The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Live from Apple’s iPhone OS 4.0 announcement
- MusicMate Throws Digital Music Startup Jamendo A Lifeline
- Former Ask.com CEO Skip Battle First Outsider To Join LinkedIn Board
- Wall Street Journal Pro Edition Now Available For Consumers ($49 per Month)
- Yahoo Wants “It’s You” To Be Theirs
- Wi-LAN Files Patent Lawsuit Against Just About Every Portable Device Manufacturer
- Goodbye, Norma Jean: Apple’s “Get a Mac” Ads Are Over
- Salesforce Chatter Gets Its Own App Marketplace: ChatterExchange
- Can Someone At Google Please Turn The Gmail Spam Filter Down A Notch?
- Doublethink – The Digital Economy Bill Against The UK’s Digital Economy
- Ron Conway And The Technology Ecosystem
- Xmarks Begins Monetizing Bookmarks With Advertising And Analytics Platform SearchBoost
- FCC: Comcast Decision Casts a Shadow On Broadband Plan
- Mixpanel Lands Chinese Social Game Developer Five Minutes, Continues Strong Growth
- Groupon CEO On Attack Of The Clones [Video]
- Glam Media Brings iPad-Friendly Publishing Platform GlamMobile To The U.S.
- Reuters: FTC Lawyers To Recommend Blocking Google-AdMob Deal
- Loopt Updates Mobile Apps, Brings LooptPulse To BlackBerry
- Google Testing Google Voice Desktop App Internally
- Qlipso’s CEO Explains Why He Bought Veoh
- Foursquare Starts To Enforce The Rules, Cracks Down On Fake Check-Ins
- Google Continues To Embrace QR Codes, Integrates Them Into Its URL Shortener
- Review: The Apple iPad
- AdLib: Apple’s Secret Weapon For Making Better Web Apps For The iPad
- Hey, Twitter Startups: It’s Time To Stop Filling Holes and Start Building Killer Apps
| Live from Apple’s iPhone OS 4.0 announcement Posted: 08 Apr 2010 08:38 AM PDT It’s that time again, folks. The day that is looked upon with excitement by fan boys and cynics alike: it’s an Apple announcement day. Apple has already made it perfectly clear that today’s announcement will bring details about iPhone OS 4.0 – but what ever will they be? Will it multitask? Will there be interface overhauls? Will this new OS singlehandedly eliminate world hunger, disease, and flash floods? We’re in Cupertino to find out – join us after the jump for a constant stream of updates from our live blog. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>      
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| MusicMate Throws Digital Music Startup Jamendo A Lifeline Posted: 08 Apr 2010 08:27 AM PDT  Back in January, TechCrunch Europe broke the news that Luxembourg-based digital music startup Jamendo was running out of money fast and looking for an exit. Three months later, the company is announcing that European music broadcasting and technology company MusicMatic has purchased the entire stake investor Mangrove Capital Partners held in the startup. It's unclear exactly how big Mangrove's piece of the pie was, but I gather they were a majority shareholder in the company.
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| Former Ask.com CEO Skip Battle First Outsider To Join LinkedIn Board Posted: 08 Apr 2010 07:58 AM PDT
Battle currently serves on a number of boards of popular consumer internet companies including OpenTable, Expedia and Netflix. And Battle also advises several enterprise-focused companies, including Advent Software and Workday. Weiner tells me that Battle’s considerable experience advising both consumer focused and enterprise companies makes him the ideal choice to join LinkedIn. Weiner sees LinkedIn as a hybrid of the two, with its social network catering to everyday professionals and its enterprise licensing business developed for HR departments and recruiters to manage contacts. And Weiner says that LinkedIn will be adding new board members in the near future. With 65 million members, LinkedIn is steadily growing in terms of users but its fastest growth, says Weiner, is internationally. India, China, and Brazil are among the fastest growing countries in terms of userbases, and LinkedIn is trying to invest further in those markets, by opening up regional offices. In the past few months, LinkedIn has set up offices in India, Canada, Sydney, Toronto and is making plans to expand to more countries in the near future. And internally LinkedIn is growing as well. With 500 employees now, the company will be hiring engineers, sales reps and international staff over the coming year, hoping to reach 850 employees by the end of 2010. While LinkedIn is a strong IPO candidate, Hoffman told us at TechCrunch50 last fall that he’s not in any rush to go public. Later, Hoffman told Reuters that the company plans to pursue an IPO at some point, but not any time soon.The company was valued at around $1 billion in its last round of financing in 2008, and has been profitable since 2007. Weiner, who took the helm as CEO in June, tells me that almost all of the $100 million that LinkedIn has raised over the past few years is still in the bank. In fact the funds from the last round, $78 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, SAP Ventures, Goldman Sachs and McGraw Hill, haven’t been touched at all. For now, the company has been