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This Article Explains "This Article Is A Must Read."
Jan 20, 9:18AM
Many of you have asked for a post revealing the story behind this post. (Warning: Don't click if you're easily angered. And please don't read any further if you hate inside baseball posts). This morning Mike wrote something called "Obligations To Dead Sources" in which he refers to a tweet from New York Times correspondent Micheline Maynard. Maynard's tweet about not breaking a promise to protect a source "Jerry York told others of us details about Steve Jobs' illness. To me, a promise is a promise" actually broke her promise to protect a source. It's mind blowing, I know. 
The USPTO Is Reviewing Facebook's Trademark For 'Facebook.' Wait, What?
Jan 20, 7:15AM
So Facebook has been a bit aggressive with their trademarks in the past, most recently filing to trademark the word "Face." The social network has also gone after companies that have "book" in their name. But the tables may have turned on Facebook, if long-distance calling company Talkbook has its way. As All Facebook reported last week, Talkbook filed a "petition for cancellation" to the USPTO claiming that the social network's trademark on "The Facebook," was fraudulent because it dropped the "the" from the trademark. You can read all the gory details in the filing here (courtesy of DomainNameWire). And according to the USPTO, the current status of Facebook's trademark for "Facebook," now states that "a cancellation proceeding is pending at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board." 
Google Ventures Leads $600K Investment In LawPivot, A Quora For Startup Legal Advice
Jan 20, 5:01AM
There's no doubt that the success of startups like Quora have propelled the Q&A space into the spotlight. And there seems to be room for other niche Quora-like sites, such as enterprise-focsued Opzi and recently launched LawPivot, which provides crowdsourced legal advice to technology companies. Today LawPivot is announcing that it has secured $600,000 in new funding from Google Ventures and a number of angel investors, including Richard Chen, David Tisch, David Li, Nick Mehta and Don Hutchison. This brings LawPivot's total funding to $1 million (the startup previously raised $400,000 in angel funding). LawPivot is essentially a "Quora for legal advice" that allows technology companies to confidentially ask legal questions to expert attorneys. Questions are completely confidential, so companies still have privacy within the platform. The startup was co-founded by a team of lawyers and tech execs, including Jay Mandal, a lead mergers and acquisitions attorney at Apple; Nitin Gupta; an intellectual property litigation lawyer; and Steven Kam, a software engineer and architect with experience as an intellectual property litigation lawyer. Clearly, these guys have experience in advising tech companies on how to navigate the law. 
Payback: I Just Canceled AT&T By Way Of Google Voice
Jan 20, 4:49AM
Over the past few years, I've been pretty vocal with my distaste for AT&T. Their complete and total incompetence when it comes to handling the iPhone in major metropolitan areas (or really any mildly crowded area) was only matched by a few of the colossal fuck-ups they've had with regard to some of my bills over the years. Tonight was the last straw. And it couldn't have come at a more perfect time. Thanks to the new awesome number porting feature that Google Voice is now testing, I was able to cancel my AT&T service tonight — without having to talk to a soul at AT&T. I just completed the process which took less than five minutes. You see, when you port an existing number over to Google Voice, it will proceed to cancel the carrier contract that is tied to that number. Google is very good about warning you that this will happen — they make you check something like six checkboxes just to make sure you really, really want to do this. And then they make you enter your current carrier account number and the like so they can complete the process. But again, it's all super-simple. And awesome. I'm no longer an AT&T customer thanks to Google.
Google Voice Is About To Take Off: Number Porting Coming Soon For $20
Jan 20, 3:43AM
We've been huge fans of Google Voice for quite a while now — it makes screening calls and managing multiple phones a breeze — but there's always been a huge thorn in its side: it didn't allow people to port their existing phone numbers over. In other words, in order to take advantage of all of Google Voice's benefits, you'd have to get a new phone number. Now, after years of waiting, that's finally changing: Google has quietly enabled number porting for Google Voice. Update: Google tells us that this is currently just a test available to some users and is not rolling out to everyone yet. However, it seems likely that a wide scale launch is coming soon. 
Want To Top Apple's All-Time Top Paid Apps List? Sell A Ton Of Apps — Or Do This
Jan 20, 2:32AM
Last night, we pointed out that as a part of their countdown to 10 billion app downloads, Apple actually revealed the top all-time app downloads for paid iPhone apps, free iPhone apps, paid iPad apps, and free iPad apps. The top results seemed pretty straightforward, with a few oddities here or there. And there may be a good reason for such oddities. The system appears pretty easy to game. Well, technically, it's probably not really "gaming" the system. At least not yet. It just appears that Apple is being a little sloppy in populating their lists. After speaking to a few top app developers, it seems that Apple is counting total download numbers in aggregate, regardless of if an app switched between being free and paid.
