The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- For Sale: One Plane In Salvage Condition, Small Bird Strike to the Engines, Some Water Damage
- NASA Astronaut Tweets From Space – For Real This Time
- Myxer Report: Android Outpaces iPhone Users For Downloading Mobile Content
- Dow Jones VentureSource: Bad Year For VC Deals Ended With A Decent Q4
- Former Charter CEO And AOL Vet Neil Smit To Lead Comcast’s Cable Business
- Sobees Launches Realtime Social Media Discovery Platform
- In India, Facebook Uses Google AdWords To Leapfrog Orkut
- Five Journalists Picked To Live In A House And Report Based Only On Twitter And Facebook
- TechCrunch40 Alum ZocDoc Launches in San Francisco
- Exclusive: SecondMarket Data On Private Company Stock Sales
- In A Pre-Apple Tablet World, Instapaper + Kindle Is King
- Twitter Revamps SUL, Switches To Categorized Suggestions With No Mass-Following
- AppStoreHQ Taps Into Twitter For iPhone App Recommendations
- Bay Area News Project Strikes Content Deal With The New York Times
- Schmidt: “Our Next Huge Business Is Display” And Mobile Growing Too (4Q09 Earnings)
- Google Figures Out Another Use For YouTube: Earnings Webcasts
- Hillary Clinton Extends Foreign Policy To The Internet And Wants Your Help
- Foursquare Adds Another Weapon For The Check-In Wars: A BlackBerry Client
- Peer News Announces New Editor…But Little Else
- Too Big To Fail: Facebook Begins Building Its Own Data Center In Oregon
- Meet The New YouTube: Less Clutter, Easier Search, And No More Stars
- Bam! Bing Now Cooks Up Recipes
- iPhone And Android Now Account For 81 Percent Of Smartphone Web Ads In the U.S.
- Rixty, Online Payments For The Unbanked, Scores $1.24 Million In Venture Round
| For Sale: One Plane In Salvage Condition, Small Bird Strike to the Engines, Some Water Damage Posted: 22 Jan 2010 06:49 AM PST  That's right: you can own the plane that "Sully" Sullenberger dropped ever-so-gently into the Hudson on January 15, 2009, a little over a year ago. It looks like it's still in pretty good condition - maybe it would make a nice playhouse for the kids? - with most of the gear intact. The plane is out in Jersey somewhere, but you can probably just rent a Zipcar at Ikea in Elizabeth and drive it home, probably down the Pennsylvania turnpike.
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| NASA Astronaut Tweets From Space – For Real This Time Posted: 22 Jan 2010 06:12 AM PST Astronauts aboard the ISS received a special software upgrade earlier this week, according to a NASA statement released moments ago: personal access to the Internet and the World Wide Web via the “ultimate wireless connection”. This personal Web access, called the Crew Support LAN, takes advantage of existing communication links to and from the station and gives astronauts the ability to browse and use the Web. The system basically provides astronauts with direct private communications. From the release:
Flight Engineer T.J. Creamer made first use of the new system Friday, when he posted the first unassisted update to his Twitter account from the space station. Previous tweets from space had to be e-mailed to the ground where support personnel posted them to the astronauts’ Twitter accounts. What’s the coolest place (pun intented) you’ve ever tweeted from?
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| Myxer Report: Android Outpaces iPhone Users For Downloading Mobile Content Posted: 22 Jan 2010 05:56 AM PST Mobile content delivery company Myxer is releasing a report this morning that indicate much of what we already know about Google's Android platform: Android is gaining traction in the mobile space. According to data provided by Myxer’s 30 million users, visits to Myxer's mobile site from users on the Android operating system grew 350% in 2009, compared to the iPhone, which grew 170%. In total, Myxer delivered seven times more downloads to Android devices than iPhone devices in Q4 2009. Myxer, which delivered ringtones and other content to 1,500 different devices in 2009, also delves into the break down by type of Android device, with HTC’s Dream/G1 commanding 35% of the unique users completing downloads on Android handsets in December. HTC’s myTouch, Motorola CLIQ, and Motorola Droid each used by 18%, 11%, and 7% (respectively) of total unique Android users on Myxer. Myxer reports that the Blackberry Curve is the most frequented phone to visit Myxer’s mobile site to download content, with Windows Mobile and Palm devices decreasing in visits during 2009. Hip-Hop/R&B content dominates as a music genre; accounting for 77% of Android downloads and 47% of iPhone downloads. The company seems to be doing fairly well in the mobile content space. Myxer just delivered 10 million ringtones to iPhone users (and 1 billion ringtones in all) and offers over 2 million free ringtones, wallpapers and videos. Users can also make their own ringtones, videos and wallpaper from music and files a customer already owns. And according to the company, its mobile site sees six million monthly unique visitors downloading over 85 million content items from Myxer each month. The startup also recently launched MobileStage, a suite of mobile marketing services aimed towards the music industry. Competitors include mSpot, Playphone and SendMe.
