Apple may be known for its advertising prowess, but this little marketing coup is going to go down as one of the most hilarious ad placements in recent history. doubleTwist, the company co-founded by renowned software reverse engineer DVD Jon, has managed to place a banner for its product directly next to the main entrance to Apple’s flagship San Francisco store.
The ad invites passersby to try “The Cure for iPhone Envy”, which they can use to access their “iTunes Library on any device. In Seconds”. It’s clearly a message that Apple doesn’t want anything to do with. We’re hearing that Apple employees are currently scratching their heads as to how this appeared. So how did this wind up only a few feet from the store’s entrance, and directly beneath a giant Apple logo?
Apparently the window technically belongs to BART, the Bay Area’s commuter transit system. doubleTwist got in touch with an ad agency that BART deals with and leased the window, giving them the chance to plaster their ad just below the Apple logo in its full glory. This is apparently the first time the window has been used for this purpose (before it just sat bare). And because everything was done legally, Apple’s going to have a hard time getting rid of it.
While DVD Jon has a long history of reverse engineering digital media security, doubleTwist is a perfectly legitimate software application that makes it easy to manage media files for a variety of hardware devices. It’s sort of like iTunes, except it works for nearly any device — not just your iPod and iPhone (you can find an extensive overview here, and the app now supports both Windows and Mac). Given that one of the iPod’s biggest advantages over competitors is the seamless experience it offers to users, Apple probably isn’t a big fan.
Tonight’s the night that we’re announcing the winners of The TechFellow Awards, and you can watch the ceremony live right here on TechCrunch at 9 pm PST, care of a live video feed from Ustream.
The TechFellow Awards is a a new startup investment program that we created in partnership with Founders Fund. At least twelve fellows will be granted $25,000 each tonight to invest in an early stage startup of their choice. Founders Fund will invest an additional $25,000 alongside those investments and request an additional right to invest another $250,000 when the company raises its next round of financing. In all, Founders Fund expects to devote around $3.6 million to the program.
An amazing group of people have helped us select winners of the TechFellow Awards and will be attending the ceremony tonight at the beautiful and newly-renovated California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park:
A year ago MySpace and Fox Interactive Media were trumpeting an upcoming office move to Playa Vista in Los Angeles. Peter Levinsohn (former) President of the no longer existing Fox Interactive Media, justified the move to the 300,000 square foot space based on the “phenomenal success” of the business, and noted that he expected “even greater growth and achievements in the coming fiscal year.”
FIM has experienced phenomenal success in its three-year history, and we have plans for even greater growth and achievements in the coming fiscal year. Given our tremendous track record, it's only fitting that we should enter into the single biggest real-estate transaction in Los Angeles in the last 25 years. When we move to our new facility between June of 2009 and January of 2010, not only will we enjoy the distinction of having one of the largest corporate headquarters in the LA area, but we will be housed in a state-of-the-art facility that reflects our corporate identity and culture.
Time to cut costs. And people cuts alone won’t do the trick. Levinsohn said “Given our tremendous track record, it's only fitting that we should enter into the single biggest real-estate transaction in Los Angeles in the last 25 years.” Now new digital chief Jonathan Miller, who has probably noted that with all the layoffs MySpace doesn’t really need all that hip new square footage, is saying they’re backing out of that transaction. In an email to all MySpace employees, Miller said:
Everyone,
Since coming on board, it's no secret that I have asked each of the executive teams within my organization to conduct a comprehensive strategic review of their businesses to ensure that we are operating as efficiently and effectively as possible. These reviews have included a very close look at our costs and a full examination of our resource allocation – an important exercise that will help us determine whether our resources are aligned properly with our business priorities. This process is still ongoing and we will be communicating the details of the reviews as the results become available.
One immediate result is that we have determined that we will not be moving to Playa Vista. After taking many different factors into account, we have decided that the best plan for our businesses is to remain in our current locations for the near future. We're making great progress building strong standalone businesses at each of our LA locations, and the last thing we want to do is to interfere with that momentum. In addition, the realities of the current economy make the prospects of a move incredibly expensive, a fact that I believe makes this decision not only good for our working environments, but also for our bottom line.
As I mentioned above, the strategic reviews are ongoing and I assure you that our executive teams are working as quickly as possible to determine what, if any, additional decisions will be made and we will communicate with all of you as frequently as possible in this regard.
Best,
Jon
It’s funny how MySpace PR fell all over themselves to get the word out on the new office space last year, but not a word on pulling out now. We hear the San Francisco office is next to go.
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Last week, Facebook took a $200 million investment that valued the company at $10 billion. So if Facebook is worth $10 billion, how much is Twitter worth? After all, Twitter turned down $500 million from Facebook late last year, and founder Evan Williams might not even sell it for $1 billion. But how about for $1.7 billion?
