Saturday, March 19, 2011

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PayPal And eBay Users Raise $1M Towards Japan Earthquake And Tsunami Relief

Posted: 19 Mar 2011 09:00 AM PDT

Similar to the relief efforts surrounding the Haiti earthquake last year, technology companies are actively encouraging their users to donate to campaigns coordinating relief efforts in Japan, which suffered a massive earthquake and tsunami a little over a week ago. As we learned this past week, Zynga’s gamers have raised over $1 million, and Facebook app Causes has raised $700,000 from tens of thousands of donors to the Japan relief effort. And today, PayPal and parent company eBay are announcing $1 million raised by users towards the the Japan earthquake and tsunami relief campaigns.

PayPal users have donated $793,000 via the payments giant’s web campaign, here. Users can donate funds towards the American Red Cross, GlobalGiving, HandsOn Tokyo and a number of other organizations helping with the relief efforts in the country.

Sellers and shoppers on eBay.com have raised $207,000 by donating proceeds of their eBay sales and by giving a donation at checkout. And PayPal is now crediting transactional fees incurred from March 11 to April 10, 2011, to any US 501(c)(3) organization or Canada Revenue Agency registered charity fundraising to aid Japan relief. This also includes donations made via mobile phone.

PayPal’s act of waiving its fees is notable considering that many credit card companies have yet to do so when it concerns donations. Mobile phone carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile, have all eliminating texting fees for SMS messages sent for donation purposes towards the earthquake and tsunami relief.



Listen Closely: Broadcastr Brings You An Audio Guide To The Whole Wide World

Posted: 19 Mar 2011 08:31 AM PDT

I’m a huge William Gibson fan, not least for the ideas with which his books overflow. One such in Spook Country was location-based virtual art: VR images that can only be seen at specific real-world places. As is often the case with Gibson, I read that and wondered, “How long?”

Well, we’re halfway there. I give you Broadcastr, a new platform that allows anyone to record or upload audio, and then “pin” it to physical locations. Broadcastr then indexes and curates that audio for playback via Web or smartphone, where it can be filtered and shared in the usual ways. Think of it as a crowdsourced audioguide to anywhere and everywhere, as if the whole world was a museum: restaurant reviews straight from diners’ mouths, mix tapes for memorial sites, citizen journalism, etc. It also provides the infrastructure for a whole new era of collective oral history; if Broadcastr takes off, its big data will be fascinating.

And it just might. “Mobile is where audio has always worked,” founder Andy Hunter points out – car radios, Walkmans, iPods – “because it has this ability of enhancing your experience without pulling you out of the world.” Today you can use Broadcastr to listen to New York City travel information from Fodor’s as you roam, or walk through Brooklyn and hear the latest local crime blotter, or wander from Houston to 30th Street and hear a different micro-targeted theatrical experience on every block. Think of it as audio-channel augmented reality. They’ve connected with everyone from the Shoah Foundation, who are pinning survivor stories at Auschwitz, to champion storytellers from The Moth; and in the two weeks since their launch, user-generated content has already doubled the size of their library. (Crucially, contributors retain all rights.)

For my highly idiosyncratic money, the most interesting thing about Broadcastr is its ability to tie fiction to a place. So I’m glad to see that its co-founders Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum, who previously launched the e-magazine Electric Literature, view Broadcastr as another way of “bringing narrative to the digital age.” But I do wish that it allowed contributors to restrict their audio so they can only be heard by people who are actually at the tagged places. Restriction breeds creativity. Imagine an audiobook that can only be heard as you walk through its real-world setting: that would be up there with Gibson’s Agrippa, or Geoff Ryman’s 253, or Christian Bök‘s poems inserted into microbial genomes, in terms of tech-enabled experimental storytelling. (Margaret Atwood once said that the one thing Canadian writers have in common is a strong sense of place. She might have been on to something: Ryman, Bök, and Gibson are all Canadian.)

OK, so the rest of you are more interested in their crowdsourced worldwide audioguide, and its obvious advertising and museum/festival/tourism markets. Broadcastr are angel-funded, and they plan to start charging for premium content (on an app-store model) later this year, and then incorporate advertising sometime next year. Their iPhone and web apps are available now, their Android app should emerge this month, and they intend to release an API in July. NYC and the Bay Area seem the most densely packed with material so far, but I quickly found an entry for High Park in Toronto, only a stone’s throw away from me. Go give it a listen; you too might hear something interesting just around the corner.

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(Founder Stories) Foodspotting’s Soraya Darabi On Women In Tech

Posted: 19 Mar 2011 07:00 AM PDT

Let’s face it, the tech industry is dominated by male geeks and alpha dog VCs. It’s not easy being a female founder in that environment. But as Foodspotting co-founder Soraya Darabi tells Chris Dixon in Part II of her Founder Stories interview, “If you are smart and articulate and know your product, nobody can argue with that.” And, she adds in the video above, “It's probably a lot easier . . . now than it was ten years ago.”

