we think it’s a very fair rev share for the value we’re providing,” Google Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra says.
As you might expect, in the Marketplace, Google will feature certain apps on a rotating basis. And each will have a star rating system and reviews written by people who have used the app. Apps will be grouped into different categories to make it easier for customers to find exactly what they’re looking for. Once they do, the four steps alluded to above are:
So how does this all work? Google connection points for integration into Apps are actually done through open protocols such as OAuth. And while signing-in may seem like a pain across different apps, Google has streamlined that as well thanks to another open protocol: OpenID. Once an app is hooked in to Google Apps, it will appear on your main Apps Dashboard alongside the other Google-made apps you use. It will even appear in the “more” drop down that Google uses in the toolbar across its properties. And because these apps are so tightly woven into Google Apps, they can take advantage of the built-in Google Apps such as Gmail and Gtalk to easily communicate within the third-party apps.
And there’s more. While it’s not quite ready to launch just yet, in the second half of 2010, Google plans to launch flexible billing options for third-parties using their services. Basically, this will allow companies to use Google Checkout to handle complicated billings, such as subscriptions. This could mean trouble for startups specifically in this space, such as Recurly. Also coming later will be detailed analytics for transactions, we’re told. For now, developers are free to hook up their data to their own analytic programs to run their numbers. While Google’s options for this Marketplace sound nice and open, there’s actually something even better: you don’t have to build your apps on their platform. Whereas a big player like Salesforce wants to keep the apps it works with in the Force.com ecosystem, Google doesn’t care where you build it — it can be on App Engine, or on anything else. You simply hook your app up to the APIs and you’re ready to go. It’s a model so enticing that even a big Google competitor in this space, Zoho, is ready to work with them, and is launching as an initial partner. All told, there are more than 50 companies partnering up at launch, including a winner of the audience award at this year’s TechCrunch50, Socialwok. As to whether Google could eventually roll this app store model out to the more consumer facing apps they offer, Gundotra gave me the old, “We have nothing to announce at this time.” That reads suspiciously to me like a “yes,” provided this is the hit it seems like it should be.
     
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| Web-Based Productivity Suite Zoho Finds A Place In The Google Apps Marketplace Posted: 09 Mar 2010 06:59 PM PST
So starting today, Google Apps users will be able to add on-demand CRM app Zoho CRM and project management software Zoho Projects into Google Apps. While Zoho has previously rolled out the ability log-in to its applications via your Google Apps IDs, the two applications have been specially formatted for further immersion into Google Apps with App’s extended APIs. IT admins will now have an option to add Zoho Apps to their domains through Google Apps Marketplace. Once the IT admin adds a Zoho application to their domain, all users within the domain will have access to the Zoho Application through Google universal navigation. In the version of Zoho CRM for Google Apps, Zoho will allow Google Apps domain admins choose the users he or she wants to provide access to Zoho CRM and can import users from Google Apps contacts. And if you have Mail Add-on enabled in Zoho CRM, you can POP your email from Google Apps to Zoho CRM. These emails will show up in the CRM system automatically for each contact. Emails sent from Zoho CRM will also show up in Gmail in Google Apps. Zoho CRM and Projects will also be integrated with Google Apps Calendar. Google Apps users will now be able to subscribe and view their CRM and Projects events right within Google Calendar. Additionally, Zoho Projects and Zoho CRM allows you to attach documents directly from Google Apps. The fact that Zoho was chosen as a pilot partner for this program isn’t surprising. Although some of Zoho’s applications compete with Google apps products, the startup has consistently pushed interoperability with Google Apps. Over the past two years, the startup launched a deeper integration with Google Docs; and the ability to log-in with Google and Yahoo IDs. And according to our latest stats, Zoho has definitely reached over 2 million users, and has a loyal follower base.      