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| Dow Jones VentureSource: Bad Year For VC Deals Ended With A Decent Q4 Posted: 22 Jan 2010 05:51 AM PST
In Q4 2009, investors put $6.3 billion to work in 743 deals, up slightly from the $6.1 billion invested in 619 deals during the same period in 2008. In total, last year saw 2,489 deals completed and $21.4 billion in venture capital invested in U.S. companies, a 31% drop from 2008 when $31 billion was invested in 2,817 deals. We also remarked earlier that we’d seen an uptick of venture funding deals in the fourth quarter of 2009, based on analysis of data available in our own CrunchBase. Scott Austin, editor of Dow Jones VentureWire said: “While venture capitalists as a group loosened their purse strings toward the end of 2009, some start-ups, especially those seeking first or second rounds, may be in for a rude awakening in 2010. A large share of companies are due for capital this year and the competition will be fierce.” “Venture capitalists are still treading lightly when making investments,” added Jessica Canning, global research director for Dow Jones VentureSource. “In the fourth quarter, venture deal activity returned to levels seen before the collapse of the financial markets, but capital invested continued to lag as investors gave companies just what they need to reach the next milestone.” According to Dow Jones VentureSource, the healthcare industry collected more VC dollars than the IT industry last year ($7.7 billion compared to $6.1 billion, respectively), which would make 2009 the first year on record that this has occurred. Within IT, software companies continued to take the largest chunk of investment as they have done since 2001. Investors put $2.9 billion into 487 software deals in 2009, a 43% drop from the previous year. The Communications and Networking segment ended the year with $1.5 billion invested in 123 deals, off 11% from the previous year. Overall, the median round size in 2009 was $4.7 million, down from $6 million seen in 2008, according to VentureSource. Later-stage deals accounted for the largest chunk of deal activity with 944 deals, or roughly 39% of the total U.S. deal count for the year, attracting $11.4 billion in investment. Meanwhile, seed- and first-rounds accounted for 803 deals and raised $3.7 billion. For other statistic material on the VC industry, check out the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, analyzed here by GigaOM and Venturebeat, among others. Dow Jones LP Source also recently released figures that showed U.S. private equity firms raised less than $100 billion in funds in 2009, down 68% compared to the year before.
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| Former Charter CEO And AOL Vet Neil Smit To Lead Comcast’s Cable Business Posted: 22 Jan 2010 04:52 AM PST
Neil Smit joins Comcast from Charter Communications, where he served as CEO and Director for the past 4 years. Prior to joining Charter, Smit was the President of Time Warner's America Online Access Business overseeing Internet access services, including America Online (AOL), CompuServe and Netscape ISPs. Smit also served at AOL as Executive Vice President, Member Services, and Chief Operating Officer of MapQuest. Part of his responsibility will be the operations of the à la carte music streaming offer to ISP and cable customers which we hear is currently in the works.
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| Sobees Launches Realtime Social Media Discovery Platform Posted: 22 Jan 2010 02:58 AM PST There’s no shortage of real-time search engines that are tracking the web and social media sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook for results. Collecta, OneRiot, Microsoft’s Bing and Google all offer compelling search engines to tap into the real-time stream. Today, social media client Sobees is jumping into the stream with its real-time search discovery platform. The platform, which is powered by Microsoft Silverlight and runs on top of Windows Azure, has the look and feel of Sobees’ Twitter client. Within the page, the search offering aggregates searches by categories in five columns or modules including real-time search (Twitter, Friendfeed, Facterylabs and OneRiot), image search (Bing, Flickr, Google and Yahoo), video search (Bing, Google and Youtube), web search (Bing, Google and Yahoo) and news search (Bing, Google, New York Times and Yahoo). For each column, the user can filter results by choosing to click off services, or click off columns all together. You can also choose to search from trending topics pulled from Twitter and Yahoo that are updated in real-time. While the engine is a standalone sight, it will soon be included in Sobees’ Twitter client as well. The real-time search platform is fairly innovative and could be a good companion to the the client Although the third-party social media application space is crowded, Sobees seems to be doing well for itself. Its client, which has a Windows native desktop app built in .NET and a web application built off of Microsoft Silverlight, integrates Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed and LinkedIn. The startup recently struck a deal with Yahoo in December to integrate the client in Yahoo Mail in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain (the application is called "My Social Networks"). Sobees will also be launching a native Android Twitter client which has support for multiple Twitter accounts, Twitter search, geolocation, lists and most of the basic Twitter functionality. A native iPhone app is in the pipeline. I’m a fan of Sobees and find myself wishing the startup offered a mac-client.
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| In India, Facebook Uses Google AdWords To Leapfrog Orkut Posted: 22 Jan 2010 02:13 AM PST
And now a reader informs us that Facebook is buying Google ads on the search giant’s India portal (Google.co.in). You can see some examples embedded in this post or on our tipster’s blog. It’s impossible to determine if this is new, but perhaps Indian TechCrunch readers can tell us if these just started popping up or if they’ve been running for a while. I’ve been trying out searches for people on a couple of other country portals but haven’t seen any Google AdWords campaigns from Facebook at first glance. We’ve contacted Facebook for more information. The move is fairly ironic for two distinct reasons: first, because Facebook has been struggling to become the leader in social networking in India at the expense of Orkut, which is of course a Google service (it depends on who you ask which one is effectively leading, but Facebook has definitely been making strides all around the world). Second: in June 2009, Facebook hired away Google’s Grady Burnett, who had been leading the Mountain View company’s AdWords business in Ann Arbor, Mich. He’s now Director, Global Online and Inside sales at Facebook. Also noteworthy: when you effectively click through on one of these Facebook ads, you don’t actually run a search query on the person you’ve been looking for – it just redirects you to the Facebook homepage where you have to renew your search to find him or her. Surely, there must be ways to improve that process? Have you spotted any Facebook advertising on Google in your country? Let us know. Update: these ads seem to appear on the Google Brazil search portal as well according to commenters on this post and on Twitter. This would make sense, as Orkut is also huge in those parts. (Thanks for the tip, Ricky)
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| Five Journalists Picked To Live In A House And Report Based Only On Twitter And Facebook Posted: 22 Jan 2010 12:23 AM PST
Fast forward to 2010; While not quite that extreme, five journalists have agreed to go stay in a farmhouse together to see what kind of stories they can get using only Twitter and Facebook as sources. They will be stripped of their cellphones, and will have no other contact with the outside world other than the social networks. I’m not kidding. MSN has the full story here. The goal here is to see just how good these networks are at actually providing information. Regular readers will know this is a topic near and dear to my heart as I’m a huge proponent of using these realtime information streams to gather information. Sure, the speed at which the information flows in doesn’t always equate to the complete story, but they’re great for watching events unfold before your eyes. That said, there is often a need for other sources to verify the information being found in realtime, so using only these networks as the source of information should yield some interesting results. The five people, from Canadian, French, Belgian and Swiss radio stations will be staying in France’s southern Perigord region for this experiment. It will last for five days. “They have agreed to be linked to the outside world only through Twitter and Facebook. No web surfing is allowed,” Francoise Dost of the RFP French-language public broadcasters association (which is running the experiment) tells Agence France-Presse. They’ll be giving updates on their respective radio stations and apparently will be updating a collective blog. They’ll also obviously be on Twitter, which you can find here. The Next Web has more as well. Keep an eye out for reports out of the south of France of celebrities being dead that are actually still alive.