able to fund growth through operating cash flow. Weiner says that in the current position of the company, an IPO is an option but remaining independent is also a viable possibility. And Weiner isn’t ruling out the possibility of raising more funding in the future, adding that the best time to raise money is when you don’t need it. So where is the majority of LinkedIn’s cash flow coming from? Its enterprise licensing business, where HR reps and recruiters can license advanced LinkedIn platforms, is currently its largest revenue channel. Customers include 50 percent of the Fortune 100, so you can imagine that LinkedIn must be making solid money in sales from these companies. LinkedIn as a product has had a few interesting developments over the past few months. The network launched two-way integration with Twitter a few months ago and also launched an integration with Microsoft Outlook. And LinkedIn opened up its API, allowing startups like Tweetdeck, Posterous and Ribbit, to bring LinkedIn to their platforms. Weiner says this is all a greater strategy of bringing LinkedIn to any sites or platforms that people may use in their professional life. In fact, the Twitter integration has caused a substantial increase in status updates on the professional network. But noticeably missing from these integrations, is Facebook. With Facebook’s 400 million plus users, it would make sense for LinkedIn to tap into the world’s largest social network. At the moment, there are no public plans to do so. However, as IPO rumors continue to swirl, LinkedIn is focusing on growing its product and making it a better, more integrated offering, which seems like the smart thing to do. Weiner says that with 500 million professionals in the world right now, LinkedIn has just scratched the surface of what the network can do.      
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| Wall Street Journal Pro Edition Now Available For Consumers ($49 per Month) Posted: 08 Apr 2010 07:19 AM PDT
This morning, the WSJ Pro Edition became available to consumers as well, at the exact same price point ($49 per month) although existing WSJ.com subscribers can upgrade for a discounted rate (+$25 per month). What to expect: news coverage and analysis of some 2,000 WSJ journalists with more than 17,000 global business and news sources from Dow Jones Factiva and the network of Dow Jones Newswires. The company initially said that the site would be introduced to a broader audience in January 2010, so obviously there was quite some delay into getting it launched. According to the press release, the premium news sites comes with personalization options, powerful search capability and a team of dedicated editors. Here’s how Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief, Dow Jones & Company, and managing editor, The Wall Street Journal, pitches the site:
Do you think this offering is appealing enough for consumers?      
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| Yahoo Wants “It’s You” To Be Theirs Posted: 08 Apr 2010 06:56 AM PDT
The estimated cost: more than $100 million. CEO Carol Bartz at the time said that the $100 million global advertising campaign would not turn out to be a short-term marketing scheme, but a harbinger for Yahoo's new direction and its products going forward. Evidence to that statement is the fact that Yahoo last week filed for a U.S. trademark on the “It’s You” expression. The mark consists of standard characters, without claim to any particular font, style, size, or color. The description given is fairly broad – it reads:
Let’s see if Yahoo manages to secure a trademark for the phrase any time soon.      
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| Wi-LAN Files Patent Lawsuit Against Just About Every Portable Device Manufacturer Posted: 08 Apr 2010 05:33 AM PDT
According to its website, its portfolio today includes more than 800 patented inventions, either developed in-house or acquired or licensed from third parties. This morning, Wi-LAN announced that it is suing just about every mobile phone and laptop maker in the world in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, alleging that these companies are infringing Wi-LAN’s U.S. Patent No. 5,515,369 by making and/or selling various products enabled with Bluetooth technology. The list of companies that Wi-LAN is targeting is long, but just to give you an idea: it includes corporations like Apple, Sony, Toshiba, Dell, LG, Intel, Texas Instruments, Acer and Motorola. Wi-LAN will be represented in this action by law firm McKool Smith, the same firm that got VirnetX a $105.75 million patent infringement verdict in its lawsuit against Microsoft a couple of weeks ago. It’s also the same firm that in May 2009 helped i4i win a $200 million lawsuit against Microsoft (the awards were later lifted to $290 million after review). We’re trying to obtain more details about the case, but here’s the summary description of the patent, which is titled “Method for frequency sharing and frequency punchout in frequency hopping communications network”, for starters:
Click here for the entire document (PDF).      
