You guys didn't think I'd go to China and forget to bring you back something, did you? Sillies.
My last day in Shanghai I met with Peter Crawfurd and Michael Yang the baby-faced founders of ShirtsMyWay.com. (Pictured here.) ShirtsMyWay allows you to customize a men's dress shirt with trillions of possible combinations of details, from the material on the collar to the stitching around the buttonholes. Shanghai-based tailors whip it up, and it's mailed out to you for $65-$95, including international-shipping.
Right now, the site is running a buy-two-get-one-free Father’s Day special, but TechCrunch readers are getting an additional 10% off their entire orders placed before June 7. Because they aren’t normally set up for this kind of promotion (ahem, I was a little pushy about it all), you have to email your name and the promo code “TechCrunch 10%” to support@shirtsmyway.com within an hour of placing the order to get the discount.
So here’s the bad news for some of you: Right now, the site only makes shirts for men, although the guys awkwardly measured me on a hutong in Shanghai to make me the first-ever women's shirt. (I still haven't gotten it, so no word on the results.) For other ladies out there, I figure this is at least a good idea for a cheap and very personalized Father's Day gift.
Crawfurd and Yang haven't raised any outside capital to date, and this wasn't the easiest business to start-up. It took Crawfurd more than a year to find the right tailors and fabrics. Meanwhile, Yang tried twice to outsource the building of the site itself and both times was disappointed, so finally he rebuilt it all himself. In February 2009, they finally launched.
Apparently, it’s going well. In April, they sold about 300 shirts, and with just a handful of employees they break even on way less than that. (They wouldn’t let me say how much less, but it’s substantially less.) Every once in a while, it's nice to see a business model that doesn't need huge volumes to work, isn’t it?
Syncing calendars and scheduling meetings over email can be an arduous and annoying task. I’ve often wished that I could just send my calendar to contacts instead of going back and forth over email, so we could find a mutual time that works best for various schedules more quickly. Tungle, a scheduling and calendar sharing tool we wrote about during its launch last year, has made scheduling a meeting a whole lot more social and simple through its Tungle.Me technology.
Tungle offers users Tungle Accelerate, a free web-based application that lets you share calendars across companies and platforms, schedule meetings with individuals or groups inside or outside their company and propose multiple meeting times in invitations. The service currently syncs with Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Entourage for Mac, and soon Lotus Notes.
Tungle’s latest technology, Tungle.Me, a “click to meet” application that is integrated with Tungle Accelerate, makes inbound scheduling more social. Once you create a Tungle account, you can also create a Tungle.me URL (you can include this link in an email or message and anyone can click on it) which you can send to contacts. At that site, contacts will input their name and email to verify their identity, then choose an available time to meet with you. Your calendar (which is synced via Tungle) will appear so that contacts can choose an open time. The spots where you have meetings are blocked off. Once a contact requests a meeting, you are sent an email with potential times for meetings. You can accept the meeting time (your calendar will be updated upon approval), send the contact another meeting time or you can deny the meeting all together. If you add meetings into your calendar that are synced with Tungle, your Tungle.me link is updated in real-time. And contacts who request a meeting don’t have to be Tungle users to use the Tungle.me interface.
Your Tungle.me link can also be embedded as a widget in an email or on a site as well as added as a Facebook widget on your profile. The widgets display a real-time glance of a users’ availability and a quick link to their personal Tungle.me URL.
The widget is a great idea, but I’m not so sure I’d want to give Facebook users and all of my friends the ability schedule a meeting with me. There is also the potential for random people, who you don’t know, to spam your email with meeting requests. Of course, you can always deny these meetings but it’s still annoying to sort though random emails in the first place.
But the service itself is a innovative idea and could save users, especially those who have frequent daily and weekly meetings but don’t have a personal assistant or secretary, a lot of time when it comes to scheduling those meetings. And the ability for your Tungle calendar to be synced with Outlook, Google Calendar and other popular scheduling applications makes the service compelling. Tungle’s main competitors are TimeBridge, which also lets you publish your calendar to selected users, and Jiffle.
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Since I got home from China last week, I’ve found myself in a lot of conversations where phrases like “the next Silicon Valley,” or “just like Silicon Valley used to be,” keep coming up. But while China is swimming in capital and littered with start-ups, I’m going to argue it’s not the next Silicon Valley. In fact, it’s something far different than I’ve ever seen before.
If you think about it, Silicon Valley doesn't really move as fast as people say it does. Sure, the rest of the U.S. business world may feel out-lapped by the pattern of companies going from nothing to billions in a few years, but those start-ups are mostly the outliers. For every wunderkind smirking on the cover of a magazine, there are far more entrepreneurs who slogged away for thirty years before ever getting their Nasdaq moments. And there are even more who slogged away for longer and didn't.
