The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Neutrality Or Bust
- Isle Of Tune Lets You Compose Music By Um, City Planning
- Instagram Gains Suggested Users, 7 New Languages, And Yes, 2 New Filters
- Google Quietly Kills Their Creepy Latitude Location Alerts Feature
- Former Yahoo Engineers Shed Light On Why Delicious And Other Acquisitions Failed
- The @Mention Cloud
- Online Video In 2011: Connected TVs, Social Recommendations, And Standards Wars
- Gillmor Gang 12.18.10 (TCTV)
- Startup Sherpa: Serving Two Masters And Changing Consumer Behavior (Part II)
| Posted: 19 Dec 2010 07:01 AM PST Editor’s note: Guest author John Borthwick is the CEO and founder of betaworks and in a previous life was a senior strategist for Time Warner and a witness in the Microsoft antitrust case. Access to fast, affordable and open broadband, for users and developers alike is, I believe, the single most important driver of innovation in our business. The FCC will likely vote next week on a framework for net neutrality—we got aspects of this wrong ten years ago, we can't afford to be wrong again. For the reasons I outline below, we are at an important juncture in the evolution of how we connect to the Internet and how services are delivered on top of the platform. The lack of basic "rules of the road" for what network providers and others can and can’t do is starting to hamper innovation and growth. The proposals aren’t perfect but now is the time for the FCC to act. Brad Burnham stopped by our office earlier this week to talk about his proposal for the future of net neutrality. The FCC has circulated a draft of a set of rules about neutrality that the Commission will likely vote on this week. Though the rules are not public, Chairman Genachowski outlined their substance last week. Through a combination of the Chairman's talk, the Waxman Proposal, and the Google/Verizon proposal, one can derive the substance of the issue and understand its opportunities and risks. I strongly support much of what the Chairman has proposed and I support the clarifications that Burnham outlines. But before further discussing this point, I have to ask, why does this matter now? Over the past few years there has been a lot of discussion, a lot of promises, and some proposals with regard to net neutrality. Here are three reasons why this matters now: 1. The Internet and how we build things on the network is undergoing meaningful change as we transition to broadband and wireless access. Network providers are making significant capital commitments that will shape access to networks in coming years. Despite this, the US is behind in both broadband and wireless connectivity. Only 65% of American households have broadband access, compared to 90% of households in South Korea. It is important to note that not all access is created equal. A study from earlier this year puts the US in 18th place with an average of 3.8 Mbps downstream compared to an average of 14.6Mbps in South Korea. The US is now 22nd in terms of downstream broadband speed, behind Latvia and the Czech Republic. The story is the same on a price per megabit basis: in the US, we pay $40 per month for an average of 3.9Mbps, which can be compared to a $45 per month fee that includes 20-30Mbps connections in France(plus VoIP service and HDTV + DVR to boot). As I said at the outset, access to fast, affordable broadband for users and developers is, I believe, the single most important driver of innovation in our market. We got this wrong ten years ago—we don't have a competitive market for broadband today, access is inconsistent, prices are high and speeds are often anemic—and we can't afford to be wrong again. The structural separation approach that the Europeans took a decade ago yielded cheap, fast access in their market. I believe this access has been the most significant factor in the advancement of European Internet innovation. Despite this, the European approach is now reaching its limits. The transition to wireless Internet access provides an opportunity; and as the network becomes more diverse, the need for common technical standards becomes essential. An uneven experience across various platforms will fragment innovation and promote gatekeepers' ability to tax applications. Match this situation with the embedded conflicts of interest in the delivery of video over DOCIS, or wireless vs. over-the-top IPTV, and you get a sense of the network complexities at hand. As Chairman Genachowski pointed out, we need "rules of the road" and now is the time to act. 2. Most of the innovation that has taken place online over the past 15 years was born out of a handful of architectural decisions. Two of these decisions are now being challenged. Non-discriminatory pricing of bits and the clear definition of layers (i.e. the logical separation of conduit and content) that make up the Internet stack are two of the key architectural foundations of the network. The fact that bits containing applications, images, text or videos are handled in the same manner is central to how the Internet works. Network providers can shape or manage traffic on an aggregate, best-effort basis but identifying a single application or any content in an application or page will change the way the network is used. Specifically, it will