The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Plerts Blends Check-Ins With Medical And Personal Safety Alerts
- Estimate: 800,000 U.S. Households Abandoned Their TVs For The Web
- NetVibes Launches A Realtime Tracking Platform With Instant Dashboards
- Searchandise Commerce Raises $7 Million From Madrona Venture Group And Others
- Virtualization Infrastructure Software Company VM6 Raises $4 Million
- Mygazines Does Not Launch An iPad App
- Apple Finally Releases Core i5 and Core i7 MacBook Pros
- Report: U.S. Paid Search Spend Is Picking Up Again
- iPhone App Developers Consolidate: Double Encore Buys Up Massively Overrated
- 3Crowd Raises $6.6 Million For Cloud Management Tools
- SpringSource Acquires UK-based Open Source Company Rabbit Technologies
- SaaS Field Service Software ServiceMax Raises $10 Million From Salesforce And Others
- Realtime Media Sharing Service TweetPhoto Raises $2.6 Million Series A
- Realtime Collaboration Platform Threadbox Now In Public Beta
- Gruber: Apple Was Right, Adobe Get Over It [Video]
- Full Details On Twitter’s Long-Awaited Ad Platform: Promoted Tweets
- Facebook May Be About To Jump Into The Virtual Currency Offers Game
- Source: Twitter’s Ad Platform Launches Tonight
- Hands-on Video, First Impressions, and Speed Tests For Opera Mini On iPhone
- Eric Schmidt: Mobile Is The Future, And There’s No Such Thing As Communication Overload
- Surprise, Surprise: Opera Mini iPhone App Gets Apple’s Stamp Of Approval
- Attention Readers: Just in Time for Your New iPad*, Free Movies!
- Ben Horowitz And Fred Wilson Debate Fat Versus Lean Startups At TC Disrupt
- Google Plans To Expand Cloud Computing Services
- YC’s NewsTilt Aims To Help Journalists Create A Business Model For Content
| Plerts Blends Check-Ins With Medical And Personal Safety Alerts Posted: 13 Apr 2010 09:04 AM PDT
For example, if you decide to buy something on CraigsList and visit a seller’s home that is unknown to you, you could enable a Plerts alert. If you don’t check-in after the visit, Plerts will alert the member of your social graph with an alert that you are rogue. Another example is to ensure that someone is taking their medication. The user can check-in after taking the medication, thus alerting their loved ones and personal contacts that their family member has taken his or her proper medication. Unlike 911, Plerts is designed to be preemptive to an emergency. One of themain issues with Plerts is privacy. Users may not want to tap into their social graph on Facebook, for example, and allow friends and contacts to know what your medical conditions are or who you are meeting. But with Plerts, nobody has to know where you are or what you're doing (i.e. going on a blind date, going away on vacation) unless the unfortunate happens and you fail to check back in. Only at this point is your real-time location and personal information made available to your pre-selected contacts (which can be limited a to a few close friends or family). While the basic service is free, Plerts offers a premium service that is $4.99 a month or $49.99 for an entire year. The company is also in discussions with universities, insurance companies, hospitals, parents' organizations and more about partnerships and white-labeling. Plerts was co-founded by Andrew Busey, who founded Challenge Games, and previously founded and sold Pluck and iChat, and Colin Anwaty, a former iPhone gaming developer. Plerts will face competition from other safety alerting services like Life360.
