The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Vittana Applies The Kiva Model To Help Finance Education In Developing Countries
- Gina Bianchini Replaced As Ning CEO By COO Jason Rosenthal
- Microsoft, aQuantive Veterans Set Out To Build “Intelligent” Ad Serving Platform
- Tim Bray Throws His Hat Into The Android Ring Because He Hates The iPhone
- The Lab Vs. The Real World: Product Testing Is Hard
- Fandango Begins Rolling Out Mobile Tickets That Let Moviegoers Go Paperless
- LoKast’s Proximity Based Mobile App Takes Content Sharing To A New Level
- Twitter Expected To Take The Wraps Off Its Advertising Platform Today
- KIT digital Buys Rival Multicast For Approx. $18 Million
- Brightcove To Power Online Video Platform For EMI Music In North America
- Dan Abrams Expands Mediaite Empire With Fashion News And Culture Site Styleite
- Facebook Opens India Office To House More Sales And Operations Staff
- Hunch Takes $12 Million From Khosla Ventures, Adds Former Facebook CFO To Board Of Directors
- Google Product Manager RJ Pittman Defects To Apple
- Web Publishing Startup DocStoc Now Offers Branded Viewers To Users
- SpotRank Is Skyhook’s Intelligent Location Firehose. SimpleGeo Is The First To Wield.
- Scamville Marches Onto The iPhone, Sneaks Back Into Facebook
- Foursquare And Gowalla In A Dead Heat In The Location War
- Google Is Working On Letting Users Link Their Gmail And Google Apps Accounts
- For Power Users, Gmail Set To Get Up To Speed
- Google May Start Pre-Testing New Buzz Features With Users
- The Key To Gmail: Sh*t Umbrellas
- Go Try It On Will Be Your Wardrobe Consultant And Personal Stylist In One
- Facebook May Begin Allowing Developers To Store User Data For More Than 24 Hours
- Eko: Mobile Banking for India’s “Dial-Up” Internet
| Vittana Applies The Kiva Model To Help Finance Education In Developing Countries Posted: 15 Mar 2010 09:15 AM PDT
Vittana partners with microfinance organizations located in developing countries to donate to students in need of funding. Loans for students range from $200 to $1,500, are then funded by individual lenders, via $25 donations or more, on the Vittana website. One hundred percent of the loans are given to the student. Launched in beta last May, the Vittana community has made over $110,000 in loans to nearly 200 students around the world, who are now getting their degrees. Thus far, Vittana has programs in Mongolia, Nicaragua, Paraguay Peru and Vietnam and plans to expand to India and countries in Africa soon. And Vittana students have had a 97 percent repayment rate. The non-profit organization was founded by former Amazon employee Kushal Chakrabarti and was incubated in the fbFund REV program. Vittana has received funding from a number of notable investors and leaders in the technology space including Mike Murray, Mitch Kapor, Joel Spiegel, Dave McClure, and Dave Richards. Qifang is implementing a similar model for education in China. In conjunction with NCAA March Madness, Vittana launching a Microfinance Madness initiative to help bring together bloggers, college students, startups and other groups in a competition to lend the most money to college students around the world. TechCrunch is participating in the initiative and will be facing The Huffington Post, Redfin and others to raise funds. Join our group and make your donation today!      
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| Gina Bianchini Replaced As Ning CEO By COO Jason Rosenthal Posted: 15 Mar 2010 08:32 AM PDT Ning CEO Gina Bianchini is being replaced as the CEO of Ning by COO Jason Rosenthal. Bianchini founded the DIY network of social networks with Marc Andreessen. But after five and half years at the helm, she is ready to try something new. She will transition to an entrepreneur in residence role at Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm started by Andreessen. In a blog post, Andreessen (who remains chairman of Ning) notes:
Over the past year, Ning’s unique worldwide visitors have doubled to 20.7 million, according to comScore, which is still much smaller than other social networks such as Hi5 (46.5 million) or LinkedIn (42.8 million). But at least it’s bigger than Friendster’s 15 million. Andreessen notes that Ning will continue on the same course under Rosenthal.      
