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How Not To Be Influential? Quora Spam On Mechanical Turk
Jan 09, 8:42AM
There's has been much discussion in the past couple of days about how Quora can handle its recent explosive growth, avoid becoming a Yahoo Answers (i.e. full of nonsense and spam) and scale with grace. As further evidence of a growing success problem, Google's Head Spam Avenger Matt Cutts points us to the above evidence of Quora fraud through Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Ironically the above Human Intelligence Task (HIT) involves voting up Internet marketer Larry Genkin's answer to the very popular and highly contested question "How do you become influential?"
Julian Assange Nominated For A Crunchie? Oh Bad Luck, Kim Jong-Il
Jan 09, 1:51AM
So, The Crunchies Finalists have been announced and - thanks to votes from you, our valued readers - Wikileaks' Julian Assange has been shortlisted for the "Founder of the Year" category. Of course, as one of the co-hosts of the awards, it's vital that I be seen as impartial and in no way inclined towards or against any particular nominee. For example, it would be hugely inappropriate for me to suggest that nominating a creepy, egotistical, criminally negligent alleged rapist as "best founder" sends out an astonishingly messed-up message to other entrepreneurs. Equally, running around the TechCrunch office screaming "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? JULIAN ASSANGE?" at the top of my lungs would likely give the appearance of bias against that oily little Australian tool. So I won't do that.
OMG/JK: I Wonder If The Verizon iPhone Comes In Red
Jan 08, 11:00PM
It's time for your favorite part of the week: the new episode of OMG/JK, featuring fellow TechCrunch writer MG Siegler and myself talking about the hottest stories in tech. And this episode's a great one (though that should come as no surprise). This has been a remarkable week in technology news, especially when it comes to the iPhone and Android (which, as you may have noticed, happen to be subjects MG and I like to talk about). In this episode we go over the impending release of the iPhone on Verizon (I've never seen MG more giddy), the Amazon Android App Store (say that three times fast), the new video demo of Android's tablet OS Honeycomb, and Apple's new Mac App Store.
NSFW – The Song: No, Seriously This One Really Is Not Safe For Work [NSFW]
Jan 08, 9:23PM
Well, this is several types of amazing. Way back in 2009, I received an email from an Argentinan lawyer-turned-singer/songwriter by the name of BluBlú. She's a big TechCrunch fan, she explained, and was considering writing a song based on my Not Safe For Work columns. Would I mind? Of course I wouldn't mind. After all, MG has a song, so why shouldn't I? That said, I wasn't actually expecting there to ever be a song. I get a lot of crazy emails. Oh me of little faith.
Gillmor Gang 01.08.11 (TCTV)
Jan 08, 8:07PM
The Gillmor Gang reconvened after the holidays. Robert Scoble took the occasion as an opportunity to catch up on some much-needed rest from his Vegas hotel room, albeit on camera. CES continued to be the ghost of conferences past, as the @Scobleizer famed let's-walk-the-show-floor-with-a-camera-tour took a record 60 minutes or whatever. For those who remember Johnny Carson, this has become Robert's version of the Ed Ames tomahawk throw. John Borthwick weighed in on the inevitable Year of the Tablet discussion from New York, where my view of Apple dominance is met with healthy skepticism but no real counter argument. Borthwick's Bit.ly service continues to prosper even as Twitter consolidates services and clients in-house. As a self-described former member of the entertainment cartel (AOL), he declined repeatedly to join my cartel-bashing while essentially agreeing with me. Androiders @JTaschek and @KevinMarks ably represented the Android-will-beat-Apple-if-we-have-to-ship-individual-tablet-models-for-each-customer crowd. Marks even had one of the paperweights that he brandished on camera. I fended off a plea from @Borthwick to fix the RSS feed for the 7 remaining people who would rather podcast than stream. Other stuff was talked about. I had fun. Video Ahead
Can Google Get Its Mojo Back?