     
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| Estimate: 800,000 U.S. Households Abandoned Their TVs For The Web Posted: 13 Apr 2010 08:41 AM PDT Are you a cord-cutter, or do you want to be? Have you had enough of paying your cable company through the nose for 800 channels, when all you really watch is maybe 20 or 30? With an increasing selection of high-quality TV fare coming online, more people are experimenting with ditching their TVs (or more accurately, their cable and satellite TV subscriptions) for online options such as Hulu, Netflix, broadcaster Websites, or Apple’s iTunes. The numbers are still small, but last year an estimated 800,000 U.S. households cut the cable cord altogether, according to a new report by the Convergence Consulting Group. By the end of next year, that number is forecast to double to 1.6 million. Cord cutters don’t yet represent a serious threat to the $84 billion cable/satellite/telco TV access industry, which counts an estimated 101 million subscribers. But they are a leading indicator of the shift to TV viewing on the Web. The cord-cutters make up less than 3 percent of all full-episode viewing on the Web. The rest comes from people who are only beginning to watch occasionally online. An estimated 17 percent of the total weekly viewing audience watch at least one or two episodes of a full-length TV show online. Last year, that percentage was 12 percent, and next year it is forecast to grow to 21 percent. As more and more viewing options become available online, more people will add Web viewing as part of their mix. For instance, in my home we don’t have a TV in the kitchen, but we keep a laptop there. Last night, my wife watched a full episode of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolutionon Hulu while she was cooking. The online viewership for the Masters on CBSSports doubled this year to 1.3 million people who watched a total of about an hour each of golf online. When any screen can be a TV, people will watch the one that is closest. And the easier it becomes to connect your computer to your flat screen TV, the more the online video sites and services will become just another set of channels. The free, advertising supported model is still the most popular. Although Apple is making noises about making Apple TV more than just a hobby and doubled the number of TV shows available for download last year, Convergence estimates only 100 million episodes were downloaded last year, up from 90 million in 2008. The associated download revenue was only $200 million. Meanwhile, Convergence estimates that U.S. online TV advertising by the likes of CBS, Disney/ABC, NBC Universal, News Corp., Time Warner, and Viacom made up 2.5 percent of their estimated $62 billion of traditional TV advertising revenues last year—or an additional $1.56 billion (which is above other estimates putting all online video advertising last year at $1 billion). But you get a sense of the huge revenue gap here, and this is not even counting the extra $34 billion in programming fees the broadcasters and TV networks got from the cable companies last year. No wonder they are in no rush to move their shows to the Web. What is helping them stave off the cord-cutters is the growth of DVRs, video-on-demand, and HD channels. Convergence estimates that 35 percent of U.S. households have a DVR, and 36 percent have HD. By 2012, it forecasts that 50 percent will have DVRs and 58 percent will have HD. And more video-on-demand is bringing a la carte options directly through the set-top box. But the Web will always be cheaper. It is a question of convenience versus cost. So what are you, a cord-cutter or a coach potato? Photo credit: Flickr/Schmilblick      
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| NetVibes Launches A Realtime Tracking Platform With Instant Dashboards Posted: 13 Apr 2010 07:35 AM PDT
The dashboard is essentially a way for users to track content on the realtime web. For example, if I create a dashboard for Tiger Woods, NetVibes will aggregate videos from Google search, news from Google news, photos from Flickr, realtime search results from Yahoo, Tweets about Woods and more. Users can browse content within their Instant Dashboard using the Netvibes Smart Reader, which lets people view real-time content in magazine-style widgets or in a flowing RSS reader. Dashboards can be personalized and users can also add more content from the Netvibes widget and content ecosystem, which includes a plethora of RSS feeds and widgets from social networks and content platforms. NetVibes has transformed its product since its launch five years ago. The startup began with personalized homepages, became a distributed widget platform, changed CEOs (when founder Tariq Krim stepped down in 2008 to start Jolicloud), then started appealing to enterprises, brands, and advertisers with intranet offerings and social media dashboards. And the startup just hit profitability on a net income basis, with revenue from enterprise offerings comprising most of sales. NetVibes offers an enterprise version of dashboards for PR and marketing professionals, which pulls together different monitoring and analytics tools (such as Google Trends, Compete, Yelp, Hootsuite, and Trendrr) all into one dashboard. Netvibes Showcase from Netvibes on Vimeo.      
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| Searchandise Commerce Raises $7 Million From Madrona Venture Group And Others Posted: 13 Apr 2010 07:13 AM PDT
This second financing round for the company (it had earlier raised $7.5 million) was led by new investor Madrona Venture Group and joined by prior backers Cloquet Capital Partners, DFJ Gotham Partners, Draper Associates, Inflection Point Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners and Wheatley Partners. The company says the capital will be used primarily to expand its sales/marketing and operations teams. Searchandise Commerce provides a service the combines paid search with traditional in-store merchandising practices. The service essentially aims to enable retailers to monetize every visitor that comes to their site, not just those who transact. Manufacturers and their ad agencies can tap Searchandise to place CPC bids on products to positively affect visibility across its network of retail and comparison shopping sites. The investment of Madrona in Searchandise was led by Brian McAndrews, who joined the VC firm in August 2009 as Managing Director, after spending eight years as CEO of digital marketing company aQuantive (formerly AvenueA) and as senior VP at Microsoft, leading its Advertising and Publisher Solutions group. McAndrews has now joined the Searchandise Commerce Board of Directors.      
