The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- SecondMarket: $70 Million In Private Shares Traded In March
- Search Growth Slows In The U.S.
- Nokia Buys Geographic Search Technology Company MetaCarta
- Research In Motion Wants To Get Into Your Car With QNX Software Acquisition
- Citizen Journalism Platform AllVoices Sets Up News Desks In 30 Cities Around The World
- Check Out Tagxedo, A Ridiculously Cool Word Cloud Generator
- Kontagent Raises $1 Million For Facebook Analytics Platform
- His Dashboard App For iPad Rejected, Developer Publishes Code On GitHub
- Netflix Renews Agreements With Universal, Twentieth Century Fox
- Full iPhone OS 4 Event Plus Bonus Footage
- Apple Gives Adobe The Finger With Its New iPhone SDK Agreement
- Cloud Computing? Microsoft Office Is Not All In
- Gmail Launches Sneak Peek And Nested Labels. You’ll Want To Check These Out Right Now.
- The TechCrunch Kegerator
- Next Jump Takes Over MasterCard’s New Rewards Program, MasterCard MarketPlace
- Yahoo Loses CTO Ari Balogh
- Twitter: 60 Percent Of Registered Accounts Are From Outside The U.S.
- Marc Benioff’s Secret Sales Weapon: Chatter On The iPhone (Video)
- Jobs Takes A Few Pot Shots At Google, Rubs Salt Into The Wound With ‘iAds’
- Review: HTC HD2 On T-Mobile
- Steve Jobs On Why The iPhone Doesn’t Allow Unsigned Apps: They Don’t Want A Porn Store
- Everything You Need To Know About iPhone OS 4.0
- GameCenter: Apple Looks To Emulate Microsoft’s Success With Xbox Live-like Video Game Community For iPhone
- Apple Announces iAd Mobile Advertising Platform
- iBooks Is Coming To The iPhone
| SecondMarket: $70 Million In Private Shares Traded In March Posted: 09 Apr 2010 08:32 AM PDT Transactions of private-company stock on SecondMarket nearly doubled in March, rising to $70 million from $43.8 million in February. It is the highest amount that has ever been traded on SecondMarket. The stats are in its March report, which you can download here. A full 41% of the transactions were sales of Facebook stock, compared to 48% in January. We’ve reported that these sales are being completed for as high as $40 per share (or a $17.6 billion valuation). Despite the demand, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg does not appear to be in any rush to take the company public. MedeAnalytics, a healthcare performance analytics company, saw 14% of the transactions, LinkedIn took 10% of the transactions, with Zynga taking 7% of the sales, and Twitter and LifeLock each taking 4% of the total. eSolar, Slide, Kayak, and Serious Materials were also seeing transactions in March. The transactions concentrated mainly in consumer products and services (72%), media and entertainment (14%) and IT services (14%). In terms of unmet bids, Facebook led the way with one-third of all buyside demand followed by Twitter (6%), LinkedIn (5%) and CraigsList (4%). On the seller side, ex-employees of start-ups continue to make up the bulk of parties who are selling shares, but the percentage of current employees and investors selling shares rose slightly in March.      