That is the valuation we come up with when we run Twitter’s numbers through our new social network valuation model. The model takes into account the size of each social network’s audience in different countries and the average online spending per capita in those countries. Using Facebook’s $10 billion valuation as a baseline, Twitter would be the fourth most valuable social network after MySpace ($6.5 billion) and Bebo ($1.8 billion).
Of course, that $10 billion valuation was for preferred shares, so $1.7 billion might be a valuation a strategic investor or acquirer would be willing to place on Twitter. If you use the $4 billion to $6 billion range Facebook’s common stock is being valued at in private sales, then Twitter’s valuation would come down to $671 million to $1 billion. And if you use Bebo’s 2008 valuation of $850 million as a benchmark instead, Twitter would be worth $781 million.
So there is your range: roughly $700 million to $1.7 billion. And remember, Twitter may still have scaling issues, but it doesn’t have all the costs that Facebook has in terms of storage and other capital expenditures. For one thing,Twitter isn’t keeping everyone’s photos on its servers—that is what TwitPic and Yfrog are for. On the flip side, there is also the question of revenues, which remains an open question for Twitter (and for Facebook, for that matter). Is Twitter going to make money from real-time search, corporate accounts, or maybe even figuring out a way to sell followers? Given how engaged a large portion of Twitter’s users are already and how it is becoming a hot testbed for opt-in marketing, it is not inconceivable that Twitter’s users will be worth more to advertisers than Facebook’s. But before we can find out, Twitter needs to pick a business model.
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We’ve taken a break from reviewing elevator pitches for awhile but we’re back with a good one: VocabSushi. The pitch is concise yet detailed and manages to pack in a good amount of content into a one-minute pitch. The founder, Jeff Novich (an SAT tutor), even managed to squeeze in the price points for the services.
VocabSushi is an online verbal test prep service that helps you prepare for standardized tests like the SAT, ACT, and GRE by teaching you vocab words with real-world, contextual examples found in the daily news. The site crawls the daily news from around the U.S. to find examples of vocab words to show users context of how a word is used while also seeing the definition of the word. VocabSushi has compiled lists of vocab words commonly tested on each standardized test and contains recorded MP3 pronunciations, definitions and sample sentences for every VocabSushi word.
The site’s tests simulate traditional verbal standardized tests, offering you sample definition multiple choice and sentence completion questions. VocabSushi’s tests are intuitive and tracks your progress overall and for every word. When you learn words, they’re automatically replaced with newer, more challenging ones. You can also download word quiz podcasts and print PDF version of tests.
Pricing is $10 for month, $25 for 3 months, and $50 for a year’s subscription to the service. Kaplan, Princeton Review and others offer online tutoring for the verbal sections of standardized tests but don’t have the intuitive testing and comprehensive audio pronunciation and real-world context features of VocabSushi. Prepme’sstandardized test help system also keeps track of what questions you get right and wrong, remembering what questions you miss and challenging you accordingly. Prepme’s plans are pricier, but the startup offers comprehensive tutoring for all subject matters of standardized tests. Learn10 is another interactive vocabulary learning site.
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I’ve been spending the last few days fooling around with Google Squared, the search giant’s experimental attempt to generate structured results, and for the most part I’d consider myself cautiously optimistic. Now, Google has made it clear that Squared is still in pretty early stages. The logo has a nice big “Labs” title slapped on it, complete with green beaker. The blog post introducing the product to the public stated that Squared is experimental and that “this technology is by no means perfect” and is merely a first step. There’s no question that Google doesn’t think this product is ready for prime time. It’s just opening up the lab so we can see the nifty stuff that’s starting to form.
Which is why I’m already getting annoyed by the stories pointing out how funny it is that Google Squared has declared the current Russian president dead or that President Obama passed away in 1982. Oh, Prince William kicked the bucket, too. And Google Squared apparently hates conservatives. It’s probably only a matter of time before the mainstream press picks up on a potentially offensive result and multiple organizations scream with feigned outrage.
For those who haven’t been keeping up with it, Squared is a fairly major departure for Google that could eventually change the way we look up data on the web. If you run a query for “dogs“, rather than present a list of pages relevant to canines as the ‘normal’ Google would, Squared attempts to generate a spreadsheet of dog breeds, complete with their average height, weight, and country of origin. As with Wolfram Alpha, another structured data search engine, it’s very cool when it works — it just doesn’t work all that often.
Anyone who has used Squared for more than two minutes knows that it messes up quite a bit. I think you’d be hard pressed to search more than a few queries in a row that didn’t result in clearly incorrect facts or glaring omissions. Many of the service’s initial reviews pointed this out, and for good reason. We’ve all seen the goofs. But at this point honing in on a poor result just feels mean spirited and lazy.