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| Virtualization Infrastructure Software Company VM6 Raises $4 Million Posted: 13 Apr 2010 06:40 AM PDT IT virtualization infrastructure software company VM6 Software has secured a $4 million series A round of investment with RBC Venture Partners and Ignition Partners. The investors are both getting a seat on the board of directors (Rich Fade and Jean-David Begin from Ignition and RBC, respectively). In addition, VM6 has announced that industry veteran Stephen Pollack, who founded PlateSpin back in 2003 (and sold it to Novell for $205 million in cash 5 years later), has joined the company’s board as well. The investment from RBC and Ignitation will be used to expand VM6 Software’s customer base, future software development and marketing and sales efforts worldwide. The company’s VMex software offers businesses an all-in-one IT infrastructure solution that leverages the benefits of virtualization to manage, provision, consolidate and protect distributed servers and desktop environments. VM6 recently joined the Microsoft BizSpark One program, and announced the general availability of its VM6 VMex Enterprise Edition, which leverages Microsoft’s Hyper-V to combine virtualization with shared storage, clustering, and management and monitoring solutions. VM6 Software is headquartered in Montreal, Canada with a primary business office in Toronto.      
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| Mygazines Does Not Launch An iPad App Posted: 13 Apr 2010 06:14 AM PDT Digital publishing company Mygazines has launched its iPad Edition, a browser-based mobile reading system for Apple’s tablet device. In case the title of this post confused you: it’s decidely not an iPad app, but rather an integral part of Mygazines Mobile, a universal e-reading system that works on almost any touch-screen device, including the iPhone, iPod touch and Android phones. But the iPad, with its bigger screen and and impressive multimedia capabilities, obviously lends itself for these types of enhanced publications much more than even the most capable smartphones. Readers can simply head to a dedicated publication URL (example) and Mygazines’ system will automatically recognize and display a unique interface for the iPad. You can find a list of (mostly niche) magazines here. Features include page flipping, article lists, social bookmarking, e-mail sharing, page thumbnails, zoom and links. Publishers can also customize options and colors to create a unique branded environment. Here’s a demo video:      
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| Apple Finally Releases Core i5 and Core i7 MacBook Pros Posted: 13 Apr 2010 05:57 AM PDT  Finally, finally. Apple finally released MacBook Pros with Intel's latest chips while updating nearly everything else, too. The just announced MBPs forgo the Core 2 Duo CPUs in favor of the faster and more efficient Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs -- except for the 13-inch line. The 15-inch now rocks a i5 or i7 CPU, 4GB of RAM, and switchable graphics between an Intel HD Graphics GPU and the NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M with 256MB of RAM. The 17-inch's spec bumps are similar but instead gets graced with the Core i7 standard and a 500GB hard drive. It also got the new GPU options but with 512MB of memory on the GeForce GT 330M.
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| Report: U.S. Paid Search Spend Is Picking Up Again Posted: 13 Apr 2010 05:44 AM PDT U.S. paid search spend increased 11% in Q1 2010 compared to the first quarter of 2009, marking the strongest quarter for paid search since the fourth quarter of 2008, according to a report from SearchIgnite, a provider of search optimization solutions that claims to manage more than $450 million in PPC spend annually. Still according to the report, search marketing remained flat quarter-over-quarter (-0.5%), a metric that SearchIgnite says typically shows declines in Q1 due to decreased marketing spend after the holidays. In 2009, spend in Q1 compared with Q4 2008 declined more than -14%. The first quarter of 2010, however, held steady with Q4 spend. In addition, Q1 2009 saw spend decline nearly -2% YoY, while spend in the first quarter of 2010 is up 11% YoY. SearchIgnite concludes that these figures could indicate that the search market is rebounding from declines witnessed during the recession. Other notable findings in the report: Retail and travel sectors driving growth Retail and travel marketers drove much of the growth in paid search, with spend from those verticals up 26% and 9% year-over-year respectively. For retailers, this marked the fifth straight quarter of YoY PPC spend increases since SearchIgnite began tracking this metric. Bing grows YoY … … but dips in Q1 due to reliance on retailers. Spend on Microsoft's Bing increased 22% YoY as the engine continued to take share from Yahoo. However, according to SearchIgnite, Bing saw the most declines of all engines quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) due to a decline in retail search spend following the holidays, a vertical which continues to be a key driver of growth for the engine. You can download SearchIgnite’s latest white paper on U.S. paid search spend here (registration required). The company says it tracked more than 50 billion impressions and 1 billion clicks on Google, Yahoo! and Bing from January 1, 2006 through March 31, 2010 for its quarterly reports.      