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| TechCrunch40 Alum ZocDoc Launches in San Francisco Posted: 22 Jan 2010 12:01 AM PST
So far ZocDoc has been focused on New York and Washington DC, growing users and new doctors by double digits, month-over-month since inception. Last month some 110,000 patients used the site to make appointments. The company decided it was time for a third city, opening it up to an online vote and San Francisco won overwhelmingly. Votes aside, it's a natural next step. San Francisco is full of Web savvy early adopters, and new transplants who are always trying to figure out how to find a new doctor. On a less rosy side, San Francisco also has the highest STD rates and some of the longest wait times to see a doctor in the country. For instance, it takes 36 days to see a dermatologist in San Francisco. The problem is so bad that California has recently enforced legislation that requires doctors to see patients on a timely basis. ZocDoc–which specializes in scheduling same-day appointments– could be a great way to for doctors to outsource some of those requirements immediately. (If I were one of the pun-ier writers on staff, I'd say the launch is “just what the doctor ordered.”) ZocDoc’s approach is a familiar one. Just like OpenTable finds a dining time in a certain neighborhood or an online travel company finds a hotel room for a certain price, ZocDoc integrates with doctors offices’ appointment systems, filling open time slots far more efficiently, especially since 35% of ZocDoc users make appointments after hours. There's a benefit to the city too. Some 40% of ZocDoc users schedule same-day appointments, which takes the burden off emergency rooms. The company estimates that it has saved New York some $500,000 in emergency room costs. And of course, that saves patients money too: The average emergency room visit is $700, versus $60 for an office visit. And guess what? The company actually has a business model. Doctors pay an average of $200/$350 a month for the service. It has taken some work to get everything running smoothly, according to ZocDoc spokesperson Karsten Vagner. There are some 1,400 different practice management software systems out there and ZocDoc has had to integrate its site with each of them. But it's a lean organization nonetheless. After recently doubling its staff ZocDoc still only has 35 employees. Aside from an undisclosed angel round, ZocDoc has only raised $3 million to date from superstar investors that include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff and Khosla Ventures. Vagner said there were no plans to raise more money, but I'd be stunned if another round wasn't in the works. As for further expansion, Vagner says to expect at least one or two more cities in the next eight months. New city launches can be uncertain for any local-oriented company, since local network effects matter more than anyone's experience in New York or DC. But ZocDoc has additional chicken-and-egg problem: One of the core features is patient reviews, but it only allows patients who've booked appointments through ZocDoc to leave a review. That means the site isn't immediately as helpful as it should be. That said, there is some clear momentum, at least on the doctor side: New York launched with a few hundred appointment slots, DC opened with 21,000 and San Francisco doctors have already posted 100,000 openings. The question with ZocDoc has never been "Do we need this?" but rather "Can they roll it out fast enough to keep a first mover edge and build a sizable company?" The pace is slower than what we've seen from other local-oriented companies like Yelp and OpenTable, but healthcare is important and ZocDoc is smart to focus on getting it right in each place before moving on.
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| Exclusive: SecondMarket Data On Private Company Stock Sales Posted: 21 Jan 2010 11:43 PM PST
Most companies don’t like SecondMarket one bit, at least at first blush. Companies don’t want random outsiders holding their stock before they’re public. And they don’t like some employees having liquidity events before others, it tends to screw around with morale. And there are also legal and tax issues. Stock options must be priced at “fair market value” or both the employee and company face tax consequences. The board of directors usually sets the common stock price at a fraction of the preferred price. But when there are verified third party purchases on places like SecondMarket, the companies have to use those sales as a guide. The result is higher priced options for all employees. But we’ve seen a big evolution in startup stock dynamics over the last year. Companies like Facebook and Zynga have created controlled secondary markets for their employees to sell stock, generally at around 65% of the preferred price. Yelp seems to be doing the same. Giving employees a way to “take some money off the table” isn’t such a bad thing after all. Think of it as releasing some of the steam in the pressure cooker. So about that data. Second Market says that just over $15 million in transactions were closed through them in December 2009. The top company was Solyndra, with 38% of the transactions, followed by Facebook with 31%. Ebags was next with 13%. LinkedIn, Zynga and Tesla Motors each took 6% of the total. In all, half of the transactions were for “consumer products and services,” which includes website services like Facebook. Alternative Energy/Clean Tech took 44%, and software took just 6%. The vast majority of completed transactions were for later stage companies that have raised at least three rounds of capital. 64% of transactions were for startups based in California, followed by New York (10%) and Boston (3%). Part of the sky-high price around consumer website stocks like Facebook and Twitter is due to an imbalance of demand and supply. 70% of buyer demand is around those stocks, but just 20% of the overall supply is. Employees from a wide variety of startups want to sell their stock, but most of the demand is for the hot Internet stuff, and Tesla (which has 5% of demand).