YouTube Rolls Out Its New Homepage To Everyone
Jan 20, 2:04AM
YouTube started experimenting with a new homepage last month, amping up its recommendation features so it would suggest new content you're interested in. Today it has rolled out that experiemental homepage to all users. YouTube product manager Brian Glick tells us that the decision was made primarily because of positive user feedback, "Over 100,000 people filled out a survey, and most thought that the homepage is better now. Millions of people opted in, now we're just putting it out to all the rest."
Is Apple Poised To Take Social Seriously In iOS With "Media Stream" And "Find My Friends"?
Jan 20, 1:47AM
Another day, another iOS beta. This time, 9to5mac has dug into the latest iOS 4.3 beta and found something rather interesting: hints of a would-be new feature to be called "Media Stream". While the details are obviously pretty scant at this point, early speculation points to a more social version of iOS. 9to5mac notes that inside the code for Media Stream is also a reference to something called "Photo Streams", which is something other users may be able to subscribe to. What other users? Well, presumably your friends. 9to5mac is putting two-and-two together, tying these hints to the recently found "Find My Friends" feature in the first iOS 4.3 beta. 
US, China Compare Clean Tech, Environmental Concerns at the Whitehouse
Jan 20, 1:43AM
Today, President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao revealed, at a press conference in Washington D.C., conclusions from their latest round of meetings that have taken place this week at the White House. The two world leaders have met eight times since Obama took office. Excerpts from their speeches relating to environmental issues follow below. A full transcript of today's press conference is available at Whitehouse.gov.
LivingSocial Hits A Million Amazon Gift Cards Sold, $20 Million In Card Value
Jan 20, 1:14AM
Living Social has been offering $10 off any $20 Amazon purchase since 5am this morning and it's been a boon huge for the company, which Amazon has invested in. Now the deal has just crossed over the one million mark, with 12 hours to go. LivingSocial tells us that there are currently 99.4K vouchers being sold each hour, 2k vouchers sold each minute and 85 vouchers being sold each second.Already this has beat the Groupon/Gap deal which ended in $11 million worth of Groupons sold.
PicPlz Pretties Up Android App And Begins Accepting (Beta) API Applications
Jan 20, 1:13AM
Last week, we noted that mobile photo-sharing app PicPlz rolled out a bunch of improvements to their app in an effort to better compete with rival Instagram. Sadly, that new polish was only for their iPhone app at the time. But today brings good news for Android fans: the same features! And there's a bonus too: PicPlz is now accepting applications for access to their API. PicPlz has more about the new features for Android users here. Here's the main gist of the update:
How Sonos Got It Right: Up Close With A Survivor
Jan 20, 12:54AM
John MacFarlane had a dream: to send music from one box to every room in the house. In 2002, the only way to do this - sanely - was to run speaker wire from room to room, creating an install headache or a rats nest of wires. Instead, his company, Sonos, succeeded at sending the audio wirelessly, a feat that has been replicated many times but has never resulted in a product as successful and popular as the Sonos Multi-Room Music System. There's a dirty secret in gadget start-ups: they fail. Constantly and catastrophically. Unlike web or web service start-ups, gadget start-ups require R&D, manufacturing, and distribution. The Gizmondo, the most famous of all flame-outs, involved unkept promises, horrible hardware, and an exec with organized crime ties wrapping a Ferrari Enzo around a light pole. Making hardware is hard. It takes time, and MacFarlane and his team took three years to finally launch the ZonePlayer 100 and remote control. During this time multiple vendors tried and failed to ship similar products. However, thanks to a unique design aesthetic, some nice software, and a lot of luck, Sonos survived and is now thriving. 
After A Fateful Tweet, 60mo Raises Series A From Lightbank, Yo
Jan 20, 12:37AM
Last October, finance-tracking startup 60mo sent a tweet to Lightbank that read: "Hey @lightbank, we should chat sometime. Mid-westerners gotta stick together, yo." Three months later, Lightbank has its response: "fo sho". Today, 60mo is announcing that it's closed a Series A funding round led by Lightbank. Exact details of the deal aren't being disclosed, but we're told it's "in the range of a million dollars". And yes, that tweet was actually the first time the two organizations communicated with each other. 60mo, which we've covered before, is an online service that helps businesses manage their finances by importing data from QuickBooks, FreshBooks, and a variety of financial institutions like Bank of America, Chase, and American Express. 