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| iPhone App Developers Consolidate: Double Encore Buys Up Massively Overrated Posted: 13 Apr 2010 05:39 AM PDT
Massively Overrated has developed Coathangr, which is designed to serve fashion-centric microblogger; and the iPhone version of Typewar, a multiplayer typography game that is popular with graphic designers. Double Encore has developed a number of popular iPhone apps including the PGA Championship application for Turner Sports, the NBA Game Time iPhone and iPad applications for NBA Digital and the Brightkite iPhone app. Double Encore, which recently ventured into iPad app design and development, says that revenues are up 220% from last year. The acquisition of Massively Overrated just expands its offerings and resources to create popular apps for both the iPhone and iPad. With so many app developers around the Apple ecosystem, it makes sense for smaller iPhone app developers to pool their resources and talent and consolidate. I suspect we may be seeing more acquisitions and mergers in the near future.      
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| 3Crowd Raises $6.6 Million For Cloud Management Tools Posted: 13 Apr 2010 05:17 AM PDT
Founded by BitGravity co-founder Barrett Lyon, 3Crowd’s management tools give enterprises greater controls over content delivery and other cloud services, enabling them to use multiple services at once. 3Crowd, which recently launched, help users manage their content across multiple CDNs (content delivery systems) at the same time, using rule sets to determine which CDNs should be tapped depending on variables like the user’s location and which content they’re accessing. The product also looks to make it easy to actually deploy your content to these CDNs — you have to create the account with the CDN, but 3Crowd can then walk you through a wizard to get things going.      
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| SpringSource Acquires UK-based Open Source Company Rabbit Technologies Posted: 13 Apr 2010 05:14 AM PDT Java application infrastructure and management solutions provider SpringSource, itself picked up by VMware last year, this morning announced the acquisition of Rabbit Technologies, an open source software company based in the UK. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but SpringSource says it will add the RabbitMQ open messaging system into its suite of technologies. The VMware company added that by providing clear integration with the Spring Framework, the community of Spring developers will be able to leverage RabbitMQ as they evolve their applications from traditional datacenters into private and public cloud deployments. RabbitMQ will continue to be open source software, and SpringSource plans to continue full support for the RabbitMQ developer community. Rabbit Technologies was founded in February 2007. It is a spin out from LShift, the UK software consultancy and Cohesive FT, the US virtualization and cloud computing company. This isn’t the first company that was purchased by SpringSource. In August 2009, mere days after its own acquisition by VMware, the company bought Cloud Foundry, a Java platform-as-a-service provider.      
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| SaaS Field Service Software ServiceMax Raises $10 Million From Salesforce And Others Posted: 13 Apr 2010 04:55 AM PDT
As field service software, ServiceMax essentially helps manage other company’s equipment at their sites. ServiceMax software automates workforce optimization, advanced scheduling and dispatch, parts logistics, inventory and depot repair, and installed base entitlements. ServiceMax is being used currently by 60 different customers including DuPont. Built on top of Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform, ServiceMax has gained considerable support from Salesforce. The technology giant participated on both of ServiceMax’s funding rounds and the satrtup just launched an app on Salesforce Chatter’s recently launched app marketplace ChatterExchange. ServiceMax will use the funding to expand operations worldwide and further sales and marketing operations. The startup faces competition from Oracle and others.      