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| Search Growth Slows In The U.S. Posted: 09 Apr 2010 07:26 AM PDT Are the search industry’s best days behind it? The growth in the number of U.S. search queries is slowing down dramatically. According to the latest numbers from comScore’s qSearch estimates, overall search volume growth slowed down to 7.6 percent in March, 2010 from 10.4 percent growth in February, 2010 and 33.1 percent growth in March, 2009. Part of the reason for the slowdown is “partly due to challenging comps” which will continue through May, writes Barclays Capital Internet analyst Douglas Anmuth. But the slowdown may also be an indication that the search industry is maturing, and the next leg of growth may not kick in until people start searching on their mobile phones in a significant way (Steve Jobs says that won’t happen) or something else gives people a reason to search even more than they already do. There are only so many searches you can do in a day, and many people are already hitting their saturation point. Here are the annual growth rates for select months going back a year, which really shows the drop-off: March, 2009: 33.1% Even though overall search growth is declining, Bing is still the fastest-growing search engine, with 51 percent growth in March, followed by Google with 10 percent growth. Both our outpacing the market. Yahoo, on the other hand, saw search volume decline 11 percent annually, although it did gain a tenth of a percent share since February. So its declines may be stabilizing. The table below shows the market share for each of the five largest search engines in the U.S., along with their monthe-over-month and year-over-year changes. Google actually dropped 0.3 percent from February, 2010, while Bing and Yahoo together gained as much. U.S. Core Search Share, March 2010 (Source: comScore qSearch)
Photo credit: Flickr/Robert Thomson      
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| Nokia Buys Geographic Search Technology Company MetaCarta Posted: 09 Apr 2010 06:31 AM PDT
MetaCarta was founded in 2001, is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and employs over 30 people. MetaCarta’s solutions enable companies to bridge the gap between content and maps. Its products fall into four major categories: the MetaCarta Platform, Geographic Data Modules, GeoWeb Applications, and Hosted Content Collections. To see an example of what MetaCarta’s technology is capable of, see NewsMap, a hosted map mashup / extension that enables Web publishers to dynamically display maps that show the places mentioned in their news articles. Or check out its GeoSearch News service, which aggregates news from thousands of sources and displays a map of the locations mentioned in stories. MetaCarta also has a partnership with Microsoft in place to provide its Geographic Search and Referencing Platform to deliver map-based local news within the Microsoft Vine service. For Nokia, this is the second small acquisition in two weeks – it recently picked up mobile Web browser company Novarra. Its purchase of MetaCarta is another testament to the Finnish mobile giant’s focus on location and navigation-based services for its wide range of handsets that find their way into the hands of customers all over the globe.      
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| Research In Motion Wants To Get Into Your Car With QNX Software Acquisition Posted: 09 Apr 2010 06:25 AM PDT
RIM will also be working to expand QNX’s technology in the automotive markets. The Canadian mobile device manufacturer just acquired BlackBerry-app maker Viigo a few weeks ago. QNX Software Systems, based in Ottawa, Ontario, was founded in 1980 and acquired by Harman in 2004. One of its flagship products is the Neutrino platform OS, which the company says is deployed across multiple business sectors including automotive, industrial, telecommunications, medical, defense, and aerospace. QNX recently announced that its technology has been licensed for more than 17 million in-vehicle systems worldwide, an increase of 130 percent since 2008.      
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| Citizen Journalism Platform AllVoices Sets Up News Desks In 30 Cities Around The World Posted: 09 Apr 2010 05:57 AM PDT
AllVoices allows anyone to contribute blog posts, images, videos and other observations, on local and global news. The site’s proprietary technology (AllVoices has filed for three patents) will tag, rank and sort news based on a global, regional, country and city pages and will determine what is breaking news and popular (in terms of phases of a news cycle). The system will also filter for spam, police the site, fact check each user report for credibility and assign a credibility rating to each news report. The site also lets users file reports from their cell phone via MMS and SMS, which is helpful to users in countries where computer usage is low but mobile device usage is high. The end goal is to provide a 360 degree view of reported news that also has a multimedia view of what’s happening in the world. AllVoices, which recently raised $3 million in funding, is seeing significant use traction and is even approaching the traffic of more established sites like CNN’s iReport. The site currently has a community of 300,000 citizen reporters and is seeing close to 5 million unique visitors per month. The brainchild of Amra Tareen, AllVoices was launched by Tareen and her co-founders in 2008. A former VC at Sevin Rosen Funds, Tareen recognized the importance of the citizen voice in everyday news in 2005 when she was an aid worker in Pakistan following the catastrophic earthquakes that caused massive damage and deaths in the country. The startup will also be focusing on expanding coverage in the U.S. in the near future.      
