The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- The Lumimask: A Mask That Wakes You As Gently As Mother Nature
- Outsourcing Platform Freelancer.com Hits 2M Users – Guess Where Most Are Based?
- eBay’s Gross Mobile Sales For The Holiday Season Up 166 Percent To $230 Million
- Irony: Read Kindle Books On Your Rooted NookColor
- Flight And Hotel Price Tracking Startup Yapta Is Raising A $6.4 Million Round
- Skype Reveals A Bug In Its Windows Client Was What Crashed Its System
- SCVNGR To Hover Over Times Square This New Year’s Eve
- Stealthy Mobile Games Startup Wild Needle Is Raising $3 Million In Series A Funding
- Energy Literacy Platform: Track And Turn Off Household Appliances With Your Phone
- Doing Words: If Spotify Is Now A Verb, What Else Should Be?
- Seeing Interactive And Weebly Partner, Offer White-Label Websites To Bolster Small Biz SEO
- Over A Year After Its Acquisition, Is Mint Still Fresh?
- Q: What Does Quora Mean For The Future Of Blogging? A: Business As Usual
- Suit Against Apple Alleges Privacy Breaches By Apps
- Groupon Closing $950 Million Round, Valued At $4.75 Billion
- Groupon’s Valuation Could Be As High As $7.8 Billion [Update: We Have The Document And The Actual Valuation]
- More On AOL’s Disc Strategy: $1.19 Floppies, 50% Of All CDs Made, And Precision Bombing
- SnapPages Lets You Hook Into LinkedIn For Custom Online Resumes
- Will 2011 See App Makers Thinking Android-First? One Developer Thinks It’s Possible
- Keen On… Erick Schonfeld: Will 2011 Be 1999 All Over Again? (TCTV)
- Awesome Quora Chrome Extension Is Awesome
- The SEC Investigation Into Private Stock Sales Is All About The Glaring Lack Of Disclosure
- TechCrunchTV’s Funniest Videos From 2010 (TCTV)
- Fancy Is A Social Shopping List For The Design-Obsessed
| The Lumimask: A Mask That Wakes You As Gently As Mother Nature Posted: 29 Dec 2010 08:55 AM PST
This device, called the Lumimask, is currently on Kickstarter and $50 gets you a pre-order unit while $100 gets you the device and a pair of pajamas (pre-washed). If it doesn’t get funded it doesn’t get made, so this guy is sending out his heartfelt entreaty to you, the Internet, in hopes that someone out there will help him.        
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| Outsourcing Platform Freelancer.com Hits 2M Users – Guess Where Most Are Based? Posted: 29 Dec 2010 07:13 AM PST Outsourcing marketplace Freelancer.com (formerly known as GetAFreelancer) has hit a milestone: 2 million professionals have registered for its service to date. That’s up from 1 million in October 2009. The Sydney, Australia-based startup says the 2 million users (which I seriously doubt are all active) hail from 240 countries. The largest country represented is the United States, with over 21% of users. Second to the U.S. is India, with 19%. Following the top 3 countries, in order, is the UK, Pakistan, Canada, the Philippines, China, Bangladesh, Romania and Australia. Freelancer.com indicates that over 890,000 projects have been posted on the marketplace so far, from projects as simple as designing a website (~$200) or logo design (~$30) to stuff like “Design of a Fully Functional Dune Buggy” ($268) and “Composition of a Rap Song to help Chinese Students Learn English” ($102). The company says some of its most prolific users are making hundreds of thousands of dollars thanks to its platform. Earlier this year, Freelancer.com acquired virtual content marketplace Freemarket.com. And just last week, they purchased LimeExchange, adding another 80,000 freelancers from around the world to its userbase.        
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| eBay’s Gross Mobile Sales For The Holiday Season Up 166 Percent To $230 Million Posted: 29 Dec 2010 06:44 AM PST eBay’s mobile sales continued to grow during the holiday shopping season, according to a release issued by the company today. eBay is reporting that gross merchandise value (also known as GMV, the total sales dollar value for merchandise sold through eBay) was up 166 percent to $230 million from Nov. 25 to Dec. 25 from the same period last year. In the U.S., sales from eBay’s mobile apps grew 134 percent over the same period last year, generating nearly $100 million in GMV. In terms of yearly stats, eBay says that designer handbags, diamond jewelry and Rolex watches topped this year's most expensive holiday purchases. In the U.S., the top five categories ranked by the number of items sold through eBay's mobile apps for the year were: clothing shoes & accessories; cell phones & PDAs; collectibles; jewelry & watches; and toys & hobbies. In terms of gadgets, the consumer electronics category saw its peak in mobile sales after the release of the iPad and iPhone 4. In the U.S., cars & trucks ranked in the top five categories in every state except Hawaii, and auto parts was a top five category in all 50 states. Other categories that were shopped through eBay mobile in nearly every state were clothing & accessories (49 states) and sporting goods (47 states). It’s no secret that eBay has been making a big push to launch and promote its new mobile offerings in time for the holiday season. And as more consumers look to their mobile phones as a way to search and shop for products, eBay is gaining more traffic to its apps. eBay's primary iPhone app has seen over 13 million downloads, and its suite of apps have been downloaded 30 million times.        