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| Realtime Media Sharing Service TweetPhoto Raises $2.6 Million Series A Posted: 13 Apr 2010 04:13 AM PDT
Also investing is Qualcomm, according to TweetPhoto founder & CEO Sean Callahan because most photos are and will continue to be shared via mobile phones. The startup says it will use the additional capital to bolster its core offering, a platform of open APIs and mobile SDKs for real-time media sharing across the social web, introduce new products and expand its developer relations program. First launched back in April 2009, TweetPhoto allows users to share and interact with media across multiple social networks through its developer platform. TweetPhoto users can link their accounts and publish media instantly to Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and other popular social networks, and the TweetPhoto APIs support features such as photo commenting, favoriting and voting, meta-data filters, geo-tagging, location-based search, friend feeds and customizable widgets. One year after launching the service, TweetPhoto says it currently serves close to 15 million monthly unique visitors from various social networks, 40 million API requests a day and 250 million images on a monthly basis. A quick glance at Compete suggests that it is trailing competitors like Yfrog and TwitPic, however. I asked Callahan the obvious question: with all the brouhaha following Twitter’s decision to start filling some holes and purchase iPhone app developer Atebits (maker of Tweetie), isn’t he afraid that Twitter might get into the media sharing field sooner or later either by acquisition (e.g. of rival TwitPic) or by launching a service of its own? Callahan says that every one of the investors asked that same question, and his answer was always the same: he claims that feature-wise, TweetPhoto beats the competition by a long shot, and that by diversifying where traffic is coming from (as it’s not only a Twitter media sharing service) they migigate the risk of any one social network cutting off the spicket. Callahan adds that TweetPhoto is an agnostic platform for the social web as a whole, with software development kits for a variety of languages and social networks. This sounds to me exactly what other developers of Twitter applications (such as Seesmic) are saying, but I would really love to hear them repeat those words once Twitter effectively makes some moves. Callahan, for one, says he has a plan B ready, although he declined to go into detail.      
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| Realtime Collaboration Platform Threadbox Now In Public Beta Posted: 13 Apr 2010 03:49 AM PDT
About a month ago, Threadbox showed off the results of its efforts and entered into private beta mode. Starting today, anyone interested in giving the product a whirl can sign up. Rather than rehash what my colleague Leena Rao already wrote about Threadbox redux, here’s the gist of it:
If you test it, let us know what you think. Here’s a demo video if you’d like to see it in action first:      
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| Gruber: Apple Was Right, Adobe Get Over It [Video] Posted: 12 Apr 2010 10:05 PM PDT Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has unexpectedly emerged as a central figure in the Apple-Adobe fiasco. It was his treatise on “Why Apple Changed Section 3.3.1″ that launched a thousand tweets. And it was his post that Steve Jobs referenced when a developer requested comment (“We think John Gruber's post is very insightful and not negative…Steve”). Whether you agree with Apple or not, it’s hard to argue with Gruber’s logic for Apple’s motivations. Today, we talked to Gruber via Skype. When asked for his response to Steve’s shout-out, Gruber meekly grinned and said, “I just smiled.” Thankfully, he saved his verbosity for the rest of the interview. We’ve included two clips, one focusing on his personal opinion on Apple’s decision and the fate of Adobe (above) and the second on how the iPad will influence the computer market and Apple’s future strategy (below). Some key highlights from the interview: On his personal opinion on Apple’s SDK agreement:
     
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| Full Details On Twitter’s Long-Awaited Ad Platform: Promoted Tweets Posted: 12 Apr 2010 09:08 PM PDT
Here are the details outlined in the articles:
Both reports note that Twitter will eventually allow third party Twitter clients to integrate Promoted Tweets, with the app developer receiving a cut of the revenue. In a move that may raise the ire of Twitter users, the articles also state that Twitter plans to eventually put ads into your Twitter stream:
Now would be a good time to point out some of the comments made about the upcoming ad platform by Twitter COO Dick Costolo at our RealTime CrunchUp last November:
Do Promoted Tweets live up to that promise? At this point, we haven’t gotten a chance to try them out for ourselves, but this is certainly more conventional than I was expecting. It also sounds a whole lot like TweetUp, the new Twitter search/ad platform that Bill Gross launched last night. Image via AdAge      
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| Facebook May Be About To Jump Into The Virtual Currency Offers Game Posted: 12 Apr 2010 08:50 PM PDT
We hear Facebook is partnering with a few startups to offer its own currency, Credits, to users. Facebook launched Credits last year and has slowly been ramping up the use of its virtual currency, most recently expanding its availability on Facebook’s most popular gaming app, Zynga’s Farmville. It’s unclear exactly when the offers will be rolling out or which startups the social network is partnering with in the offers, but we’re assuming the Facebook offers will make an appearance in games on the social network. And we hear that the offers platform will be a test at first. So why would Facebook get into the offers game? The virtual goods and currency market has heated up with the immense popularity of social gaming on Facebook, MySpace and other sites. The space is expected to grow into a $2 billion industry within the next few years and it makes sense that Facebook would want to open up a new revenue source for its new currency platform. Another reason that Facebook might do this is to have increased control over the types of offers that are served to users on the network. Facebook came under fire last year following the Scamville scandal, in which virtual currency monetization platforms were serving up scammy lead-gen offers to users. Shortly following Scamville, Facebook revamped its enforcement efforts around app advertising and offer scams.      