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| Microsoft, aQuantive Veterans Set Out To Build “Intelligent” Ad Serving Platform Posted: 15 Mar 2010 08:16 AM PDT
Jeff Wood, Guy Taylor and Ryan Treichler are today announced their new company, aiMatch, as well as the limited availability for “early adopters” of its online ad technology platform. In addition, the threesome said they have also convinced former Head of Publisher Solutions EMEA for Microsoft Advertising Steve Perks to join the club. So what does aiMatch do? According to the press release, the company aims to put advertising intelligence (hence the “ai” in the name) in the hands of online publishers, helping them create new audiences and revenue opportunities, while at the same time maximizing the value of their advertising inventory. The company will provide a solution for online publishers to create, forecast, deliver and analyze online ad products based on an open platform that it says is able to communicate with value-add systems for aggregating data into one actionable view. In the words of Jeff Wood, former VP of Publisher Sales at Microsoft Advertising and now CEO at aiMatch:
As mentioned earlier, aiMatch’s online advertising platform is currently only open to some early adopters, with full availability scheduled for June 2010.      
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| Tim Bray Throws His Hat Into The Android Ring Because He Hates The iPhone Posted: 15 Mar 2010 08:05 AM PDT As Apple goes on the offensive against Android, it risks alienating more and more developers. Today, another prominent developer is chose the opposing side. Tim Bray, the well-known software architect and blogger, is joining Google to help rally even more developers around the Android mobile operating system. Bray is the co-inventor of the XML Web standard, and most recently worked at Sun Microsystems. In a blog post, he explains that he is drawn to Google in part because he hates the iPhone, or at least its closed and controlling environment from a developer’s perspective.
He also notes that Android is catching up to the iPhone in terms of sales:
In February, Google noted partners are selling 60,000 Android handsets a day, and Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones last quarter, or about 97,000 a day. Android is making steady gains in market share. Bray’s decision to throw his hat into the Android ring is just the latest example of a growing backlash among developers to Apple’s autocratic ways. Facebook developer Joe Hewitt famously quit the iPhone over similar issues. Apple cannot afford to alienate developers because, given the choice, they will shift their attention and their apps to other platforms.      
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| The Lab Vs. The Real World: Product Testing Is Hard Posted: 15 Mar 2010 08:00 AM PDT  Unless you've been living under a rock for the last couple months, you know that Toyota has had problems with sudden acceleration of some of its vehicles. Apparently, the root cause of the problem is still unknown, which is a little troubling to the average consumer. Toyota claims to be doing everything they can to investigate, but that doesn't seem to be enough. Now everyone and their brother are suddenly product design engineers and have the gall to tell Toyota what to do and how to do it. Witness this opinion piece in the LA Times by David M. Cummings entitled "Haven't found that software glitch, Toyota? Keep trying". Mr. Cummings worked on the Mars Pathfinder project for NASA, so he has some credibility to his name when it comes to software design and product testing. But his opinion piece seems to completely miss the point of the PR nightmare that Toyota is dealing with. 
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| Fandango Begins Rolling Out Mobile Tickets That Let Moviegoers Go Paperless Posted: 15 Mar 2010 07:07 AM PDT Waiting in line for movie tickets is still the worst part of going to the movies (unless you are going to see The Bounty Hunter). With so many mobile phone movie apps, it’s easy to find what’s playing at nearby theaters and even purchase tickets right from your mobile phone, but then you still have to get a paper ticket from the dispenser or the ticket agent. But your ticket could easily be delivered to your mobile phone via a 2D barcode. Today, Fandango is launching a mobile ticket program in eight cities which lets moviegoers finally go paperless. Your ticket is delivered to your mobile phone in the form a of a 2D barcode, or QR code, which the ticket-takers can scan. Movie theaters need to equip their attendees with special scanners, which is why it is only available in a few markets. (MovieTickets.com is testing a similar program). Here are the theaters participating in Fandango’s initial rollout:
     
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| LoKast’s Proximity Based Mobile App Takes Content Sharing To A New Level Posted: 15 Mar 2010 06:27 AM PDT
LoKast, which is actually short for "local-casting,” allows you to set up a profile that will list all of your photos, selected contacts, videos, web links and music on your mobile phone. You can select which content you’d like to include to the public and which content you’d like to keep private. When a LoKast user is in proximity (300 feet) of other LoKast users, the app will automatically discover other users nearby and allow the user to view and download their content. For example, you can see the iTunes library of any user who is in close proximity to you. You can choose to download a 30-second clip of any song to your own profile and can also follow the link to the iTunes store to purchase the music (LoKast collects an affiliate fee for this, of course). Similarly, you can download photos, videos and even contacts from other users into your profile. You’ll also soon be able to share apps on your phone with other users. The beauty of Lokast is that it has its own internal network; eliminating the need for 3G connectivity to run the app, as LoKast works in subways, underground and heavily congested areas such as stadiums, where 3G connectivity is unreliable. The startup’s app is effectively all network based and currently has five patents for its proprietary technology. LoKast is also partnering with bands to help market their content to users. LoKast has struck deals with music distribution companies including The Orchard, IODA and Monalis 360 to provide users with exclusive content within the LoKast app. And production companies, such as Mark Cuban's Magnolia Pictures, are also using the service to promote their new films. LoKast will soon be launching an Android app, and plans to launch integration with Facebook Connect. The app itself is incredibly simple to use and seems like it has potential to be a great way to share content on your mobile phone. Of course, some people may not feel comfortable sharing their personal content to complete strangers, so that may be a barrier for certain users.      
