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Dec 02, 6:49AM
Path
launched two weeks ago with a swell of buzz. Then came the backlash. It was
swift and merciless. "It's a social app that discourages large-scale social sharing — WTF?," seemed to be the main complaint. Well, love it or hate it,
Path is sticking to its, yes, path. But an update tonight brings a few nice updates. First and foremost, you can finally use pictures taken outside of the app. Previously, you could only load up the app, hit the camera button, and take a picture to share on the service on the spot. The reason for this was that they wanted to make sure your path was being shared in realtime from where you really were. But the latest version of the app, 1.0.2, has a new "Library" button in the camera area. Hitting this allows you to pick any photo from your camera album. But read that carefully — it has to be from your
camera album. In other words the picture still has to be one taken with your iPhone camera. Again, there's a reason for this.
Dec 02, 6:29AM
I am shown product demos in some of the strangest places. On Wednesday afternoon, I found myself in a Starbucks in New York City's Grand Central Terminal with Rajnish, one of the founders of
Althea Systems. Rajnish was in town from Bangalore and he wanted to show me
Shufflr TV, his startup's Internet TV application. Shufflr is available right now as a desktop AIR app, but the company is also working on a simplified version for TVs and one for Android phones. In the video above, Rajnish shows me a demo across all three screens (using his laptop in place of a TV, but he did switch to a TV remote as you can see). There was a lot of distractions, including some screaming kids next to us, but Rajnish stayed focussed and powered through the demo.
Dec 02, 4:56AM
It took
Waze a full year to get 500,000 users. It then took another six months to hit a million. Three months after that, they hit 1.5 million. And in just the last two months, they've already surpassed 2 million users. In fact, they're past 2.2 million, actually. Yes, the Israel-based social mapping company has become a hit. And for good reason too — it's
a good idea and a fun one too. Thanks to cellphones with GPS and WiFi triangulation capabilities, they get users to build out their maps for them simply by driving around. And if there are issues on the road, such as major traffic jams, all of that information comes in through the apps and can be sent to other drivers.
Dec 02, 2:11AM
Long before Mark Pincus talked about
making revenue any way he could, there was Oracle's Larry Ellison. Brash, funny, ladies-man-playboy and intensely competitive, they don't make tech entrepreneurs like Ellison anymore. Bloomberg's
Game Changers series is taking on Ellison in a special airing tomorrow at 6 pm pacific time on Bloomberg TV. It sounds like it'll be a juicy send up of
my favorite eyebrow-less mogul, and I'm setting my TiVo now. They wouldn't send me a transcript before it airs, but I did get a few teasers out of them. Here are some quotes from the show by some of the people who worked the closest with Ellison.
Dec 02, 2:00AM
Naturally, no sooner do a publish
a story on Google's forthcoming social product and some of the intrigue surrounding it, do some new sources come out of the woodwork. We can now confirm, by way of no fewer than four sources, that Google's social product is in fact internally called "Emerald Sea". And yes, obviously, it is being dogfood tested within the company. In the previous post, we noted that an anonymous user on
Quora stated that the project was internally called "Emerald City". We also stated that we had heard "Emerald Sea", but figured that perhaps we had just heard it wrong. But it turns out that Mr. or Mrs. Anonymous is actually the one that likely heard it wrong.
Dec 02, 1:33AM
Around YouTube headquarters, there's a stat that management likes to throw around to make it clear that the company isn't resting on its laurels. No, it isn't the fact the site is the world's second largest search engine or that its users upload 35 hours of content per minute. It's that the average user spends around 15 minutes per day on YouTube. That would be an impressive amount of engagement for just about anything else, but it pales in comparison to the five hours that people spend sitting in front of their TV sets watching cable (yes, seriously). And make no mistake: YouTube wants to take some of that time for itself. Today, the site is taking an important step toward that goal as it improves its Leanback product with a key new feature: personalized channels. LeanBack, which
launched in July and is integrated into Google TV, lets users hit 'play' and then sit back and watch an endless stream of YouTube content with no input required. In short, it's YouTube TV. And now it's
personalized TV — something that no cable network out there can match.
Dec 02, 1:05AM
Follow the yellow brick road... It's no secret that Google is working on a new social project that is
thought to be a layer which will be spread over many of their properties. Actually, it is supposed to be a secret. But everyone knows about it. At first, it was known as "Google Me", but that's probably not what it's going to end up being called when it rolls out at some point next year. And if you believe an anonymous answer on Quora, that's not what Google is internally calling it. And based on what we've heard, they may just be right. According to
this post from November 4, Google is in the process of internally testing the product they're calling "Emerald City". The fact that the anonymous user says it's being dogfood tested shouldn't be a surprise to anyone — Google tends to do this with most of their big products before launch. What's interesting is the detail the user goes into:
Emerald City has been integrated into numerous products and is being actively used internally.