hamper innovation by end-users such as individuals, developers and new or existing companies. Similarly, the layers are building blocks that are vital to how we develop and build Internet companies. This goes back to seminal pieces of Internet literature like the rise of the stupid network. I agree that, in the short term, tightly coupled systems can provide more efficient means to drive end-to-end innovation when you know precisely what you want to build. But I fundamentally believe that the essence of innovation is that you don't usually know exactly what you want to build. Innovators aim to solve problems—they start in one place and then they iterate. All too often real innovation is simply stumbled upon. Ideas and companies evolve (or pivot, as we now call it) as they better understand the problem they are seeking to solve. The Internet has demonstrated time and time again that loosely coupled systems and edge-based innovation is what drives the kind of massive change we have seen over the past two decades. This freedom to create "on the edge", and to evolve ideas, is what gets me up in the morning and keeps me up late at night. Like all good architecture, structural principles are remarkably resilient to change and scale. There have been continual challenges to these principles over the past few decades but this has all been part of the persistent tension that exists in a network between centralization and decentralization. Today, given our current transition to wireless and broadband access, the challenges faced are more fundamental as network providers attempt to change these building blocks as preconditions to future investment. The conflation of access (and control of access) with control of the stack of the open Internet is wrong. 3. Edge-based innovation has been the driver of change and creativity online, yet the edge has no single representative. The edge-based innovation I talk of is predicated on access to a handful of things and the persistent tension between centralization and decentralization is a hallmark of a healthy web, evident in debates all the way back to Napster, CompuServe and AOL and, more recently, Facebook and Wikileaks. We have many native Internet companies relative to ten years ago. Though these native Internet companies come from the edge, no single company represents the edge. Moreover, as companies scale, they become increasingly misaligned with the edge. Google, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, and Yahoo, for example, all came from edge-based innovation but no longer represent the edge. Despite intentions to the contrary, there is a natural evolutionary path through which a large company becomes less likely to let edge-based innovations flourish and more likely to preserve the status quo. There is currently an over-representation of the center in Washington DC and the edge needs a louder voice. That's up to us and, most likely, also up to you. So what to do? As Burnham outlines, there are a handful of areas that merit attention. The key points are: Application discrimination and specialized services Burnham advocates Barbara van Schewick's approach to "all application-specific discrimination". I believe this approach can work because it works today. It is hard to understand where to draw lines here but we know what we think when a network provider discriminates against a specific application or specific content. We know it when we see it. Schewick proposes a generalized rule to ensure that this discrimination does not happen. If you doubt this approach, read the Zedevia letter as evidence that companies hesitate to invest without clarity—companies need clearly drawn lines. How much edge-based telephony (i.e. voice-based communication) innovation have you seen on the iPhone? Not a lot. Today—the list of issues and examples of discrimination is starting to grow. This is happening as the adoption of over the top services (IPTV etc.) places pressure on the cable companies’ video based revenues or the wireless companies’ voice and data revenues. Application-agnostic network management with a definition of an application should include apps, sites and web services. To the extent that there are specialized services that network providers want to put in market they should do that—but they need to be distinguished from the open internet. Wireless rules The arguments that wireless should be treated separately from wireline are in my mind specious at best. Despite the fact that wireless network providers manage the network differently than wireline providers (given a need to share a limited resource among varying densities of users), wireless providers, like wireline providers, should not have the ability to discriminate against specific content, sites or applications. Furthermore application developers need uniformity of standards at the lower levels of the stack to be able to build products and services in a seamless manner at higher levels of the stack. For example, we are currently building a social reading service that will ship as an iPad application. It includes an interface that distills content streams that should be of interest to you, the reader. The content is then displayed inline, regardless of whether it is text, images or videos. Imagine you use this iPad application