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| Twitter Expected To Take The Wraps Off Its Advertising Platform Today Posted: 15 Mar 2010 06:13 AM PDT
Twitter made a memorable splash at SXSW three years ago, and will likely have opted for the conference as the right place to detail its digital advertising plans, which it hopes will become a major source of revenue in addition to its realtime search outsourcing deals with major Internet players like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, which are said to have already turned the company profitable on an operational basis. Just for reference: the company also switched the flip on the geolocation feature for its website in time for SXSW. Nobody knows for sure whether Twitter will effectively be launching its proprietary ad platform today, but there’s a good chance it will, at least to a subset of advertisers. The company's head of monetization, Anamitra Banerji, stated as much during a talk at an advertising industry panel on 22 February when he said Twitter’s online ad platform would debut in beta form ‘in a month or so’. In addition, GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram at the time cited a source from the media industry who said Twitter was working with several major partners for the imminent launch, including "new and traditional media". We – and others – have speculated before about what Twitter ads could or should look like and last November, Twitter COO Dick Costolo told us at our Realtime Crunchup that the new ads will be "fascinating”, “non-traditional” and that “people will love it”. I’ve yet to come across any form of digital advertising that people truly love, and Twitter is tricky territory for advertising as it revolves primarily around personal, direct communication between individuals. It isn’t anything like putting display ads up on a newspaper site (or even a social network), or matching search keywords with relevant text ads. I’m very curious to find out what will be so non-traditional and fascinating about Twitter’s ad model, and if they’ve effectively been able to come up with a way that will prove both beneficial for online advertisers and non-disruptive for its many millions of users throughout the world. I’m also looking forward to April, when Twitter will likely be outlining its revenue strategy with third-party developers at its first ever Chirp conference. My (educated) guess is we’ll know more this afternoon – William’’s keynote starts at 2 PM. (Image via eHow)      
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| KIT digital Buys Rival Multicast For Approx. $18 Million Posted: 15 Mar 2010 04:46 AM PDT
The acquisition sum is comprised of $4.9 million in cash and 1.3 million shares of KIT digital common stock, plus the assumption of approximately $4.6 million in long-term liabilities. KIT digital plans to close the acquisition by the end of this month. This is KIT digital’s sixth strategic acquisition, following the purchases of Narrowstep, Visual Connection, Morpheum, Kamera, The Feedroom and Nunet (the latter two brands were retired by KIT digital late 2009). Multicast specializes in live event broadcasting, Internet video management and targeted multimedia communications for about 1,000 organizations ranging from government, non-profit organizations to Fortune 500 companies. In 2009, Multicast claims to have delivered broadcasts for some 50,000 live events and served more than 250 million video streams to a worldwide audience. The company is said to derive an estimated $12 million in annualized recurring licensing fees for its IP video management software, with additional revenues related to professional services. From what we can gather, Multicast has never publicly talked about how much funding it raised and when, although it is listed as a portfolio company of Northbrook, Illinois based MK Capital. KIT digital will be integrating Media Suite’s live and content delivery solutions onto its VX-one platform, and expects to host Multicast’s clients operating on a unified platform by the third quarter of 2010. Several Multicast executives will be transitioning to KIT digital’s global management team and the company’s offices in Atlanta, Georgia will continue to be staffed by 90+ Multicast employees. Concurrent with the Multicast acquisition, KIT digital announced that it has acquired or agreed to acquire nearly 4 million of its outstanding in-the-money warrants over the course of the first quarter, using the proceeds from its recent $15 million public equity offering.      