The alternative is for Google to restrict access to Squared until it does work consistently, which could be years, if ever. What Google is doing here is pretty gutsy, and the fact that they’re letting us play with it when it’s still half-baked makes it even more so. So let’s take Squared for what it is, and (hopefully) help it grow into something powerful rather than harp on its self-admitted flaws.
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Just yesterday, we reported how .com domain registrations were starting to turn around again after a lackluster 2008. Today brings further proof as the domain candy.com has just sold for $3 million to G&J Holdings. That makes it the second largest domain purchase this year, following Toys R Us’ acquisition of toys.com.
G&J Holdings plans to use candy.com to sell — get this — candy. They would like to become the online destination for all your candy needs by offering expedited shipping and competitively price products, as well as a nice shopping experience. But really, how much does all of that matter when you have the awesome candy.com domain name? The press release claims there are over 800,000 searches for the word “candy” each month — hence, the $3 million price tag.
The deal was actually all set to be done a couple months ago, but it took all this time to finalize it (read: for the lawyers to go over it). The site was purchased from the “Domain King,” who has all the details of how it went down. His real name is Rick Schwartz and he made a name for himself last year when he sold the ireport.com domain to CNN for $750,000. He also owned property.com which was sold for some ridiculous amount to foreclosure.com as the economy collapsed.
Pixelpipe, the service that lets you syndicate text, audio, video and image files to 80 different social networks, blogs and sites, has launched an amped up version of their Android app. Following the release of the Android 1.5 “cupcake” that has video capture functionality, Pixelpipe’s app lets you upload video and audio directly from the device to over 45 social media destinations.
The new app, which previously let you send photos as your status update or blog/micro-blog post, will link to media and send out a shortened link back to the user’s customizable pi.pe landing page. Similar to TwitPic, a pi.pe page is a customized Pixelpipe landing page where media can link back to.
The Android app also lets you upload MP3s and audio recordings directly from the handset to music-focused social networks such as Imeem, as well as to Twitter, as a status update or an email. Since video files can be so large, the startup has rewritten its mobile upload service to accommodate large files being transferred from slower mobile connections. Pixelpipe’s app also enables background uploads, allowing users to just press the home key to put Pixelpipe in the background and still continue an upload. This contrasts to its iPhone app, which loses the connection to the application as soon as the application is closed.
Pixelpipe’s app will be a boon to Android users out there, especially given the new video uploading capabilities. The true virtue of Pixelpipe’s service is the fact that it lets you publish all types of files to various social networks and sites from a centralized place versus TwitPic, which lets you publish photos to just to Twitter, or TwitVid, which lets you publish videos to Twitter. The latest Androids got some buzz last week at Google I/0, where the company handed out free G2 Androids to attendees as a thank you to the development community. While Android’s market share is still small, a full 18 to 20 different handsets are expected to be released this year from a variety of manufacturers.
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More evidence just came in that the recession has come to online advertising (in case you were still wondering). The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCooper today reported their numbers for online advertising revenues in the U.S., and they are not pretty. Internet advertising declined 5 percent in the first quarter of 2009 to $5.5 billion, compared to the first quarter of 2008. Industry revenues were down an even steeper 9.8 percent sequentially from the fourth quarter’s $6.1 billion.
Last quarter’s falloff was first evident after Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL announced their earnings numbers. As I noted in a month ago, the online ad revenues of those four stalwarts declined by 2 percent annually in the first quarter (7 percent sequentially) to $7.9 billion. But that is a worldwide number. Today’s IAB estimate adds further evidence that the U.S. is following the global trend.
Does one down quarter make a recession? The typical rule of thumb is two down quarters in a row, but that is for the economy as a whole, not for individual sectors. I guess we can wait to see what happens in the second quarter. The worst might very well be behind us. Or not. Either way, online advertising is hurting and seeing not just slowing growth, but actual dollar declines. Without a pickup in the general economy, online advertising will continue to sputter. Who thinks the second quarter will bring another decline? Who thinks it will show a rebound?
A secret tipster pointed us to a Credit Suisse report that posits that Microsoft is working hard on an ad-supported version of Microsoft Office. There will be two versions - one web-based and one for a desktop install - and both will have limited functionality compared to the full-bore suite. The plan is to create a version that is immune to piracy. Nigeria, for example, has a 92% piracy rate while the US is at 20%. Creating a free version would allow schools and average folk to enjoy an Microsoft Works-like environment while ensuring a steady stream of real revenue from larger IT shops.