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| Check Out Tagxedo, A Ridiculously Cool Word Cloud Generator Posted: 09 Apr 2010 05:36 AM PDT There’s a new word cloud generator in Web town, and it’s a pure delight if you’re into visualization technology, words or better yet, both. Its hard-to-remember name is Tagxedo and it was built by developer Hardy Leung and released just a couple of days ago. Leung says the inspiration for the app is Wordle, a word cloud generation tool we’ve covered once or twice in the past. Well, good news for Leung: even Wordle creator Jonathan Feinberg, who recently left his regular job at IBM Research to go work on Google Books, says Tagxedo is not so much an alternative as the next generation of Wordle, and a “leap forward” in both the layout algorithms and the design of the tweaking interface. I concur – Tagxedo’s downright amazing. You can use the app to create visually stunning word clouds like the ones I embedded in this post by inserting words (e.g. speeches, news articles, letters, slogans, themes, and so on). You can do so by uploading a document, entering a URL or simply by pasting text into the appropriate field. Tagxedo will size words appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurence within the body of text, leaving out small words like “is”, “are”, “do”, etc. With just one click, you can rotate the cloud, modify its colors and font, and also alternate between themes and shapes as you please. You can even upload your own images and have the word cloud assume the shape of the image (e.g. Twitter), although Leung admits that the quality of the end result depends a lot on which images gets uploaded, as it’s a very complex process. You can save word clouds as images at will (in pretty high resolutions, even), and Leung says a button to print directly from the app is in the works. While in beta for a limited time, the application will remain completely free, and even when it won’t be in beta any longer Leung promises that a lot of the functionality will be preserved in the basic, free version. Hurray! The app was built in Silverlight, and in case you were wondering why, Leung says:
His longer explanation on the choice for Silverlight can be found in the FAQ section. On top is the word cloud for TechCrunch.com – can you guess where this one is coming from?      
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| Kontagent Raises $1 Million For Facebook Analytics Platform Posted: 09 Apr 2010 05:28 AM PDT
It’s no coincidence that all of the new investors are in the gaming world; Kontagent’s deep analytics for Facebook apps offer compelling metric for the gaming sector and currently tracking over 50 million monthly active users with its analytics. Kontagent’s platform gives Facebook app developers and publishers detailed data of demographics based on geographic location, age groups, gender, user engagement times, social interaction and other variables. The platform provides powerful A/B testing across any viral channel (a button, an invite or a notification) that sits inside Facebook. Kontagent also offers developers viral optimization tools to track the virality of the application on Facebook. And Kontagent offers these analytics to iPhone and web applications using Facebook Connect. Over the past year, Kontagent has seen attracted a number of casual and social game developers using its platform, says co-founder Albert Lai. Lai says that Kontagent’s deep set of analytics that show traffic and behavior across features as small as a notification or or invite, give game publishers greater insight into the strategy of attracting traffic to their games on Facebook. As casual and social gaming on Facebook continues to rise, Kontagent’s deep analytics will be able to capitalize on this growth.      
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| His Dashboard App For iPad Rejected, Developer Publishes Code On GitHub Posted: 09 Apr 2010 03:55 AM PDT When developer Rich Hong published a sneak preview video of his home-made Dashboard app for iPad, plenty of commentators deemed it cool and a potentially very useful addition to the tablet device’s software stack. Alas, Cupertino has now rejected the app for “contradicting the iPad’s user experience”, whatever that means (I guess Apple doesn’t want even a hint of multi-tasking on the iPad until they decide to add support for it). Hong has swiftly made the code for the app open source on GitHub, enabling other developers to compile it for themselves and/or their social circle. I bet it’d look great on a jailbroken iPad, too.
