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Google CR-48 Notebook Owners (And Hopeful Owners) Besieged With Flood Of Google Group Spam
Feb 12, 9:26AM
We're still trying to figure out exactly whats happening, but Google CR-48 Notebook owners, and even some people who just signed up to get one but haven't yet, started getting hit with dozens, and then over 100, emails this evening. It all started at around 12:23 am PST. Why? It appears that people were automatically added to this Google Group - http://groups.google.com/group/chrome-notebook-pilot-users - and then the emails started flowing every minute or two. And then many times a minute as people started posting asking for the spam to stop, which was then sent out to every member. One tipster unsubscribed to the group after over a hundred emails came in over 20 minutes. Another person said they got 89 in rapid fire before unsubscribing. We'll update with more info as we get it. Here are some of the messages being posted:
UberMedia, Indeed. Bill Gross' Twitter Ecosystem Empire Just Acquired TweetDeck
Feb 12, 2:16AM
The number of companies in the Twitter ecosystem keeps contracting. But not for a necessarily bad reason, but because they keep getting purchased. And what's crazy is that it's largely one person who has been buying them up: Bill Gross. We've just learned that his company, now called UberMedia, has just acquired TweetDeck. We're hearing that the deal, which happened recently, was in the $25 - $30 million range. And this is clearly the largest deal they've done yet as TweetDeck is the largest Twitter client outside of Twitter's own properties.
Telogis Raises $2.9 Million More To Help Companies Manage Fleets, Reduce Emissions
Feb 12, 2:07AM
Telogis, a location-based technology firm in Aliso Viejo, Calif. has raised another $2.9 million, according to a new SEC filing, to help businesses track and manage their fleets of vehicles, and workforce using GPS, mobile and web technology. The company touts its "mobile resource management" software and services as environmentally beneficial, and fuel-saving. According to the Telogis website, its mapping and fleet-management systems help companies: cut [drivers'] idling by more than 25 percent, reduce miles driven out-of-route by 30 percent, and can reduce speeding for better fuel economy... 
Sony: "Publishers Are Being Held To Ransom By Apple"
Feb 12, 1:14AM
There's much to be said in favor of a successor to iTunes. Not just the application itself, though I'd love to see it disappear, but the whole service. Things move fast, and although Apple moved faster than the music industry, it now finds itself in a distressingly similar, and vulnerable, position. Sony seems to think the iron is hot, and consequently is preparing to strike; SCE CEO Michael Ephraim is quoted by The Age as saying, "Publishers are being held to ransom by Apple and they are looking for other delivery systems, and we are waiting to see what the next three to five years will hold." Strong words, but can Sony back them up? The future, they believe, is in streaming, and strong competition is already present in the form of established services like Spotify, Rdio, and Grooveshark. Will Sony's Music Unlimited service, in the middle of a stepped roll-out in Europe, actually form a credible alternative, or will it languish with low subscriber numbers until Sony kills it off in a couple years?
In A Step Back Towards V3, Digg Ending RSS Submissions For Publishers
Feb 12, 12:35AM
In a step back towards the old Digg, Digg Product manager Mike Cieri just sent out an email to partner publishers stating the intent to remove the RSS submitted stories feature. For those of you that remember, the RSS submission feature was how stories from the Reddit publisher account on Digg were sent to the Digg front page in an act of rebellion against the V4 redesign of the site last August. The painful V4 redesign led to a user revolt and a drastic drop in traffic, with a corresponding increase in traffic over at competitor Reddit.
The Internet Scores Its Second Victory Of The Day, Borders Nears Bankruptcy
Feb 12, 12:02AM
A while back a Seeing Interactive post entitled "You've Got Mail Is Ripe For A Sequel" went popular on Hacker News. In You've Got Mail the movie, which is a bit of a joke around TC HQ because of its ties to Aol, The Shop Around The Corner, a small bookstore run by Meg Ryan goes out of business because Fox Books, a huge Borders-type book store run by Tom Hanks, opens up around the corner. The "Is Ripe For A Sequel" post pointed out how differently that scenario would have played out. Twelve years later, Borders, affected by online book sales and sales of competing e-readers, is heading into a tailspin.