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| Goodbye, Norma Jean: Apple’s “Get a Mac” Ads Are Over Posted: 08 Apr 2010 05:26 AM PDT  Of two things I was always sure: that people would not talk to me at parties and that Apple's "Get a Mac" ads would be around forever. I imagined showing my grandchildren the ads in 2040, explaining that once, a long time ago, the animated corpse of John Hodgman used to be a real man and now as he capers about on our 3D holoscreen talking about the PC's lack of a fission reactor power supply, gobbets of preserved flesh strung up like a puppet on a skeleton of titanium, well, you can still see some of that same schlubby good humor in that soulless meat pop that I enjoyed back in 2010, before the Happening. That will never happen, people. Apple is discontinuing the campaign. n an interview with AV Club Long said that Apple hasn't brought them back into the studio in a long while and that he believes they're going to "move on."
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| Salesforce Chatter Gets Its Own App Marketplace: ChatterExchange Posted: 08 Apr 2010 04:54 AM PDT
But Chatter, which launched in private beta earlier this year to 100 customers, is slowly growing up, adding more customers and developing its own ecosystem. Today, Salesforce is expanding the beta program and launching ChatterExchange, a marketplace for Chatter Apps. Leveraging what Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff calls the Cloud 2, Chatter is delivering realtime access to data and information, using social sources, such as YouTube and Twitter. And today, Salesforce is announcing that Chatter is now being used by 500 clients, with the company adding 400 more customers to the Chatter private beta group. Specifically, Salesforce extended the Chatter private beta to more than 250 Service Cloud 2 customers, because the company has seen positive results from integrating Chatter with its customer service software. Chatter will allows service agents monitor and stay on top of priority customer service castes, locate expertise for particular issues, conduct realtime case collaboration, manage service level agreements milestones and share information with sales reps to align case and opportunity updates across a business. Taking a page from the enormous success of Salesforce’s App Exchange, the company is now creating a Chatter-centric marketplace for third-party apps, called ChatterExchange. A few weeks ago, Salesforce opened up Chatter’s API to developers so they could build compelling apps to compliment the usage of the collaboration platform. More than 12 Chatter-Enabled partner applications are now available in the ChatterExchange on AppExchange 2, including: Appirio, CA, Docusign, Echosign, Fairsail, FinancialForce.com, Genius.com, Job Partners, Jobscience, ServiceMax, Xactium and more. Salesforce has also integrated 15 Force.com labs apps into the ChatterExchange, including Chatter Timeline, Chatter Live Tag Cloud, Chatter + Google Alerts, and more. Prices of apps range from free to $10 on average. Chatter itself will retain the same functionality. Chatter gives you a dashboard of reports and approvals, workflow, tasks and calendar and will let you see updates from people, files, applications, HR, and will integrate other feeds (Dow Jones, Thompson Reuters). Similar to Facebook, employees can create business profiles with professional information like personal contact data, area of expertise, and work history. Searching other people’s profiles, colleagues can quickly identify individuals who are relevant to their enterprise needs. Users can post status updates to share communications, files and links around a project, sales deal or customer support case. And users can see realtime feeds of personalized updates from people, applications and documents. With Chatter, all status updates from a customer’s Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or custom Force.com application are posted to the feed. So apps actually have the ability to post status updates, similar to a person, creating an actual ecosystem around apps and employees. Any app listed on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange will be able to stream updates to the Chatter feed. Since they are delivered on the Force.com platform, developers can build or enhance cloud applications to use Chatter's profiles, realtime streams, and APIs. Later this year, Salesforce will end its private beta period and all 72,500 Salesforce.com customers will receive Chatter at no additional charge. It comes as no surprise that Salesforce is creating an ecosystem around Chatter; its AppExchange has done phenomenally well and has even served as a model for outside enterprise products. For example, Google Apps just launched a marketplace for its productivity suite that seems to take a page from Salesforce. While Chatter looks and feels like a social network, Benioff has been fairly adamant that Chatter is best characterized as a collaboration platform, not a social network. In fact, Salesforce doesn’t see its main competitors as Facebook, Twitter or even enterprise friendly social networks like Jive or Bantam Live. Instead, the company believes Chatter will pose a serious threat to Microsoft’s Sharepoint and IBM’s LotusNotes.