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| Brightcove To Power Online Video Platform For EMI Music In North America Posted: 15 Mar 2010 04:18 AM PDT
The EMI Group company will use Brightcove as its online video publishing and syndication platform of choice in North America, across all of its website properties and to some of its third-party syndication partners. Brightcove sure knows how to convince big music to sign deals with them: in addition to EMI Music, the company works with a host of other major record labels including Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, Sony and Atlantic. The Brightcove platform will enable EMI Music to create customized viewing experiences, including country and language-specific video experiences for its Web properties, and expand the reach of its video content through SEO, social sharing tools and a range of third-party distribution capabilities. EMI Music will also be able to tap into Brightcove’s monetization and analytics tools in order to open up new revenue streams through online video advertising. Brightcove recently scored a few big wins in Europe as well, signing up the U.K.’s Virgin Media and a number of customers in Spain ranging from publishers Conde Nast Digital Spain and Grupo V to video and music providers TQMadrid and Sony Music Spain. It doesn’t win all battles, though: rival Ooyala recently took over as lead provider of an online video distribution platform for the Telegraph Media Group. Also check out Michael Arrington’s video interview with Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire in Davos from earlier this year. (Via press release)      
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| Dan Abrams Expands Mediaite Empire With Fashion News And Culture Site Styleite Posted: 15 Mar 2010 04:00 AM PDT Media and legal news pundit Dan Abrams is expanding his Mediaite, mini-empire today with the launch of fashion news site Styleite. Abrams announced late last year that he has a definitive plan for expanding to other verticals, and most recently launched tech and geek culture site Geekosystem. Styleite is the Mediaite family’s venture into fashion journalism, with a little edge and pop culture stirred in. The site covers the news of what’s taking place in the industry and focuses on a blend of analysis and breaking news. Stories range from Amy Winehouse’s new designs to Yves Saint Laurent’s latest exhibition to Lady Gaga’s best fashion moments in her latest music video. The site also features a fashion industry-focused Power Grid which is Mediaite’s trademark feature for ranking individuals and execs in various industries. The technology will rank 3,000 models, brands, execs, designers, reporters and others in the fashion industry based upon their power and media exposure weekly. But Styleite aims to more than just a fashion news and analysis destination; the site also wants to be a fashion community. Styleite includes a feature , which is similar in theory to Like.com’s Weardrobe, that allows users to create a profile and upload photos of their outfits and then tag their photos with the brands and styles that they are wearing at the time. The aim is to socialize user generated content around fashion and engage visitors in the art of styling their clothes. Abrams has seen considerable success with Mediaite since its launch last year, with the site making Technorati's top 40 blogs list. Mediaite also expects to turn profitable this year as well. And Styleite may be able to draw a different demographic than the media and tech focused sites. I’m a fan of fashion-focused news sites incorporating social media and community creating tools into their platforms and I think Styliete could end up helping push the envelope forward when it comes to fashion journalism.      
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| Facebook Opens India Office To House More Sales And Operations Staff Posted: 15 Mar 2010 03:39 AM PDT
In the statement, the company says both offices will allow them to better serve its users, advertisers and developers. Facebook added that it is currently recruiting people to staff the online sales and operations teams for both office locations. The India-based support center will not be Facebook’s first international office – it already established a presence in Dublin, Ireland, just over a year ago (PDF). Don Faul, director of global online operations at Facebook, in the blog post said that having multiple support centers in a variety of time zones helps Facebook provide better round-the-clock, multi-lingual support. According to the company, seventy percent of the people using Facebook are now located outside the U.S. and are accessing the service from more than 70 languages. In India alone, Facebook says it has more than 8 million people actively connecting on Facebook A quick glance on Wikipedia teaches us that Hyderabad houses many computer software companies and consulting firms, so much so that the city is sometimes referred to as “Cyberabad”. Microsoft apparently has established its largest R&D campus outside the US in the ‘City of Pearls’, and other names on the list of companies with one or multiple offices in Hyderabad include Google, Alcatel Lucent, Amazon, HP, Dell, IBM, Motorola, Oracle and Deloitte.      
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| Hunch Takes $12 Million From Khosla Ventures, Adds Former Facebook CFO To Board Of Directors Posted: 14 Mar 2010 10:23 PM PDT
I spoke to cofounder Caterina Fake this evening about the round. Fake says that Hunch, which is less than a year old, now has lots of data to work with in making recommendations. In fact, she says, users have answered nearly 50 million questions on Hunch since launch, and the company can use that data to make better and better recommendations. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales joined the company’s board of directors in late 2009.      
