The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Amazon’s Diapers.com And Soap.com Bring E-Commerce To Facebook Pages
- Chartbeat Cracks 2 Million Concurrent Users Tracked
- Google Apps Removes Scheduled Downtime Clause From SLA; Gmail Had 99% Uptime in 2010
- Kickstarter: The PadPivot Might Be The First True Universal, Multi-Function Tablet Stand
- Which Is The Most Capital Efficient Online Video Startup Of Them All? (Hint: Rocketboom)
- Watson! IBM’s Artificial Intelligence Looks To Upstage Its Human Benefactors In Grand Jeopardy Challenge
- Netlog Creates, Becomes Part Of Massive Media; Expands To New York And Dubai
- SNAP Interactive Raises $8.5 Million For Social Dating Applications
- RepEquity Acquires Digital Agency Virilion
- Local.com Aims To Raise $15.5 Million In Public Offering
- Tosh.0 Takes On Angry Birds, As Do I
- Stealth Milewise Raises $1.5 Million To Help People Cash In On Reward Programs
- Groupon Said To Be Valued At, Like, $15 Billion
- News Corp’s The Daily iPad Newspaper Delayed By “Weeks, Not Months”
- Hybrid Streetlights: Good Or Bad News For Utilities?
- If this Conference Room Table Could Talk… (TCTV)
- My Contribution To AOL’s Q1 Targets. (You’re Welcome, Tim)
- ShareSquare Gets 150K To Build Out Its QR Code Platform [Invites]
- Ship or Get Off the Pot
- AOL’s Q1 Winter Luge Goals Revealed
- Cubeduel: Hot Or Not Meets LinkedIn. Your Darker Side Will Love It.
- HP Also Holding A Second webOS Event On February 9 To Woo Developers
- Justin Bieber URL Shortener Bieber.ly Shuts Down After Cease And Desist
- Groupon China Giving, Like, a Billion Reasons It’ll Beat the Clones
- VBS.TV And Reddit Are Leading Us Into The Golden Era Of Information Discovery
| Amazon’s Diapers.com And Soap.com Bring E-Commerce To Facebook Pages Posted: 14 Jan 2011 09:08 AM PST E-commerce on Facebook has steadily been ramping up as both small retailers and big brands set up online store fronts on the social networks. With access to Facebook’s nearly 600 million members, it makes sense for retailers to bring e-commerce and the shopping experience to the social network. Today, Quidsi, which Amazon acquired for $540 million last Fall, is launching an shopping experience on Facebook for Soap.com and Diapers.com On the Facebook pages for Quidsi-owner properties Soap.com, BeautyBar.com and Diapers.com, existing users of the shopping sites will be able to shop for products directly from the social network under a tab called “Shop My List.” Members will be able to access their Diapers.com and Soap.com shopping lists by logging in with their Quidsi credentials and then complete a purchase of all or some of these products without ever leaving Facebook. And customers can shop on all three sites via one tab (so users can order Soap items while on the Diapers page) and like individual products. Quidsi VP of E-Commerce Josh Himwich says the unique aspect of the experience is that you never have to leave Facebook to complete your purchase. Many retail outlets list products for purchase on their Facebook pages, but users have to complete the transaction on a separate site. The one drawback of the experience is that only existing Diapers.com and Soap.com users who have shopping lists created on these sites are able to use the e-commerce app on Facebook. Himwich says that Quidsi is targeting existing users purposefully, because those who are likely to be fans of Diapers.com or Soap.com on Facebook are probably loyal shoppers of the sit (combined, the Quidsi Facebook pages have around 60,000 fans/likes). As for the Amazon factor, the deal hasn’t closed yet so this has been a Quidsi-sponsored product (the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of this year). But Himwich adds that Amazon was particularly interested in direction Quidsi is going with adding the social element to e-commerce. Amazon is no stranger to social commerce these days and has been ramping up its integrations with Facebook, recently launching a feature that taps into the social network for recommendations. And of course, the ecommerce giant just made a whopping $175 million investment in group buying site LivingSocial. And Himwich says that Amazon is looking to invest in a few more Facebook-focused e-commerce startups. While Himwich says that “no one has yet cracked the nut on Facebook e-commerce,” the Facebook integration is a way to dip Quidsi’s toes into the social e-commerce waters to see if a full-on storefront makes sense. It should be interesting to see if Amazon follows Quidsi’s footsteps in actually setting up retail storefronts on Facebook for its marketplace. It would certainly help turn Facebook into a virtual mall.        