     
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| Can Someone At Google Please Turn The Gmail Spam Filter Down A Notch? Posted: 08 Apr 2010 03:14 AM PDT Warning: this is sort of a personal pet peeve of late, so if you only care about reading general tech news, you might wanna skip this one. I’ve been a happy Gmail user for years, and never had any complaints about its ability to separate legitimate emails from spam. Nevertheless, I’ve made a habit out of regularly checking my spam folder out of fear of missing important emails, even though I used to have to recover only one or maybe two messages per month. Now I’m glad I made a habit out of doing that. Since about a week and a half ago, I’ve noticed that legitimate emails are being marked as spam at increasing rates, to the degree where I have to check my spam folder as often as my regular inbox in order not to miss breaking news from sources or via our contact page, or even emails from TechCrunch colleagues. As you can tell from the screenshot above (click through for a bigger version of that image), most of the emails in my spam folder this morning are messages I want to read or scan at least. Most of them do not contain more links than emails that hit my inbox, some come from people who I’ve been receiving emails from for years, and one was event sent by my new TC colleague Evelyn Rusli … from her Gmail account. I’ll save you the trouble of trying to count: 6 out of 31 emails in that screenshot were actually spam, the rest were legitimate messages. Needless to say, if you work for a blog like the one you’re reading now, this is really bad. I’ve asked my Twitter followers if they are Gmail users and have also noticed this trend, and from what I can gather I’m far from alone in this (see responses here, here and here), although some say this started occurring for them months and not weeks ago – and some haven’t noticed anything strange whatsoever. Either way, I contacted Google about the problem too, and a company spokesperson said:
From what I understand, Google’s internal statistics do not suggest that there’s an increase in legitimate emails being filtered out, nor is there any indication of an increase in false positives (which I don’t have a problem with). Basically, they seem to suggest it’s not a general issue and that some emails are simply falling through the cracks in my case. Frankly, I doubt it, based on my conversations about this on Twitter and the fact that the issue popped up one bad day and hasn’t gone away since. The main problem is that there’s no way for me to manipulate the automated filter – Google simply suggests creating filters per message / contact or to constantly add people to my Contacts list, which is virtually impossible at this scale. So I guess I’m stuck with checking two folders instead of one until Google makes another adjustment in my favor. Has the spam filter being overactive for your Gmail account as well of late?      
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| Doublethink – The Digital Economy Bill Against The UK’s Digital Economy Posted: 08 Apr 2010 01:40 AM PDT  In 1938 Winston Churchill made a radio speech which was broadcast to America, describing what was happening as Nazi forces spread across Europe. "The stations of uncensored expression are closing down; the lights are going out; but there is still time for those to whom freedom and parliamentary government mean something, to consult together."Perhaps if he'd been around today and au fait with the Internet he might have used the same phrase to describe what is going on in legislatures across Europe. Tonight the UK Labour governement, together with the Conservative arty, forced through the controversial Digital Economy Bill. The Bill now gets a 'third reading' in the House of Lords, which means it is almost certain to become law. The government did a deal with the Conservative leadership, which got a number of provisions it didn't like removed. In other words, it was, to use an old British phrase, a "stitch up." 
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| Ron Conway And The Technology Ecosystem Posted: 08 Apr 2010 12:29 AM PDT
Why is that? Part of it is because Ron is the most prolific angel investor in the business. And also one of the most successful. The sheer volume of deals he’s done over the last 20-30 years, investing in 3-4 startups per month, is staggering. And his hit rate is so high, particularly for the massive win startups, that very few investors can come close to the success rate he’s had. But a more important reason why he’s the center of startup life in Silicon Valley is the fact that he works so long and so hard at what he does. Ron could have retired long, long ago. But he works harder than most people I know. And most of the time he’s not working for himself. He’s simply helping out other people. Andreessen Horowitz partner Ben Horowitz wrote a blog post earlier today talking about why Ron Conway is so crucial to our community and ecosystem. Make sure to read the whole post. Horowitz gives specific examples of how Ron operates, and says these are the key factors to how Ron does business:
I’ve seen Ron “doing business” in this way too many times to count. Just one example: One time he managed to sell a startup to an anxious buyer before his angel investment in the startup closed. Ron got nothing in the deal, and was happy to do it. I once asked him why he wasn’t upset that the company didn’t figure out a way to close his investment before selling. His answer: “The timing didn’t make sense, and it’ll come back to me eventually in goodwill and future deals.” The truth is I have no idea why Ron continues to work so hard and give so much back to the tech community. But we’re lucky he does, and I hope he keeps on doing it for a long, long time. If you’re a startup just getting off the ground and you want a serious competitive advantage, you pitch Ron and his team. If he invests you’ve got a force of nature on your side and a real advantage over the startups that he passed on. The real test will come a few years later, once you’ve made it big and your startup is a success. When Ron calls asking for a favor, make sure to take that call. Because it’s the least you can do.      