People, Not Things, Are The Tools Of Revolution
Feb 11, 11:35PM
Warmest congratulations to the Egyptian people, whose truly grassroots revolution has reminded the world what political action is supposed to look like. Although the work is far from done, and reconstituting a government by the people and for the people is perhaps the more difficult phase, it is right that they, and the world, should take a moment to reflect on a job well done. Some are using that moment to praise the social media tools used by some of the protesters, and the role the internet played in fueling the revolution. While it's plain that these things were part of the process, I think the mindset of the online world creates a risk of overstating their importance, and elevating something useful, even powerful, to the status of essential. The people of Egypt made use of what means they had available, just as every oppressed people has in history. Twitter and Facebook are indeed useful tools, but they are not tools of revolution — at least, no more than Paul Revere's horse was. People are the tools of revolution, whether their dissent is spread by whisper, by letter, by Facebook, or by some means we haven't yet imagined. What we, and the Egyptians, should justly be proud of, is not just those qualities which set Egypt's revolution apart from the last hundred, but those which are fundamental to all of them.
TechCrunch's Laura Boychenko Infiltrates Google Ventures
Feb 11, 11:22PM
We're never happy when a TechCruncher leaves, but it's always nice when they end up somewhere awesome and can feed us lots of confidential information. Ben Meyer at Facebook and Daniel Levine at Accel Partners, for example, send us weekly confidential updates from their companies. Laura Boychenko, who has been with us since 2008, is working her last day at TechCrunch. On Monday she starts a new job at Google Ventures. And what Google doesn't know is that we're keeping Laura on our payroll, too, and we expect lots of inside information to be coming our way. It's the TechCrunch way.
With 80 Million Users, Pandora Files To Go Public
Feb 11, 10:38PM
Music streaming service Pandora has filed to go public. It could end up raising as much as $100 million. Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan are co-managing the deal. The filing puts them on track for a mid-2011 IPO, as we reported earlier. Some financial stats from the SEC filing: For the first nine months of 2010 it lost $328,000 on revenues of $90 million. (Michael Robertson's $100 million revenue estimate we published earlier this tear was pretty damn close). Pandora's fiscal year ends on January 31 (weird), but in the prior full year ended on January 31, 2010, it lost $16.7 million on revenues of $55 million. So you can see how much it got its fiscal house in order since then, adding $35 million in revenues and practically eliminating its loss. 
Mubarak Shut Down The Internet, And The Internet Paid Him In Kind
Feb 11, 10:08PM
Yesterday, after 17 days of protests, former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak gave a speech to the Egyptian government that made it seem like he would not be stepping down. This led to many people on the ground in Egypt and elsewhere feeling depressed, a series of humorous jokes being bandied back and forth on Facebook and Twitter and one Twitter employee commenting to me,"Well, we can only do so much." It has become fashionable amongst Western media and armchair foreign policy experts (hi Malcolm) to dismiss the idea that what happened in Egypt was a digital revolution mainly because most people associate Facebook and Twitter with the mundane over-sharing of what you ate for breakfast. That and the fact that its been pretty damn hard to pin down what exactly causes revolutions. This belief isn't helped by the truth that a ton of social media noise did not actually lead to a regime change in Iran during #IranElection. 
"I Love The Petting Zoo Guy": The Curious Characters Sarah Lacy Met While Writing Her New Book [TCTV]
Feb 11, 9:47PM
For the past few days, it seems the whole world has been reviewing Sarah Lacy's new book, Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos . Fortune's Dan Primack described it as "an outstanding piece of journalism", Jon Swartz at USA Today called it "a fascinating new gem of a book," Vivek Wadhwa in Business Week describes how it "vividly illustrates how the American Dream has become America's most significant cultural export" and even Michael Arrington - possibly the world's most persistent Silicon Valley flag-waiver - jumped in, saying "Sarah's book opened my eyes... to the untenable constraints that people around the world have to work with." My own - thoroughly biased review can be found here. But, yeah yeah, blah blah - I get it - it's a brilliant piece of business journalism. For me, though, the best thing about the book is its cast of characters. The Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky entrepreneurs. The Chinese driving school guy who has his own petting zoo, the Israeli movie mogul, the Brazilian slum-kid-turned-genius-entrepreneur and - of course - Jean de Dieu Kagabo. So while everyone else continues to rave about the important business lessons and geopolitical implications of Sarah's book, I bullied her into the TCTV studio to chat about some of her favourite people she met while writing it. The individual parts - one for each country - are below, or you can watch the full thing here.