Come Get Your Tickets To The 2010 Crunchies Awards After Party!
Jan 20, 12:08AM
Tickets to the 2010 Crunchies Awards are officially sold out. However, if you still would like to be a part of Friday night's event, we have decided to release tickets to the After Party! The After Party will be located in San Francisco at the Exploratorium on January 21st from 9pm PST - 11:30pm PST. Come celebrate the results of the 2010 Crunchies Awards with us in style. There will be a fully-hosted bar, amazing finger food, and a gaming room. ELEW will be serenading us all night long with his Rockjazz renditions of hits from Coldplay, The Killers, and more. Red Bull talent DJ Platurn and internet dance sensation, the Oakland TURF Dancers, are also set to round out the evening's lineup. 
Four Lessons From Evernote's First Week On The Mac App Store
Jan 19, 11:37PM
Editor's note: The following guest post is written by Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, which is currently the No. 5 app in the Mac App Store. It also didn't hurt that the app has been prominently featured by Apple. We just finished our first week on the Mac App Store and it might have been the most important week in Evernote's history. Here's how it went and what we learned: Over the past year, about 70% of Evernote's new users came from mobile app stores, mostly iOS and Android. This led us to the understandable conclusion that mobile was the crucial thing that made a platform attractive to independent developers. Last week made us realize that the reality is a little bit more nuanced. It isn't mobile that's overwhelmingly important, it's the app store. Until a week ago, all the good app stores just happened to be on mobile devices, but someone with a shiny new Macbook is just as eager to get the best apps as someone with a shiny new iPhone. 
AOL's Editions: The App For When You Crap
Jan 19, 11:11PM
Apparently our parent AOL has this super-secret iPad app they've been working on for a few months. Like everyone else on the web today, the only thing we know about it is its name, Editions, and that it's "coming soon" — the stuff on the teaser page. They (smartly) tend to not divulge secret project information to us. Based on the tagline, "The magazine that reads you", we're going to assume it's a Flipboard-like app that looks at your interests and serves up content for you in a pretty format. But actually, the "behind the scenes" video the team made as an easter egg for the teaser site actually reveals quite a bit more. For example, Senior Director of Mobile Projects, Sol Lipman, was more in favor of the tagline: "The app for when you crap."
Qualcomm Invests $3 Million In Q&A Service ChaCha
Jan 19, 10:51PM
Question and answer service ChaCha has just received a $3 million infusion from Qualcomm's venture arm Qualcomm Venture Partners. This brings the company's total funding to a whopping $75 million. In a statement, Scott Jones, ChaCha's CEO says that Qualcomm's "experience and insight into the global wireless ecosystem will help ChaCha continue to expand its service worldwide." ChaCha has been a roll over the past year, achieving profitability, raising boatloads of money, and reaching record traffic numbers for its Q&A product. 
Eventbrite Sold Over 11M Tickets Last Year For $207M In Gross Sales
Jan 19, 10:33PM
Eventbrite has had a banner 2010. In a blog post wrapping up its 2010 milestones on its company blog the company reveals that gross ticket sales in 2010 were exactly $206,899,900, more than double the $99,141,981 in ticket sales raked in in 2009. The total number of tickets sold in 2010 also ran laps around the 5,141,051 sold in 2009, at 11,004,743. Eventbrite also had 222,353 events posted in 2010, over 9,370 cities from 147 countries represented, bringing in an 17,224,232 average monthly page views. The most trafficked month for the Eventbrite site was October with 6,738,155 unique visitors.
Facebook Teams With Snaptu To Launch Rich App For Feature Phones
Jan 19, 10:20PM
Facebook has proven to be immensely popular on smart phones: it's the most downloaded application of all time on the iPhone and probably holds the record on Android as well. But the user experience for so-called feature phones, which still make up the vast majority of cell phone usage worldwide, hasn't been as rich — users generally have relied on Facebook's lightweight m.facebook.com site, which gets the job done, but doesn't really have an 'app' feel. Today, that's changing. Facebook has just announced the launch of a new application for feature phones that was developed in conjunction with Snaptu. According to Facebook's announcement, the app will work across 2,500 device models from the likes of Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and LG. The application will include a home screen that looks similar to the one seen on the iPhone and Android, and Facebook notes that it also includes contact sync support and faster scrolling through status updates and photos. 