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| Google Product Manager RJ Pittman Defects To Apple Posted: 14 Mar 2010 08:20 PM PDT
We’ve also received an email that Pittman sent to his coworkers and friends about the move (we’ve redacted a paragraph about hanging out with his family during his time off):
It’s unclear exactly what project Pittman is working on (his email only says that it’s a “pretty neat role for me”) and there’s little chance Apple’s PR team is going to give us any guidance. That said, my hunch is that he was recruited at the behest of the Lala team. Apple acquired the streaming music service in December, less than two months after Google and Lala worked in tandem to launch Google OneBox Music Search. Pittman was one of the key players on that project, and worked closely with Lala to get it off the ground. That said, Apple could be after his other talents — Pittman had previously presented at the launches of other search-related products, including a Google Labs event. And before that, he founded Groxis. We’d previously heard that Google and Apple had a gentlemen’s agreement not to poach each other’s employees. Obviously, that’s no longer the case.      
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| Web Publishing Startup DocStoc Now Offers Branded Viewers To Users Posted: 14 Mar 2010 08:00 PM PDT
The viewer itself is fairly sleek and resembles DocStoc’s normal document viewers. Users can directly download documents from the viewer and DocStoc will automatically convert any convert historical embeds with Docstoc. For example, all of the documents we’ve embedded with our TechCrunch DocStoc account will now include our branded viewer. Also included in the viewer is the ability to monetize on the publisher side. So publishers can choose to put streams of ads in the viewers, which is operated by DocStoc. DocStoc and the publisher will then share in any advertising revenue. Competitor Scribd launched branded viewers in October, but the feature appears to be only available to select publishers. The startup just launched a new marketplace for professional documents and with 3 million registered users, DocStoc is now profitable. Nazar says that the company is seeing 20 million uniques per month and is growing rapidly as a business focused site. Branded and customizable viewers works into this vision nicely. Here’s an example of the TechCrunch branded viewer: Apple vs HTC      
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| SpotRank Is Skyhook’s Intelligent Location Firehose. SimpleGeo Is The First To Wield. Posted: 14 Mar 2010 07:26 PM PDT
SpotRank gives developers access to hundreds of million of anonymous location entry points put into the Skyhook system. In fact, there are some 500 million points (100 meter “spots”) at the service’s launch. With this massive amount of data, developers can do things such as predict what locations will be hot on which nights, or predict traffic patterns. They have so much data because it’s not based around things like check-ins, which are hot right now on the consumer side of location, but rather everytime a device needs location for anything. The first partner signing up to use SpotRank is SimpleGeo. It seems like a perfect partnership. SimpleGeo provides back-end location services for many startups, so the more data, the better. And Skyhook’s data goes back several years, a nice addition for the young SimpleGeo. One thing SimpleGeo co-founder Matt Galligan is particularly excited about is that the SpotRank data is all time-coded. This will allow users of its service to do trending data. And SimpleGeo is working on making the data realtime. Other partners interested in signing up for SpotRank include the hot location startup Gowalla, and ShopKick, the soon-to-launch retail location check-in service (makers of the CauseWorld app that we’ve covered a few times). At some point tomorrow, the SpotRank data should be live on Skyhook’s site showing some SXSW data — which will no doubt be huge with the Location War going on. [photo: flickr/flattop341]      
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| Scamville Marches Onto The iPhone, Sneaks Back Into Facebook Posted: 14 Mar 2010 06:01 PM PDT In our Scamville series of posts last October we exposed the massive user fraud occurring Facebook and MySpace social games. Fake quizzes tied to long term mobile subscriptions, malware-laden toolbar downloads and other scams were the center of the controversy. The industry did a lot of talking in the wake of those posts and some long term changes have been made. For the most part, for example, Fake quizzes and the Video Professor scam are off Facebook (but see below on what’s still there). But now we’re seeing the same old scams hit the iPhone. And the same players, particularly OfferPal Media and SuperRewards and now Google, are powering those scams. Specifically we’re seeing SMS-subscription offers, which trick users into putting long term subscriptions on their mobile phones (or their parent’s mobile phones). New Offerpal CEO George Garrick promised to take a leadership position in cleaning up scammy ads. He said “It will be a fundamental part of the Offerpal culture that any offers we distribute meet stringent standards of integrity and quality, as specified by our partners, credible industry experts, and good old common sense.” We’ve seen very misleading SMS subscription ads on a variety of applications with Admob ads. We’ve reached out to Google for their comment. Tap Defense, an iphone game created by TapJoy, contained multiple version of the SMS subscription scam until today. The offers were being run by Offerpal. After we contacted Offerpal about this story the offers were removed and they gave us the following statement:
