The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Google eBooks: Is That All There Is?
- This Weekend: CrunchGear’s Stocking Stuffer Giveaway
- Chile’s Grand Innovation Experiment
- (The) Greatest Thing Facebook Ever Did Was Drop The “The”
- Yahoo’s Head Of Engineering For Communication Products, An 11 Year Vet, Latest To Sign Off
- Another Key Feature Of Google +1: Massive-Scale Social Video Conferencing
- Don’t: Parade In Front Of TechCrunch HQ Wearing A Chicken Costume
- Ask a VC: Kairouz on Canada, Splurging on Wine and the Surging NYC Scene (TCTV)
- Yahoo Just Killed… Consumer Confidence In Them
- Zappos Expands To A San Francisco Office, Is Hiring
- Google To Expand And Market Movie Streaming Service In 2011
- Confirmed: Tumblr Raises $30 Million
- Dropbox Hits 1.0, Adds Features
- Seesmic: From Near Death to Enterprise Chat Spoiler?
- Google Takes Another Big Step to Retain Employees: Autonomous Business Units
- TC Disrupt People’s Choice Winner Miso Media Raises Funding From Google Ventures
- TechCrunch Surges To Lead In UCSF Challenge, Crushes Hopes Of Twelve Year Old
- FitFu Wants To Get You Exercising At Your Desk, And Everywhere Else
- Yahoo Has Hit Rock Bottom And Is In “Absolute Disarray”
- Startup Sherpa: Chris Dixon And Stickybits CEO Billy Chasen Talk About Pivoting (Part I)
- Yahoo Trying To Unload Del.icio.us, Not Shut It Down
- Tron: Legacy Review Round-Up: A Mixed Reaction (At Best)
- The Fall And Rise Of Twitter In English Literature
| Google eBooks: Is That All There Is? Posted: 18 Dec 2010 09:28 AM PST Two weeks ago the Google eBookstore finally launched, and the world was briefly amazed. Google Editions, as it was known until launch, was the book world’s Duke Nukem Forever: vaporware for seven years, depending on how you count. Its actual emergence was like the birth of a unicorn. A mewling, misshapen, half-baked unicorn. Some background: "In 2004 Google digitized the entire contents of several major US libraries, and made a lot of material available on-line, mostly in snippet form as part of its Google Book Search program. It did this without the consent of rightsholders," to quote an April 2009 email from my agents. (I’m the author of half-a-dozen books, mostly technothrillers.) The resulting legal jihad remains unresolved, and Google’s dream of scanning, indexing, linking, and selling the contents of every library in the world has fragmented into a hodgepodge that includes their Book Search, Library Project, Books Partner Program, and now eBookstore, all of them semi-intermingled. Confused yet? Many hopes and dreams were projected onto Google Editions’ vaporware. It would index every published word since the dawn of humanity, and make it possible to search your personal library, and deep-link to individual chapters, sections, and paragraphs. It would somehow singlehandedly resurrect the dying bookstore trade. Instead, when the fog finally cleared, all we got was Kindle Lite. Oh, it does what it does well enough. You can buy books from Google and read them on your Android, iWhatever, e-reader, or the Web; authors and publishers can upload their own books, with or without DRM; and it’s all been expertly implemented. But now that you can read Kindle books on the Web, Google’s new eBookstore is little more than a carbon copy of Amazon’s Kindle ecosystem — except that you can’t (yet) read DRMed Google ebooks on a Kindle (which remains, I note, the world’s most popular e-reader) or email them as gifts. There are some good features. The best is that you get public-domain books for free, though they seem to have missed the Creative Commons train: neither of the books I’ve released for free appears in their catalog. You can link to a specific edition of a book. Authors and publishers without PDFs can send physical books in to be scanned. Publishers get some of the ad revenue from their books’ web pages. And it has the world’s greatest error page. Nice little touches, but mostly inconsequential. A ridiculous amount of ado has been made about the eBookstore’s one innovative feature: they’re allowing independent bookstores to sell Google eBooks through their own web sites. I don’t know what it is about indie bookstores that makes otherwise hard-headed analysts go all misty-eyed and misty-minded, but anyone who thinks this is a game-changer is on crack. "A middleman’s business is to make himself a necessary evil," quoth William Gibson, and love ‘em or hate ‘em, bookstores are to ebooks what travel agents are to online travel; unnecessary and irrelevant. Leaving that distraction aside, when you compare Amazon’s ebook ecosystem to Google’s, the latter finds itself in the unfamiliar position of inferior copycat. That isn’t entirely their fault. Most publishing companies are terrified dinosaurs, and book rights are a legal morass in which the dream of Google Books will languish for some time yet, alas. (Their recently released—and completely awesome—Ngram corpus search offers some idea of the possibilities.) If only Google had decided six years ago to ask for permission instead of forgiveness. Now their much-vaunted eBookstore launch is a tepid anticlimax, and they have mostly themselves to blame.        
