The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Zoho Calendar Steps Out Of Beta With Sharing, Subscribing And More
- With A Fresh $16 Million Round, BuyWithMe Plans To Expand To 20 Cities
- Solar Impulse, The Solar-Powered Airplane, Tries To Fly 24 Hours
- Kids Clothing Swap ThredUP Raises $1.4M From Trinity Ventures, Founder Collective And Others
- Nokia Turns To Russian Authorities To Get Leaked N8 And Other Property Back
- Webroot Acquires Hosted Internet Security Services Provider BrightCloud
- Apple’s Invasion of China Begins With This Shanghai Apple Store
- Gawker Media Grinds To A Halt – Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Other Blogs Down (Update)
- Borders Launches Its Own Kobo-Powered E-Book Store
- Clifford Stoll, Hacker-fighting Astronomer, On This Whole Internet Thing
- You’re Dead, Unless You Tweet Otherwise
- Android Fanboys Grab The Barf Bags, Cupidtino Is Getting Some Action
- Soho OS Lands $1M, Opens Business Management Suite To All Small Businesses
- Fast Company Creatively Combines Link Baiting With A Pyramid Scheme.
- A Russian Billionaire, Jay-Z, And Gowalla Loom Large Over New York
- Hands-on With the Hitachi Life Studio Mobile Plus
- WakeMate’s Long Delays May Finally Be Coming To An End
- AdSafe Media Raises $7.25 Million For Brand Verification Platform
- Jeff Ma’s Keys To Success In Business: Blackjack And Sports
- Best Buy Issues Reprieve For Employee Behind Videos — But He Declines Reinstatement
- Twitter Explains What @EarlyBird Is: It’s All About Distributing Advertiser Deals
- Help Key: Replacing the Apple TV
- Amazon’s Original Kindle Patent Could Spell Trouble For Competitors
- TV Shack Flouts The Feds By Moving Video Piracy Site To Offshore Domain
- AP Not Amused By The Woot Story, Tries To Play The Oil Spill Card
| Zoho Calendar Steps Out Of Beta With Sharing, Subscribing And More Posted: 07 Jul 2010 08:53 AM PDT
One of the primary additions to Zoho Calendar is the ability to now privately share your calendars with other users with a Zoho account. You can share your calendar in a read-only mode so that users can view only Free/Busy times or all of your events and meetings. Read-write mode allows other users to edit your existing events or event create and edit events on your calendar. Similar to Google Calendar, you share your calendar with other users by adding their email address to the account and then setting preferences. While Zoho Calendar allows you to import events by file or URL, you can now also “subscribe” to another calendar, which will update your calendar regularly. You can subscribe to 'internal' calendars (calendars from Zoho applications) or subscribe to any other calendar in ICAL format by providing the URL, which will update your events a couple of times a day. You can also subscribe to your friends' public calendars using their email addresses. If you want to make your calendar completely public, Zoho is now allowing you to embed your calendar on an external site. Other new features include an event based view (vs. calendar/date view), the ability to clear a calendar and more. Of course, Zoho Calendar faces formidable competition from Google Calendar, as well as Microsoft Outlook and iCal. But for Zoho’s 2 million plus users, a unified calendering application across all of the suite’s applications will certainly see heavy use. This year, Zoho has added a number of updates to its applications, including an upgrade to Zoho Wiki, unified search across applications, integration with Facebook Connect and the addition of an app in the newly launched Google App Marketplace. This type of growth is impressive from a startup that competes with tech giants like Google and Microsoft and has never received outside funding. So is there any possibility of an exit through an acquisition? Zoho’s Raju Vegesna tells me that the startup has no intention of selling right now.