at home on your home network. All images, text, and videos are displayed and usable. Now imagine that you take your iPad to the park and fire up the same application through a 3G or 4G wireless connection and all of a sudden the videos won't work? Not that they are slow—they just wont work given the plan you are on. Increasingly, users expect experiences to be the same regardless of connection type. Devices like the iPad are designed to be used in many environments; the idea that connectivity should dictate experience is becoming antiquated. Distinctions that network providers have around wireline and wireless should be limited to the physical layer of the stack. People who are creating companies should not have to build for two different networks. Commissioner Clyburn got this right when she recently said: “We should ensure that, while there are two kinds of networks, we don’t cause the development of two kinds of Internet worlds.” She continues, “Some have raised the issue that different rules are needed in the wireless arena because it is more competitive than the wired world. But I believe we cannot ignore the fact that there are many features of the wireless market that create high switching costs, such as exorbitant ETFs and a lack of handset compatibility across carriers.” Wireless access is the future for the majority of internet access—carving it out of an agreement, or limiting the rules to Internet websites (vs. websites, applications, or services as Waxman proposed) would, I believe, be a mistake. Since my work years ago on the Microsoft Antitrust trial, I have been an adamant believer in minimizing the role of government as it relates to technology policy. Nonetheless, if government has a role in technology policy it is right here. Our business at betaworks is predicated on a thriving market for early-stage tech innovation at the content and application layer. Most of the businesses we have built or funded would not exist without the assumed freedoms that formed the platform we call the Internet. We now have the same opportunity that we faced a decade ago. We can support the FCC in putting in place "rules of the road" to enforce basic tenants or we can continue down a path that de-facto leaves these decisions in the hands of large companies with limited oversight, no transparency, and no means of enforcement. The pace of innovation today is staggering yet there are walled gardens that are becoming increasingly difficult for small startups to surmount. I hope the FCC and the Chairman will take a bold step forward and that this results in something we can work with to scale the next decade of innovation in this sector. Here is my bundle of reading on the subject: http://bit.ly/Neutrality_readings (brought to you courtesy of a nice bit of edge based innovation!) If you agree that net neutrality is worth fighting for, do something about it, starting with making some noise. Tell your friends on Facebook why this is important Post this on Tumblr Retweet this to your followers on Twitter        
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| Isle Of Tune Lets You Compose Music By Um, City Planning Posted: 18 Dec 2010 08:03 PM PST Need something to do while waiting for your copy of Farmville for Dummies to arrive? Isle of Tune is the latest in viral web distraction, built on the side by London-based interactive director Jim Hall. Isle of Tune lets you create whole songs by building a little town using objects like streetlamps, houses and trees to make sounds. There is even a collection of pre-built loops for those of us less musically inclined. Hall also offers a way to customize individual sounds, share your island on Facebook and Twitter as well as vote other people’s islands up or down. iPhone and iPad versions are in the works. While a pretty amazing digitally landscaped version of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” currently rounds out the Isle of Tune top 50, I dare you to show me something more hipster than MGMT’s “Kids,” built entirely with animated cars, flowerpots and bumps in the road.        
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| Instagram Gains Suggested Users, 7 New Languages, And Yes, 2 New Filters Posted: 18 Dec 2010 07:53 PM PST
First of all, in an effort to drive more social connections for new users, they’ve added a suggested users list. Second, they’ve added seven new languages (Japanese, German, Russian, French, Chinese, Italian, and Spanish). Third, they’ve fixed a number of bugs and increased performance. And finally, for the first time, they’ve also added two new filters into the mix. The suggested users feature may draw a bit of controversy given what it did for certain users on Twitter (like our TechCrunch account). But the reality is that it’s an obvious and easy way to get new users engaged. Co-founder Kevin Systrom tells us that the feature is partially algorithmic, based on your location and language. But going forward they hope to make it much more algorithmic and less about them selecting people. The two new filters are called “Sutro” and “Toaster”. I’m sure you’ll be seeing them all over Twitter shortly. Humorously, the latter appears to be named after Kevin Rose’s new little adorable puppy. You can find Instagram in the App Store here.
