Google’s Bob Lee creates a much better image to go with our post yesterday about One Laptop Per Child and Windows teaming up. More at CrunchGear. CrunchBase Information One Laptop Per Child Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Next month GigaOM will hold Structure 08, a conference centered on the changing face of computing infrastructure. The event will discuss the wave of cloud computing technology that has been driving a revolution in web applications and has started to overthrow the notion of conventional servers. Structure 08 will feature a workshop on Google App […]
Next month GigaOM will hold Structure 08, a conference centered on the changing face of computing infrastructure. The event will discuss the wave of cloud computing technology that has been driving a revolution in web applications and has started to overthrow the notion of conventional servers.
Structure 08 will feature a workshop on Google App Engine, along with keynote presentations from Werner Vogels (Amazon), Greg Papadopoulos (Sun), and James Crowe (Level 3). You can see a full schedule here.
We’re giving away five tickets to the event, so leave a comment telling us why you’re too financially impaired to pay for a ticket and we’ll pick the best responses.
Structure 08 will be held on June 25th at San Francisco’s Mission Bay Conference Center. TechCrunch readers who register by May 20 can get a 10% discount on registration here.
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Dash Navigation is opening up its in-car GPS device to outside developers through an API program. The Dash already lets consumers create Yahoo map mashups on teh Web which theycan then send to their car. (Read my earlier review). Now, companies that want to create specific applications for the device, which includes […]
Dash Navigation is opening up its in-car GPS device to outside developers through an API program. The Dash already lets consumers create Yahoo map mashups on teh Web which theycan then send to their car. (Read my earlier review). Now, companies that want to create specific applications for the device, which includes a two-way data channel through GPRS as well as WiFi, can join the API program.
The company’s API launch partners include:
—Coldwell Banker (real-estate listings application) —Funambol (personal calendar access) —Mediaguide (identifies names of songs playing on the radio through the Dash’s microphone) —Trapster (shows drivers speed traps and lets them warn other Dash drivers) —WeatherBug (live weather condition)
I have a feeling the Trapster app is going to be a big hit. Companies or developers who want more information about the APIs can send an e-mail to developer [at] dash [dot] net. (I guess putting the APIs on a Website is too advanced for them). But opening the device up as a platform should get a lot of cool apps on there.
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A week ago Wired Magazine voiced its displeasure over our syndication partnership with the Washington Post. Wired’s Betsy Schiffman wrote “We’ve got nothing against TechCrunch, but it seems crazy-crazy to us that the Washington Post, a paper known for the sort of reporting that can take down U.S. presidents, is publishing content written by a […]
A week ago Wired Magazine voiced its displeasure over our syndication partnership with the Washington Post. Wired’s Betsy Schiffman wrote “We’ve got nothing against TechCrunch, but it seems crazy-crazy to us that the Washington Post, a paper known for the sort of reporting that can take down U.S. presidents, is publishing content written by a dude who invests in the companies he writes about. But what do we know.”
When I read this I thought “WTF?” (with an emphasis on the “F”). Wired is a competitor to TechCrunch, but we’ve been on friendly terms with them for years now. Editor-In-Chief (on the print side) Chris Anderson and I were on Charlie Rose the same night a month ago, and Chris wrote some nice words about me in his post about the show. Wired’s Fred Vogelstein also wrote an awesome profile of TechCrunch in 2007.
So back to Wired’s slap at us. They seem to be concerned that I have personally invested in a handful of startups (all disclosed here) and we occasionally cover those startups and their competitors. And even though I disclose those relationships, Wired’s position is that the Washington Post should terminate the syndication relationship with us.
I responded to the article as succinctly as possible here (written after a night of heavy drinking at the Time 100 party) and then followed up with additional Twitter messages suggesting we hold a Wired burning party. I chose Twitter specifically for this response to make sure Wired knew I wasn’t happy with the post, but I specifically didn’t write about it on TechCrunch or even CrunchNotes to keep things relatively calm (I have 16,000 or so followers there, v. TechCrunch’s audience of 3 million or so plus feed subscribers). I also then let the matter drop, as I had made my point.
Emails to people I know at Wired went unanswered. Schiffman emailed me on May 9 with further attacks and a request for comments and details but I didn’t respond. Frankly, she’s proven herself to be a troll, and so anything I write might as well be public here on TechCrunch. And, as I said, I let the matter drop.