Dixon thinks the problem is that VCs keep looking for the same patterns, They think the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg will be a young, male, alpha geek. He also notes that pitching your startup idea in the country-club atmosphere of many VC firms can be both intimidating and counterproductive. “I am not sure presenting well to 40 grumpy people correlates to building a great product,” he quips.

But gender issues is not all the two talked about. In the first video below, Dixon puts Darabi through a rapid-fire Q&A, asking her what she would do if her company folded (“I’d go to culinary school”), what advice she has for other startup founders, who are her female mentors, and—my favorite question—”Can you beat people up?” (It turns out she can). And Dixon let’s loose that he was actually a philosophy major in college, which he describes as “the best seven years of my life.” (Insert your own joke here).

Be sure to watch Part I of this interview, where Darabi discusses how Foodspotting began and her previous job as social media manager of the New York Times. The full interview is also in the second video below, and you can catch up with more episodes of Founder Stories on iTunes.

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‘Beatbox’ Bill Gates Takes On ‘Sinista’ Steve Jobs In A Rap Battle (Video)

Posted: 19 Mar 2011 06:33 AM PDT

You can debate if there is still that much of an epic battle between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs – or Microsoft and Apple in other words – at all these days. As much as pundits like to keep drawing comparisons to their financials, the tech world is far more interesting that the competition between those industry giants, who are destined to remain giants for a long time.

Before I start rambling further thoughts about this, here’s a cool animation made by the folks at Albinal. Enjoy the rap battle between Beatbox Bill and Sinista Steve, and tell us who you think laid down the better verses (or alternatively, write your own):

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Don’t Bet Big. Little Bets Are The Ones That Turn Into Billion-Dollar Ideas

Posted: 19 Mar 2011 06:00 AM PDT

Editor's note: The following guest post is by bestselling author and former venture capitalist Peter Sims.  His next book, from which some of this article is exclusively drawn, is Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries.  His last guest post for us was on how Google is becoming more like Microsoft.  

He can be found on Twitter @petersims.

When I was in business school, one of the most common things I would hear people say was that they wanted to do something new—like start a company or take an unconventional career path—but that they needed "a great idea" first.  That always surprised me a bit, especially at an entrepreneurial hub like Stanford, since most successful entrepreneurs don't begin with brilliant ideas—they discover them.

Ironically, this would include the biggest business idea to come out of Stanford in decades.  Google didn't begin as a brilliant vision, but as a project to improve library searches, followed by a series of small discoveries that unlocked a revolutionary business model.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't begin with an ingenious idea.  But they certainly discovered one.

Meanwhile, Pixar started as a hardware company that never found a market, and got into digitally animated movies by making a number of small bets on short films.  Twitter began as a side project within Odeo, a podcasting company that was going nowhere.  After asking employees for suggestions about what the company should do, Odeo founder Evan Williams gave Jack Dorsey, then an engineer, two weeks to develop a prototype for his short messaging idea.  People inside Odeo loved using it and Twitter was soon born.

The truth is, most entrepreneurs launch their companies without an brilliant idea and proceed to discover one, or if they do start with what they think is a superb idea, they quickly discover that it's flawed and then rapidly adapt.

Of course, everyone wants to make big bets.  That's a Silicon Valley maxim.  Go big.  Be bold.  But brilliant ideas are over-rated and people routinely bet big on ideas that aren't solving the right problems, including Google Wave and WebVan.  Pixar storytellers must make thousands of little bets to develop a movie script, Hewlett Packard cofounder Bill Hewlett found that HP needed to make 100 small bets on products to identify six that could be breakthroughs.

Just as Twitter went from a small bet to a big one, small bets are affordable and achievable ways to learn about problems and opportunities, while big bets are for capitalizing upon them.

Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia, is one of the leading researchers to study how entrepreneurs tend to make decisions.  (One of her studies, titled, "What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial," started to ripple through Silicon Valley after Vinod Khosla posted a copy of the article on the Khosla Ventures website along with the note, "First good paper I've seen.")

Sarasvathy points to the value of what she calls "affordable losses."  Seasoned entrepreneurs, she emphasizes, will tend to determine in advance what they are willing to lose, rather than calculating expected gains.  They don't teach this in business school; just the opposite, in fact.  But the next new billion-dollar idea is virtually impossible to predict, even for a visionary like Mark Zuckerberg for much of Facebook's early history.

The rapidly shifting Silicon Valley landscape for entrepreneurs and venture capital reflects these realities.  Unlike some of the old guard venture firms who still seek to bet big on ideas before the entrepreneurs have proven they are actually solving user problems, Y Combinator, Lean Startups and the Customer Development model, as well as the way some 'Super Angels' invest, are predicated on small bet philosophies and affordable losses, while seeking to help entrepreneurs iterate as cheaply and quickly as possible to find valuable problems.

Expect great debates to come between these two camps on things like expected exit values: big bets versus little bets.  After all, the old VC mantra was to find the next billion-dollar idea.  "We're out to hit singles and doubles," angel investor Dave McClure has stated reflecting a shifting tide, "We're not trying to hit a home run every time and strike [sic] out a lot."  Traditional VCs privately chafe at this kind of talk.  But with the rise of Y Combinator, and DST's recent announcement to invest $150,000 in every seed-stage Y Combinator company, everyone understands the game is changing.