Snoopin' On Instagram: The Early-Adopting Celeb Joins The Photo-Sharing Service
Jan 19, 9:42PM
Step one: obtain a ton of users. Step two: get brands to leverage your service. Step three: get celebrities to use your service and promote it. Step four: mainstream. While these steps obviously aren't a one-size-fits-all thing, they have been a pretty standard set of rules for a number of popular startups in recent years. Twitter and Foursquare immediately jump to mind. And now it looks like Instagram just hit step three. Hip hop artist Snoop Dogg has begun using Instagram. Earlier this afternoon, he tweeted out his first picture to his nearly 2.5 million followers. It's Snoop in a suit "bossin it up". And yes, he used a filter.
Buoyed By PayPal's Growth, eBay Posts 24 Percent Increase In Profits
Jan 19, 9:31PM
eBay just posted strong fourth quarter earnings, announcing that revenue for the fourth quarter ending in 2010 increased a 5% to $2.5 billion, or up 10% excluding Skype, compared to the same period of 2009 (eBay sold Skype in Q3 of 2009). On a GAAP basis, eBay reported net income of $559.2 million, or $0.42 per diluted share. The company's non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $638.8 million, or $0.52 per diluted share, representing a 24% increase excluding Skype, compared to the same period of 2009. eBay beat analyst expectations of $0.47 per share. The company's PayPal business ended the quarter with 94.4 million active registered accounts, adding approximately one million active accounts per month. PayPal's net total payment volume was $26.9 billion in the fourth quarter (up from $21.3 billion in the same quarter in 2009), with nearly half of PayPal's revenue in the fourth quarter was generated outside the United States. eBay's marketplaces segment $15.0 billion in gross merchandise volume, with the number of sold items up by 10%, thanks to the strong holiday shopping season.
The Top 20 VC Power Bloggers Of 2010
Jan 19, 8:26PM
A lot of venture capitalists and super angels are not only active investors, but also active bloggers. Below is a list of the top 20 VC power bloggers as compiled by Larry Cheng of Volition Capital based on traffic data from Compete. The metric being used here is average monthly unique visitors during the fourth quarter of 2010. Compared to last year's list, there's been a big shakeup in the VC blogging world. Paul Graham of Y Combinator took the top spot, pushing Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures to No. 2. And four new names appear in the top ten, including Chris Dixon (Founder Collective), Ben Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz), Charlie O'Donnell (First Round Capital), and Larry Cheng himself. They pushed down Bill Gurley (Benchmark), Josh Kopelman (First Round), Bijan Sabet (Spark)—who are all still in the top 20—and Guy Kawasaki (who was pulled off the list because he is not as active as a VC anymore).
Best Buy To Talk You Out Of Verizon iPhone (Which They Won't Have) With A BGR Blog Post
Jan 19, 8:07PM
We're now just three weeks away from the launch of the iPhone on Verizon's network (or two weeks if you're already a Verizon customer). There's no question it's going to be a massive seller. And we already knew that AT&T would attempt to do everything in their power to make sure that their customers don't jump ship. But now it appears that they may have a partner in this perilous mission: Best Buy. A document obtained by GearLive, which they say is confirmed as an internal Best Buy playbook, details how the company is instructing employees to deal with questions about the Verizon iPhone. Specifically, they're to use the following argument:
Keen On… Kevin Kelly: What Does Technology Want? (TCTV)
Jan 19, 8:01PM
In his important new book, What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly - the legendary Silicon Valley provocateur and Wired magazine's Senior Maverick – introduces technology as a thing with needs, wants and appetites. What Kelly thinks of as "technology" might not quite be God, but it's something that reflects the laws of the universe and is thus central to our experience as human beings. For Kelly, technology is "stuff we make with our minds" – which includes everything from this post to his book to your iPhone to Facebook to the Internet. This is what Kelly - whose ideas seem to be simultaneously religious, Darwinian and transcendental - calls the "technium" and it, he says, is what is driving today's seemingly unstoppable and inevitable digital revolution. So where did this technium begin and where will it end? If anyone knows the answer to this question it is Kevin Kelly, who, twenty-five years ago predicted the future before most of us knew it existed. Video ahead.
Nintendo 3DS Spy Report, Part 2: Hands-On With Zelda, Super Street Fighter IV & More
Jan 19, 7:42PM
The one disappointing thing about the Nintendo event from this morning: we still don't have the exact list of launch titles, with Nintendo instead opting to draw attention to the system's "launch window," the several week period between its March 27 launch and E3. What are you gonna do? Me, I played a couple of these "launch window" games right after the press conference. Here's a quick breakdown of what I saw, and played.
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