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| This Weekend: CrunchGear’s Stocking Stuffer Giveaway Posted: 18 Dec 2010 08:00 AM PST If you haven’t noticed, we’ve been away great stuff for the past few days and this weekend is no exception. Today and tomorrow we’re giving away a whole slew of exciting prizes including, but not limited to, lasers, iPad gear, and assorted sundries. You will love what we have on offer this weekend. Without further ado: Check CrunchGear’s Stocking Stuffer Giveaways and keep checking Saturday and Sunday.        
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| Chile’s Grand Innovation Experiment Posted: 18 Dec 2010 07:00 AM PST
Unfortunately, the magic never happened, anywhere. All government-sponsored (top-down) tech-cluster efforts—everywhere in the world—either have failed or are on life support (though some pretend they are not). That's because they all used the wrong ingredients. It isn't real estate, universities, or VCs that make innovation happen; it is entrepreneurs. To create a tech center like Silicon Valley, you need to first attract smart entrepreneurs from all over the world. Then you have to create entrepreneurial networks; instill a spirit of risk-taking and openness; and build mentoring systems. You also need to provide seed financing to startups. The money is easy; everything else requires a change in culture that usually takes decades. But Chile is trying a radical new experiment that I helped conceive, to short-circuit this process. It is importing entrepreneurs from all over the world, by offering them $40,000 to bootstrap in Chile. They get a visa; free office space; assistance with networking, mentoring, fundraising, and connecting to potential customers and partners. All the entrepreneurs have to do, in return, is commit to working hard and live in one of the most beautiful places on this planet. The program, called Start-Up Chile, is still in the pilot stage. Chile has selected 25 teams to receive grants. Seventeen of these teams have already moved to Chile's capital city, Santiago. The program will be officially launched on January 13, 2011. It will then be opened to the next batch of 100 startups. Chile expects to "import" around 1000 startup teams over the next three years. The program is headed by Nicolas Shea, who reports to Chile's Minister of Economy, Juan Andrés Fontaine. To review the progress of Start-Up Chile, I travelled to Santiago this week. I came back convinced that Chile has a chance to become the first region in the world that will build a tech center out of nothing at all. And it will achieve this feat for a much smaller investment than other regions have made in efforts that failed. All of the teams that I met raved about the opportunities they had gained by being in Chile. They told me they have gained valuable time to perfect their technologies before having to raise capital from Angels or VCs; that they’d found Santiago to be a really cheap place to live; and that they benefit by being able to network with each other, are appreciative of the support that the Chilean government is providing by connecting them to local businesses and investors, and enjoy the high quality of life and wonderful scenery and climate. They also find the natives to be very friendly and eager to learn from them. I thought it best to let these entrepreneurs tell you their stories, themselves. So I recorded a video and had them collectively edit this. I must warn Chilean men not to watch this. They won't like what Karina Aguirre (a Chilean who recently joined a Start-Up Chile team) has to say (or not to say) about them. These are some of the companies featured in the video:
Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.        
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| (The) Greatest Thing Facebook Ever Did Was Drop The “The” Posted: 17 Dec 2010 07:55 PM PST Or so argues this music video about ex-Facebook president Sean Parker’s mythical contribution to humanity. Behold as a goofily dressed and bewigged Parker sings about the apocryphal moment (as seen in The Social Network) where he convinced founder Mark Zuckerberg to drop the “the” in TheFacebook and just go with Facebook. The fictional rapper Parker goes for broke, urging that the lesson be applied universally to stuff like The Marines, The Pope, The Liberty Bell and Smokey The Bear. Yeah, what’s the deal with “The” anyways? Anyways while I’m pretty sure this isn’t the first rap song to refer to the Napster founder, it’s sure to be the funniest. My favorite lyric? “That’s my status so go ahead and ‘Like’ it.” Hot.        