     
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| Netflix Renews Agreements With Universal, Twentieth Century Fox Posted: 09 Apr 2010 02:20 AM PDT
Both agreements encompass physical and digital distribution of movies and, in the case of Fox, TV programs. And yes, they include 28-day windows between street date and Netflix catalogue availability for new releases. Here are the details: Twentieth Century FoxThe renewed deal with Netflix brings an expansion of the license for Fox streaming content, including a first-time streaming license for Fox TV shows that includes complete prior seasons of several blockbuster television series like “Lie to Me,” “Bones,” “24,” and “King of the Hill,” as well as complete seasons of TV series such as “Prison Break,” “Arrested Development” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” The distribution deal also includes films like “Aliens,” “The Thin Red Line,” “Romancing the Stone” and “Patton.” Fox Filmed Entertainment and Netflix said new and more choices to be added over the lifetime of the agreement. As part of the agreement, Twentieth Century Fox will have the ability to determine the window on its content in both the physical and streaming formats. The agreement provides for the oft-lamented 28-day window from the street date for new Blu-ray and DVD film releases, and varying dates of availability for its library and new television programming. Netflix had earlier struck a similar deal with Warner Brothers, much to the dismay of my colleague MG Siegler (and many others). Among the first releases under this arrangement will be “Avatar”, which will be available to Netflix customers 28 days after its April 22 street release date. UniversalA similar agreement was reached with Universal Studios: new release titles on DVD and Blu-ray will be made available to Netflix members after a 28-day window, giving Universal a dedicated time period for sales of its physical and digital offerings. Universal says Netflix and its 12 million registered users benefit from this too, because of reduced product costs, significantly more units and better in-stock levels four weeks after street date. The first release covered under the new agreement is the comedy “It’s Complicated,” which will be available to Netflix subscribers 28 days after its April 27 street release date. Additionally, a license for Universal streaming content allows Netflix to provide its members more movies they can watch instantly. The streaming agreement makes films like “Gosford Park”, “Billy Elliott” and library films such as “The Pianist,” “Being John Malkovich” and “Do the Right Thing” available to watch on-demand. Likely, the digital distribution agreements with both studies will propel Netflix higher on the list of comScore’s top online video sites. Especially now that it has released an iPad app, will soon add support for the Wii and is reportedly working on an iPhone app. When the company released its Q4 2009 results back in January, we noted that the percentage of subscribers who watched instantly more than 15 minutes of a TV episode or movie in the last quarter of 2009 was nearly 50 percent, compared to 28 percent for the same period of 2008. Expect that percentage to go up and to the right.      
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| Full iPhone OS 4 Event Plus Bonus Footage Posted: 08 Apr 2010 09:59 PM PDT Invitations to Apple’s iPhone OS 4 Event were not easy to come by but that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on Steve’s slide show. Apple has posted all 60 minutes of the presentation on its website.      
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| Apple Gives Adobe The Finger With Its New iPhone SDK Agreement Posted: 08 Apr 2010 07:29 PM PDT
So what does that mean? Apple may have just made the flagship feature of Adobe Flash CS5, which allows developers to port Flash applications to the iPhone, totally useless. John Gruber of Daring Fireball was the first to point out the change in the License Agreement. Here’s the relevant text:
The ban appears to directly apply to the new Flash feature, but Adobe said it was still “looking into” the change when we asked them about it. Here’s the brief statement they sent us:
Should this affect Adobe, as Gruber believes it does, it would be a huge loss for the software maker — Adobe CS5 is due to launch in less than four days. It’s also an especially vicious move on Apple’s part, because it seems quite clear that Adobe didn’t know this was coming (they’ve spent many months marketing the upcoming feature, and it obviously took plentiful developer resources to build it). Adobe and Apple have been waging a vocal battle over the last few months, with tensions mounting as Apple announced that the iPad would not offer Flash support. The fact that Google and Adobe are now working tightly to improve Flash integration in Google Chrome probably doesn’t help. There is still quite a bit of ambiguity as to who this might impact. One increasingly prominent tool that could be affected is Sequoia-backed Unity Technologies, which offers a platform for quickly designing three dimensional applications. In the original version of his post Gruber theorized that Unity may be affected, but he’s now less sure. Reached for comment, Unity gave us this statement:
In other words, nobody seems entirely sure what this means quite yet. But the backlash has certainly started. Many developers have taken to forums like Hacker News to voice their opinions, with the most up-voted comment stating “What a horseshit maneuver by Apple.” Some have taken to Twitter to denounce the move, with prominent developer Joe Hewitt (who was responsible for Facebook’s iPhone application for years) tweeting “So much for programming language innovation on the iPhone platform”. If it wasn’t abundantly clear before, it certainly is now: Apple is playing dirty. It doesn’t care what the developer community thinks. It has the users, it has the media’s undying love, and it has an incredibly impressive line of products. If a developer decides to quit the iPhone over this move, that just means less competition for the rest of the developers looking to capitalize on the flourishing platform. The media may pick up on the story briefly, but most people don’t care, so it’ll move on. And the iPhone will keep selling like hotcakes.      