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| In A Pre-Apple Tablet World, Instapaper + Kindle Is King Posted: 21 Jan 2010 06:40 PM PST
The Kindle, while not the Apple Tablet, is an excellent device for doing one thing: reading. And when matched with the super-fast bookmarking service Instapaper, it’s perhaps the ultimate long-form article reader. And an update this week made it ever better. On Monday, Instapaper creator Marco Arment announced that he had significantly upgraded Instapaper’s support for the Kindle. This update made articles saved to Instapaper and transfered over to the Kindle (either wirelessly or by USB-sync) more Kindle-like, which is to say, formatted in a way more much like periodicals are when bought on the device itself. That means that you can now use the Kindle’s buttons to more easily navigate through Instapaper articles you’ve saved to read on the device. Previously, you had to go through a series of rather laborious clicks to reach an article, and even more to get back to the main menu of articles to pick a new one. Now, you simply use the Kindle’s stick to navigate forwards and backwards between different articles. (When you’re on a selected article you wish to read, you still use the standard “Prev Page” and “Next Page” buttons to read through them.) There’s also a new “View Sections List” to see a complete table of contents for all the articles you’ve saved to read. Arment also made a change so that only the most recent Instapaper articles are shown on your main Kindle screen, while old ones are moved to a different folder — something which stops a huge amount of clutter on your main screen if you fall behind in your reading (as I often do). Arment notes that with this new formatting and organization, reading Instapaper articles on the Kindle is now he favorite way of consuming them, even beating his excellent iPhone app. And I have to agree. This combination of Kindle + Instapaper is a killer application for the device — and it’s available right now before the Kindle’s official support for apps (announced yesterday) is even in place. If an online article is over a few paragraphs, I now automatically use my Instapaper “Read Later” bookmarklet to save it and send it over to my Kindle for reading when I step away from my computer. And now it’s easier than ever to do that. As I said, this use of the Kindle + Instapaper gives me hope for what Apple can deliver in terms of a reading experience with the tablet. And I see it as proof that the core concept of the tablet-as-a-reader can work. The Kindle will likely retain one big advantage: its e-ink is easier on your eyes (similar to paper) than a backlit screen (much like a computer screen), which the tablet is likely to use. But the tablet will likely offer colorful graphics and interactive elements that the Kindle can’t possibly match. Not to mention that as a touchscreen device, it will almost for sure beat the pants off of the Kindle’s button + stick navigation — just as the iPhone does. Despite the aforementioned announcement of Kindle app support, I find it hard to imagine that the device will ever get anywhere near the type of apps an Apple tablet will likely bring with it. The Kindle is simply too slow and too well, monochrome. I suspect Amazon may change both of those things this year in direct response to not only Apple’s device, but the several other devices that will hit the market this year in time the great tablet war. But for now, the Kindle remains the way to read online content offline. At least until next week, it is the tablet king.
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| Twitter Revamps SUL, Switches To Categorized Suggestions With No Mass-Following Posted: 21 Jan 2010 02:44 PM PST  Twitter has just implemented a change that may well have a massive impact on the service. The company has revamped its highly controversial Suggested User List, in favor of a list of Suggestions based on topic. That’s big news in and of itself (before Twitter’s suggestions were not categorized), but there’s also apparently no way to add all of these users to your account at once. In other words, members of the SUL will likely see their user growth counts take a big hit. You can try out the new suggestions page for yourself here. Update: Twitter employee Josh Elman has just posted about the change on the Twitter blog. One thing worth pointing out: these lists are now generated with algorithms, and will be updated regularly. If the algorithm decides a certain user isn’t appealing to new Twitter members, they may be removed from the list:
We’re still playing around with the new suggestion feature, but here’s what we’ve gathered so far. First, it looks like members of the old SUL have been transitioned over to the new format. There are twenty categories, covering everything from Technology to Cuisine (there’s also sections for Staff Picks, as well as a spell list of Staff Picks for Haiti). Clicking on one of these categories will bring up 20 recommended Twitter users. It appears that the order of the users presented has some randomness to it — I’ve had the order of the Technology section switch a few times as I played around with it. The Suggested User List has long been controversial, because it effectively guarantees anyone on it hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers (disclosure: TechCrunch is on the list). But the list certainly has a valid purpose — it helps expose new users to interesting Twitter users (Twitter is pretty boring if you aren’t following anyone). The old SUL would present 20 people, at random, from Twitter’s list of possible recommendations. It also allowed users to follow all of these recommendations at once. The new system has apparently removed this mass-follow ability, which may well cause a downturn in the rate at which members of the list get new followers. Granted, it’s still pretty easy to hit those Follow buttons next to every suggested user, but it takes much more effort than adding them all in one fell swoop. Via Scobleizer.