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| Yahoo’s Head Of Engineering For Communication Products, An 11 Year Vet, Latest To Sign Off Posted: 17 Dec 2010 07:31 PM PST
Vemulapalli, amazingly, has been with Yahoo for over 11 years. Over that span he has worked his way up the engineering ranks, culminating in his position leading some of the few products that have been bright spots for Yahoo in recent years. That includes the massively-used Yahoo Messenger product, and all of the other messaging integration across the various Yahoo products. As he puts it in his LinkedIn profile, these products, “deliver billions of messages per day, delight 250+ million monthly unique users and generate $150+ million in revenues for Yahoo!“ Naturally, as seems to be the norm with Yahoo recently, the situation surrounding Vemulapalli’s departure is a bit odd. We had heard that today was actually his last day at the company. But when reached for comment, he told us that he had not yet decided on his future with the company and was still “contemplating” it. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s communication team at first had no response to our inquiry about the situation, then gave us a “no comment”, then confirmed his departure with no further details. Okay then.        
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| Another Key Feature Of Google +1: Massive-Scale Social Video Conferencing Posted: 17 Dec 2010 06:58 PM PST
But there’s also quite a bit more to it, based on what we’ve been hearing. For one thing, we’ve been hearing a bit of talk about specific mobile applications, which may or may not be called “Loop” — after one of the key features of +1 (think: groups). But another feature of +1 is apparently large-scale video conferencing. Video conferencing is hardly a new phenomenon, but Apple’s Facetime, Cisco’s Umi, Skype and others have driven some renewed interested in the concept. Apple’s iChat software has long supported up to four people at once on a video call. But this Google entry, which may be known as something along the lines of “Hangout” or “gConferencing”, can apparently support well over a dozen people at a time — and maybe even more. People with knowledge of the feature say it works very well. It could be tied into your Loops — you just pick the friends you want to video chat with and hit a button and you’re good. Apparently, a key to all of this is multiplexing — multiple digital streams being sent over shared resources. It may seem a little weird that such a feature would be a key part of +1, but again, from what we’re hearing, while the toolbar thing is the main entry point, it’s hardly the only part of the service. (And no, the picture in this post is not of the feature.) [photo: flickr/flype]        
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| Don’t: Parade In Front Of TechCrunch HQ Wearing A Chicken Costume Posted: 17 Dec 2010 06:13 PM PST Late last week, a handful of TechCrunch staff noticed something strange going on in front of our headquarters in San Francisco: there was giant, creepy-looking chicken pacing back and forth in the street, holding a sign over its head that said “TechCrunch Dont Be Chicken, Check Out DoDont“. Laura bravely went outside to scope out the situation — she returned to say that the guy had already been out there for hours, and that this was actually the second day he’d been walking around TCHQ (nobody noticed him the first day). So, I did what any other fearless reporter would do: I grabbed my Flip camera and started talking to the giant chicken. As you’ll learn in the video above, the chicken in question happens to be one of the founders of DoDont, a site that invites users to voice their recommendations on a binary scale: “Do” something, or “Don’t”. Like the pizza at Primo’s? Tell people to ‘do’ dinner there. Hated the service at your local movie theatre? Tell your friends that they ‘don’t’ want to go there. You can vote on the ‘Dos’ and ‘Don’ts’ you agree with, and you can also see the top Dos and Don’ts for each tag category. The chicken — whose actual name is J. Brent Large — says that the site is a decision engine (he’s also described it as a “Digg for opinions”). It uses Facebook Connect for signins, and in the near future, he says that it will add support for Twitter integration and asymmetrical relationships, as well as native mobile apps and an API. Obviously it’s very simple, probably to a fault. Then again, we’ve seen sites with similarly simple propositions take off — Formspring’s ‘Ask me anything’ comes to mind — so who knows. Now, let me be clear. As a general policy, TechCrunch writers have every intention of ignoring any similar shenanigans for the foreseeable future. People try similar stunts all the time and we generally ignore them, but this one took guts and is pretty funny. But everyone else, please use our company submission form and/or tips address. Here’s a video overview of DoDont:        
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| Ask a VC: Kairouz on Canada, Splurging on Wine and the Surging NYC Scene (TCTV) Posted: 17 Dec 2010 06:03 PM PST
In this episode we talk about what New York finally got right, why Rho has offices in Canada, the value of an incubator versus bootstrapping and why Kairouz doesn’t think there’s as much opportunity in online beer as there is in wine. (Note: Apologies on my audio. We had some issues, but Kairouz is the one answering the questions and his is just fine.)        