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| Cloud Computing? Microsoft Office Is Not All In Posted: 08 Apr 2010 07:08 PM PDT Microsoft is still fumbling as it tries to navigate its way out of the innovator’s dilemma. The business was built and nurtured on its lucrative suite of Office products— unfortunately, that reliance on Office is now complicating its full migration to cloud computing. Today, we spoke to Senior Vice President Chris Capossela, who acknowledged the challenge of growing profits without pay-to-install software. Microsoft is gearing up for the launch of Office 2010 (available to businesses on May 12 and to the casual consumer in June), marking the first time the software giant will release free web versions of Office applications like Word and Excel bundled into Windows Live. Now that consumers can get these basic applications for free, the company is hoping that pay add-on features will be enough to override the loss. Last week, the president of Microsoft’s business division, Stephen Elop, optimistically told us that while profit margins could (let’s be honest, they will) shrink, overall profits could be supported by new add-ons. When asked how the company will maintain its profits, Capossela first response was paid software: “There’s a few things that we’re doing, number one we’re making it a lot easier for people to buy Office when they buy a new PC. We got a new Office pre-install program that many OEM partners have signed up to use….so when you go and buy a new PC in the fall let’s say you’ll have the Office skus already installed there….making it far simpler.” In our video interview, Capossela eventually goes on mention that there will be paid services on cloud computing, although he did not articulate which services are expected to be the biggest revenue drivers. However, the fact that Capossela heavily (and immediately) highlighted the old pay-to-install Office model, underscores Microsoft’s ongoing dependence on the old cash cow and perhaps, excess optimism. Last month, Steve Ballmer said, “when it comes to cloud, we’re all in.” The company’s head may be in the cloud but one foot is on installed software. Today’s Microsoft is no longer competing in 1995’s software market. The company still has to deal with piracy, but more significantly, it has a viable threat in Google Docs. Microsoft has been very successful in locking down the largest companies as enterprise clients, like Starbucks and GlaxoSmithKline— of the 10,000 largest companies Microsoft serves 70%. But the company is struggling in gaining traction among the smaller potatoes, the start-ups which have been attracted to Google Docs relatively simple and cheap model. Google Docs has become less simple over time, but many entrepreneurs still see it as the easiest and cheapest way to service their companies. The consumer is clamoring for more simplicity but Microsoft’s business model seems to be moving towards more complexity. Because Microsoft can no longer expect to sell as many Office products in the store, it has to rely on a multitude of paid services and options (Exchange Online, Sharepoint, etc.) creating layers of complexity. All that said, Microsoft is moving in the right direction and trying to embrace cloud computing. Personally, I’m excited to use Office 2010 online as a consumer and blogger, with all its rich features— but then again, I won’t be paying for it. (Image: Flickr/FirstMichael)      
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| Gmail Launches Sneak Peek And Nested Labels. You’ll Want To Check These Out Right Now. Posted: 08 Apr 2010 06:53 PM PDT
After activating Sneak Peak in Labs, either right click on a message or use the handy keyboard shortcut ‘h’, and the preview pane will pop up. You probably won’t be able to see the entire message you’re looking at, but it’s definitely enough to figure out if the message is important or if it should promptly be sent to your archive. You can use the ‘j’ and ‘k’ shortcuts to scroll through your list of messages, looking at a preview of each. My only gripe (and it’s a fairly significant one) is what Sneak Peek does when you actually act on a message. Gmail junkies will know that ‘y’ is the shortcut for ‘archive message’, and it’s key for anyone who is sifting through a lot of Email. Unfortunately, hitting ‘y’ while you’re using Sneak Peek will archive the message as it should, but it also closes your Sneak Peek pane, so you have to hit ‘h’ again. This may not sound like a big deal, but when you’re adding an extra keystroke to an action you have to make a few dozen (or more) times a day, it gets tedious fast. Alongside Sneak Peek, Labs is also launching a feature called Nested Labels. This allows you to put your labels in a hierarchy, which excites me less, but apparently is oft-requested. Here are the instructions Google offers for using the feature:
     
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| Posted: 08 Apr 2010 06:53 PM PDT
Currently on tap: Stella Artois      
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| Next Jump Takes Over MasterCard’s New Rewards Program, MasterCard MarketPlace Posted: 08 Apr 2010 05:00 PM PDT MasterCard’s customer rewards program just got a major upgrade. As part of a deep, three-year partnership with NYC-startup Next Jump, the credit card organization just launched MasterCard Marketplace. Any cardholder can go to the site and sign up for discounts on electronics, computers, clothing, jewelry, and other products from thousands of merchants and manufacturers. Next Jump will operate the program on behalf of MasterCard, and help it advance its overall e-commerce strategy in other ways as well. While it is not a very high-profile company, Next Jump already powers the employee discount and rewards programs for 90,000 companies, including 60 percent of the Fortune 500. Next Jump also powers Overwhelming Offers and Yahoo’s Daily Deals. It’s raised $45 million, and early Google investor Ram Shriram sits on its board. (Read my earlier profile for more details). Next Jump takes an algorithmic approach to reward both good shoppers and good deals. In the MasterCard Marketplace, consumers can rate offers, set alerts, and get ranked based on how much they shop. Each offer, in turn, is also ranked base don its conversion rates. Next Jump has put together a network of 28,000 merchants. They are encouraged to offer products at a discount in return for gaining access to highly-motivated shoppers. In this day and age, everyone wants a special deal. (Note the rise of group discount and flash sale sites). Now everyone with a MasterCard can feel a little extra special.      