Fridays on Twitter usually mean one thing: Being bombarded with “Follow Friday” messages. You know the ones, they contain usually no information other than a bunch of Twitter names followed by the #followfriday hashtag. But this Friday brings a new potential challenger: Robot Pickup Lines.
Thousands of messages are coming across the network tagged with #robotpickuplines. As you might expect, they are suave lines a robot might say to pickup another robot. Here are a few choice ones:
I have a feeling that the countdown to backlash against this meme is already on, so get your witty line out there before you’re ridiculed for it.I, for one, like this meme just because it beats the boring Follow Friday one, and reminds me of Conan O’Brien’s old Pimpbot 5000 routine.
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Google has a post today on its blog outlining how many of its applications are built right into the Palm Pre’s webOS. That’s hardly surprising given that it’s an OS built around the web technologies Google knows and loves: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But buried in the post is a little nugget of information that is sure to enrage some iPhone owners: The Pre will support push Gmail from the get-go.
Push technology allows an email to come to your phone without the user having to specifically call up to the server to get it (known as “pull”). This means near instantaneous receipt of messages as opposed to your phone being set to check for new messages at set intervals, which is how Gmail configured through the iPhone’s mail client currently works. Push Gmail has been rumored for a little while. But now it looks like Google is ready to tout it.
Push email is a feature that made BlackBerry devices so popular back in the day, but now it’s on a number of phones — including the iPhone with MobileMe email and Yahoo Mail. But, despite users clamoring for push Gmail since the iPhone 2.0 software launched last year, it’s still not available. The Pre is able to do it because it supports the IMAP IDLE protocol, according to the post.
Push Gmail also not surprisingly works on Google Android phones. But there is no word on when it will be available on the iPhone other than some short messages in the past that Google was working on it. Considering the budding rivalry between the iPhone and the Pre, and Apple’s close ties to Google, I’m betting we’ll see it come soon to the iPhone as well. Who knows, we could even hear about it at WWDC on Monday — let’s hope.
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Yahoo just opened its doors to a bunch of new OpenSocial apps. People who use MyYahoo as a startpage can now add apps from Mint, KaChing, WordPress, and more. The apps include a small view which appear on your MyYahoo page, but can also open up into a canvas view (which is essentially a dedicated page on Yahoo for that particular app). The Mint app, for instance, gives you a dashboard view of your finances and alerts. The WordPress app lets you do a quick post to your blog right from Yahoo. All together, Yahoo added 14 new apps for users to choose from. You can check your meds (Drugs.com), gas prices (GasBuddy), fantasy stock portfolio (kaChing), food and wine pairings (MyRecipes + Snooth), share books (WeRead), or just play Flood-It (LabPixies). You gotta add Flood-It, love that game.
The underlying apps will benefit from getting extra exposure on MyYahoo, but it won’t drive much traffic to their sites. People who want to go deeper into the apps will simply open up a canvas page, much like they do on Facebook. But that is okay, because it shouldn’t really matter where your users interact with your service. For Yahoo, this is yet another step in its effort to be the starting point on the Web for its users. The nice thing about the OpenSocial apps is that users don’t have to leave Yahoo to engage with them. So it is really Yahoo’s way of remaining a destination site and keeping its users within its walls, even if they are using non-Yahoo services. Today, Yahoo is also bringing some new add-ons into Yahoo! Mail, including PayPal and Picnik. And Yahoo! TV (which is built into some Samsung and LG TVs) now lets you watch YouTube videos.
The apps are built on top of the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP). The canvas views at least support OpenSocial, but app developers still have to tweak the apps to make them Yahoo-friendly. For instance, the “small view” (i.e. the widgets which actually appear on the MyYahoo page) must be developed using “Yahoo! Markup Language” (YML), which is an extension of HTML with more bells and whistles. Yahoo is trying to bring together YML and the OpenSocial Markup Language (OSML), but right now they are forked. But turning an OpenSocial app into one that works inside Yahoo is getting easier. Yahoo joined OpenSocial last year. No word yet on when MyYahoo will start supporting Facebook apps. Oh right, cause that’s never gonna happen.
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Yahoo is introducing a slew of new applications that aim to complement its free webmail service today. Since December last year, Yahoo features a number of third-party applications inside Yahoo Mail, such as Xoopit, Flickr and Flixster, all in a good effort to reduce the amount of websites you need to visit as well as time you need to spend to perform certain task related to communicating with your friends, relatives or co-workers.
Starting today, that list includes other tools like online payment handling platform PayPal, basic photo editor Picnik, Xoopit service MyPhotos and file sharing application Zumo Drive. If you already have access to the applications Yahoo brought to Yahoo Mail back in December, you'll notice several of the apps the next time you log in, located along the left side of your inbox.