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| Yahoo Just Killed… Consumer Confidence In Them Posted: 17 Dec 2010 05:41 PM PST
Yahoo may not be killing Delicious, but they have killed something else: consumer confidence in them. The entire time I was reading the back and forth of this fiasco, I had one thought on my mind: I need to get my pictures out of Flickr, pronto. No, Flickr wasn’t on the list of companies being “sunset”, but how do I know that in a year it won’t be? Hell, maybe even 6 months from now? I don’t. In fact, I’d say it’s 50/50 that something similar happens with that service. Sure, Delicious has been largely stagnant over the past few years (which, of course, is Yahoo’s fault), but it has long been one of the mainstays of the so-called “Web 2.0″ movement. In fact, the sale of Delicious to Yahoo was one of the first stories that TechCrunch broke back in 2005. There are a ton of people that have a ton of data in it. It’s still a valuable tool to those people. It has millions of users. Yahoo just gave them all the middle finger. Mathew Ingram argues that the moves makes sense from a business perspective. Maybe. But the key ingredient of Yahoo’s business is people using their services. If they’ve showing that they can just kill off such a big one on a whim, I’m just not sure how they can convince us that all of them aren’t at risk. Yahoo says that Delicious isn’t “a strategic fit” for the company anymore. How is Flickr? I know the CEO Carol Bartz has a hard time explaining what Yahoo is, but of the dozen answers she has given, one hasn’t been “photo-sharing service”. It’s true that plenty of other large companies kill off products all the time. Google, for example, “sunset” a number of services like Dodgeball and Jaiku in early 2009. But that was a different time. The entire U.S. economy was collapsing. Everyone was making cuts everywhere. And none of those services were the size of Delicious. Yahoo’s plan now is to try to find a buyer for Delicious. That’s great, but it might not be so easy. Even though they just likely drove down the price with this fiasco, they’re still going to want a pretty penny for the company. It has been a part of Yahoo for so long that there’s likely a lot of proprietary code behind it, and they’re not going to part with that for nothing. Even before all of this info got leaked, we had heard there was interest from other Bay Area companies taking Delicious off of Yahoo’s hands. The hold-up was and likely still will be the price. I’m sure they will be able to find a buyer, but it’s not going to be as easy as they’re making it seem. And again, that’s very troubling. What if it’s a death-by-default situation? And Flickr is a thousand times more troubling. That service is so large that the only ones who could likely buy them off of Yahoo are one of the big boys. That means Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc. And again, there’s likely a lot of code in there that Yahoo may not want companies that they still see as competitors in some ways buying. The whole situation is just sad. Yahoo has become a shadow of what it once was. Even with massive layoff after massive layoff, they still have tons of talented people working there. But those people can’t do anything about big picture product direction decisions coming from the top as Yahoo tries to morph into some kind of something that will make shareholders happy. And that’s the thing. Yahoo is all about the shareholders now. It’s all about the bottom-line. That’s all that matters. It’s not about the users. It’s not about building or maintaining great products. It’s about finding the ones that make the money and slicing the rest. People often express their growing concerns about putting data into Google for privacy reasons. But I now have a problem putting data into Yahoo out of the concern that it could just disappear one day. That’s really terrifying. [photo: flickr/dev null]        
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| Zappos Expands To A San Francisco Office, Is Hiring Posted: 17 Dec 2010 04:32 PM PST
Buried down deep in the post, which also announces the launch of a public API as well as the launch of Zappos iPhone and iPad apps, is this one paragraph blurb detailing the expansion plans:
The company is looking for spaces in the SOMA area (unfortunately they’re not considering our home, here at startup central 410 Townsend). Zappos Product Manager Will Young will be heading up the new office and currently plans on hiring eight senior developers and two senior visual designers. Zappos was an outgrowth of Venture Frogs, an incubator CEO Tony Hsieh and CFO Alfred Lin started in the Bay Area. The two ended up moving to Nevada to get away from the Valley during the crash and tap into that city’s customer service oriented culture. This move back represents a rekindling of some of that startup energy. Says Young, “We’re thinking this office will hopefully hit a sweet spot for developers/designers who want to work in an environment that feels like a start-up (10 people) but also want to join an existing company that has a pretty awesome culture and brand.” The new hires will still have to go through the rigorous four week Zappos customer service training that all potential employees do. “It’s harder to get into Zappos then to Harvard,” Hsieh told me in this pretty infamous interview. Here’s the company’s dorky “A Few Good Men” inspired recruitment video, below:
       
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| Google To Expand And Market Movie Streaming Service In 2011 Posted: 17 Dec 2010 03:18 PM PST
Ex-Netflix executive Robert Kyncl, who was hired by Google earlier this year, is negotiating studio deals, says our source. The service will initially focus on top tier films and to focus marketing efforts there, including pairing with Google TV. A deeper library will be added over time. Existing rental titles are certainly not new release top tier films. Earlier this month Google acquired video delivery company Widevine. Technology from Widevine may be used to power the new movie service. We’ve reached out to Google for comment.        