But then today Schiffman wrote a follow up article on the same issue. No new facts, she just wanted to reiterate how much she dislikes the partnership, I guess.
And if anyone thinks this is just something between Schiffman and TechCrunch, it isn’t. I have never met her and don’t know her at all. And her editor Dylan Tweney defended her when questioned by Valleywag about it. He was asked why Wired is now tagging every post about TechCrunch with “Buttmunch,” and if it is the way TechCrunch is referred to generally around the office and he responded “I don’t think it has come into general usage around the Wired.com office. We can always hope, though.”
My Response:
TechCrunch has financial conflicts of interest via advertisers and via companies that I have invested in. I’ve disclosed my personal investments - and as I’ve said many times in interviews, the grand total of the four active investments is less than I make per month in income from TechCrunch.
WRT advertisers, we do not specifically point out when we write about a company that has advertised with us, because no one does and frankly it would be nearly impossible given how many advertisers go on the site over time. We’ve created an ethical wall between editorial at TechCrunch and all revenue activities, which is run by our CEO, Heather.
The Washington Post obviously got comfortable with our policies, since they are syndicating our content.
Glass Houses
I question Wired’s intentions in posting about this, specifically now that they have posted twice. As a competitor they are clearly conflicted when writing about us, and attacks like these, including the childish tagging issue, appear to be little more than attempts to disrupt our deal with the Washington Post. And yes, that means that by the very act of attacking us and this deal, Wired is engaging in the exact behavior it says is unethical. Worse, they don’t even point out the conflict.
We’ve caught Wired in ethical lapses before (they subsequently added a disclosure to the article). And even the big guys are caught with the occasional hand in the cookie jar. I don’t believe we have ever engaged in unethical behavior of any kind on TechCrunch, not even the kinds of lapses seen at Wired and the NYTimes.
I have a lot of respect for many of the writers and editors at Wired. But as far as I’m concerned Wired.com, from Editor-In-Chief Evan Hansen on down to Betsy Schiffman, has clearly crossed an ethical line here. Perhaps they are giving up the fight to write relevant content and are resorting to sensationalist trash like this to generate page views. If that’s the case, it is a shame. I used to love that magazine.
Update: I’ve asked Hugh Macleod to do a cartoon for this fight, and have put a placeholder in until he responds. This is meant to point out how ridiculous this whole dispute is.
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MySpace has informed us that on Monday it was awarded $234 million in statutory damages, the largest anti-spam sum ever made under CAN-SPAM and apparently ever under any law. This is also the first time damages have been awarded under the California Anti Phishing Act. The case was won against two notorious spammers, Sanford Wallace and […]
MySpace has informed us that on Monday it was awarded $234 million in statutory damages, the largest anti-spam sum ever made under CAN-SPAM and apparently ever under any law. This is also the first time damages have been awarded under the California Anti Phishing Act.
The case was won against two notorious spammers, Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines. Wallace earned the nicknames “Spamford” and “spam king” for having sent as many as 30 million spam messages per day during a period of time in the 1990s.
Wallace and Rines spammed MySpace by creating their own accounts and stealing the passwords of others. They then went on to mass message users an estimated 735,925 times. Each of these messages warrant up to $300 in damages under the 2003 federal anti-spam law CAN-SPAN because they were conducted “willingly and knowingly”.
The case was brought against Wallace on March 23, 2007 and subsequently against Rines on September 25, 2007 when it was learned the two were working together.
MySpace has yet to collect the actual award and may very well not ever do so; it appears as though they don’t even know where two spammers are (the judgment was made in their absence after they failed to show up to court). Even so, they are charging ahead with another pending case against Scott Richter who also used stolen passwords to spam MySpace users.
The News Corporation-owned social network issued has issued the following public statement:
MySpace has zero tolerance for those who attempt to act illegally on our site. The Federal District Court in Los Angeles awarded MySpace $233,777,500 under the federal CAN-SPAM Act and $1,500,000 under the California anti-phishing statute. User engagement is up 32 percent year over year while spam is significantly decreasing, proving efforts like this are working. We thank the court for serving justice upon defendants Wallace and Rines and we remain committed to punishing those who violate the law and try to harm our members.
We’re told that the second largest award under CAN-SPAM was much a lower figure: $2.9 million, paid by ValueClick to the FTC in just March of this year.
Additional details for this MySpace case can be found through the Associated Press.