       
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| Google Quietly Kills Their Creepy Latitude Location Alerts Feature Posted: 18 Dec 2010 07:28 PM PST
The only place Google noted this is on this page on their support site. As they write:
While it may have sounded like a good idea on paper, the execution of the feature was bizarre. You would get emails notifying you where your friends were if they opted to use the feature. That lead to users getting weird emails like this:
It’s not quite: “Peter is looking in your window RIGHT NOW”, but it’s not that far off either. There was a way to stop getting these alerts, but it was a really weird feature to make opt-out. It was also a bit weird because they would only send the alerts when your friend was somewhere they’re not normally at. There are at least a dozen scenarios where that could be troublesome. Google recently released a Latitude iPhone app, and says the service now has 9 million active users — which we find a little suspect, but the service is deeply integrated into Android. [thanks Dan]        
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| Former Yahoo Engineers Shed Light On Why Delicious And Other Acquisitions Failed Posted: 18 Dec 2010 05:53 PM PST
There have been many more fumbles, which you can read here. So how did it get to this point? A Quora thread with posts by a number of former Yahoo engineers and employees sheds some light on why the acquisitions of web services startups like Delicious and Upcoming failed at the company. Neil Kandalgaonkar, a former engineer at Upcoming writes: If they were supposed to revitalize Yahoo, they weren’t treated that way. They weren’t all combined into any one thing, even though they all relied on social networking and shared the same kind of userbase. Instead they were parcelled out to different parts of Yahoo where they were subordinate to the existing hierarchy and agenda. (Flickr was the exception though, in that they carved out a separate role for themselves, and absorbed Yahoo Photos rather than the other way around.) Arguably the Upcoming acquisition is the only one that “revitalized” anything as Leonard Lin made it his mission to work on Yahoo’s culture. But others counter that Flickr isn’t as independent as one would think and faced administrative obstacles from Yahoo. Longtime Flickr engineer, Kellan Elliott-McCrea (who now works at Etsy), wrote that from his conversations 15% of the large projects they the Flickr team “tackled over the last few years (internationalization, video, various growth strategies, etc) went into building the feature, whereas 85% of the time was spent negotiating and dealing with Yahoo. Elliott-McCrea writes: I recently pulled up a worklog I was keeping in 2008-2009, and I found 18 meetings scheduled over a 9 month period discussing why Flickr’s API was poorly designed and when we’d be shutting it down and migrating it to the YOS Web Services Standard. As for bookmarking service Delicious, Dave Dash, former Yahoo engineer for the product writes, Yahoo! lacks vision. It had Delicious for years, but didn’t properly place it in its eco-system. It ignored the founder for the most part, and switched the management team above it repeatedly. While all of this is anecdotal, it does provide a picture of a company that bogged its acquired-startups down in its company’s administrative BS. As Chad Dickerson, former Yahoo developer evangelist and the current CTO of Etsy comments, “In my experience, entrepreneurs moving into Yahoo! often got stuck doing PowerPoints about “strategy” instead of writing code and shipping products.” That seems to some sum it up in one sentence folks. If you haven’t read it already, take a look at the entire thread, including comments.        