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| Irony: Read Kindle Books On Your Rooted NookColor Posted: 29 Dec 2010 06:32 AM PST
       
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| Flight And Hotel Price Tracking Startup Yapta Is Raising A $6.4 Million Round Posted: 29 Dec 2010 06:04 AM PST Yapta, which helps travelers book airline tickets (and hotel rooms) as cheaply as possible, has raised close to $3.5 million of a $6.4 million financing round, an SEC filing reveals. According to the information we’ve gathered through CrunchBase, the round will bring the company’s total amount of funding to $14.4 million. Yapta lets travelers track fares from most of the major domestic and international airlines, allowing users to select flights to follow, and then be alerted when the price fluctuates. If the price declines after you purchase your ticket, Yapta will help you get a refund or credit from airlines that have lowest guaranteed fare policies. The service was initially launched as a browser add-on in May 2007, morphed into a full-fledged website a year later and started tracking hotel prices in addition to flight fares in 2009. Yapta has previously raised funding from Bay Partners, First Round Capital, Swiftsure Capital, and Voyager Capital, among others.        
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| Skype Reveals A Bug In Its Windows Client Was What Crashed Its System Posted: 29 Dec 2010 05:24 AM PST After suffering a massive outage last week, Skype CIO Lars Rabbe has now detailed what went wrong. One of the root causes? A bug in the Skype for Windows client (version 5.0.0152). Rabbe kicks off by explaining that a cluster of support servers responsible for offline instant messaging became overheated on Wednesday, December 22. A number of Skype clients subsequently started receiving delayed responses from said overloaded servers, which weren’t properly processed by the Windows client in question. This ultimately caused the affected version to malfunction. Initially, users of Skype’s newer and older Windows software, as well as those using the service on Mac, iPhone and their television sets, were unaffected. Nevertheless, the whole system collapsed as the faulty version of the Windows client, 5.0.0.152, is by far the most popular – Rabbe says 50% of all Skype users globally were running it, and the crashes caused approximately 40% of those clients to fail. The clients included roughly a third of all publicly available supernodes, which also failed as a result of this issue. From the blog post:
Rabbe goes on to explain a lot of people who experienced crashing Windows clients started rebooting the software, which caused a huge increase in the load on Skype’s P2P cloud network. He adds that traffic to the supernodes was about 100 times what would normally be expected at the time of day the failure occurred. A perfect storm in the P2P clouds, so to speak. To learn how Skype supported the recovery of its supernode network, and what they’ll be doing to prevent this from happening again, I suggest you go read the full blog post. And major kudos to the company for being so prolific in explaining what happened.        
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| SCVNGR To Hover Over Times Square This New Year’s Eve Posted: 29 Dec 2010 05:00 AM PST
To mark the occasion, American Eagle will be offering New Years-themed challenges on SCVNGR (for example, entering what your resolution is for 2011). For each challenge that’s completed, American Eagle will be donating $5 to Big Brothers Big Sisters of America — and SCVNGR will be matching that donation. As people stand outside in the frigid cold waiting for the ball to drop, you can bet a good number of them are going to check out the app. Getting a feeling of Déjà vu? That’s probably because Foursquare actually had a very prominent placement on the same Times Square billboard back in August, again as an American Eagle promotion.        