Six Apart, creator of the blogging platform Movable Type, has partnered with LightPole, a mobile application provider. The two companies have co-developed a plugin for Movable Type that’ll allow bloggers to geo-tag their posts, create geo-located Points of Interest, and publish content through LightPole channels to mobile phones. The plugin brings Movable Type to […]
Six Apart, creator of the blogging platform Movable Type, has partnered with LightPole, a mobile application provider. The two companies have co-developed a plugin for Movable Type that will grant bloggers to geo-tag their posts, create geo-located Points of Interest, and publish content through LightPole channels to mobile phones.
The plugin brings Movable Type to two distinct (and important) markets: Geo-enabled websites and location-based phone services. These features could be a boon to bloggers, especially those that write about real-world locales, such as restaurants or landmarks. They may also help writers reach a much more massive audience through mobile phones.
The news comes soon after LightPole’s implementation of Yahoo’s geo-information platform FireEagle last month.
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Omnisio has launched a tool that presenters will find very useful for conveying their messages to online audiences. The new presentation tool takes slideshows uploaded in PDF format or to SlideShare and synchronizes them with videos uploaded to YouTube, Google Video or Blip.tv. The synchronization allows viewers to jump around within presentations by clicking on particular […]
Omnisio has launched a tool that presenters will find very useful for conveying their messages to online audiences.
The new presentation tool takes slideshows uploaded in PDF format or to SlideShare and synchronizes them with videos uploaded to YouTube, Google Video or Blip.tv.
The synchronization allows viewers to jump around within presentations by clicking on particular slides, which show up in an area below each video that operates much like the dock on Mac OS X. As you watch a presentation, you’ll see the current slide sitting alongside the video so you can refer to it just as you would when watching a presentation in real life.
Publishers can create these video-slideshow compilations with a fairly easy drag-n-drop tool provided for free on Omnisio’s site. In addition to syncing slides, they can add markers for people and highlights that show up within a video. These too can be used to jump to particular spots during playback, such as when your favorite celebrity appears or a particularly good joke is made.
This is Omnisio’s second video compilation tool. The first, which debuted in March, lets you take multiple videos found on the net and stitch them together into new mashups.
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Would you pay someone to add all the correct song titles and cover art to the songs in your iTunes library? TuneUp is an iTunes plugin that aims to make cleaning up your music library as simple as drag-and-drop. The program attempts to automatically tag a user’s music library by analyzing the musical […]
Would you pay someone to add all the correct song titles and cover art to the songs in your iTunes library? TuneUp is an iTunes plugin that aims to make cleaning up your music library as easy as drag-and-drop. The program attempts to automatically tag a user’s music library by analyzing the musical data in each file, even if a song has been previously mislabeled. TuneUp’s digital fingerprinting technology is powered by a partnership with GraceNote, which features a database of over 80 million songs. The program is currently available as an invite-only beta on Windows, with a Mac version on the way.
If you’re looking to try TuneUp out on a Windows machine, you can grab one of 100 invites here.
The interface is simple and intuitive. Upon launching iTunes, a sidebar appears with four tabs labeled “Clean”, “Cover Art”, “Now Playing”, and “Concerts”. TuneUp’s biggest draw are the Clean and Cover Art tabs, which utilize the Gracenote database. To use each, the user simply selects a batch of songs and drags them to the appropriate field. Each song is quickly examined, and the program presents a number of possible matches for the user to either apply or discard.
In practice the cleaning functionality works well. Even after stripping all ID3 data embedded in MP3s from a portion of my music library, TuneUp was able to correctly identify songs at least 90% of the time. The system that is used to compare potential data and album art was especially useful, as it granted me to choose which album each song belonged to (I no longer have Led Zeppelin’s “IV” scattered across four different Greatest Hits albums).
TuneUp is currently planning to offer a subscription plan for its service, though it has yet to work out the details. This presents a problem, as cleaning up a music library is typically a one-time ordeal. It is also a chore, and many people would just as soon put off the chore than pay to be able to do it faster.
In addition to cleanup, as a way to offer long-term value, TuneUp has included a number of suggestion features. “Now Playing” offers a list of album recommendations, YouTube videos, and eBay auctions related to the song that is currently playing. “Concerts” presents a basic calendar that lists any upcoming events in a region.