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| Posted: 18 Dec 2010 01:40 PM PST
In the new world of the iPad circa iOS4.2, incoming information is divided neatly between email and social alerts. My work email vibrates when it arrives with an alert sound, but requires opening my InBox and then scanning the short abstracts. 4.2′s InBox threading sometimes hides the context of replies under the text of the last opened part of the thread, and from there you open URL citations into the Safari container with its own 9-deep navigation. External alerts from my Twitter client appear on the screen with an audible chime and vibrate. @mentions are the trigger, opening the client and presenting various methods for unpacking the full message. There’s typically a URL citation, other @mentions to constrain the nature of the social cloud intended, and tools that fan out to follow various tweets, @mentions, and retweets of the various members of this little world encapsulated within. Elegantly, URLs are displayed within the app, with tools to expand to fill the frame, park outside in Safari, and forward. Many social aggregators have mined citations to produce digests of trending stories and multimedia. Google Reader support in the new Flipboard and Delicious’ apparent folding are two sides of the same coin, a last ditch effort to ignore the impact of the social stream on the InBox. Where RSS used to capture so much of the flow of information, now social signals determine not only whether but when items reach the InBox. @mentions win the race to the InBox. You might think just focusing on @mentions would produce a fatuously egocentric view of the stream. But in fact that's exactly what we all do. Techmeme, for all its technology and human editorial, is still Gabe Rivera's view of who's talking about him, his issues, his view of what constitutes interesting material. And judging by his continuing success, if it's all about Gabe, it's all about us too. Us is remarkably stable in its basic parameters of interest. So-called tech news is really about the architecture and evolution of the technology that @mentions us. The email InBox is not about us, it's to us. Its architecture of to's, cc's, forwards, and blind cc's is a window into the success or failure the outside world has in triggering responses from us: read this, reply to that, be aware but be quiet about, etc. @mentions are something more expansive; they inform and stimulate while at the same time opening a return channel that stays alive across the details of each message. Not just here's what I'm doing or telling you, but here's a key to a larger thread that carries over from node to node without closing down. @mentions are additive to the pool of interest, a signal that "I" think "you" should be aware of this, moving forward. So if in one message I @mention you and @kevinmarks, and another message next month I mention you and @dannysullivan, you become a link between those two people and their streams of messages and @mentions. Not necessarily a strong link, but repetition and patterns of repeated citation (retweet storms, live streamcasts) build out a cloud of dynamic interest. What takes this beyond simple aggregation or filtering is the integration of direct messages. In email, such private messages are scoped by the cc's and blind cc's/forwards. The former tell us who's included in what's "private" but we have no idea as recipients of who constitutes the latter. Direct messages are essentially to's in email terms, but currently that's as far as they go in most systems. I haven't figured out a way of sending multiple DMs on Twitter, but if and when this was possible it would bring with it all the implications of email's management by (in)visibility. In an odd way, it would kill email only to implant it inside the new host at the center of social mail. Whether email co-opts the social stream or not, groups have already provided a way to carry on scoped conversations without fear of leaking personal or business secrets. @mentions continue to exist in a parallel universe which will continue to expand outward along time and relationship dimensions. Since much of a person's knowledge and interests can be communicated in general terms in the clear, direct messages will eventually become alerts to specific people or groups about where to look inside the @mention cloud. Today's secret is tomorrow's cruft, waiting for intelligent filters to flush out of our InBoxes. Yeah, I heard that. What else? Already we're seeing @mentions begin to consolidate around resolution engines that use the @mention cloud to normalize different @names across multiple systems. If @benioff becomes the preferred @mention because of its ubiquity on Twitter, it's trivial to map those @mentions to a different username on Facebook or Chatter, and vice versa. Indeed, the Twitter @mention namespace has become the defacto standard. But an open one, the more that name is used across silos whether by bit.ly-style name resolvers or perhaps a common field for @twittername alongside user name and userid. It's possible Twitter might attempt to slow down the democratization of its @mention data by gating API access as they did with the first tool to harness this power, Track. But at least for now Twitter is more focused on making this more discoverable in its iPad client than any other I've used, by letting us click from @mention to profile to tweets, @mentions, and URLs. It's a manual process for now, but one that is spreading to the Web client and the rest of the downlevel tools available. It's completely changed how we consume conferences, live webcasts, and stolen moments in meetings, leaving the constant screen refreshes to our @mention cloud of forward-looking scouts.        