Dec 02, 1:00AM
The e-reading battle is raging hot, and while statistics ostensibly showing an insurgent iPad should be taken with a grain of salt, the volatility of the market is plain to see. The Kindle has made the most of an early lead, and promises to be a highly popular gift item. The Nook Color is receiving encouraging reviews and has just been rooted, rendering it a thrifty choice for tablet shoppers. Color e-ink is on the horizon. It's a glorious time to be an e-book seller. So it's no surprise that Google is jumping into the fray with the long-awaited Google Editions service, set to launch by the end of the year in the U.S. and first quarter of 2011 internationally. But between Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBooks, and independent publishing services like Amazon's DTP and the unfortunately-named Pubit, is there room for another player? Not that that's ever stopped anyone from trying — but I think in this case it may be that Google brings something new to the table: decentralization.
Dec 02, 12:28AM
With the tagline "There's excess inventory for a reason…" website Worst of Gilt follows in the footsteps of Regretsy and Lamebook in highlighting the absolute worst of luxury flash sales site Gilt. Now you can follow all your favorite Gilt fails like Hulk backpack to Scarf Tee (!) and even some you didn't know about like Bambi Candle. Yes, Bambi Candle. While I wish the site was slightly funnier, allowed for user submissions as well as let you click through to the actual Gilt Deals (What? I need me some Hulk backpack), this is pretty much the world's most perfect idea for a blog.
Dec 01, 10:54PM
Racktivity— a provider of hardware and software-as-a-service that manages power consumption within data centers— closed an $8 million series B investment, the company announced today. The round was led by Partech International and joined by the startup's seed investors Big Bang, along with a group of angels based in Europe. The company was founded in Belgium, and recently opened offices in Redwood City, Calif. ...Within the data center, Racktivity's hardware and software-as-a-service is used to monitor installed equipment, generate real time reports on how it is functioning and how much power the equipment uses, then automatically power down servers and routers that are idle. 
Dec 01, 10:37PM
It's perplexing to me that Facebook still hasn't released an iPad app. And recent comments from the company suggest that they're in no hurry to. Because of this, apps like Friendly have risen that wrap Facebook's touch site in a cocoa skin and sell it for $0.99. They've undoubtedly made a killing doing that. Now the popular visual RSS reader, Pulse, is about to add Facebook support as well. Luckily, they're doing it for free. And it's fantastic. To be clear, Pulse has not made a full-fledged Facebook client for the iPad. But what they have done is integrated Facebook into the overall Pulse experience so that you can do some social exploration in a very visual way. 
Dec 01, 10:30PM
Apple was granted a set of patents earlier this week, but while those were practical, even prosaic in their content, this new one is simply baffling. I'm thinking that the many talented engineers at that company are coming up with more ideas than Apple can actually execute, but are too cool to ignore. Today's "grab bag" patent is for an autostereoscopic 3D display that tracks the user's position in space and adjusts the display accordingly. It's a monstrously complex way of doing things, but if you don't want to wear glasses, this is what you get.
Dec 01, 10:04PM
Motorola has just purchased 4Home, the developer of home monitoring, control, and energy management software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 4Home's software platform essentially adds a technology layer to any consumer's home. Services include energy management, home security and monitoring, media management and home health. The software allows consumers to control web-based content on their TVs, appliances in the Kitchen, home devices and digital media in one unified user-interface, and track their home energy usage down to the device level. The technology also has mobile functionality as well. 
Dec 01, 10:02PM
Jeremy Liew is my guest on Ask a VC this week. He’s a guy with plenty of Web battle scars. He was an early employee of CitySearch back in the mid-1990s, a senior executive at InterActive Corp. and a senior executive at AOL. (You know, before AOL was cool again.) He’s been at Lightspeed Venture Partners [...]
Dec 01, 9:45PM
Back in April 2008, married couple Aaron and Christine Boring filed suit against Google for "intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion" of their privacy, because a Street View car drove down their Private road and snapped some photos of their house. Aside from giving the press an opportunity to go pun-crazy, the case has been notable for its longevity: most of the charges, which included negligence, were thrown out in February 2009, but Boring v. Google came back for an encore this year. The lone remaining charge? Trespassing. Now, over two and a half years after the case got started, a judge has handed down her consent judgement, ruling that that Google was indeed guilty of Count II Trespass. The Borings are getting a grand total of $1 for their trouble. Ouch.
Dec 01, 9:34PM
Who doesn't know Scoble? A-list blogger, Twitter evangelist, Rackspace videographer, serious party-boy, Robert Scoble is one of Silicon Valley's most ubiquitous and transparent figures – a seemingly fully public personality in our open-sourced age of publicness. In person, though, Scoble isn't quite Scoble. For all his professions of transparency and his claims that privacy is dead, there's still something slightly hidden, perhaps even mysterious about the real life Robert Scoble. And that's why I invited him onto my show. As a fully public personality with a global brand who, nonetheless, has cultivated a certain distance from himself, Scoble may well be all our futures. So watch him and learn how to develop a successful identity in our new attention economy. One day, for better or worse, we may all be Robert Scoble. Video ahead.
