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Playstation Suite: Sony Brings Playstation Games To Android Phones
Jan 27, 9:04AM
At their PSP2 launch event today, Sony did not only unveil the new device but also introduced "Playstation Suite", a new cross-device game platform the company will use to bring Playstation 1 titles to Android phones and tablets (version 2.3 and up). In other words, Sony games will not exclusively be distributed to owners of the Playstation Phone that's supposed to be officially announced next month. Read the rest on MobileCrunch.
Facebook CTO Bret Taylor On HTML5, Mobile As The Future, And Yes, FriendFeed
Jan 27, 9:03AM
Yesterday, following his talk at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, I had a chance to sit down with Facebook CTO Bret Taylor. I've been following Taylor's work pretty closely since the early FriendFeed days, so it has been interesting to watch his transition into this powerful role inside of Facebook. And make no mistake, he's transitioned well. We talked about a wide range of topics regarding the company these days, and Taylor has a clear command over pretty much all of them. Obviously, he knows plenty of things that he's not going to tell me, but the answers he did give are actually pretty insightful as well.
Streaming Is Driving New Subscriber Growth At Netflix
Jan 27, 8:22AM
Netflix is betting its future business on streaming movies and TV shows over the Internet, and so far that bet is paying off nicely. Just last November, it introduced a streaming-only subscription for $7.99 a month, and that helped drive subscriber growth up 63 percent last quarter to end the year with 20 million subscribers. "More than one third of new subscribers are signing up for the pure streaming plan," Netflix reports in a letter to shareholders (PDF and embedded below). And it expects that percentage to keep growing. Netflix added 7.7 million net new subscribers total last year, up from 2.9 million in 2009. The growing appeal of streaming should keep driving that number up. And Netflix is spending less to attract new customers. While new subscribers grew 63 percent, Netflix spent 10 percent less on marketing. Its average cost to acquire anew subscriber fell to $11.13 in the quarter, from $19.81 during the September quarter before pure streaming was an option. Also, a lot more people are taking advantage of Netflix's free one month trial to see if streaming is for them. Nearly 9 percent 
Sony Unveils The PSP2 ("As Powerful As The PS3″)
Jan 27, 7:38AM
As previously reported, Sony just unveiled a PSP successor, codenamed "Next Generation Portable", at an event in Tokyo. The biggest bullet point here is that Sony claims the portable system is as powerful as the PS3, which means it will be supposedly able to produce "PS3-like graphics". Sony did show the hardware up and running. Read the rest on CrunchGear.
Task Management Startup Cohuman Raises $600K
Jan 27, 7:36AM
Cloud based task management service and Disrupt Startup Alley alumnus Cohuman has raised $600K in additional angel funding. Investors in the round included Diamond II Investments, Jupiter Partners, Stage One Capital and other angels. This is the second round of angel funding Cohuman has received and is added to a $800K raised in the fall of 2009 for a total $1.4 million. On Cohuman people can assign individual tasks and because it is web-based any group of people can collaborate through it. "We really think co-human is a better way to get things done, it really addresses some of the shortcomings of contemporary messaging technologies," says CEO Matthew Work.
IMHO, Imo Is A Pretty Great Way To Chat. Today Brings A New Design And An Exit From Alpha
Jan 27, 7:02AM
It was almost exactly two years ago that my colleague Robin Wauters first wrote about a service called Imo with the title: IMO.IM Is The Best IM Web Service You've Never Heard Of. I'll be honest, I didn't listen to him at the time (though, to be fair, I didn't even work at TechCrunch yet). He followed up a few months later when the service added Facebook chat support. But since then, they sort of dropped off our radar. So it's time tonight to give them some more love, because the service really is pretty great — and after three years in alpha, they're finally dropping that label. The idea is super simple: Imo is an IM client that allows you to sign in to many different types of IM accounts at once, all managed through their service. Obviously, there are many services like this out there. But the key to Imo is that it's fast and easy to use. I mean really easy. All you have to do is enter your user name and passwords for the different services and you're off and running in a way that's very seamless.
WebMynd Receives 100K TechFellow Award To Focus On Addon Developer Platform
Jan 27, 5:38AM
YCombinator-funded WebMynd, which launched in 2008 and was most recently responsible for the browser addon Search Smarter, is today announcing that it is the recipient of one of our heralded 2010 TechFellows Awards, from none other than Paul Graham himself. WebMynd will be using the 100K in financing to develop a new product, the WebMynd Addon Developer Platform.
