The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- The Complaint: Apple’s Patent Lawsuit Against HTC Is All About Android
- AOL To Pour $50 Million Into Patch This Year
- Magic Paint And A Loquacious German At Microsoft TechFest (Videos)
- ExactTarget Buys CoTweet, Sets Up “Social Media Lab” In San Francisco
- Google Testifies Before U.S. Senate On Ways To Fight Global Censorship
- Apple Goes After HTC In Lawsuit Over 20 iPhone Patents
- MySpace Lost Faith For All Things Mobile; Former VP John Faith Gone
- HootSuite Rolls Out Android App; Partners With 140 Proof To Serve Ads On Mobile Clients
- Lights Go Out For Streamy, Founders Flock To Facebook And Zynga
- Kampyle Confirms Funding, Kicks Off Beta Test For Application Feedback Product
- Opera 10.50 Lands On Windows, Mac And Linux Version ‘Coming Soon’
- Netflix Is Surveying Interest In An iPhone App
- Gmail Security Enhancements Expected Tuesday
- The Filter Signs DailyMotion Deal For Its Discovery Engine
- Y Combinator To Startups: “We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer”
- Why Hit Up One Happy Hour When You Can Hit Up 15,000?
- ShareThis Introduces The Share Stream
- Android Market Gets A $13,000 Per Month Success Story Of Its Own
- We’re Not In Kansas Anymore. Well, We Are — Google, Kansas.
- New, Arbitrary App Store Rejection Reason: “Minimum User Functionality”
- Google: Flickr Can Keep Using Picnik. Yahoo: We Have No Comment.
- Mobclix Acquires iPhone App Sales Analytics Software Heartbeat
- Twitter Turns On The Firehose For Realtime Search Startups
- Facebook f8 Tickets Go Up A Bit Early. Not All That Much Cheaper Than Twitter Chirp.
- Facebook Details How It Tests Code, But Won’t Say How It Misdelivered Private Messages
| The Complaint: Apple’s Patent Lawsuit Against HTC Is All About Android Posted: 02 Mar 2010 09:10 AM PST Earlier today, Apple issued a press release stating that it is filing suit against cell phone manufacturer HTC for patent infringement. No mention of Android or Google was in the press release. But one of the actual legal complaint, which we’ve obtained and embedded below, makes no bones about it. As expected, this lawsuit is about the Android. HTC, of course, is one of the largest manufacturers of Android handsets. The complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Delaware targets: “certain mobile communication devices including cellular phones and smart phones, including at least phones incorporating the Android Operating System (collectively, "the Accused Products").” By going after the biggest Android manufacturer, Apple is putting all Android cell phone makers—and by extension Google— on notice. Is there any doubt now why Google CEO Eric Schmidt had to resign from Apple’s board last year? The battle lines are now drawn. The patents that it says are being infringed include:
Another complaint was filed with the ITC and may include other patents, since there are only ten here and Apple claims 20 patents are being infringed altogether. Apple vs HTC      
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| AOL To Pour $50 Million Into Patch This Year Posted: 02 Mar 2010 09:06 AM PST
Another fascinating tidbit in the filing is related to hyperlocal news site Patch. Patch, which currently offers hyperlocal news for 37 small towns and communities in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut and California, was acquired by AOL in June of last year. According the the 10-K, AOL plans to invest up to $50 million in hyperlocal news site Patch during the remainder of 2010. And it’s been reported that Patch will roll out to “hundreds” of communities in the future. According to the filing, Patch was bought by AOL for $7.0 million in cash. AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong, had previously invested $4.5 million in Patch back in his Google days via his private investment firm Polar Capital. Armstrong waived his right to receive any money beyond his initial investment back from the investment, accepting the return of his capital in AOL common stock. Armstrong then returned the $4.5 million back to Polar Capital in the form of AOL shares. We know that Armstrong is not only bullish on niche content but is also looking for AOL to become a content powerhouse. The company has even developed its own CMS, Seed, which is a content machine that aims to redefine journalism. And AOL just bought internet video company StudioNow, which was integrated into Seed, to boost its video content on editorial sites.      