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| AppStoreHQ Taps Into Twitter For iPhone App Recommendations Posted: 21 Jan 2010 02:27 PM PST
The site looks at Twitter’s public stream, checking tweets for links back to the App Store. Every time someone links to an app, they treat that as a vote from that user. When you visit the site’s homepage, you can browse through the apps that are currently the hottest on Twitter or on the web (the latter is determined by apps with the most blog post mentions). Or, if you want personalised recommendations, you can tweet about an app or two that you enjoy. The one catch is that you have to include one of a few keywords like “iPhone” or “AppStoreHQ” in your tweet, otherwise the system won’t catch it. The service only resolves links with these keywords, because it would take a prohibitive amount of processing power to follow every short URL and Link to see if they’re linking to an iPhone app. Once you’ve tweeted about a few apps, the system will make customized suggestions based on what other similar users have tweeted about. Obviously the more apps you tweet about, the better the recommendations become (which is also a good way for the service to grow virally). The system also takes into account a few other sources of data, including any apps you’ve Favorited on AppStoreHQ and which apps you’ve actually clicked through while browsing the site. CEO Chris DeVore says that while the service could develop a sentiment engine to ensure that apps being linked to in tweets are actually being shared with a positive comment, it’s actually very rare for people to tweet a link to an app they don’t like, so they don’t do this processing. I like the idea of using tweets for app recommendations — writing a tweet isn’t as involved as writing a blog post so the site will probably be able to get more data to analyze, and it will also be able to surface hot new apps quickly. That said, the algorithm will also likely have to put up with lots of spam from Twitter. And I think the AppStoreHQ layout could use some work, as its menu system seems clunky and bland. AppStoreHQ has actually been around for a while, offering recommendations based on app links in blog posts. It also has a search engine for iPhone apps that it has white-labeled and is currently integrated in a number of other popular iPhone app news and community sites. We’ve covered many other App Store recommendation services, including Chorus, Appolicious, AppsFire, and Appsaurus. 
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| Bay Area News Project Strikes Content Deal With The New York Times Posted: 21 Jan 2010 02:00 PM PST The Bay Area News Project, a non-profit media organization providing hyper local news to the San Francisco area, has announced a deal to provide news to the New York Times. The content will be used for The New York Times’ local San Francisco editions on Friday and Saturday. The deal with the New York Times has been rumored to be in negotiations but was officially announced today. The project, which was announced last year, has received $5 million in funding from financier Warren Hellman. The site, which has a staff of nearly 30 journalists, is also supported by KQED-FM (Though it appears that deal has ended) and University of California, Berkeley's graduate school of journalism. The Project as also brought on former McKinsey partner Lisa Frazier as CEO and Jonathan Weber, the co-founder and editor in chief of The Industry Standard, as the site’s editor in chief. The New York Times has a similar arrangement in Chicago with the nonprofit Chicago News Cooperative, a similar organization in theory to the Bay Area News Project. The Times recently made waves after announcing a new metered billing system yesterday. The exact details of the plan are unclear and its questionable whether the controversial move will actually bring revenue into the publication.
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| Schmidt: “Our Next Huge Business Is Display” And Mobile Growing Too (4Q09 Earnings) Posted: 21 Jan 2010 01:09 PM PST Google Just announced earnings for the fourth quarter. Revenues were up 17 percent to $6.7 billion, while non-GAAP earnings increased 35 percent to $2.2 billion, or 6.79 per share. That is well above the analyst consensus of $6.50 a share. The slides are above. Revenues for the full year ended up being $23.65 billion, up from $21.8 billion in 2008. Net income for 2009 was $6.5 billion. Google’s revenue in the quarter was broken down 66 percent (or $4.4 billion) from its own sites and 31 percent (or $2 billion) from AdSense revenues across its advertising network. The other 3 percent came from licensing and other businesses. While the Google’s ad revenue on its own sites increased 16 percent, AdSense revenues grew an even faster 21 percent. Paid clicks on ads were up 13 percent annually and up 9 percent from the third quarter of 2009. The average cost per click was up 5 percent annually, and 2 percent sequentially. The company ended the year with $24.5 billion in cash and 19,835 full-time employees (170 more people than on September 30, 2009). My notes from the live conference call are below. CEO Eric Schmidt: Overall very pleased with performance. We are back in business full blast. Investing heavily. Excited to continue to reinvent search. Doing acquisitions at pace of one a month. Jonathan Rosensweig: Our strategy in 2009 was to double down on our core, search, advertising and display. Also wanted to invest in Chrome, [Android, other new products]. Internally we called this the “More wood behind fewer arrows” approach. AdWords launched a new front end Android started with 1 device, now at 20 Launched Chrome OS. We saw a lot of businesses go to the cloud YouTube is monetizing well Most importantly, search is performing well. Also launched music search and realtime search. In 20101 we will be investing. We will pour a lot into search. Key is time to result. How fast can we get a user to result. Also more types of ads. Beyond search and search ads, a few major trends transforming the Internet. The first is social. When you say social, people think of social networks, but all of the Web is becoming social. You will trust a restaurant review more from a friend, so maybe it should have a higher ranking, but only for you. Also people researching shopping online more. Personalizations, mobile. We think there is the potential to make the mobile Web better than the PC Web. Organization are moving to the cloud not only because it is cheaper but because it is a better way to do things. Q&A Q: Sequential growth is similar to 2007. Are overall search spending trends back to normal? Also materiality