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| Stealthy Mobile Games Startup Wild Needle Is Raising $3 Million In Series A Funding Posted: 29 Dec 2010 04:54 AM PST An interesting startup called Wild Needle that will be entering the social mobile gaming space soon, is raising $3 million in funding, $2.5 million of which it has already secured, according to this SEC filing. Self-proclaimed to be in “super sneaky stealth mode”, the company, which was founded earlier this year and is based in Mountain View, boasts that its mission is to “stretch the boundaries of the mobile game experience farther than it’s ever gone before”. From the Wild Needle website:
Wild Needle reveals little about its plans on how to do that, let alone the team that’s putting things together over there. Its website only mention that the team consists of a small group of entrepreneurs with experience at companies like Playdom, Microsoft, PayPal, and Adify. The SEC filing turns up three names: Playdom co-founder and chairman Rick Thompson is listed as an executive, as is (former?) VP of Platform Solutions for Adify, Heidi Carson. Listed as a director is Robert T. Coneybeer, co-founder of VC firm Shasta Ventures, so we’re assuming they led the financing round, if they aren’t the sole investor to date. We’ll be watching Wild Needle, and possibly waste lots of time playing their games, in 2011.        
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| Energy Literacy Platform: Track And Turn Off Household Appliances With Your Phone Posted: 29 Dec 2010 04:04 AM PST
The Energy Literacy Platform is based on the idea that by empowering consumers with a tool that informs them how much energy their appliances really use, they will start saving energy. The platform consists of three parts:
The modules change their color over time, from green to yellow and finally to red, as you approach the energy limit you previously set on the ELP website or app (see below). On the web, your energy consumption is visualized in more detail, helping you to track the exact amount of energy (and money) consumed by each device in real-time. What’s cool is that you can turn off things while on-the-go through the ELP website or the smartphone app, for example if you forgot to turn off the lights in your house. The Energy Literacy Platform Project has come out of Japanese seed acceleration program Open Network Lab (which we covered extensively here). Maker Sassor, run by a group of students from Keio University’s Graduate School of Media Design in Tokyo, expects to launch the platform in summer next year.        
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| Doing Words: If Spotify Is Now A Verb, What Else Should Be? Posted: 29 Dec 2010 12:47 AM PST
Some lists, though, are deserving of slightly greater consideration – like, for example, this one compiled by "Sprakradet" – The Language Council of Sweden. I mean, "Sprakradet" – that sounds like it might actually be a real thing. Or maybe not: according to the esteemed Council, 2010 was the year in which "Spotify" became an official Swedish verb. Unfortunately the verb's definition is also in Swedish so I can't actually read it, but I assume it must be something along the lines of… Spotify (v): To repeatedly and embarrassingly fail to launch in the US. The list also got me wondering which other tech-centric verbs might – or at least should – have been coined this year. Verbs like… Tumbl (v): To suffer increasing periods of downtime at the same time as the media anoints you the "next big thing" (Replaces last year's: to Twitter) Facebook (v): To continue to grow in valuation no matter how many (privacy, ad-scam or Aaron Sorkin movie) scandals surround you. (See also: to sell your soul to the devil) Quora (v): To build a "highly praised" (and "valuable") service despite the fact that only twelve people actually use it, just because those twelve people happen to be Silicon Valley investors and reporters. (For antonym see “to Yahoo Answers”) Instagram (v): To take a shitty photograph, and make it shittier. Yahoo! (v): To somehow appear even more tragic through the use of optimistic punctuation. (See also: Bebo! Digg! A!O!L!) TechCrunch (v): To sell your company to a corporation you would criticise others for selling to, at the kind of (reported) valuation that you'd criticise others for accepting, at a time you’d… etc. More suggestions? Make them in the comments. Best ones win TechCrunch t-shirts. Happy New Year!        
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| Seeing Interactive And Weebly Partner, Offer White-Label Websites To Bolster Small Biz SEO Posted: 28 Dec 2010 10:01 PM PST YCombinator-backed Seeing Interactive, which helps newspapers build and sell space in online ad directories and YC-backed Weebly, the service that lets you create your own drag and drop websites, have partnered up to give local newspapers even more options when selling local advertising to small and medium sized businesses. Seeing Interactive, which raised $1 million in June, used to direct businesses to Weebly when they needed to build websites to supplement Seeing Interactive’s SEO-optimized Marketplace directory pages. Seeing Interactive has now integrated Weebly into its backend and as of January 1st will allow its newspaper clients to offer advertisers the ability to manage their website and directory listings from the same dashboard. Newspapers can now sell the two services as a package, or separately. “Many of our end users–newspaper’s clients–have never used the internet past e-mail and Weebly makes it easy for them to have a premium website. We’re thrilled to be able to integrate with Weebly,” says CEO Lloyd Armbrust. Seeing Interactive has already done a test launch with several newspapers including the Norfolk Daily News, The Daily American in Somerset, (the confusingly named) York News Times and Belo Corp’s The Press-Enterprise. You can see an example of a Weebly/Seeing Interactive site here and the power of the SI 81-point SEO audit and social media integration here. According to Armbrust, the new Weebly white-label website integration has made The Press Enterprise an extra $60,000 in the first three weeks of trial and Armbrust projects revenue of over $500,000 for the entire year. Here’s to saving newspapers, one search ranking at a time.