YC-Backed Tutorspree Is An Airbnb For Tutoring
Jan 27, 3:54AM
Launching today from the YCombinator Class of 2011, Tutorspree is a online marketplace for K-12 tutors along the lines of accommodations network Airbnb, but specific to tutoring (yes I've made this comparison before). Founded by Aaron Harris, Josh Abrams and Ryan Bednar, the startup is disruptive in the sense that the tutoring space up until now has been monopolized by agencies like Sylvan and Huntington Learning Center or risky alternative Craigslist. 
Google Begins Soft Censorship Of Arbitrary Piracy-Related Queries
Jan 27, 3:00AM
The efforts of media companies to quash online piracy are a bit like someone trying to put out a forest fire with a wet noodle. The latest pathetic flail comes in the form of coercing Google into censoring its results for some search terms. A number of words will no longer be autocompleted or trigger an instant search, among them the interesting and perfectly legal "bittorrent." It's a new high for antipiracy theater, because you can of course still search for the terms by hitting enter, and get the same results as before, including direct links to torrent files hosted on well-known indexers. The move will accomplish two things, though: first, it will damage consumer trust of a company whose services are ostensibly objective, and second, it confirms for the hundredth time how quixotic and misguided the efforts of the MPAA et al. are in every action they take.
Quora + CrunchBase + LinkedIn = Best Extension Ever?
Jan 27, 2:15AM
A month ago, Polaris Ventures principal Ryan Spoon wrote up a quick blog post looking for a developer with Chrome extension/app experience. He had a pretty simple idea for something to help him with his job. Matt Basta saw the post and created the extension Spoon was looking for almost instantly. Now they're opening it up for all to use and calling it Polaris Insights. The straightforward app is very, very slick. You simply visit the website of a company you're interested in, hit the extension button, and you get an overlay of the CrunchBase, LinkedIn, and Quora data for the company. The CrunchBase column shows you the funding information, the LinkedIn column shows you your connections within the company, and the Quora column shows you some of the Q&A conversations going on about about company. 
YC Co-Founder Jessica Livingston On The Dearth Of Women In Tech (And Some Steps To Fix It)
Jan 27, 1:33AM
Last August our own Michael Arrington wrote a post addressing a topic that's as important as it is sensitive: the lack of women who are running startups. In short, his point was that there simply aren't enough women who are setting out to become entrepreneurs — and it's not because the issue is being swept under the rug or because the industry is heavily weighted against them. Now Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston has written an insightful article discussing her own experience with this. Livingston is as qualified as anyone to analyze the problem — she wrote Founders at Work and has also interviewed hundreds (perhaps thousands) of founders for Y Combinator. And her conclusion is similar to Michael's: So why don't women want to start startups? I wonder if it's not that not enough women want to start startups, but that not enough women even consider it as an option.
LinkedIn Buys Business Card Converter CardMunch, Will Offer Its Services For Free
Jan 27, 12:35AM
In perhaps one of the most like-minded and forward-thinking acquisitions I've ever seen, career-driven social network LinkedIn has bought CardMunch, a Shoeboxed-like startup that scans your business cards and accurately converts them into phone contacts using Mechanical Turk. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. 
Browser-Powered Desktop Notifications Are Coming To Gmail
Jan 27, 12:19AM
Now this is nice. If you're a heavy Gmail user you've probably installed some kind of desktop notification system — be it a browser extension, a separate Gmail app like Mailplane and/or Growl. But now, hot on the heels of launching a dynamic unread count in browser tabs, Gmail is launching something that doesn't require any downloads: built-in desktop notifications. A small banner on Gmail just prompted me to enable the feature, which works for both inbound chat and email messages (you can opt to receive notifications for all new emails, or just 'Important' ones as deemed by your Priority Inbox). Google is probably rolling this out gradually (there's no blog post yet), but I'm seeing it in both of my accounts.