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| Posted: 08 Apr 2010 03:24 PM PDT
Yahoo says they will announce Balogh’s successor shortly. I asked Balogh about Yahoo’s product roadmap and where they need to focus in the future. He says “The key focus areas for Yahoo are pretty obvious if you look at trends. They need to continue to reinvent online experience and drive social into that online experience. You saw some of that in the fall with Communications and more recently with Yahoo Entertainment, and the tie in to devices. You’ll see us focusing on the search UI and driving innovation and ease of use in advertising.” Here’s Yahoo’s official statement on the departure: “Ari Balogh, EVP, Products and CTO, has decided to leave Yahoo! for personal reasons. Ari plans to remain with the company until June 3 and will be working with the team to enable a smooth transition. We expect to name his replacement in the coming weeks. We thank him for his many contributions and wish him well.” And Ari’s official statement: "While Yahoo! has become a family to me in many ways over the last two years, I have a situation with my personal family that is difficult and has driven me to make some changes in my life. This job was my dream job, which makes this decision very hard. I have been working with Carol on a succession plan that we will roll out over the coming weeks. Yahoo! has many opportunities to touch so many people’s lives and the company is well positioned to take advantage of every one of them. I am confident that the incredible people at Yahoo! will deliver against our vision to be the center of people’s online lives." This is the second high level tech departure for Yahoo in as many months. In March EVP Ash Patel, one of the first Yahoo employees, announced that he was stepping down as well.      
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| Twitter: 60 Percent Of Registered Accounts Are From Outside The U.S. Posted: 08 Apr 2010 02:52 PM PDT
Twitter also said that following the availability of its site in Spanish in November, the site saw a 50 percent boost in sign-ups from Spanish speaking countries. It seems that current events and political engagement seem to also precipitate growth for Twitter. Following the earthquake in Chile, signups spiked 1200% and nearly all of those were using Spanish as their language. In Colombia, signups are up 300% after politicians started using the network as a platform to speak to constituents. India, which is a potentially huge market for Twitter, has seen accounts rise by nearly 100% since the beginning of 2010 because politicians and Bollywood stars have started using the platform to communicate to fans and constituents. Traffic has also grown after a partnership with Bharti Airtel, India’s largest carrier, to ensure that SMS Tweets are sent and received at standard rates. International growth is also probably attributed to the availability of Twitter in German, Italian, French, which was rolled out late last year. Twitter crowd-sourced much of the work for these translations. Twitter is also available in Japanese.      
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| Marc Benioff’s Secret Sales Weapon: Chatter On The iPhone (Video) Posted: 08 Apr 2010 02:48 PM PDT As you'd expect, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is a constant salesman. At a dinner last night in New York City, he kept showing everybody in the room his newest baby, Salesforce Chatter, which turns Salesforce into feeds of people and customer data. He was showing it on his iPhone, which he wields as a sales weapon. (Benioff cornered one poor CIO with his iPhone demo for a good 20 minutes). I got Benioff to show me the iPhone app on video (above). It is a supercharged, Chatterized version of Salesforce’s iPhone app which is not yet generally available. But you can see how it is very Facebook-like in that you follow a stream of updates from people you work with. Each one has a profile. But companies and customers also have their own feeds and profiles. Anyone who uses a Twitter app on an iPhone or Facebook or Yammer will find this user-interface familiar. Benioff might be a big believer in the iPad as a new window onto the cloud, but it is the iPhone that he can whip out every time he meets a customer that is going to help him sell Chatter. At the beginning of the video, Benioff also mentions the news announced earlier today that Chatter will get its own marketplace of apps.      