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| Xmarks Begins Monetizing Bookmarks With Advertising And Analytics Platform SearchBoost Posted: 07 Apr 2010 11:55 PM PDT
So Xmarks aggregates and analyzes over a billion bookmarks to create web site ratings and reviews via on its platform. Reviews are added by Xmarks users, at a rate of 200,000 web site reviews per month. Currently, if the service is installed on a user’s computer, Xmarks will show a ranking and starred review curated from Xmarks’ database of reviewed URLs and sites next to the search result on any Google or Bing search. With SearchBoost, Xmarks will add the ranking and starred review next to ads within these search results. This feature is live in Xmarks for Firefox, and is coming soon to Xmarks for IE and Xmarks for Chrome. Unfortunately, the feature’s technology doesn’t work with Safari. So does SearchBoost promise higher click through rates? James Joaquin, CEO of Xmarks, says yes. In a study of over 200,000 users, Xmarks found that SearchBoost increased pay-per-click performance by 15%. Joaquin says that these ads are more trusted because of the ratings and starred reviews, so consumers tend to click on these ads vs. normal search ads that appear in Google or Bing searches. Along with SearchBoost, advertisers will get an advanced analytics platform that gives them insight into the click through behavior and performance of both paid and organic search results. Using anonymous data from Xmarks’ community of four million plus users, Xmarks will show advertisers how many people have bookmarked their site, how many bookmarks competitors have, how may impressions, clicks their advertisements and URLs receive within the bookmarking community. Additionally, the analytics platform will show advertisers which search terms are delivering the most clicks across both paid and organic search results and more metrics. And Xmarks is now seeing an average of 15 million daily searches and 450 million searches per month. SearchBoost, which includes the search ad offering and the analytics, has four levels of pricing. Level 1 will see you back $29 per month and allows for a maximum of 250 clicks on your ad, and a maximum of 25 different reports (each URL or search term is one report). Level 3 is $99 per month, offers 10,000 monthly clicks and 1000 reports. And Xmarks will also be offering a customized enterprise plan as well. The product is appealing for advertisers, especially if it improves click through rates on ads within Google and Bing. And the price seems affordable for small businesses. But the caveat is that you’ll only be gaining data from Xmarks’ 4 million plus users.
Founded by Mitch Kapor and Todd Agulnick, Xmarks competes with other popular social bookmarking applications like Delicious and StumbleUpon, which also offers a paid advertising service. Xmarks has raised a total of $8 million in funding.      
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| FCC: Comcast Decision Casts a Shadow On Broadband Plan Posted: 07 Apr 2010 08:06 PM PDT The FCC acknowledged on their official blog today that the court’s decision on the Comcast deal could hamper their national broadband plan. General Counsel of the FCC, Austin Schlick says that the court’s ruling that the FCC does not have the authority to enforce net neutrality was an “important ruling.” “It undermines the legal approach the FCC adopted in 2005 to fulfill its statutory duty of being the cop-on-the-beat for 21st Century communications networks.” This week, a panel of judges ruled unanimously that the regulatory body did not have the power to order Comcast to stop interfering with consumers’ access to BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer services. Schlick says the ruling will have no effect “on most” of the FCC’s national broadband plan, which includes some 200 recommendations— but the decision could impact critical components. “Yesterday's decision may affect a significant number of important Plan recommendations. Among them are recommendations aimed at accelerating broadband access and adoption in rural America; connecting low-income Americans, Native American communities, and Americans with disabilities; supporting robust use of broadband by small businesses to drive productivity, growth and ongoing innovation; lowering barriers that hinder broadband deployment; strengthening public safety communications; cybersecurity; consumer protection, including transparency and disclosure; and consumer privacy. The Commission must have a sound legal basis for implementing each of these recommendations. We are assessing the implications of yesterday's decision for each one, to ensure that the Commission has adequate authority to execute the mission laid out in the Plan.” The FCC unveiled it’s broadband plan in March, announcing the goal of connecting 100 million homes to broadband by 2020.      