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| Chartbeat Cracks 2 Million Concurrent Users Tracked Posted: 14 Jan 2011 09:00 AM PST It was only last August that Chartbeat passed one million concurrent users tracked across all the sites that use the realtime analytics dashboard. It took 16 months from launch to get there. Now, a mere five months later, Chartbeat has broken through the 2-million user milepost. Chartbeat is like Google Analytics, but in realtime. It lest you see exactly how many visitors are on any page on your Website at any given time, where they came from, and how your realtime traffic compares to the norm. So you can see spikes right when they are occurring. I use it religiously to track how posts are doing on TechCrunch every day. And more and more sites are getting religion, it seems, or traffic is growing for the already-converted. The 2-million user number is concurrent users across all sites that use Chartbeat, and that is an average number at any one instant. It is certainly a popular service. In fact, it is up for a Crunchies award this year for Best Interent application. You can vote for it here (along with other nominees).        
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| Google Apps Removes Scheduled Downtime Clause From SLA; Gmail Had 99% Uptime in 2010 Posted: 14 Jan 2011 09:00 AM PST
Google has also changed its agreement to count ANY intermittent downtime. Previously, a period of less than ten minutes was not counted as downtime. And before that, Google Apps could be unavailable for more than 21 hours on a given day, and the company could still claim they had 100% uptime. In addition, Google is once again claiming 99.984 percent uptime for Gmail in 2010 (in 2008 Gmail also has 99 percent uptime). Google says that 99.984 percent uptime “translates to seven minutes of downtime per month over the last year.” The company is also claiming that it had the least amount of downtime in 2010 compared to its competitors. Google’s decision to credit Google Apps customers for downtime is significant, considering that many cloud providers don’t provide this within their SLAs.        
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| Kickstarter: The PadPivot Might Be The First True Universal, Multi-Function Tablet Stand Posted: 14 Jan 2011 08:47 AM PST
Not only does the PadPivot do multi-angle, table-top tablet mounting and holding, but the contoured shape is designed for legs, too. Most tablet users can attest, this is the most common usage location anyway. The Kickstarter demo video embedded in this post shows why. You sit down, put the tablet on your thigh and then do a little balancing routine to keep it in place. With the PadPivot, you simply rest the backside of the iPad or any other slate device on the PadPivot’s pad while the rounded shape holds to your leg. Oh, and it folds up nicely, too. I’m sold.        
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| Which Is The Most Capital Efficient Online Video Startup Of Them All? (Hint: Rocketboom) Posted: 14 Jan 2011 08:17 AM PST Success in online video is relative to how much time, effort, and money you put into it. Andrew Baron of Rocketboom offers the (albeit self-serving) chart at right in a post updating the State of the Union for his startup and online video in general. I like this chart because it tries to compare the total capital poured into four different online video ventures and the total cumulative videos put out and consumed by viewers. Next New Networks is by far the largest, with an estimated 1 billion cumulative video views, but it’s also raised $27 million in venture capital (weren’t they supposed to be bought by YouTube by now?). Revision3 and Rocketboom come in at the next tier with 312 million and 290 million cumulative video views, respectively. A decent accomplishment by both, but it took Revision3 about $10 million in capital to get there whereas Rocketboom got there with only $1.5 million. And then there’s MyDamnChannel, with 105 million cumulative views and $7.5 million in capital invested. Not very capital efficient at all, assuming revenues are tied to video views, which is usually the case. In order to better visualize the ratio of cumulative views to total invested capital, I created the chart below based on Baron’s original one. Here you can see the capital efficiency better in terms total video views per dollar invested. Over its lifetime, Rocketboom has attracted 193 views per dollar invested, compared to 37 for Next New Networks, 31 for Revision 3, and 14 for MyDamnChannel. That’s pretty good for a bootstrapped startup, but Rocketboom still only produces one show (albeit daily), compared to a whole roster of shows for Next New Networks and Revision 3. Is Rocketboom pofitable? Baron says, “We’re still here.” And the company, which also operates KnowYourMeme and Mag.ma, is living off revenue since last September. It’s capital efficiency has gotten it this far, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if Rocketboom taps outside investors to help take the company to the next level, just as online video advertising starts to finally take off.        
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| Posted: 14 Jan 2011 07:51 AM PST
       
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| Netlog Creates, Becomes Part Of Massive Media; Expands To New York And Dubai Posted: 14 Jan 2011 07:20 AM PST  European social networking site Netlog is to become part of a newly established social media company dubbed Massive Media, the company announced yesterday. The Ghent, Belgium-based company says its product portfolio will soon be expanded to new markets but declined to disclose any further information on future projects at this point. Co-founder and CEO Lorenz Bogaert did reveal that the company recently hired 25 new employees to work on new endeavors inside Massive Media.
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| SNAP Interactive Raises $8.5 Million For Social Dating Applications Posted: 14 Jan 2011 06:43 AM PST SNAP Interactive, the publicly listed company behind social dating applications and services like AreYouInterested, is to raise $8.5 million in a private placement transaction. Under the terms of the transaction, SNAP has agreed to sell approximately 4.25 million shares of its common stock to institutional investors at $2 per share and warrants to purchase up to approximately 2.125 million additional shares of its common stock. The warrants to purchase additional shares will be exercisable at an exercise price of $2.50 per share and will expire five years from the closing date (expected to be 19 January). SNAP says it has more than 30 million installs across its social dating applications for Facebook, the iPhone and other platforms.        