       
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| Over A Year After Its Acquisition, Is Mint Still Fresh? Posted: 28 Dec 2010 08:11 PM PST
But things may not be going gangbusters at the company these days. We’ve learned that in the next month, three key employees from the original, pre-acquisition team will be leaving, including Director of Marketing Stewart Langille, lead designer Justin Maxwell, and head software engineer Daryl Puryear. One Mint insider estimated that around 40% or more of the pre-acquisition team has left since Intuit bought the company in September 2009, some of whom have left substantial amounts of unvested stock on the table. Most of the executive team remains, but many employees have gone on to work at or launch their own startups. Granted, it isn’t unusual for personnel to leave after an acquisition. Startups thrive on being nimble, and the umbrella of a large company and a new corporate infrastructure can slow things down. We’ve heard from one insider that Intuit has handled the acquisition quite well in terms of giving the company resources. The issue, it seems, has been in the execution — Mint just hasn’t pushed out many projects in the last year. The big ones were an Android application, a launch in Canada, and a ‘Goals’ feature that helps you budget your income so that you can save up for that vacation or big-screen TV. Those aren’t bad features, mind you, but they don’t seem too groundbreaking. “Momentum has slowed down,” is how one insider put it. It seems that some Mint users aren’t pleased with the way things are going, either. As a litmus test Mint polled its Facebook audience in November to ask what they thought of the post-acquisition Mint. Most responses have been negative, with numerous comments complaining of bugs and slow sync times between a user’s financial institutions and their Mint accounts. Reached for comment, a company spokesperson said that there is “definetly no glut of departures”, explaining that the team has grown much more than it’s shrunk, and attributing any “key shifts” to long-time Mint employees taking advantage of the hot job market. The spokesperson added that Mint has been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to support international growth, and will be increasing its presence by adding two new countries next year. The company also plans to launch an iPad application and other mobile apps.        
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| Q: What Does Quora Mean For The Future Of Blogging? A: Business As Usual Posted: 28 Dec 2010 04:41 PM PST As many of you have noticed, we (and by “we”, I mainly mean “me”) have been using Quora a lot as a source of inspiration for story ideas. Some people seem to think this is a great idea. Others seem to think it’s the end of TechCrunch, blogging, and the world — perhaps not in that exact order. But here’s what it really is: business as usual. One reader, Elias Bizannes, tweeted the following yesterday, “Blogging 3.0 according to @parislemon 1) Follow the founders of Quora 2) Spend all day on Quora 3) Rehash voted-up Quora posts on TechCrunch“. My response to this was as follows, “@EliasBiz so was blogging 2.0 doing the same thing on twitter? and blogging 1.0 doing the same thing on blogs?“ My point, again, is that Quora is simply a new medium for what’s been going on since the beginning of blogging. And, to an extent, you could argue since the beginning of writing in general. That is, there needs to be a nugget of information that sparks a story. For the past 10+ years, many people have relied on other blog posts for this. For the past three years or so, many people have used Twitter for this. And now people are starting to use Quora for this purpose. This process usually starts with blogs (like TechCrunch) and then eventually moves to the mainstream media. The same thing will happen here. In a year, CNN will be reporting information coming from Quora. Why? Because it’s a great source of information. On it, you’ll find people like high-profile executives Steve Case and Reed Hastings candidly answering questions about the companies they are (or were) involved with. You’ll also find former employees of companies giving insightful nuggets of information about those companies. It’s really no different than if they each blogged about these things. But they aren’t doing that, likely because it’s the question itself that sparks them to answer. And the fact that all of these answers are connected in a centralized, filtered location makes it much more powerful. That Quora answers can be lengthy (unlike tweets, which are limited to 140 characters) has brought up some unease as well. Aggregators, like Techmeme, have started linking directly to threads there. Other sites, such as Silicon Alley Insider, have started republishing entire Quora answers. But again, that’s no different from the norm. That site also regularly republishes full blog posts found elsewhere. We don’t do that type of full republishing, not because we think it’s bad, it’s just not what we do. Instead, when an interesting Quora thread pops onto my radar, I like to think it over and write it up in a way that I would any other story. That is to say, I like to inject my own words and opinions and expand on the thought. The other day, Robert Scoble wrote a post wondering if Quora was the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years? I still would definitely give the edge to tools like WordPress and Blogger, and then to Twitter (which serves as both a source of information and a means to distribute content), but Quora, at least as it stands right now, is the next step in the evolution. It’s not just that it’s Yahoo Answers reborn, it’s that it’s Yahoo Answer done right. It utilizes several things that other social services have implemented over the years and ties them all together in a way the surfaces excellent information. There’s always been a concern that as Quora expands its user base, it will get less useful, but all indications are that it has been expanding rapidly in recent weeks — and guess what? It’s actually getting better. In other words, expect more posts based on information found on Quora, not less. And expect that trend to spread across the web. Just like it did with Twitter. Just like it did with blogs. It’s all about the information, not the medium. [image: Disney]        