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| Confirmed: Tumblr Raises $30 Million Posted: 17 Dec 2010 02:47 PM PST For the past several weeks there’s been reports of blogging platform Tumblr raising a boatload of money. That was confirmed today in a SEC filing with numbers on the Series D round. $25 million to be exact. According to the filing it looks like Spark Capital, Sequoia and Union Square Ventures participated in the round. We’ve heard that the post-money valuation is in the ballpark of $155 million. We had also heard that the total amount of funding was $30 million, no word on whether the round was reduced in size or there is just a second tranche coming later. Tumblr founder David Karp will have plenty of things to spend the money on, Tumblr just opened a new office in New York Cityand hired another four people to bring the total up to 16 people now. David Karp recently told TechCrunch that he plans on expanding the company to 20 employees before the end of the year. Update: Tumblr President John Maloney tells us that the full round is actually $30 million, as we previously thought and there will be a second SEC filing on Monday for $5 million. Maloney also gave us the breakdown: Sequoia went in at $20 million, Spark Capital at $5 million and Union Square Ventures at $5 million. You can read more about the company’s plans for the cash in its blog post “Getting ready for 2011.”        
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| Dropbox Hits 1.0, Adds Features Posted: 17 Dec 2010 01:57 PM PST
The most important new feature is probably the selective syncing: you can now select which computers sync with which folders, so you don’t need to worry about your off-site HD footage backup saturating the shabby wi-fi at a coffee shop. I think this makes it into a much more versatile tool, and I plan to use it more extensively now that I don’t have to worry about my PC desktop contaminating my Mac laptop with uselessly synced OS-specific junk, and vice versa. They’ve also made sure there will be no issues with metadata (such as in-app locking of files) syncing, which makes it more applicable in a business environment. And the client itself has been redone to be more efficient and use less RAM. The release is inexplicably nicknamed “Rainbow Shell,” which is a fairly obscure reference to side-quest from classic SNES RPG Chrono Trigger. I haven’t the faintest clue why this should be, but I (and many of the commenters at the Dropbox blog) appreciate the hat tip. The new version is available now, and should install right over your old version.        
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| Seesmic: From Near Death to Enterprise Chat Spoiler? Posted: 17 Dec 2010 01:56 PM PST
Just a few months ago Mike was saying Twitter deciding to compete with developers had essentially killed Seesmic. That may be true for consumer chats, but enterprise is another matter. And between Yammer’s new round of funding and Salesforce’s Chatter product, enterprise chat is heating up. Might Seesmic be a spoiler? The two have already been chummy, with Seesmic integrating into Chatter and Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff appearing on stage together multiple times. We’ll post more details when we hear them. (Disclosure: This may come as a surprise since Mike is so hard on Loic, Seesmic and the French generally, but he was an early investor in the company.)        