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| RepEquity Acquires Digital Agency Virilion Posted: 14 Jan 2011 06:23 AM PST RepEquity, which provides online reputation, search and social media management services, this morning announced it has acquired and now merged with digital agency Virilion to offer integrated digital marketing services in search, social media, creative and technical development across the Web and mobile. The combined company has a team over 50 people across offices in Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Austin. Founded in 1997, Virilion (formerly Mindshare Interactive Campaigns) boasts clients such as eBay, Sirius|XM Radio, WellPoint and U.S. Fund for UNICEF.        
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| Local.com Aims To Raise $15.5 Million In Public Offering Posted: 14 Jan 2011 06:16 AM PST Local search site operator Local.com this morning announced that it has priced an underwritten public offering of 4 million shares of its common stock at a price of $4.25 per share. Net proceeds, after discounts, commissions and estimated expenses, will be approximately $15.5 million. Local.com has given the underwriter, Canaccord Genuity, a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 600,000 shares of common stock to cover overallotments, if any. If exercised, the overallotment will result in net proceeds to the company of approximately $2.3 million (which would thus bring the total of capital raised to $17.8 million). Local.com owns and operates a local search site and network in the United States. The company claims it provides over 20 million consumers with relevant search results for local businesses each month, on Local.com and over 1,000 partner sites. The company, which is listed on NASDAQ, is getting a beating on the markets today.        
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| Tosh.0 Takes On Angry Birds, As Do I Posted: 14 Jan 2011 05:43 AM PST
I have a problem with Angry Birds. Think about it: these are self-sacrificing suicide birds throwing themselves wholesale at pigs inside of poorly-constructed structures made of various easily-shattered materials including glass, plywood, and stone. Given the nature of their attacks, I believe a political reconciliation should be – and must be – possible. The loss of life on both sides is, if you are a poor player, unilateral on the part of the birds and the bigs, at worst, suffer limited casualties.        
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| Stealth Milewise Raises $1.5 Million To Help People Cash In On Reward Programs Posted: 14 Jan 2011 04:37 AM PST Milewise is an up-and-coming New York startup that’s currently in stealth mode (its service has been invite-only since at least the first time I caught wind of the company, which must have been in the summer of 2010). According to this SEC filing, they’ve just raised $1.5 million in debt funding. We don’t know much about the company, except that it was co-founded by Vinay Pulim, who previously started Isovia (acquired by Motorola) and Reble.fm (acquired by Playlist.com) and was most recently senior software engineer at Hunch. The other co-founder is Sanjay Kothari, who was previously at Boston Consulting Group. The Business Insider recently profiled the startup as one of the “25 Hush-Hush New York Startups You Need To Know About” and wrote:
We’ve contacted the startup to learn more about what they’re building, and when they plan to launch in public beta.        
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| Groupon Said To Be Valued At, Like, $15 Billion Posted: 13 Jan 2011 08:22 PM PST
The report also amps up Groupon’s valuation to more than double the $6 billion Google had reportedly offered for the company just months ago, at about $15 billion “or more.” From The New York Times:
Groupon is on a tear, recently raising $950 million dollars from investors such as Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins and Morgan Stanley in the largest ever financing round for a startup, according to the Times. Groupon, which has aggressively focused on its international expansion plans as of late, also hit a less notable milestone today, over $1 billion dollars saved through the use of Groupons. Here’s Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, the “quirky personality” behind the rise of group couponing, in an interview for Crain’s “40 Under 40: 2009.” Image: Groupon for Groupon        
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| News Corp’s The Daily iPad Newspaper Delayed By “Weeks, Not Months” Posted: 13 Jan 2011 06:46 PM PST
All Things D has learned (from a slip-up at an internal News Corp meeting, no doubt) that The Daily will not, in fact, be launching next week, but has been put off to an unspecified date, probably some time in February. And they blame Apple! The nerve. Supposedly, The Daily was supposed to take advantage of a new feature in the Apple economy that would push new content automatically to your device or devices. Basically a pay subscription service, like a regular newspaper. But the word is that Apple’s not ready to go live, and they’ve caused News Corp to delay the launch until such a time as the feature is actually complete. Considering that can’t possibly take too long, the source of this information has shared that the delay is on the order of weeks, not months. Or at least, that’s when they’ll announce the next delay. Paul thinks this thing is going to go down in flames. I’m not so sure, but I do know that the kind of person who buys an iPad is far more likely to be taking advantage of all the free content on the net. They don’t get up in the morning and pick up the Times from their doorstep. They pull their iPad off the nightstand and check their feeds. That said, if they can even get 5% of the 8-million-strong iPad membership to pay $5 a month, that’s a triumph. It will depend on their opening move, however. If they’re smart, they’ll give it away for a good long time — 90 days, perhaps. If they can run on fumes for that time and then fill the tank when people find they actually like this little app, then they’re fine. But if they try to charge for admission up front, they’ll be high and dry.        