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| Mixpanel Lands Chinese Social Game Developer Five Minutes, Continues Strong Growth Posted: 07 Apr 2010 06:15 PM PDT
The biggest news: Mixpanel recently signed major Chinese social game company Five Minutes, which is behind the hit cross-platform game Happy Farm and has 23 million daily users across all of its games. But Mixpanel doesn’t just do games — other customers include Slide, Justin.tv, and Posterous. Doshi says the amount of data flowing through Mixpanel is rapidly increasing, with “hundreds of millions” of datapoints a month (he declined to give exact figures, but did provide the graph below). Doshi says that much of Mixpanel’s success stems from its funnel analytics, which allow developers to determine where in their application’s flow users are dropping off, so they can optomize accordingly. Doshi explains that some other services offer funnel analytics as well, but that Mixpanel visualizes it in a way that has struck a chord with developers. Mixpanel launched out of the Y Combinator program last summer, and got another major vote of confidence in February, when it received seed funding from PayPal and Slide founder Max Levchin and Bebo and Birthday Alarm founder Michael Birch — both of whom have extensive experience in analytics.      
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| Groupon CEO On Attack Of The Clones [Video] Posted: 07 Apr 2010 05:59 PM PDT Groupon’s Andrew Mason is well aware of all the Groupon-esque sites but he says he’s picking his battles: “At first it was definitely really weird, just because my motivation as an entrepreneur, internet person, is so different from the type of person that would go and copy something exactly… The first couple of times we saw these sites it would be just people copying our exact design…to a tee everything that we were doing. When we made changes, a couple of days later they would make those changes. Like even stupid things we were doing, like we could have run a deal on porn and there probably would have been 80 other sites that would have run a deal on porn the next day. It was strange. After awhile you just shut it out and go on doing what you do. Mason says he’s focused on growing the company with plans to be in 100 cities by the end of this year. Groupon will also break up larger cities into subareas. For example, the suburbs surrounding Chicago or the smaller cities in the Bay area will soon each have their own daily deal. He did not explain how Groupon will continue to leverage and work with social media tools, but he did mention that he’s very “excited about some of the stuff that Facebook’s announcing later this month.”      
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| Glam Media Brings iPad-Friendly Publishing Platform GlamMobile To The U.S. Posted: 07 Apr 2010 04:59 PM PDT
For advertisers, Glam is offering engaging ad formats on a variety of devices, including formats customized for the iPad without the use of Flash. For publishers, Glam is helping provide additional waysto connect with audiences on the go. Specifically, Glam sees the iPad as an opportunity to bring magazine-like glossy content to the device (a strategy that many online sites and magazines are taking). The GlamMobile Publisher Platform includes specially formatted mobile sites for content partners, mobile apps for devices like the iPad and iPhone and GlamMobile Display Ads that are optimized for mobile devices and socials adds, using Glam’s Tinker to target social conversions via Facebook and Twitter. It’s wise for Glam to try to make its publisher network cross platform with a mobile offering. It’s sure to draw even more traffic to Glam’s sites. Today, the Glam Vertical Network has more than 500,000 articles and posts, more than 100,000 videos and upwards of 20 million micro-blog posts.      
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| Reuters: FTC Lawyers To Recommend Blocking Google-AdMob Deal Posted: 07 Apr 2010 04:26 PM PDT
According to a Wall Street Journal report yesterday, the FTC started assembling a legal team to prepare to block the deal. And the FTC is soliciting statements from the same competitors that Google is lobbying, in an effort to get these companies to testify on the regulatory ramifications of the AdMob acquisition. Of course, Google claims that AdMob is only one of the many ad networks are competing in the arena and the mobile advertising market is still so young that it’s still unclear who the leader is in the space right now. And of course, Google is quick to point to Apple’s recent acquisition of mobile ad network Quattro Wireless. It appeared that Google had high ambitions for AdMob, which was one of Google’s largest acquisitions since it bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in 2008. The rise of mobile advertising attracted Google to this space and with the acquisition of AdMob, the search giant could gain a valuable revenue channel. AdMob, which some say is approaching a $100 million business within the next three years, could be an extremely profitable source, especially when the platform is plugged into AdWords and DoubleClick.      
