Saturday, February 19, 2011

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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Facebook Shares Are Worth Almost Three Times More Than Tweets For E-Commerce

Posted: 18 Feb 2011 08:50 AM PST

White label daily deals platform and TC Disrupt finalist ChompOn is releasing some interesting data today comparing the value of shares, Tweets, likes and follows in the context of e-commerce. Using data from the sites that it powers daily deals for, ChompOn examined the conversion rate and action for deals shared on Facebook and Twitter.

According to the startup, the value of a Facebook share is $14 and the value of a Tweet is $5. For shares and tweets, ChompOn was able to directly attribute sales to the original action and took the total revenue attributed to each action and divided it by the total number of shares/Tweets. ChompOn is working with 50 partners including Blackbook Magazine, JDeal and the wine vertical of flash sales site Beyondtherack, to power Groupon-like crowdsourced coupons

By comparison, ChompOn says the value of a Facebook like is $8 and the value of a Twitter Follow is $2. For likes and follows, ChompOn estimated attribution by looking at traffic references and subtracting out purchases made through shares/Tweets as well as purchases made through direct traffic. Of course this data is a bit tenuous and anecdotal. And it’s important to note that this analysis does not capture the long-term value of customers over time.

We’ve seen other data that shows the higher value of a Facebook share over a Tweet. Eventbrite recently reported that a share with Facebook friends results in $2.52 worth of ticket sales whereas a Twitter share is only worth $0.43.

As we wrote back then, Facebook and email most closely match your real friends. In the context of events, this produces better conversions. But it’s interesting to see that in terms of commerce, Facebook again provides a higher value than Twitter in terms of conversions.

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ChompOn
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What Are President Obama, Zuck, Jobs And Other Silicon Valley Tech Stars Toasting To?

Posted: 18 Feb 2011 07:59 AM PST

The White House has just posted several photos from President Obama’s dinner with a number of Silicon Valley’s technology CEOs and leaders yesterday evening. As you can see from the photos, the star studded invitee list included Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, Cisco’s CEO John Chambers, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Genentech Chairman Art Levinson; Google CEO Eric Schmidt; former state controller and venture capitalist Steve Westly Doerr, and Stanford University President John Hennessy. The event was held at Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr’s home.

The “cheers” photo above is a little cheesy, but as you can see, both Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg got the prime seats at the table, both seated next to President Obama. And the candid of picture of the President engaged in conversation with Zuckerberg is also a priceless shot. It’s interesting that the White House chose to release that particular photo to the public.

Any guesses as to what Obama, Zuck, Bartz, Jobs and the rest are toasting to?

The Samwer Brothers Make A Killing After Selling Facebook Stake From 2008

Posted: 18 Feb 2011 07:46 AM PST

The three Samwer brothers behind the highly successful European Founders Fund in Germany have sold their shares in Facebook, according to a report in the German press.

Marc, Oliver and Alexander Samwer (who also own the German language Deutsche Startups tech news site) sold their shares because “we are at the early stages” and their requirement for capital for their existing investments has “roughly tripled”, according to Oliver Samwer.

There appear to be no figures for how much their stake was worth but we can confidently say they have made their money back.

AC130 For Android: Turn Those Benjamins Into Little People And Then Destroy Them

Posted: 18 Feb 2011 06:12 AM PST

BeyondReality’s Jeroen Mol has an interesting concept for his new Augmented Reality game slated to go live in the Android Market in the next month or so. His clever idea of using paper money notes as AR targets (you know, those little black and white designs you usually have to print out first and view with your mobile device) eliminates the need to have a printer around before playing the game. Of all the “mobile money” concepts I covered at the Mobile World Congress, this was the most fun. See the video below for details.

Read more…



eBay And PayPal Team Up For Developer Conference And Open Platform

Posted: 18 Feb 2011 05:52 AM PST

eBay owns payments giant PayPal, and PayPal is deeply integrated within eBay’s marketplace but both companies have operated fairly separately when it comes to APIs and developer relations. But interestingly, eBay and PayPal are announcing that its API teams are joining into one combined open platform business, made up of the assets of both eBay and PayPal platforms.

The idea, according to PayPal’s head of platform, Matthew Mengerink (who lead the new joint platform), is to offer developers one ecommerce solution that will offer a “complete approach” to online and offline business. And PayPal Innovate X, the payments company’s popular developer conference, will now also include eBay’s developer conference as well.

So why are eBay and PayPal joining forces on API and developer efforts? The company says that it makes sense to pool resources to create a platform that brings together online and offline commerce, shopping and payments, with mobile, social and local components. I guess there could be some interesting APIs that could combine a payments platform with eBay’s local initiatives, which include recently acquired Milo.

But it does make me wonder whether eBay is attaching itself to PayPal’s developer conference and platform because the payments company has a stronger developer community with a more widely-used API. This is purely speculative, but PayPal has been eBay’s crown jewel for some time now, and marketplace hasn’t really been growing all that much.

And PayPal’s developer community has been steadily growing, thanks to the launch of a number of innovative payments products and APIs released over the past year.

eBay could see a collaboration as a way to bring more developer attention to its own offerings, especially as the ecommerce giant looks to local commerce to bring new life into the marketplace.