Thanks to the integration, Yahoo mail users get access to a number of useful services without the need to leave the communication interface. That way, Yahoo intends to increase the stickiness of one of its core products, in a relative, open-minded way. After all, users now don’t need to leave the interface to e.g. crop photos, transfer money, share large attachments with others, and so on, and Yahoo is not restricting itself to using or building proprietary tools.
Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie faced down two hardball questions in a Q & A wrap to a conversation with Wired editor Steven Levy at the Churchill Club. On one, a much anticipated question about Google's new realtime collaboration tool Wave, Ozzie had put a lot of thought into the answer. He praised the small startup project as only he could, as a clone of the Groove software he sold to Microsoft while joining the company and taking the CSA reins from Bill Gates. But he also critiqued the Google effort as "anti-Web", suggesting the project took on such a hard problem that its complexity might curb its adoption. Nonetheless, he seemed to relish learning from Google's effort, positioning Live Mesh as a simpler reworking of Groove in the context of integration into the Microsoft OS. For a Silicon Valley audience who probably has paid little notice to Mesh, Ozzie's careful dissection may spark some deeper attention as Wave exits its early pilot stages and grapples with integration into Google Apps.
The cutesy culture at Google might be coming to an end. The company is finally getting serious by dropping the don’t-blame-us-it’s-only-a-beta label on products that have been around for years. We thought apps like Gmail and Google Docs would be the first to lose the beta label because those are sold to enterprise customers. But Google Finance beat them to it. If you go to Google Finance today, you will see that it has quietly dropped the beta label.
It is about time too. Google Finance launched more than three years ago. By now, it is a fully baked finance site. But Google isn’t making a big deal about the fact that Finance is now a full-fledged product. In fact, it isn’t making a big deal about anything on Google Finance. The Google Finance blog hasn’t been updated since last March.
Maybe Google is keeping quiet about its finance site because, despite going at it for three years and driving traffic straight from Google’s search homepage (ticker symbols pull up stock charts from Google Finance), it hasn’t been able to make much inroads against the most popular stock site out there, Yahoo Finance. According to comScore, Google Finance attracted just 1.4 million unique U.S. visitors in April, compared to Yahoo finance’s 21.7 million. In other words, Yahoo Finance is 15.5 times bigger than Google Finance (see chart below). In the past year, Yahoo Finance added 2.2 million monthly unique users in the U.S. In other words, it added more people than Google Finance’s entire audience. The worldwide numbers show a similar disparity, with Yahoo Finance at 43.5 million uniques vs. 2.4 million for Google Finance.
I find both equally informative, but Yahoo Finance is still my default. Old habits die hard.
(Shout out to reader Michael Konen for spotting the change).
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These are some very early prototypes Japan's No. 1 telecommunications company NTT recently showcased during the JPCA Show 2009 in Tokyo, but they are pretty cool to look at and may show a glimpse of the near future. The basic idea is to one day be able to offer cell phones featuring an interface for attachable and replaceable hardware add-ons. The company's Institute for Advanced Technology is researching on how to transform a conventional cell phone into a "physical", two-piece flute, for example. Users would then attach the upper part of a flute to their cell phone and press its keyboard buttons to make music. Songs can even be shared wirelessly with other users.
Reno, Nevada-based maker of slot machines and other gaming products International Game Technology has hired Chris Satchell to fill the newly-added position of CTO at the publicly listed company.
Satchell comes from Microsoft, where he filled the same role for Redmond’s Interactive Entertainment Business, responsible for technical strategy and execution across the video gaming business including Xbox, Games for Windows, Xbox LIVE and Microsoft Game Studios as well as future platform incubations.
Satchell is what you call an industry veteran, having held positions of executive director and engineering director at the 3DO Company and technical director at Silicon Dreams before joining Microsoft. At Redmond, he was general manager and chief software architect of XNA (Microsoft’s game development platforms and services), director of engineering for Microsoft Game Studios, and development manager for Studio RX (game titles such as Forza Motorsport, Fable and Crackdown).
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Great idea, good execution, reasonable traction, no future. That’s what it boils down to with the latest entry to the deadpool: Totlol, a video destination site that aggregates the best videos suitable for kids from YouTube with the help of a community of parents and toddlers, is closing down. When Erick reviewed the service back in November 2008, he deemed the service an impressive alternative to traditional Saturday morning TV cartoon watching and “children's Web video for the children of the YouTube generation”.
Unfortunately, while the initiative clearly struck a chord with thousands of parents and their kids, one-man company / Totlol developer Ron Ilan sees no future for the website:
“My focus over the past year has been on making Totlol the best video web site for kids and parents out there. I think I succeeded. It got great reviews. It has been copied and borrowed from. It is packed with features. It has an iPhone web app. It has an active user community. It is growing. Last month Totlol was visited 150,000 times.