Jan 08, 5:49PM
A spectre is haunting Mountain View. No, not bed bugs: bit rot. Google is in serious decline. I don't see how they can deny it. They have famously always been a data-driven organization, and the data is compelling. Business Insider's list of the 15 biggest tech flops of 2010 cited no fewer than four from Google: Buzz, Wave, Google TV, and the Nexus One. Bizarre errors have erupted in Google Maps. Many of its best engineers are leaving. Influential luminaries like Vivek Wadhwa, Jeff Atwood, Marco Arment and Paul Kedrosky (way ahead of the curve) say their core search service is much degraded from its glory years, and the numbers bear this out; after years of unassailable dominance, Google's search-market share is diminishing—it dropped an eyebrow-raising 1.2% just from October to November—while Microsoft's Bing, whose UI Google tried and embarrassingly failed to copy earlier this year, is on the rise.
Google Bangladesh Site "OwN3D by TiGER-M@TE"
Jan 08, 4:27PM
We just got an anonymous tip that Google's been 'hacked' - sure enough, visitors of the company's Bangladesh search site (Google.com.bd) see a defaced landing page rather than the usual search site. As far as I can tell, www.google.com.bd functions properly, so whether this really constitutes a 'hack' is up for debate. Local Bangladesh media, including online newspaper bdnews24.com, reported on the news as well, quoting a CTO of a local ISP, who confirmed the hack.
Confirmed: Index And Union Square Invest In SoundCloud
Jan 08, 3:28PM
As we hinted predicted four days ago, SoundCloud was indeed talking to Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures about investing. It's confirmed today on their blog that both firms have made undisclosed investments. SoundCloud was looking to raise another round since its last was in April 2009, from Doughty Hanson Ventures for EUR 2.5 million. Since then it has scaled in adoption and taken on bigger offices and more staff. 
What Exactly is a Business Model?
Jan 08, 3:00PM
Everyone in the tech world talks about business models. But I'll bet that if you quizzed a random sample of these people, you'd find that they really don't know what a business model is. I did just that with my students at UC-Berkeley. Most raised their hands, and MBA student Blake Brundidge's attempt to answer the question was a valiant one—but none of them really had a clue. The only one who got the answer right was Lionel Vital, a Stanford student gatecrashing my iSchool class. The reality is that discussions of business models are like discussions of teenage sex: everyone talks about it all the time; everyone boasts about how well he or she is doing it; everyone thinks everyone else is doing it; almost no one really is; and the few who are are fumbling their way through it incompetently. I'll tell you what a business model is, in case you are quizzed by your investors. But first, let me answer the big question that is surely on your mind: what is a Stanford student doing at Berkeley?
Go, You Vampire Squid
Jan 08, 2:15PM
I simply love Goldman Sachs. The Facebook deal is a brilliant poke in the eye for just about everybody, and proof, yet again, that money, like water, finds its own level. If there are buyers and sellers to be matched, and a fee to be made in the process, the fine folks at Goldman Sachs will figure out how to bridge that gap. So much the better if there is regulatory friction to arbitrage against, it simply raises the fee. For the last seven years, the venture capital industry has been saying that the IPO process is broken and startups are the losers. In a fine display of Wall Street's can do attitude, Goldman has gone and produced an alternative to an IPO; one where the clear winner is the startup. Make no mistake; this is a great result for Facebook. Consider the alternative. Going public is hard, and being public is harder. This is true for a company like Facebook, not because of the cost of Sarbanes Oxley compliance, which would be more than manageable, but because of the insidious nature of being public and having a focus on quarterly earnings, governance and the stock price. No matter how hard you try to avoid becoming short-term focused, the constant drip of analyst meetings, quarterly updates and daily stock price tickers takes its toll. Your earliest and best employees, fully vested and now fully liquid, leave, and instead of building a company, the CEO is getting on quarterly analyst calls. The best reason to go public was to get the money. Conventional wisdom used to say that the only way to raise $1 billion-plus, at an attractive valuation, was to provide investors in return the transparency and the liquidity that being a publicly traded stock entails. The company puts up with the analysts, the information requests and the quarterly filings in return for getting the cash. Goldman has given Facebook all of the benefits and none of the negatives of a public offering. They should have a happy client.