And in terms of the conference, it should be interesting to see how the split is in terms of announcements and activities between the two companies. Innovate has always been a high point in the year for PayPal, when it releases its most innovative new products. Hopefully, eBay’s participation won’t take attention away from this.

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PayPal
eBay
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RoundPegg Raises $1.27 Million To Be The eHarmony For Jobs

Posted: 18 Feb 2011 05:35 AM PST

Job hiring startup RoundPegg has raised $1.27 million in new funding led by Access Venture Partners with Croghan Investments participating. RoundPegg is a graduate of the TechStars class of 2010.

RoundPegg is essentially a eHarmony for jobs. The site aims to match employers and potential employees based on personality and culture matches as well as skills and experience. Founder Tim Wolters says that currently the site has thousands of job seekers and hundreds of companies who are looking for employees that fit within their corporate culture.

RoundPegg is also offering its matching and communications technology in-house to large companies that want to evaluate how employees are interacting with the company. The enterprise offering aims to deliver insights into how companies and teams are wired and helps identify similarities and differences in cultural values, personality, and communication styles. For example,
Dish Network recently used RoundPegg to identify top performers’ business environment preferences.

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RoundPegg
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San Francisco Wants to Tax Your Stock Options– All of Them.

Posted: 18 Feb 2011 12:07 AM PST

Few people are aware the San Francisco has had a tax provision in its municipal code since 2004 that requires companies to pay a payroll tax on gains from employee stock options. No one pays it, and San Francisco hasn’t enforced it to date, but companies are becoming increasingly agitated that the city may change that policy at any time. The number of high profile and high value startups based in San Francisco – like Twitter and Zynga – may be too big of a temptation for the city to ignore.

Recently, I heard San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee on our local NPR station talking about how important it was to keep Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco. To those worried that the recent talks between Twitter and the City were stalling, his words must have been reassuring. But if Lee really wants to keep Twitter– and thousands more tech jobs– in San Francisco he needs to defuse this much bigger ticking tax time-bomb now. This isn’t just about keeping Twitter in San Francisco– this has ramifications for San Francisco’s entire startup ecosystem.

To be clear, this is not a trend. Even the federal government considers taxing these options off the table, and we haven’t been able to find a single city in the United States with such a far-reaching tax policy. This would create potentially huge costs for startups that they can sidestep simply by moving a few miles to the North, East or South. If enforced, expect an exodus of San Francisco jobs to surrounding areas.

The provision: Section 902.1 of the San Francisco Business and Tax Code. It was amended in 2004 to include stock options. Here’s the relevant text of the provision (bolding added):

SEC. 902.1. – PAYROLL EXPENSE.

(a) The term “Payroll Expense” means the compensation paid to, on behalf of, or for the benefit of an individual, including shareholders of a professional corporation or a Limited Liability Company (“LLC”), including salaries, wages, bonuses, commissions, property issued or transferred in exchange for the performance of services (including but not limited to stock options), compensation for services to owners of pass-through entities, and any other form of compensation, who during any tax year, perform work or render services, in whole or in part in the City; and if more than one individual or shareholders of a professional corporation or members of an LLC, during any tax year performs work or renders services in whole or in part in the City, the term “Payroll Expense” means the total compensation paid including salaries, wages, bonuses, commissions, property issued or transferred in exchange for the performance of services (including but not limited to stock options), in addition to any compensation for services to owners of pass-through entities, and any other form of compensation for services, to all such individuals and shareholders of a professional corporation or members of an LLC.

(b) Any person that grants a service provider a right to acquire an ownership interest in such person in exchange for the performance of services shall include in its payroll expense for the tax year in which such right is exercised an amount equal to the excess of (i) the fair market value of such ownership interest on the date such right is exercised over (ii) the price paid for such interest.

The tax rate? 1.5%. And remember that neither the federal government, nor California, tax gains on most employee stock options at all.

This is a complex situation, and it’s mostly theoretical at this point. We started hearing reports a few weeks ago that startups like Zynga and Twitter were worrying about it, but neither company wanted to comment. In fact, we got a lot of pressure not to write this article, lest we wake the city up to how much more it could be taxing out of its most over-performing corporate citizens. The Mayor’s office did not return our calls for comment either. So, it took us a few weeks to untangle exactly what the risk is.

Our main tour guide through the city’s tax law was John Duncan, the former general counsel for Slide, who is now in Google’s legal department. At first he, like most of the startup community, had never heard of any pending startup tax penalties. But the more he dug, the more he got to the bottom of it.

Here’s the run down:

  • San Francisco has long had a 1.5% payroll tax on any local businesses. No other Bay Area city does. Move your headquarters just a few miles over the city border– no tax. This alone is a big reason Twitter is considering moving to Brisbane.
  • San Francisco’s payroll tax says that “payroll” includes the value employees get for options, also known as the “spread,” says Duncan.  “If I work for Slide, and I make $50,000 from my stock compensation, San Francisco says that is just as if Slide wrote me that check,” he says.
  • There are two kinds of options. Non-qualified options and ISOs. Typically, ISOs are the ones most employees get. In 2004, the Federal government examined this issue, and that it would not charge payroll tax on the ISO spread, although taxing the spread on non-quals was fine.
  • San Francisco has not clarified that ISOs are exempt from payroll tax. But so far they haven’t been taxed for one simple reason: Companies didn’t have to report the spread on employee’s ISOs to the IRS, so San Francisco never knew what that possibly taxable income was. That has just changed in January of this year, Duncan says. Now, companies have to file with the Feds to tell them how many people exercise ISOs, allowing the city of San Francisco the right and the information it needs to start charging payroll tax on this spread if it wants to.