While building Totlol I was constantly looking for ways to make it sustainable. I failed. A “normal” website would just “fill up” with ads, but Totlol is not a “normal” site. There are two things that set harsh limits on what can be done - the target audience and the usage of the YouTube platform. With Totlol you just can’t do what other websites do.
It is now June 2009, more than a year has gone by, and I find myself running a website that is loved and growing but has no future. It needs a long term sponsor and I can’t find one. I just can’t support and develop it all by myself anymore.
So, it is now time to say goodbye.”
Vancouver-based Ilan is shutting the site down for good on Canada Day, July 1st.
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Data from monitoring service StatCounter suggests that Bing, Microsoft’s new search decision engine, has overtaken Yahoo Search as the number two search service in the U.S. and worldwide in large part thanks to stealing market share from leader Google.
The company’s analysis for Thursday finds that in the U.S. Bing overtook Yahoo to take second place on 16.28%, with Yahoo Search currently at 10.22%. For the sake of comparison: Google’s U.S. market share is pegged at 71.47%, and its worldwide share at a whopping 87.62% (vs. 5.62% for Bing and 5.13% for Yahoo).
Are people just test-driving Bing en masse, or does this have anything to do with the fact Bing was forced upon IE6 users (now fixed)? Or is it just because it’s that good and the advertising is already working? Either way, the jump Bing appears to have made since launching merely a couple of days ago is significant, and the drop you see in Google’s share even more so.
(StatCounter claims to measure the search and browsing behavior of over two million users and says it tracks in excess of ten billion pageloads per month over its network of three million websites.)
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Mike Torres, Lead Program Manager on Microsoft’s Movie Maker team, has kicked off a series of blog posts about the upcoming release of Windows Live Movie Maker, which is supposed to replace the eponymous desktop video editing software that has come pre-installed on Windows machines ever since Windows ME hit the market.
So far, the application has been in public beta, but many have criticized the inclusion of the program in Live Essentials in such a rudimentary state, claiming it should have been left out until it was ready.
Torres acknowledges as much:
“We also learned a lot by releasing an early beta of Movie Maker last year. People were surprised (or shocked, rather!) at the limited number of transitions, effects, and overall functionality in the program. We wanted to release the beta to start the conversation about the use of the ribbon and some of the overall changes to the software model, but in hindsight, the application just wasn't useful enough for that. So, thanks for bearing with us as we've continued our work on Movie Maker.”
Windows 7, Microsoft’s next operating system, will not come with Movie Maker out of the box, so Microsoft wants to make Windows Live Movie Maker - official release due “later this year” - the primary tool for users who want to do some basic video editing. For that and other reasons, I thought it was pretty funny that one of the oft-requested features Torres cites in the blog post is support for Windows XP, the OS that pre-dates Vista.
Those users are out of luck, by the way, since Microsoft has decided not to add support for XP “given the technical requirements” (Windows XP lacks the new graphics driver model built into Vista and the upcoming Windows 7, as well as DirectX).
It’s one of Microsoft’s greatest tragedies: while they keep trying to better their products and adapt them to rapidly evolving technology in both hardware and software, they also need to factor in those tens of millions of users that are still using older systems and seem reluctant to upgrade to a new OS. The thing is: if Microsoft doesn’t innovate, it inevitably gets left (further) behind online, and when it does the company often alienates a large part of its customer base.
Or what you’d call finding yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place.
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Yahoo’s purchase of FoxyTunes for a rumored $30M legitimized the add-on play as a product strategy for Israeli startups.
I see new startups in this category almost weekly. We’re bearish on add-on plays because the "get them to download, install and use" parts are tricky - and monetizing those users is nearly impossible. In recent months, though, SimilarWeb’s name keeps popping-up and the reason may be the technology it’s spent two years building out. Sequoia Capital Israel, we’ve heard, is spending extra time looking into it and your typical add-on play doesn’t normally make their cut. So what is it about this little company?
On the surface SimilarWeb is everything you’d expect from a discovery Firefox/IE add-on. Once installed it docks to either side of the browser and displays similar sites, displayed as thumbnails or as a list. Users can rate each result with a thumbs up or down, the latter removing the result all together. Users can also suggest a site by pasting-in a URL. This not only customizes the user’s own results, it also impacts global results for all users. If you don’t want to install the add-on but still want to see it in action, try SimilarSites which pretty much mimics the experience in a web app.