And even the breakout Googles and Facebooks of the Valley had the clear benefit of building their companies on top of decades of infrastructure build-out. I mean "infrastructure" in the sense of technology infrastructure—the chips, routers, open source stack, etc.— but I also mean it in the sense of Valley infrastructure that makes it possible to come up with an idea at breakfast and have a company by noon. It's taken decades of continual boom-and-bust cycles to create the complex fabric of venture capitalists, angel investors, lawyers, term sheets, accounting methods and best practices that a newby entrepreneur waltzing in the Valley today has the luxury of taking for granted.
What makes China so staggering is that everything that happened to corporate America over decades—think the television and media studios build out of the 1950s, the greed of the 1980s, the dot com bubble, the build out of physical and IT infrastructure, current Web 2.0 and CleanTech innovation—is all happening to China at once.
Imagine: At the same time eCommerce is getting sea legs, TV Home Shopping is also getting hot. Online ads are growing not because people are TiVoing through commercials—both TV and online ads are growth markets at the same time. Ditto for entertainment and piracy: While Hollywood sees the Internet as a threat to its cozy legacy business, China's entertainment industry is just now building amid a world where piracy is already rampant. No one assumes anyone will buy a CD, so they just look for other ways to make money. The wonder of China right now isn't just the size of the market. It's the rate at which dozens of “old” and “new” economies are all maturing amid one another, and the hyper-network effects that such economic progress is having throughout the country.
As for China’s start-up ecosystem , it’s working to build its own Valley-like infrastructure, but it doesn’t have the luxury of growing it steadily over several decades. Experts say there's at least $20 billion in venture capital sloshing around the country right now. It’s probably double that if you count angels and unofficial or very local funds, says Rocky Lee of DLA Piper, a law firm that represents much of that venture money in China.
That's why calling China merely “the next Silicon Valley” misses the singularity of what's happening there. The Valley has never been like this, and I don't say that to knock the Valley. In many ways, our steady development has been healthier. But it’s also a lot less electric. In the next ten years or so way more money will be lost amid the China chaos, but I’m betting way more money will be made too.
It reminds me of the distinction between start-ups who develop products in "parallel" and those who develop them in "serial." In the former, you raise a bunch of money, hire an army of coders and develop your whole vision at once. In the latter, you build one product, prove that one works and can make money, then raise more money to develop a second. Typically in a time of economy plenty and investor froth everyone pushes for parallel. When the funding and revenues get tight, the serial approach comes into vogue. Parallel is always more exciting; serial is always more rational.
Silicon Valley tends to develop start-ups in “serial waves,” if you will. There are always outliers and waves can coincide in timing like CleanTech and Web 2.0 did, but investors and entrepreneurs tend to jump on dominant high-growth bandwagons and ride them until a few billion companies come out of them and many more fail. Then they wait for the next wagon.
China, as a country, is developing in parallel. The wagons are running constantly and going in nearly every direction. It’s a time of chaos that can burn people out, but it’s also one so unique in the history of modern economics that many ambitious people can't ignore it. That's why most transplants from the West who survive their first two years in China tend to stay for more than ten.
Given all this, China is a lot more inwardly focused than other places like Israel and Europe where start-ups have to be global from day one to have a big enough addressable market. When it comes to the Web and mobile, the biggest surprises will likely come from local, non-English speaking entrepreneurs, maybe even those outside the largest cities. They probably don’t read TechCrunch and may not even know where Silicon Valley is on a map. But that won’t matter, because their local market will necessarily develop very differently than ours.
And while China gets a rap for ripping off U.S. Web start-ups now, I think we're going to start seeing U.S. start-ups copying a lot of elements of Chinese entrepreneurs' business plans, whether it’s unlocking the value in virtual goods, experimenting with alternative online payment methods or developing more social forms of e-commerce, where like-minded friends shop together.
You always find the best ideas within atmospheres of constraints. It's why some of the best companies are started during recessions. It's why Israel was such a surprising hot-bed for Nasdaq IPOs in the late 1990s. And it's why Chinese Web companies have come up with other ways of making money than just slapping ads on a site, because they had to.
I’ll be going back to China in October, and I’m learning Mandarin in the meantime. Because odds are the next great grinning Web coverboy may not speak English. (And for the commenters who keep complaining that India isn’t getting enough TechCrunch love, calm down! I’ll be there most of November.)
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Google wants more small businesses to claim their listing profiles on Google Local (which is basically listings that pop up in Google Maps and local search results). To entice them, starting tomorrow it will give local businesses in the real world with physical addresses a free dashboard akin to what Websites get for free with Google Analytics (see screenshot above). Except that it will show stats such as how many times their business comes up as a search result, how often people click through, as well as how many times people generate driving directions to their business son Google Maps and where those people come from.
In return, all they need to do is claim and verify their listings at the Google Local Businesss Center. It takes about as much time as setting up a new email account, maybe a little more. Google gets clean data (and, thus, better results), businesses get free analytics and an opportunity to train Google’s search engine. Right now only a few hundred thousand businesses in the U.S. have been claimed out of approximately 20 million.