     
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| With A Fresh $16 Million Round, BuyWithMe Plans To Expand To 20 Cities Posted: 07 Jul 2010 08:39 AM PDT A lot of venture money is chasing social commerce startups right now because group buying sites are chasing a lot of money (in the form of consumer spending). Groupon kicked things off with its $135 million mega-round last April. LivingSocial has raised $49 million so far. And now BuyWithMe just closed a $16 million B round led by Bain Capital Ventures, bringing its total raised to $21.5 million. Matrix Partners also invested. “This reminds me a lot what online travel looked like in 2000 with so many players,” CEO Cheryl Rosner tells me. “It is a large opportunity, and the market is organizing.” There are literally dozens of daily deal sites in the U.S. alone, and it is a city-by-city fight for mindshare with consumers and local merchants. Rosner, who was just recruited as CEO in April from TicketsNow (where she was CEO after stints at Expedia and Hotels.com), plans to use the cash to expand to 20 cities by year end from five today—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. BuyWithMe offers daily discounts on products and services from local merchants such as pilates classes, massages, and restaurants. The main target market is urban females, but some deals have universal appeal. For instance, right now in New York City, which is suffering under a brutal heat wave, the deal is ten small ice cream cones at Tasti D-Lite for $21. As with Groupon, deals only become active once a minimum threshold of consumers agree to purchase the item or service, but each deal lasts for a week (versus the 24-hour time-limit on Groupon). As with any sale, putting a time limit on the deals gives potential buyers a greater sense of urgency. But the real key to the growth of these social commerce sites is the social aspect. Deals are shared through email, Facebook, and Twitter. “Great deals create great viral brushfires,” says Rosner. “If you have the right opportunity and right value people will share it with their friends.” The phenomenon is very different from one-by-one coupons or even more traditional group buying clubs of the past. “The social aspect of the Web over the last couple of years created this great tipping point for value shopping, and for savvy shoppers to be exposed to great deals,” explains Rosner. The average deal price on BuyWithMe is around $30 to 35, which is up from the mid-$20 range just a couple months ago. Even after the discount, which is typically 50 to 70 percent off, the local merchant splits the 35 to 50 percent of the remaining revenue with BuyWithMe. While that doesn’t sound like a great deal for the merchants, most of these deals are for excess, unsold, perishable inventory such as classes, restaurant reservations, or other services. It is really more of a marketing opportunity for local businesses to get exposed to new customers and get people to come into their shops who otherwise wouldn’t think of it. “It is an extremely profitable business model,” notes Rosner. She is plowing all her cash back into the business right now, however. BuyWithMe was founded only a year ago in May, 2009, and already employs 52 people. A BuyWithMe sales rep personally visits each merchant that runs a deal (building a local marketing business, even one online, requires a lot of legwork). But can BuyWithMe hope to compete with Groupon, which is already offering daily deals in 150 cities in 18 countries (75 cities in the U.S.), employs more than 300 people, and has raised a lot more cash? Social commerce may very well turn out to be a winner-take-most market because of the network effects at play. The more active buyers there are in each city, the faster deals spread virally through social networks and sell out faster, thus attracting more merchants and better deals. It is still early days, though, and the potential market is huge. Is there room for 100 daily deal sites? Probably not. But there is room for at least four or five to carve out decent-sized businesses, even if Groupon ends up taking the lion’s share of the market. The land grab is on, and BuyWithMe is in the race.      
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| Solar Impulse, The Solar-Powered Airplane, Tries To Fly 24 Hours Posted: 07 Jul 2010 08:11 AM PDT <img src=”http://www.crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/solarimpulse1.png”/>A solar-powered airplane, named the Solar Impulse, means to prove, once and for all, that harnessing the energy of the Sun is a good and practical idea. I mean, why would we try to capture some of the energy put out by a completely free nuclear reactor hanging in the sky? The plane took off from Switzerland a little bit ago, and will try to fly for 24 hours without stopping. Here’s hoping it’s a great success.      
