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After Months Of Buzz, Path Launches: It's Photo Sharing Where You Can Be Yourself
Nov 15, 5:06AM
Over the last few months there's been plenty of buzz and speculation about Path, a hitherto "stealthish" company that was founded by long time Facebook employee Dave Morin, along with Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau. The company has raised funding from a very impressive list of investors that includes Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit, Keith Rabois, Ashton Kutcher, and a laundry list of Facebook alumni. And tonight, it's ready for its big debut. You can grab the free app on the App Store right here. So what is Path? In short, it's a private photo sharing network — think Instagram, but without the filters and with a privacy model that takes away any anxiety associated with sharing photos with people you don't know. It's based around email addresses and phone numbers, rather than a public database of users. And compared to other popular social applications, Path is going against the grain: there's no follow system and the friend system is also quite different from what you're used to on Facebook.
Raid The MiniBar: Meebo Gets Into The Site Check-In Game. But Don't Call It A Game.
Nov 15, 5:01AM
With the rise of Foursquare, the "check-in" has become fairly commonplace. With the launch of Places, Facebook will only make it more so. It shouldn't be surprising that we're seeing dozens of other startups spring up to do check-ins for FILL-IN-THE-BLANK. Media check-ins were a pretty obvious extension. But now we're seeing a number of companies pop up that are doing check-ins for websites. A couple of these, Badgeville and OneTrueFan, launched in September at TechCrunch Disrupt. Now they're about to get some very big competition: Meebo. Specifically, on Tuesday, Meebo is launching a new browser extension, the Meebo MiniBar, in alpha. This extension, which will be available for Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, will allow people to check-in to the websites they're browsing on the fly. And this extension is just the first step. Once it's fully up and running, Meebo plans to add the functionality to their popular toolbar. A toolbar which spans some 8,000 partner websites and reaches 180 million unique users a month already.
The Most Beautiful Images On Google Street View
Nov 15, 4:15AM
Since 2007 Google Street View, in an effort to "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" has visually captured the human experience gamut from pranks, to nudity, to crimes to death. While it's had its share of issues, the Google Maps project is perhaps one of the greatest juxtapositions of technology and imagery our culture has produced. 
RSS Is Dead, But Reeder For Mac Makes It A Beautiful Corpse [Preview]
Nov 15, 12:54AM
For a long time after the launch of the iPhone, despite thousands of apps for just about everything you can imagine, there was no killer RSS reader app. That changed when the 2.0 version of Reeder arrived earlier this year. It's so good that I often prefer using it to reading feeds in Google Reader, long my go-to RSS reader. And the iPad version is even better. And now it's about ready to launch in beta for the Mac. While the blog Macstories did a preview back in September when the software was in early alpha, it has come a long way since then. And developer Silvio Rizzi has given me permission to do a short preview of what you can expect when the beta hits (sometime in the next couple of weeks, he hopes). I've been using the app for months now, and it's finally feeling rock-solid. And it has completely replaced Google Reader for me.
Did Tumblr Just Reverse Take Down 4Chan?
Nov 14, 10:24PM
Today was supposed to be the day that 4Chan took down Tumblr. Instead, it looks like 4Chan itself is down. Could Tumblr be behind it? As you can see, 4Chan is down for everyone, not just me. And it has been that way for at least the past 15 minutes. The timing is interesting since it was supposed to be 5 PM ET when the 4Chan DDoS attack was to begin — that was roughly 15 minutes ago. It is possible that Tumblr users, which had been planning a counterattack for tomorrow, moved it up to today to break 4Chan?
NSFW: I'm Some Random Tech Entrepreneur and I Approve This Confusing Message
Nov 14, 7:09PM
Last month, the world raised a quizzical eyebrow towards a new advertising campaign for Stolichnaya vodka, starring two Biz Stones, hanging out with each other in a bar. This month it's the turn of Foursquare's Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, posing in chunky knitwear (and with only the merest hint of homoeroticism) to promote Gap. To say the thinking behind the ads is muddled is to use comical understatement. As I write these words, millions of Gap shoppers and Stoli drinkers are staring blankly at the over-airbrushed, bizarrely ill-conceived advertisements, thinking "yeah, I've heard of Twitter but who the hell is that dude? And what's a Foursquare? Is it a Facebook thing?" In fact, if I were a cynical man I might draw a few appropriately cynical conclusions from corporate America's new-found obsession with tech entrepreneurs whom 99.9999% of the population couldn't pick out of a police line-up.