The other benefit to Google is that the more that small businesses can measure the impact of search, the more likely they will be to buy search ads. The dashboard shows the top search queries that result in a business’ listing showing up. The next obvious step is to start buying those keywords or optimize a business’ site to make sure they are on the page. There is no integration yet with Google AdWords (like there is on Google Analytics), but you can see that one coming from a mile away.
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During his keynote at the TWTRCON conference yesterday in San Francisco, Steve Rubel showed off a mind map he made entitled “The Future of Twitter.” The map, which I’ve embedded below with his permission, is an interesting way to look at the state of the service.
It starts out branching into two different directions: “Twitter and the Ecosystem,” and “Twitter as an OS.” One side shows what could happen to Twitter in the future from possible threats (of services that can kill it), to companies that could acquire it, to those that it could acquire. The other side shows Twitter as a social OS versus its role as a marketing OS. From there it goes into its role as a platform, and the rise of the apps based around it.
The map is a good look into what is becoming an increasingly complex web of relationships involving Twitter on the Internet. As the service continues to gain popularity, this web will only continue to expand unless one of the threats destroys it or if a larger company acquires it. Rubel has more in his post on the matter. Brian Solis‘ and Jess3’s Twitterverse diagram also offers a good visual look into the state of Twitter.
Blog and media network Sugar Inc. will announce a third round of funding today, $16 million from Sequoia Capital.
They are using at least some of the proceeds, they say, to buy out NBC, which invested $10 million in the company in June 2007. The NBC investment came with an advertising sales deal that the companies dissolved last year.
The company has now raised a total of $31 million in capital.
Sugar is also announcing the acquisition of Los Angeles-based Shopflick, a video powered fashion marketplace founded by David Grant in 2008.
Grant, who is the former President of Fox TV Studios, will become president of a newly formed Sugar division called Sugar Digital Entertainment, which will “expand the Sugar brand into online video, television, film, videogames and other content formats.”
CEO Brian Sugar says the company is seeing nearly 100 million monthly page views per month. He won’t disclose revenue, but says that the company is now profitable. A year ago we’d heard they were doing around $15 million in annual revenue. They have 97 employees.
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With its real-time search and growing hordes of users, Twitter has become one of the best ways to stay up to date on current events and breaking news (assuming of course, its search function is actually working). But one of the conventions Twitter users have adopted to associate their tweets with a certain event — the hash tag — can be an incredibly inefficient way to spread what’s actually going on. This is because Twitter users have grown accustomed to tagging any tweet somehow related to an event with its corresponding hashtag, even when they aren’t actually attending. This helps spur conversation, but it becomes much harder to weed out the news from the noise, and occasionally leads to propagation of false information. Almost.at, a very slick web application built by freelance iPhone developer David Cann, may be the answer to this problem.
Built on the Cappuccino web framework, the first thing that you’ll notice is that Almost.at is sporting a very polished interface that strongly resembles a native application. The app consists of four main columns. On the far left side you’ll see a handful of different popular topics, which include breaking news stories and events. Clicking on one of these (we’ll use E3 as an example) will fill the three right columns with real-time feeds of recent content: one column for recent tweets that include the #E3 hashtag, another for rich media from Flickr, Twitpic and YouTube, and a third with relevant links that have been sent out in recent tweets.
Every 10 seconds or so, the service will pull in the latest content, so you shouldn’t ever have to manually refresh. You can also use a timeline at the bottom of the page to browse through the history of an event (for example, I could ‘watch’ this weekend’s Maker Faire as it happened, even after the fact). One small caveat though: make sure to scroll to the bottom of a column rather than the top, as Almost.at displays these new items below older ones.
Aside from its snazzy interface and real time updating, Almost.at’s appeal lies in its ability to help users differentiate between people who are at an event, and people who are just talking about it. The system behind this is pretty simple: every tweet has a ‘+’ sign next to it, and if you see a tweet from someone that seems to be actually attending event, you can click it to add them to a special ‘Followees’ list. From then on, their tweets will be displayed with a yellow background in everyone’s feed, and you can optionally choose to watch a feed with tweets that only come from Followees. At this point it’s working very well - I love being able to watch the actual E3 news as it comes in from press at the scene, rather than have to wade through the waves of fanboy spam.
Of course, this system comes with one major problem: any user can add anyone to the Followees list, which means spammers could easily add themselves. At this point there isn’t any kind of communitiy moderation system, though Cann says that one is definitely on the way (for now he’ll have to regulate spam himself). Cann is also hand picking the events that users have to choose from (the servers can only handle a few at a time), though it sounds like he may look for a way to do this automatically in the future.
If you find yourself really enjoying Almost.at, you can download it as its own standalone application. Cann says this is really just a browser window dedicated to the site, but it should allow you to keep it running for hours on end.
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Both are free and both use speech-to-text technology and voice recognition to completely automate directory assistance calls. GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) has been going for a while, and is surprisingly intuitive. It keeps adding features like nearby intersections.
Bing 411 (1-800-246-4411) gives you local business listings, as well as local traffic, weather, and movie listings. The voice is a little more obviously computer-generated than Google’s, but it also can get you a phone number, address, or directions. It also tells you how many stars the business has in average reviews. What’s more, the second time you call, it remembers your last request and you can ask for “saved searches.” It is a voice-activated Bing for local business searches.