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| Socialwok Takes A Stroll In The Google Apps Marketplace Posted: 09 Mar 2010 06:59 PM PST
Socialwok in the the Google Apps Marketplace allows organizations to use their existing Google Apps accounts to login into Socialwok and create a social network for their domains to share within Google Docs, Google Calendars, Google Spreadsheets and other Google objects in feeds. For example, with the Socialwok Gmail gadget, users can view, post and comment on various feeds in their organization right from Gmail. Ming Yong, CEO of the company, said that integration with the marketplace was a logical choice because of the growing number of SMBs that are using Google Apps as their productivity suite of choice. Currently Google has more than 2 million businesses using the Google Apps Suite. Over 6,000 domains and tens of thousands of users are using Socialwok. Socialwok’s standard edition on the marketplace will be free but the startup will launch a paid edition in May. Socialwok, which employs a freemium model, has steadily been adding features and improvements to its application, including releasing a new version of its HTML 5 mobile version for Android and iPhone browsers. And in the process of developing an innocative application, startup managed to catch Google’s eye. Socialwok was chosen as one of the showcase companies for AppEngine technology at this year’s Google IO Developer Sandbox (Socialwok is powered by Google App Engine). And the startup wrote a blog post on Google’s Enterprise Blog about Socialwok. We’ve continuously written that if Google doesn't buy the startup, they should at least heavily promoting what they're doing. And it appears that Google has taken the latter route. For now. There’s no doubt that Socialwok could face the same fate as Google Docs killer and collaboration platform Etherpad or Microsoft Word collaboration plug-in Docverse.
     
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| MetaLab Accuses Mozilla Of Plagiarizing Its Design (Updated) Posted: 09 Mar 2010 06:39 PM PST
While Wilkinson is understandably upset, at this point,it looks like the plagiarized image is just a mockup on the Mozilla wiki — not the actual product (though it’s obviously still in bad taste). We’ve reached out to Mozilla for a comment. You can see a screenshot comparison from Wilkinson’s blog post below. Update: Here’s a comment from Mozilla, stating that the copy-and-paste design was a proof of concept:
On its wiki, Mozilla describes FlightDeck as a tool to “enable the community to rapidly, collaboratively develop both extensions that utilize the Jetpack framework and Jetpack Capabilities crucial to the expansion of the Jetpack framework’s core.“ Update 2: Wilkinson has added the following update to his blog post:
     
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| Live: Google Apps Marketplace Launches At Google Campfire One Posted: 09 Mar 2010 06:04 PM PST
Here are the links to our extended coverage on the Google Apps Marketplace:
Below, find our live notes from the event. Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering
David Glazer, Engineering Director
David Garrard from Google
And that’s a wrap.      
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| Amazon Wields $25 Gift Certificates To Pacify Frustrated Comic Book Fans Posted: 09 Mar 2010 05:36 PM PST
The tale is a bit complicated. After word of the apparent sale began to spread, plenty of comics fans began to snatch up the books as quickly as they could, causing some of the graphic novels to climb toward the top of Amazon’s best seller lists. Within hours Amazon fixed the pricing glitches (which affected multiple items), and told some customers that rather than canceling their entire orders, they’d still receive a single copy of the books they purchased at the heavily discounted price. The only catch was that they’d only get one copy apiece (many people had purchased multiple copies). Quite a nice gesture considering that Amazon could have simply canceled the orders outright. Unfortunately, something went wrong. This morning, Bleeding Cool reported that many (and perhaps all) of these single-copy orders had been canceled as well, without any kind of notice or email from Amazon. As it turns out, Amazon simply doesn’t have enough books in inventory to fulfill all the orders it promised, so it’s handing out $25 gift certificates as an apology for the inconvenience.
It’s hard to really fault Amazon for this. Obviously there were some errors in miscommunication, but it really didn’t have to do any of this — every online retailer has a clause in their Terms of Service that doesn’t make them liable for pricing mistakes.      