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| Magic Paint And A Loquacious German At Microsoft TechFest (Videos) Posted: 02 Mar 2010 08:28 AM PST
We spent part of the morning getting a preview of some of the projects on display at the upcoming TechFest – an employee event where Microsoft researchers share some of the things they’re working on. Some of these projects eventually become products or features in one form or another. Others don’t. It’s sort of like a high school science fair, if you can imagine the students a decade or two older than that and with nearly unlimited funds to play with. I took brief videos of all of the projects on display. The ones with obvious product potential in the near future are Project Gustav and the translating telephone, which are the first two below. But all are fascinating. Immersive Digital Painting (Naga Govindaraju) A realistic painting-system prototype that enables artists to become immersed in the digital painting experience. Project Gustav achieves a high level of interactivity and realism by leveraging the computing power of modern GPUs, taking full advantage of multitouch and tablet input technology and our novel, natural media-modeling and brush-simulation algorithms. The prototype provides realistic models for pastel and oil media, with more to come. The Translating! Telephone (Kit Thambiratnam, Frank Seide) Demonstration of a system for live speech-to-text and speech-to-speech translation of telephone calls. The goal in the telephone-call scenario is to provide an aid for cross-language communication in the event that no other means of communication exists. The system makes extensive use of speaker-adaptation technologies to achieve reasonable, real-time speech-to-text transcription accuracy. This is then translated live using machine translation to provide speech-to-text translation and further fed into a text-to-speech system to realize speech-to-speech translation. The speech-to-text transcript and the translated transcript are shown to the users to enable validation of their intentions. Mobile Surface (Chunhui Zhang): An interaction system for mobile computing. The goal is to bring the Microsoft Surface experience to mobile scenarios and to enable 3-D interaction with mobile devices. Demonstration of how to transform any surface, such as a coffee table or a piece of paper, into a Mobile Surface by using a mobile device and a camera-projector system. Also shows 3-D object imaging, augmented reality, and multiple-layer 3-D information visualization. Developed a system with the camera-projector component to scan 3-D objects in real time while doing normal projection. To visualize, 3-D data can be projected onto a surface formed by a piece of paper while maintaining the original scale as if it were printed on that paper, and a user can interact with the projected content with a hand. Mobile Surface enables you to interact with digital contents and information around you from anywhere. Natural User Interfaces with Physiological Sensing (Desney Tan and Dan Morris): Microsoft's work on interaction modalities, or natural user interfaces. While these modalities rely on sensors and devices situated in the environment, there is a need for new modalities that enhance the mobile experience. We take advantage of sensing technologies that enable us to decode the signals generated by the body. We will demo muscle-computer interfaces, electromyography-based armbands that sense muscular activation directly to infer finger gestures on surfaces and in free space, and bio-acoustic interfaces, mechanical sensors on the body that enable us to turn the entire body into a tap-based input device. Inside the Cloud: New Cloud-Computing Interaction (Chunhui Zhang): With cloud computing, users can access their personal data anywhere and anytime. Cloud computing also will enable new forms of data to be provided for users, with applications ranging from Web data mining to social networks. But cloud computing necessitates new interaction metaphors and input-output technology. The cloud mouse is one such technology. With six degrees of freedom and with tactile feedback, the cloud mouse will enable users to orchestrate, interact with, and engage with their data as if they were inside the cloud.      
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| ExactTarget Buys CoTweet, Sets Up “Social Media Lab” In San Francisco Posted: 02 Mar 2010 08:26 AM PST Email marketing software giant ExactTarget has agreed to acquire CoTweet, a young company that offers a tool that enables multiple people to communicate on Twitter through corporate accounts. CoTweet will continue to operate from San Francisco as a business unit of ExactTarget, essentially taking charge of the company's social media product development. CoTweet co-founder and CEO Jesse Engle will lead the San Francisco operation and head ExactTarget’s new “social media lab”. Terms of the agreement have not been disclosed, but we’re digging. CoTweet was founded in 2008 and offers a browser-based collaboration platform that allows companies to manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single dashboard, support multiple editors, track conversations, assign roles and create follow-up tasks. Its high-profile customers include Whole Foods, McDonald's, Microsoft, Ford, Dell and Pepsi, among others. The company raised just over $1 million in seed capital from Ron Conway’s SV Angel fund, The Founders Fund, Baseline Ventures, First Round Capital, Maples Investments and Freestyle Capital. Twitter COO Dick Costolo also managed to squeeze in a quote in the official press release, saying that he sees the acquisition as a “strong validation that valuable, sustainable businesses are emerging from the Twitter ecosystem”. ExactTarget claims annual contracted revenue of around $114 million for 2009, a year in which it raised a staggering $145 million in venture capital. The company employs more than 600 people, recently opened an office in London and counts Nike, Best Buy and UMG among its clients. You can read the company’s letter to its customers here.      