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| Hybrid Streetlights: Good Or Bad News For Utilities? Posted: 13 Jan 2011 06:30 PM PST
Designed for primary use in parking lots or over highways, UGE’s Sanya streetlights include a standard setup of the company’s 600 W Eddy wind turbines, along with a steel tower or pole, solar panels, lead acid batteries of the variety used in many cars, controls and light emitting diodes (LEDs) made by suppliers from Asia and the U.S. They can store up to 5 days of power, and can be customized to cast a particular color of light according to the product’s official webpage. The UGE Sanya could take some business away from utilities by generating power from off-the-grid renewables for use in the pervasive, on-all-night streetlights. In many U.S. markets today, electric companies are the ones who actually install, maintain and power communities’ residential streetlights. This traditional business model has caused problems recently for various municipalities and utilities that serve them. In Fayetteville, North Carolina (as reported by Andrew Barksdale for The Fayetteville Observer, N.C.) Progress Energy (NYSE: PGN) is threatening to turn the streetlights off, unless the town pays a bill over $100,000 there, or gives PE permission to charge monthly fees to customers it serves in the area. It’s even worse in Lawrence, Kansas (as reported by Chad Lawhorn for the Lawrence Journal World & News). The city’s auditor, Michael Eglinski, believes the power company in charge of streetlights there, Westar Energy, is overcharging Lawrence for electricity it provides, failing to meter precisely, and worse is using woefully inefficient bulbs deliberately to boost sales. Consumers can’t turn streetlights owned by utilities on or off, nor can they swap out old bulbs for highly efficient ones. The arrangement doesn’t feel fair to every resident. Utilities’ sympathizers, on the other hand, point out that they are responsible for things like repairing street lamps should a tree branch or car accident take one out, and incur other costs to keep cities safely lit. The UGE Sanya streetlights could provide one benefit to utilities, though. Since they’re grid connectable, the lights can send excess power from the wind turbines and solar panels back through the grid. That helps utilities fulfill regulatory requirements to increase the percent of power they get from local, renewable sources. Nick Blitterswyk, founder and chief executive of UGE, said more than 100 Sanya streetlights sold in the product’s first month on the market. None of Sanya’s buyers so far have been utilities in the U.S. Queries have come from municipalities, retailers and hotels eager to illuminate their properties, cut electricity costs, and win a green public image. A mechanical engineer at UGE, Mateo Chaskel, said that the constantly moving turbine technology in the lights should last twenty years, requiring just an annual maintenance check-up, barring natural disasters or accidents. Not including the batteries, the LED lights and other parts within should endure as long as the turbines, he said. He hopes they’ll reduce waste from spent bulbs, along with maintenance costs for companies, cities and utilities that switch to the Sanya. The streetlights are assembled at a UGE facilitly in Asia, and shipped to San Francisco for distribution in North America. They usually qualify for a 30% rebate from the federal government. The city of San Francisco recently installed the hybrid lights as part of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s sustainable civic center efforts. More recently, Chaskel said, they were installed in about five sites in Pusan, South Korea. They will soon be installed in lots and along city streets in: San Jose, Oklahoma, Ohio, the Virgin Islands, Australia, and Poland.
Photo credits: traditional street light via Ecksunderscore and Sanya via Urban Green Energy        
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| If this Conference Room Table Could Talk… (TCTV) Posted: 13 Jan 2011 06:25 PM PST
Paul Martino has started four companies, most recently Aggregate Knowledge, and he was one of the first investors in Zynga. Duncan Davidson was most recently managing partner for the Leviathan-like VantagePoint Venture Partners, and founded several companies including Covad Communications– a DSL pioneer that went public and was valued as high as $9 billion. And Richard Melmon’s roots go back to the early Intuit days, through the legendary Regis McKenna, onto VisiCalc and eventually co-founding Electronic Arts. In a relatively young industry, those are some deep venture roots. Apparently, their conference room table has seen about as much action. In a fun final segment we reminisce with the Bullpen guys. Enjoy!        
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| My Contribution To AOL’s Q1 Targets. (You’re Welcome, Tim) Posted: 13 Jan 2011 06:16 PM PST
Just in case you missed it, between now and March, TechCrunch’s parent company will be concentrating on the following areas…
The first six are all well and good, with “double patch engagement” being of particular interest to the company’s pirate employees. For me, though, the undisputed highlight was item seven: “customize office around towns”. In case you missed the story, “towns” is Here, then, my contribution for TechTown… You’re welcome, Tim.        