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| Source: Twitter’s Ad Platform Launches Tonight Posted: 12 Apr 2010 07:56 PM PDT
Sponsored (or, paid) Twitter messages will appear above normal search results, says our source. And there may be an “Adsense” syndication format as well that third parties like Seesmic, TweetDeck, etc. can tap into for a revenue share. We were not briefed on the the new platform but we’ve heard that others were, there may be more details coming out shortly. The product will officially debut at Twitter’s Chirp conference on Wednesday. It was about a year ago that we said it was time to start thinking about Twitter as a search engine with search monetization mechanics. That’s the monetization model Twitter is betting on.      
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| Hands-on Video, First Impressions, and Speed Tests For Opera Mini On iPhone Posted: 12 Apr 2010 07:50 PM PDT Today was the day that pigs flew. Seemingly out of no where (or, arguably, perfectly timed to downplay all the rabble rousing surrounding some new terms added to the SDK), Opera Mini has been approved for the iPhone. It’s not going to be available in the US for a few more hours, but we were able to dig it up by tinkering around with some settings and, well, pretending we were somewhere else. I’m checking it out right this second, but I wanted to give you guys a really quick hands on demonstration, along with a few early impressions and speed tests, to tide you over until it’s available everywhere. Check it out after the break. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>      
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| Eric Schmidt: Mobile Is The Future, And There’s No Such Thing As Communication Overload Posted: 12 Apr 2010 06:36 PM PDT
The discussion covered a range of topics, including the security threat from China, Chrome OS, and Google’s future. Some key takeaways: Schmidt says that while many people associate Google with search, it’s fundamentally an information company, which is why it has undertaken initiatives in the enterprise, the browser, and mobile. He also says that despite the growing number of incoming information streams, there’s no such thing as communication overload (just watch a typical 18 year old, he says). Schmidt also underscored a theme that’s grown increasingly apparent over the last few years: the future of computing is mobile. Schmidt says that businesses should have their best developers working on their mobile applications. He also says that the interoperability and security of mobile devices will be key factors for large businesses a few years down the road. Below are my live notes from the interview: Q: How did Apps come to be an important part of the company? A: Much of the network computer was announced in 1997 and it didn’t work. What has changed? An enormous jump in technology. Sun in 1983 had a diskless computer. Google has announced a diskless computer this year, and they’re now much more powerful. Q: Why take these computers you’re making out to world? Why take your eye off the ball of your core competency search? A: People think of Google as a search company, but we’re really an information company. What’s interesting about these web apps is that you can do these sharing applications now. One of the new things about the web is that it enables sharing-sensitive apps. I think calendars are boring.. but I’m wrong. Because they’re shared quite often, people share their calendars quite a bit; spreadsheets are the same way. A: The key insight in these architectures is that you can have open exchange data interfaces. Applications are no longer these monolithic applications. Q: The nice thing about large IT apps… Q: Who is an interesting player here? Q: When you’re at scale, what are some of the things you’re seeing? Q: Let’s spend a minute on the future. On the product, inside the corporation. What kind of relationship you want with businesses, and your work with news computers, Chrome OS, the tablet. Q: What’s it going to cost? Q: IM video, voice. Is there such a thing as overkill in communication? Q: As CEO, what are you doing to help create spirit of innovation, culture of dot com environment. What are you doing to keep the spirit alive? Q: You alluded to breach/near breach with ‘advanced persistent threat’ (China). Are there security lessons you can share? Q: How do you see Google on the ground level, in those areas where despite conditions everyone has a mobile phone? Q: Where do you see Google in 3-5 years? Q: Warren Buffet says that when you acquire great wealth you find yourself in more interesting circles/situations. What are 1-3 things you’ve learned that have knocked your socks off? Q: Could you give me a thumbnail report of Google? Q: I’m from the Pentagon. I listened to Alan and Jeff speak about public, private cloud. What do we need to do to engage more to become more successful in gov/industry partnership? Q: What do you think are great skills/talents/areas of study these leaders should seek?      