How Email Apps Will Help You Learn To Love Your Inbox Again
Nov 14, 3:36PM
Email has taken over our lives, and most of us hate it. But a new generation of email apps are changing how we interact with the inbox, and on Monday Facebook might even join the party. The inbox of the future is going to look a lot more like Facebook than the one you're using today—but it's also going to do a lot more. Thanks to these apps, you'll learn to love your email again. Here are four ways your inbox is changing, with some of the services that are making it better:
Who Breaks A Twitterer Upon A Wheel?
Nov 14, 12:11PM
In recent days Britain has started to resemble an earlier era of intolerance. People are using social networks like Twitter and Facebook to be themselves, but the Police, the judiciary and the Establishment are showing worrying signs of not understanding this shift in society. Two recent cases, the "Twitter Joke Trial" and the "#welovebaskers" case currently exploding on Twitter serve to highlight this. And there is a direct comparison to an earlier era. In 1968 William Rees-Mogg, as editor of The Times newspaper, quoted Poet Alexander Pope, for an editorial about the "Redlands" court case brought against the Rolling Stones. The Stones had been partying at a house, whereupon they'd been busted by the Police for possessing a small amount of drugs. The case resulted in prison sentences for Rolling Stones members Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. But Rees-Mogg's Times editorial came to the Stones defence, concluding "If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain and the new hedonism, then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equity. It should be the particular quality of British justice to ensure that Mr. Jagger is treated exactly the same as anyone else, no better and no worse. There must remain a suspicion in this case that Mr. Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been thought proper for any purely anonymous young man." Swap out "new hedonism" for "the new social networking" and you find that the public nature of social networks is causing a disconnect in British society which has implications for our freedom of speech. 
The Phone Call Is Dead
Nov 14, 7:45AM
In the tech industry saying that something is dead actually means "It's on the decline." And yes, the phone call is on an inexorable decline. My original title for this post was "The Phone Call Will Be Dead In __ Years" but as consumer inertia is somehow still keeping our parent company Aol in the dialup business, I thought it might be prudent not to include an ETA on the death of the call. Less obsolete but more annoying than a handwritten letter, the phone call is fading as a mode of communication even if the nostalgic will be singing its praises for awhile. We reached a breaking point in 2008 when text messaging topped mobile phone calling in usage, and we've been living in a world dominated by text based communication ever since (Thanks Twitter).
How Durable Are Information Monopolies On The Internet?
Nov 14, 6:17AM
Does the Internet tend towards natural monoplies? Columbia Law professor Tim Wu makes a strong argument that it does in an Op-Ed in this weekend's Wall Street Journal. While there is plenty of diversity on the Internet and few barriers to setting up shop, he points out that category after category is dominated by a single firm: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, and eBay. If you define a market narrowly enough, it is easy to make any company look like a monopoly. But let's concede that the Internet creates a lot of winner-take-most, if not a winner-take-all, situations. The bigger question is: How durable are information monopolies on the Internet?
Three (Lousy) Photos Look To Be The First Taken With The Nexus S
Nov 14, 1:47AM
Well looky what we have here. The other day, Engadget got the first photos of the Nexus S, Google's sequel to their Nexus One phone. Now it looks like we may have happened upon the first photos taken with the device. If you look in this Google Picasa album, you'll see three random photos that appear to be of nothing. But if you click on the photos themselves and hit the "more info" button, you'll see one very interesting thing about these lousy photos: each list the camera as "google" and the model as "Nexus S".
Photo Reveals That Google Is Still Baking Android Gingerbread — Literally
Nov 14, 1:16AM
I know, I know. The indications were that the next version of Android, 2.3, was supposed to be out already. It has been nearly a week since an OHA member tweeted that the Nexus One would be getting the Gingerbread OTA update in "the next few days". So far, nothing. But Google is doing their best to keep whetting everyones' appetite. Yesterday, the search giant sent out a tweet from their mobile account (yes, the one they paid to promote on Twitter two days ago). The tweet read, "Our cafes are baking something sweet", and contained a link to a TwitPic of dozens of gingerbread Android cookies. Cute Google, cute.
Down Goes Arrington: WordPress.com Getting Top Author Stats Shortly
Nov 14, 12:25AM
If 75 percent of my day is spent writing, the remaining 25 percent is probably going over TechCrunch stats. I'm obsessed with it. That's why I do so many posts about things like Chrome getting ready to overtake Firefox as the dominant browser among TechCrunch readers (less than 1 percent away now). So I was obviously happy when WordPress.com (which hosts us) overhauled their Stats area earlier this year. But it was always missing just one thing. WordPress.com's Stats area gives you a solid overview for how your blog is doing overall. And unlike Google Analytics, the data is up-to-the-minute fresh. You can see your top posts, top referrers, top search engine terms, top clicked links, and a few other things. One thing it doesn't have though is the ability to see how each author is doing in terms of traffic to their posts. In other words, it's lacking in the vanity department. But that's coming shortly.