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| ShareSquare Gets 150K To Build Out Its QR Code Platform [Invites] Posted: 13 Jan 2011 06:11 PM PST
In the same space as Likify and Mofuse, ShareSquare is a QR Code creation platform specifically for music and entertainment brands. With ShareSquare’s CMS, artists and promoters can deck out branded merchandise like posters, promos, flyers and even bumper stickers with QR codes corresponding to a custom HTML5 web app (see a mockup one for Justin Bieber, to the left). Fans with a QR code scanner like RedLaser, can then scan the code to check out related content such as MP3s, music videos, contests and, eventually, make purchases. The ShareSquare CMS also allows realtime placement and by media (i.e. billboard vs. poster vs. sticker) tracking analytics for QR codes as well as something ShareSquare founder and Founder’s Institute graduate Mattias Galica calls “Like Lock,” where fan Facebook “Likes”unveil special access to prizes and exclusive content. Content is monetized through ads. On a trial run for six weeks, ShareSquare has been working successfully with Hollywood agencies and studios like William Morris Endeavor and Disney. A QR campaign for artist Mitchel Musso reached 2,500 posters, 10,000 packaging stickers and over 181 shopping malls nationwide. Gallica explains the challenges of the space,“Only geeks recognize what a QR code is. The big challenge in the space is that QR codes have a ton of things that you can do with them. Sharesquare is disciplined enough to focus on two verticals.” Indeed, taking the entertainment route might be a winning move for the L.A. based company which will also be doing band leaderboards at SXSW, “We’re looking to see what the next couple of months brings us,” says Galica. Readers interested in taking us ShareSquare on their 500 free invite offer can register here, using the code TCRN500.
       
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| Posted: 13 Jan 2011 06:06 PM PST
We hear lots about Android these days as a million tablets bloom at CES. But the world we’re hearing about is the one where Apple lives in a one-carrier model. It’s a Model T world where you can have any color as long as it’s AT&T. Every day people walk into any other carrier store and walk out with Android, because they don’t know the difference. Contrary to the pr, the Android sell to the broad market is not about Open v. Closed, or store v. market, or any of the direct feature comparisons. That’s because the features are comparable, the experience is similar, the sell is based on stepping up to the iPhone experience whether it’s called Kleenex or Cheerios or the supermarket knock off. The knock off becomes the brand. But in doing this jujitsu, Google has created a climate where the knock off is vulnerable to attack if the rules that got them there change. Google having given the carriers a reasonably indistinguishable knock off to sell, Apple can now safely drop the exclusive wedge for disintermediating carrier profit margin havens such as tethering and IM and eventually VoIP. Snap. Verizon offers iPhone 4. Forget the slight redesign, forget the lack of multitasking between data and voice, forget the pricing models for unlimited, tethering, and video chat over 3G. Now the store brand is competing directly with the actual iPhone. Naturally the pent-up demand by Verizon contractees will blow out the overall numbers. But much more importantly, Apple is free to ship an iPhone 5 across the board, where existing contractees can be marketed to with bundled services, i.e. the new TV, the new Enterprise, the new Office. One device, with the carriers battling for the most attractive rendering of services. This is where we switch over to Google's H.264 move. Faced with ship or get off the pot, Google will do whatever it needs to do to establish its platform as a unique and valuable proposition. With H.264 store brand adoption over 50%, Apple has reached the point where its Flash blockade is no longer painful to the majority of iOS users. With a broad non-exclusive base opening up, Apple is free to blow out the market unless something radical is done — destabilize the inevitability argument around Flash-is-dead by a weird combination of OpenFUD and brute force. Never mind that it tells its developers and Chrome adopters to never believe a word Google says about its motivations and reliability of partner strategy. In effect, Google is broadening its mission statement from "What's good for the Web is good for us" to "What's good for the Web and bad for Apple is good for us." At best, it's Google water-testing VP8 to gauge its patent liabilities; at worst it's a weak signal if they reverse course. It suggests a certain thin-skinnedness over the Verizon deal and its bandwagon implications, and underlines the alacrity of the timing (over the next two months) within which Chrome will be crippled. And the short term fix is to continue to support Flash as a way around having to download another plug in. The weird thing here is that this begins to feel like a Google version of a Silverlight play, starting with video and Chrome and then marching through the other browsers via YouTube. Silverlight is seen by some as the reason Bob Muglia was sent packing, most likely by Steve Sinofsky consolidating power to succeed Ballmer. Muglia and Ray Ozzie were surprisingly in synch around using Silverlight as a stalking horse for embedding Windows in an uber Web OS, disagreeing (or subtly agreeing) only over the timing of the transition. While Ozzie owned the vision and strategy, Muglia owned the execution and a rising revenue base in the Servers and Tools Business. The black helicopter noise suggests Muglia was undermined by the retrenchment around Silverlight he surfaced in an interview with Mary Jo Foley, but here again Apple's Verizon deal around iPhone 4 and a Verizon iPad threatens Microsoft much more directly by accelerating iOS and damaging both Windows Phone and the MIA Windows tablet. Just as with Android market success, Ozzie and Muglia's success at destabilizing private cloud margins for servers and the increasingly irrelevant and collaboration-free Office platform in order to save the company has created an Azure economy that needs to be managed by a new breed of president, or by Ballmer directly. Google has moved way past Microsoft in mobile, and now Apple is moving back out in front of both. Ironically, Ozzie leaving cut Muglia's legs out from under him, as his P&L looks good compared to everybody else but Sinofsky's. In the Ozzie/Muglia