of mobile? A: We won’t comment on mobile. In general, you see throughout second half of 2009 a recovery. Finance is not as strong as other areas. Make progress with all the other verticals. Q: Could you rank key monetization changes you made in 4Q. How do you think about mobile, will it drive P&L> Jonathan: Quality Qs. Q4 tends to be a modest quarter for us. We try to freeze the launches after Thanksgiving to give advertisers stability during the holidays. RPM was stable. All Advertisers are on AdWords 3, makes them more effective in their biding efforts. the main thing in mobile is advertisers are getting better figuring out what works on mobile, including a phone number or address is increasing clickthrough rates. A: two pronged strategy on mobile. Driving product innovations, Goggles, Voice navigations, that drives monetization. Schmidt: the China stuff has been covered. to review, we reported there was a cyber attack on Google, still under investigation, we made technical changes to prevent a future attack, also found monitoring of civil rights, third, Google will no longer be willing to apply the censorship rules in China. Our business is not changed yet. We will change that soon. {i.e. still censored results for now] Q: you mentioned 5X increase in mobile search. What kind of revenue per search are you getting? Jonathan: The new formats, the targeting tools and the reporting we are giving to advertisers is making a difference. Click to call, letting advertiser target specific high-end devices or carriers, so seeing improved monetization across mobile. Q: How are the new ad formats doing? A: Ad formats we launched in Q4 have been very successful. Jonathan: try typing Sears into Google. You’ll see site links, Deal of the day, Tools section, better experience for both the advertiser and the user. Q: Updated metrics o how much of YouTube is being monetized. before you said it had tripled. A: YouTube has gone from a nice to have to an essential part of a media campaign. Homepage was nearly sold out in Q4, running ads in 20 countries worldwide, to give you a perspective on how successful YouTube has been. Q: Ad spending trends by advertising size? A: Larger advertisers continue to increase spending, retailers was strong during the holidays. Continue to work with smaller advertisers, a seasonal issue where we see larger advertisers outperform smaller ones. Q: Rank your no-search businesses in terms of revenue and growth potential. A: Depends on whether you look at absolute growth or relative. Smaller ones are growing faster. We have said is that our next huge business is display. If I were to talk about absolute numbers that would be No. 1. But smaller ones growing faster. No. 1 there is mobile. We have a lot of evidence that people are moving towards data-friendly mobile devices quite quickly. 2010 will be a year of significant mobile revenue growth. In terms of Apple, as a former board member I have a special place in my heart. We have some things coming up with them, but also compete. Q: Do you need to diversify away from advertising revenues. Mobile strategy is perplexing, network partners and Nexus One. Schmidt: We are not immune to global economic trends. I think we fared better than others. We are trying to use GPS data to target by location and have a lot of initiatives, but the biggest area will be in display. We have quiet a healthy enterprise business which will grow rapidly over the next few years. We will be one of the leaders there. I think there has been a lot of confusion about that. What the Nexus One is rally about is a new way to purchase a phone. Nexus One is the first of a long line. You will see other manufacturers. you can buy and provision a phone. Q: Is Bing having an effect on cost per click? Also taxes? A: We think our CPCs generally are not impacted by what other competitors do. They are set by an auction model between customers. Q: what will Nexus One Margin be? A: we don’t track margins for businesses. [measure success in other ways, the margin will be what it will be] Q: TAC issues, how big is display today? A: TAC trending down due to mix issues. In the case of display, the few facts we shared already are worth mentioning. It is a $17B industry. TV industry is $117B industry, shifting to the Internet, So no doubt a huge pie to go after. We don’t comment on specifics of our market share, but a big focus for us with a lot of runway. Q: We are seeing from third party data that iPhone is 50% of mobile traffic is that what you are seeing? Can you give us sense of percentage of advertisers Schmidt: We are not going to speculate market share of Apple’s mobile products. As far as I can tell our relationship with Apple is very stable. Q: Ad shifts between search and display? Schmidt: My sense is they don’t shift, they add. We do it better than anyone else and continue to win all of those deals.
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| Google Figures Out Another Use For YouTube: Earnings Webcasts Posted: 21 Jan 2010 01:02 PM PST If you’ve ever tried to listen in on a Google earnings call on the web, it’s kind of a pain. That’s especially true if you use a Mac because Google insists that you use either Real Player (which is awful on the Mac) or Windows Media Player (which doesn’t work on a Mac). Of course, you could always call into an actual phone number, but who does that anymore? Thankfully, for its Q4 2009 earnings being announced this afternoon, Google has made things easier. Gone are the options to listen via Real Player or Windows Media Player. Instead, you have one option: Webcast on YouTube. Google has set up a YouTube account, GoogleIR (investor relations) that will host the earnings call and the follow-up Q&A session. All you need is a web browser with Flash installed to listen in. Currently, you’ll heard the traditional classical music that plays while everyone waits for the call to start. And while it won’t be clear until it actually starts, it looks like Google could be taking advantage of the video aspect of this webcast as well. Google always releases slides alongside its earnings numbers to better illustrate results. It looks as if Google may run these slides during the call for a more interactive experience. Again, it’s not yet clear if that will actually happen, but that would be a good way to better illustrate what they are discussing — and a good use of YouTube for this type of thing. Google’s earnings will be announced at 1:30 PM PT today. We’ll be listening in and following up with analysis. Most accounts have Google beating estimates relatively easily, despite the latest situations surrounding China and possibly their growing rivalry with Apple.