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| SXSW Interactive: Because hell doesn’t have enough promotional stickers Posted: 09 Mar 2010 05:34 PM PST
At about this time, it’s traditional for tech publications to publish handy guides to “surviving SXSWi” – packed with useful advice that’s basically interchangeable with that for any other festival since the beginning of time. “Drink plenty of water!” “Prepare for some late nights!” “Plan ahead to make sure you don’t miss anything!” “Pack sturdy shoes!” “Always use a condom!”. Useful advice for SXSWi, certainly, but also applicable for Oktoberfest, Glastonbury, Woodstock and the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia (although for the latter, replace ’shoes’ with ’sandals’ and ‘condom’ with ’sprig of silphium’). This year, though, I decided to use my experience of past SXSWi’s to produce something more useful. A very specific and completely foolproof guide on surviving this year’s event. And here it is… Tip One: Don’t go to South by Southwest Interactive. I’m serious. It sucked last year, and it’s going to suck again this year. You’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise. The idea that SXSWi is a conference – or even a festival – for people doing interesting and useful things in technology is a fallacy. In reality, it’s just a non-stop orgy of bullshit fanboyism – a chance for people with stickers on their laptops to go and add more stickers to their laptops; an opportunity for sweaty dorks in Diggnation t-shirts to line up for two hours in the hope of getting Alex Albrecht to – I dunno – sign their laptop, I suppose, or maybe give them another freaking sticker. Even the parties – which are basically the only reason to go – are horrible: the free bars runs out too soon, and they’re always rammed with the kind of people who you could be forgiven for assuming have never been inside licenced premises before. “But Pure Volume at 2am is pretty awesome!” No it isn’t. You were just drunk. You’d lined up for three months to get in with your stupid plastic entry tag and you had to convince yourself that the experience was worthwhile because the only alternative was to kill yourself. Free vodka Red Bulls are not worth the hassle. Take your lead from the pros: buy a couple of bottles of vodka and a case of Red Bull and host your own party in your hotel room. Except you can’t, can you? Because you’re sharing with your friend Dan and he has to be up early for the “Google Hackathon”. “But we’re launching a new app, and it’s going to be awesome.” No it isn’t. But I completely understand why you think it will be. With all those fanboys in one place, where better than ‘South by’ to launch your awesome new location-based app? Two years ago, Twitter was the undisputed hit of the festival. Everyone was using it – to find parties, to silently heckle panels, to do all the things that one can do with Twitter. Last year those same people were so desperate to find the new Twitter that they mistakenly handed that crown to Foursquare on the basis that a relatively small number of Web 2.0 scenesters used it to find out where their friends were partying. And yet, despite that auspicious start, and a shit-ton of publicity since, Foursquare has failed to capture the imagination of even most early adopters, particularly those outside of San Francisco and New York. Foursquare was resolutely not last year’s Twitter. Last year’s Twitter was Twitter. That won’t, however, stop a billion start-ups blowing their entire launch budget on flying their whole team – armed with sacks of flyers and amusing stick-on bugs and branded candy and more fucking stickers – to Texas, confident in the knowledge that their app (with its stupid cutesy name) will be the hit of the festival. It won’t be. It will just be yet another location-based app sloshing about in a sea of location-based apps that may be temporarily useful while a thousand early adopters are crammed into an area of less than one square mile. The moment the festival is over, you’ll be dead. Instead, this year’s hot location-based app will be… Twitter. You’re welcome. Call me Nostradamus. Last year, while in Austin, I wrote a column for the Guardian talking about the awfulness of the event, saying..