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| Kids Clothing Swap ThredUP Raises $1.4M From Trinity Ventures, Founder Collective And Others Posted: 07 Jul 2010 07:30 AM PDT
ThredUP aims to bring affordability and convenience to the children’s clothing market, which is estimated to be valued as a $1 billion space. The platform allows parents to exchange boxes of outgrown kids clothing and shoes for new items that fit. Since launching a few months ago, thredUP has accumulated 12,000 members and saved families an estimated $195,000 in children's clothing. The startup’s co-founder James Reinhart tells me that ThredUP is adding 1,000 new members per week. The new funding will be used to build out the startup’s engineering team, to further product development and to acquire customers. And Reinhart says that ThredUP is expecting increased transactions on its platform in preparation for the Back to School season and Halloween. ThredUP will be holding its first costume swap on halloween. The startup has a solid idea. Many parents end up donating old kids clothes to charity (which is a worthy cause) but ThredUP gives families an alternative to this and at the same time save families money on further spending.      
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| Nokia Turns To Russian Authorities To Get Leaked N8 And Other Property Back Posted: 07 Jul 2010 07:06 AM PDT A couple of months ago, Russian gadget blogger Eldar Murtazin posted a review of a new Nokia phone, the N8 – the first to feature the Symbian^3 platform – before it was officially announced. This thing happens all the time, but there’s much more to this story. A day after the review, Nokia posted a message on its blog titled ‘One of our children is missing’, positing that Murtazin somehow got his hands on a very early, pre-production prototype with dated software that was far from ready. The company also added that it was “determined to protect its intellectual property”. Nokia is now making good on that promise. In a blog post published moments ago, the Finnish mobile juggernaut explains that it had formally requested Murtazin the return of “all unauthorized Nokia property”, which he apparently didn’t respond to. As a result, Nokia says it has now contacted Russian authorities to assist the company in the return of the goods. For what it’s worth, from what I can gather from Murtazin’s blog posts on the matter (in Russian), he has tried to contact Nokia over the past few weeks to no avail. He also claims the whole ordeal is now doing damage to his reputation. Going back to Nokia’s statement, the company claims its move is unrelated to Murtazin’s recent criticism directed at the company and its products, and that it has no intention to have his blog Mobile-review.com shut down. But the company does seem keen on exploring legal actions against Murtazin, as well as casting more doubts over his objectiveness with regards to the mobile industry he covers:
Nokia says it will let the Russian authorities determine what the most appropriate course of action is going forward. Update: Murtazin shares his side of the story, claiming Nokia is trying to make him look like a blogger and not the professional journalist he really is, in an email. He also explains that the story we linked to at the beginning wasn’t an N8 review per se, but rather a weekly column piece called birulki64is. Murtazin says he has never received any letters from Nokia, and that the company is thus lying. He also reiterates that he’s been trying to reach Nokia’s PR team, but hasn’t heard back from them for months. To be continued, no doubt.      
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| Webroot Acquires Hosted Internet Security Services Provider BrightCloud Posted: 07 Jul 2010 06:18 AM PDT  Internet security company Webroot today announced it has acquired BrightCloud, a Web content classification and security services provider. Webroot aims to integrate BrightCloud's technology with its own proprietary malware detection and security-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but the BrightCloud team will join Webroot's Cloud Engineering team with an expanded focus on hosted security services.
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| Apple’s Invasion of China Begins With This Shanghai Apple Store Posted: 07 Jul 2010 05:58 AM PDT
Apple plans on opening three stores in Shanghai and is considering more locations in other first and second-tier Chinese cities as well. The first Chinese Apple Store opened in 2008 in Sanlitun, Beijing but these new locations mark a strategy shift for Apple. In fact, The Oriental Morning Post stated this morning that Apple plans on having as many Chinese retail outlets as Louis Vuitton – that’s over two dozen.      
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| Gawker Media Grinds To A Halt – Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Other Blogs Down (Update) Posted: 07 Jul 2010 05:11 AM PDT We’ve had our fair share of outages around here, but we’re not nearly as big as the Gawker blogging empire is, so it’s worth noting that every site in the Gawker Media blog network is currently down and out. From Gizmodo to Gawker.com, Kotaku, Jezebel and Lifehacker, every visitor to the sites operated by the new media company is being served a dry message that reads ‘Http/1.1 Service Unavailable’. I’ve been checking out some of the Twitter feeds of said blogs, as well as that of founder Nick Denton (whose personal blog is also down), but it appears they’re either not yet aware of the issue – rather unlikely – or too busy getting things back up again to let their respective audiences know what’s up (or down, rather). Update: and they’re all back – Gawker tech is holding the servers differently now :) I’m not sure just how big Gawker Media is, but in terms of reach, it’s very big. The last report I can find on its traffic numbers date back to November 2009, when Denton said the company’s network was at nearly 400 million pageviews a month, with not a single blog getting under 20 million pageviews per month.      