Photo credit: flickr/Jo Christian Oterhasl

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Reddit, Social News Frontrunner, Is Down To One Developer

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 07:41 PM PDT

Two out of the three remaining Reddit programmers quietly left the social news community last week, Mike Schiraldi going to Google and David King going to Hipmunk where he joins Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. This means that the over one billion page view a month site is currently running with only one developer (Neil Williams, hired in November) and two sysadmins until it can hire new engineering staff.

Reddit, which experiences about 75 million monthly visits and is one of the top 100 most visited sites on the Internet, had six hours worth of downtime yesterday which it chalked up to an Amazon Web Services failure.

This fact that this all rests on poor Neil Williams’ shoulders right now might seem shocking, as Reddit is doing better than ever traffic-wise  hitting 14 million unique visits a month according to Google Analytics. To put this into perspective, competitor Digg (which has 42 employees and has raised over $40M in funding) now has around 9 million unique visitors down from about 16 million in August, according to Quantcast.

In a sense Reddit is the unlikely winner of a the voting-on-news race, a competition that has been somewhat forgotten in the wake of Twitter. But the company is absolutely not shutting down, despite it currently operating on a skeleton staff of six people, in addition to a part time designer and a part time customer service person.

Sysadmin jedberg holds that company is doing extremely well despite recent departures in a Reddit thread:

“In fact, we just had a meeting with the President of Conde Nast, who told us that they are extremely pleased with reddit and the community, and want to give us more resources and more funding. They just approved us to hire even more people than we had originally planned. To further reinforce the point above, our financials are looking quite good for the year.

Raldi will be sorely missed. He was the face of our company, and our most prolific blogger. Hopefully some of the new folks that come on after this round of hiring will want to write blog posts, or perhaps I’ll pick up that job again.

The one silver lining to this is that raldi’s departure really opened up Conde’s eyes to what our needs are as a site that is different from all the other properties at Conde Nast. I’m just sad that he couldn’t stick around to benefit from these changes. :(“

Community manager Erik Martin also tells me that the company plans on hiring four more engineers as fast as it can, but doesn’t know where it is in the hiring process. He wants to get the new staff on board as soon as possible, obviously, “Traffic keeps growing. We’re having infrastructure growing pains, but traffic is still growing.” And then, “It’s a crazy lean skeleton crew, but we’ll get through it.”

Btw. Reddit is hiring.

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The Pedants’ Revolt: Does The AP’s Killing Of E-Mail Mark A Worrying Escalation?

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 07:28 PM PDT

PHOENIX (TC) — Solemnly they filed into the briefing room at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism: the journalists, the bloggers and those who tweet on behalf of celebrities. Only the scratching of nib against paper and the clicking of keys broke the unpropitious hush, as those in attendance prepared to record the announcement.

And then, at the stroke of 2pm, the representatives of the Associated Press took to the stage. Total silence now. The calm before the bombshell: no less impactful for being anticipated.

"Daddy," generations of children as yet unborn will ask, "where were you when the Associated Press removed the hyphen from the word 'e-mail'?"

Yes, after this morning's world-changing announcement, the jounalistic cyber-pedantry landscape will never look the same. Never mind the fact that most of us dropped the hyphen from “e-mail” around about the same time we stopped dialling up to Compuserve. And never mind that the AP’s acknowledgment that email is a distinct and legitimate communications medium comes just as the rest of the world has moved on to IMs and DMs.

No, never mind any of that: this a monumental development – as big at least as the moment when, earlier this month, the Pope finally declared that we should all stop blaming the Jews for killing Jesus; or the time last week when my mother finally realised she didn't have to begin every IM to me with the greeting "Dear Paul,".

The change doesn't become official until 2am tomorrow morning (CDT) — but at least one AP writer was happy to risk his job by breaking his own employer's embargo…

Under the headline "Innocence Project professor pulled from class", the unnamed AP writer wrote…

"A Northwestern University journalism professor whose students are credited with helping to free more than 10 innocent men from prison – including death row – has been pulled from the class that made him famous amid allegations of ethics violations.

David Protess told the Chicago Tribune he was notified by email this week that he wouldn’t be teaching the investigative journalism course for the upcoming quarter."

"Notified by email." Just seeing it written like that gives me goosebumps.

But that's not all; just as the assembled throng in the briefing room of Arizona State were regaining their collective wits, the AP spokespeople struck out with not one but two additional haymakers. Effective Saturday morning, both "cell phone" – boom! – and "smart phone" - thwack! – will become self-contain nouns. They won't even go through the hyphenated gestation period: from 2am tomorrow, as if by magic, the words cellphone and smartphone will pop, fully formed, into existence.

For an Internet purist like me, this is starting to look like a worrying escalation: a sign that the once-staid AP might be losing their heads in the Internet age. With e-mail and “cell phone” and “smart phone” gone, how long can it be until "home page" ceases to be two words? And then… well…

First they came for e-mail, but I haven’t used the hyphenated form for years, so I did nothing.