Or Offer, CEO, was visibly uncomfortable every time I tried prying details about their technology, but finally relented with some general explanations: The backbone of SimilarWeb’s technology is based on multiphase analysis, which in plain English means that there are several engines running in the background, analyzing websites based on different mechanics, metrics and workflows. These include: user browsing trends, user ratings, tag analysis, ecosphere analysis, semantic breakdowns, and automated background research.
The company claims to have mapped millions of sites, and adding tens of thousands daily. This means that it will always suggest other sites, regardless of whether the site the user is currently on is a popular one, or one much further down the tail.
Nothing of the above stands out particularly or sheds light as to what’s so interesting about this company. A technical due diligence may be what’s necessary to truly understand SimilarWeb’s edge. No matter how you look at it though, the company is doing what it needs to be taken seriously… It has amassed thousands of users in the three months since its launch. Dr. Yossi Vardi is an investor and they seem to have Sequoia’s attention. Must be satisfying after two year’s worth of coding under the radar.
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Here’s some bittersweet news for those of you eagerly awaiting Google’s Chrome browser for Mac or Linux: tonight Google is publicly releasing developer versions of the Chrome browser for both operating systems, and anyone will be able to download them. Unfortunately you won’t be able to ditch Safari or Firefox just yet — these builds are not close to stable, and you won’t be able to use them on a day to day basis. But you’ll still be able to put something in your Dock that says Chrome, so that’s something, right?
For those who haven’t been paying close attention to the progress of Google’s browser on platforms other than Windows, you’ve actually been able to download builds of the open-source project behind Chrome, which is called Chromium, for quite a while. In our testing these builds have proven to be quite speedy, somewhat stable, but nowhere near ready for prime time — they don’t yet support plugins (including Flash), and there are a number of options that you’d expect out of a browser that simply aren’t there yet.
This developer version of Chrome is essentially a rebranded version of the Chromium project, and doesn’t represent a much-improved new branch that Google has quietly been working on. It still doesn’t support plugins, and there are still some other missing key features, like printing.
My initial impression to tonight’s news was that, while the stable version of Chrome might be a little ways away, tonight’s release might indicate that we’re at least getting close. Unfortunately, it still sounds like we have a while to wait (or at least, Google doesn’t want to get our hopes up early). This is the first part of Google’s three step release channel, which begins with the Developer version, continues to Beta, and finishes up with a build the company is comfortable deeming ‘Stable’. We’re at step one.
Google’s spokesman went as far as to say that the company doesn’t want us to download this version of Chrome unless we’re ready for frequent crashes and a generally not-so-great experience. But if you’re looking to start testing the evolving browser under the name ‘Chrome’ rather than ‘Chromium’, then have at it.
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We're at the Churchill Club's "Potential of Cloud Computing" event, where Wired's Senior Writer Steven Levy is interviewing Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. Ozzie made some interesting predictions on the future of cloud computing a few weeks ago at J.P. Morgan's Technology, Media and Telecom Conference. Microsoft is continuing to assert its position in the cloud as the release of its cloud computing platform, Azure, draws near.
Earlier this year three key MySpace executives jumped ship only two months before the company’s major reorg. Since then they’ve been pretty quiet — we’ve learned that they raised a $10 million funding round led by August Capital and Redpoint Ventures, but aside from that there hasn’t been much to go on. Now, more details are starting to emerge: we know that the company will be called Blue Rover Labs, and we’ve gotten our first glimpse of the homepage.
Earlier this afternoon each of the team members tweeted out a link to Blue Rover Labs at approximately the same time, with no explanation given. The page is quite sparse, with little on it other than a list of the current staff. The three MySpace execs, Amit Kapur (former MySpace COO), Steve Pearman (former MySpace SVP Product Strategy) and Jim Benedetto (former MySpace VP Technology) have apparently brought on Kunal Anand, a former MySpace Senior Technical Lead (and later, Grockit Engineer) as a fourth member.
The company describes itself as a “well-funded stealth internet startup”, and includes a note telling us that it’s happening “right now” and to “stay tuned for exciting news”. There’s also a link to a hiring page, where the company writes that it’s looking for “PHP ninjas, LAMP architects, memcached gurus, rock-star product managers, UX/UI experts, and other swiss-army-knife hackers”.
That’s about all we know so far, but it sounds like more details will be coming soon. We’re optimistic about this team, and eager to see what they come up with.
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A year ago we modeled out the true value of various social networks based on the idea that users in high-value online advertising markets like Japan, the UK and the U.S. were worth more (financially speaking) than those in lower value online advertising markets. Facebook had recently become the largest worldwide social network in terms of users, but based on our model MySpace was still by far the most valuable social network.