Sadly, unless it’s a very well kept secret, there’s no such rival event and this year’s SXSWi will be more of the same bullshit. And for that reason, I’m totally serious when I say that you shouldn’t go. Instead – while your rivals are distracted in Texas, pissing their money up the wall and ejaculating over their laptop stickers during yet another Evan Williams keynote – you should use the time instead to stay at home and work on building your start-up. Your liver will thank you, your investors will thank you, and most importantly so will millions of real-world users who really want you to create something new and innovative rather than being sucked into the hype and churning out just a better, prettier Twitter-meets-Gowalla clone for the approbation of your peers. Yeah? Yeah. I’m moderating the “Unsexy & Profitable: Making $$ Without Hype” panel on Saturday at 3:30pm in Hilton A/B. See you in Austin. (Photo of Gary Vaynerchuk and Kathy Sierra by Randy Stewart)      
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| Twitter Starts Routing All Links Through New Anti-Phishing Service Posted: 09 Mar 2010 05:14 PM PST
At this point, it’s not really clear which links are being converted to Twitter’s twt.tl shortened links. We just ran a test at the TC office with two different links: one for an article on GigaOm, and another for a bit.ly link that pointed to a page on Google Buzz. The links I received on my Twitter client were both unchanged, but both were converted to twt.tl links in our Email notifications (obviously neither of them had malicious content). From the Twitter blog:
Image via ToastyKen      
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| SV Angel Partner Brian Pokorny Now CEO Of Dailybooth Posted: 09 Mar 2010 02:17 PM PST
Dailybooth, the runner up in the “best social app” and winner of the “time sink” categories at this year’s Crunchies Awards, is “your life in pictures.” Some 6 million monthly visitors share pictures and status updates with eachother. “It’s a community for self expression,” says Pokorny. A typical interaction: a users posts a photo, taken with their webcam, showing what they’re eating, what they’re feeling, or perhaps with friends in the background. Other user then respond via text or photos. Some strings go on for hundreds of responses. Here’s an example. The company, originally incubated by Y Combinator, has raised just under $1 million from notable investors such as Sequoia Capital, SV Angel, Betaworks, Kevin Rose, Caterina Fake, Chris Sacca, Joshua Schachter, Gary Vaynerchuk and Aydin Senkut. Founders Jon Wheatley and Ryan Amos will remain in their current roles at Dailybooth. Pokorny has worked with Conway on his various investments since 2006, and has racked up quite an angel portfolio of his own. He owns stakes in Twitter, Square, Milo, Blippy, Bump, Tweetdeck, OMGPOP and others. He’s staying close to SV Angel, too. In addition to his new role as CEO of Dailybooth, Pokorny will remain as a Strategic Partner with SV Angel where he will continue to provide key insights into sourcing and evaluating investment opportunities in social media and other sectors. “I’m excited to have Brian join one of our hottest portfolio startups and lead it to the next level,” said Ron Conway via email. “He will remain part of the core team at SV Angel as a strategic partner, and I look forward to working with him in this new role.” SV Angel has also been in the new recently – they are reportedly closing a new $10 million fund, the first time the fund will take outside investors to participate in their startup investments.      
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| Google’s Chief Economist: “Newspapers Have Never Made Much Money From News” Posted: 09 Mar 2010 02:09 PM PST
Earlier today, Google chief economist Hal Varian gave a presentation to an FTC workshop on the changing economics of the newspaper industry. We all know that newspaper ad revenues have been falling off a cliff for years. Many media companies blame Google and are trying to put the genie back in the bottle with partial metered models for online news. Google is understandably on the defensive, trotting out Varian to paint an unemotional picture with as much data as he can muster. But the picture he paints is a dour one for print media. For instance, the chart above shows the decline of overall newspaper ad revenues. Newspapers have taken huge hits in classifieds advertising (in blue) and national brand advertising (in red). The online portion (green) is still too small to make much of a difference. The collapse in print ad revenues is coming from two places: the overall ad recession of the past couple years and the shift to online news consumption. Here are some telling stats from Varian’s presentation, which is also embedded below:
Varian concludes: “Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet.” It sounds like he agrees with Netscape founder and investor Marc Andreessen, who recommends that newspapers “burn the boats” carrying their dying print businesses. “The fact of the matter is that newspapers have never made much money from news,” says Varian. They make money from “special interest sections on topics such as Automotive, Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink,, and so on.” The problem is that on the Web, other niche sites which cater to those categories are a click away, leaving the newspapers with sections which are harder to sell ads against, such as sports, news, and local. So what are they supposed to do? He doesn’t really have a good answer, but ignoring the realities of consumer shifts in reading behavior and news consumption is not it.      