Then they came for “cell phone” and “smart phone” but I’m not my grandparents, so I did nothing.

… and then they came for the uppercase 'I' in 'Internet'.

Out of my cold, dead hands, AP. Out of my cold, dead hands.

$700,000 Donated To Japan Relief Efforts Via Causes, Salesforce Pledges $25K Matching Grant

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 07:06 PM PDT

As Japan works to recover from the horrendous earthquake and tsunami that struck last week, many companies and citizens are donating what they can to help. One of the easiest ways to help is to send a text message to the Red Cross (text REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation), but there are plenty of other options, particularly if you’re looking to support a certain charity or organization. Today, Causes founder Joe Green told me that tens of thousands of donors have given some $700,000 to Japan relief efforts thus far via the online platform.

As for the photo above — right now Green is appearing on a local Bay Area NBC special, where a phone bank sits ready to receive calls for donations to the Japanese Cultural & Community Center of Northern California. Salesforce has just agreed to match up to $25,000 in donations to the effort — which comes in addition to the $100,000 they already matched for donations to the Red Cross. You can find the JCCCNC’s Cause right here.

Green says that over 20 organizations have been using Causes to help raise funds for Japan (which probably makes it the largest multi-charity donation platform). These charities benefit from relatively easy transaction processing (which is conducted by Network for Good), and users who donate will be guided through the viral steps that are Causes’s bread and butter. One small nit, though: the credit card companies have yet to waive their processing fees for Network For Good (which they did following the Haiti earthquake) so Causes is still having to charge a small fee for each donation. Green is hopeful that the credit cards will waive these fees once again.

Other notable fundraising efforts include LivingSocial’s pledge to match over $1 million in donations (it’s matching all $5 donations through this deal, which is still live).

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Google Ventures Launches $10,000 Startup Referral Program For Employees

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 06:24 PM PDT

If you’re a Google employee and you know about a stealth startup that wants funding, you can pocket a cool $10,000. The Google Ventures team announced the new program at Google’s weekly all-hands “TGIF” meeting, earlier this afternoon.

It’s pretty straightforward. If a Google employee knows about a startup that Google Ventures might be interested in, they fill out a form on an internal website. They state why they like the startup, and they need to be prepared to give a “warm introduction” to a key employee at the startup. If Google Ventures invests, the employee that referred the startup gets the $10,000 in cash.

It’s modeled on Google’s in house employee referral program, Google Ventures partners Bill Maris and David Krane tell me, although the payout is much higher for startup referrals.

Within a few minutes after the meeting they’d received ten referrals, and most of the company is still unaware of the program. By Monday, all 25,000 Google employees will have the details, and be on the lookout for promising startups.

There are more programs coming to help Google Ventures get deal flow, says Maris. In the near future they’ll announce more “unique, haven’t-been-tried-before, outside of the box type ideas that will apply to people who aren’t Google employees, too.

In the meantime, if you know of a startup that would be right for Google Ventures, I highly recommend looking up ex-TechCruncher, current Google Ventures employee Laura Boychenko. I’m sure you can cut some kind of deal with her where she gets the referral money and then splits it with you.

Kidding, kidding. Everyone calm down.

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Wow, Google Has Ported My Ten Thousand Button Nightmare To The iPhone!

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 05:26 PM PDT

Back in October of last year, I got my first glance at the Sony Google TV remote. I immediately broke out into a cold sweat and hives. I mean, just look at the thing. Our collective living rooms are already a nightmare of boxes and cords — Sony and Google managed to translate that nightmare into remote control form as well. And now that nightmare is going virtual.

Earlier today, Google announced the Google TV Remote app for the iPhone. On one hand, it’s great that they’re willing to release this on a rival platform. On the other, ahhhhhhhhh!

To me, the big benefit of an app-based, touchscreen remote is that you can do away with the conventions that have constrained remote controls for decades. Google does that somewhat with things like the cool voice search. But they also manage to fill the app with a nightmare jumble of buttons. I mean, you’re going to need a manual to figure out what all of those buttons do.

The layout of the buttons when all of them are exposed seems to make very little sense — they clearly have just crammed as many buttons as they can on to a single screen. In the screenshot on the right, I count 33 buttons. 33!

In their post, they tout how you’re can easily see the buttons at night thanks to the backlit screen. And that’s good because you’re going to need to be constantly looking at this thing to make sure you don’t hit the wrong button — or several of them.

Compare this app to the Remote app that Apple makes for the Apple TV. That app has almost no buttons. Instead, they focus on a large touchscreen area so you can use the remote without looking at it. This has long been the only good thing about button-based remote controls. Google managed to kill the only good thing while porting the bad, Apple did the opposite.

To be fair, Google TV is a different beast than Apple TV. With Google TV, you need a remote that can control traditional television channel navigation. But there are different ways you can do this other than virtual “+” and “-” buttons. Swiping, would work, for example. And why are there dedicated play and pause buttons? This is a virtual environment, shouldn’t one just transform into the other when pushed?

The recently launched startup Peel also does a nice job with their app controls. Again, it’s not a nightmare of buttons, but a re-thinking of how remotes should work as digital applications.