Ask a VC: Andreessen Horowitz's John O'Farrell Answers your Questions
Jan 27, 12:02AM
This week our guest on Ask a VC is John O'Farrell of Andreessen Horowitz. O'Farrell is yet another Opsware alum filling out the firm's partnership ranks, and he follows the firm's strategy of hiring partners with specific company building expertise. At Opsware, he headed up the company's business development and leading Opsware's partnerships, acquisitions and eventual purchase by HP for $1.65 billion. He had a similar role at hot cleantech startup Silver Spring Networks before jumping to Andreessen Horowitz last year. So those startups or would-be entrepreneurs out there with burning questions about deal making? This is the perfect week to send your questions to AskaVC(at)techcrunch(dot)com.
Hovensa Petroleum Refinery To Pay $5.3 Million Fine, Invest $700 Million In Pollution Controls
Jan 26, 11:24PM
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice announced today that Hovensa LLC — a joint venture between Hess Corporation and Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. — will pay a civil penalty of more than $5.3 million, and spend more than $700 million in new pollution controls as part of a settlement resulting from a complaint about Clean Air Act violations by the company at its St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands refinery. According to the government-filed complaint, Hovensa made changes to its petroleum refinery that increased its emissions, after having failed to obtain pre-construction permits, and failing to install required pollution control equipment there. The proposed settlement requires the company to spend $700 million on upgrading its refinery business with...
Facebook Is Hard At Work On A Tablet-Optimized Experience
Jan 26, 11:09PM
"We need to make a tablet version of Facebook. It's something we're working on right now." That was Facebook CTO Bret Taylor speaking to me yesterday in a sit down following his one-on-one interview on stage at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco. Now, before you get all excited, note that Taylor is not specifically saying that the social giant will make a native iPad app. Instead, he's saying that there's needs to be a better version of the service for tablets in general. Having said that, he didn't exactly rule out a native iPad app either in our chat.
Nifty: Google's Elemental API Periodic Table
Jan 26, 10:23PM
Google is a behemoth. They're a behemoth with a massive amount of APIs that millions of developers use around the world to build millions of apps and services. There's simply no good way to keep track of them all. But Google comes close with a pretty nifty way: a periodic table. As you can see on this page, Google has a full periodic table built out showcasing their APIs and developer products as of January 2011. 
>From Now On We Will Only Be Using The Word 'Pivot' In Mockery
Jan 26, 10:07PM
After months of over-saturation, word on the street is that "'Pivot' is the new 'Fail.'" And while Instagram, Twitter, Foodspotting, Groupon have all successfully pivoted in recent years, it seems like everyone and their mother is doing it nowadays, to mixed results. But if you are one of the desperate millions that is currently considering a pivot, there's nothing better than learning from others' experience, so here is an illustrative guide to the evolution of some famously pivot prone companies as well as predictions for their next moves.
If Search Engines Played Jeopardy, Which One Would Win?
Jan 26, 8:57PM
The recent victory of IBM's Watson computer against human competitors in an exhibition round of Jeopardy got computer scientist Stephen Wolfram thinking about how regular search engines might fare in such a match-up. So he took 200,000 known Jeapardy clues and ran them through six search engines (Google, Bing, Ask, Blekko, Wikipedia Search, and Yandex). He excluded known Jeopardy sites from the results, and didn't test his own Wolfram Alpha because it is not designed for those kinds of queries. What he found is that the search engines did fairly well, depending on how you measure success. Google did slightly better than the rest, but Bing and Ask were close behind. On average, Google got the correct answer somewhere on its first results page 69 percent of the time, versus 68 percent for Ask and 63 percent for Bing. Google got the right answer somewhere in the title or snippet of text of the very top result 66 percent of the time, versus 65 percent for Bing (and Ask dropped to 51 percent). 
Why Crivo Was Nominated for the Best International Crunchie and How It's Changing Brazil (TCTV)
Jan 26, 8:55PM
No doubt, the International category at the Crunchies usually gets the most head-scratching here in the TechCrunch offices and in the auditorium. And truth be told, if we're picking the best candidates it probably should. The most transformational International companies aren't building things for the US market that we might have heard of; they're building things that are transforming their own home markets. And in countries like China, India, Indonesia, Russia and Brazil-- those domestic markets are huge. One of my favorite nominees this year is called Crivo, and it's revolutionizing the credit markets in Brazil, opening up opportunities for car loans and house loans for the growing middle class for the first time. Because positive credit incidents-- i.e. paying your credit card on time every month for ten years or buying a $1 million house-- are considered private information that can't be legally shared, banks are incredibly conservative when it comes to lending money. Crivo scours digital databases for anything else that could tell them whether you are a good credit risk-- even whether you lied about your phone number. The results are returned within three seconds, giving lenders more information then they've ever had before.