Twitter Informs Users Of DOJ WikiLeaks Court Order, Didn't Have To
Jan 08, 7:59AM
The US Department of Justice has served Twitter with a 2703(d) court order to reveal information about accounts related to people associated with WikiLeaks. The order is a request for account data including the ominous "correspondence and notes of record related to the account" for users Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror), Rop Gongrijp (@rop_g), Birgitta Jonsittir (@birgittaj); Julian Assange and Bradley Manning from November 1, 2009 to present.
Kleiner Perkins To Invest In Groupon's Massive $950 Million Funding Round
Jan 08, 2:16AM
Last week we reported that Groupon was closing a massive $950 million funding round at an impressive $4.75 billion valuation in the wake of walking away from an acquisition offer from Google. Groupon already closed half of that — around $500 million — from Russian firm DST, Fidelity and Morgan Stanley. Now we've heard from multiple sources that distinguished Silicon Valley firm Kleiner Perkins is on the verge of participating in the round as well. It's unclear when the remainder of the round will close or who the other other participants aside from Kleiner will be. Kleiner has recently been making aggressive moves in Silicon Valley, including a $150 million slice of Twitter's recent $200 million funding round.
Yet Another Kevin Rose Rumor! iPad 2 Announcement Coming In "3-4 Weeks"
Jan 08, 2:13AM
Another year, another set of Kevin Rose predictions, this time about the iPad 2. Apparently Rose has revealed to the subscribers of his foundat.io/n newsletter (and everyone else) that the iPad 2 announcement will be coming in 3-4 weeks, giving the exact date of February 1st as a possibilty. So basically last year's iPad announcement date, plus a year. Briefly mentioned is a retina display and front/back cameras. The retina display tip seems to be the most controversial (Rose has amended it with a second update suggesting a higher dpi but not retina) and some people are saying it's impossible
Will A Q&A Ecosystem Bloom? Quora Launches An API In Alpha
Jan 08, 1:53AM
Many successful startups have followed a simple pattern in recent years. They gain the users then demand for an ecosystem begins. We saw this with Facebook, with Twitter, with Foursquare, etc. Quora is currently in the process of gaining those users. And now the demand for an ecosystem is kicking in. So they're releasing an early API to meet that demand. Specifically, Quora has launched an "Extension API". Engineer Edmond Lau has detailed it here, but essentially, it's a simple API that allows users who are building browser extensions based on Quora's data to access better data from users who are logged into Quora.
#LessAmbitiousMovies Got Over 364K Tweets, Reaching Over 27M Twitter Users
Jan 08, 1:18AM
If you've been on Twitter at all lately you're probably at least vaguely familiar with #LessAmbitiousMovies, which is a hashtag that exploded on Twitter on Monday night in what we thought was record time, judging by the fact that it seemed like our entire Twitter stream was at some point saturated with not so ambitious film titles.
Why Apple Will Let Verizon Announce An iPhone
Jan 08, 12:28AM
Editor's Note: Jim Dalrymple has been writing about Apple for more than 15 years. You can follow him on Twitter @jdalrymple and on his Web site at The Loop. Earlier today, Verizon announced a special event to be held next week and while the company gave no details, everyone is speculating that this is the long-awaited, much-anticipated Verizon iPhone. If that's the case, one question immediately leaps to mind -- would Apple really let another company announce an iPhone for them? We all know how secretive Apple is and how much they love doing their own events.
iTwin, A 2009 TechCrunch50 Finalist, Starts Shipping (CES 2011 Interview)
Jan 08, 12:23AM
We ran into iTwin co-founder Kal Takru at last night's press event, Showstoppers, and he had some good news for us. You may recall them as a finalist from 2009's TechCrunch 50 — and now they're shipping. That's a stage many startups don't reach. In case you've forgotten, the iTwin is a simple device for connecting two computers wirelessly. You plug one half into one computer, and one into another, and if all goes well, an encrypted connection is created between them (via the internet, not directly), letting you share files securely.
HTML5 Could Help Bring Some Sanity To Online Guitar Tabs
Jan 08, 12:17AM
If you've ever searched online for guitar tablature (a popular music notation format used for guitars), you know that it's a generally miserable experience. First there's the problem of quality — there's myriad versions of popular songs out there, and many of them are wrong. But even once you've found the tab you're looking for, actually using it is a pain. The most basic tabs are just text documents, with notes presented using a combination of ASCII characters. That works, but it's no better than looking at the tab on a piece of paper — you can do much better by taking advantage of the fact that you're viewing the tab from a computer. Now an experiment on Mozilla's Hacks portal, which showcases neat things that are being done with Firefox, gives a glimpse of what tabs could look like in the future with the help of HTML5.