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| Jobs Takes A Few Pot Shots At Google, Rubs Salt Into The Wound With ‘iAds’ Posted: 08 Apr 2010 02:08 PM PDT
In regards to multitasking, Jobs said “In multitasking, if you see a task manager, they blew it. Users shouldn't have to ever, ever, ever think about that stuff.” This is a direct hit at Google’s Android system. While a task manager isn’t 100 percent necessary on Android phones, many people download and use it to manage multiple apps running on the device. In regard to mobile search Jobs said, “On a mobile device, search is not where it's at, not like on the desktop. They're spending all their time on these apps — they're using apps to get to data on the internet, not generalized search." Search is Google’s core competency, and search ads are Google’s bread and butter. Jobs is essentially saying that search is irrelevant on mobile devices, which seems to go against Google strategy with its Android platform. Jobs spoke about the unified inbox on the iPhone, saying that “Customers have really wanted this…we've made it so you can have more than one Exchange account, as well. If you want to focus on just one account, we've added fast inbox switching." Note that jobs didn’t mention Gmail. Probably not a coincidence. In the question and answer portion of the presentation, Jobs said emphatically, “We do not have plans to be a worldwide ad agency. We don't know a lot about advertising, but we're learning. We tried to buy AdMob, but Google snatched them up because they didn't want us to have them, so we bought another smaller company, Quattro. But we're babes in the woods.” Although playing innocent, Jobs was clearly shedding light on Google’s motivations with purchasing AdMob (which honestly sounds like a fight between two toddlers over a toy-a very expensive toy). Jobs points out that Apple decided to buy a “smaller company” in contrast to Google’s $750 million acquisition of AdMob. The announcement of iAds comes at a time when there are reports that the FTC is planning to block the Google-AdMob deal, because of anti-trust issues. Google bought the biggest player in the mobile advertising space, and is now being intensely examined for it. And of course, Apple also coincidentally announced its innovative, foray into the mobile advertising world (which is a multi-billion dollar market), just as Google faces regulatory hurdles which may curtail their involvement in the space. Of course, Apple’s iAds could ends up being superior to the search ads Google has made a living off of. But Apple stepping in means that Google and AdMob officially have competition from one of the world’s largest technology companies in the mobile space, which could be good news for Google’s probable case against the FTC. Photo Credit/Flickr/KWDesigns      
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| Posted: 08 Apr 2010 02:06 PM PDT
As for picking a day on which to publish a WinMo 6.5-based phone review, we could have done better.      
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| Steve Jobs On Why The iPhone Doesn’t Allow Unsigned Apps: They Don’t Want A Porn Store Posted: 08 Apr 2010 12:12 PM PDT
The answer — that the iPhone will not allow for unsigned apps — does not come as a surprise. But Jobs’s reasoning behind it was certainly interesting to hear. Because it’s a clear example of Apple’s hypocrisy. For years, iTunes has sold songs with explicit lyrics and movies with graphic nudity. Further, as we’ve pointed out numerous times, the iPhone comes with Safari. The web has quite a bit of porn on it. Hell, many porn sites have even launched HTML5 versions that are optimized for the iPhone. Yes, parents can disable access to Safari with parental controls, but Apple could easily add a similar parental control setting to restrict running unsigned applications, too. The real reason that Apple won’t allow for unsigned apps? They want to maintain full control over the iPhone, in part to ensure that it’s a nice, clean environment. And also so that they can block applications from their competitors, like they’ve done to Google. For those who were wondering, Jobs may well have been referring to Android porn store MiKandi, pictured at right (obviously NSFW). Update: I should clarify what we mean when we refer to ‘unsigned apps’. Every application you download from the App Store is reviewed, approved, and signed by Apple. It is the only place to download an application to your iPhone, because the phone does a check for this seal of approval (unless you jailbreak it). If Apple began allowing the iPhone to run unsigned apps, the App Store could still be restricted to apps that had gone through Apple’s approval process — it would still be the ’safe’ place to download apps. But Apple could also allow users to install apps through other channels, like the web. Android does this, but only after displaying a warning that users could potentially download malicious applications. Apple would not be selling these unsigned applications. We don’t expect this to happen, of course. But there’s a difference between demanding that Apple allow pornography into the App Store (which is something that I do not support) versus allowing users to go on the web to download an application that doesn’t have Apple’s approval. Image via Phandroid      
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| Everything You Need To Know About iPhone OS 4.0 Posted: 08 Apr 2010 11:11 AM PDT
Here, in handy bullet point form, are all the things you need to know about iPhone OS 4.0…      
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| Posted: 08 Apr 2010 11:06 AM PDT  I guess Apple is serious about gaming now. It just announced, as one of its many iPhone "pillars," the development of GameCenter, which our man on the scene, Greg Kumparak, described as "Xbox Live for the iPhone." Match-making, leaderboards, achievement points, the works.