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| Borders Launches Its Own Kobo-Powered E-Book Store Posted: 07 Jul 2010 04:35 AM PDT
     
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| Clifford Stoll, Hacker-fighting Astronomer, On This Whole Internet Thing Posted: 07 Jul 2010 04:26 AM PDT
Cliff, who now makes these great Klein bottles, was, for a while, an Internet pundit. Luckily, it didn’t work out but a buddy pointed me to this great article from 1995 where Stoll derides the Internet and says it’s a dead end.      
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| You’re Dead, Unless You Tweet Otherwise Posted: 07 Jul 2010 03:05 AM PDT Short version – a false report about renowned Dutch DJ Tiësto dying in a car accident spread via Twitter, was talked about so much that it ended up in trending topics, and was ultimately denied by the man himself via his own Twitter account. I increasingly find it disturbing that false information can make the rounds so quickly these days, and I’ve sadly long realized this is an unstoppable, irreversible yet disheartening trend. Somewhat longer version – At the risk of flogging a dead horse (pun intended), I’m saddened by the fact that this is the umpteenth case of a celebrity being declared dead on one or more social networking sites, without anyone seemingly being able to determine the actual source of the ‘news’ and thus unable to verify the information with absolute certainty. Granted, most people seemed to be simply echoing the rumor – hitting the retweet or like button is oh so easy – and asking themselves and/or their Twitter followers whether it’s really true or not, seemingly in an attempt to locate a solid source for the news – in vain. Meanwhile, I wonder how much longer this would have been kept going if Tiësto (né Tijs Michiel Verwest) didn’t have the chance to use his own presence on Twitter to squash down the rumors of his passing as swiftly as he did. I wonder what his family and friends, assuming they’d pick up on this through Twitter or other media that base themselves on these false reports, go through if they wouldn’t be able to reach him instantaneously. I wonder what the experience was and is like for him, seeing his fans, peers, close and less-close friends or even relatives disseminate and attempt to verify the false information of his tragic death. Emotional roller coasters abound, I can imagine, and all because somewhere, someone decided it’d be fun to trick people into believing he died in a car accident. But most of all, I wonder if this is a trend, similar to the online mob phenomenon Michael talked about in the past, that is unequivocally here to stay. I fear it is, and I can’t think of a way to reverse or prevent it. Actually, scratch that. I know it is, and I can’t think of a way to prevent it, and no longer believe it is possible at all. Am I being a pessimist, or a realist? (Image via nestland on Flickr)      
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| Android Fanboys Grab The Barf Bags, Cupidtino Is Getting Some Action Posted: 07 Jul 2010 02:23 AM PDT
The niche site has already attracted over 22,000 members since it launched last month, we’re told. Yes, 22,000 Apple fanboys/fangirls gathering in one spot to fall in love. Android fanboys everywhere must be puking their guts out. And that’s not all, Cupidtino is actually bringing in some money. While they’re still playing around with the pricing plan, currently, they’re charging $4.79 a month if users want to exchange messages (signing up is free). As they note on the site, “Our membership costs the same as a venti Mocha but lasts longer than 20 oz.” Even that slogan will likely make people cringe — but thanks to that pricing scheme, they’ve already hit five-digit revenues. Sure, that’s nothing huge, but not bad for three weeks either. They’ve also provided us with a breakdown of their usage by country:
Clearly, the U.S. is dominating, but Germany, Canada, Russia, and Great Britain are all pretty strong as well. So what’s next for Cupidtino? They’re starting the process to raise funds so they can hire up and scale to reach all the Mac lovers out there. How long until we see an Android dating site? Androidgyny, perhaps?      