CrunchGear Drives GM's Autonomous EN-V Concept Vehicle
Jan 08, 12:04AM
We're here at CES in Las Vegas live streaming the show floor; getting our hands on all the super-modern and futuristic cool stuff. Today, GM asked us to come by and check out what they think the future will be like for some people. This future has many types of vehicles that fit entirely different lifestyles. That future is of course more than 10 years away, but we'll get there with working concepts like the GM EN-V. And they gave us the keys.
TechCrunch Giveaway: Tickets To The 2010 Crunchies #Crunchies
Jan 07, 11:18PM
The Finalists for the 2010 Crunchies Awards have been announced and voting has already started. So why not give away some free tickets to a few lucky readers? People say the Crunchies are to technology what the Oscars are to Hollywood. You can read the full list of winners for 2009 here, 2008 here, and 2007 here. Some [...]
Disrupt Winner Qwiki Is In The Middle Of Raising A Quick $8 Million
Jan 07, 11:06PM
Qwiki, the visual search startup that won the top prize at TechCrunch Disrupt last September is in the middle of raising as much as $8 million in a series A financing. According to an SEC filing, it has already sold $5 million worth of the round. Both venture capital firms and individuals are investing. It appears that a large part of the round ($4 million so far) is being taken up by a pooled investment fund from Felix Venture Partners, at least according to this separate SEC filing. The company is still raising money to complete the round. Qwiki has already raised $1.5 million in seed capital from angel investors including Keith Rabois (from PayPal, Slide, and now Sqaure), Shervin Pishevar (SGN), an Jawed Karim (the third YouTube founder), and Elad Gil (Google, now Twitter). The company was founded by Doug Imbruce and Louis Monier (who founded AltaVista).
CES Showstoppers: In Video
Jan 07, 10:52PM
Showstoppers, like Unveiled and Digital Experience, is a peripheral show to CES but it offers close hands-ons with lots of great gear. Here is the huge mass of videos we've collected and we'll pop out items that made us smile.
Video: Hands-On With The RED Scarlet
Jan 07, 10:36PM
I just wrapped up a short interview with Ted Schilowitz from RED, in which he told us (and all our live stream viewers) all about the new RED Scarlet (AKA Epic Light) digital cinema camera. I got to hold the thing and revel in its 3K glory; and while RED devices are notoriously never "final," this felt about as final as it gets. I don't want to repeat what's already out there regarding the resolution, accessories, dates, and so on, which are all googleable (and some not final), so I'll stick to general impressions and you can watch the video for specifics. A few beauty shots are included for you to covet.
Sustainability Roundtable Raises $1.2 Million To Help Corporations Go Green
Jan 07, 8:52PM
A new SEC filing revealed that the Cambridge, Mass. consultancy Sustainability Roundtable, Inc. (SR Inc.) raised about $1 million to help corporations green their facilities and operations, and learn how to run their businesses in an environmentally and socially responsible manner. With a special focus on energy efficiency and real estate, SR Inc. bills itself as a provider of "shared cost" research and consulting services to its members. According to the company's LinkedIn page, their client-members include several private sector corporate real estate, tech and green building businesses including: Adobe Systems, Akamai, Autodesk, Gensler, Harvard University, IBM and Siemens Industry...
Hands-On Video: Surface V2 At CES
Jan 07, 8:35PM
We saw the Surface V2 (as they're calling it) soft-launched at the press day before CES, then demonstrated briefly by Ballmer in his keynote, and at last given official status with pictures and all the next morning. And then we got the the chance to try it out in person at the Microsoft booth. We've got video, some hands-on pictures, and our first impressions of the device. One thing I should make clear right away, which is of course slightly disappointing, is that this is definitely not a consumer device. It's too expensive and development is very much aimed at commercial deployment. That said, they hope to make the devices ubiquitous enough that having one at home would be redundant. You may form your own opinion of that strategy.
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