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Facebook SIMs, HTC/INQ Phones — Facebook's Phone Project Lingers, But It's None Of Those
Feb 15, 8:04AM
Facebook wants to be everywhere. They've made this very clear. They want to be on you desktop, on your laptop, on your smartphone, on your tablet, and on your dumbphone. The latter, they directly addressed today with a new SIM card made in conjunction with Gemalto which magically gives basically every dumbphone — aka "feature phone" — a simple entry point to use the social network: SMS. It's a great idea, and very cool for emerging markets. In fact, you could make a case for it sort of being a "Facebook Phone". But it's obviously not the mythical one which Facebook absolutely wants you to believe doesn't exist. Nor are the phones that HTC may be releasing tomorrow at Mobile World Congress. PocketNow was apparently able to snag some images of these Android-powered HTC devices that carry a special Facebook button at the bottom. Again, potentially cool and useful, but not the Facebook Phone. And that INQ-built Facebook phone? Also cool, but also not the Facebook Phone.
Zynga's Reported $7-$10 Billion Valuation Surpasses That Of EA
Feb 15, 7:53AM
My friends over at the WSJ have been knocking it out of the park lately, reporting last night that social gaming phenomenon Zynga is raising a new $250 million round of funding that values the company at between $7 - $9 billion according to, eh hem, sources. Then today Bloomberg piggybacked on the news, naming names in terms of players in the talks, including Fidelity investments and T.Rowe Price (who coincidentally also has signifigant shares in gaming company Electronic Arts). Bloomberg also reiterated the same price for the round at $250 million and bumped the valuation range up to "close to ten million," continuing down the well worn path of hinting at market exuberance by running down the checkpoints signifying a tech industry investment bubble, er frenzy.
Millennial: For The Second Month, Android Leads iOS For Mobile Ad Impression Share
Feb 15, 4:45AM
Millennial Media has released its monthly mobile report this evening, and it looks like Android has continued its reign at the top of the network in terms of mobile ad impression share, after overtaking iOS for the top spot in December 2010. Millennial, whose ads reach 63 million of a total of 77 million mobile web users in the U.S., or 81 percent of the U.S. mobile web; is reporting that Android ad impression share increased by 8 percent month-over-month to capture 54 percent of the network's ad impressions in the U.S. in January. iOS trailed behind with 28 percent of mobile ad impression share, which is decrease of 4 percent. RIM followed with a 14 percent impression share, down 2 percent from last month. Apple iOS ad requests increased 47% month-over-month, with Android requests growing by 32% month-over-month. RIM requests remained relatively flat month-over-month, Symbian requests increased 24% and iPad requests increasing by 43% from December. 
Nerds Ditch Grammys for New York's First Music Hackday
Feb 15, 3:49AM
With more references to Justin Bieber than a Valentine's day party at an all-girls Canadian middle school, Music Hackday rolled into New York City this past weekend. Event organizers John Britton and Dave Haynes noted this had been the biggest Music Hack Day yet, with 72 demos. Hundreds of hackers showed up and a waiting list of hopefuls swelled to 300. Hacks included invisible iPhone instruments, Kinect hacks, web-based sequencers and SMS valentines day tributes. 
JumpBox Now Offers One-Click Installs On Amazon's Free Usage Tier
Feb 15, 3:15AM
Last October Amazon launched a feature that's exciting for developers: a free usage tier that provides a limited amount of access to EC2, S3, and Amazon's other cloud products free of charge. It's a big deal because it lets developers roll out new projects without any upfront cost (they only have to start paying when their project takes off). But it hasn't been particularly useful for average consumers, who don't know how to set up projects on Amazon's Cloud. Now JumpBox, a startup that offers 'Open Source as a Service', has launched a feature that makes this free usage tier accessible to just about anyone. The feature supports one-click installs for WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, and Joomla — you enter your Amazon secret key, create some JumpBox credentials, and you're off and running. JumpBox benefits from getting exposed to new customers (who may also opt to install other apps at a premium) and Amazon benefits because these users may eventually hit the limits on the free usage tier and switch to paid plans.