Of course, if you do have a Google TV and an iPhone, this app does beat the hell out of using this.

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CrunchBoard Jobs: We’re Hiring

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 04:17 PM PDT

TechCrunch is hiring. Come work with us! The positions we have available right now are:

Executive Support:

Executive Assistant
– San Francisco, CA

Product and Engineering:

Web Developer – Ruby on Rails
– San Francisco, CA
CrunchBase Manager
– San Francisco, CA

Sales & Operations:

Ad Operations Manager
– San Francisco, CA
Sales Marketing Manager
– San Francisco, CA

Conferences & Events:

Conference Program Chair
– San Francisco, CA

You can also use CrunchBoard to search for other companies that may be hiring. Some other positions open right now include:

iPhone Developer
- just.me inc. – Palo Alto, CA

Back-End Developer
- Tixdaq – London, UK

Software Developer, Amazon Instant Video
- Amazon – Seattle, WA

Click the job titles to apply.

Netflix Original Content Is Much More Than A Strategy Shift — It Could Shift An Industry

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 03:14 PM PDT

Three years ago, if you had asked people to choose between cable television and Netflix, the vast majority would have laughed at you. A DVD-by-mail service versus thousands of pieces of content always at your fingertips?

No one is laughing anymore.

Netflix has confirmed that they intend to pay for House of Cards a new show being produced by David Fincher (yes, he of Fight Club, The Social Network, etc) and starring Kevin Spacey (yes, he of The Usual Suspects, American Beauty, etc). Netflix is not paying for the full production of it, but instead they’re paying for the first-rights access to air it. In other words, they get the first “window” to show it to viewers.

And while the company is saying that this isn’t a shift in strategy, it could end up being potentially much more than that.

Up until now, Netflix has not had content in this first window. Instead, they’ve focused on the second or third or even fourth window. That is, they’ve shown content after it’s in theaters or on television for its initial run. And sometimes they don’t get content until after it’s been in theaters and then on television for quite some time. This catalog of content has been the service’s bread and butter.

But with House of Cards, the game changes. For the first time, they’re going to get people signing up to Netflix to get first access to content. And if it’s as good as the talent behind it suggests, they might get a lot of people signing up for that very reason.

And if that’s the case, they’ll be doing a lot more of these deals. And that would effectively make them a premium cable television channel — like HBO or Showtime. But they’ll be one with thousands more pieces of content for a lower monthly price. And they’ll be one not burdened by any artificial show times. Most importantly, they’ll be one not burdened by the cable television model — at all.

If Netflix’s new gamble here works, this is the absolutely the future. In three years, we won’t be paying $75 a month to a giant cable conglomerate. We’ll be paying $8 to Netflix and other players that pop up — like HBO (by themselves), perhaps. Sure, there will still be the monthly fee for Internet. But most of us are already paying that. We’d just be removing the ridiculous $75 cable television fee that gives us thousands of channels with content only on at a certain time — and most of which we don’t want.

Of course, the cable companies will push back against this. Maybe they’ll jack up the price of Internet even higher if you don’t also subscribe to cable television. You’d think the courts would stop something like that from happening, but they haven’t stopped these companies from basically having monopolies over entire cities and regions in the U.S.

But hopefully other alternatives will bubble up. Google or wireless or both or something we haven’t even thought about yet. The market will demand it.

The cable television model has been broken for far too long. For over a decade now we’ve heard the promises of a la carte content and pricing, but it never came because there was no real incentive for it to come. (By the way, how much do you want to bet we see it soon if this new Netflix maneuver works?) There is a reason that everyone talks about quitting cable. It’s a rip-off. The content is 99 percent shit. And the presentation is awful. And the overall experience is worse. You know, all the little things.

Now that model is being assaulted from all sides. And this Netflix bet is perhaps the best sign yet for a cable-less future.

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Q: What Does It Say About The Wisdom Of The Crowd That “White People Stink” Has Been Trending On Twitter For Almost 24 Hours?

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 03:05 PM PDT

A: Everything.



Kevin Rose Resigns From Digg, Closing Round On New Startup

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 02:49 PM PDT

Wow, when I wrote last night that Kevin Rose doesn’t really use Digg anymore, I had no idea how perfect the timing was. It turns out Rose really has tuned out. Because, say multiple sources, he’s already resigned from the company and is closing a $1+ million financing round for a new startup he’s founded.

Rose first launched Digg in December 2004. The service was an instant hit, and for a long while just all the big players thought about acquiring the company. Things never got so close as they did in mid-2008, when Google took Digg all the way to the altar before walking away at the last minute. Digg would have been sold for some $200 million. Every employee knew about the deal because Google had interviewed them all individually. Credit to then-CEO Jay Adelson for getting everyone back on track after the deal fell apart.

But those were the glory days for Digg. The site faded as newer services like Twitter and Facebook became ubiquitous. Rose and Adelson had a falling out, Rose stopped coming by the office much for months, and one of them had to go. It was Adelson. Rose took over as CEO until they hired Matt Williams last Fall.