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| Loopt Updates Mobile Apps, Brings LooptPulse To BlackBerry Posted: 07 Apr 2010 04:25 PM PDT
LooptPulse, which was first announced last fall, is Loopt’s discovery feature. If there are a lot of Loopt users checking in at a nearby event or restaurant, the service will recommend it to you, even if your friends aren’t necessarily there. Loopt generates some of these recommendations using data from its partners like Zagat, CitySearch, Bing, and Tastingtable (recently added partners include SonicLiving, Zvents, and Metromix). Loopt has been around for much longer than hot location startups like Foursquare and Gowalla, and has more registered users than either of them. But in some senses it’s playing catchup — for years Loopt was a passive service that constantly tracked your location as opposed to the check-in services that have recently caught on. Loopt has now shifted its model to compete more directly with these services, and its Pulse discovery features go beyond what Foursquare currently offers. Disclosure: Loopt offers a branded TC version of the service here</a.      
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| Google Testing Google Voice Desktop App Internally Posted: 07 Apr 2010 03:57 PM PDT
Gizmo5 fills some of the holes in the Google Voice product, particularly providing an endpoint for calls. Currently Google Voice users must assign their Google Voice phone number to an actual phone to make and receive calls. Google never commented on how they might use Gizmo5’s technology. But we’ve confirmed that they have now built a Google Voice desktop application to make and receive calls. From a user perspective, this will let Google Voice users take calls right from their desktop. When will the new application launch? Possibly soon. Earlier this week Google started testing the application internally. This “dogfooding” of products (as in “eating your own dog food”) is a step that Google and many other companies take before launching something publicly, to iron out any problems that pop up.      
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| Qlipso’s CEO Explains Why He Bought Veoh Posted: 07 Apr 2010 02:39 PM PDT The long, sad tale of video site Veoh seemed to be in its final chapter when founder Dmitry Shapiro declared the company was filing for bankruptcy back in February. The copyright litigation with Universal Music Group proved to be too costly and too distracting, even though Veoh won a summary judgement in its favor. But hours before Veoh was actually about to file the bankruptcy papers, an unlikely suitor appeared: a seed-stage startup in Los Angeles called Qlipso. Qlipso ended up buying the assets of Veoh, including its Website, filtering, recommendation, and backend technology, video library, advertising deals, and still-substantial audience. ComScore estimates that 14 million people a month still visit Veoh. Qlipso, on the other hand, is a startup developing a virtual room platform where people can share videos and other Flash media, while chatting via text, video chat or avatars. I spoke with Qlipso CEO Jon Goldman by phone today to ask what possessed him to do the deal. “This is an exotic venture strategy,” he admits, “Qlipso is an early-stage R&D company transforming into an business with scale and audience.” Qlipso gains an instant audience, a better-known brand, and relationships with advertisers. Goldman thinks the deal will help to establish Qlipso faster than he could have done on his own. “I think we have accelerated this by years,” he says. “We have a 5-person sales team in NY, a large audience, it is completely transformational.” If Veoh had gone ahead and shut down the site, he notes, there would have been no deal. Goldman would not disclose the price, but the asset sale was funded by Qlipso’s main investor Jerusalem Venture Partners. “This is a significant bet for an early stage venture capital fund,” is all Goldman will say. Over the years, they’ve put a few million dollars into Qlipso, and injected multiple times their previous investment to finance the acquisition. Part of the cash infusion will also go towards the capital required to keep operating the site. Whatever the acquisition price, it was a fraction of the $70 million investors as varied as Michael Eisner, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, Intel, and Spark Capital put into Veoh over the years. The proceeds will now be split up among creditors and, if anything is left, the investors. The Qlipso virtual rooms will become incorporated into the Veoh site, which will also be used to distribute more individual downloads of the Qlipso software. Watching videos on Veoh will become more social. You will be able to invite your friends to watch videos in a virtual room, or join existing rooms. Whether or note people actually want to watch videos this way remains to be seen, but now Qlipso has a large audience to test its technology on. Veoh’s demographics are also skewed towards young males who like sci-fi and anime, a group Qlipso is targeting. Also reached by phone Veoh founder Shapiro says, “I am pleased to see that Veoh wil be in operation.” How much do you think Veoh was worth?      