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| Suit Against Apple Alleges Privacy Breaches By Apps Posted: 28 Dec 2010 04:36 PM PST
Apple’s privacy policy touches on this directly, yet leaves plenty of room for movement on their side, which is really what the suit is all about, though Apple is simply the biggest target at the moment. The lawsuit alleges that the “non-personal information” collected by likes of Pandora and The Weather Channel can easily be collated and used to identify individuals. It’s beyond a doubt that given a few key pieces of information, one could be positively identified; studies have shown (Paul Ohm credits Latanya Sweeney) that given birth date, gender, and ZIP code, one can identify a vast majority of Americans. How many times a day do you think you give out one or more of those things? I was tempted to take the cynical side here and say “what did you expect?” However, the truth is that despite the changing nature of privacy and what your personal information is worth, there appear to be shenanigans in play here. It’s not clear to the end user just what is being collected and used, and by whom. To be sure, the privacy policy says:
But are apps restricted in some or all of the same ways? Is “our advertising” the same as “advertising on our devices”? Does Pandora consider your music choices “personal” or “non-personal,” and how do they make that distinction? How far must something be anonymized before it can be called sufficiently so? The fact is that a huge amount of potentially personal or private information is being sent out by millions of users who not only have no idea it’s being sent out (which, as far as I’m concerned, is for them to find out at their own pace and peril), but also have no way of controlling it or opting out — other than not using a given service. Some say that’s as much of an opt-out as something like The Weather Channel is required to provide, but that puts a lot of power in the hands of the largest players. The lawsuit targets Apple currently, but the spirit behind it could easily have been directed at Google or a number of other companies that make a business out of creating individuals out of scraps of information. A compromise will have to be achieved here, but I doubt we’ll have a satisfactory one for a couple years, since all these potentially invasive services are at a very early stage. This lawsuit is a symptom of a growing problem, but I doubt it will result in any serious advances. Marketing companies themselves may in fact be the correct object for users’ frustration, and policy changes might have to be made specifically concerning them — though that may be putting too fine a point on that kind of legislation, which should be decisive and encompass as much as possible. As it is, these companies are having a grand time floating through the loopholes and gaping omissions of current privacy policy and law. Update: I should have included the relevant portion from the developers’ agreement:
Similar but more specific to the other stuff. Still leaves a lot to interpretation, though.        
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| Groupon Closing $950 Million Round, Valued At $4.75 Billion Posted: 28 Dec 2010 04:07 PM PST
The company is raising big money – around $950 million. And the valuation is an impressive $4.75 billion valuation. Just not quite as impressive as the earlier figure being thrown around. A separate source says Allen & Co. is advising Groupon on the deal. The company, which just recently turned down an acquisition offer from Google, has raised $171 million to date, much of it taken off the table by founders and execs. Our expectation is that much of this new round of financing, if not all of it, will also be used to cash out existing investors. The deal should be closed in a few weeks, says our source.        
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| Posted: 28 Dec 2010 01:56 PM PST
Note: A source is now telling us that Groupon’s actual valuation is $4.75 Billion on a $950 Million Raise. According to a VC Experts report, Groupon gave the State of Delaware a heads up on its new funding on December 17th with an Amended/Restated Certificate of Incorporation. The document showed the authorization of an up to $950 million round of Series G preferred stock says VC Experts. While this doesn’t necessarily mean the company will be raising that amount, it does give it the capacity to do so. The report says to expect a SEC Form D with the exact amount of financing to be filed next week. From the VC Expert Blog:
According to VC Experts’ estimate, the new round gives Groupon a “best estimate” valuation of $6.4 Billion. The filing has reportedly also increased Groupon’s authorized voting common shares to 250 million and if all of them are issued at $31.59 per share could mean that the company is valued at over $7.8 billion. VC Experts says it will release the Amended Certificate of Incorporation filing tomorrow morning to its email distribution list. We are currently looking into it and have contacted Groupon for more information as well. Updates: The entire document is now available for download on the VC Experts site. PDF below. Fortune’s Dan Primack is reporting that Groupon was talking to a Boston-based equity firm before the Google acquisition talks and that the same firm might also be leading this round, which he posits at way lower than the reported $950 million. Groupon CEO Andrew Mason confirms that Groupon is indeed in the middle of a financing round with, what else, a tweet.        