Here’s how this would play out. Say a company like Twitter, valued at $3.4 billion in its last funding round, goes public at a $10 billion valuation and raises $100 million. There’s a good chance that most founder and employee equity would be tied up in ISOs, meaning as much as $3 billion – $6 billion of the $10 billion valuation could be tied up in stock that was originally an ISO. If it were half – $5 billion – then Twitter would get a tax bill from San Francisco for $75 million. 75% of the $100 million they just raised would be paid to San Francisco.

We’re making some assumptions here for the sake of illustration, but even if the percentage of ownership from stock options is lower, it’s still a hefty tax just for being to the North of the San Francisco Airport, West of the Bay Bridge or South of the Golden Gate. It’s a steep price to pay just for being located in the small seven-mile-by-seven-mile stretch of San Francisco proper. The second a company’s headquarters crosses those lines, that cost goes away. Imagine what Facebook — with a $70 billion  secondary market valuation and growing– is saving in current and future payroll expense just by being in Palo Alto. Hundreds of millions of dollars.

Now, I know what you are thinking: Of course, San Francisco is not going to enforce this. Why would any city do anything to drive out thousands of jobs from the city? Why on earth would San Francisco even allow this threat to dangle? The answer lies in the city’s notoriously progressive politicians and voters who simply put have a history of hating millionaires. And billionaires? Well, they’re three zeros worse.

Check out this article by progressive local weekly The Bay Guardian if you don’t believe me. Residents are calling out Twitter for “corporate blackmail” and shirking its “social responsibility.” Wake up. This is a for-profit company with a fiduciary duty to shareholders. After all, if paying local payroll taxes were a well-agreed on “social responsibility,” why wouldn’t any other city in the Bay Area levy them?  Why wouldn’t most other major cities in the United States levy them? San Francisco is a dangerous exception here, not the rule.

To wit: In November 2008, the city overwhelming approved something called Proposition Q, that would tax the money venture capitalists make from returns as payroll income, not capital gains. It’s unclear what the state of Proposition Q is. Duncan says there were some legal challenges to it, based on the proposition trying to do too many things at once and that it wasn’t well explained. He says it appears to be valid, but isn’t sure how enforced it is. Now, you can argue that those returns should be taxed as payroll and you can argue that the richest of San Franciscans should pay more taxes. Or you can be rational and realize, if proposition Q were enforced, any investor would shut their doors and move over the city line. Only unlike a multi-billion dollar startup, that VC fund doesn’t take thousands of jobs with it.

There are reasons for startups to be optimistic. This would still take a lot of work to enforce, and there’s always the chance the city values jobs more than its messianic Robin Hood fantasy. Indeed, there was an unprecedented exception put in place for payroll taxes on biotech companies in 2004 to encourage jobs. But it bears noting that the balance of power has shifted more towards progressives with San Francisco’s comparatively pro-business mayor Gavin Newsom becoming lieutenant governor of the state.

And frankly, city auditors may not even be thinking about going after ISOs. “I would be stunned if any company in San Francisco has been paying tax on ISOs or if San Francisco auditors have thought of the issue,” Duncan says. “But now that there’s this piece of paper, it makes it easier.” A city auditor making $40,000 a year is unlikely to have much sympathy for the hardships of a young multi-millionaire.

Another mitigating factor: It’s a bigger issue for companies aiming to go public, and that’s a small subset of startups. Typically the tax won’t amount to a cost-prohibitive amount in the case of an acquisition, and that cost could just be passed on to the acquiring company. No big deal. Is it possible that a company could move to San Mateo the year before an IPO? Yes. But could the city sue and allege that the value of those options was created in San Francisco? Yes, again. Because few other cities have local payroll taxes to begin with and the Federal government doesn’t subject these options to payroll taxes, there are almost no precedents here.

But among the reasons for optimism, don’t count capitalist common sense. San Francisco has a mixed record on supporting local businesses– to put it mildly. I’ve written before about how the city’s progressive government and neighborhood rabble rousers have a habit of supporting mom-and-pop retailers… until they’re successful enough to open a few more locations, then certain vocal residents can viciously turn on them.

That’s already unimaginable to most people. But penalizing entrepreneurs who create thousands of local jobs in just a few years? Well, if that starts to become enforced, this city will have really outdone itself. The financial industry has already largely left San Francisco; ditto publishing and media. In the late 1990s, most of Silicon Valley’s biggest technology hits including eBay, Yahoo, Google, Cisco, Oracle and Sun Microsystems were all headquartered outside San Francisco. The Web 2.0 movement has finally seen tech jobs come back, but they can just as easily leave again and few companies can create as many local jobs as quickly. This is not an idle threat: Because San Francisco is so out of step with its neighbors, moving a few miles solves the entire issue.