These types of offers are particularly insidious. Users are offered virtual currency in exchange for answering a quiz or some other seemingly harmless offer. But once they click through and awswer the quiz questions they’re told they need to enter their mobile phone number to get quiz results. Often there is fine print outlining the charges. But the already tiny print is completely unreadable on a mobile screen, making that disclosure meaningless even when it appears. SMS subscription scams are among the most lucrative offers to game publishers because users get a recurring fee of $10 – $25 per month until they are able to terminate the subscription. Many users never notice them, and those that do usually have a lot of trouble getting them shut off. Zwinky Back On Facebook:We’ve also seen offers for the Zwinky toolbar back on Facebook games. When Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said “I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away” he was talking about Zwinky, one of the most hated malware wrappers on the Internet. Too see it back on Facebook offers, through both Offerpal and SuperRewards (we saw offers from both companies on Fishworld by TallTreeGames) is disconcerting. More screenshots
     
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| Foursquare And Gowalla In A Dead Heat In The Location War Posted: 14 Mar 2010 05:37 PM PDT
In fact, Foursquare and Gowalla are basically in a statistical dead heat, at least in Austin. Multiple sources confirmed this information, and one actually showed me proof (which I was asked not to share). In other words, the war is still raging. So why did Business Insider draw the conclusion that Foursquare was “mopping the floor” with Gowalla? Because they looked at their “The Hive” feature which scans Twitter for links being shared by influencers, and noticed that many more are sharing Foursquare links. Of course, the main problem with this information is that it uses a small sample set of data. The other problem, as Business Insider notes in an update, is that Foursquare tends to have more “spam check-ins” — that is, fake check-ins. It’s important to remember that while Gowalla uses GPS data to verify a person is actually at the venue they say they are, Foursquare does not. That’s how this guy can check-in all over the world and steal mayorships for places he’s never been. The downside to Gowalla’s system is that sometimes it prevents you from being able to check-in at all, if they can’t verify you’re at a place. Or sometimes places are created in the wrong spot, so you can’t check-in some places even if you’re really there. To use my own small sample set of data, it seems that the people on my social graph is Austin are in fact using both Foursquare and Gowalla to check-in everywhere they go. I’ve also noticed that more seem to be sending check-in data to Twitter from Foursquare. But again, that doesn’t mean they’re not using both, just that they’ve decided to use only one to send out data to Twitter (which makes sense), and for whatever reason, most are choosing Foursquare for that. [image: DreamWorks Pictures]      
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| Google Is Working On Letting Users Link Their Gmail And Google Apps Accounts Posted: 14 Mar 2010 05:02 PM PDT
As today’s SXSW panel on Gmail came to a close, the panelists revealed one last juicy tidbit: they’re working to resolve the problems with multiple namespaces that users have to deal with. The team didn’t get specific — they simply repeated that they have to deal with the same problems, as they have “@google.com” accounts for work and standard Gmail accounts for personal use. And they know it’s a pain. There’s no time frame, and we have no idea what form the feature will take. But at least we know Google is working on it. Image by Helico
     
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| For Power Users, Gmail Set To Get Up To Speed Posted: 14 Mar 2010 04:34 PM PDT
When addressing the question, “why is Gmail slow?,” Perlow asked the audience to raise their hands if they thought Gmail was too slow. A solid number of people raised their hands. Perlow said that the reason everyone didn’t is because slowness is really only an issue for power users of the service — those with hundreds of thousands or even millions of messages. As someone approaching 100% usage of my Gmail inbox, I know this problem well. The good news is that not only is Google well aware of the problem, they are have a solution. While he didn’t elaborate on the backend changes that will be the solution, Perlow was confident enough to say, “we are fixing it.” Gmail currently has hundreds of millions of users (Google wouldn’t give the exact number), and it ranks as the number three email service in the world (behind Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail, both of which have been around longer than Gmail).      