You've Got FMail
Nov 13, 9:12PM
The news on Monday appears to be that Facebook will reinvent email. TechCrunch says it's the long awaited Gmail killer. Others say it's Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit's project since he came to Facebook in the FriendFeed acquisition. Paul says he hasn't been working on that, but rather the Big Freaking Zip File app where we can download all our Facebook bits. And anyway, he's gone — off to Y Combinator to continue his angel investing. And I'm gone — from email. Have been for a while now. I still use email all the time. Or rather, it uses me. I watch colleagues at work (Salesforce.com) bounce back and forth from Outlook and Gmail, selecting, reading, skimming, and oh yes, deleting, deleting, deleting. You have to do that in Outlook, to stay ahead of the Mailbox is Full message. Gmail, not really, but it's hard to break the old habit. And recently I had to start paying for that privilege, when Google stopped raising the limit and converted me to a cloud customer.
Hi, Mom. Welcome To 1995
Nov 13, 6:49PM
Hey Dad, will you please print this out for Mom? Thanks. I remember the first time I fired up Netscape on a computer in the library of the law firm I had just started working at in 1995. I think I went to Yahoo and clicked on some things, and called it a day. For the next year the Internet was mostly about receiving and forwarding email jokes. Some of my friends were really excited about being joke "hubs." Thank God that's all history. Jokes are rarely forwarded by email any more. It's been replaced with spam. Anyway, back to my mom, who occasionally shows up here in a cameo appearance. 
Social Gaming: Where We've Been, and Where We're Headed
Nov 13, 5:05PM
So there was this guy named Ken who was working a 9-to-5 at some giant software company writing tons of code for something whose importance and value was exceeded only by its monotony. Ken's wife, Roberta, had been playing some newfangled PC game and thought to herself, "Man, this game sucks! Ken and I should totally make a better one!" The husband-and-wife team then worked nights and weekends for three months building a game. The final product? Mystery House. And it was awesome. On the heels of this success, they raised money, made more hit games, and eventually sold their gaming empire for $1.5 billion. For those of you who aren't familiar with this story, it could just as well be the founding story of a Playfish or a Zynga today. But this is the story—or my version of it—of the founding of Sierra Online back in the '80s. It was an exciting time back then. Technology had enabled game developers to develop new game mechanics and immerse players in new worlds in ways that had never been imagined before. And the best part? A husband-and-wife team could work nights and weekends and knock out a meaningful and entertaining game in three months.
The Future of Indian Technology
Nov 13, 3:59PM
The Indian technology industry got its start running call centers and doing low-level IT work for western firms. Then, in the 2000s, it started taking on higher-level IT tasks, offering management consulting services, and performing sophisticated R&D. Now there is another transition happening, one far more significant: a transition to development of innovative technology products. Instead of providing IT services as the big outsourcing companies do, a new breed of startups is developing high-value products based on intellectual property. The Indian industry group NASSCOM estimates that in 2008, the country's software product revenues totaled $1.64 billion. It forecasts that this will grow to $11 billion per year by 2015. I attended the NASSCOM Product Enclave in Bangalore, this week, and gave several talks to the 1000+ entrepreneurs in attendance. I was surprised at the changes that are powering the new transition: its tech workers are leaving high-paying jobs in IT services, and kids out of school are ignoring social taboos against failure and defying marriage customs to become entrepreneurs. A few Americans are also joining the fray, starting their ventures in India rather than in Silicon Valley. Though in China, returnees from the U.S. are fuelling the entrepreneurship boom, they aren't as important in India. Sadly for my Indian friends in Silicon Valley who are looking to return home, returnees—formerly in high demand and treated like rock stars—are out of vogue and now treated like rocks.
Dear Foursquare, Gowalla: Please Let's Stop Pretending This Is Fun
Nov 13, 3:49PM
It's a bad month to be Foursquare or Gowalla. Ten days ago, 900-pound gorilla Facebook announced Facebook Deals for Facebook Places (i,e., location-based coupons) and check-ins for third-party apps. A day later, Pew Research reported that, despite all the hype, the use of location-based services is actually declining in America, from 5% of the online population in May to 4% last month. Forget the fabled hockey stick; that's more like a broken pencil. Why? Because they're not giving us any good reason to use them. Look at their web sites. Gowalla proclaims, "Discover the extraordinary in the world around you." Foursquare says, "Unlock your city." To which I say: "Oh, come on" — and it seems I speak for approximately 96% (formerly 95%) of the population. I have no interest in enlisting in a virtual scavenger hunt, or unlocking merit badges — what is this, the Cub Scouts? — or becoming the narcissistic "Mayor" of my local coffee shop. Thanks for the offer, but I'm afraid I already have some semblance of a life.