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| Google Testifies Before U.S. Senate On Ways To Fight Global Censorship Posted: 02 Mar 2010 07:12 AM PST Today, Google is testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law to address internet freedom and censorship, particularly calling attention to the recent security and censorship issues in both China and Iran. Google’s Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong is presenting testimony on behalf of the search giant, which we’ve embedded below. Much of the testimony outlines the background on what happened in the China security breach, where the Gmail accounts of human rights activists were breached by hackers in China. The attacks were systematic and also extended to 20 other companies, including Intel. Google is unwilling to shed light on who initiated the attacks because the investigation is ongoing. Of course, Google has dealt with censorship and security issues with many countries in past. Wong says that over 25 governments have blocked Google services in the past. YouTube has been blocked by 13 countries including Iran, China, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Blogger and Blog Spot have been blocked by India, Pakistan, and Spain. Gmail was recently banned in Iran. And Orkut has been blocked by Iran and Saudi Arabia. You can watch the hearing live here.      
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| Apple Goes After HTC In Lawsuit Over 20 iPhone Patents Posted: 02 Mar 2010 06:38 AM PST Apple is using its strong patent portfolio to fight iPhone competitors in court. Its latest target is HTC. Apple has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the cell phone manufacturer. The suit involves “20 Apple patents related to the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware.” Steve Jobs is quoted in a press release saying: “We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.” The lawsuit itself is not available yet online. We’ve asked Apple for a copy. The lawsuit could be a way to go after Android, although Android is not mentioned in the press release. HTC manufactures some of the most successful Android handsets, from the first G1 up to the latest Nexus One. HTC’s touchscreen Android phones are the most similar to the iPhone. If that is the case, the lawsuit is a shot across Android’s bow and a warning to all Android manufacturers. This is not the first time Apple has gone after a mobile phone competitor. It is involved in similar patent litigation with Nokia. That lawsuit is more about Apple trying to get Nokia to license its patents. And the HTC suit may have the same motivation. But the fact that the lawsuit was filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) as well as in a U.S. District Court in Delaware suggests that Apple is really going for the jugular. “The ITC does not award damages,” says Peter Toren, a patent lawyer with New York City law firm Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman. The only remedy the ITC can award is an order to stop the importation of the infringing product. HTC is based in Taiwan. Apple thinks it owns the concept of the touchscreen Web phone and it wants other cell phone makers to pay for copying the iPhone or to stop altogether. Who will Apple sue next? Motorola? Palm? Research in Motion? Update: The complaint is embedded below. Some of the patents in questions are Patent Nos. 7,362,331, 7,479,949, 7,657,849, 7,469,381, 5,920,726, 7,633,076, 5,848,105, 7,383,453, 5,455,599, and 6,424,354 .      
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| MySpace Lost Faith For All Things Mobile; Former VP John Faith Gone Posted: 02 Mar 2010 06:19 AM PST
Faith has moved to Austin, Texas – just in time for SXSW – where he has joined local startup WhaleShark Media as SVP of Engineering. That company’s still in stealth mode, but was founded by former Bankrate COO Cotter Cunningham, so we’ll be keeping a close eye on that one. It’s worth noting that another key member of the MySpace Mobile team, Ulf Waschbusch, also left the company in July 2009 – he recently landed at gaming startup Garena. I asked MySpace who was running all things mobile now that both employees walked away from the company, and they informed me that stepping in for Faith is Nat Brown. In case you’re not familiar with that name, Brown was once one of Microsoft’s foremost technical minds – he created and evangelized the ActiveX/COM object model in the early nineties and went on to play a crucial role in the creation of XML, DHTML, and the first Xbox. Brown went on to do a brief stint as CTO at CAC Media before serving the same role at online music startup iLike, which was acquired by MySpace in August 2009. MySpace says Brown will henceforth be taking charge of the Mobile division, and that we can expect a lot from that particular unit in the “very, very near future”. We’ll see.      