First AOL Q1 Luge Update Since HuffPo Acquisition: We've Got Work To Do (No Kidding)
Feb 15, 2:16AM
It's rare that we get access to insider information as AOL employees here at TechCrunch HQ, so we have to rely on our mad reporting skills and the strength of our inboxes in order to figure out the goings on over in Dulles and at 770 Broadway. We've received this "Winter Luge and HuffPost Quick Update" email multiple times today, but none through any legitimate AOL channels. So I guess this means we can take off our AOL hats and just repost it (yay pageviews!). In the email, AOL head honcho Tim Armstrong welcomes content maven Arianna Huffington to the AOL family with colorful exaggerated reference to the over 4000 articles written about the AOL/Huffington Post acquisition last week, apparently signifying an AOL comeback. The email goes on to explore how close we are to our very ambitious Winter Luge Q1 goals which are indeed very very ambitious.
Apple Now The Most Valuable Tech Company By $100 Billion; Google Closing In On Microsoft
Feb 15, 1:56AM
It's hard to believe that it wasn't even a year ago when I wrote the following post: What Happens When Apple Passes Microsoft In Value? Yes, When. It's even harder to believe just how many people thought I was crazy for saying that — it happened just two months later! And while plenty seemed to think that the passing of the torch to Apple as the most valuable tech company would be short-lived, let's look at where we are today. As of market close this afternoon, Apple is now a full $100 billion past Microsoft. Yes, Apple is the most valuable tech company in the world by $100 billion dollars. To put that in some perspective: the market cap of HP is $105 billion. Apple is now worth an HP more than every other tech company.
OMG/JK: Where There Are Tablets, There's Love
Feb 15, 1:19AM
There's no better way to spend your Valentine's Day than a new episode OMG/JK (I've been practicing my rhyming). So grab some chocolates, pull up a chair, and hold your laptop close as you sit back for this week's show. This episode is all about tablets. From rumors about the iPad 2 (and 3!) to HP's upcoming WebOS tablets, it's been a big week. We also touch on the new relationship between Microsoft and Nokia, and how it might affect the smartphone market. Here are some posts relevant to this week's show:
Angry Nerds: IBM's Watson Finishes Night One Of Jeopardy Challenge Tied For First Place
Feb 15, 12:47AM
Did you all just see that? The IBM Jeopardy Challenge kicked off tonight, and Watson, the IBM-developed artificial intelligence absolutely more than held his own against his human competition. Mechanical men!
Jack Ma Flies Thousands of Miles to Palo Alto, Still Doesn't Want to See Carol Bartz
Feb 15, 12:11AM
Burn! According to sources, Alibaba Group's CEO Jack Ma is in town and he's not even paying a courtesy call to his estranged partners at Yahoo. Ma was spotted dining with Taobao CEO Jonathan Luk and other Alibaba executives at Fuki Sushi in Palo Alto last night, and a spokesperson for the company confirmed they were in town for meetings. Another source close to the company, who requested anonymity, said Alibaba was here to meet with several big Silicon Valley companies about potential partnerships with Taobao-- and that a meeting with Yahoo was specifically not on the agenda.
Experiments In Realtime News: The Eqentia Streams
Feb 15, 12:00AM
When it comes to realtime news, the prevailing wisdom these days is to let your friends tell you what to read through Twitter or Facebook. Instead of editors, people are using these social stream sto filter their news, and a whole bunch of apps (like Flipboard) are tapping into that to present your social news feed in more appealing ways. But a Toronto startup called Eqentia is approaching the problem from a different angle. It indexes 100,000 articles a day across blogs and news sites, puts them through a semantic engine to categorize them into every topic imaginable, and only then does it look at how much social attention each article is getting. Social comes last, not first. What you get is a personal news page organized by topics and sub-topics that you want to follow (business, technology, iPad news, mobile web, cloud computing). Headlines can be sorted by time, social attention, or preferred sources. Eqentia is designed to create a competitive intelligence dashboard were you can create essentially an alerts page for specialized news about any micro-topic, but these also roll up into broader topics. Each topic page shows recent tweets about that topic in a sidebar widget. The news search is also pretty powerful because of all the implicit categorization and content mining that Eqentia does.
I Just Androidified Myself. Droid's Never Looked So Good.
Feb 14, 11:30PM
By now you're probably familiar with Google's friendly green Android robot, who pops up at Android events and in various press material (a giant version also sits in front of the Android building on Google's campus). And, if you're like me, you've always wished there was a way to remake this robot in your own image — I know I often find myself doodling glasses and messy dark hair on the robot whenever I see it. But now there's a better way. Today Google released a fun new app called Androidify. It's not exactly useful, but it's a fun diversion: fire it up and you can choose from a variety of body types, outfits, and accessories to make your own custom Android robot (if you've ever created a Mii on Nintendo's Wii, this should be pretty familiar). Once you're done you can send the avatar to various social networks, change it to your phone's wallpaper, a buddy's contact icon and so on.