That the city would even toy with enforcing this is surely unfathomable to most cities. Billions have been spent by local governments world-wide trying to recreate what San Francisco is naturally blessed with, thanks to being close to the universities Silicon Valley’s first companies spun out of. Duncan notes that Slide saw a 1.5% payroll tax as an acceptable cost given lower commercial rents in San Francisco versus Palo Alto and greater access to talent. Similarly sky-high real estate and competition for talent hasn’t yet dented the Valley’s mojo– maybe a tax on ISOs won’t either. But when a move outside the seven-mile-by-seven-mile city alleviates the worry, it’s hard to argue the city doesn’t have more to gain by just reassuring companies taxing ISOs isn’t on the table. It might go down in history as the most staggering way to keep thousands of jobs without sacrificing a dime of revenue the city was anticipating. With America gripped in 9% unemployment, what city in its right mind wouldn’t make that trade?

The SF Weekly wrote a scathing cover story in 2009 that called San Francisco the worst run big city in the country, comparing it to a beautiful co-ed so spoiled by attention, she could act as obnoxious as she wanted without fear of reprisal. Twitter is sending a strong message that it doesn’t need the co-ed. It’s happy with the plainer girl next door. The threat has already gotten the city’s attention, and it’s deferring some of the next few years’ payroll tax for companies in certain high-vacancy stretches. Twitter has said that’s not good enough, and with this threat of ISO taxes hanging in the air– Twitter is right.

Hopefully for our startups and the city TechCrunch calls home, Twitter leaving will be enough of a dumping to wake San Francisco up before it enacts a disastrous policy for short term gain.

Google Courts Yahoo Users With New Delicious Bookmarks Importer Tool

Posted: 17 Feb 2011 10:15 PM PST

The Delicious saga continues … In reaction to what many have thought to be Yahoo’s mismanagement of the popular bookmarking service Delicious in the past couple of months, many people have tried to roll their own Delicious importers in hopes of taking advantage of the traffic exodus. Google too has today rolled out a Delicious migration tool for Google Bookmarks, to give people who were scared of the demise of Delicious a safe haven for their meticulously curated links.

On background: Yahoo gave many people a scare a couple of months ago when an internal Yahoo slide was leaked, revealing that Yahoo would be sunsetting Delicious, a social bookmarking site with a vehement cult following. It turns out that by “sunsetting” Yahoo actually meant selling (heh, that’s not actually what sunsetting means). But while Yahoo has approached numerous people about unloading the property, it still has not found a buyer after three months.

Google would have been an excellent choice.

The Google Bookmarks importer allows you to login with either your Yahoo ID or your Delicious ID and import all your bookmarks and tags. And whatever you’ve bookmarked on Delicious integrates seamlessly with your already existing Google Bookmarks links.

Google launched Google Bookmarks in 2005 as a competitor to Delicious and we pretty much forgot about it right until it launched a Lists feature in May. Lists let you copy your bookmarks into lists in order to share publicly and with friends and is completely under-utilized in my opinion. Under the right auspices, I could see Lists becoming a fulcrum for the social search element of Google News.

Right now to bookmark a site on Google Bookmarks you need to click a star next to what you want bookmarked in your search results history, import your browser bookmarks or add favorite sites manually, which isn’t the most intuitive process. But Google Bookmarks is in the Google Toolbar and apparently sees a lot of use, so let’s hope this is the first in a series of forward-thinking revamps.

Interesting side note: Delicious founder Joshua Schachter used to work at Google before founding Tasty Labs.

A Googler@google
A Googler
Feed Google Bookmarks something "Delicious" – import your Delicious bookmarks now http://goo.gl/kJ7cN

about 16 hours ago via webRetweetReply

A Bird’s-Eye View Of iOS And Android As Seen By One Premium Ad Platform

Posted: 17 Feb 2011 10:00 PM PST

Comparing the iOS and Android platforms is often tricky because the perspective is usually one-sided. But mobile ad platforms tend to have a pretty well-rounded look at the state of things because they’re agnostic in the religious war that is iOS versus Android. And of those, Medialets has one of the best views since their data comes from only big-time app makers which tend to be on both platforms. Apps like Pandora, New York Times, Fandango, CNN, The Weather Channel, and a wide range of others. In other words, the “premium apps”. So what are they seeing?

First and foremost, to state the obvious, mobile is exploding across the board. Medialets says their premium inventory rose almost 300 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. Pretty much every report you will have read in the past few years will say the same thing.

But while Medialets acknowledges that Android has surpassed iOS in U.S. market share, iOS is still dominating among the premium brands that they serve. These premium apps are simply moving faster still on iOS and so Medialets is serving up more inventory for them there. Android had surged ahead for a few months in terms of growth, but iOS dominated in the holidays.

In terms of Android fragmentation, Medialets also acknowledges that it is very real, but it appears to be less of an issue for these premium apps. From a device perspective, the top 3 Android devices running these apps make up some 35 percent of the share of premium inventory that Medialets serves up on Android. The top 10 devices make up 63 percent.