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| HootSuite Rolls Out Android App; Partners With 140 Proof To Serve Ads On Mobile Clients Posted: 02 Mar 2010 05:53 AM PST
The Android app features much of the same functionality as the iPhone app, including the ability to manage multiple Twitter account, create streams for hashtags and searches, schedule messages for the future, add followers to lists and accounts, share photos and shorten URLs. The paid versions allow for unlimited Twitter accounts plus on-board, click-through statistics tracking. The updated paid version of the iPhone App will include Facebook integration and landscape view. And in an effort to boost revenue, HootSuite is partnering with 140 Proof to serve ads on all versions of its mobile offerings. Ads are served within users’ Twitter streams on and are clearly marked as ads, but act as Tweets that can be retweeted. HootSuite is taking the advertising risk on 140 Proof because the startup promises highly targeted advertising. Twitter clients pass 140 Proof a user ID list (with no names) and the public information contained in a Twitter users profile, and on the advertiser side, advertisers bid on ads to be directed toward users based on keywords in tweets, followers, as well as device, location and platform. 140 Proof's algorithms calculates Twitterer's "persona" based on public tweets and who they follow and serves ads to users based on this data. The deal with HootSuite is a big coup for 140 Proof, which just launched its network a few weeks ago. OneRiot is doing something similar with its realtime ad network RiotWise, and is seeing promising results during its private beta. And we are anxiously awaiting Twitter’s new advertising model which may or may not be revealed in the near future.      
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| Lights Go Out For Streamy, Founders Flock To Facebook And Zynga Posted: 02 Mar 2010 03:54 AM PST
In a short notice posted online, Streamy says it plans to “hold” the service and “reinvent it when the time is right”. In the meantime, however, both co-founders of the fledgling company have been forced to go out and look for a slightly steadier job. One has landed at social gaming juggernaut Zynga, the other at social networking juggernaut Facebook. CEO Don Mosites, for one, is heading to Zynga to work on a “new, special project”. He won’t tell me what it is, but he promises it will be “big”. To be continued, I suppose. The other co-founder of Streamy, Jonathan Gray, will be joining David Recordon (previously with Six Apart) and Monica Keller (previously with MySpace) and become part of the social networking giant’s open source division. From what I can gather, Gray will be helping Facebook promote the adoption of projects like HipHop, Cassandra, Tornado, Thrift, and others. He’ll also continue working with HBase, which was the Hadoop-driven data back-end for Streamy.      
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| Kampyle Confirms Funding, Kicks Off Beta Test For Application Feedback Product Posted: 02 Mar 2010 03:20 AM PST
Last year was a pivotal one in the life of Kampyle, which complemented its round of financing with a blow-out year across all KPI’s. Customer growth rate surged 600%, up 25,000 for a total of 35,000 (although Finkelstein did not share how many of these are paying customers). On average, 19 users saw a Kampyle feedback button every second, ultimately converting to a total of 8M feedbacks processed. Interestingly, 57% of users who provided feedback included their real email address, thereby expressing their desire for a follow-up by the website owners or software providers that implemented the feedback form. Kampyle is enhancing its current feedback products, one for websites, the other for software install/uninstall, with ‘Kampyle for Applications’. Currently being beta-tested, the new product is designed to solicit user feedback regarding people’s actual usage of the applications. With this third product, and integrations with SalesForce, Omniture, NedStat and Google Analytics, Kampyle believes it’s able to provide the holistic, end-to-end view software developers require to effectively understand their user flow—from the initial user visit to their website, through the installation phase, to the user’s actual usage and possible uninstall. Kamyple is extending a special 20% discount on all its premium packages to the first 50 TechCrunch readers that use the following coupon code: ‘techcrunch’.      
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| Opera 10.50 Lands On Windows, Mac And Linux Version ‘Coming Soon’ Posted: 02 Mar 2010 01:25 AM PST Opera Software today released Opera 10.50, which it touts as “the fastest Web browser thus-far produced for Windows computers” (which, in turn, calls for a comprehensive speed test – anyone?). The desktop browser has also been given a completely new design, adopting some of the style elements Google Chrome users will be familiar with. Additionally, Opera 10.50 comes with a private browsing feature that enables people to browse for The desktop browser, which is free to use, lands on Windows at a time when Microsoft has just rolling out its ballot screen for European users of the OS, presenting them with a choice in browsers (supposedly random, but not in reality, as we pointed out last week). The Norwegian software maker calls Opera 10.50 the fastest browser they’ve ever produced, courtesy of a brand new JavaScript engine (Carakan) and a graphics library (Vega). The browser is also said to include improved standards support for HTML5 and CSS3. For Windows 7 and Vista users, there are some more goodies: Opera now fully supports Aero Glass, Aero Peek and Jump Lists. You can easily access your Speed Dials, tabs and more from the Taskbar. Opera 10.50 is available for Windows in 42 different languages – Mac and Linux versions are “coming soon”.      