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| Soho OS Lands $1M, Opens Business Management Suite To All Small Businesses Posted: 07 Jul 2010 02:03 AM PDT
In our initial post, the company offered 1000 beta invites to TechCrunch readers, and in response, 7000 signed-up. Today the company is removing the closed Beta gate, opening up the service to all. Soho OS is sweetening things up for TechCrunch readers with $20 towards communication services for all new TechCrunch registrants. Just follow this link: http://www.sohoos.com/welcome/techcrunch/ The company has already begun putting the money to good use. As noted in the initial post, “the interface could certainly use a UX overhaul,” and it got one, and a new logo to boot. With a new color scheme, layout and consolidation, the new interface’s look & feel is softer, more pleasant on the eye, and more convenient to use. A definite improvement on the interface we previously reviewed. Soho OS also beefed up communications features with video chat, SMS, VOIP, voice messaging, as well as improved conference calling and broadcast emails. I really like where Soho OS is going but would like to see them charging a tiered service fee rather than rely exclusively on cutting commissions off their 3rd party integrated services. There’s no shame in charging your customers kids, especially if you provide them with clear value. Tattoo that please.      
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| Fast Company Creatively Combines Link Baiting With A Pyramid Scheme. Posted: 07 Jul 2010 12:25 AM PDT
It’s a contest to find the most influential people online. To compete you give them a picture of yourself and they give you a unique link to Fast Company. To win you get people to click on that link. The more clicks, the bigger your picture gets among the hordes of others:
Yes, this is a contest to see who can send the most traffic to Fast Company. And the winner gets to have a big picture in the November print issue. I’m guessing the most influential person will also be on the cover. The best part is the pyramid scheme bolted on top – you get extra influence if people sign up for the project after clicking your link.
I’ve accidentally nominated Chevy Chase from Fletch (video clip here) to be the most influential person online. It’s currently my Facebook picture (in honor of the Lakers winning the championship), and the handy Facebook Connect sign up form just made it all so easy. I don’t have any real hopes of winning, though. This Fast Company article from 2008 tells me all about how there’s no such thing as influencers anyway. Err, what? Then why the contest? Yeah nevermind. We’ve got links to click. Join me in my quest to put Chevy Chase, with an afro, on the cover of Fast Company Magazine. My work will then be done here. And join us next week at TechCrunch when we’ll hold a contest to see who can click the most ad units on our site. Winner gets called “The Most Awesome Person Online” and we’ll put their picture on our home page for a day! And a free tshirt!      
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| A Russian Billionaire, Jay-Z, And Gowalla Loom Large Over New York Posted: 07 Jul 2010 12:14 AM PDT
So why are we talking about this on TechCrunch? Because the mural also prominently features a tech company. If I told you it was a tech company in the check-in space, you’d probably assume it was NY-based Foursquare. But it’s not. Instead, in huge letters at the bottom of the mural it reads, “Check in with Gowalla to get a special item.“ Yes, the Austin, Texas-based Gowalla is living large in the Big Apple. With this mural, they’re looming over New York, a town dominated by rival Foursquare — just as the New Jersey Nets are looming over New York, a town dominated by the Knicks. This partnership was the work of VaynerMedia. The company, run by brothers Gary and AJ Vaynerchuk, does new media consulting for a wide range of clients, including the Nets. Gary Vaynerchuk also happens to be an investor in Gowalla, so the partnership was an obvious one. And the mural isn’t all just for show. As it indicates, there’s actually a Nets’ Blueprint for Greatness venue on Gowalla (created at the spot of the billboard) that users can check-in to in order to receive a special collectable item. And because Gowalla, unlike Foursquare, requires you to position yourself with GPS when you check-in, it’s basically impossible to cheat in order to get the item — you have to actually go there. As you can see on the page, Gowalla users are also taking advantage of that services’ features by posting multiple pictures of the mural to the venue page. It seems unlikely that the 225 x 95 foot wall is going to help the Nets lure LeBron James to New Jersey (and eventually Brooklyn, where they hope to move in a few years). But it has certainly worked in generating buzz about the team. And Gowalla was smart to hitch a ride on that in a city that their rival owns.      