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| Google Takes Another Big Step to Retain Employees: Autonomous Business Units Posted: 17 Dec 2010 01:22 PM PST
Oh, we’re not going to change anything! We’re just going to give you more resources to do what you’ve been doing even better! Yeah! They bought us for a reason, why would they ruin things? It usually works for a little while, but big company bureaucracy– whether it’s HR, politics or just endless meetings– almost always creeps in. It’s a law of nature: Big companies just need certain processes to run and entrepreneurs hate those processes because they stifle nimble innovation. Google has a new policy to fight it, according to several sources close to the company. A memo was reportedly sent out a few weeks ago to certain Google business and country heads talking about a new policy of “autonomous units” within the company. It’s being referred to in parts of the company as the “NYT effect,” a reference to this New York Times article that criticized how bloated and bureaucratic Google had become, citing it as a big reason Google was losing employees to smaller companies. Not everyone gets to be an autonomous unit, but those who do have the freedom to run like independent startups with almost no approvals needed from HQ, according to our sources. For these divisions, Google is essentially a holding company that provides back end services like legal, providing office space and organizing travel, but everything else is up to the pseudo-startup. We’re told the memo cites Slide as the first working example. It’s unclear how different this may be from Google’s acquisition of YouTube, which also had the promise of autonomy. But even when Google was still private, sticking to such promises was a challenge. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has openly talked about his frustration when a pre-IPO Google bought Blogger, saying that a big hope was having more resources to hire people, but the process of hiring people was so fraught with logistics and red-tape that hiring was a nightmare. TechCrunch has not been able to find a copy of this “NYT effect” memo, although while digging, we were told that Google is getting so aggressive on leaks that an average of two people are being fired every month for the offense. (Sorry, guys, but at least Facebook is hiring nearly everyone in Silicon Valley.) We have talked with a few people with or close to Google in other countries that have seen the memo or heard of it, another person who was able to negotiate a deal all of the sudden with an international Google unit that was blocked by corporate months before, and people very close to Slide who say that the company has been running remarkably independently and only a handful of people have left since the deal closed. One source told us autonomy was not part of Slide’s negotiation, rather it was a decision made a few months ago. As a result, Slide has become more independent since the acquisition, not less, according to this person. Slide even had its own Christmas party last night, and there was nary a Google sign from what we heard. (For comparison sake, TechCrunch is run very distinctly from the rest of AOL, but even we are rocking with the whole Silicon Valley AOL crew later tonight. That should be interesting…) Even if the policy change is exaggerated by our sources, no one has disputed how distinctly Slide is being run, and that is surprising. Most people– including us– had assumed that the biggest reason Google bought Slide was to acquire talent like CEO and founder Max Levchin and to make the product a key part of its Frankenstein-like social initiatives. It’s not like Slide was YouTube, a distinct consumer brand that was a part of the zeitgeist with hundreds of millions of regular users. Slide has spent most of its life as a work in progress– from photo sharing to push media to SuperPoke and other Facebook apps to games and virtual goods. According to someone very close to the company, Slide is still evolving and working on something new. Rather than being part of Google’s overall social strategy, whatever Slide is building now is likely a hedge on that greater social strategy not working. This person doesn’t know for sure what the new Google-Slide product will be, although this person’s guess is it goes back Slide’s early days of sharing photos in creative, self-expressive ways. Slide has long seen that the key to social is photo tagging and sharing, and was reevaluating a new way to use that hook on mobile well before the recent explosion of iPhone photo apps like Instagram, Picplz and Path. (I spoke with Levchin briefly this morning, but he declined to comment on anything.) If you have the memo, we’d love to see it.        
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| TC Disrupt People’s Choice Winner Miso Media Raises Funding From Google Ventures Posted: 17 Dec 2010 01:19 PM PST
Miso’s app, which is called Miso Music, still isn’t out yet — CEO Aviv Grill says that it was submitted to the App Store earlier this month and it should be coming soon. But I got to try it briefly at Disrupt, and it definitely impressed me. Unlike most guitar tablature applications, which simply display the song you’re playing and play it back in a MIDI format, Miso’s application will actually listen to the notes you’re playing and scroll the music accordingly. It’s really slick. Grill says that the company will be using the money to expand its library of supported songs. It already has the rights to many songs via the Sony/ATV catalog, and can license other songs on a one-off basis from Hal Leonard. The trouble is that producing tabs to go along with these songs is a time-consuming task, which is where the funding comes in. Miso will be doubling in size (from three to six people) come the new year. Grill says that the company also plans to add support for new instruments down the line, and to further improve the audio detection. It’s also working on getting the rights from Universal and Warner. The company will make money via in-app downloads by charging a few dollars for each song you want to learn how to play. Provided these songs are consistently high quality (unlike the numerous awful guitar tabs all over the web), I can see this doing very well.        