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| Apple Announces iAd Mobile Advertising Platform Posted: 08 Apr 2010 10:52 AM PDT
Apple will sell and host the ads, giving 60% of ad revenue back to developers, and Jobs says that developers can add ads to their apps “in an afternoon”. Unlike most mobile ads, which kick users outside of the application they’re currently using, iAd keeps users in the same app. In a jab at Flash, while showing an ad, Jobs said “Oh, by the way, all of this is done in HTML 5.” The first ad Jobs showcased during his demo was for Toy Story 3. It was rendered in HTML 5, was fully interactive, and looked similar to a native app — it actually had a game integrated in it. Jobs said, “”This is a new kind of mobile ad. Have you ever seen a mobile ad like this? Anything even close?” Second, Jobs showed off an ad for Nike, which showed a history of Nike ads and allowed the user to actually flip through a history of the brand’s shoes. Ads will have access to many of the same APIs as ‘normal’ native applications — they’ll be able to use location services and the accelerometer. Location, in particular, will be important — this is going to be a boon to hyperlocal advertising (provided Apple offers a good way for local businesses to get their ads in the system). It sounds like Apple won’t be too restrictive on who can build apps: Ad agencies will be able to develop these interactive ads, as will app developers. Though I imagine they’ll have to go through a review process similar to native apps on the App Store. Update: During a Q&A Apple said it would use a “light touch” and that there were obviously some ads they didn’t want to have shown, the same way a TV network doesn’t want some ads shown. The obvious consequence of this new platform is that ads from other ad networks may well become second-class citizens, perhaps not just from Apple’s perspective but from a functional standpoint. Details are still scant, but if iAds are the only ads on the iPhone that can access the iPhone’s API, then ads from third party networks may be less interactive, and may not be able to as effectively determine the user’s location. Assuming developers embrace iAds and the iPhone continues its strong growth, this could have a significant impact on Google’s mobile ad efforts in the future. Here’s what Jobs had to say about the launch (we’re updating from from our live notes, some of this may be paraphrased):
     
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| iBooks Is Coming To The iPhone Posted: 08 Apr 2010 10:44 AM PDT
And, as a bonus, iPhone users will also get a free copy of Winnie The Pooh. Make sure to check out our other coverage of the event:      
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RIM has made an 
Earlier today, Apple held its 
If you live in Gmail all day, you’re almost certainly going to want to activate a new feature that just want live in labs: Gmail Sneak Peek. The feature, as the name suggests, allows you to get a preview of the message you’ve currently got selected, without actually opening it (it reminds me a bit of the preview pane you get in Mac OS X when you hit the spacebar).
TechCrunch now has a full keg high end kegerator. Which actually makes a lot of sense, because visitors really open up and talk freely after a beer or two. Thanks very much to the anonymous friend-of-TechCrunch who dropped it off and got it working for us.
Yahoo’s CTO and EVP Products 
Twitter’s lead engineer for its International team, Matt Sanford, just 
Today during Apple’s 
Pity the poor 
Today, during a Q&A session at Apple’s iPhone 4.0 Developer preview, 
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