The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Google Countersues Haircutter Company That Brought On AdWords Lawsuit
- Spotify Gets Some Local Competition – But It’s A Bit Of A WiMP
- Google Mobile App Update Brings Voice Search Support For iPod Touch
- Octazen: What The Heck Did Facebook Just Buy Exactly, And Why?
- Let The Credits Roll (In), Netflix Is Down
- Welcome To TechCrunch Or 5z8.info/dicksonparade_k5f1f_hackwebcam
- I Pissed Off A PR Spammer Today
- Shatner, My Dad Says
- Why Apple’s New Ban Against Sexy Apps Is Scary
- Speaking Of Creepy Location Features: Google’s Opt-Out Latitude Alerts
- SWASAlert: Weather Tweets That Are Faster than Lightning
| Google Countersues Haircutter Company That Brought On AdWords Lawsuit Posted: 20 Feb 2010 08:34 AM PST
On the 18th of February 2010, Google filed its answer to the complaints and simultaneously moved to file a counterclaim against the haircutting system vendor (documents here). In the most recent filing for the case, Google denies most of the allegations Flowbee had brought forward, including that it has made any unlawful use of Flowbee's alleged trademarks and similar marks. At the same time, the company admits that it allows third parties to bid on keywords that may trigger display of their advertisements as Sponsored Links. Google also filed a counterclaim against Flowbee for breach of contract. The search giant says that by filing the instant action in Texas, Flowbee breached the mandatory venue selection provision (federal or state courts of Santa Clara County, California) of the AdWords contract it had entered with Google. The Mountain View company is seeking damages for the money and resources that were spent trying to transfer the action to the ‘proper’ venue. And then there are a couple of nuggets in the whole thing that are quite amusing (if you’re anything like me, that is). For example: Flowbee in its suit filing documents attempts to define “The Internet and the World Wide Web” and mentions that people can visit Web pages using browser programs like Macintosh Safari or Microsoft Internet Explorer. In its answer, Google subtly points out that while it does not dispute the description of the Internet is essentially accurate, it denies knowledge of a "Macintosh Safari" browser program (it’s simply called Safari). Also funny: Eric Goldman, Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law and well-known blogger, at the time Flowbee filed suit noted that a lot of the language in the documents was seemingly lifted from another lawsuit that was filed earlier by American Airlines against Yahoo and Google, covering similar grounds. But reading Google’s answer, I stumbled on the company name ‘Rosetta Stone’ a number of times, and I wondered if Google’s attorneys had also copied most of the language from another suit and forgot to replace the company name Flowbee by Rosetta Stone here and there. Sure enough, the language education software maker sued Google a month before Flowbee did, equally claiming that the AdWords program infringes its trademark. And you thought sifting through court documents is always a boring way to spend a slow Saturday afternoon!      
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| Spotify Gets Some Local Competition – But It’s A Bit Of A WiMP Posted: 20 Feb 2010 07:03 AM PST  Although Sweden-born streaming music startup Spotify has done well in Scandinavian countries it would appear to now have a local competitor in the shape of a new service launching in Norway. Tech companies Aspiro and Platekompaniet have teamed up with telco Telenor to launch a music streaming service for Norwegian users. That's all fine and dandy. However, someone there needs to go to marketing 101 classes as the service is called WiMP. Yes, I can just imagine myself "WiMPing out" at my Oslo pad listening to music...
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| Google Mobile App Update Brings Voice Search Support For iPod Touch Posted: 20 Feb 2010 02:58 AM PST  Google has submitted a new version of its Google Mobile App for the iPhone platform (iTunes link), and the fresh app now finally boasts built-in support for Voice Search on iPod touch devices (2G or newer). Version 0.4.5.3281 also brings improved stability when using Voice Search on 'restrictive networks' and is also said to make Search by Voice completion detection function a bit better. Other than that, the update brings a number of bug fixes, one that fixes pasting into the search box and one that should prevent the app from crashing when you do a search for '@'.