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| Netflix Is Surveying Interest In An iPhone App Posted: 02 Mar 2010 12:43 AM PST
As the site Hacking Netflix reports tonight, Netflix is asking certain users about their interest in streaming movies and television shows to the iPhone. Notably, this would apparently only work over WiFi, which is hardly surprising given AT&T’s reluctance to let stream-heavy fare on its network. Here’s the full text of what’s being asked in the survey:
So that’s obviously very straightforward. Clearly, Netflix is thinking about providing an app that would do this on the iPhone, iPod touch, and the upcoming iPad as well, but recent remarks by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings suggests that none of this is a priority for the company. Hastings has also noted in the past that eventually the service will likely be on the iPhone. But if they’re already gauging interest among users, hopefully it will be sooner than he’s let on in the past. As Hacking Netflix notes, earlier surveys from Netflix gauging interest in the Wii and PS3 consoles with Netflix were early indicators of the service on both of those devices. Of course, you have to wonder if Apple would approve such an app that would compete directly with iTunes.      
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| Gmail Security Enhancements Expected Tuesday Posted: 01 Mar 2010 11:52 PM PST
There are two specific changes that we’ve heard Google is implementing. The first is a secondary line of defense when a user has lost his or her password. If a Gmail account is accessed from a new computer, the user will have the option of receiving a text message with a new one time use pass key. They then enter that pass key into Gmail to authenticate themselves and lock out any bad users with access to the account. Google is also possibly implementing a different version of OAuth for its contacts exporter (something often used by other services to import Gmail contacts). It’s likely to be OAuth Wrap, an easier to implement version of OAuth. If developers can be convinced to use it instead of harvesting and storing user credentials, there’s less of a security hole. These changes are likely in response to the Chinese security incident from earlier this year. A secondary line of security for users would have avoided the Twitter documents leak from last year, which originally started with a guessed Gmail password and spiraled out of control from there. This isn’t confirmed and Google hasn’t responded yet to our email, but we’ll update with any further information.      
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| The Filter Signs DailyMotion Deal For Its Discovery Engine Posted: 01 Mar 2010 11:50 PM PST
Specifically it will deliver recommendation services to Dailymotion's 66 million monthly users (according to comScore). Dailymotion's goal in this is to up the level of video consumption, user engagement and dwell time. The Filter needs content partnerships like this to prove its technology scales into the billion-request level.      
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| Y Combinator To Startups: “We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer” Posted: 01 Mar 2010 11:02 PM PST
“We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer.” Okay, yes, that’s slightly taken out of context — but it’s still one hell of a way to rile up developers. And to light a fire under some would-be entrepreneur fanboys. Here’s the full statement around the sentence:
Following the iPad’s unveiling in January, people seem fairly evenly split about whether the device will be a failure, or the next big thing (I’m on the record as saying I think it will take some time to catch on, but then will quickly rise in popularity towards the future of computing). This is a smart bet for Y Combinator (and the startups that apply for this RFS) to make. If they’re right, and this is the future of computing, these startups getting to work around the time of the iPad launch (it’s still set to ship at the end of this month) should be well positioned to fully take advantage of the device. And Y Combinator is thinking big for these startups too. It would be easy to tell companies to make apps for the iPad that are basically ports of current mobile apps, but the RFS points to this post by Facebook’s (and FriendFeed co-founder, and Gmail creator) Paul Buchheit, noting the future iPad applications may be unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Something else that is interesting to Y Combinator is how you get this new device in the door in businesses. They seem to think you’ll have to trick your company’s IT department:
Just as iPhone app development has exploded, and Android developers are finally starting to see some real money, iPad developers are already in demand. Windows-killer or not, this is certainly an area to watch for the foreseeable future.      
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| Why Hit Up One Happy Hour When You Can Hit Up 15,000? Posted: 01 Mar 2010 10:07 PM PST
But that’s exactly what Village Voice Media is launching tomorrow alongside app developer GoTime. Happy Hours, is an free application for the iPhone, Android, and the mobile web. With it, you get access to some 15,000 happy hours in 30 different cities around the country. You simply load the app up, tell it where you are (which it can know automatically on the iPhone and Android phones), and let it show you happy hours close by. While happy hour apps are nothing new (here’s another one we covered not too long ago), most are small and based around one city, or a handful of cities. Happy Hours is nationwide, so it’s good for traveling. Also, thanks to the Village Voice association, it has a range of data about establishments such as atmosphere, type of food served, etc — not to mention full reviews, when available. The app launches tomorrow for the following 30 cities: Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Broward-Palm Beach, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New Orleans, New York, Orange County, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa, Washington DC. Check out more in the video below.      