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| More On AOL’s Disc Strategy: $1.19 Floppies, 50% Of All CDs Made, And Precision Bombing Posted: 28 Dec 2010 01:02 PM PST
And she followed up today in a new thread with even more interesting information about the program. Specifically, someone asked: What was the Conversion Rate of AOL CDs in the 1990′s? Given how widespread the discs were, you might think AOL wasn’t (or wasn’t able to) monitor the rates so closely. But they were, according to Brandt. “The profitability of each and every disk and promotion effort was tracked and analyzed. We conducted approximately 2000 different tests each year and used these results to develop future programs. Despite the label ‘carpet bombing,’ there was actually a very high level of marketing sophistication and almost all decisions were data and results driven,” she writes. While she didn’t have any singular statistic to share, she does say that the first large mailing program began in the Spring/Summer of 1993, with about 200,000 discs (technically, still 3.5-inch floppy disks at the time) and other non-disk mailing being sent out at that time. “The average response to that mailing was a staggering 10%– unheard of in direct marketing– or any marketing circle,” she notes. Incredibly, each floppy disk cost AOL $1.19 to make at first. And that’s just for the disk. That doesn’t include any of the other packaging they were sent in. “Part of the success of the marketing program was also dependent on dramatically driving down the costs of producing and mailing the disks and packages,” Brandt writes. As former AOL CEO Steve Case noted yesterday, they were able to do just that. And that’s why we saw so many of those disks (and eventually discs). “At the time of the initial tests there were no machines that could assemble these packages automatically. We worked with vendors to develop automated equipment and could not have scaled the marketing programs without first developing this equipment,” Brandt writes. The strategy worked as AOL perfected the system enough that it was cost-effective. Soon, they were signing up a new user every six seconds. A few years later, they were a $150 billion company. Brandt also humorously notes that the (annoying) disc image we used yesterday in our post wasn’t actually one AOL widely sent out. Instead, it was one of the many test discs AOL was trying at the time. I actually remember the floppy disks better than the CDs because I was actually excited to get the floppies back in the day to try out the latest version of AOL. A few years ago, CrunchGear noted an AOL 1.0 disk selling for $5,000 on eBay. Which is awesome. Just in case you’re new to TechCrunch, yes, AOL now owns us. Clearly, that has nothing to do with why we’re posting this. Or does it? You’ll never know.        
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| SnapPages Lets You Hook Into LinkedIn For Custom Online Resumes Posted: 28 Dec 2010 12:56 PM PST
Now SnapPages, a website builder that we’ve covered before, has launched a new feature that does something similar, but with a bit more flexibility. SnapPages founder Steve Testone explains that many of the site’s users have said that it would be helpful if they could create ‘resume websites’ that would let them showcase their work experience in a format that doesn’t look identical to everyone else’s. To help with that, SnapPages has launched a new resume builder. It’s pretty straightforward: first, the tool will ask you to connect your LinkedIn account to SnapPages via OAuth. Next it will ask if you’d like to add any additional contact information, like your email address or Twitter account. Then you’re done — the site will generate a clean-looking website that includes your work experience and links to your social media presences. It looks like SnapPages only offers one template for your online resume (whereas LinkedIn offers a handful of options), but it has one advantage: you can manually customize the appearance and the copy that appears on your web resume. The only way to modify the text using LinkedIn’s tool is to edit your actual LinkedIn profile, which may not always be ideal. SnapPages will also let you add additional images and change font appearance as you’d like. Update: Testone clarifies that you can actually use any of the design templates already available on SnapPages — there are five available for free accounts and sixteen for premium pro accounts. It’s been a while since we last covered SnapPages, so I asked Testone for an update on the drag-and-drop website creator. Testone says that the company is on track to hit profitability in the first half of 2011, and it now has three full-time employees (up from one). The site has added a photos application, which lets you manage photos from Facebook, Flickr, and Picassa webpages and then push them out to your SnapPages site. There’s also an option to upload and host any kind of file. Finally, the site has added a new Developer Accounts option. Testone says that many of the site’s users are actually web designers who use SnapPages to help build sites for clients. So the service rolled out a special account-type for these users that lets them quickly access all of their clients’ accounts, and there’s a project management and ticketing tool built in. For another resume building tool, check out JobSpice. Update: And, as one of our commenters points out, you can also include your LinkedIn information on your About.me profile (which was recently acquired by TechCrunch’s parent company AOL).