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| Octazen: What The Heck Did Facebook Just Buy Exactly, And Why? Posted: 19 Feb 2010 08:18 PM PST
Either way, it’s leaving some people scratching their heads. Said one senior engineer at a competing company that we spoke to this evening, “Facebook just bought the web’s most talented and creative scrapers that have gotten around everyones rate limits and detection systems.” Said another person we spoke with this evening who is knowledgeable of Octazen’s product, “Facebook is so sanctimonious about protecting their own user data through Facebook Connect, but Octazen has been scraping user data for years off terms of service and then reselling it.” Both sources asked to remain anonymous. Facebook, for their part, have not yet responded to our request for comment. What exactly has Octazen been up to? The company is mostly about above-board contact importing from one service to another – signing in to Gmail from Facebook, for example, to import your contacts there and add them as Facebook friends. Much of this is done via OAuth and APIs, but Octazen is known to dive much deeper for data. One example – Octazen will sometimes collect and store user credentials directly, and sign into large social networks and other sites as if they were the user, say multiple sources. Then they’ll download the address book and social graph. A percentage of your friends on that service might be users of the service (now Facebook) paying Octazen, and you’ll be asked to friend them. But there’s a big question about what happens to the rest of the data as well, and if Octazen is storing a shadow social network in violation of terms of service to recommend user connections down the road. And they may look deeper at data than they should – at email header information, for example, to get a better understanding of who you communicate with the most. But the most unnerving part of Octazen, say our sources, is the fact that they are very, very good at scraping data at scale without being detected. They may hit a service using lots of different IP addresses, for example, and remain undetected. Octazen could, they say, scrape very public sites like Twitter, where the social graph is on each profile, in a way that Twitter wouldn’t know it’s happening. In 2007, for example, People were buying and running Octazen scripts to scrape contacts in a very sketchy way: “So we use this toolkit from Octazen to scrape contact lists off of various sites. Our ever eager users (ab)used this feature so much that hotmail blocked us.” The poster found a way to access Hotmail’s API instead of just scraping to get the data, and Octazen responded, saying “Very nice indeed” Our understanding is that Facebook already uses Octazen to mysteriously determine your long lost friends and suggest that you re-connect with them (leading to scores of emails into our inbox that Facebook is somehow reading emails or otherwise getting data they shouldn’t be). The big question is why Facebook would need to acquire a company located half way around the world if all they were doing is standard address book imports via OAuth and APIs, or proprietary but well documented protocols like Facebook uses. The implication is that these guys have serious expertise in data gathering at scale that may sometimes be in violation of the terms of service of the sites being harvested. This is obviously just one side of the possible story, albeit based on hard evidence of Octazen’s shady prior practices and via multiple sources. But until Facebook explains this acquisition in more detail, we don’t have much more to go on.      
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| Let The Credits Roll (In), Netflix Is Down Posted: 19 Feb 2010 06:15 PM PST For at least the past hour, Netflix has been down. Normally, this wouldn’t be a huge deal since as they note, “Our shipping centers are continuing to send and receive DVDs , so your movies will be processed as usual.” But, increasingly, Netflix is becoming a streaming video service. And while that aspect is up and running on the third-party devices (such as the Xbox 360) that it works on, it’s obviously not working on the web. And given Netflix’s awesome customer service, I bet that means refunds are coming. As we noted back in August, Netflix sent a message to its subscribers (who were connecting through Xboxes) noting some brief downtime for their streaming service. Along with the message, they were offering a 2% credit to be applied to your next monthly payment if you were affected. You simply had to click on a link to claim the refund (and you could actually do it even if you weren’t affected, if you didn’t mind lying). A couple weeks ago, Netflix sent out the same notice following a similar downtime. It will be interesting to see what Netflix offers its customers for this downtime, which is obviously much more widespread. As they note on the site right now, “Our engineers are working hard to bring the site back up as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience and, again, we apologize for the inconvenience. If you need further assistance, please call us at 1-866-636-3079.” Despite my strong disagreement with their decision to agree to Warner’s 28-day window for renting new DVDs, Netflix remains a company that seems to handle customer service exceptionally well (unlike others). Check out this internal presentation too; great stuff. [thanks Jeff]      
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| Welcome To TechCrunch Or 5z8.info/dicksonparade_k5f1f_hackwebcam Posted: 19 Feb 2010 05:42 PM PST