While consumers may be willing to pay for the program’s cleanup feature, I’m skeptical about its long-term utility. The Concert listing could be handy, but some of the recommendations provided by “Now Playing” are already provided by iTunes through its Music Store. And there are other suggestion plug-ins for iTunes that have more traction, such as iLike. Instead of pursing a subscription model, TuneUp might want to take into account a one-time purchase price of around $20 or an affiliate fee model tied to its suggestions.
TuneUp will face competition from services based on the MusicBrainz project, which offers a free alternative to Gracenote’s music-fingerprint database. They also face a threat from Apple - iTunes already uses Gracenote to download album information whenever a CD is inserted into a computer, and they could easily implement song lookup.
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Most of my time these days is spent crossing the blood-brain barrier between Twitter and the rest of the cloud. Twitter stands on one side, a coursing stream of social data emanating from an ad-hoc framework of asynchronous follows and vanity track filtering. On the other side, the legacy blogosphere, RSS items floated via Google […]
Most of my time these days is spent crossing the blood-brain barrier between Twitter and the rest of the cloud. Twitter stands on one side, a coursing stream of social data emanating from an ad-hoc framework of asynchronous follows and vanity track filtering. On the other side, the legacy blogosphere, RSS items floated via Google Reader shared items and planted in the Twitter stream via TinyURLs.
Managing the transfer of data across the barrier are two applications. One (FriendFeed) is disguised as a social media aggregator, and the other (Twhirl) is disguised as a rich internet application extension of Twitter that allows multiple users, point-and-click UI enhancements of the vanilla Twitter feed, and, common to all third-party apps, a licensing limitation on polling the Twitter API.
On Tuesday, Twitter suffered its first substantial test since the 3-or-so day outage several weeks ago, the Indiana and North Carolina primaries where Barack Obama essentially sealed the nomination of the Democratic Party. As the polls closed and traffic spiked, the Twitter real time gateway through IM and SMS collapsed, leaving those of us who live on that transport high and dry. within minutes, we switched over to Twhirl, which slowly but more quickly came back online than the gateway through, in my case, Gmail’s Gchat.
For the next several hours, I ping-ponged back and forth between the two services, Gchat arrayed on the left of the screen in a vertical browser window, and Twhirl in its AIR container hovering above the right of the screen and notifications rolling up from the bottom of my MacBook AIR as they were received from API requests. The Gchat gateway went up and down, alternating between no service and old tweets paging in as the database of outstanding tweets was flushed, until sometime after 7PM Pacific they synchronized just about the time Obama gave his victory speech.
The outage illustrated one more time (as if it were not obvious already) the need for a scalable and reliable Twitter, or at least one third party service that also provides the gateway functionality: Real time conversations between discoverable endpoints not necessarily aware of each other until the swarming characteristics of an event, an idea, a personality, an affinity group, or any combination of these elements are enabled. Twhirl’s Loic Le Meur announced such features on the May 2nd edition of The Gillmor Gang.
Friendfeed will likely follow suit, but it raises more questions than it answers with its expanded comment infrastructure and extended harvesting of non-Twitter streams such as delicious and blogs. Robert Scoble has used Friendfeed and its Hide function as a refuge from too much noise on Twitter answering his 20k followers, but only when Twitter implements track filtering will mass following cease to be a feature driver.
Less solvable are the tactical feints by startups that masquerade as standards-based solutions to the so-called centralization problem. Gillmor Gangs on Thursday and Friday delved into the mysteries of decentralization, but I remain unconvinced that these strategies do little more than shift the controlling authority for the Twitter namespace to other potential landlords. First, it won’t happen as long as Twitter executives maintain open XMPP access to third parties, and provide timely and responsive solutions to track spam and predictive scalability for event thresholds during the next few months.
Second, a careful reading of tech politics suggests the takeover of Twitter is an unlikely occurrence given the weakness of second tier players like Yahoo and Sun and the strengths of Microsoft and Google. Yahoo looks like Hillary’s shadow campaign as it walks through the motions of building out a social media personalization strategy while Microsoft’s Mesh infrastructure obsoletes the portal logic it’s based on. Sun is courting social media superdelegates while IBM is piling up the popular vote with customers in the midmarket. In both cases, the numbers are brutal in their inevitability. Scott McNealy should engineer a merger of the two weaklings and give Jonathan Schwartz some tools to survive, matching Yahoo users with Sun/Amazon clusters.