I tried it out, and it was able to find the Trader Joe’s near my Brooklyn apartment. But it had trouble with a french restaurant, Bar Tabac, (which Goog-411 also couldn’t understand or find). If it doesn’t understand your search, it takes you to a decision tree, asking you what type of service you are looking for. I find this highly unsatisfying in voice-activated user interfaces. My suggestion for either service: if they don’t’ understand your request right off the bat, just bail and call 1800-FREE-411 or another 411 service. It will be much faster, even if you have to pay 50 cents.
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As we’ve relentlessly documented, the Twitter-based game Spymaster went from a private alpha, to insanely popular, to feeling a full rush of backlash in about 3 days. While a lot of users were upset with Spymaster tweets from their friends filling up their streams, even more annoying to some was the constant direct messages (DMs) from friends to join the service. Now there’s a couple ways to stop getting those.
First, Topify, the power Twitter emailing service, saw the Twitter crowd’s negative reaction to the DMs and decided to add a feature to prevent it. If you’re using Topify, and get a direct message you don’t want from Spymaster, simply forward it to StopSpymaster@topify.com, and Topify will create a filter to stop these message from inundating your inbox.
This is a smart move by Topify, as it not only is a nice feature for current users, but it gives other non-users a reason to potentially use the service. That should be even more true going forward, as I’m sure Spymaster is just the tip of a very large iceberg when it come to viral spreading Twitter games.
But if you don’t want to use Topify, Spymaster itself has come up with a way to opt-out of these invitation DMs. Simply visit this page and you click the opt-out button (which verifies your Twitter name), and you will no longer receive the DMs. Co-founder Eston Bond notes that while Spymaster never sent DMs without another user specifically requesting invites be sent to friends via DM, he realizes that it was pretty annoying for some people.
As I noted above, the key thing to realize here is that Spymaster is just the first of many viral games coming to Twitter — you can’t imagine how many I’ve already been pitched. Ultimately, Twitter is going to need to step up with better filters on their end to stop these type of things from people who don’t want them. Otherwise, you’re going to have people being forced to unfollow people they may not otherwise want to unfollow. And that simply doesn’t make for a very good social service.
Sharing confidential documents within a business or between businesses can be risky—you never know who might leak a document or if your document is being shared with other employees. To solve this problem, startup Confidela has launched the beta of WatchDox, a SaaS product that allows a sender to control, restrict and track viewing, printing and forwarding of documents. We have 100 free beta invites here.
The service’s basic functionality is similar to document sharing services like Scribd and DocStoc but with ramped up privacy settings and tracking systems. DocStoc and Scribd also offer the ability to set documents as private, but WatchDox is giving users a few more tools that allow users to control and track documents.
Watchdox lets you upload any type of document, including PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, Excel files and Word documents. The service gives you a dashboard where you can control who the document is sent to, limit a recipient’s ability to view, forward or print the document and encrypt content of a document. Users can set expiration dates for each document and place watermarks on the document to show versions or the document’s recipient. Watchdox will also track recipient’s activities and location, including when a document is opened and the user’s geographic IP address. You can also send documents directly from Microsoft Outlook by via a WatchDox Outlook plug-in.
WatchDox, which is initially partnering with file collaboration and storage service Box.net to make the service available to all Box.net users, is currently in beta and adding features regularly. The startup will offer a free version of the service and will soon launch a premium version, which is $14.99 per month. Negonation also lets you upload and manage private contracts online, but is targeted towards the legal community. WatchDox seems like a useful service for documents that are confidential and private but you do lose the sharing and social elements of Scribd and DocStoc, which let users share documents with anyone and form groups around certain subjects.
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Jolicloud, the custom OS designed and built specifically for netbooks, is quietly launching later this month in private alpha for a select number of early testers and people who put themselves on the waiting list. I had a long chat with founder Tariq Krim (of Netvibes fame) about the current status of Jolicloud and came away pretty impressed. You’ll need patience before you can give it a whirl, but the good news is that we got hold of some exclusive screenshots of the operating system in action so you can see how spectacular it (still) looks, at least.
First, the skinny about the project. Krim has always been bullish on the (open) Web in general and open source technology in particular, and when netbooks started to make their way into the low-cost computer market right about the time that cloud computing was clearly maturing, he thought it was a shame that the user experience on the small-screen computers was often below par. In an effort to change that, he sought to develop a custom-built OS using open source technology and betting big on open standards, that would basically make using netbooks sexy in the same way that Apple showed the world how a mobile phone should function when it introduced the iPhone. Michael made the same analogy when he first caught wind of Jolicloud back in December 2008.