BlueKai Buys Ad Data Analytics And Optimization Startup TrackSimple
Jan 26, 8:29PM
We've learned exclusively that BlueKai, an online auction-based data exchange, has bought TrackSimple, an analytics company that provides reporting, analysis and prediction services to media companies. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we've heard the deal is an all-stock transaction. This SEC filing indicates that the stock sold to TrackSimple is worth $6.8 million. TrackSimple, which only launched in 2009, was founded by former Amazon employees Jon Ingalls and Ajit Banerjee. The startup, which raised $2.5 million in funding, provides data analytics and optimization services for media buyers and advertisers to bring all of their media and commerce data (online & offiline) into one place. TrackSimple's product, InsightService, will not only aggregate all this data, but will also make recommendations and serve insights on data based on performance. 
Google Releases Preview Version Of Honeycomb SDK, Gives Overview Of Tablet Features
Jan 26, 8:04PM
Android's answer to the iPad — a software release called Honeycomb — is coming soon. Multiple tablet devices like the Motorola Xoom are on the way, and we're probably going to see dozens of them by the end of the year. But while the OS is nearly done and Google's apps are looking great, third party developers still have to optimize their applications for these much bigger screens. Today, Google is allowing developers to do just that: it's released the preview version of the Android 3.0 SDK. This is going to give us our closest look at Android 3.0, which has been demoed before, but never very throughly. Many of the new features are spelled out on the Platform Highlights page, which we're still combing through. Here are some of the main highlights:
Twitter Launches 'Connections,' Its Own Version Of Facebook's 'Mutual Friends'
Jan 26, 7:52PM
Twitter has collapsed its "Followed By" and "You Both Follow" features into one area called "Connections" which allows you to see what users you have in common with other Twitter users. While you still can't see the number of users you have in common, the individual features are now expandable and you can see complete lists of mutual follows and people you are both followed by for any given user, when you click "more." Even though they have experimented with the feature before, the change is a permanent step towards developing a more useful Twitter social graph. Says Twitter's Carolyn Penner, "By exposing accounts that you and another user have in common, you will now know how those accounts are connected to other accounts you already follow. As a result, you'll be able to make more informed decisions about which accounts to follow." 
Marc Bodnick to Become Quora's New Grown-up
Jan 26, 7:35PM
Yesterday brought bad news for Elevation with a report that superstar partner Marc Bodnick was leaving the firm. The story seems to have gotten a lot more interesting today. We're hearing reports that Bodnick isn't simply heading for a new sexier venture firm-- he's heading to Quora to become the company's CFO. This certainly adds some credence to those who believe Quora is more than just the next generation of Yahoo Answers. It's no secret that Bodnick has been deeply impressed by the company and spending a good deal of time on the site. As this story has unfolded this morning, there's been some debate over exactly what title Bodnick will have, and we've continued to update this story based on what sources close to the players are telling us. His background is in finance, so he'll no doubt help out with CFO-duties, but it's not clear why Quora needs such a polished full-time CFO at this point in its development. He will likely wind up serving as the requisite "grown up" more than anything else, helping Quora scale, build a real business and giving the company a polished spokesperson. It's a role Bodnick would be familiar with-- after all his sister-in-law is Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg's no. 2 at Facebook.
Report: Skype Delays IPO Until Second Half Of 2011 To Build Up More Revenue
Jan 26, 7:25PM
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Skype's IPO is being pushed back to the second half of 2011. Last August, Skype filed for an IPO registration statement with the SEC, with the maximum proposed offering amount listed as $100 million (that is a placeholder amount.) It was thought that the IPO would take place early this year, but apparently the company's newly appointed CEO Tony Bates is looking for more time to get Skype "in better shape." >From the Wall Street Journal report: "Tony needs to get his feet underneath him and understand the business and the voice of the company," another person familiar with the matter said. "The intention is to go when Tony is ready and when the macroeconomic climate allows the company to go." The additional time may help Mr. Bates to get Skype in better shape and increase its value ahead of an offering. But there is also the risk the IPO market weakens, hurting Skype's chance to go public or depressing the value of the company.
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