What are these top Android devices? Medialets’ data points to the Droid, the EVO4G, the Droid X, the Incredible, and the Droid 2. Given that list, it should be no surprise that Verzon dominates in terms of Android carrier spread Medialets see. The nation’s largest carrier has some 48.5 percent of the market. Sprint comes in second at 24 percent. Then T-Mobile at 17 percent. And AT&T? All the way down at just 3 percent.

The most interesting thing to see there, of course, is what happens now that the iPhone is available on both AT&T and Verizon?AT&T clearly has started pushing Android more than the previously were. But does the data suggest that when both the iPhone and Android phones are available on a carrier, the majority go with iPhone? It certainly seems that way among those that Medialets sees, at least.

In terms of Android manufacturers, HTC leads the way at 38 percent. Motorola is second at 34 percent. Samsung has just under 20 percent. Then there are a group of others that are much smaller.

In the iPad and iPhone arena, both saw huge surges in the holiday times, as Apple’s own sales data has indicated. And yes, the iPhone sill has a clear lead over its bigger brother in terms of inventory that Medialets is serving.

Breaking down iOS, 68 percent of users are on iOS 4.x. And basically all of the remaining 32 percent are on iOS 3.x. These numbers aren’t as striking as the 90 percent iOS 4.x numbers talked about recently, but they still point to fragmentation not being nearly the issue that it is on Android.

In terms of who is buying up Medialets premium ad spots, it’s largely automotive companies right now at just about 35 percent. Behind that is restaurants and then entertainment.

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Medialets
iPhone 4
Android
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Gawker’s Gulp Moment: Big Redesign Is Driving People Away

Posted: 17 Feb 2011 08:03 PM PST

About ten days ago, gossip blog Gawker and its sister sites Gizmodo, Lifehacker and others switched over to a drastic redesign which was met with plenty of jeers. People always complain about design changes, but this time it looks like several of Gawker’s sites actually took a major hit to traffic.

According to Quantcast, which directly measures the sites, Gawker’s U.S. daily unique visitors were cut in half from a high of 561,000 to 257,000 (see chart above). Gizmodo dropped from 746,000 to 420,000 in the U.S. Sitemeter shows an even more harrowing freefall for Gizmodo (see chart at right). Jezebel and Deadspin also took hits. Only Lifehacker seems to be holding steady.

The new design (bottom screenshot) features one top story in the main column, with a few other featured stories below, and more headlines in a thinner column along the side. But it is a bit disorienting because when you scroll down, the righthand headline column doesn’t move, only only the main column does. And sometimes there is only one big full featured post on the homepage, as is the case right now with Gizmodo and a story about Steve Jobs demolished mansion in Woodside, CA.

You can revert to a traditional blog view, but the default is the “top story” view. Most people will probably never figure out how to toggle back to the comforts of the classic reverse-chron design, so they leave instead in frustration. Tweets about the redesign are more negative than positive. Some typical ones:

Ian@pjfry
Ian
I never thought a web design could instill so much malice into me but the @gawker redesign just makes me want to RAGE!

about 14 hours ago via TweetDeckRetweetReply

Liberation@liberationnyc
Liberation
@davidgustav The Gawker redesign is tragic. I just figured out last night where/what the "tags" are. And I do this stuff for a living!

about 20 hours ago via TweetDeckRetweetReply

Edgar Governo@pseudohistorian
Edgar Governo
@lampbane The Gawker redesign is so crappy that I've gone from daily repeat visits to not visiting any of their sites at all.

February 15, 2011 7:54 am via webRetweetReply

Ah well, maybe they’ll come around. There is one silver lining, however. For those people who do stick around, pageviews seem to be bouncing back to the pre-redesign levels. As long as Gawker doesn’t drive way all of its readers, it should be fine.

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Gawker Media
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Look Out Quora, InboxQ Takes Q&A Off-Site And On To Twitter

Posted: 17 Feb 2011 07:26 PM PST

As it becomes more difficult to find the answers you want on Google, using hashtags like #lazyweb to ask questions on Twitter has become some people’s recourse. Realizing this, Y Combinator company Answerly is announcing a product revamp today, going from a run of the mill Q&A site to something much more interesting. Their new product, InboxQ is a free browser plugin (right now only available on Chrome) that performs searches for questions on Twitter by keyword and other factors.

The fact that InboxQ, like Replyz, has realized that Twitter has become the platform for a lot of Q&A activity is pretty genius. And its plan is to leverage this for businesses and brands looking to connect with customers, a hyper targeted form of lead gen.

How valuable would it be for the @BestBuy Twitter account to be able to offer immediate tech support when someone asks a question about product installation? Or the @DKNY Twitter account to offer spot advice to someone wondering about the perfect “little black dress”? Currently all brands have to go on are search terms, and out of the thousands of tweets only a small percentage are questions.

By downloading the plugin here and logging in with their Twitter accounts, everyday users and big brands can set up Campaigns (by keyword, volume and/or tweet quality), answer or share Questions, track their Answers, and set up questions to be answered under To Do.