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| TechCrunch Surges To Lead In UCSF Challenge, Crushes Hopes Of Twelve Year Old Posted: 17 Dec 2010 01:06 PM PST
Zynga came in and crushed everyone with, um, more than 160,000 individual donations. Everyone else was in the hundred donation range, so the hospital decided to name two winners to keep things going. Until yesterday we were a distant 12th on the list with 74 donations. But we asked everyone attending our two TRON screenings last night to make a donation to the hospital as well, bringing in an additional 784 new donors and $7,030. That brings us nicely to the lead, crushing the hopes of Paddy O'Brien, a 12-year-old bone cancer patient now in remission (pictured above), who would have otherwise won. He has 425 total donations, meaning we’ve beat him and now get to name the room whatever we want. Victory is sweet. Ok, fine. We’re withdrawing from the race and merging all of our donations with Paddy. His Machiavellianly adorable strategy of tugging at your heartstrings isn’t beatable in a PR war. We surrender. He deserves the win. He gets the win. Here’s the final tally before our last minute 784 donations. You can see Robert Scoble way down there at the bottom.        
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| FitFu Wants To Get You Exercising At Your Desk, And Everywhere Else Posted: 17 Dec 2010 01:02 PM PST
With FitFu, founders Jof Arnold and Benjie Gillam are targeting people sitting at their desk all day, a situation where taking a few minutes to do some situps might be the difference between flab and abs. FitFu uses pretty slick animation (creative was designed by agency Despark) and voice over to encourage and remind you to do little bits of movement throughout the day. The app uses an accelerometer to measure reps (you can choose from 8 exercises), so you actually have to move to have your exercises be counted. FitFu also ingenuously adds a social element i.e. you can compete with your friends with regards to number of reps completed, keeping you motivated through competition. The app basically eliminates all excuses to not complete exercise emphasizes co-founder Arnold, “People were saying ‘Oh I can’t do many reps,’ then we made an app that would eliminate excuses you make as you go into an exercise. It’s stuff you can do at home, or on a plane or in an office.” Having vertical experience with previous apps PushupFu, CrunchFu, SquatFu and PullupFu, Arnold and Gillam are ready to focus on FitFu as a full time startup. The London-based FitFu, or what would happen if Pixar redesigned the WiFit, is in the YC winter class of 2010 and currently has 120K of UK seed funding. You can download the app here.        
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| Yahoo Has Hit Rock Bottom And Is In “Absolute Disarray” Posted: 17 Dec 2010 11:48 AM PST
Take yesterday as an example. They botch news about closing down products like Delicious. The Upcoming team is apparently wiped out, but a seemingly timestamped blog post appeared on Wednesday, after the team was gone, asking for feedback on a new design for the site. Except the blog post doesn’t have a link to the new design, and still doesn’t as of today. Probably because whoever wrote it is gone, along with the rest of the team. And today Yahoo realized that people really care about sites like Delicious and put up a blog post saying that they’re going to sell it, not shut it down. Which is great except the Delicious blog is now offline and returns an error (we reprinted it here). And finally, yesterday Yahoo announced internally that they would be shutting down an instant messaging product called MyM. Have you heard of it? Neither had we. Oh wait, we did—in 2008. It turns out it was an internal project that was never launched and formally shut down nearly three years ago. Apparently the executive team didn’t know that. In May I spoke with CEO Carol Bartz on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. The headline was the last few seconds of the talk. But that wasn’t really what was interesting about the interview. What really riled Yahoo up was when I asked if they were really even a technology company any more. I think it’s now clear to the world now that they aren’t. They’re just a nightmarish Dilbert-cartoon version of the old Yahoo, where employees fear for their jobs and stumble around the office trying to protect themselves, not build anything new and ambitious. There is only one way a company recovers from this. They must have new leadership. And soon. Because at this point they are little more than a holding company for some lucrative Asian Internet assets. This can’t possibly be what the board of directors hoped for when they hired Bartz less than a year ago. So much has changed, so fast.        
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| Startup Sherpa: Chris Dixon And Stickybits CEO Billy Chasen Talk About Pivoting (Part I) Posted: 17 Dec 2010 11:33 AM PST Welcome to Startup Sherpa, a new show we are piloting on TechCrunch TV. Rather than have one of us at TechCrunch interview subjects, we thought we’d try something different. Startup Sherpa is more a conversation between founders that we get to listen in on. Super angel investor (Founder Collective) and Hunch founder Chris Dixon is our host, and in each episode he will be talking to other founders and investors about the challenges of building a startup. Today, his guest is Billy Chasen, the CEO of Stickybits and the creator of chartbeat. Stickybits is an iPhone app which encourages you to check into products by scanning their barcodes. Originally, the idea behind Stickybits was broader and encouraged consumers to attach their own barcodes to objects and places, and use the app to upload photos, videos and messages which others can unlock by scanning the code. The app still does that, but the company recently pivoted to focus more on existing product barcodes and get brands to drive adoption through incentives and rewards. In the first segment above, Dixon and Chasen talk about when it’s the right time to pivot, and whether that is even the right term to use. Chasen notes: “When you are running a company, . . . the path where you begin at is not necessarily where you end.” You have to listen to your customers, on the one hand. On the other, some of the best products are a result of CEOs who stubbornly refuse to pivot and lead consumers where they want them to go like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. When do you think a startup should change course and when should they hold firm? We have two more Startup Sherpa segments with Stickybits which we will post soon about the challenges of trying to change consumer behavior and serving two masters at the same time (consumers and advertisers). Please let us know in comments which startup founders you’d like to see Dixon talk to in future episodes.        