Jolicloud is based on Ubuntu and Debian but is optimized significantly for use with netbooks that are permanently connected to the Internet, whether it’s over WiFi or 3G. It enables users to install a bunch of web applications that run as if they were installed natively, including Gmail, Skype, Boxee, Twitter, Facebook, DropBox, Meebo, and many more. This is made possible thanks to a close collaboration with the developers behind Mozilla’s Prism project and the open standards that live on the Web. While the Jolicloud team is pondering about some day developing a native Webkit client for the OS, it currently runs Firefox with Google Gears installed by default and supports both Adobe Flash and AIR, which means you can do virtually everything on Jolicloud that you can currently do with your current computer’s browser.
Interestingly, you can assign your Jolicloud profile (including all the applications you use) to multiple computers, which also means you can easily power up a brand new netbook, install the OS and use it exactly the same way you’re using it on any other netbook. There’s also a bit of a social layer baked into the system that lets you keep track of your installation history and displays updates in the style of Facebook’s News Feed. The system also feeds you updates on which software your friends are using (you can follow freinds who install it), so you can check if you’re using the most recent / optimized version for any tool based on their behavior. I think it would also make sense for Jolicloud to incorporate features from social network Wakoopa in there, so you could get recommendations based on what you use most, for example.
Below is a presentation with a collection of screenshots that reveal a lot about the functionality and design of the upcoming netbook OS (it works best if you view the slides in full-screen mode) as well as a video from netbooknews.com featuring a review of a slightly older version of Jolicloud.
Personally, I’m excited about the project’s potential and can’t wait to test the alpha version—dubbed Robby because of Krim’s fascination with Robby The Robot—on my Acer Aspire One later this month. At the same time, I have my reservations about the potential for Jolicloud to gain the necessary traction to make waves in the market, or the ability for the fledgling company to compete with other Linux-based operating systems, particularly Android which is rumored to be coming to netbooks in a big way in the future. But Krim is trying to invent the future here, and for that alone Jolicloud is worth keeping an eye on.
Microsoft has just announced that some new features are coming the Xbox 360 at E3. Facebook and Last.fm integration into the Xbox Live dashboard are two of them. The game Metal Gear Solid is another. But the one they seem to be touting the most right now? Twitter!
Yes, it seems the software giant, who has made some nice moves in the gaming space, has just as big of an obsession with Twitter as everyone else. You will apparently be able to see tweets and post new tweets from the console starting soon.
While, to me, this doesn’t rank up there with last year’s announcement of Netflix streaming coming to Xbox Live, it’s a pretty nice group of features to add to make the Xbox 360 more social. But the show just began, I’m sure Microsoft has some other tricks up its sleeve.
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At this morning’s Conversational Marketing Summit in New York, SocialMedia.com CEO Seth Goldstein revealed that the advertising company had been working with MySpace to develop and deploy ‘Interaction Ads’ - an advertising product that can prompt a MySpace member for input and use that, along with MySpace’s social graph, to tailor the advertising shown to their friends.
The ads are a variation on SocialMedia.com’s powerful Friend to Friend social ads, which the company first rolled out in March. The idea behind them is simple: if I visited a page on MySpace Music, an ad could ask me if I preferred Rock or Rap, with a pair of checkboxes where I could indicate my favorite genre. Then when my friends visited MySpace, they could see an ad that said “Jason likes Rock and Roll! Which do you like?” This level of customization may seem a little strange at first to users, but the ads tend to be far more engaging than typical banner ads. I won’t be surprised if ads that pair user interaction and the social graph become the norm over the next few years.
This news is obviously a very major win for SocialMedia.com - not only is the company running campaigns from major brands, but MySpace itself is working in tandem with the company to sell the ads. It’s also good to see MySpace working with third parties to maximize revenue opportunities, especially as its user growth begins to stall.
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Google’s blog publishing platform, Blogger, is bringing its Custom Search Box gadget out of its beta version, also known as Blogger in Draft. The search gadget a blog’s readers search posts, web pages linked from the blog, other blogs on the blog roll, as well as pages on the shared links list.
Google initially launched the gadget on its Blogger in Draft platform, which offers users a version of Blogger where Google tests out features and new interfaces. Google says it has upgraded the search gadget to provide simpler defaults as well as the ability for the box to integrate with the aesthetics and color of your blog. The Search Box gadget uses AJAX Search APIs to power the feature and also automatically updates the custom linked search engine when you update your blog, blog lists, or link lists.
Custom search can be a useful tool for blogs because it allows readers to not only search a blog’s content but also any pages or favored sites that are linked to, giving readers a related, but still-focused, search experience.
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Apple? Greedy? Perish the thought! Some bleeding edge iPhone users may beg to differ though: this past weekend, some of them were prompted to pay up again when trying to re-download an already-purchased app.
When you look at sales of the iPhone or Blackberry as a percentage of total cell phone sales, they are still a tiny smidgen of the one billion phones estimated to be sold this year. But when you look at what really matters—their share of revenues or operating profits—the picture looks a lot different. Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff calculated the share of operating profits going to each major mobile handset manufacturer and came up with the eye-opening chart above. It shows Apple (pink) and RIM (turquoise) increasingly taking a disproportionate share of industry profits, mostly at the expense of Nokia’s diminishing handset operating profits (blue).