       
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| Will 2011 See App Makers Thinking Android-First? One Developer Thinks It’s Possible Posted: 28 Dec 2010 12:09 PM PST
Akshay Kothari is the co-founder of Alphonso Labs, the development house behind the popular Pulse news reader app. Pulse started as an iPad app first, then expanded to the iPhone, then came to Android. Kothari credits both the support they’ve received from Apple and the press surrounding the iPad as the reason why they’ve been so iOS-centric up until now. But, “our thinking about the Android platform has changed significantly over the last couple weeks,” he writes to us. “A few interesting things have happened on Android recently,” he continues. What things? He lists three specifically:
Pulse is indeed currently featured in the Android Market. “So far, our innovation has moved from iOS to Android, and it may stay that way in the near term. But with the option to instantly get feedback on your new update, it may not be too far-fetched to have innovation move from Android platforms to iOS platform,” Kothari notes. News broke yesterday that the revamped Android Market could soon see video demos alongside the regular images. And then there’s the talk for the first true Android-based iPod touch competitor. Both are also good signs for Android development. But the major issue up until now has of course been money. As in, developers on the iOS platform have an easier road to make it. Google is also working to improve that by getting new carrier-billing deals in place for the Market. But the fact remains that paid apps are a much easier sell in the App Store than in the Market. That will need to change in 2011 for developers to really start going Android-first in a meaningful way.        
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| Keen On… Erick Schonfeld: Will 2011 Be 1999 All Over Again? (TCTV) Posted: 28 Dec 2010 11:01 AM PST
For TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld, 2011 might be the year that touch becomes central to the computing experience. It may also be the year when both mobile and social – John Doerr's third wave – grows up to finally become the dominant sector of the tech industry. Could 2011 be 2000 all over again? Could we see a collapse of all the optimism now surrounding mobile and social? Were Fred Wilson’s warnings about tech's current irrational exuberance correct? Not according to Schonfeld who, while acknowledging that there are too many me-too companies, believes that the established players driving the current boom – Facebook, Groupon, Zynga and Twitter – are for real. Is Schonfeld right? Should we be partying like it’s 1999? Or could 2011, like 2000, be remembered as the year when the music died? What Schonfeld wants in 2011 What Schonfeld fears in 2011        
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| Awesome Quora Chrome Extension Is Awesome Posted: 28 Dec 2010 10:50 AM PST Addicted to Quora? Wish there were a way to search the Q&A site directly from your browser as well as receive notifications about your notifications while surfing the web? Well, this awesome Google Chrome extension created by Andrew Brown is just what your browser ordered. Now you can be one click away from a Quora fix everywhere you go online (Brown plans on eventually showing you full notifications while you browse). Die hard fans can grab the repo now from Github or download the extension here if you’re already in Chrome. Thanks: Tristan Walker        
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| The SEC Investigation Into Private Stock Sales Is All About The Glaring Lack Of Disclosure Posted: 28 Dec 2010 10:09 AM PST The Securities and Exchange Commission is asking questions about private stock markets like SecondMarket and SharesPost. The SEC has sent “information requests to several participants in the buying and selling of stock” to a number of companies, reports the New York Times (although private market SecondMarket says they have received no request from the SEC). [Corrected: An earlier version of this story indicated that the private markets themselves received the information requests from the SEC, but the New York Times does not specify which firms were contacted]. Over the past year, trading in shares of still-private companies such as Facebook, Zynga, and LinkedIn has skyrocketed, allowing employees and early investors to sell their shares even without an IPO. About $400 million worth of shares will pass hands this year on SecondMarket, which is the largest of the private exchanges, up from about $100 million in 2009. The lack of liquidity because of the general postponement of IPOs among many Internet startups is fueling this growth. Only qualified institutions and high net-worth individual investors are allowed to participate in these markets, but as more and more shares trade hands the SEC’s 500-shareholder rule could be triggered which would require the companies to report audited financial results just like a publicly-traded company. Investors are buying shares on these markets with little to no knowledge of the actual financial results of the underlying companies. There are no disclosure requirements because these markets take advantage of employees or early shareholders who want to unload their shares to the highest bidder. Investors see these markets as a chance to get in on hot, pre-IPO, Internet startups. Facebook shares are the ones most in demand on these markets. They recently traded at an implied valuation of above $50 billion on SecondMarket, and $42.4 