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| Tweetie 2 Gaining Native Foursquare Support Posted: 09 Mar 2010 01:17 PM PST
What this means is that anytime someone in your tweet stream sends out a tweet from Foursquare (which, to the annoyance of some users, happens automatically at times), that Foursquare link (shown as a 4sq.com URL) will be able to be opened in Tweetie in a way that displays the location information in a nice format. When a tweet is eligible for this feature, you’ll see a purple square logo in the upper right hand corner of the tweet in Tweetie. When you click on a Foursquare link, you’ll be taken to a page that shows the venue’s address and phone number as well as the Foursquare mayor of the place. If you click on the address you’ll load a Google Map showing you exactly where it is. If you click on the phone number, you’ll be able to call the place right from the iPhone. Below all of that, there is a button to open the venue in Foursquare, which launches the Foursquare iPhone app. A couple other new features in Tweetie 2 include Vodpod video uploads and the ability to attach messages along with your TwitPics to that service. Look for this Tweetie 2 update soon in the App Store (it will be version 2.1.1). Meanwhile, Tweetie Two for Mac should be released in a private beta in about a month, according to new info shared on MacHeist today. Tweetie for Mac will soon be added to the nanoBundle 2, and in anticipation, they’ve added this message:
     
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| Chomp Closes In On 300,000 Users, Launches App Review Site And Chomp Connect Posted: 09 Mar 2010 11:57 AM PST
When Chomp launched eight weeks ago in the iTunes store, it launched as an app for reviewing other iPhone apps. The app shows you a stream of realtime reviews, which you can filter by everyone or just your Facebook freinds. The app is showing some traction and should hit 300,000 active monthly users sometime tomorrow, according to co-founder Ben Keighran. While it started out as an app, today Chomp launched a complimentary Website with full app search capabilities and links for each app. There, users can also see the stream of reviews, as well as dedicated pages for each app and vanity URLs for each reviewer. Developers can now link to the Chomp reviews directly from inside their apps using Chomp Connect, which also launched today in private beta. Chomp Connect lets developers add Chomp review buttons right inside their apps without forcing to go anywhere else. Keighran contends that reviews on iTunes tend to have a more negative bias because people are prompted to submit a review every time they delete an app. With Chomp Connect, developers can ask their most engaged users to submit reviews. He hopes to make Chomp a social alternative to iTunes reviews. By driving reviews straight from their apps, developers can promote their apps in the Chomp review stream. The more reviews, the more often it appears in the stream.
     
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Facebook-based mobile app directory 
Editor’s note: This guest post is written by 
More bad news for an already bullet-riddled 
A new study by Comscore will be released on Wednesday that may give hope to social gaming startups trying to monetize users. 35% of the survey respondents said that they engage in “marketing actions” to earn virtual currency (such as watching a video, filling out a survey, etc.), and 53% said they be willing to consider marketing action for currency if given the choice.
With SXSW starting Friday in Austin, Texas, 
Business to business software can be a tough sell. Online B2B can be even a harder sell. While there is certainly money to be made, unless you’re one of the big players, the likelihood you’re going to succeed is pretty small. Starting today, Google is taking their roll as one of the big players and extending a platform to boost some smaller players.
Tonight, Google 
Tonight, Google is hosting one of their Campfire One events at their headquarters in Mountain View, CA. They’re using the event to launch their new Google Apps Marketplace. This is the app store that business applications can use to reach the more than 25 million people and 2 million business that use Google Apps for their domains.
Over the last few days, a strange situation has been brewing between Amazon and a sizable number of comic book fans. On March 7, 
Twitter has just 
While 
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