era, Microsoft learned how to speak a newer language of openness and resolve to move forward into the cloud. In the Sinofsky/Ballmer era, they get to keep the cloud because they have to, and try and manage their way out of the collapse of their enterprise channel before Office is pulled out from under them. Meanwhile, a new generation of store brand social workers are using a new message bus, with Apple driving the innovation curve around a realtime set of dynamic objects. FaceTime, AirPlay, the Mac AppStore, the Twitter realtime Mac app, and so on. Once again: Verizon capitulates on behalf of the carriers to Apple. Google, flush with having educated the market across the carriers about the superphone, suddenly shows weakness and collapse of trust messaging by trying to damage Apple via a phony open source/standards gambit. Microsoft, flush with barely being all in on the cloud, fires its cloud chief to appease the old guard's Ballmer heir by completing the Silverlight coup, papering over its mobile collapse, and rolling back to the state Ozzie had rescued them from. iOS wins 2 out of 3 phone sales, 4 out of 5 tablets, transforms its Mac OS to the new iOS mobile AppStore, and competes head to head with Google and its old Microsoft model. Thanks, Verizon.        
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| AOL’s Q1 Winter Luge Goals Revealed Posted: 13 Jan 2011 05:27 PM PST Around here at AOL/TechCrunch, they tend to keep us out of the loop on corporate strategy because they know we’ll post any old memo we find. So imagine my surprise to find a box with AOL snow globes and first quarter stretch targets sent to my office in New York City (which is not at AOL’s headquarters, by the way, but the same office I’ve always had because, well, they don’t really want me in their building—despite being an AOL employee, I can’t even get an AOL ID to enter unannounced). This box has been sitting around since the holidays, and inside is a little motivational package with five AOL Winter Luge 2011 snow globes and bookmarks/postcards (see photo above). On the back of the postcards are the company’s goals for the first quarter dubbed “Q1 Winter Luge.” Some of these have been reported before, like doubling homepage traffic, which in and of itself would be huge. But there are others too, including growing ad sales revenue by 20 percent, doubling engagement on the local Patch sites, organizing around “towns” (we are in Tech Town!), recruiting top talent, and expanding the Project Devil ads, which replace clutter on the page with one big ad incorporating different interactive elements like video or maps. So while the news today was about how AOL is outsourcing sports, health, and real estate—some of the content areas where it is not so strong—the bigger strategy revolves around these goals. While there was no other information in the package other than the cards and the globes, it seems clear to me that these are very much stretch goals but ones worth striving for. In case you have trouble reading the goals in the photo above, here they are—and below that another interpretation of the Winter Luge at an AOL party (photo cropped to protect the not-so-innocent, but note the “AOL 2011″ engraved into the side of the ice luge): Q1 Winter Luge
       
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| Cubeduel: Hot Or Not Meets LinkedIn. Your Darker Side Will Love It. Posted: 13 Jan 2011 04:38 PM PST
Meet Cubeduel, a site that launched two days ago and is quickly making the rounds on Twitter. After landing on the site, you’ll be asked to connect with LinkedIn via OAuth. Next, you’ll be presented with photos of two of your former or current coworkers, prompting you to choose who you’d prefer to work with. Click one, and the site will show you another pair. Then another. Vote 20 times and you unlock access to see how other people have ranked you. Yeah, you’re already hooked. But that’s not all. The site records the votes (which are all anonymous) and tallies them, allowing you to browse individual companies like Google or TechCrunch, to see which employees have won the most ‘duels’ based on votes aggregated from all users. In other words, it gives you a nice, easy to read ranking of the ‘best’ people in each company (more on that later). The site is the brainchild of Adam Doppelt (cofounder of UrbanSpoon) and Tony Wright (cofounder of RescueTime), both of whom have left the startups they helped found to work on other projects, including this one. Wright says that CubeDuel came together over the course of the last two weeks. Since launching yesterday “thousands” of people have signed up (the site still has pretty poor analytics tools) and over 50,000 votes have been submitted in the last day. While the site certainly falls somewhere on the evil spectrum, it’s not as bad as Honestly.com, which lets users write anonymous reviews about their peers. Sure, you might end up ranked in the last 10% of your company on Cubeduel, but since there are no comments you don’t have to potentially deal with coworkers insinuating that you’re corrupt or devious. It’s fun and feels slightly mischievous, but it also has some flaws. One of these involves the fact that you’re compelled to choose between one person or the other, even if you don’t know one of them very well (yes, there’s a ‘skip’ button, but it feels like a cop-out and the site doesn’t go out of its way to say you should only vote for people you’ve actually worked with). As I tested the site I found myself favoring people with whom I’d worked directly, even if I couldn’t really say whether they were a better worker than the other. There’s also the charm factor at work — if you knew everyone at your last company (and most people liked you), then you’re probably going to fare better than the guy who churns out great code in a quiet corner of the office. Then again, as Wright says, the charm factor is always at work in the workplace anyway. So why is the site spreading so quickly? Aside from appealing to the darker side of human nature (which is more viral, naturally), Cubeduel prompts you repeatedly to share the site with your friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (part of this is because you need at least four votes before the site will show you your own ranking). It’s too early to tell if this is just a fad. If it does have some legs, Wright says that the site could figure out some ways to monetize it by packaging data in much the same way that Glassdoor does (he says the site could also let people rank companies they’ve worked at).        