But even that unlikely mating would be swift meat for Microsoft, who is all over why Twitter is fundamental to the next phase of the enterprise network. No matter who owns the pipes, the real struggle is to deliver the drugs across the blood brain barrier. Mesh abstracts out the hardware layer at a deeper level than Amazon or Solaris with its virtualization layer — down at the social layer where the users live and control the domain. It’s the users, stupid, as Carville famously put it. Once switching costs are controllable, the user can band together in affinity groups and mandate the price vendors will need to pay to be listened to.
At its simplest (its true power) Twitter is a phone switch for routing information flow. Those who control the flow control the price for the information. In a virtualized platform, the hardware is the razor and the software switch is the blades. The software switch is an affinity-based construct that manages the signal-to-noise ratio of the information flow based on the contouring signals (gestures) of the members of the group. In the language of Twitter, it’s who you follow times what you track divided by how you filter.
The trick is squeezing the firehose down into multiplexed channels across the blood brain barrier and then expanding them as they flood the brain and its synaptic map. The architecture of swarms has unique characteristics that we are seeing modeled in the contortions of Friendfeed, Facebook Connect, Ustream chatrooms, Google Reader Notes, Disqus, and the rest of what Marc Canter calls the open mesh. It goes beyond bootstrapping, harnessing the brain’s ability to add the gut instinct of survivability to the equation of what choices can be made about information triage.
Simply put, you have to have the ability to broadcast an acuity for successful guesses. We’re at the doorway of gesture farming, where individual gesturers go beyond implicit behavior harvesting and aggregation and overtly share not just what they like but what they ignore. We’re seeing this in the political realm, where people are tuning out repetitive and shrill networks built on track spamming (Reverend Wright, Day One, electability) and tuning in to credible authentic sources regardless of media affiliation. They’re going direct via TinyUrl and their social graph (follow/track/filter) ontology.
Those who laugh at Twitter and trivialize it are insulting the very users they want to engage with. In elections, that is a fatal mistake. In technology acquisition and adoption, it is similarly Darwinian. Ballmer’s buh-bye is still being discounted as posturing, but in a real-time conversation, once you’ve met the mettle of the (wo)man, you know what you need to know. I think Ballmer and Gates and Ozzie had already made the calculation before they made the offer, namely that they were looking for a partnership with Yahoo’s users and developers, not with its executives. That is not to say they were not valuable, just that they would have to prove their value in the conversation. They didn’t. The rest is still in play.
Decentralizing Twitter is unnecessary, if not impractical. Dave Winer was right the first time, when he intuitively grasped the power of Twitter was not in what it was designed to be but in what it could be used for. By building on top of it, Winer signaled that instinct that he marshaled into RSS, the gesture of respect, the idea that in Steve Stills’ words, “Somethings happening here, What it is ain’t exactly clear…” Twitter ain’t broke, and we don’t need to fix it.
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We introduced Spotplex in February 2007 as a potential Digg killer that served up popular stories by monitoring how many people read them. Somewhere along the way, it also turned into an Alexa-like analytics service. Unfortunately, neither market worked out for them and they’ve been forced to close their doors. The Digg-style service used […]
We introducedSpotplex in February 2007 as a potential Digg killer that served up popular stories by monitoring how many people read them. Somewhere along the way, it also turned into an Alexa-like analytics service. Unfortunately, neither market worked out for them and they’ve been forced to close their doors.
The Digg-style service used JavaScript that was embedded on participating pages to track how often posts were read, and top-read posts were featured on Spotplex’s homepage. The service set itself apart from Digg by requiring no intervention on the reader’s part to promote a page. On the other hand, Spotplex only recorded hits on blogs that had embedded the Javascript snippets, which severely restricted its sources of content.
Spotplex’s JavaScript embeds were also used to offer an analytics service that was designed to contend with sites like Alexa and Compete. While the addition of this service marked a shift to a very different market, both of Spotplex’s services leveraged the same backend.
CEO Doyon Kim says that the company’s ultimate failure was due to a lack of sufficient funding. The company underestimated the resources that were required to build and maintain its service, and it neglected to seek venture funding after its $450,000 seed round. This is surprising given Kim’s experience in the industry: he co-founded DialPad, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2005.
Most of my time these days is spent crossing the blood-brain barrier between Twitter and the rest of the cloud. Twitter stands on one side, a coursing stream of social data emanating from an ad-hoc framework of asynchronous follows and vanity track filtering. On the other side, the legacy blogosphere, RSS items floated via Google Reader shared items and planted in the Twitter stream via TinyURLs.
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