In a note, Modoff writes: “Increasingly, the smartphone vendors are claiming more of the industry’s profit dollars even as the pool of profitability stabilizes or shrinks.” Thanks to the success of the highly-profitable iPhone, Apple’s share of industry operating profits went from 3 percent in 2007 to 20 percent in 2008 and will grow again to an estimated 31 percent in 2009. RIM, maker of the Blackberry, is doing even better, increasing its estimated share of industry profits from 8 percent (2007) to 19 percent (2008) to 35 percent (2009). So adding those two together, Apple and RIM are expected to account for an incredible 66 percent of industry profits this year.
Meanwhile, once-dominant Nokia is seeing its estimated share of industry profits drop from 64 percent (2007) to 57 percent (2008) to 32 percent (2009). The only other major manufacturer to grow its profit share is Samsung, from 14 prcent last year to an estimated 19 percent this year. (A note on methodology: These numbers take into account operating losses at companies such as Motorola and Palm, and the total adds up to 100 only when you subtract their losses, which are expressed as negative percentages).
Such a massive shift in control of industry profits is unprecedented and speaks to the growing value of software in the cell phone industry. It also speaks to the missteps of the traditional handset manufacturers (only Samsung seems to have its act together) and the end of unbridled growth for the industry. Modoff expects total unit sales to decline slightly this year back down to one billion, while industry revenues will continue to come down from their 2007 peak. Nevertheless, Apple and RIM, will continue to take share in both units and revenues as the rest of the industry struggles (see charts below).
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Jacksonville, Florida-based Cliqset is launching the second beta version of its online identity platform today with some nifty new features, and is also announcing that it has raised $1.5 million in financing from a single angel investor.
Cliqset is not exactly an easy concept to explain, but here goes. Essentially, the platform aims to stitch together the social web by allowing users and developers build, organize and share social information across a wide variety of services. As an end user, Cliqset can help you merge and share the social information (your status updates, location, photos, etc) currently scattered around the web with the people, applications and devices you already use and trust. Developers on the other hand get access to an extensive set of read/write social APIs they can use as an alternative to building and managing support for their own.
The second beta, launching today, comes with a new Location Services API that allows developers to build apps for web and mobile by using location info from users. With the API, developers can fetch and use address information using the latitude and longitude coordinates provided by mobile devices. The gathered location information can be tied to user activities but also be used to store more generic location information that’s relevant to the applications they build on top of the Cliqset platform.
A related new element is the integration of Cliqset location services with third-party services like BrightKite, FireEagle and Twitter, basically simplifying how a user can keep their social and location information in sync across the Web.
Also new is a fresh push/pull architecture for social information that travels to and from Cliqset, Cliqset-enabled applications and the supported third-party services. A mix of push/pull functionality is now possible with over 30 third-party services, including Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, identica, laconica, Linkedin, FireEagle, and FriendFeed. It’s like the latter on steroids, actually.
Cliqset has recently closed its second seed round, $1.5 million coming from angel investor Derek Mercer, founder and former chairman and CEO of Vurv Technology, a provider of talent management software that was acquired in 2008 by Taleo for about $128.8 million. This comes in addition to an earlier early-stage capital injection of $500,000 by the man, bringing the total invested in the startup to $2 million.
Here’s a cool way for music artists to reward their biggest fans and get some Viral Marketing® in return: drummer Travis Barker and turntablist DJ-AM (aka Adam Goldstein) are offering their just-released second mixtape, “Fix Your Face Vol. 2 - Coachella ‘09″, up for free download in exchange for a mere Twitter message.
The duo, conventiently made up of two heavy Twitter users (@trvsbrkr and @DJ_AM), aims to score some extra buzz on the social networking service and is giving away the co-produced mixtape (under the name TRV$DJAM) to anyone who sends out a tweet that reads “Download the new #trvsdjam mixtape “Fix Your Face Vol. 2 - Coachella 09″ in exchange for one tweet!”. Note that you need to go to this website and grant access to an application using OAuth before you send that message.
Last week everyone got to see the demo video and a few of us were actually able to access Bing for our reviews. Most everyone, though, just had to wait to actually try the service.
Initial reader comments tended towards the negative on announcement day. Microsoft got heat for having nothing but a landing page up (and not even that for a while after the announcement). The “Bing stands for But It’s Not Google” comment appeared a number of times, as did sarcastic comments like “Looks like Live search again. Good to see Microsoft trying new things.” There were also a few variations of “MS is a bloated sinking ship…bing is nothing but a desperate attempt by an obsolete company.” You get the picture.
Today, though, they can actually try it. And the overwhelming number of user comments on our launch post Sunday evening are extremely positive. People like Bing. A few of them:
So long Google … I'm a Binger now
lol i agree. all the search results i get are very good and i really like this interface.
Bing looks interesting and very promising, It gives perfect results for couple of my favourate searches [aah my name ]
It is fast, accurate, visually pleasing - and as Sam said above - Holly crap, it doesn't suck. I really like the way the images are done - click on an image in the gallery and then the results go along the left hand side - that is a sweet feature. The news search falls a bit short - but hey.