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| Google May Start Pre-Testing New Buzz Features With Users Posted: 14 Mar 2010 04:08 PM PDT
Google Product Manager Todd Jackson said that Google had learned a lot from the incident, acknowledging that Google was in error when it made the assumption that users wanted to move their email and chat contacts over to their Buzz social graph, and auto-followed them. To make sure that kind of blunder doesn’t happen again, he revealed that Google may start pre-releasing new Buzz features to small subsets of users. So why exactly did Google Buzz launch with some key social features missing? Jackson said that while Google employees were testing out the product internally, they never had much desire to mute any of their coworkers, and that their email contact list closely matched the people they wanted to follow on Buzz. Obviously, that wasn’t true for most people once the product was released outside of the Googleplex. Which is why Google is considering pre-releasing new Buzz features to a few thousand opt-in users long before they’re rolled out to the public. That would stand in contrast to what Google does for many of its major product launches, as Jackson says that the company doesn’t like to preannounce things (it frustrates users when they can’t try the new release out for themselves). But in the case of Buzz, where changes can have a major impact with respect to user privacy, it sounds like Google may be making an exception. Jackson also noted that he had actually asked SXSW speaker danah boyd to give her keynote talk on privacy and publicity at Google headquarters.      
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| The Key To Gmail: Sh*t Umbrellas Posted: 14 Mar 2010 04:07 PM PDT
Product manager Todd Jackson made the humorous revelation when explaining how the Gmail team works as a group of about 100 people, the vast majority of which are engineers. “You can either be a shit funnel or a shit umbrella,” Jackson says. What he means by that is that as a product with hundreds of millions of users (and a company with thousands of employees) there’s a lot of stuff constantly being hurled at the team — as a shit umbrella, the product managers protect the engineers from getting distracted. It’s not enough to be a “shit funnel” where they would pass some of the junk down to engineers, they need to fully protect the engineers. This sentiment was echoed by Edward Ho, who is known as “Mr. Buzz,” as he’s the one who built up the Google Buzz team (a sub-unit of the Gmail team). Ho noted his hatred for unnecessary meetings, and has made sure that when the Buzz team needs to have them, they are based around demos, not talking about things. “It’s all about what you’ve done,” Ho says. Some other interesting notes about Gmail:
 [photo: flickr/atomicjeep]      
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| Go Try It On Will Be Your Wardrobe Consultant And Personal Stylist In One Posted: 14 Mar 2010 04:00 PM PDT
A finalist at the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, Go Try It On allows users to share photos of themselves and get honest opinions on their look before they go out. Once you upload a photo of yourself, you can add descriptions of the brands you are wearing and include context around the choice of the oufit (i.e. first date, black-tie gala). The site’s community can then comment on the site and provide feedback on fellow members’ outfits. Users have three options in terms of getting feedback: They can ask the community, keep their looks private, and just share with their friends, and finally, ask a brand if they are really looking for some savvy specific fashion advice. Eventually, Go Try It On will make money from affiliate fees; allowing users to tag their clothes with links to buy items at particular retailers. The site is similar in theory to Weardrobe, a site that allows users to share their “street-style” photos of outfits. Go Try It On differs slightly with its emphasis on the feedback from its community. The main barrier Go Try It On will face is gaining a trusted community; but with the participation of popular brands, the site could be able to gain a loyal following. One way the site could socialize users’ outfits further would be via Facebook Connect. But, Weardrobe saw success with its model and was able to gain a loyal following. The startup was selected as a fbFund winner and was recently acquired by Like.com.      
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| Facebook May Begin Allowing Developers To Store User Data For More Than 24 Hours Posted: 14 Mar 2010 02:30 PM PDT
Since that tweet, we’ve heard further whispers about a change to Facebook’s 24 hour policy retention, and that Facebook is already briefing developers on the upcoming changes. So why does this matter? Facebook has historically been quite restrictive with regard to what developers are allowed to do with user data; in particular, it only allows developers using Facebook Connect to store user data for 24 hours before they have to delete it, or ping Facebook’s servers for a refresh. There are some exceptions to that rule (you can get a sense for them here), but the majority of the ‘meaty’ content can’t be stored by developers. As a result, applications have to constantly connect with Facebook’s servers, which multiple developers we’ve spoken with say is very inefficient. If Facebook does extend that 24 hour window, developers would be able to do things that generally require locally stored data, like batch processing (this isn’t feasible now because the application would have to make an API call for each user). Likewise, if these applications had the data stored locally they would be able to boost load speeds because they wouldn’t have to wait for a call to Facebook’s servers after their applications loaded. Of course, such a change would also have privacy implications (we’ll wait until we have all the details before we analyze those). That said, we’ve also heard that many developers simply ignore some of Facebook’s data retention policies, in part because Facebook has a very hard time enforcing them. So it’s unclear just how big an impact this would have on the applications being developed.      