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| ShareThis Introduces The Share Stream Posted: 01 Mar 2010 08:48 PM PST You know all those share buttons across the Web? They are getting more and more social. What I mean by that is initially they were used to share stories or content mostly via email on a one-to-one basis, but over the past year or so services like Facebook and Twitter have been overtaking the way people use those buttons to share stories, videos, images, and links. The way most people interact with these button is through widgets on publisher’s sites. But one of the largest sharing button networks, ShareThis, is about to turn that around and introduce a Share Stream which shows you what your Facebook friends are sharing across the Web. Soon your Twitter followers will be added as well (at launch you will only be able to see what everyone is sharing across Twitter). Of course, the Share Stream is also available as a customizable widget to show on any site. A link at the bottom of each ShareThis widget will invite you to find out what your friends are sharing. When you click on it, you will be taken to a Share Stream where you can log in using your Facebook, Twitter, Google, or Yahoo IDs. There you will see what your else people are sharing from the site you just came from or about the same topic as the page you were on. The Share Stream can be filtered by trending or real-time topics, by source, by what everyone is sharing, or only by what your friends are sharing. ShareThis gets its data from the 130,000 sites which use its sharing buttons and collectively reach 430 million unique visitors a month. Its No.1 competitor AddThis is somewhat bigger, but ShareThis recognizes the same users across sites and creates a semantic index of the every page where its buttons are placed. Using a taxonomy based on Wikipedia categories, ShareThis can figure out the topics associated with each page that is shared. Thanks to this topic knowledge, ShareThis can suggest other pages on related topics which are also being shared by your friends or more generally. CEO Tim Schigel plans to create an ad network of sorts which will let publishers and advertisers target ads to people based on what they are sharing based on browser cookie data (yup, every time you share, you are being tracked, anonymously). He keeps data on engagement levels after people share content, and while the pageviews resulting from each click are still highest for email, Facebook is catching up. And Facebook has a bigger multiplier effect (on average three different people click on each shared link versus just one for email) which puts it over the top in terms of impact. Twitter’s multiplier effect is six times higher (18 clicks per link), but its engagement levels are much lower. More importantly, people who follow a link from Facebook, says Schigel, “are 50 percent more engaged,” on average, than people who find the same page from search. Intuitively that makes sense because there is more hit or miss with search results compared to following a suggested link from someone you trust. Like other sharing networks, ShareThis has seen Facebook soar to 42 percent of all sharing, beating out email (at 40.7 percent) for the first time in February. Twitter represents 8.7 percent of all sharing via the ShareThis button. So the Share Stream pretty much already exists on Facebook and Twitter alone.      
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| Android Market Gets A $13,000 Per Month Success Story Of Its Own Posted: 01 Mar 2010 07:58 PM PST
Now Android Market is getting its own glimmers of hope. Edward Kim, who built the application “Car Locator” around five months ago, has just announced that he’s pulling in $13,000 a month from the application, which “started as a little side-project while [he] was vacationing with [his] family”. Kim writes that the free version of the application has been downloaded around 70,000 times, while the paid application has been downloaded 6,590 times. The price was initially $1.99, but he moved it up to $3.99 (he notes that despite doubling the price, the number of downloads didn’t decrease too much). So what was Kim’s secret to success? Well, a big part of it seems to have come from the fact that Car Locator is now a featured app on Android Market, which means Google more prominently displays it to users than ‘normal’ applications. Getting featured increased the app’s revenue by over four fold. This probably comes as bittersweet news to developers (you can’t exactly count on being featured by Google), but Kim says that he’s ranked between 100 and 200th place in the Market’s ‘Paid’ category, which means that there are probably at least 100 other applications seeing similar success. Android Market is still far behind the App Store in many respects (except for openness), but it looks like it’s finally starting to mature. Kim is very optimistic about the future of the platform, telling me “Android appears to have grown enough that developers can make some money off of it, but there’s not SO many developers that you’ll never get noticed.” Here are some of Kim’s other observations:
     
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| We’re Not In Kansas Anymore. Well, We Are — Google, Kansas. Posted: 01 Mar 2010 07:09 PM PST
The city’s mayor today signed a proclamation that for the rest of the month, Topeka will be known as “Google, Kansas.” Yes, you’re reading that correctly — Topeka is now “Google.” Now, to be clear, this isn’t a legal name change. Lawyers advised the mayor and the city council that they wouldn’t be able to change the name for just the month and then change it back (no word on if they also advised them that it would be well, stupid) — so instead their going with this proclamation asking people to simply call the city “Google.” While this is a silly way to get Google’s attention, the benefit could be huge. The 1Gb/sec fiber is roughly 100 times faster than what most Americans get today for Internet speeds. That’s especially true in rural areas. And while Topeka may not be the most rural city in the country (it is the state capital and has over 120,000 citizens), they could undoubtedly make good use of this ultra fast connection. Google’s fiber connection is still more than 20 times faster than even most fast broadband connections. Humorously, this isn’t the first time Topeka has tried something like this. Apparently, in August 1998, the city has a proclamation to change its name to “ToPikachu” — yes, after the Pokemon character. So this move seems roughly 100 times more sane than that one. Also funny — apparently this special city council meeting lead to the postponement of another one, where they were actually going to talk about real issues. Ah, local governments.      