Rose stayed on in vague executive role after Williams took over, but it’s been clear that Digg isn’t really top of mind for him anymore. He’s not using it much, as I showed last night. And he is very active with Revision3 and other projects.

So what’s the new startup? We’re still trying to figure that out, as well as who he’s hired and who’s invested. We’ll update as we hear more. Rose, for his part, isn’t responding to my emails, which isn’t surprising.

Update: Rose has tweeted that he’ll “continue advising Digg / on the board of directors, & taping Diggnation (as i have been since [Willaims] joined).”

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With A New Name In Tow, MyPad’s ‘Facebook For iPad’ App Hits 3 Million Downloads

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 02:43 PM PDT


Back in January I wrote about an iPad application called Facepad, which drew heavy inspiration from Twitter’s iPad application to create a similar ‘swipable’ experience for Facebook that lets you jump between open pages by swiping left and right (it’s pretty slick). The application has hit a couple of speed bumps — Facebook asked it to change its name, so it’s now called MyPad — but it’s still drawing plenty of users, many of whom are spending a lot of time in the app every day. You can download MyPad on the App Store right here.

Cofounder Cole Ratias says that the application has now surpassed 3 million downloads since it launched in January, and that on average users are spending nearly 3.5 million minutes inside the application per day. They’re also uploading around 4,000 photos each day through the app.

MyPad makes money by placing ads in its free version and selling a premium version with no ads (the paid app is currently 99 cents). But it has bigger ambitions than just getting a lot of page views — it’s looking to take advantage the eyeballs drawn to its Facebook features to launch a gaming platform that’s integrated into the application, but doesn’t live on Facebook. Ratias says that the service will also be offering tools to developers that let them tie their games into MyPad’s platform, which we’ll be hearing about in the next few months. In the mean time the company is closing a “large seed round” and will be expanding beyond its team of three.

MyPad’s success — and that of its biggest competitor, Friendly — is made possible by the fact that Facebook doesn’t offer a native iPad application of its own, even though the hugely successful device has been out for nearly a year now. This is likely because Facebook is already having to grapple with keeping numerous native applications up to date (like Android, iPhone/iPod Touch, and Palm OS) — adding a bunch of tablet operating systems to the mix is only going to make things more difficult to keep the apps at feature parity. Instead, we’re probably going to see a tablet-optimized HTML5 site at some point.

For the time being, many iPad users are turning to apps like MyPad and Friendly. But these aren’t perfect — at their core they’re reskinned versions of Facebook’s touch.facebook.com mobile site, which leads to some quirks (Facebook Chat is unreliable, for one). Ratias says that in addition to the gaming-related features detailed above, MyPad is still planning to rebuild some of Facebook’s core features, like a new photo viewer and chat client that should have better stability.

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Loytr
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Right Media Founder Michael Walrath Becomes Chairman of Yext

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 02:24 PM PDT

Local advertising startup Yext has a new chairman, Michael Walrath. Walrath was the founder and CEO of Right Media, an online advertising exchange which he sold to Yahoo for $850 million in 2007. Since then he’s been investing and starting other projects. One of his biggest investments is Yext, where he is the largest individual shareholder outside the company.

Walrath became a board member of Yext about a year and a half ago when he first invested in the company’s $25 million series B. Now that he is taking chairman role, he will be at Yext’s New York City offices once a week plotting the overthrow of the online local advertising world with CEO Howard Lerman. (The two are pictured here enjoying some green St. Patrick’s Day champagne yesterday when they told me the news).

Yext started with pay-per-call ads online targeted at local service businesses. That business is its main source of revenues, but more recently Yext launched a local search advertising product called Tags aimed at small businesses who want better visibility on local directory sites other than Google. From one dashboard, small businesses can manage their search ads on partner sites including MapQuest, Citysearch, Yellowbook, Local.com, SuperPages, White Pages, MerchantCircle, and Topix.

“We think tags will surpass calls in a matter of 12 to 18 months,” says Lerman. ” We basically started a whole new company within our company.” One of the character traits that convinced Walrath to become more involved is Lerman’s willingness to take big risks in the pursuit of bigger markets. “Howard is only one I know who is dismissive of a mid-8 figure revenue stream as not being the main product,” he says. Maybe Walrath can help Yext add a digit or two to that revenue figure.

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The Sun Will Set For Yahoo’s AlltheWeb On April 4

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 02:16 PM PDT


As we heard in late December, Yahoo was planning to “sunset” a number of its products, including Delicious, AltaVista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Picks, and AlltheWeb. While we all assumed sunsetting meant shutting the product down, Yahoo said it was actually looking to find a better home for Delicious. But Yahoo recently notified users that it would be shutting down MyBlogLog in May. And it appears that in the case of AlltheWeb, sunsetting is also leading to the search engine’s demise.

As stated on AllTheWeb’s front page: Yahoo! will be closing AlltheWeb on April 4, 2011, as we focus on other features to improve your search experience. Starting on April 4, 2011, http://www.alltheweb.com will redirect to Yahoo! Search at http://search.yahoo.com. Thanks for your understanding.