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| Eko: Mobile Banking for India’s “Dial-Up” Internet Posted: 14 Mar 2010 12:33 PM PDT
One of the most ambitious companies I met with during my last trip to India in November was Eko, a mobile banking company. There are a few SMS-based bank applications in India, but Eko differs because the phone isn't just another channel for the account—it is the account. You make payments and transfer money simply by dialing numbers. It's so simple, you don't even need to understand SMS to use it. It's an ingenious offering that doesn't try to be everything to everyone. It aims squarely at the unbanked—some 60% of India's huge population. For now, Eko is focusing on the 1,000 kilometer corridor between Delhi and Bihar. It's a textbook case of the how hard it is to build something incredibly simple within a sandbox of tight constraints—yet that simplicity is the same thing many would argue caused Twitter's 140-character missives to become so universal. There are no extra bells and whistles with Eko's service because there's no room for them, and at the end of the day, probably little need for them. The accounts are actually held by the State Bank of India, which insures up to 100,000 rupees per account, but Eko's customers don't ever go into banks. The "tellers" are the tiny corner groceries that dot every neighborhood and street corner in India's crammed urban areas and expansive rural areas. They are the center of commerce for those living on intermittent jobs, tips and handouts. These stores sell medications by the pill, shampoo in tiny sachets, cell phone minutes by the Paisa, and frequently extend credit when needed. Eko just seeks to give this already trusted, daily-visited vendor one more thing to sell. The interface is simple enough for anyone to use, regardless of language or literacy. Just like filling out a check requires you to enter the payee, Eko's founder Abhishek Sinha (pictured above amid his signage) wanted to come up with a cost-affective equivalent of an RSA token, so he created a paper version of it. Account holders get little booklets with pages of 11-digit codes. Seven digits of it are random numbers, with four randomly placed black marks, where the person enters his or her PIN. So even if the booklet is stolen, no one knows the PIN number and they still can’t access the account. There’s a VeriSign logo on the back of each booklet. Sinha reached out to VeriSign to see if they could come up with a better solution– instead they endorsed his. Freedom from always having to carry cash has obvious safety and empowerment implications. But this is a hard company to build out broadly in a country like India. The very strength of the model to truly reach the unbanked—turning those trusted, neighborhood grocers into tellers—inherently makes it costly and time-consuming to build because there are so many of them serving relatively small neighborhoods and villages. Eko has 30,000 account-holders right now. "I thought it'd be a million by now," Sinha says. "We've had a lot of false starts." There's a cost-time trade off. Since the service launched in late 2007, Eko was outsourcing the management of the grocers to a third party who sells multiple things through the channel already. But evangelizing the product takes more hand-holding, so the number of accounts wasn't growing. Since November, Eko has taken over the management of these grocer accounts assigning employees to each neighborhood and investing in street promotions, blaring its Bollywood-eque jingle extolling the virtues of banking and bedecking stores with in-store signage. Now new accounts are soaring. Eko had just 6,000 accounts before the switch in strategy. It added 10,000 in January and is now adding 10,000 every 15 days. But costs are going up too. Sinha, who made some money founding a previous company Six DEE Telecom Solutions, has self-funded the venture until now, and in Eko got a $1.78 million grant from the World Bank and The Gates Foundation. But that money will run out this year. He's working on raising a venture round now—and hoping to get a whopping $10 million. In his previous startup he says he was turned down by literally hundreds of VCs and says that this time it's going a lot better. Indeed, he jokes, it'd be hard for it to go worse. For one thing, he's learned a 60 page PowerPoint is overkill. Like VNL, the solar-powered, mobile equipment company that was 100% bootstrapped by the founder, this is one of those companies that is tricky to build in India. There's a huge social need and business opportunity if it hits scale, but there's also a lack of capital to support deals like this. A venture firm is more comfortable in the $3 million-to-$5 million range and a private equity firm would demand a lot more maturity of the business before it would invest. Had Sinha not invested his savings in the project, it likely wouldn't have gotten this far. I asked several times if Sinha was worried. What if he couldn't raise the money? He laughed every time I asked with a look in his eyes of "Do you know how hard it actually is to be an Indian tech entrepreneur?" He says he's been through enough to know there's always a way. (Regular readers know there's a word for that.)      
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