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| New, Arbitrary App Store Rejection Reason: “Minimum User Functionality” Posted: 01 Mar 2010 04:06 PM PST  So say you're really into Jersey Shore. And you want to make a phone like the duck phone in the show. And you're like "Why not make an app that quacks like a duck and makes your phone quack like a duck?" Heck, it's a free country, as far as you can tell. This is what our grandfathers fought the Battle of the Bulge for, right? Well the cheese-eaters at Apple will say that your dumb quack app "contains minimal user functionality" and, as a result, deny your application to rock out on their App Store. 
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| Google: Flickr Can Keep Using Picnik. Yahoo: We Have No Comment. Posted: 01 Mar 2010 02:52 PM PST
Google, for its part, says that it will allow third-party sites (including Flickr) to continue to integrate with it. Here’s the statement they sent us:
That sounds good, right? Well, it doesn’t sound like anyone bothered to tell Yahoo. Here’s their statement (from OutCast Communications, which does Yahoo’s PR):
If Yahoo was going to continue the Picnik relationship, don’t you think they’d come out and say so. Or at least say something like, “at this time, we see the relationship continuing.” Instead, it looks like they may be weighing their options. Or maybe they just don’t really know how the acquisition will affect things yet. The problem is that Picnik is currently the only way to do that majority of edits on Flickr. Without it, the product as a whole becomes less valuable. So will Yahoo have to build its own photo-editor (which they obviously were against before, or they would have done it rather than partner with Picnik)? Or will they partner with someone else — maybe Aviary? Regardless, Google has a history of acquiring companies and then letting their products wither (Dodgeball, Jaiku, etc). Let’s hope that’s not the case here, and that Picnik is at the very least integrated into Picasa (Google’s online photo service), because it’s a solid service.      
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| Mobclix Acquires iPhone App Sales Analytics Software Heartbeat Posted: 01 Mar 2010 02:09 PM PST
Mobclix bought Heartbeat from app developer Enormego, which launched the software in January 2009. So far Heartbeat has tracked $25 million in paid application downloads with over 3,500 applications using the platform (55 percent of which are paid apps). Heartbeat’s offerings will be folded into Mobclix’s platform to offer Heartbeat’s software to both Android and iPhone app developers. Heartbeat’s sales analytics will be integrated with Mobclix ad revenue data to allows developers to have a visualization of all aspects of an application's revenue including ad monetization, in-app purchase and paid models. While Heartbeat’s current service only caters to the iPhone app market, its technology will be adapted to serve Android apps as well. The acquisition makes sense for Mobclix to boost its exchange’s offerings. Mobclix allows app developers to sign up with their ad inventory and ad networks bid for the spots based on age, gender, location, and other factors. The ads being served change automatically, based on which ad network is bidding the highest to reach the users of that particular app. It also lets advertisers buy across a variety of apps based on demographic, geo-targeting, and behavioral characteristics. The startup recently announced a deal to offer Nielsen's ad targeting data into its ad exchange to enhance ad targeting. With the acquisitions of AdMob by Google and Quattro Wireless by Apple , ad exchanges and networks like Mobclix, Greystripe and others are working hard to boost the appeal and strength of their products. But according to Gartner, the mobile advertising market will generate $13 billion in revenues by 2013, leaving plenty of possible revenue to go around.      