Unlike Delicious, AlltheWeb’s fate isn’t really much of a surprise. Yahoo acquired the search engine In March 2004 via the Overture deal with the hope of building up its own search platform. Overture actually purchased both AlltheWeb and AltaVista in 2003. Yahoo gained these search properties when it acquired Overture in 2004.

Of course, with the huge success and rise of Google, AlltheWeb didn’t stand a chance. And thanks to both Google and now Microsoft Bing’s dominance, Yahoo’s own search portal isn’t doing that great, forcing Yahoo to outsource its search to Bing.

By way of history, AlltheWeb was one of the early search engines on the scene but never managed to pick up lasting traction. According to its Wikipedia page, the search engine was indexing around 3.3 billion pages before it was acquired by Yahoo in 2004.

Another Yahoo acquisition bites the dust. Who’s next?

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Hitler Weighs In On SXSW Jumping The Shark

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 01:35 PM PDT

To save all 15 of you the effort of writing a response to MG’s “Saying ‘SXSW Is Over’ Is Over” post right now, the “Has SXSW Interactive jumped the shark” discussion has hit Godwin’s Law. That’s right someone has made a Hitler’s Downfall video where the Fuhrer shares his views on how much the conference has sold out as its scaled, thereby symbolically decreeing the “SXSW is Over” meme officially, yes, over.

My favorite parts:

“If you’re attending SXSW for the Pepsi Max booth, please leave.”

“Now this is just another excuse for marketing douches to get shitfaced at parties! Fucking Twitter got its start here! Now we’re supposed to get excited about an iPad 2 popup store. New Foursquare badges … Or a sponsored BBQ with people who could give a shit about creativity and innovation …”

“Look at us! We dress like the lesser-know members of Arcade Fire!”

“SXSW was about meeting the unpretentious people behind great tech innovations. Now it’s a bunch of self important Twitter celebrities, running around, looking for the next good party on their iPhones.”

“Oh look at me look at all the RSVPs I have.”

“The techies look down on the marketers. The marketers ignore the techies. And the hipsters look down on everyone.”

While the Interactive conference has probably suffered from the Eternal September problem ever since it was called SXSW Multimedia, going from hundreds to around 20,000 attendees means it is whole different (and mainstream) beast from now going forward. So was this year a tipping point? Well it’s a sign of the times we live in where a supposedly homegrown viral video created for the “Help Save SXSW from Marketer Douchebaggery” movement is itself prefaced by an ad.

Via: Here’s Some Awesome

Ask a VC: Peter Barris on Scaling the VC Business and Snagging the First Stake in Groupon (TCTV)

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 12:00 PM PDT

My guest this week on Ask a VC is Peter Barris of NEA. NEA is one of the oldest venture firms in the country, one of the first to be bicoastal and one that unabashedly sticks to the same mega-fund strategy in good times and bad.

Reader questions for Barris included everything from how to avoid getting cheated by bad VCs and what metrics he looks at when investing in an ecommerce company.

And for those of you who write in week after week asking why more VCs don’t invest in the rest of America– Barris is an investor after your own heart. He tells the story of how loyalty for his hometown of Chicago has lead to a burgeoning portfolio of promising deals– including the first venture stake in Groupon.

Songkick Poaches A Big Hitter CTO Out Of Google

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 11:55 AM PDT

Live bands site Songkick has achieved something fairly rare for a European startup. Rare enough to be worth a mention, at least. In common with what appears to be a trend of Google people escaping to new startups in the Valley, it’s hired a big gun out of Google’s London office.

Dan Crow, a former Tech Lead/Manager at Google for search and mobile, has an impressive CV. He’s a PhD in Machine Learning, worked at Apple and is a former a co-founder of three start-ups in the Valley including the wildly successful Blurb. He then did six years at Google in NYC and London.

Seeing Interactive Changes Name To OwnLocal, Launches Hyper-Local Deals Network

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 11:29 AM PDT

YCombinator-backed Seeing Interactive, which helps small publishers maintain market share against national competitors like AOL’s Patch, has changed its name to OwnLocal today, expanding beyond providing ad services for newspapers and launching a daily deals network for publications and communities. “We want to help local markets own their own markets,” says CEO Lloyd Armburst.

The Daily Deals platform will join OwnLocal’s suite of product offerings including white-label Yelp-like directory Local Hero, Web Builder and a print to web ad converter. OwnLocal wants to equip smaller local papers with the tools they need to sell ads and get revenue to fund local reporters, Daily Deals being one such tool.

So what makes this offering different from Groupon and LivingSocial? “We’re going into markets that haven’t even heard of Groupon,” says Armburst. Armburst is focused on leveraging the power of the hyper-local market and the hyper-local newspaper industry which is a tough nut to crack. “What is working nationally, that we can wrap up and make work in a small local market,” he says.

The product allows for multiple deals, social features, flash sales and syndication. OwnLocal has also hired a part-time person to be a “deal master” of sort sorts. The deal master will provide writing services as well as consult publishers on deal viability and build trust, crucial in more rural markets which don’t trust “those people from California.”