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| Online Video In 2011: Connected TVs, Social Recommendations, And Standards Wars Posted: 18 Dec 2010 12:00 PM PST Editor’s note: Online video is going through many changes as people begin to connect their TVs to the Internet and social sharing over Facebook and Twitter influence what people watch as much as search. In this guest post, Jeremy Allaire, founder and CEO of online video platform Brightcove, gives his view of where online video is going next year. Allaire’s last guest post for us was on the standards war in mobile video formats. Web video is just getting started, and 2011 promises to be yet another year of transformation in the online video landscape. The stage is set for mainstream connected TVs, Over-the-top adoption, and even more videos watched directly streamed from website. Here are the five biggest trends in online video that will play out in significant ways for end-users and publishers alike. 1. Connected TV Platform Wars The past year saw the definitive emergence of platform wars in the handheld computing landscape. This year will see those wars expand into new territory, the Connected TV platform market. Input 1 on the TV is the new homepage or start screen. We should expect that the battles will look incredibly similar to the market that emerged for smartphones over the past several years, but with some other entrenched players. Google vs. Apple vs. the dominant TV brands. In fact, these platforms will largely be based on a similar architecture, offering app and content publishers a common model for creating device-oriented applications and Web experiences. Apple will ship an iOS-based Apple TV display and will open up Apple TV to third-party apps beyond Netflix. Developers will have a common model for building apps across the phone, tablet and TV, as well as a suite of new APIs for phone and tablet apps to interact with TV apps (think remote control type activities, gestures for games, etc.). Its platform will also support HTML5 with a set of design standards for TV Web 10-foot experiences. Google, which has already put forward its first rendition of the same, will expand on this and create models that integrate Android apps across all devices. In addition, the largest of the TV CE manufacturers (e.g. Samsung and LG), will put their best foot forward with TV App SDKs, App Stores and TV Web standards based on HTML5, looking to leverage their massive volumes and strong position in the living room to fend off Apple and Google from owning the consumer experience and app distribution relationships. Expect by the end of the year a frenzy of publisher and developer interest in creating TV Apps and TV Web experiences as the volumes of products shipping by the end of 2011 will be in the tens of millions and very attractive as a target platform. 2. Over-The-Top TV Subscriptions will emerge, but largely fail The long coveted idea of Over-The-Top (or OTT) TV distribution (through services such as Google TV, Apple TV, or Boxee), which would lead in turn to tens of millions of consumers "cutting the cord" with their cable provider will further take hold in 2011, but will largely disappoint consumers. While library video on-demand subscriptions through services like Netflix, Xbox Live Marketplace, and Amazon VoD offer users great and broad libraries of content, they don't yet offer a compelling substitute to a cable subscription. In 2011, we'll see the first wave of attempts to create more rich TV subscription bundles that are available over the Internet. Expect Netflix to start paying for more recent and popular TV shows, and for Apple to potentially offer a low-priced ($25/month) TV subscription product with a collection of recent hit TV shows. But most major broadcasters and studios won't bite or participate in a meaningful way, leaving consumers still feeling like these products don't offer enough. The absence of a broad offering of live sports will be a major factor keeping cords from being cut. At the same time, your existing cable subscription will start to offer a greater range of content over the Web, and likely top-tier cable companies such as Comcast / Xfinity will make their online video products available through open devices and apps, blurring the lines even further. We'll have to wait until 2012 when the scale of Connected TV adoption is large enough that online TV subscription providers will be willing to write big enough checks to get the best available programming. 3. Facebook and Twitter will become larger sources of video traffic than Google search In a recent jointly published study by Brighcove and TubeMogul, we reported that the fastest growing source of traffic to videos on publisher websites were social platforms Facebook and Twitter. This growth is accelerating and the role of these platforms as primary content discovery and viewing environments will reach a point by the end of the year that they will soon be as large and important as Google search. Increasingly, online video publishers will treat Facebook.com as a Web publishing platform that is as important as their own Web domains. Facebook will welcome and embrace using its site as a media distribution end-point, offering rich tools and a business model that doesn't require that it share in advertising revenue generated from impressions on its site. This will be highly attractive to publishers and