Dec 01, 9:05PM
Over Thanksgiving weekend a New York Times story, "A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web" clued a lot of people in to some of the drawbacks of Google, namely that negative attention online and complaint links from customer service sites like Get Satisfaction can actually be a benefit to business as in the problematic case of online retailer DecorMyEyes. The Times piece followed DecorMyEyes customer Clarabelle Rodriguez as she suffered online and offline harassment from DecorMyEyes founder Vitaly Borker, all in the name of improving his Google Search rankings. While I saw that DecorMyEyes had dropped in the Google rankings for eyewear related searches like "La Font" directly after the post went out, it was only a matter of time before Google did something official.
Dec 01, 8:46PM
For the last few days we've been getting a series of increasingly loopy emails from a startup in Sweden asking us to write about their launch. (See photo to the left.) I realize this post may be the beginning of a slippery slope of relentless pitches from Scandinavians that ends up with someone breaking into my house to bring me a pitch and a latte. But what the hell? I like lattes and TechCrunch was a site built on giving exposure to persistent, gutsy entrepreneurs building things because they wanted them to exist in the world and the series of very persistent pitches from Peter Sullivan of Vacation Relation epitomized that. So I did one better than a post and invited Sullivan on TechCrunchTV to talk about his company. Running on fumes from three days coding and no sleep, he didn't disappoint.
Dec 01, 8:35PM
During your time online, you've filled out dozens — probably even hundreds — of forms of all shapes and sizes, covering everything from usernames to billing information. Unfortunately, nobody actually enjoys filling out these forms, which can lead to serious conversion problems for web apps: new users will often happily wander around a site to learn about a new widget, but as soon as you ask them for their email address or credit card information, most of the time they'll shrug their shoulders and head back to FarmVille. That's a big problem, and it's one that Reward Level, a new startup launching today, may have a solution for: it's incentivizing users to fill out forms by offering them hot deals as a reward. It sounds simple, but that's exactly why it might actually work. 
Dec 01, 8:19PM
Touching on the topic of why LTE will be successful during their press call this morning, Verizon tooted their own horn a bit by bringing up, curiously enough, the success of Android. To quote Verizon CTO Tony Melone: Android really took off when Verizon got involved.
Strong words — and ones that have some Android devotees in quite the tizzy. But are they true? 
Dec 01, 7:57PM
On Tuesday, the United States senate passed the Food Safety and Modernization Act (senate bill 510). If the House also approves the bill, as expected, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will have the power to force food recalls when contamination is reported by consumers. The bill will also increase the stringency and frequency of safety inspections for food manufacturers and processors. Last week, the senate amended their version of the bill to make farms with revenue less than $500,000 a year exempt from the new requirements. Direct-to-consumer sellers, including farmers' market vendors, would also be exempt. The bill does not address poultry or beef products, which are regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). A managing partner at the venture and private equity fund Bradmer Foods, Adam Borden, predicted...
Dec 01, 7:45PM
Candytech, a Prague, Czech Republic-based marketing firm and Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant, used to run a Facebook statistics portal called Facebakers. Starting today, it will run that same portal under the banner Socialbakers. Guess who urged the company to change the name of its product? Correct!
Dec 01, 7:38PM
WikiLeaks was briefly down this morning not only because of ongoing DDoS attacks, but because it was actually taken off Amazon Web Services by Amazon and moved back to a Swedish provider, according to this tweet from Reuters. WikiLeaks has been in the news almost every day since it released 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables to major media organizations on Sunday. Yesterday founder Julian Assange was put on Interpol's Wanted list for non-WikiLeaks related charges.
Dec 01, 7:30PM
In June of 2008, we wrote about SproutCore, and open source framework that was demoed that year at the WWDC event put on by Apple. The reason they were demoing it was because it was going to be the technology powering the soon-to-be-released MobileMe experience on the web. Apple had actually been using the framework with .Mac before that as well. And for good reason: the guy who created it, Charles Jolley, worked for them. Now Jolley is trying to open up that work to the rest of the web with his startup Strobe. And they've just gotten some big backing from O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Hummer Winblad to make it happen. So what exactly is Strobe? GigaOm's Om Malik had a nice interview with Jolley back in July after he left Apple to talk about the project. Essentially, Strobe is a company built to help developers around the web code mobile applications with the SproutCore framework, which again, Jolley created. The idea is to use JavaScript and HTML5 to create touch-based apps which run as if they're built using native code. The best known examples to date are some of the MobileMe apps and iWork.com, which Jolley helped drive the development of at Apple.
Dec 01, 7:05PM
Yep, you read that right. Today, YouTube is officially launching TrueView, a new ad format that lets users skip over ads they aren't interested in — and advertisers are actually okay with it. It's a new format that YouTube has been testing for a while now, and it's a bit different than what you're probably used to. When a TrueView ad unit begins playing, you'll notice a five second countdown timer — as soon as that's up, you'll see an arrow that will let you skip the remainder of the ad and get back to the content you wanted to see, or you can choose to keep on watching the ad. No kidding. 
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