In beta for two months, the OwnLocal Daily Deals platform, which will take less of a cut than Groupon/LivingSocial and will allow you to cap orders, will will be opened up publicly to OwnLocals network of over a 100 publishers today. Armburst tells me he has two major partners already in the pipeline to use the platform.

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Keen On… Bruce Sterling: What Comes After the Future? (TCTV)

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 11:20 AM PDT

So what comes after the future? I asked Bruce Sterling at SXSW.

But, for Bruce, the future is really the past. "I like narratives," he told me, while explaining why the most "effective" futurists are good historians. So perhaps, using this logic, what comes after the future is history.

And Bruce is certainly an effective futurist as well as a good historian. Which is why when I asked him about today's Internet obsession with "the social," he riffed with dark euphoria about the history of socialism as well as what it's like to be a 15-year-old kid with no knowledge of the past.

Check out yesterday's interview with Bruce when he explains why hactivism isn't compatible with democracy and what the difference is between gothic high tech and favela chic.

What Comes After the Future

"The Social"

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Zynga Adds Team From Mobile And Video Game Developer Floodgate Entertainment

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 11:01 AM PDT

In Zynga’s 10th acquisition in ten months, the social gaming giant is announcing the acquisition of the team from Massachusetts game developer Floodgate Entertainment. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Floodgate has developed a number of casual, mobile and PC titles, including MoPets, Madden 2005 and 2006, Nascar 07, Pirates Of The Caribbean, Flowerz and others. Floodgate’s team of developers and engineers will join the Zynga Boston team (which was started via Zynga’s Conduit Labs acquisition). Floodgate’s founder, Paul Neurath, will be joining Zynga Boston joining as Creative Director.

Floodgate was spawned from computer game developer Looking Glass Studio. In 1990, Neurath founded Blue Sky Productions, which became LookingGlass in 1992. The company folded and Neurath founded Floodgate in 2000.

Zynga just launched its own rewards platform RewardVille, and expanded FarmVille to include second farms. The company’s newest game CityVille is dominating social gaming on Facebook with 91 million active users. And the social gaming giant is reportedly raising a $250 million round of funding that values the company at between $7 to $9 billion.

Zynga has been on an acquisition tear over the past year, building up talent, game studios and creative leads in a number of cities around the world. Of course, with Zynga's $850 million in revenue (with $400 million in profit), many of these acquisitions are a drop in the bucket.

The social gaming company’s past acquisitions include social browser Flock, New York’s Area/Code, Texas-based NewToy, XPD in Beijing, Unoh Games in Tokyo, Conduit Labs in Boston, Dextrose AG in Frankfurt, Germany,Challenge Games in Austin, and Bonfire Studios in Texas.

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TechCrunch Giveaway: A Motorola Xoom #TechCrunch

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 10:21 AM PDT

For today’s giveaway, we are giving away a Motorola Xoom. The Motorola Xoom is the world’s first tablet with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb). We’ve written numerous posts on whether or not we think this is better than other tablets, but we wanted to give you a chance to decide and tell us what you think.

Not only does the Xoom have Honeycomb, it has a pretty amazing bootup screen which you can check out here.

If you want a chance at winning the Motorola Xoom, all you have to do is follow the steps below.

1) Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

2) Then do one of the following:

- Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TechCrunch hashtag)
- Leave us a comment below

The contest starts now and ends tomorrow, March 19th at 7:30pm PST.

Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will choose at random and contact the winner this weekend with more details. Anyone in the world is eligible, as long as you can receive delivered packages.

Just for fun we included MG Siegler and Jason Kincaid’s OMG/JK episode, as well as Erick Schonfeld and John Bigg’s Fly or Die episode, both discussing the Xoom.

Good luck!

Xobni Is Coming To Gmail, Android, And iPhone (100 Beta Invites)

Posted: 18 Mar 2011 09:46 AM PDT

Ever since Xobni launched at the first TechCrunch 40, it’s been about Outlook and then Blackberry. But those of us who use Gmail also want to make our inboxes smarter. Today, Xobni is launching aprivate beta for Gmail, and will soon also launch iPhone and Android apps. The first 100 readers to sign up for the Gmail beta will get in (use the code XOBNI-TC100).

The Gmail app comes in the form of a browser extension for either Chrome or Firefox (Safari and IE will come later). Once you install it, a Xobni sidebar appears in your Gmail Inbox. Once you allow it to index your contacts and hook it up to your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts, it starts to show you all sorts of relationship data. Contact search in the Xobni box is hella fast, much faster than searching in the Gmail search box (but only for contacts, it does not index the entire text of your messages).

When you open up an email, the Xobni sidebar shows you a graph plotting your relationship history (how many messages you’ve exchanged) as well as other contacts frequently CCed on messages to or from that person. You can also tab through to a list of recent emails with that person, summary info from their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter profiles (along with recent status updates and Tweets).

Soon, the Xobni extension will work inline in the regular Gmail search box as well, creating smart autosuggestions every time you search. Other additional features the company is working on include contact suggestions in the To: field based on related contacts in the past, phone number extraction and attachment search . It will also pull Tweets and Facebook updates from your closest email contacts in a dashboard view, whether or not you follow them on those social networks.

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