I tried it out with the keyword “Apple”and realized that questions yielded are relatively high quality. InboxQ uses natural language processing software to detect real questions (only 1% of tweets with question marks are real apparently). The startup’s previous incarnation Answerly used the same software on Google searches but then the founders realized that Twitter was more valuable in terms of user engagement.

Says founder Joe Fahrner, “We find that questions on Twitter seem to be way richer and have more context because there is the expectation from the asker that real people are reading the question in their Tweet and not machines (as in algorithmic search).”

In terms of a possible business models, InboxQ plans on offering brands premium access to analytics and data. Farnher tells me that InboxQ is planning on more browser support and that a Firefox version is due out next week. He also is planning to expand the service to more than just Twitter, and plans to crawl both Quora and Yahoo Answers as well as develop more API partnerships and further keyword relevancy.

There is huge huge untapped potential in Twitter as a Q&A service and InboxQ is fortunate to be a first mover. Farnher tells me about one of its beta users who had had a Twitter account for a year and didn’t utilize it. Then, after downloading InboxQ in January, their usage picked up exponentially, “It was as if using InboxQ helped “unlock” the value of Twitter for them.”



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Y Combinator
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‘Year Of The Rabbit’ Begins As Chrome 10 Hops Into Beta With ‘Crankshaft’ JavaScript

Posted: 17 Feb 2011 05:41 PM PST

As they have made abundantly clear over the past several months, Google hates talking about the version numbers of Chrome.

Well, except when they have something to talk about. Which is actually quite often.

Today brings another post highlighting some new features in Chrome 10, which has just hit the beta channel of the browser.

“In the spirit of the lunar new year, we're excited to kick off the Year of the Rabbit with a slew of enhancements in the Chrome beta channel,” Google writes. You can find a whole list of new features and improvements for Chrome 10 beta here, including password sync, GPU-accelerated video, and the new settings tab. But the key to Chrome 10, once again, is speed.

Specifically, JavaScript speed. Chrome 10 uses the latest version of their V8 engine, which they’re calling “Crankshaft”. Google previewed this on stage at the Chrome OS/Web Store event back in December and it was being tested in both Chromium (the open source browser on which Chrome is based) and the developer builds of Chrome. But now it’s apparently ready to primetime as Google is touting it in not one, but two posts.

Writes Google:

Chrome's JavaScript engine V8 runs compute-intensive JavaScript applications even more quickly than before. In fact, this beta release sports a whopping 66% improvement on the V8 benchmark suite over our current stable release.

The benchmark chart below comparing this version of the JavaScript engine to the previous versions is pretty staggering.

You can find the beta version of Chrome here. Obviously, Google doesn’t consider it tested enough to be fully stable yet. But I’m typing this post on it. It seems pretty solid — and yes, fast.

[photo: flickr/robobobobo]

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Google Chrome
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Google Opens Developer Preview Of Chrome Web Store In 15 More Countries

Posted: 17 Feb 2011 05:06 PM PST

After months of anticipation, Google finally unveiled the Chrome Web Store this past December. But a lot of users were disappointed with the launch for one very big reason: it was U.S.-only. Starting today, Google is finally taking the initial steps to change that, as they’ve opened a developer preview of the Web Store for 15 more countries.

Note that this doesn’t mean the store is ready quite yet for international users. Google says that a full launch will happen “later this year”. “We are releasing this developer preview ahead of the consumer release so you have enough time to prepare your apps for international users,” Google notes. This is the same thing Google did for U.S. developers back in August of last year. If that timetable holds, international users should get access in about four months.

So which countries are getting access to this developer preview? Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

And, significantly, there will be localized payment options in place for each of those countries. Notes Google:

If you are using Chrome Web Store Payments to charge for your app, you will also be able to set the app price for each country although if you're not based in the United States you will not be able to complete your merchant account sign up just yet (this will be enabled soon).

The early talk about the store has been that web apps weren’t selling too well. But others have said their apps are doing fine. Regardless, opening up beyond the U.S. can only help.

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Anoma.ly Gets 500K From A Bunch Of Rockstar Investors, Rebrands As Dapt

Posted: 17 Feb 2011 04:22 PM PST

Anoma.ly, a startup that is working on optimizing the personalization of realtime information streams, is announcing its first funding round today with 500K in seed money from rockstar investors like Yelp’s Russel Simmons, PayPal’s Max Levchin, YouTube’s Steve Chen, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Klout’s Thomas McInerney, James Hong, ex-Googler Harry Cheung and Microsoft Kinnect creative director Steph Tryphonas.

i/o Ventures partner Jim Young called it “The most stacked angel round he’s seen.”

The startup will be using the funding to launch a major update to its Cadmus firehose product, rebranding it as Dapt. In the same vien as My6Sense and Storify, Dapt will be focused on aggregating conversations on Twitter and from other places around the web.

Says founder Jay Velayudhan, “It’s hard to highlight the top conversations especially globally. What we’re trying to do is monitor who is it that you like to talk to. Who are the influencers in the field? We want to make Twitter less of a popularity contest and more about what you find interesting.”

Velayudhan also tells me that they will be using the funding for new hires and recently added another engineer to the team, former TellMe engineer and University of Waterloo classmate Tim Kuo. The company is currently in stealth as it’s focused on building its product, but plans to be opening up publicly in the coming months, “We really want to nail that model of back and forth conversations which is kind of broken right now.”