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| Hands-on With the Hitachi Life Studio Mobile Plus Posted: 07 Jul 2010 12:00 AM PDT
The drive also includes Hitachi’s own back-up software, although you can simply format the drive and turn it into a Time Machine back-up volume.      
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| WakeMate’s Long Delays May Finally Be Coming To An End Posted: 06 Jul 2010 06:24 PM PDT
WakeMate has posted an update to its blog that indicates that it’s optimistic about having a large chunk of orders out close to the end of the month (though it sounds like that may slip a bit). From their post:
WakeMate’s product consists of a $50 wristband that you wear while you’re sleeping, which can analyze your sleeping patterns and wake you up at the opportune time so that you can beat morning grogginess (also see the pricier Zeo Sleep Coach and Fitbit, which can track your sleep but doesn’t have the wake-up alarm). Data from the wristband is relayed to your phone — WakeMate is developing companion applications for the iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. WakeMate’s delays have resulted in plenty of frustrated users, in part because WakeMate collected a five dollar downpayment for its pre-orders.      
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| AdSafe Media Raises $7.25 Million For Brand Verification Platform Posted: 06 Jul 2010 06:15 PM PDT
Launched in May 2009, AdSafe Media uses algorithmic modeling and human verification to rate and verify the brand safety of content on commercially supported Web pages via a proprietary system. The rating then allow advertisers to properly place display advertising campaigns of sites. AdSafe plans to open its Content Rating API late this year to integrate with real- The company recently released a report that provided an analysis of the key display advertising brand safety metrics and industry insights, which shows that 47% of traffic was served by exchanges, real-time-bidding (RTB) or demand-side (DSP) platforms. According to the report, premium brand advertisers seem to be shifting a larger percentage of their display adverting spending to exchanges, RTB and DSP platforms because of increased media efficiency and broader reach afforded by these channels. AsSafe faces competition from DoubleVerify, AdXpose and others.      
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| Jeff Ma’s Keys To Success In Business: Blackjack And Sports Posted: 06 Jul 2010 06:05 PM PDT In terms of interesting backgrounds among people in the tech space, Jeff Ma has one of the most interesting. If you’ve read the book Bringing Down The House or seen the movie 21, the main character is based on Ma — yes, in the movie he’s a white guy, but still, that’s him. He was a member of MIT’s now famous blackjack team for seven years. From there, he went on to co-founder a sports startup, Citizen Sports, which Yahoo acquired this past March. Ma is actually the only one of Citizen Sports 30-some employees that didn’t go over to Yahoo with the deal. Instead, he decided to take some time off to help promote his new book, The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big In Business. The book is an extension of talks Ma has given around the country relating risk-taking (or rather, calculated risk-taking) in both gambling and sports to advantageous moves in business. Below, find a conversation I had with Ma on TechCrunch TV today. We talk about everything from blackjack, to the new Facebook movie (based on a book written by the same author who wrote Bringing Down The House, Ben Mezrich, whom Ma knows well), to Yahoo, to Ma’s own book, to where LeBron may be going. You can find The House Advantage on Amazon here.      