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| Foursquare Starts To Enforce The Rules, Cracks Down On Fake Check-Ins Posted: 07 Apr 2010 02:30 PM PDT
The move has been a long time coming. Foursquare cheating, which we’ve discussed before, has been around since the service launched. Until recently it didn’t really matter — you might claim a mayorship or two, but they weren’t worth anything so nobody cared. But now that some venues are actually starting to offer discounts and promotions to mayors, these rewards are about more than just bragging rights. Here’s how Foursquare is describing the system in its post:
So why didn’t Foursquare roll out a more restrictive model long ago? The company wanted to avoid the issues its competitor Gowalla has run into: namely, that phone GPS systems aren’t always that accurate (or even working indoors), which could prevent people from checking in at places there were actually at. That kind of false negative is extremely frustrating for users. Foursquare’s compromise is to only attempt to verify your location when it comes to rewarding points and badges — you’ll always be able to tell your friends where you are.      
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| Google Continues To Embrace QR Codes, Integrates Them Into Its URL Shortener Posted: 07 Apr 2010 01:02 PM PDT
Google has made it clear that it’s a big proponent of QR codes, despite the fact that few people in the United States have used them (I’ve never felt compelled to use one myself, but they’re huge in Japan). QR codes are currently the only effective way to link to an app on Android Market, and Google has mailed QR code stickers to thousands of local businesses across the country (it lets customers quickly look the business up on Google’s business directory). Facebook is also experimenting with QR codes for its location services. For those looking to try out the new feature, the Goo.gl homepage still says that the service is “currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use”, but it’s plenty easy to start using it yourself. It’s officially available through Google Toolbar and FeedBurner, and you can also find various bookmarklets and browser extensions that let you generate a Goo.gl link.      
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| Posted: 07 Apr 2010 12:12 PM PDT  In these times we have little opportunity for mystical religious experience. By "religious" I mean the feeling that something exciting is about to happen - whether after death or immediately, through the intercession of a divine being, a miracle in life. The neophilic mind has craved magic, craved the new and spectacular, since prehistory. Man deified thunder, worshiped the cave bear. Over time we have refined the impulse; we have learned to associate it with places and things of our own creation, which provoke the mystical feeling in themselves and in what they represent. Cathedrals were at once a site for worship and a site for awe, and our better natures were expressed in them for centuries. These days a small minority of us, mostly situated in the developed world, have replaced the awe of religious experience with the awe of technological advancement. To further that line of thinking, the fanboy is, it can be argued, a new form of religious supplicant and the fanboy's most prominent church is the Church of Apple. 
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| AdLib: Apple’s Secret Weapon For Making Better Web Apps For The iPad Posted: 07 Apr 2010 10:37 AM PDT Did you give in and buy yourself an iPad? Go grab it. If you don’t own one, just reach your arms out, conjure up a temporary air of smugness, and play along. Now take your iPad (or your imaginaryPad, or what have you) and pop into Safari. Hit the bookmarks button, and then tap “iPad User Guide”. Explore a bit. Notice the dual-pane view with independent scrolling; notice the elasticity of the views. Notice that, outside of the URL bar up at the top, it looks and feels just like a native application. Half of the hacky-type people reading this article have probably already bailed to go tear apart the source code at this point. Why? Because Web Apps don’t really work like this; HTML, CSS, and the standard javascript libraries really just don’t provide any of this functionality. It looks like Apple has something up their sleeves to make iPad Web Apps a bit more.. app-like. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>      
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| Hey, Twitter Startups: It’s Time To Stop Filling Holes and Start Building Killer Apps Posted: 07 Apr 2010 10:27 AM PDT There are thousands of apps built on top of Twitter, but are any of them a true killer app that could give rise to an entirely new sub-industry? Venture capitalist, and Twitter investor, Fred Wilson doesn’t think so. While Twitter desktop clients, mobile apps, photo uploading services, and URL shorteners have all made Twitter what it is today, he points out:
Wilson is still waiting for the equivalent of the desktop publishing startups which defined the early Mac computer or Lotus Notes for the PC. The time for filling holes is over, he suggests. Twitter is now big enough for some killer apps to emerge and create entire new businesses. Wilson rattles off some obvious (to him) opportunities to create new Twitter startups around social gaming, verticals like finance and movies, enterprise apps, information discovery, and analytics. Of course, many startups are already tackling some of these areas, which is why Wilson thinks the real killer apps will be less obvious until they hit us. What will those killer apps be?      
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Professional social network 
Back in October 2009, Dow Jones 
In September 2009, 
When Salesforce’s enterprise-friendly social collaboration platform 
In the 
Following a 
The FTC is reportedly gearing up to challenge the Google-AdMob deal, due to anti-trust regulations The search giant acquired the popular mobile advertising network for 
Location-based social network 
Last November 
Last December, Google 
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