ShadyURL (made by Wonder-Tonic) is awesome because well, it creates shady URLs. Rather than focusing on making a URL as tiny as possible to spread on a site like Twitter, ShadyURL takes a regular web address and converts it into something that looks as sinister as possible. For example, techcrunch.com becomes: http://5z8.info/dicksonparade_k5f1f_hackwebcam Facebook.com becomes: http://5z8.info/myspace-of-sex_n2×0b_amazon.com-phish Twitter.com becomes: http://5z8.info/refugee-murder_c1e7m_serbian-brides Google.com becomes: http://5z8.info/fake-gmail-login-page_g2i5t_yourdick Awesome stuff. One big fear about URL shorteners is that they obfuscate what may well be harmful websites. Some shorteners, like Bit.ly now check out the links and warn you if they point to a malicious site. ShadyURL doesn’t do that. Instead, it takes what may well be a perfectly normal website and wraps it in a URL that looks like it may point to some nefarious region of the web. You know, sex, murder, drugs, viruses. Again, just awesome. [via LaughingSquid]      
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| I Pissed Off A PR Spammer Today Posted: 19 Feb 2010 02:01 PM PST
Today something new happened though. It wasn’t a PR firm we went to battle with, it was a press release distributor – prMac. I know these guys well, because for the last year and a half they’ve sent me an average of 15 emails a day, sometimes far more. Each email contains a useless press release that someone paid them to spam out to the media. As far as I know, not one of these emails has ever turned into a story. Most PR emails come from a human, and it’s easy to just reply and tell them to stop if it becomes annoying. The more streamlined operations that spam stuff out at least give us an opt out to get off their dreaded mailing list. But not prMac – none of their emails have an opt out. Today was the day I decided to take a stand against the onslaught of prMac emails. Some small step in my hope to regain human dignity, I guess. Since there was no opt out, I simply sent out a Tweet, saying “prMac really needs to chill out on the unsolicited press spam, and give an unsubscribe link.” I followed up with a link to a single day’s emails from the company. If I were prMac, I would have seen this and either kept on spamming, or quietly taken techcrunch emails off their list. But that didn’t happen. Instead, they got angry. Really pissed off, actually. First came a comment to that image of the spam, saying “Claims it’s spam, but OPTED IN to the service. The reason for the duplicates is TechCrunch provided two email addresses.” Then a barrage of emails (sort of ironic). One said in part, and I’m not kidding, “prMac is an OPT IN service for the media. We’re not spammers. We set up your account for you, only for your convenience and under your behalf…” Yep, they followed a statement that they are opt in only and that they aren’t spammers with an admission that they set up our account for us “only for your convenience” (and certainly not at our request). Unpleasant words were exchanged over the course of ten or so more emails. prMac forwarded an email from 2008 where they cajoled a CrunchBase staffer into giving up our emails to start the whole process. I noted that I had no way of stopping the barrage, and kept pointing out that a simple opt out in each email would have been so…legal of them. But by far the most perfectly absurd comment came from prMac in one of their last emails, where they said to me “…you seriously need to take some diplomacy lessons my friend. The smart ass remarks aren’t assuaging me one iota, and only making a situation worse than it didn’t even have to be.” Indeed. And since I want to become a better person, I’ve enrolled myself in a course on how to be diplomatic with spammers who don’t want to let go. Hopefully, I’ll handle the situation with more finesse next time. In the meantime, though, the whole PR profession really needs to get a grip. We aren’t here to do their bidding. We serve our readers. At least, the readers we like. And our community. If they want to be part of that community, they need to lose the sense of entitlement and chill out on the aggressive marketing a little bit. I would have been quite happy just venting on Twitter earlier today and eventually setting up an email filter to remove anything that came from them. But we’re only human. And this tirade of angry emails (just now yet another one from them popped into my inbox – “If your receiving distributions from us were such a problem, when didn’t you bring this up long before?? It’s not like we started doing this yesterday.”) was a little too aggressive and a little too much. So now I’ve vented more fully.      
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| Posted: 19 Feb 2010 01:56 PM PST
The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Shatner has agreed to star in the show as the father, and because of it, the show has been greenlit to shoot a pilot episode. It’s not yet clear when it will air, but when it does, it will be on CBS. The creators of Will & Grace are executive producing the show for Warner Bros. TV alongside Halpern and Patrick Schumacker, both of whom wrote the script for the pilot. Both Halpern and Schumacker used to write for the TV and movie blog Screen Junkies. On Twitter, Shit My Dad Says continues to rise in popularity. By the time we wrote about it in August, the account already had over 100,000, but by November (the time of the TV deal), it was well past 700,000. Now, it has over 1.1 million followers and you can expect that to keep rising when the show airs. Of course, how well the show can translate a Twitter account remains to be seen. After all, it will be on network television which means no swearing — a large part of what makes Shit My Dad Says tweets funny. In fact, of just the last 10 tweets the account has sent out, 8 of them would have to be altered to make it onto TV (7 feature “fuck” or “shit” and 1 features “dicks,” which CBS probably won’t like either). But I’m sure Shatner will find a way to make even a show called Stuff My Dad Says humorous. Also, we love William Shatner because William Shatner loves us (see video below).      