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| Surprise, Surprise: Opera Mini iPhone App Gets Apple’s Stamp Of Approval Posted: 12 Apr 2010 04:53 PM PDT Good news for Opera (and its legions of fans around the world): the company has just announced that its mobile browser Opera Mini has been approved for iPhone and iPod touch on the App Store. The app will be available as a free download within 24 hours, depending on which market you are located in. The iPhone app was shown off by the Norwegian software company to a small circle of reporters at the most recent Mobile World Congress (us included). Opera then officially submitted Opera Mini for iPhone to the Apple App Store on March 23, when we wondered out loud if it would ever be approved. The answer to that question is yes, contrary to what many believed would happen. I guess they can take that counter down now. Opera Software claims Opera Mini for iPhone is up to 6 times faster than the native browser thanks to its compression and server-side rendering technology, based on internal tests, and after having tried it at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona myself I have to say it’s definitely zooming. When the app was first submitted to Apple for approval, Opera told me that they had analyzed the App Store policies in great detail, and that they were completely certain of being 100% compliant – looks like they were right. Earlier today, Opera disclosed that it now counts over 100 million users, about half of which are using its mobile browser products. The company also offers Opera Mini 5 beta for Android phones. The iPhone app is already showing up for me here in Belgium, how about where you’re located? (Source: press release)      
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| Attention Readers: Just in Time for Your New iPad*, Free Movies! Posted: 12 Apr 2010 04:47 PM PDT
Now for those of you who don’t fancy the idea of spending 40-hours a month in a cramped coach seat, there's a cool new way to witness this knife's edge between increasing stability and instability without leaving your laptop. It’s called AsiaPacificFilms.com and it's basically a Netflix for Asian Pacific indie filmmakers. The service was born out of founder Jeannette Hereniko's experience organizing film festivals. Frequently attendees would write to her and ask where they could see a certain film again and the honest answer for most was "You can't, sorry." Finally, using deep connections in the Asian film world, she decided to create a place where you could. I met Hereniko on my recent swing through Hawaii, and was captivated by her descriptions of how the painful-yet-rewarding route to modernization was playing itself out in art across Asia. I convinced her to give our readers a free one-month trial. Go to AsiaPacificFilms.com and enter TechCrunch2010 to redeem it. The company has raised just $350,000 in angel funding to date, and is in the process of There's a complex tech-and-cultural cocktail of reasons why including the availability of cheaper film and editing equipment, availability to get an audience through non-traditional Internet means, and the whole globalization movement creating real ties between the West and the rest. And, says Hereniko, this very same angst, hopefulness, creation and destruction of national identity that emerging markets are going through gives endless content fodder. Urbanization, disparity between rich and poor and dramatic social change is the reoccurring theme in most of the films she's seeing, across a host of countries. To get you started here are a few of Hereniko's own suggestions. I plan on checking out each of these during my upcoming 20-plus hour flights, along with “The Land Has Eyes,” a film Hereniko and her husband (both pictured above) produced that was Fiji’s 2006 official submission to the Academy Awards.
Update: * Where by ‘iPad’ I mean of course ‘device that actually supports flash‘.      
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| Ben Horowitz And Fred Wilson Debate Fat Versus Lean Startups At TC Disrupt Posted: 12 Apr 2010 02:18 PM PDT Most entrepreneurs take it for granted these days that the best way to run a startup is lean and mean. It is a badge of honor to be able to take a startup as far as you can with as little capital as possible. But is that always the best strategy? At our upcoming Disrupt conference in New York City (May-24-26, buy tickets here), VCs Ben Horowitz and Fred Wilson will debate both sides of the coin. Actually, they will be continuing onstage what they’ve already started on their blogs. Horowitz sparked the debate when he wrote The Case For The Fat Startup. Reflecting on his experience as CEO of Loudcloud/Opsware (which he founded with Marc Andreessen and sold to HP for $1.6 billion, but only after raising $346 million and ditching its first business), Horowitz argues:
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures responded with his own post, Being Fat Is Not Healthy. Wilson cautioned that in his experience investing in more than 100 startups (including recently Twitter, Zynga, Etsy, and Foursquare) it is better to build the product first, and get the boatloads of cash later (if you need it). He responds:
Horowitz, of course, offered a rebuttal. (By the way, at Andreesen Horowitz his biggest investment in Skype). It was getting heated, so we invited them to work it out at Disrupt. Actually, Om Malik gave me the idea for the debate (thanks, Om). He will also be joining us as a speaker, along with Steve Case, Ron Conway, Jack Dorsey, and Charlie Rose. And of course, there will also be a startup competition. (Find out how to become a sponsor or exhibitor). Fred Wilson photo by Randy Stewart.      