we'll see more and more VOD type applications launched concurrently on publisher sites and Facebook.com. 4. Video Ubiquity—Every Company is a Media Company While a bit of a cliché, we're seeing this happen at an accelerating pace. In 2011, if you are a professional institution, organization or business of any size, you will have an online video strategy. Video is becoming such a central part of how one communicates, markets, educates and informs online that every pro website will be publishing some form of online video. It will first feel a lot like the brochureware era of the first generation Internet, with a lot of poorly-conceived and poorly-executed content. But a new era of Web video production businesses will emerge much as the Web development industry of the mid-90's emerged, and organizations will start to iterate and experiment with how to best accomplish their online objectives using video. 5. Battle Over Video Delivery Standards Heats Up Google's recent announcement that they are acquiring Widevine adds fuel to what is already an important platform war over how video is consumed, secured and delivered both on PCs and increasingly on non-PC devices. Several alternative stacks are emerging for encrypting / securing and then, in turn, delivering video in a high-quality and reliable manner to all platforms and devices. Apple offers Apple HTTP Streaming which both secures video and provides for adaptive delivery to both HTML5 and iOS Apps, but is proprietary to Apple's devices and software. Adobe offers its own DRM services and HTTP streaming standards, both of which are proprietary but are designed to work across client and device platforms that support the Flash runtime. And now Google will get in the mix with Widevine's technology, which also provides a method to encrypt and secure video files and deliver them to nearly any device or operating system using adaptive bitrate HTTP streaming. We should expect that, like with On2's video codecs which were open-sourced as the WebM video standard, Google will open source and freely distribute the Widevine technology, as well as bundle it as a standard part of the infrastructure in Chrome, Chrome OS and Android browsers and operating systems. It all adds up to more Web videos on more devices and points to a day when we won’t be able to tell the difference between the Web and TV.        
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| Posted: 18 Dec 2010 12:00 PM PST The Gillmor Gang took advantage of the presence of multiple Android lovers to provide a visceral demonstration of the anti-Jobs reality distortion field. Namely, that no matter how many new Android phones hit the market at 2 week intervals, none is actually better than the iPhone. Michael Arrington went a step further, declaring that Android tablets were destined for instant has-been status once the next iPad ships in February or so. Robert Scoble succeeded in proving Flipboard may be Steve Jobs’ favorite iPad app but still remains useless until they open up. Danny Sullivan wondered how you get into their Tech media section, but why he would care with his iPad sitting unused most of the time. Gillmor’s theory is that the death of Delicious at the hands of the drowning Yahoo represents capitulation to Twitter’s domination of what once was called bookmarking and now social citation. Kevin Marks saw a lineage between Delicious, Facebook, and Twitter, but Arrington was more interested in details on a story his team was writing about an alleged Salesforce investment in Seesmic. Scoble stepped in with a demo of a new app that pulled historical data from these and other social apps into a timeline. Thanks to those who showed up and especially those who didn’t.        
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| Startup Sherpa: Serving Two Masters And Changing Consumer Behavior (Part II) Posted: 18 Dec 2010 10:30 AM PST Yesterday, we debuted Part I of Startup Sherpa, a new show with angel investor (Founder Collective) and Hunch founder Chris Dixon talking to Stickybits CEO Billy Chasen about when is the right time for a startup to pivot. Today, in Part II above, Dixon and Chasen discuss how startups can serve two different masters (in Stickybits’ case, consumers and advertisers). With consumer mobile apps there is always a tension between pleasing advertisers and driving away users. It is a delicate balance. 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. Another challenge Stickybits faces is trying to get consumers to change their behavior. Scanning product barcodes is an unnatural act for most people, unless you are a grocery store cashier. But trying to change consumer behavior is a common problem many startups face. The key is to make it worth their while for consumers to do what your product asks of them, as Chasen and Dixon discuss in the video below. Startup Sherpa is more a conversation between founders that we get to listen in on than a typical interview conducted by a TechCrunch journalist. Tell us who you would like to see Dixon talk to next in comments below.        
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An update to 
Back in February, we noted a sort of creepy feature of Google Latitude that was annoying some users: Location Alerts. The beta feature actually launched alongside the Location History feature the previous 
As we’ve 
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