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| Yahoo Trying To Unload Del.icio.us, Not Shut It Down Posted: 17 Dec 2010 10:57 AM PST
Yahoo says that while Delicious doesn’t have a “strategic fit” at the company, it will not be shutting the service down entirely for now. In fact, it looks like Yahoo is going to find a new home for Delicious (a.k.a. sell). Of course, unsurprisingly Yahoo is blaming the press for its own PR mismanagement, writing “Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press.” Umm, what? If they would have said all of this yesterday and been more responsive, then there ould not have been so much speculation. It took Yahoo 24 hours to admit that it admit that Delicious won’t be shut down after all? And this raises the question of whether Yahoo originally planned to “sunset” Delicious and now just changed its mind in the past 24 hours because of all the uproar from users and the press. I guess judging from the company’s PR strategy throughout the reports of layoffs, we shouldn’t be surprised.
       
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| Tron: Legacy Review Round-Up: A Mixed Reaction (At Best) Posted: 17 Dec 2010 10:07 AM PST
       
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| The Fall And Rise Of Twitter In English Literature Posted: 17 Dec 2010 09:22 AM PST Words come and go, and now thanks to a new Google database of 500 billion words in 5.2 million books, you can chart the popularity of words in literature and other books going back hundreds of years. The database is can be accessed by scholars or anyone through a Google Labs project called the Google Books Ngram Viewer. You type in a word, and it charts the usage of that word over time. Naturally, I typed in “twitter”, to see how that word has come in and out of vogue. The result is in the chart above, which shows the word gaining popularity from 1750 and peaking a little over a century ago around 1900. Then the word went into along decline until this decade when it started to shoot up again. The graph above is smoothed over, it doesn’t really start to take off until 2006 (see unsmoothed graph) when Twitter was founded, and the word took on an entirely new meaning. Strangely, though, there was an uptick starting even before that around 2003. Maybe Jack Dorsey read it somewhere and it stuck in his mind. The Ngram Viewer is case-sensitive. So if you do a search for “Twitter” proper, it shoots up even higher. For some reason the data only goes to 2008, so imagine what the chart would look like if it went all the way to today. These searches are across all English-language books in the database, but you can also narrow it down to just English fiction or different languages. The charts are broken up into different time periods, which you can click on to get book search results containing the word you are graphing. Speaking of the rise and fall of words, they can also tell us something about the relative importance of different centers of power in the public imagination. Do a search for “Paris, London, New York, Boston, and Rome,” for instance, and you can see when interest peaked and started to taper off for each one. Yeah, things don’t look so good for America (as represented by New York City).        
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Regions all over the 
Aeterna Sol.
Entrustet
CruiseWise
Piehole.ie
Tripeezy
At the risk of sounding like we’re kicking 
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been able to dig up a bunch of details about Google’s secret forthcoming social service. The service, previously codenamed “
It has been fairly amazing to watch this Yahoo “sunsetting” news over the past 48 hours. It seemed to go from a bad leak, to huge backlash, to PR disaster, to confusion, to worse PR disaster. Now Yahoo, by way of Delicious (the most prominent service being “sunset”), has 
Google is expanding its feature film streaming service, says a source who’s been briefed on the product. The service will likely be an expansion of the current movie rental/streaming test launched by Google earlier this year. Announcements should be made in early 2011, says our source, and will be heavily marketed.
I’d like to extend hearty congratulations to the Dropbox team for doing what many web-based companies might avoid for years on end: 
This whole 
It may or may not be the residual effects of 
Yahoo has hit rock bottom. They’ve now, finally, 
Yesterday, a 
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