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| Best Buy Issues Reprieve For Employee Behind Videos — But He Declines Reinstatement Posted: 06 Jul 2010 04:35 PM PDT
In their statement about the situation (below), Best Buy humorously refers to Maupin as “the aspiring film-maker.” The company notes that they took their time coming to a decision about what to do because they wanted to ensure they were maintaing a supportive environment for employees, while also making sure employees couldn’t openly disparage customers, vendor partners, and other employees. Best Buy says that three video in particular caught their attention, and that those videos have now been taken down. What’s interesting here is that the three videos apparently don’t include the two most popular ones. Maupin originally told us that there were a “couple other videos” on his account that did reference Best Buy in a comical manner and that he took those down immediately when the company asked. He said they were also asking him to take down the more popular videos, but he refused to do that, as they don’t mention Best Buy in any way (but do mention brands Best Buy carries). But Best Buy is now apparently doing a 180 on what they initially told Maupin. Now, they’re indicating they only cared about the other videos in question (which, again, mentioned Best Buy specifically). But that wasn’t the case last week, according to Maupin. “According to the statement BBY issued, the videos they were offended over are gone, but 2 of them they took issue with are up, so maybe they’ve realized those two don’t mention Best Buy or maybe they’re just settling, considering the spotlight on them,” Maupin tells us. Undoubtedly, without the two popular videos, which now have nearly 4 million views combined on YouTube, none of this would have been brought to Best Buy’s attention in the first place. At the end of their statement, Best Buy notes that Maupin is scheduled to return to work on Friday. Unfortunately, they apparently didn’t clear that with Maupin himself. “I’m not planning on returning to work — immediately, anyway. Honestly, I don’t know how I could return considering some of the things that were said to me and not have a lot of awkwardness on the job. I’m looking at possible jobs in graphic art — nothing definite yet, but I’m searching,” he tells us. Below, find Best Buy’s full statement on the matter and then Maupin’s official one. And, of course, the videos below that. Best Buy:
Maupin:
     
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| Twitter Explains What @EarlyBird Is: It’s All About Distributing Advertiser Deals Posted: 06 Jul 2010 03:18 PM PDT ReadWriteWeb had a solid scoop last week when it uncovered Twitter was set to go live with an account called @EarlyBird. Well, it has just gone live, with a tweet pointing to this page where the company explains what it’s all about. Looks like Twitter is about to start offering users exclusive, time-bound deals, events and sneak peeks, for which it has partnered with a number of (yet unnamed) advertising partners. Those advertisers will distribute offers via the @EarlyBird account, and they get to determine the terms of the offer, including availability, amount, and pricing. And you? You get to opt in to them. If you want to get access to said exclusive deals, you need to of course follow the @EarlyBird account, although you may also see offers if someone you follow retweets a tweet from that account. Yes, that means exclusive deals are bound to get viral pretty quickly, which will be interesting to observe given that many of the offers distributed via the account will be time-sensitive of nature (otherwise it wouldn’t be called Early Bird, of course). Twitter outlines that it has deals with select advertisers in place, but welcomes suggestions of a product/event sent by @reply to @earlybird. Nevertheless, since Twitter clearly looks at this like a significant potential revenue stream, they are keen on emphasizing that it will be selective about the type of deals they highlight. Also worth noting: the company suggests that deals will come mostly at the beginning of the day (it’s safe to assume that they mean the start of the day throughout the United States, at least at first). As for internationally available offers:
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that at the end of the list of questions presented on the introductory page, Twitter makes it clear that while it is kicking things off with US-wide offers, the company will explore location-based and even thematic (e.g. fashion or music) deals in the future. This could get pretty big, pretty quickly, in my opinion. Now let’s see how many followers the @EarlyBird account gains in the next few days. At the time of publication, it had 833 followers. For Twitter, this is far from the first or only attempt at generating revenue. It currently rents out access to its data ‘firehose’ to notable Web giants such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft and is actively experimenting with Promoted Tweets and Trending topics. For the record, Twitter has raised a staggering $160 million in funding to date, and we believe the valuation of the company to run up to $1 billion. Do you think it’s worth that much?      
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| Help Key: Replacing the Apple TV Posted: 06 Jul 2010 02:53 PM PDT
Slowly but surely, however, the ATV hit its limit. I ran out of disk space and didn’t want to upgrade and XBMC was choking on larger files. The device itself was as hot as a griddle most of the time and I worried that at some point I’d have a bricked device on my hands. I went on a quest for a networked device to do two things: stream audio from multiple sources, including my library of MP3s, and to play video from a NAS drive over the network. If it could play Netflix that would be gravy. I put a number of devices to the test and have come up with a real winner.      
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| Amazon’s Original Kindle Patent Could Spell Trouble For Competitors Posted: 06 Jul 2010 02:47 PM PDT
The relevant language in the patent starts off thus:
That alone would be be sufficient to give pause to the designers of similar devices — and unfortunately for them, it gets worse.      