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| HP Also Holding A Second webOS Event On February 9 To Woo Developers Posted: 13 Jan 2011 04:34 PM PST A week and a half ago, we were invited to join HP on the morning of February 9 for an “exciting announcement”. But it appears that they’re now also reaching out to others about another event later that day. This new invite reads: “HP webOS. The future revealed.” Below that, it lists the same February 9 date, but lists the time as being from 7 PM to 9:30 PM. And it will be in the same venues: Fort Mason Center, Herbst Pavillion in San Francisco. So what’s this all about? The next line is key: “Please join Jon Rubinstein and the HP webOS Engineering and Developer Relations teams for a special presentation and developer community reception.” In other words, it’s a developer event being held the night after they reveal what they’re doing to reveal at their press event. Makes sense. It looks like HP wants to get to work ASAP. So what’s actually being announced? Speculation has been that webOS 2.0 would be more formally unveiled at that time. But we also now know that tablets will definitely be a part of the day. How? Because HP EVP Todd Bradley told CNBC as much yesterday. When he was asked a questiona about tablets, Bradley responded that “you and I will talk about that on the 9th.“ So, webOS 2.0, tablets, and probably some new phones in the morning to woo the press. Then a developers, developers, developers event at night with Rubinstein to get everyone who will actually have to support the new stuff excited about the future of the HP webOS platform. [thanks Joseph]        
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| Justin Bieber URL Shortener Bieber.ly Shuts Down After Cease And Desist Posted: 13 Jan 2011 03:33 PM PST Earlier today we wrote about the Justin Bieber URL shortener Bieber.ly, which had the dubious distinction of shortening long URLs to the shorter and more catchy Bieber.ly. About 22 hours after the site, went up developer Elliott Kember emails us to say he received a “Cease and Desist” letter apparently from lawyers representing “His Bieberness.” The site now reads “Aww, we got lawyered. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted! Unfortunately we’ve been asked to take this site down.”  @philsturgeonPhil Sturgeon @jakeencinas @elliottkember You'll have to ask permission from "His Biebiness" for that to happen. Says Kember, “This was pretty much the fastest C&D letter I’ve seen – it only took about 22 hours from launch to email.” Teen singer Bieber and his over 7 million “Belieber” followers occupy a vast and murky part of the Internet so it’s no surprise that someone from the Bieber camp would put legal pressure on the guys behind the defacto “Justin Bieber URL Shortener.” What is surprising however, is that the blog “Lesbians Who Look Just Like Justin Bieber” still manages to stay up. I have (sadly) contacted Justin Bieber’s press team for more information, and will update this post (and start applying to grad school) if/when they get back to me.  @elliottkemberElliott Kember I'm sad to announce that Bieber.ly has been shut down. On a more positive note – my first Cease And Desist notice! Printing and framing.        
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| Groupon China Giving, Like, a Billion Reasons It’ll Beat the Clones Posted: 13 Jan 2011 02:51 PM PST
Apparently Groupon’s Berlin team– which has been leading much of its international efforts with varying degrees of success– has hired its own team and sent them to China to build something new on the mainland from scratch. (I’d guess a future acquisition might still be in the offing once it gets its China sea legs.) Now, a source tells us that Groupon China is using “large parts” of that $950 million to aggressively hire for all positions. Check out this posting from a private university job board:
Whoa. 1000 employees by March? Groupon clearly isn’t taking some Google-like “we’ll just operate from Hong Kong and that’ll be fine” approach. Groupon is taking on the biggest clone army in the world. Will the Chicago two-year-old that has broken so many other Silicon Valley records also break the curse of China? I applaud Groupon doing this the hard way by investing in building a team on the ground, but plenty of companies have lost “near endless funding” trying to conquer China. I can guarantee the solution doesn’t just lie with MBAs and consultants. I hope our redacted friend knows what he’s/she’s getting into.        