3 Months To The First Million Users, Just 6 Weeks To The Second Million For Instagram
Feb 14, 11:18PM
Back in late December of last year, we noted a huge milestone for photo-sharing app Instagram: a million users. As we noted at the time, remarkably, it took them only three months to hit the mark. That's crazy when you consider it took Foursquare a full year to hit that mark. And it took Twitter two years! Well now Instagram's insane growth has also been made to look small: by Instagram. The service has just hit 2 million users. They tweeted the milestone earlier, and I've confirmed it with the company. This comes just six weeks after the million mark milestone.
Best Buy Brings In Ozzy And Bieber To Completely Hose TechForward, Says Lawsuit
Feb 14, 10:16PM
You don't see total betrayals like this every day. But if the facts that TechForward are alleging in their lawsuit (embedded below) against Best Buy are true, this is some truly sleazy stuff. Last year, says the lawsuit, Best Buy and TechForward engaged in a trial program of TechForward's Guaranteed Buyback Plan in a number of Best Buy stores. Customers choose to purchase the plan at the time they're buying a gadget, like those extended service warranties. If they get the plan, they have the option of selling the gadget back to Best Buy for store credit on a sliding scale. The longer they keep the gadget, the less they get back. For people who upgrade often, it may be an excellent choice and certainly saves the hassle of selling something on Craigslist or eBay. TechForward says that the way they do the buybacks is important - price, exercise rates, etc. BestBuy allegedly held out the promise of a partnership and got TechForward to give them highly proprietary data under a confidentiality agreement. 
Keen On… MIT Professor Says Robotic Moment Has Arrived, And We Are Toast (TCTV)
Feb 14, 9:01PM
Once a cheerleader of the Internet revolution, Sherry Turkle, the Director of MIT's Initiative on Technology and Self, has become deeply pessimistic about our digital future. In her controversial new book, Alone Together, Turkle argues that the development of emotionally sympathetic robots like Tamagotchis and Furbies means that the "robotic moment" has arrived for the human race. "We are toast," Turkle told me when she came into the TechCrunch San Francisco studio earlier this month. It's no laughing matter. Alone Together is the result of hundreds of interviews that Turkle has carried out over the last 15 years with a broad cross section of children, adults and old people. What Turkle finds is that, out of a sense of disappointment with each other, we've turned to robots as a substitute for human interaction. What Turkle meticulously charts in Alone Together are robots used by lonely, isolated human beings as lovers, best friends and caregivers. Video ahead.
Deloitte: Text Messaging Still Far More Popular Than Mobile Twitter, Other Social Networks
Feb 14, 8:47PM
Don't tell Twitter's Dick Costolo, but it seems everyday users are completely content with the ability to SMS their friends. So says a recent Deloitte study, which found that 90 percent of smartphone users send at least one text message per day. Compare that to only 40 percent of smartphone users who "hit up" their social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, at least once per day. In other words, reports of the text message's demise have been grossly exaggerated.
Google Crowdsources Content Farm Detection With A Chrome Extension
Feb 14, 8:35PM
After a weekend filled with more search drama -- from a sting operation set up by the New York Times to catch SEO offender JC Penney, to The Content Farm satire blog, to Danny Sullivan's tongue in cheek "How to use Google to Search" to Mike Arrington's "Search Still Sucks" -- Google has launched a quick hack that allows users to block sites they don't want showing up in their results.
With The NFC Wave About To Hit Shore, RFinity Raises Money To Make It Fast, Secure
Feb 14, 8:23PM
Of all the interesting new tech that seems poised to garner a lot of buzz in 2011, near field communication (NFC), is probably the most exciting. If it takes off, it will transform the ways we communicate, share, and make payments with digital devices. This will likely take years to happen, but the groundwork is being laid right now. And RFinity is one of those companies at the forefront. While Google and Apple are responsible for generating much of the buzz about NFC at the moment, the technology goes far beyond simply having the right type of chip in your mobile device. For example, how do you handle different types of data transfers being made from one device to another? And how to you ensure that they happen as quickly as possible? And most importantly, how do you ensure that they happen securely? Those are the things that RFinity is thinking about.