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| Hillary Clinton Extends Foreign Policy To The Internet And Wants Your Help Posted: 21 Jan 2010 01:02 PM PST In a defining speech today on Internet Freedom, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton extended foreign policy to the Internet, calling it a “global networked commons.” Her speech harked back to Franklin Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms speech, and updated each one (Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Worship, Freedom From Want, Freedom From Fear) to apply to the Internet. She also added a new freedom, the Freedom to Connect:
Apparently, it is now the U.S. government’s foreign policy to protect and promote these freedoms throughout the information “commons” which extend beyond our physical borders. It is also U.S. foreign policy to encourage corporations, particularly those in the technology industry, to protect these freedoms. Call it corporate statecraft. Towards the end of the speech, Clinton applauded Google’s recent decision to rethink whether it will continue to operate in China following coordinated cyber attacks on its operations there. Not only that, she encouraged other companies to follow Google’s lead:
Certainly, the Internet knows no national boundaries. But trying to impose our ideas of freedom onto other countries, especially dictatorships, may end up being a futile effort. Nevertheless, Clinton explains why she thinks it is important to try:
Going through the various freedoms, below I’ve distilled some of what she had to say. On Freedom Of Expression, she notes:
On Freedom Of Religion:
On Freedom From Want:
On Freedom From Fear:
The State Department is actively developing tools to help citizens of other countries express themselves freely on the Internet and circumvent censorship. Clinton also announced that the State Department will launch an “innovation competition” to help promote these freedoms abroad:
Sounds like the State Department is going to start an Internet Freedom fund. Photo Credit: Flickr/ U.S. State Dept.
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| Foursquare Adds Another Weapon For The Check-In Wars: A BlackBerry Client Posted: 21 Jan 2010 12:02 PM PST
The service is officially launching on the BlackBerry today after several weeks in private beta testing with a few hundred users. Specifically, the app with work on all 8000 and 9000 series devices (any BlackBerry with a trackball), and it will also work with the touchscreen BlackBerry Storm, but Foursquare notes that a special version built for that device is in the works too. As you can see in the screenshots, the app is pretty similar to the Foursquare apps on the other platforms. While not quite as pretty as the latest iPhone version, it gets the job done. Our own Leena Rao has been one of the beta testers, and speaks glowingly of being able to use the service after months of iPhone-envy. That said, she does note that there were some bugs, but can’t be sure if that’s more of a BlackBerry problem then a Foursquare problem. A number of testers have noted in the forums problems with location-sensing, but with the latest update that got sent out last week (the “release candidate”) version, the service made a number of UX tweaks in an attempt to make it more obvious to find the actual venue you are looking to check in at. This BlackBerry launch is an important one for Foursquare as they continue to grow. Windows Mobile and Palm Pre versions has also been in the works for some time by independent developers using Foursquare’s API. Once it’s on all the mobile platforms, it will have a pretty strong defense against both Gowalla, which is currently iPhone-only but has a mobile web interface that works on Android, and the Yelp application, which just last week added the check-in feature that is the key to Foursquare. That is still only available on the iPhone app, but it has some 1.25 million users — well above Foursquare’s total numbers (somewhere around 200,000). Foursquare also just yesterday confirmed the hiring of a COO (which they are calling their General Manager).
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| Peer News Announces New Editor…But Little Else Posted: 21 Jan 2010 11:28 AM PST
The news was that John Temple former editor and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, will be taking over the role of editor and moving to Honolulu and the service will be launching early in the second quarter of this year. And good news journalism grads: They’re hiring! The idea behind Peer News is to reinvent local, civic-minded journalism in a profitable way. It’s a big hole and a big problem– something Temple knows well. The Rocky Mountain News ceased publication about a year ago after some 150 years in business. So far Omidyar and Temple are playing their cards incredibly close to the vest. They won’t disclose business model details, the scope of the organization, what form it will take or even what name they’ll do business under. The only thing we do know is the site will be almost totally Hawaii-focused, which would seemingly restrict the money they could make from traditional online ad revenues where the size of audience means everything. But Omidyar stressed in the call that they’d be paying staff “what they are worth” and building a sustainable business. Either he’s got a great idea none of us have thought of or this will be a frenzy of business model trial-and-error. Either way it’ll be fun to watch and given Omidyar’s star power, plenty of people will be watching.”You shouldn’t assume that traditional models that have worked for the print would should preside in the online world,” Omidyar said when pressed for details for the millionth time during the Q&A. “I have a different view.” I’m going to Honolulu in March and Omidyar and I are supposed to be getting together, so stay tuned for more details. Meantime, to apply for a job, go here.
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| Too Big To Fail: Facebook Begins Building Its Own Data Center In Oregon Posted: 21 Jan 2010 11:16 AM PST
The service broke ground on its first data center in Prineville, Oregon, it announced today on its blog. The artists rendering of what the building will look like when done shows a massive facility (that sort of looks like a Playstation 2). Facebook notes that it will be ” highly efficient and cost-effective for our operations today and into the future.” But why build it in Oregon? Well, a number of large companies choose the state for some of their data centers, including Amazon and Google, despite not being headquartered there. The state offers cheap power, a good climate (read: cooler), and tax incentives for companies to build these centers there. No word on how much this is costing Facebook, but undoubtedly it will end up being cheaper in the long run then their current strategy of leasing out entire data centers for their needs. And cost-saving on the server side is very important to the company. When the company announced it was cash-flow positive back in September (when it had a mere 300 million users), the milestone was largely attributed to the work they’ve done with technologies such as Haystack, which cut the cost of photo storage on servers for them, as well as other server associated cost savings. Facebook also has a number of energy-saving techniques it plans to use in this facility. Here are the main ones they note:
Some 200 people will be working to build this data center until its completion in early 2011, The Oregonian notes. Once it’s completed, there will be a staff of about 35 people in the building; mostly technical staff to make sure things are running smoothly. When a not insignificant percentage of the world is using your product, you want to make sure it stays up. And now Facebook is taking that reliability into its own hands.