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| Google Plans To Expand Cloud Computing Services Posted: 12 Apr 2010 02:03 PM PDT
So what does that mean? Google doesn’t want to keep expanding into commoditized services like online storage. Instead, it wants to offer services that go beyond those, allowing developers to tap into Google technology that they haven’t previously had access to. One example that came up during the roundtable was to give developers access to Google’s automated translation services, which can translate Email and webpages with a fair amount of accuracy almost instantly. That’s about as detailed as the roundtable got, but we’ve heard elsewhere that Google is considering a variety of other value-added services. One of these could include online video encoding as a service; another could focus on location/geo services. It sounds like Google is still considering which features it wants to offer and we don’t have a timetable. But it’s quite clear that we’ll be hearing more about this soon (and remember, Google I/O is just over a month away).      
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| YC’s NewsTilt Aims To Help Journalists Create A Business Model For Content Posted: 12 Apr 2010 12:35 PM PDT
NewsLab’s co-founder Paul Biggar, believes that the future of journalism is around the niche brands that are created by the journalists and writers themselves. NewsTilt is essentially a content network and community based around news and professional journalists. Journalists can apply to create a branded niche news site on NewsTilt, and if accepted, NewsLab will completely automate and develop a site for the writer, from the design and content management system of the site to operating SEO and advertising. NewsTilt will host the various micro-news sites on their own network, and will syndicate all content, power social media integration and even link between sites that its hosts when appropriate. Journalists will be able to select their own domain as well. NewsTilt also wants to create a vibrant community around the news sites on its network and will require its audience and visitors to sign in with Facebook Connect. Journalists on the other hand, will be encouraged to participate in the conversation with the community by sharing story ideas with their audience. In turn for basically powering the business model and technology for journalists, NewsTilt will take a 20 percent cut of revenue from ads on the site, using Google AdSense (which Biggar says is a temporary advertising platform for now). The site is currently accepting applications from journalists who want to start a news site on NewsTilt, and is being extremely selective with which journalists are accepted NewsTilt has assembled a seasoned editorial team in place to oversee the operation, headed by Jon Margolis, former chief National Political Correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. So far, the startup has only selected 30 professional journalists out of 150 who’ve applied, and each applicant goes through a rigorous screening to ensure that any content they create is both well-written and has editorial quality. The accepted journalists will write from all over the world, including the U.S., China, and Turkey, and will be reporting on a number of niche topics including technology, news in Iran, business travel and more. Biggar is quick to emphasize that NewsTilt is in no way a content farm like others in the space who have a similar model, such as Demand Media. NewsTilt, says Biggar, is first and foremost a news site and its journalists are professional with considerable experience in mainstream media. And NewsTilt aims to pay journalists fairly and equitably with the aim of creating insightful and professional editorial news content. For many print journalists that find themselves perhaps out of a job or are looking to enter the entrepreneurial side of things with their own news sites, NewsTilt is a really compelling platform. Especially when you consider that the site develops and operates all of the business and advertising side of the publishing model, and allows writers to keep most of the money they make. Plus, writers pretty much have the autonomy to write about whatever they want. I have a feeling we’ll be hearing more from NewsTilt in the future.      
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I've spent some 30-weeks in developing countries over the last year. It’s been a pretty brutal travel schedule, but it’s given me a rare vantage point to see the business, technology and cultural implications of the crushing urbanization, growth of a middle class and chaotic economic ascendancy that’s happening in several hot spots all at once. Spread across so many places, it's a phenomenon that the modern economic world has never seen, yet the story can really only be told correctly country-by-country through local eyes.
When you think of developer-focused web computing services, the first thing that probably comes to mind is Amazon’s hugely popular AWS, which includes S3 (storage) and EC2 (processing). Google has its own web computing service — namely, Google App Engine — and the search giant is looking to significantly expand its offerings. During a roundtable discussion this afternoon at Google Headquarters, 
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