The results are actually good. i did a search for "extend a dd-wrt network with airport express" and was impressed by the qlty of the results. also the results look clean. and the left hand guided search assistant is great.
good results and feels really responsive and fast. Will use.
I kinda like it….will have to play with it for a week or so.
Wow! Did Microsoft finally nail search? Had to know they would get it right at some point…
Also quite impressed. Even though there are heavy graphics, it still feels light and responsive. I actually think it makes Google feel a little stale.
wow…… bing is good……..surprise coming from Microsoft…
I expected the worst and was pleasantly surprised. The images search was better (more relevant) that what I was getting at Google. I also tried some searches that I normally use Google for and most of the same results came up, in roughly the same order (meaning I could use this thing for real after all). The only problem I see is breaking the habit of using Google. That Bing is actually competent and useful for search is really surprising. MS nailed it. Even if it's not "as good as" Google, it's pretty damn close.
My thoughts on Bing: I like it. And I’d consider using it as my search engine. But like many people I’m used to Google and I know how to find the things I’m looking for. Bing returns very different results for a lot of queries, which is great. But it also means spending time learning how to use Bing to get what you need out of it. I’ll spend that time because it’s my job. But for most people, they’ll stick to what they know, and that’s Google.
If Microsoft takes search share with Bing, it will likely be from Yahoo. If I were Yahoo and I was thinking of doing a search deal, I’d pull that trigger sooner rather than later. Yahoo wants a “boatload” of money to do a search deal or sell the company outright. Microsoft offered a boatload last year for either deal and couldn’t get it done. If Bing is a hit, there’s little reason for them to offer more. Google’s blocked from working with Yahoo, so they aren’t going anywhere.
I’ll sum up with this - whether Microsoft ultimately succeeds or not in “winning” the search war, the competition is very good for the rest of the Internet. Google needs to be pushed to try innovating new things (not this). And search marketing competition will ensure that Google doesn’t get too greedy. We don’t need Microsoft to win, but we do need to avoid a world with just one search engine that matters. Maybe Microsoft can win that lesser war, at least.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Seatwave, the UK-based upstart behind the eponymous marketplace for secondary tickets, has landed $17 million in Series D funding led by Accel Partners with Atlas Venture, Mangrove Capital Partners, Fidelity Ventures and Adinvest joining the round, writes Atlas partner Fred Destin on his blog.
Recently named Europe’s fastest growing digital media company by investment bank GP Bullhound, Seatwave allows fans to trade theatre, sport and music tickets online and thus competes (hard) with TicketMaster (IAC), StubHub (eBay) and that other well-funded startup in the ticket reselling space, Viagogo, which raised over $65 million to date including an investment from tennis legends Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf. The primary reason it was selected is because the company reportedly saw its revenue rise 2203 per cent in the past two years, with user numbers having increased to 1.9m monthly users today and exchange operations in five countries.
The company was founded in 2006 by Joe Cohen, formerly with Ticketmaster and Match.com, and Atlas Venture, which remains the largest shareholder. Seatwave has now raised a whopping total of $53 million including this round. The startup raised seed and $3 million in Series A funds from Atlas Venture in 2006, $8 million from Mangrove CP and Atlas in 2007, and raised a large $25 million round back in February 2008.
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Edocr, a smaller competitor to other document sharing startups like DocStoc and Scribd, re-launches today with new features and an API, after a long time off-radar.
Eschewing the publisher focus of Issuu, or the broad business focus of DocStoc, the boot-strapped Edocr focuses on corporates and organisations. So for instance, companies can upload all their public-facing documents, whether they be company reports, press releases, guidance documents, you name it. Admittedly the slightly dull-but-necessary focus is not going to set the world alight, but with plenty of enterprises still getting their heads around the basics of blogging, RSS and even social networks like Twitter, edocr is a simple way for companies to share their PDFs without being lumped alongside a pirated copy of a Harry Potter novel.
New features include an improved design, bulk uploading of documents, an API, document categories, better search and the ability to auto-tweet to a Twitter account when new documents get uploaded. The question is, will that be enough to set it apart from the many players in this field?
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
This is just too good. One of the features of Microsoft’s just launched Bing search engine is that it auto-plays videos in results when you hover over them. Naturally, the first thing a number of people, like Loic Le Meur, did was search for “sex” or “porn.” The results are majestic — if you’re a teenager looking for a way around porn filters on your computer. And this isn’t artful porn or something like it, it’s straight-up, hardcore pornography.
Now, to be fair, to see these results, you do have to manually override the adult filter on the video search, but that’s a whole 2 clicks and doesn’t require that you actually verify your age or anything. The Bing team on Twitter is already warning users about this following Loic and other’s tweets about the issue. But the results literally speak for themselves. If you’re so inclined, go ahead and try, it’s one hell of a way to browse porn. Straight porn, gay porn, you name it. It’s all there, ready to auto-play.