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| Meet The New YouTube: Less Clutter, Easier Search, And No More Stars Posted: 21 Jan 2010 11:00 AM PST
Many of the changes are aesthetic. You’ll find that YouTube has removed nearly all labels and extraneous text, resulting in a much cleaner feel (and one that feels more Googleish). The logo has even dropped the “Broadcast Yourself” tagline, though YouTube hasn’t committed to dropping that entirely. Things like the video description have been moved around, the all-important view counter is bigger, and nearly all ‘advanced’ information has been collapsed (you can hit buttons to reveal it again). But there are also some changes that may affect how you use the site. First, YouTube has ditched the five star rating system it has employed for years in favor of a binary “Love It” or “Thumbs Down” system. The company has been talking about how useless its rating system is for some time now, so the move doesn’t come as a surprise. YouTube says that any rating your video currently has in the old system will somehow be transitioned to the new one, though the details haven’t been worked out. The other major functional changes are related to navigation. The right side of the screen features a list of videos that you might be interested in watching next (just as YouTube has always done). But now it’s contextual. Say, for example, I ran a search for “Avatar”. Clicking on a result would bring up the video as usual, but instead of just showing Related Videos on the right hand side of the screen, YouTube will now show other search results from that query, making it much easier to jump between different results. You’ll also find that you no longer have to scroll within a widget to browse these additional videos, which was one of my gripes with the old design. YouTube has also implemented a very slick feature for when you’re actually running a search. In the “old” YouTube, when you run a query you leave the video you’re watching and are taken to a results page. Now when you run a query, the currently playing video will slide to the left side of the screen while results populate the right-hand side, allowing you to queue up your next videos without having to stop the one you’re watching. Other changes include new controls that let you specify what video resolution you want to view a movie in (YouTube will serve the “ideal quality” as the default).  Here’s a shot of the old site:
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| Bam! Bing Now Cooks Up Recipes Posted: 21 Jan 2010 10:33 AM PST  Bing just launched a nifty new feature for any cooks out there. When you search for a food item, Bing will now show recipe results that involve the item. So if I search for macaroni, I’ll see a tab to the left of results that will show me “Macaroni Recipes.” Recipe results are pulled from a variety of recipe websites including MyRecipes.com and Epicurious.com. Each recipe will result will show the source or name of the site, user ratings, and a measure fat and of calories. You can filter recipes by convenience, type of cuisine, occasion, ratings, course and main ingredient. Unfortunately, the recipe feature doesn’t show up for every query. I typed in macaroni and cheese as well as spaghetti and meatballs, I didn’t get the recipe results for either search term. It’s important to note that Google doesn’t do this with recipes. With many recipe portals on the web, it can often be difficult to sift through large amounts of recipes on the web within search engines. As an avid cook who uses sites like Epicurious and Foodnetwork.com often, I am a big fan of this addition to Bing.
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| iPhone And Android Now Account For 81 Percent Of Smartphone Web Ads In the U.S. Posted: 21 Jan 2010 10:01 AM PST When it comes to the mobile Web, increasingly there are only two mobile platforms that matter: Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. According to market share data put out today by AdMob (which is being acquired by Google), the iPhone and Android combined captured 81 percent of U.S. mobile ad impressions on smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2009, up from a combined 55 percent in the first quarter of 2009. Most of that growth comes from Android, which nearly doubled its market share from the third quarter to 27 percent. The iPhone OS made up the other 54 percent. (Worldwide, the iPhone had 51 percent share and Android had 16 percent, for a combined total of 67 percent). Back in the first quarter of 2009, Android only had a 4 percent share of mobile ad impressions (which is also a decent proxy for overall mobile Web and app usage). It took a lot of share from Blackberry, which went from 20 percent to 10 percent over the past year, and Windows Mobile, which went from 12 percent to 3 percent. And Palm, which Android passed long ago, is barely a rounding error now, compared to its 7 percent share a year ago. During all of this time, not only has the combined market share of Android and iPhone been growing, but so has overall mobile Web traffic. In North America alone, mobile Web traffic has doubled in the past year. Increasingly this looks like a two-horse race between iPhone and Android, and all the other mobile phones don’t matter. No wonder Google only cares about targeting mobile ads to those two platforms. Full report embedded below:
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| Rixty, Online Payments For The Unbanked, Scores $1.24 Million In Venture Round Posted: 21 Jan 2010 10:00 AM PST
The company lets users pay for online purchases, particularly virtual goods in games, with cash. Users go to Coinstar machines and choose to have a credit issued instead of cash, or purchase prepaid cards in convenience stores. In total there are 20,000 locations that sell Rixty prepaid credits/cards.
The company had previously raised a $25,000 angel round from Keval Desai, who recently left Google to join Digg as vice president of product. The company is located in San Francisco.
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According to statistics 
Different territories demand different marketing approaches. 
Remember the 
San Francisco hasn't heard much from 
Everyone is awaiting Apple’s tablet device. Some people (
For a while, the only way to play the location-based 
Pierre Omidyar, eBay founder and
YouTube is on a roll. Last night, the world’s largest video site rolled out HTML5 
Rixty is an excellent payment option for the unbanked – usually teenagers – who don’t have access to their own credit or debit cards. Instead of using their parents’ card(s), or billing to their mobile phone (or getting involved in questionable | You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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