Anoma.ly went through the i/o Ventures accelerator program, which is still accepting applications for its Spring cohort until February 21st. you can apply here.

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GoodGuide Ranks Mobile Phone Sustainability: RIM Worst, Nokia Best

Posted: 17 Feb 2011 03:29 PM PST

Click image, right, to enlarge.

Today, GoodGuide (a TechCrunch50 alumni company) added mobile phone rankings to their comprehensive database that ranks the environmental and social performance of products, and the companies that make them.

In its new mobile phone category, the San Francisco startup ranked 576 different handsets and chargers from 16 top mobile phone makers in the U.S. market. GoodGuide assessed everything from the “ingredients” that go into the phones, to each device’s energy efficiency, recyclable qualities, and manufacturers’ willingness to disclose details about its supply chain, materials and more.

For environmental performance and impact of the companies overall: RIM came in dead last, Nokia topped the GoodGuide environmental chart, and Apple stood at third place.

No Apple iPhone cracked the top fifteen GoodGuide list of the most environmentally friendly devices, despite the company’s strong overall showing. The Nokia C6 Cell Phone took top honors, followed closely by Samsung’s Blue EarthMobile Phone. RIM’s Blackberry Bold 9000 Smartphone was the worst-rated handset. [Ed's note: See screenshot above, for further ratings.]

GoodGuide founder Dara O’Rourke explained why Apple was viewed favorably as a company, but its phones were not rated as environmentally friendly:

“Apple released a new supplier responsibility report this week, which won the company points.

Until this year, though, Apple could not even tell you what metals or minerals were in their phones, or where they came from…Along with other mobile manufacturers, their stance had been: we can’t tell you whether conflict minerals are in our phones, and we can’t tell you who manufactured a sub-component of what's in there — it’s proprietary, competitive, or not something we know.

Now, it’s 2011. The industry is playing catch up on all of this. Consumers are demanding to know more. There are still a lot of details that Apple hasn’t disclosed about their iPhones though. A lack of transparency on each product keeps the iPhone — and the Blackberry — lower in the product rankings.”

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act may soon require phone manufacturers to disclose such details.

The scientist who led the mobile phone research for GoodGuide, Pedro Vieira, said that to derive its product-scores, the company licenses and compiles studies from government, academic, business and independent research organizations, adding some of their own proprietary data to the mix. The company assigns a weight to each study so that a company-provided claim about its own product will be worth less than an independent, scientific lab’s research into the same item.

Unlike other sustainability reports on mobile phones — like the O2 Ecoratings in the U.K. market, or Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics — GoodGuide reported environmental and social impact as separate scores, offered company and product-level scores, and provided information about phones’ radiation levels (not counted in their scores) for consumers who believe this could pose a health risk.

O’Rourke noted that ultimately, his company aims to help people find brands and products that align with their own social, health and environmental concerns, but doesn’t want to advocate what those values should be, or which brands they should choose. He doesn’t believe that GoodGuide scores would convince even the most tree-hugging, granola-eating Apple fan to switch to a Nokia. He hopes that such ratings will, however, give consumers motivation to pressure companies they buy from to be as transparent as possible, though, and to improve the sustainability of their products and operations.

GoodGuide’s top ten list of the most environmentally sensible phone manufacturers included:

    1.Nokia
    2.Sony Ericsson
    3.Apple
    4.Pantech
    5.Palm
    6.Kyocera Sanyo
    7.Motorola
    8.HTC
    9.Samsung
    10.Curitel

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Is Bleacher Report the New New Media Hope? (TCTV)

Posted: 17 Feb 2011 03:15 PM PST

TechCrunch is off the market. Huffington Post won’t be the first $1 billion independent new media company. So who else is left to give us hope that blogging can be the savior of declining old media?

It might be Bleacher Report. The sports site is coming off a huge 2010 and a banner January: Unique users grew to nearly 20 million per month, and it’s now the fourth largest sports destination according to comScore, not including roll-up fan sites. In December, the company raised a $10.5 million round of funding, and named a new CEO, Brian Grey, former general manager of Yahoo Sports and former general manager of Fox Sports Interactive– two of the only sports properties that still dwarf Bleacher Report.

Because this is such a sleeper success story we invited Grey into the studio to talk about how the business has continued to grow while so many blogs have stagnated, why sports has been such a neglected vertical and as a Raiders fan what he thinks of Donald Rumsfeld’s bizarre declaration that the team was “evil.”

Video below.


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Nordstrom Acquires Flash Sales Site HauteLook For $270 Million

Posted: 17 Feb 2011 01:32 PM PST

In one of the larger exits so far in the flash sales business, retail chain Nordstrom has acquired flash sales site HauteLookfor $180 million in Nordstrom stock and three-year earn-out of up to $90 million. HauteLook has raised $41 million in funding.

Thanks to the immense popularity of members-only, online sample sales, HauteLook has grown to 4 million members since launching in 2007. The site offers massively discounted sale events in women's fashion, men's fashion, accessories, kids' clothing and toys, travel and home and beauty.