I had one hell of a time just finding a result that would be easy enough for me to edit with you still being able to tell what it is. Obviously, this stuff is not safe for work — unless perhaps you work on the Bing team.
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MashLogic, a browser tool that gives users contextual information about content on websites (since publisher-driven links often don’t do the job), is coming out of beta this morning. And they’re announcing a second seed round of financing - $500,000 from high profile investors SoftTech VC, Scott Kurnit (About.com founder), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder) and Gil Penchina (Wikia CEO). Kurnit also joins the board of directors of the company.
Bessemer Venture Partners is incubating the startup and put in most of the original $900,000 in seed money. The company has raised a total of $1.4 million to date and works out of the Bessemer offices.
MashLogic is a more direct approach. Users must download a Firefox plugin to use it, but there's no toolbar. Instead, you simply change the settings to tell it what kind of information you'd like to have included on web pages. Links to Wikipedia is an easy one. But it also has company links to LinkedIn to show you people there you might know. And a currency converter. Etc. It's like a frickin Swiss Army Knife for hyperlinks.
One setting I like - the ability to remove all links on a page, and then only MashLogic links appear. For a lot of sites, the user experience is vastly superior. You can also create blacklists of domains that won't show up in links on the page, even if the original publisher put them there.
Once you've got the tool configured, smart links will start popping up all over the place. Professional Athletes get their playing stats, Politicians get a real time poll of their progress towards the White House. Currencies are *zap* converted. You can even see a map for any street address.
Their goal is to save you from having to go back to the search engine to find the next thing you're intersted in but isn't linked on the site.
The site has evolved since October. It’s now available for Internet Explorer in addition to Firefox. Also, any topic trending up on Twitter is highlighted and linked (at the user option), with additional information on who’s tweeting about that topic. And if a Twitter username appears in the text of a web page (as they do in our comments), clicking on it brings up a box with that Twitter users information. Users can also post to their Twitter accounts. Here’s how it looks:
MashLogic works with publishers to create slightly customized versions of the product that pull information from that publisher first. Users can customize away from those changes, but most don’t. We’ve been distributing a version of MashLogic since last October and it drives a fair amount of traffic to us from people seeing TechCrunch and CrunchBase content “linked” from around the web.
It’s one of the few products I’ve tried that I’ve stuck with over these last months. It definitely makes browsing and research easier. Try it, I think you’ll like it.
Here’s an interview I did today with founder/VP Ranjit Padmanabhan. After I butcher his name we see how it all works:
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It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as go Google yourself, but now you can go Bing yourself. (Then again, Google took a few years to become a verb.). Bing, Microsoft’s latest effort to compete in search, is now live on a “preview” site. The key thing to pay attention to is the guided search assistance on the left and the different experiences for the travel, images, video, maps, news, and shopping tabs.
A few things to try:
An ambiguous Web search: “turkey” (do you want images, recipes, facts, or a map of the country? The topic guides in the left explore pane will help you narrow your search).
Many believe the greatest potential of Twitter lies in its ability to perform real-time searches of various keywords. So when that functionality is delayed by some 3 hours, as it is right now, and has been throughout much of the night, with no explanation, you can imagine that users are going to get a little annoyed.
Go ahead, search for anything right now — a good example is for the word “the,” as it’s used in a ton of tweets. The most recent results you’ll find are from 3 hours ago. [Update below, it's back with a huge gaping hole.] Not only does this badly impact my vanity searches, but there are companies who now rely on Twitter Search to run services such as brand management. Imagine the horror Comcast must be feeling right now not being able to see my tweets constantly bitching about their crap service in real-time.
Likewise, Trending Topics is not working as it also relies on Twitter Search. So we’re being tricked into thinking people actually care about the MTV Movie Awards.
We’ve gotten tipped this a number of times throughout the day, but I’ve largely been ignoring it, trying to give Twitter the benefit of the doubt to at least update us on what is going on. But this is ridiculous. Fix your damn search functionality Twitter, you’re not much use without it.
Update: And it’s back up — with a nice little 4 hour gaping hole of tweets not indexed. Go ahead and try this query and if you go back far enough, you’ll see that it all of a sudden jumps back 4 hours at one point. All those tweets, apparently, lost.
You guys didn't think I'd go to China and forget to bring you back something, did you? Sillies.
Since I got home from China last week, I’ve found myself in a lot of conversations where phrases like “the next Silicon Valley,” or “just like Silicon Valley used to be,” keep coming up. But while China is swimming in capital and littered with start-ups, I’m going to argue it’s not the next Silicon Valley. In fact, it’s something far different than I’ve ever seen before.
Blog and media network 
As we’ve relentlessly documented, the Twitter-based game 
But if you don’t want to use Topify, Spymaster itself has come up with a way to opt-out of these invitation DMs. Simply 
At this morning’s 
Apple? Greedy? Perish the thought! Some bleeding edge iPhone users may beg to differ though: this past weekend, some of them were prompted to pay up again when trying to re-download an already-purchased app.
Jacksonville, Florida-based 
Thursday may 
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