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| Twitter Turns On The Firehose For Realtime Search Startups Posted: 01 Mar 2010 01:33 PM PST When it comes to getting access to all the data that flows through Twitter, there are the 50,000 apps that drink from Twitter’s Streaming API, which is subject to various limits. And then there are the chosen few who get the full unlimited firehose of data, the more than 50 million Tweets a day coursing through Twitter. In the past, only select partners, particularly big search engines such as Google or Bing, got the full firehose. Search engines need it more than others to be able to index and serve up results in realtime. Today, smaller search startups are also getting the firehose. These include Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search (which has not yet launched). In December at Le Web, Twitter indicated that the firehose would open up to more and more developers. This is a step in that direction. And while Twitter makes deep-pocketed partners like Google and Bing pay for the firehose, it treats startups differently with more favorable (even free) terms, or at least it used to. These aren’t the first startups to get the firehose, and they won’t be the last. Once they get to a certain size though, they’ll pay if they don’t already. Apparently it works on a sliding scale. Photo credit: Flickr/ZeroOne      
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| Facebook f8 Tickets Go Up A Bit Early. Not All That Much Cheaper Than Twitter Chirp. Posted: 01 Mar 2010 01:22 PM PST
The ticket page for f8 was briefly online earlier today at this URL. It appears that Facebook has since put it under password protection. But guess who was able to grab a screenshot? This guy. Notably, it appears that regular f8 tickets will be $325 this year. While that’s still about $140 cheaper (140, get it?) than Chirp, it’s not drastically cheaper, as many had been thinking. In the past, Facebook has sold tickets for $250, or even $150 if you signed up early. But, f8 still has one major price point advantage: tickets for students are only $50. When asked why tickets were so expensive to Chirp, conference organizers noted that unlike f8, Chirp wasn’t accepting outside sponsors, which f8 has used in previous years to keep costs down. It’s not clear if Facebook is doing that again this year, but judging from the ticketing page, at least Eventbrite is a partner. f8 will take place this year on April 21 and 22 at the San Francisco Design Center (same as previous years). Again, this is exactly one week after the two-day Chirp conference. We’ve reached out to Facebook about the event, and ticket prices, and will update when we hear back. Update: Here’s Facebook’s statement to me:
So basically, it sounds like that was indeed the page, and it just went up a bit early. And yes, prices appear to be going up. [thanks John]      
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| Facebook Details How It Tests Code, But Won’t Say How It Misdelivered Private Messages Posted: 01 Mar 2010 12:52 PM PST
Most people probably just shrugged their shoulders at the news, but it’s yet another blemish against the company’s security record. This isn’t the first time Facebook has run into security issues, and I’ve grown increasingly concerned that the company might be playing fast and loose with its quality assurance policies because it doesn’t want to sacrifice the rapid iteration it’s famous for. With this in mind, I reached out to Facebook late last week to ask about their protocol for deploying code and how the bug made it through in the first place. The company responded to some of my questions, and refused to answer others. At least, Facebook eventually answered some of my questions. At first, the company sent me a vague statement reiterating that they were investigating the issue, and that they “maintain industry-leading quality assurance and security systems, and the reliability of Facebook is our top priority.” In response, I reminded the Facebook spokesperson that it had just sent thousands of messages to people who weren’t meant to receive them, which would seem to indicate that it is not, in fact, on the bleeding edge of online security. I restated my questions and the company got back to me with this more detailed overview of its QA and code deployment policies, found below. Note that it begins with a general statement Facebook provided, along with more direct answers to my questions (which are in bold).
What are your protocols for pushing code?
Are there multiple people reviewing all code that gets pushed?
What changes are you making to ensure that this does not happen again?
When do you expect to conclude your investigation, because I will certainly be following up for the details about it?
While interesting, none of this is particularly surprising. And because Facebook isn’t commenting on the outcome of the investigation, we’ll probably never find out what caused the bug (or if company protocol was even followed in this case). But hey, at least they say they’re doing the right things. It’s worth pointing out that Facebook is by no means the only company affected by such issues. Last year, I wrote a post called the Sorry State of Online Privacy, where I detailed some of the security lapses that had hit Facebook, Twitter, and Google (and of course there’s the recent Google Buzz fiasco). All of these companies would likely claim to have state of the art testing and security measures, yet such problems seem to pop up every few months. I’m aware that it’s impossible to have a fully secure system, but that doesn’t mean engineering teams should be treating these problems as inevitabilities. To reiterate what I wrote last year, the word 'private' should not mean "this will remain hidden until we accidentally break something".      
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Yesterday brought the news that AOL 
Yesterday I visited Microsoft HQ on a surprisingly warm winter day in Redmond, Washington. This was an all day briefing with 
Troubled social networking giant 
Alas, personalized news streaming service / social network aggregator 
There has never been a shortage or rumors that 
Google will roll out a number of security enhancements to 
Last August, 
Village Voice Media has always been about location. Their publications (which include 
In the months following the iPhone App Store’s launch in July 2008, it became clear that the platform was turning into a gold rush. Success stories of one-man companies earning 
Last month, Google announced 
Earlier today, in writing about 
Mobile ad network 
Back in December at Le Web, Twitter 
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