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| VBS.TV And Reddit Are Leading Us Into The Golden Era Of Information Discovery Posted: 13 Jan 2011 02:25 PM PST
It’s stories like this – stories that would once rate a few feature pages in Discover magazine or Omni (remember Omni?) – that are now percolating through the Internet, to our benefit and to the detriment of old media who can’t keep up. Now we get the real story sans any nonsense graphics, anticlimactic taglines or fluff. It’s the future, everyone. Saying that the Internet is killing traditional media is disingenuous at best. The Internet herself isn’t the antagonist, nor are the traditional media companies that are swiftly making online a priority. It’s the independent sites fueled by nothing but raw passion and curiosity that are transforming news consumption. VBS.TV picked up the story early last year and produced an 18 minute video about the NASA’s undersea Atlantica Expeditions. Of course the video had the outlet’s trademark high production values and direct-but-honest approach. This is what VBS.TV does. They find an off-beat subject and cover it properly. See their coverage of North Korea. Or the art of nude photography. (NSFW) Or The Aquatic Life of Dennis Chamberland. This particular video was produced under VBS.TV’s Motherboard.tv channel, where the site’s editor, Alex Pasternack, told me that they focus mainly on “The weird and exciting side of technology.” They discovered this man while searching for a story on undersea living and colonies. It was the perfect fit for Motherboard.tv: a quaint backstory, great shooting location, and a man with words “NASA Bioengineer” on his business card. This video and blog post were the result of the meeting. National Geographic went on to run a similar story in the Fall of 2010 that explored the subject in a broader sense over multiple episodes, but still (albeit less prominently) features Mr. Chamberland. This is what VBS.TV and its shows like Motherboard.tv do. During the previous season, just the Motherboard.tv team was outing one featured documentary a week while simultaneously managing a clever website — which follows the same guiding principle but allows for user-submitted posts — that saw 500k unique visitors in December 2010. VBS.TV is a go-to alternative news outlet where this sort of stuff is the norm. But here we are today when, nearly nine months later when Dennis Chamberland’s son encouraged the NASA bioengineer to do an IAMA on Reddit. Welcome, to the Internet, Mr. Chamberland. Reddit is famous for their community of honest and curious users. These IAMA posts — Internet speak for “I am a [insert profession or human trait]” — are part of what makes Reddit great. Anyone from random users with an interesting story or celebrities do these sort FAQ posts. The purpose is that Reddit users are then open to ask questions that the IAMA will then answer. Reddit’s effective user moderation system then filters the good from the bad, resulting in an sincere, mostly flame-free, Internet conversation. It’s this sort of interaction on Reddit, and story production and discovery from VBS, that is driving the Internet past traditional media. Take away the VBS.TV video and this NASA engineer could have still seen similar results and satisfying interaction on Reddit as Internet users crave new and fresh content. Old media moving to the web and even blogs like us are not the so-called killers of print media. It’s the ability to bypass news outlets altogether and interact directly with the story or subject that will slowly draw attention away from the establishment. The old standbys did pick up this story. National Geographic did their series on it, but watch it after the Vice video. One is frank, genuine and direct. The other is filled with fancy graphics and lots of filler. Then yesterday, on January 12th, CNN ran the story as part of their partnership with Vice but failed to add anything new to the story. It’s not just Vice and Reddit. It’s Twitter and Facebook in a broader sense. It’s athletes interacting with fans on Twitter and Sarah Palin’s Facebook soapbox. It’s increasingly easier for the average world citizen to derive their own conclusion about a subject directly from the source and not through a news outlet’s political or corporate filter. I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but it’s interesting to note that one man’s quirky job became a meme, then a news topic, then a topic of general conversation. The news cycle isn’t dead, it’s just happening in new places.        
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That about does it. The PadPivot must be the last novel idea in tablet stands. Shut down the Chinese design factories. This seems to address the entire market’s needs and more.
Like it or not, but the robots are coming, and they're not messing around. I know this because I've seen an IBM-developed artificial intelligence (AI) named Watson 
While I think modern comedy died with Don Knotts (The Incredible Mr. Limpet was the A Bout de Souffle of talking fish movies), Daniel Tosh is trying to bring a little color back into its cheeks with this odd, if true, look at Angry Birds. View it, please, and return to us here for further information.
Ready for more “Groupon is worth what?!” kind of reactions? The New York Times is 
While we may all have our own opinions on whether News Corp’s iPad-bound newspaper, 
Urban Green Energy — a New York City startup that designs and manufactures small wind turbines — has released and installed the first of its new, “hybrid” or wind- and solar-powered streetlights. 
Erick’s 
Mobile QR platform 
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