The basic idea behind the flash sales model is this: designers ad retailers, such as Marc Jacobs or Versace, place excess inventory on a sale site at 50 to 70 percent discounts over a several day period. The sales are private, available only to members, with upcoming sales from brands announced via emails. You can get invites from other members or request invites via the site.

The flash sales space is definitely competitive; and the amount that HauteLook sold for isn’t entirely surprising. Two years ago GSI Commerce bought RueLaLa in a deal valued at $350 million. Gilt Groupe, has been raising huge amounts of money, growing its user base at a rapid pace and turning a strong profit. In December, Gilt raised another $15 million, bringing the company’s total funding to nearly $100 million. At one point Gilt was valued at $400 million but that number has surely increased over the past year. And an IPO could be in the near future.

One Kings Lane, has also recently raised a large amount of money and is growing like a weed. And there are a number of independent players like Ideeli, BeyondTheRack and others who are still growing at a fast clip.

The concept has even attracted retail giants like eBay, Saks and Neiman Marcus, which are now jumping on the bandwagon to offer their own private sales, a market which Nordstrom clearly wants to enter the space. I wouldn’t be surprised if other larger retailers snap up niche, smaller flash sales sites over the next few years.

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Game Closure Makes it a Breeze to Build Multiplayer, Cross-Platform Games

Posted: 17 Feb 2011 01:07 PM PST

It’s probably fair to say that most people love the interactive experience of playing realtime multiplayer games, yet perhaps surprisingly, the majority of games on the App Store today are single player. Even the popular social games on Facebook don’t offer the rich experience of the classic multiplayer console games like Halo. This seems largely due to the fact that the coding, synchronizations, and de-buggings required to write multiplayer games can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. The same is only more true for multi-platform, multiplayer games.

Enter Game Closure. Launching today at SSE Labs’ Demo Day at AOL, Game Closure is a smart new game development environment and SDK that makes it easy to create, host, and deploy HTML5-based cross-platform, multiplayer games, starting with iOS, Android, and Facebook.

Game Closure, which is essentially the gaming version of Heroku and Appcelerator, allows game developers to write a game in pure JavaScript and use standard HTML5 APIs. The startup’s SDK then compiles, deploys, and accelerates the game. No plug-ins are required, just a Web browser, and any old browser will do. When your game runs on non-browser platforms like mobile devices and tablets, the SDK creates an actual native app using APIs like OpenGL. Like their competitors, Game Closure offers developers everything they need to build, host, and deploy their games at warp speed.

Traditionally, game players are accustomed to experiencing platform lock-in when playing games. You have the games you play on Android, the games you play on your desktop, and your iPad. The same is true for developers: when writing games, they are generally required to create separate versions for each platform using fundamentally different technology. What’s so cool about Game Closure is that it allows players to seamlessly transfer live, running games to virtually any device and provides developers with all the tools to make cross-platform distribution fast and easy.

Game Closure is the project of Michael Carter, Martin Hunt, and Tom Fairfield, all of whom have prior experience with game development. Carter designed the initial WebSocket protocol for HTML5 and Hunt previously worked at Meebo, where he led the development of the “Meebo Bar”. Hunt is currently enrolled in Stanford’s Computer Science PhD program, studying Human-Computer interaction. Carter told me that, though the startup is currently boot-strapped, they’ve recently migrated their operations from “a basement closet” to the “luxurious AOL offices” in Palo Alto, thanks to SSE Labs’ partnership with AOL. I suspect that Game Closure is currently occupying the space reserved by AOL for TechCrunch’s offices, so I’m glad to see it’s being put to good use.

Fellow TechCruncher MG Siegler wrote a post last week on how the overall user experience of native apps far exceeds that of HTML5-based apps. Carter told me that he agrees with this assessment; during initial trials of games running in HTML5 on phones, he found that they “ran 30 times slower than browsers”. However, because HTML5 has a far richer set of tools and optimizations, it was far less complicated to develop those games in HTML5. To address this problem, the GC SDK includes a native (non-browser) implementation of the HTML5 APIs, accelerated for use on mobile devices, so that you can have your cake and eat it too, as they say.

According to Carter, all studios need to do is learn how to use standard HTML5 technologies and Game Closure will host and deploy their games on every relevant platform. Pretty cool.

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IMDb Takes Android App Global With International Movie Showtimes And More

Posted: 17 Feb 2011 12:00 PM PST


Amazon’s IMDb recently updated its iPad and iPhone apps with international showtimes, entertainment news and more. Today, IMDb is bringing these updates to its recently launched Android app.

The app, which is free, now includes a completely redesigned homescreen that integrates the latest trailers of movies, and features updated entertainment news from hundreds of media outlets. You’ll also be able to install an IMDb news widget on Android devices.

And the Android app shows users international movie showtimes for 13 countries including USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, New Zealand Argentina and Chile. IMDb says that it will also launch a similar update to its Windows 7 app.

Mobile is a central part of IMDb’s "everywhere" strategy, which also includes the ability to log-in to apps with Facebook Connect and share updates on both Facebook and Twitter from within apps. The strategy seems to be working Over the past two years, IMDb has seen 10 million mobile installs across all platforms.

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