Google Earth Adds A Panoramic Photo Layer For A 360-Degree View
Nov 13, 2:30PM
Google Earth's ability to provide a visually compelling view of the world's terrain, cities, oceans, weather data, treks, and more never ceases to amaze me. It looks like Google has added another way for users to view the world in Google Earth: panoramic photos. Google Earth now includes a Photo layer which will allow users to find 2D photos taken from Panoramio (a photo community Google acquired in 2007), as well as panoramic photos sourced from 360cities.net, which collects panoramic photography on the web. Google had previously integrated 360 Cities into Google Earth, but this appears to be a deeper integration of the photos into the viewing experience. 
Meet the New Enterprise Customer, He's a Lot Like the Old Enterprise Customer
Nov 13, 2:00PM
Every day I hear from entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists about an exciting new movement called "the consumerization of the enterprise." They tell me how the old expensive Rolex wearing sales forces are a thing of the past and, in the future, companies will "consume" enterprise products proactively like consumers pick up Twitter. But when I talk to the most successful new enterprise companies like WorkDay, Apptio, Jive, Zuora, and Cloudera, they all employ serious and large enterprise sales efforts that usually include expensive people some of who indeed wear Rolex watches. In fact, companies like Yammer who originally started with new age models have transitioned to more traditional enterprise sales approaches after experiencing the market without them. So what gives? Are all these smart people out of their minds? Has nothing changed since the early days of IBM? Some things have changed, but others are exactly as they were.
Google Trumps Facebook On List Of In Demand Employers Among College Students
Nov 13, 7:59AM
Google has had a tough time in the past month or so, being more or less being positioned by the media as a company that is in danger of losing its top talent to Facebook. Especially when the news of its 10% across the board raises comes off as reeking of desperation during one of the worst talent crunches Silicon Valley has ever seen. Wait a minute, since when is a company giving raises to employees something to disparage? Brian Heifferon, COO of Aftercollege (a site that helps connect students with the companies they want to work with after college) has shared with us some insight into how the rest of the country views Silicon Valley's current talent arms race.
*AD HERE* TripAdvisor: Plan *AD HERE* Your Vacation *AD HERE* Here *AD HERE* Please
Nov 13, 4:06AM
So, LeWeb '10 is coming up. Let's say you're looking for some good ideas of where to stay and what to do in Paris while you're there. Where are you most likely to turn on the web? Google. A search for "paris vacation" yields TripAdvisor as the top result. You click on that link. Oh. My. God.
Why Is mail.facebook.com Pointing To An Outlook Web App Login?
Nov 13, 3:00AM
This whole Facebook Mail thing is getting curiouser and curiouser. After our post on Facebook taking control of fb.com, a number of people have reached out to say that mail.fb.com actually resolved to mail.thefacebook.com (that doesn't seem to be the case for all people). What's interesting about that is that mail.thefacebook.com (and mail.facebook.com) is live for all to see. It's an Outlook Web App with a nice big Facebook logo that asks you for a username and password.
Yep, Facebook Takes Control Of Fb.com Ahead Of Mail Launch
Nov 13, 1:05AM
Project Titan is coming. On Monday. That's what we've heard from sources with knowledge of Facebook's secret mail project. And since we broke that news, there has been a lot of speculation about what domain Facebook might use for these new email addresses. Currently, the popular choice is fb.com. But while it seemed like Facebook acquired it earlier this year, no one knew for sure. Now it looks like we do. As the site Domain Name Wire points out, the Whois record for the domain name has just been updated. While Markmonitor.com is still listed as the registrar name, Facebook is all over the records now as well. Most importantly, the domain namespace servers are now pointing to facebook.com. And Facebook is listed as both the administrative and technical contact.
Ask a VC: How Kiteboarding and Venture Capital Became Less Risky (TCTV)
Nov 13, 1:02AM
My guest on Ask A VC this week is Bill Tai of Charles River Ventures. He's also a professional kiteboarder. You may ask: Why would a guy who has been a VC since 1991 need kiteboarding sponsors? That was my first question. Generally in this video we talk about how the venture business has changed during the last 20 years and how kiteboarding has changed over the last 10 years. There are a lot of parallels. Both games have become safer and more mainstream, but does that mean they're less fun? Video below.
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