True Ventures Funds Orabrush, the Justin Bieber of Mouth Care
Feb 14, 8:20PM
Now here's a funding deal you don't get to write about everyday. True Ventures has invested $2.5 million in a tongue scraper. That's not high-tech jargon for, say, a scummy site that steals private data off of your social networks and sells it to marketers. True Ventures newest portfolio company is a small consumer package good company out of Provo, Utah that sold a million tongue brushes last year for a few dollars each. And the hope is this little company can teach Silicon Valley a thing or two about how to use social media.
Can You Really Build A Great Tech Firm Outside Silicon Valley?
Feb 14, 7:46PM
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur who has gone to the Dark Side of VC. He started his first company in 1999 and was headquartered in London, leaving in 2005 and selling to a publicly traded French services company. He founded his second company in Palo Alto in 2005 and sold this company to Salesforce.com, becoming VP of Product Management. He joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a General Partner focusing on early-stage technology companies. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable and on Twitter at @msuster. Last year I was on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley meeting with one of the most prominent venture capital firms in the country. We were talking about a company, Factual (disclosure my firm is an investor), which was founded by one of LA's most talented Internet entrepreneurs, Gil Elbaz, who as co-founder of Applied Semantics (purchased by pre-IPO Google for $102 million and now Google AdSense) is responsible for a large portion of the Internet's monetization. 
GiveForward Raises $500K To Be The Kickstarter For Medical Expenses
Feb 14, 7:40PM
GiveForward, an online fundraising tool for medical expenses, has raised $500,000 in funding from Tim Krauskopf, New World Ventures, David Cohen, Ed Chandler, Social Leverage and Excelerate Labs. GiveForward, which was incubated in Chicago's Excelerate Labs, wants to become the Kickstarter for medical expenses. The platform allows anyone to create customizable fundraising pages where friends and family from across the world can donate online.
Netflix Finally Lands On The Boxee Box
Feb 14, 7:30PM
Smooooooch! That's Avner Ronen of Boxee Box wishing all the Boxee Box owners a happy Valentine's Day with a big wet Netflix kiss. The streaming media service just hit box and will certainly makes some Boxee Box owner's day with ability to browse the Netflix streaming catalog right from the box. Netflix was supposed to hit the Boxee Box by the end of 2010. That's what the official website said even up until last week. Then it was supposed to hit in January. Clearly that didn't happen. Boxee was getting its fair share of flack over the delay thanks to the constant cycle of missed deadlines.
Funding: $3 Million More For Large-Scale Geothermal Contractors, Enlink Geoenergy
Feb 14, 7:15PM
A new SEC filing revealed today that Los Angeles-based clean energy business, Enlink Geoenergy Services raised $3 million more from Craton Equity Partners to build large-scale, geothermal systems for businesses and government institutions. Here's how the heat pump technology that's most frequently installed by Enlink Geoenergy works, according toThe Union of Concerned Scientists: "Ground-source heat pumps take advantage of the constant year-round temperature of about 50°F that is just a few feet below the ground's surface. Either air or antifreeze liquid is pumped through pipes that are buried underground, and re-circulated into the building. In the summer, the liquid moves heat from the building into the ground. In the winter, it does the opposite, providing pre-warmed air and water to the heating system of the building."
Huge Vote Of Confidence: Uber Raises $11 million From Benchmark Capital
Feb 14, 7:00PM
Uber, a young startup that let's people book a black car service on the fly via their mobile app, has closed an $11 million round valuing the company at $49 million pre-money valuation, $60 million post-money, we've confirmed from sources. Benchmark Capital led the round, with participation from previous investors. Benchmark partner Bill Gurley joins Uber's board of directors. Sequoia Capital partner Alfred Lin, we've heard, also participated in the round as an individual. It's been quite a year for the company that was originally thought up by StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp. He doesn't own a car, wanted a private car service instead of using taxis, but didn't want the cost of a dedicated car. 
Video Game Leaks: The Long & Ignoble History
Feb 14, 6:15PM
It's not the first time this has happened, and it most certainly won't be the last time. A reasonably complete build of Crysis 2 (reports suggest people have already beaten the game) leaked at the weekend, prompting Crytek, the game's developers, to release a statement saying that it, along with EA, the game's publisher, was "deeply disappointed by the news," and that it "encourage[s] fans to support the game and the development team by waiting and purchasing the final, polished game on 22nd March." The download clocks in a just less than 10GB.
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