billion on SharesPost. A couple years ago, Facebook won an exemption from the SEC’s 500-shareholder rule by arguing that the shares were mostly held by employees, and it also changed the way it issued restricted stock. But if the number of external shareholders exceeds 500 investors, the SEC might want to revisit that exemption. The same issue would hold for other private companies who end up with more than 500 shareholders through these private sales. The SEC is obviously concerned about the growth of these unregulated markets, especially now that funds are being created specifically to invest in these types of securities. To the extent that they become an alternative to public markets, the SEC may require the same sorts of disclosures for companies which gain more than 500 shareholders as a result of their shares being traded there. At that point the companies may as well go public because they gain nothing from these secondary markets other than as a release valve for employees and early investors. (Companies typically do not sell their own shares through these markets, nor do they benefit financially from the trading). In the end, it is all about disclosure. Because nobody can really know what these companies are worth without knowing their true profits, losses, revenue growth, and other financial metrics. If it looks like a public company and trades like a public company then the SEC might just end up regulating it like a public company. Photo credit: Flickr/andrecismo        
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| TechCrunchTV’s Funniest Videos From 2010 (TCTV) Posted: 28 Dec 2010 09:48 AM PST During the holiday season, there’s a newsroom tradition to look back at the year’s funny and memorable videos. At TechCrunchTV, we don’t want to disappoint. TechCrunchTV launched this June and since then, we’ve produced around 1,000 videos. We’ve asked tough questions to CEO’s, entrepreneurs, VC’s, and angels. We brought you exclusive interviews with new start-ups and top tech companies. We provided live coverage of Disrupt. And, as you can see in this video, we’ve had our share of funnier moments. Highlights include a backstage moment with our new AOL boss; Jason Kincaid and MG Siegler turn into their favorite smartphones; John Biggs vs Four Loko; Michael Arrington as a robot; and two famous words from Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz. There’s also a year end tradition to give credit and thanks to the people behind the camera. Our TCTV staff, who producer, direct, shoot, edit, and process much of our content includes John Murillo and Ashley Pagan. We also want to thank our video partners, including Ustream for our live event streaming, Ooyala for hosting our video on demand content, and Newtek for our Tricaster video switcher. We’ve got some more surprises ahead in 2011, so keep on watching.        
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| Fancy Is A Social Shopping List For The Design-Obsessed Posted: 28 Dec 2010 09:38 AM PST
The idea behind Fancy is fairly simple. Via a bookmarklet, you can flag and import pictures of pretty much anything from other websites into your Fancy profile. You can also download pictures and text into your profile as well. Or you can snap a photo of a favorite product from Fancy’s iPhone app. You can tag photos (i.e. shoes, furniture) to make them searchable on the site. The social component of Fancy allows you to follow other users whose product and image collections you like. You can save other products listed on users’ profiles to your profile and you can access a feed of new products added by the users you follow. Users can also embed Fancy images on other websites. And the stark design of the site is visually appealing when combined with the images that users add. Fancy describes itself as “a blog, magazine, wishlist and store catalog rolled into one,” which is pretty accurate. It seems like a a great way to collect, curate and share the things you love through visual images. I think there could also be an opportunity for brands, celebs and designers to use Fancy to publish curated lists of their “favorite things.”        
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There are plenty of clocks that “light” the room slowly, flooding your optic nerves with crisp morning luminosity in order to wake you the way Madre Natura wanted us to. But until now there’s never been a mask that will wake you with the same soothing change in luminosity. 
Just when we thought the 
In a few nights, an estimated 1 million people are going to pack into New York’s Times Square for New Year’s Eve (brrr). And amidst all of the confetti, snow, and alcohol, they’re going to see a whole lot of ads, which is what Times Square does best. One of them represents a win for location-based mobile game 
As the end of each year looms, there's a fun tradition amongst news organisations of publishing lists of "new words" coined during the preceding twelve months. The only slight problem with the lists is that they're largely nonsense, comprised mostly of phrases made up by lazy journalists on a deadline.
Here at TechCrunch, we’ve long been fans of personal finance site 
Here’s a bit of a sticky situation: Apple is 
Lots of excitement today about 
Yesterday, our post about 
Over the weekend, there was a ton of talk about 2011 being the year in which 
Only four more days of 2010; four more days till we get to 2011. So what to expect in the new year? What do we most hope for and fear about 2011?
We recently 
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