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| Why Apple’s New Ban Against Sexy Apps Is Scary Posted: 19 Feb 2010 01:18 PM PST
First, a little background: we’ve seen numerous reports about applications that have been pulled from the App Store for featuring sexual content, but there are still plenty of apps that have names like “Magic Boobs”. I reached out to Apple PR to ask if they’d enacted a sweeping policy change that could affect many applications, or if they were only removing a handful of applications with especially explicit content. This morning an Apple spokesperson sent back a response. It doesn’t have any answers:
I’ve asked Apple to further clarify their stance — does this only apply to applications that have received complaints? Do they have any plans to specify what exactly makes an application too sexy for the App Store? I’ll be surprised if they get much more specific. Now, it’s true that many of these “sexy” applications were little more than spam, featuring titillating titles, perhaps a handful of sexy photos, and little else. There were some applications that included more functionality, but it’s safe to say that the average quality of the applications on the App Store has almost certainly improved because of the new ban. But it’s still a disturbing move on Apple’s part. Most worrying is that “sexy” applications were already blocked at one point until Apple specifically changed its policies to begin letting them in. It was only a little over a year ago that the words “Boobs” and “Booty” in an application’s description weren’t allowed. But Apple made the conscious decision to lift that ban. In effect, Apple sent a message to developers that on a platform where the rules are nebulous and anything innovative is risky, these applications were safe. Now it’s changing its mind. Since the App Store first launched in July 2008, Apple has gradually loosened restrictions on what kinds of applications it would approve. In December 2008, it started approving “humor” apps like iFart and Pull My Finger, as well as an NC-17 rating for adult applications. And over the last year, it began allowing more and more sexy applications — it even began offering parental controls with the iPhone 3.0 software update to help parents keep what their kids accessed in check. Now Apple is moving in the other direction, and it’s setting a scary precedent. It’s showing that it’s comfortable throwing out applications that developers have spent their time and money building, without even bothering to give them advance notice. It’s one thing to have an application get denied when it’s first submitted — it’s another thing entirely to have the rug pulled out from under you once your app has thousands of downloads and customers. Is Apple going to start blocking apps like Qik if it builds its own live streaming service? Are iFart’s days numbered? Could Apple simply ban all NC-17 rated applications because too many parents complain? And then there’s an entirely different issue: censorship. Apple is now one of the world’s largest gatekeepers to content, with a store that encompasses music, video, applications, and soon, books and magazines. And it’s shown before that it’s a totally inconsistent hypocrite when it comes to which content it’s willing to sell. Have exposed breasts in an R rated move? Sell it! Jiggling boobs in a silly iPhone application? Banned. Apple previously blocked an iPhone application that allowed users to access the Kama Sutra. What happens if it gets too many complaints about iTunes making it too easy to purchase books and magazines with sexual content?      
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| Speaking Of Creepy Location Features: Google’s Opt-Out Latitude Alerts Posted: 19 Feb 2010 12:22 PM PST
While their Google Location Alerts feature is not new (it started beta testing in November alongside location history), the amount it is being used seems to be increasing. And it’s freaking some users out. For example, we received two emails yesterday forwarded to us from users who have no idea why they were getting email notifications about friends’ locations. And they have every right to be confused, because they didn’t sign up to get them. You see, Google sends you these alerts automatically if your Google Latitude contact opts in to them. Again, to be clear, you get these alerts if your contact opts in to them. As Google explains it on the site:
Now, you may opt-out of these emails, but you have to visit the site to do that. So what do these emails look like? Like this:
While I’m a firm believer in the future of location, and believe that many of the privacy issues being raised now will eventually blow over as it becomes more commonplace, these alerts seem pretty creepy to even me. Especially because they are opt-out. And they’re actually a little weirder. As Google explains:
So you actually only get these alerts when your contact is in an “unusual place.” That makes some sense, since getting these alerts all the time would be beyond annoying. But obviously that “unusual place” may be a place Peter doesn’t want you being alerted about. Yes, he can opt-out of sharing that location, but the problem is that Latitude is always on, and most people forget (or simply don’t care) to turn it off. Google has caused quite a stir over the past couple of weeks by making many of the features of Buzz opt-out (even auto-friending, which they had to change). Obviously, opt-out helps drive usage, but it also annoys and creeps users out. And I can’t think of a better example then a user automatically getting an email with someone’s location that they didn’t ask for. [thanks greg]      
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| SWASAlert: Weather Tweets That Are Faster than Lightning Posted: 19 Feb 2010 11:55 AM PST
Weather seems to be overlooked in the hyperlocal news world so projects like this, however oddly constructed, are an important addition to the mash-up ecosystem. Osborne recounted the genesis of his product thuswise:
What we have here, then, is a good, old-fashioned mash-up. Osborne makes most of his money now from advertising and deals with about $1000 or so in costs to keep up the service and the timely feeds. This is obviously not for everyone – I suppose if you live in a high traffic tornado area, this would be great, but for the rest of us “34 degrees and it may snow later” is enough of a weather report for the whole day. However, airplane pilots and the weather-obsessed may find SWASAlert quite useful.      
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In August 2009, home haircutting system maker 
Facebook has acquired its third company, Malaysian startup 
The web has no shortage of URL shorteners. In fact, there are so many that they’re all kind of blending together and I have no idea where to turn beyond the de-facto one Twitter uses, 
It’s no secret that we consider the PR 
We first wrote about 
The past couple of days have seen some brouhaha over location privacy issues. Please Rob Me brought up the potentially 
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