Funny Or Die Explains The AOL-HuffPo Deal: "Bringing The Future Back To 1996″
Feb 11, 9:42PM
Ever since AOL announced its $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post, pundits have been asking what does it mean? Well, look no further. Funny or Die created the faux infommercial above that looks like it was shot 15 years ago. The tagline is, "AOL and the Huffington Post: Bringing the future back to 1996." Basically, what you get with AOL-HuffPo are Alec Baldwin editorials and cybersex chatrooms filled with midwestern housewives. Oh, and you can also download your favorite Wav files of Arianna Huffington quotes, which you can listen to every time you get a new email: "Master the Internet." I am downloading some right now at AOL HQ, from where I'm writing this post.
Internet: 13,483,282 Newspaper: 0
Feb 11, 8:33PM
A lot of people like to bitch and moan about how in the age of realtime information, the stream moves too quickly and as a result, there's a decent chance of inaccurate news being spread. There's no question it's an issue, but with the situation in Egypt, we're once again seeing the overwhelming upside of this realtime data spread that makes services like Twitter so powerful. And just look at the flip side. The above image shows the frontpage of a newspaper that was delivered this morning. There are hundreds more like it around the country. Many, many people still get their news this way. They woke up this morning, opened the paper and got information that is so old that it's now totally inaccurate. It's ridiculous.
Segway 2.0? German Bicycle on Steroids Comes to the US
Feb 11, 8:28PM
Fair or unfair, German Web entrepreneurs get a bad rap for being copy cats. If Stefan Gulas is any representation, the same can't be said for German entrepreneurs making...what I guess you would call futuristic motorized bicycles? Gulas has spent the last six years building something called the eROCKIT that defies a vehicle category. Unlike a motorcycle, it's active-- you have to pedal to make it go. But unlike a motorized bicycle it goes incredibly fast. So fast it can out accelerate a car. And it's completely electric, borrowing some technology and looks from your home exercise bike.
How E-Commerce Got its Groove Back
Feb 11, 8:15PM
James Slavet is a partner at Greylock Partners, and just co-led the new $23 million financing of One Kings Lane. E-commerce was an innovation wasteland for most of the past decade. While social media companies such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter were growing exponentially, breakthrough new commerce start-ups have been few and far between. As our friends at First Round Capital noted in this blog post, 7 out of the top 15 sites on the Web were started in the past decade but only 1 of the top 15 e-commerce sites was started during this same period. Who was that new, major e-commerce entrant? Umm, NewEgg. There haven't been many exciting financial outcomes, either. I'm not talking about pioneers such as Amazon or eBay but the start-ups that came later. Sure, there are a few, such as Zappos, Diapers.com and Stubhub, but not many.
Vodafone Releases Webbox $100 Web-Surfing Keyboard For Emerging Markets
Feb 11, 7:52PM
Emerging markets need the Internet. Whether they're looking up commodity prices or contacting loved ones overseas, users in developing countries like South Africa and Ghana need a way to get online and this unique device from Vodafone looks like a logical and quite elegant way to do just that. The device is a keyboard with a standard set of RCA cables sprouting out of the back. You plug it into any TV, new or old, and turn it on. Instantly you have 2G or 3G access to an Opera Mini browser, locally relevant news, as well as games, a dictionary, and a text editor. Instead of a PC, a user would plug this in and use it as necessary, downloading data at 90% compression.
Square Turns Two And Celebrates With A Massive Times Square Billboard
Feb 11, 7:50PM
Jack Dorsey's mobile payments startup Square is celebrating its second birthday today and also embarking on a massive marketing push—a Times Square billboard in New York City. The massive, multi-angle, multi-panel billboard shows how easy it is to use Square on an iPhone, with the tagline "Now everyone can accept credit cards." We're told that Square didn't pay for the billboard but that it was funded by "generous supporter." This has been a big week for the company. Square just teamed up with designer Vivienne Tam to launch a limited edition, branded Square credit card reader. 
Wael Ghonim: If You Want To Liberate A Government, Give Them The Internet
Feb 11, 5:34PM
By now, you've probably heard the news that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has stepped down, with massive crowds celebrating their new freedom in Cairo's Tahrir Square. I happened to be watching the coverage on CNN while Google MENA Marketing Executive Wael Ghonim spoke to CNN's Wolf Blitzer about his perspective on the situation. Ghonim had been previously been detained and blindfolded for 12 days for organizing protests against the Mubarak government, and was only released earlier this week. Ghonim, who has been a figurehead for the movement against the Egyptian government, told Blitzer "If you want to liberate a government, give them the internet." Ghonim, is of course, referring to the fact much of this revolution was organized on Twitter and Facebook (similar to the Tunisian protests). Ghonim was believed to have hosted the first Facebook page that organized the January 25th protests. When Blitzer asked "Tunisia, then Egypt, what's next?," Ghonim replied succinctly "Ask Facebook."