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| TV Shack Flouts The Feds By Moving Video Piracy Site To Offshore Domain Posted: 06 Jul 2010 02:25 PM PDT Last week, the Feds shut down nine video sites for piracy and copyright violations. The enforcement was a combined effort by the Department of Justice, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center under the Department of Homeland Security. It is the new Intellectual Property Police, and they are fighting to save Hollywood. The press release announcing the online raid included this choice quote from U.S. District Attorney Preet Bharara: “If your business model is movie piracy, your story will not have a happy ending.” The following domains were seized TVshack.net, Movies-Links.tv, FilesPump.com, Now-Movies.com, PlanetMoviez.com, ThePirateCity.org, ZML.com, NinjaVideo.net and NinjaThis.net. Of course, it only took a few days for at least one of the sites to reappear at a different domain. TVshack.net, for instance, is now at TVshack.cc. There you can watch full streams of bootleg versions of The Twilight Saga:Eclipse (filmed in a theater with people standing up and casting shadows on the screen, see below), Toy Story 3, True Blood, and other movies and TV shows. The .cc domain is administered by the Cocos Islands, which is a territory of Australia. The company is based in Stockholm, Sweden. Another one of the shuttered sites has reappeared at www.watch-movies-tv.info, but it no longer offers streaming movies. You get what you pay for with these sites. The video quality is predictably awful, and you have to endure pop-up ads for Russian mail-order brides blocking part of the screen. But some people don’t mind. We’ve been noticing spikes to our Crunchbase directory from people looking for info on TV Shack (our Crunchbase entry is the second result on Google). Who wants to guess how long the .cc domain will stay up?
     
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| AP Not Amused By The Woot Story, Tries To Play The Oil Spill Card Posted: 06 Jul 2010 01:51 PM PDT
This morning, Paul Colford, the Director of Media Relations for the AP sent emails to both me and Woot CEO Matt Rutledge. Here’s what we got:
Did he really just pull out the oil spill card? Yes, he did. A few minutes later, Rutledge got the same basic email, minus the oil spill coverage reference. The emphasis of both is that the AP actually interviewed Rutledge about the story. Sure enough, they did. Here’s the quote the AP used from that interview:
Yep, that’s it. So that’s 24 words lifted from Rutledge’s post (which wasn’t linked to, by the way) and 3 words from the AP’s reporting. So, if I’m interpreting this correctly, the AP’s stance is that it’s fine to lift excerpts from others’ work as long as you interview them — even if that interview only results in a three word quote and the quotes you’re lifting are much longer. Just to make sure, I emailed the AP about it:
I didn’t get a response. But I did send it to Rutledge (remember, the interviewee here). Here’s what he wrote back, “I was just mulling over how to respond to similar confusing email here, but I think I like your response better.” A couple hours later I wrote a quick follow-up to the AP:
About 20 seconds later Colford writes back:
Ouch. Someone is a little cranky. A few things here. 1) Interesting that Colford didn’t note that position at all in his original email. Instead, his position was that they were free to lift passages from Rutledge’s post because they “interviewed” him. 2) That AP release from 2009 completely disregards the fact that in 2008, the AP did in fact try to bully Drudge Retort into taking down excerpts from their stories that ranged in length from 39 to 79 words. After some big backlash, they quickly tried to back away from that, and their 2009 statement basically rewrites their position stating that they’re not going after bloggers for using excerpts from their stories (even though they clearly went after Drudge Retort). 3) Wouldn’t a “non-’story’” be a story? The quotes around story already indicate Colford’s belief that the Woot issue isn’t a story. So a non-non-story is a story. Anyway, whatever. I’m a little confused by this whole thing. So is Rutledge. I think the AP is too. But I’m going to go with what I can only assume is their policy now. Since I technically “interviewed” Colford for this post, I’m going to copy an AP story below. I’ll go with an oil spill one since he was so quick to point those out. And sure, I only got a few words out of Colford, but since that doesn’t seem to matter, I’m just going to paste an entire AP story below. I like this new policy.
     
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