Based on the original year-old model, if Facebook was worth $15 billion (their then-current valuation), MySpace, with far more U.S. users, was worth nearly $20 billion:
Our model takes Comscore data for available countries and regions. We've graphed each of 26 well known social networks with the data we have been able to collect. We've then calculated the average advertising spend (estimated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in a recent report) for each person online in each of those countries. For example, in the U.S., the total 2008 estimated Internet advertising spend is $25.2 billion. We've divided that by the number of people online in the U.S. according to Comscore (191 million), to get an average Internet spend per person of $132. View the raw data and calculations here.
The U.S., by the way, is only the 4th most valuable market per Internet user, trailing The UK ($213), Australia ($148) and Denmark ($144).
We've then multiplied the average Internet spend per user in each market with the number of unique users each social network has in that market, essentially creating a "weighted average" based on the advertising dollars chasing users. If a social network has more users in the U.S., Japan, the UK, Germany, Australia, and other bigger advertising networks, they will have a higher weighted average valuation.
We believe this model is an effective way to rank various competing social networks. It bumps down networks like Orkut and Friendster who have tens of millions of users in markets with very little advertising spend, and bumps up networks with lots of users in higher value markets.
Based on this model, MySpace is by far the most valuable social network. Second place Facebook has just 75% of the value of MySpace (even though it now has more users), followed by Bebo (26% of MySpace value), Hi5 and Amebio. LinkedIn comes in at no. 11, at 6% of MySpace's value.
The new model takes into account the dramatic rise of Facebook usage over the last year, the massive recent decline in MySpace usage, and less dramatic changes in the other social networks. We’ve also modeled out the various valuations with the old Bebo ($850 million) and LinkedIn ($1 billion) valuations as pivot points. We’ve also added Twitter to the list just for kicks.
The bottom line: If Facebook is worth $10 billion today, MySpace is worth just $6.5 billion. Bebo is worth $1.8 billion, Twitter is worth $1.7 billion and LinkedIn is worth $0.8 billion. Facebook also accounts for 37% of all social networking value points in our model. Another way of saying this: If Facebook is worth $10 billion, the value of the entire social networking industry is $27.1 billion.
Lots of charts and graphs below. The full model is here if you want to look at all the data (I recommend zooming unless you have super vision). Thanks to TechCrunch intern Dan Romero for running the new model.
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Research In Motion has acquired Dash Navigation for an undisclosed amount, according to a spokeswoman for RIM. Dash, which makes makes the car GPS device Dash Express (read our review of the device here), had been struggling to compete with GPS device competitors like Garmin, and shifted its focus away from the hardware business last year towards selling its software to other device manufacturers.
Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia backed, Dash originally manufactured a network-connected GPS that pooled the location and speeds of all nearby Dash owners to give them back real-time traffic reports. The device has some notable features but couldn’t build a large user base and was forced to change its business plan and lay off 65% of its staff in November. We wrote back then that Dash’s API program was strong, so switching to licensing its software made sense. But the primary appeal of Dash’s software, which is built around being connected to other Dash owners and sharing driving data with each other, could be lost if the software is licensed by a device manufacturer.
RIM refused to comment on how Dash will be incorporated into its business but it’s safe to assume that the company will use Dash’s technology to upgrade the GPS in their devices in some capacity. This is similar to Nokia’s acquisition of digital map maker NAVTEQ in 2008 to help add map technology to their devices. Although RIM’s acquisition is on a slightly smaller scale, Dash’s technology does give RIM some important mapping and car navigation technologies, many of which can be applied more broadly to cell phones. If the connectivity feature of Dash is maintained by RIM, this could prove to be a useful tool for Blackberry users, given how many Blackberry devices are out there.
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Tonight’s the night that we’re announcing the 
Just yesterday, we 
A secret tipster pointed us to a Credit Suisse report that posits that Microsoft is working hard on an ad-supported version of Microsoft Office. There will be two versions - one web-based and one for a desktop install - and both will have limited functionality compared to the full-bore suite. The plan is to create a version that is immune to piracy. 
Fridays on Twitter usually mean one thing: Being bombarded with “Follow Friday” messages. You know the ones, they contain usually no information other than a bunch of Twitter names followed by the #followfriday hashtag. But this Friday brings a new potential challenger: Robot Pickup Lines.
Google has 
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On the surface SimilarWeb is everything you’d expect from a discovery Firefox/IE add-on. Once installed it docks to either side of the browser and displays similar sites, displayed as thumbnails or as a list. Users can rate each result with a thumbs up or down, the latter removing the result all together. Users can also suggest a site by pasting-in a URL. This not only customizes the user’s own results, it also impacts global results for all users. If you don’t want to install the add-on but still want to see it in action, try 
Here’s some bittersweet news for those of you eagerly awaiting Google’s Chrome browser for Mac or Linux: tonight Google is publicly 
We're at the 
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