Evernote Rival SpringPad Springs Past 1 Million Users
Feb 11, 5:30PM
Evernote rival Springpad has hit a milestone today—one million registered users. In January alone, Springpad saw more than 250,000 new signups. So far, more than 10 million items have been saved by users. Similar to Evernote, Springpad serves as a multi-platform digital notebook. The service allows you to jot down notes, save websites, images and more. Springpad will then categorizes your saved content, and allows you to share your notes, set reminders and get alerts to relevant news, offers and deals. The app's semantic data technology allows you to save products, books, movies, recipes and more, and automatically get enhanced information, including price drops, local availability and coupons. 
Zipzoom Raises $2.2 Million To Help Connect Shoppers And Local Businesses
Feb 11, 5:10PM
Exclusive - Zipzoom, an Ontario, Canada-based startup building an online marketplace where consumers can hook up with local and/or national businesses, has scored $2.2 million in angel funding from a number of private investors. The company recently launched the beta version of its service, which aims to connect 'ready-to-buy' shoppers with 'ready-to-sell' businesses. 
Nokia Microsoft Is Like Yahoo Bing – Nokia's Days As Innovator Are Over
Feb 11, 5:05PM
As I was plugging in to power my iPhone to live stream today's Nokia press conference, I overheard someone lean over and say "This is the most important day of your life". It was whispered into the ear of Nokia's PR spokesman as he took the stage today to introduce Nokia CEO Steven Elop. It certainly was important - but not in a great way. Today his boss effectively ended Nokia's history as an ecosystem of its own, laid down its guns, and gave in to a Windows Phone future. To me the direct comparison is Microsoft taking over as the search engine behind Yahoo. Under Carol Bartz, Yahoo surrendered in the search war to Google and decided to let someone else try: Bing. From that day on Yahoo gave up it's long tradition of innovation. Exactly the same thing has happened today. Everything about this event screamed that. Elop is Nokia's Bartz. He's looks at this entirely as a business transaction. Sure, he recognised the problems. But he took the decision not to fight. 
Time Inc. Releases Sports Illustrated Digital Subscriptions
Feb 11, 4:15PM
There is a vast hole in the Internet now. Two things are missing and those two things are sports commentary and, once a year, images of scantily clad women. Time Inc. is righting these wrongs by releasing "All Access" digital subscriptions to Sports Illustrated on the web, Android, and WebOS. The new platform will offer the "iconic print magazine" on all devices, starting with Android tablets and smartphones as well as a web-based version on si.com. How much does this privilege cost? $48 annually or $4.99/month for a print and digital subscription or $3.99/month for a digital-only subscription. Current SI subscribers will receive free digital access immediately for the remainder of their subscriptions.
Nokia Share Price Takes A Hell Of A Nosedive, Down 14%
Feb 11, 4:08PM
How low can Nokia's share price go? It was to be expected, but that doesn't make it any less newsworthy: Nokia is really taking a beating on the public markets right now. Stock price was down about 14% last I looked (NYSE), but it has been hovering around a 13.5% drop in the past few hours.
GE Acquires Tall Turbine Tech From Wind Tower Systems
Feb 11, 3:53PM
General Electric (GE, NYSE: GE) announced today that it acquired technology from Wind Tower Systems, that can enable the company to build and ship wind energy equipment that's more efficient, taller and longer than what it offers now. Longer wind turbine blades, generally, capture more energy from wind. Taller towers to accommodate these blades can be difficult to ship, install and keep steady in the field, however. According to a GE press statement, the technology it acquired from Wind Tower Systems is "space frame tower system technology" for use at wind farm sites that...
Former Microsoft Vet Chris Weber To Lead Nokia's USA Business, Louison Is Out
Feb 11, 3:50PM
Following Nokia's strategy shift announcement, the Finnish mobile phone giant has just announced that it has appointed former Microsoft executive Chris Weber as President of Nokia Inc. (United States), and head of Markets, North America. That means Mark Louison, a long-time Nokia employee who was appointed that role back in March 2007, is out to "pursue new career opportunities". Weber comes to Nokia from his own consulting business, but he's mostly known for his career at, yup, Microsoft.
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