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You Can Order An iPad 2 Right Now. Are You Buying?
Mar 11, 9:50AM
Slightly ahead of the announced 1 AM PST launch time, Apple's iPad 2, which was introduced earlier this month, is now up for sale at the company's US online store. Estimated shipping date for iPads are from March 18 to March 25th. That day, the iPad 2 will also be made available in 26 additional countries - Apple says further international availability and pricing will be announced at a later date. Online orders will ship within 3 to 5 days, and buyers are limited to two units per order.
After Amazon, Masterobjects Takes Google To Court Over Instant Search Patent
Mar 11, 8:59AM
Yesterday, I broke the story of a small search software outlet named Masterobjects taking on Amazon.com in a notable patent infringement lawsuit. The patent-in-suit, US patent no. 7,752,326, describes a method to immediately start showing search results even while a user is still typing his query into the search box - instant search if you will. Well, turns out Google is indeed the next target on the list.
Posterous Joins The SXSW Pile On With Posterous Events For iPhone
Mar 11, 3:47AM
Because you ain't nobody unless you have a special version of your app for SXSW, Posterous has today released its own effort with Posterous Events, a which allows people at a massive event like SXSW or even something as humble as a family picnic to create a simple site around that event using their iPhone apps. All users who want to create a Posterous site around an event have to do is open up their iPhones and create a .posterous address for a specific location and post (the site you most recently posted to will stay on top of your events). 
Loosecubes Wants To Change The Way You Co-Work, Launches SXSW Micro App
Mar 11, 2:50AM
Seed funded by Accel and Battery Ventures, Loosecubes is a workplace sharing community with a focus on co-working. Unlike Liquidspaces, which primarily matches people with work spaces, Loosecubes founder Campbell McKellar tells me she wants to move beyond providing an area with wifi and match people with people. Loosecubes will be launching a redesigned site and product next week and but wants to help people come together in advance, and thus is holding a Co-Working Un-Conference in Austin tonight until 11pm at 301 Colorado (Colorado and 4th). To further drive this "bringing people together" thing home, LooseCubes built the HTML 5 app Instant Jelly especially for the SXSW occasion. 
Aol To Journalists: You Be The Rock Star, We'll Be Mark Chapman
Mar 11, 2:25AM
"You be the rock star, we'll be your stage." - Aol billboard outside TCHQ
"Hey, what's going on? - Russell just got electrocuted." - Almost Famous
The re-invigoration of Aol continues apace today with the announcement by Tim Armstrong that 900 employees will be laid off before the afternoon is out. According to Wired, those canned include "veteran journalists from AOL's top news sites, including PoliticsDaily, DailyFinance and Walletpop". Or as AOL's SVP of news put it: "I have just laid off dozens of the most talented journalists & product folks I know." And, lest overpaid freelancers like me get too cocky, Tim had a nice fuck-you-very-much for us too. "Going forward, AOL will invest more heavily in our in-house editorial team and transition away from a reliance on freelance journalists," he wrote in an email leaked to Business Insider. Thank God I write books for a living, eh? To be fair, though, Armstrong's grand plan for making Aol the world's greatest content company isn't limited to laying off "dozens of the most talented journalists and product folks". According to a second leaked memo that's just landed in my inbox, other proposed measures to improve the bottom line include…
Instapaper Goes Social With Sharing, Likes, And Friends
Mar 11, 1:51AM
I remember when I first fell in love with Instapaper. It was a few years ago, and most people were still using Delicious or worse, their browsers, to bookmark things on the web. Delicious was still solid at the time, but it was also pretty slow. Instapaper was wonderful because it was fast. You hit one button (a bookmarklet) and it saved an article to read later. The reality is that the service hasn't changed all that much over the years. But the iPhone and now iPad have transformed it from being a useful service into an essential one. And it has grown into a big enough business where creator Marco Arment was able to leave his job as CTO of Tumblr to focus on it full time. And now we're seeing the fruits of that.
Social Retargeting Ad Network RadiumOne Raises $21M At A $200M Valuation
Mar 10, 11:58PM
RadiumOne, an online ad network that aims to combine social and intent data to serve ads, has raised $21 million in Series B funding led by Crosslink Capital, with DFJ Esprit, Adams Street Partners and Trinity Ventures participating in the round. This latest round brings RadiumOne's total funding to $33.5 million. Although the company declined to name the valuation in the round, we heard from industry sources that the network's valuation was roughly $200 million (we heard one online company tried to buy RadiumOne for $250 million). RadiumOne was founded by serial entrepreneur and gWallet founder Gurbaksh Chahal. Chahal sold his ad network BlueLithium to Yahoo for $300 million in 2007 and at the time, Chahal's company was the fifth largest ad network in the United States and the second largest in the United Kingdom. Chahal's non-compete contract with Yahoo ended in October 2010, and he got back into the online ad business with RadiumOne. 
VigLink Raises Another $5.4 Million To Help Publishers Monetize Outbound Clicks
Mar 10, 11:57PM
VigLink, a startup that helps publishers and bloggers monetize their outbound traffic, has closed a $5.4 million Series B funding round led by Emergence Capital, with participation from existing investors Google Ventures and First Round Capital. The company raised $800,000 in January 2010 and has now raised a total of $7.3 million. The company is also revealing that SoftTech VC took part in an earlier round (their participation was not previously disclosed). VigLink's goal is to help publishers monetize their content more effectively and without much effort. After installing a small snippet of code on your site, VigLink will detect whenever you create an outbound link to any of 12,500 merchant sites. It will then automatically convert this link to an affiliate link, which means that you get a kickback whenever someone clicks it and eventually completes a purchase on the linked merchant site. 
UberGenius: Uber Is Taking Control of SXSW Pedicabs
Mar 10, 11:42PM
San Francisco is a ghost town right now. It seems as if the entire city has packed up and headed to Austin, Texas for SXSW. The conference was too big two years ago. Then it got bigger last year. And this year it's expected to be significantly bigger once again. I'm leaving tomorrow, and I'm scared. But the good news is that an old trusty friend will be on hand to help us navigate the insane crowds: Uber. Yes, mobile app-controlled car service is heading to Austin as well for SXSW. But they're doing it with a true Austin twist: pedicabs.
Google May Face Antitrust Hearings In Senate
Mar 10, 10:52PM
Google is constantly under antitrust scrutiny these days, whether it's for large acquisitions into new markets such as its proposed ITA deal or for its general dominance in search. The company has faced antitrust investigations in Europe. But now Google faces possible antitrust hearings in the U.S. Senate . Senator Herb Kohl (Democrat from Wisconsin), who is the Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, announced his subcommittee's agenda today for the 112th Congress. One of the planned agenda items is a probe into Google's "dominance over Internet search" and "allegations raised by e-commerce websites that compete with Google that they are being treated unfairly in search ranking, and in their ability to purchase search advertising." 
Picplz Adds Photo Collections And Borders
Mar 10, 10:04PM
Social photo sharing app picplz is preparing to roll out an update to both its Android and iPhone apps that will add the ability to create collections of photos. The feature is already live on its Website. Under every photo, next to the like button there is now an "add to collection" button. You can photos to existing collections or create new collections. For example, here is a collection of photos of Sunsets. The idea is that much like people like to create playlists of songs they can create collections of photos from their own, the people they follow, or just the most interesting ones. The feature will appear in both the Android and iPhone mobile apps as soon as the updates go through. Android should be today, and iPhone (iTunes link) whenever Apple gets through the backlog of SXSW apps awaiting approval. 
Analyst: Non-iPad Tablets Will Be Collecting Dust On Store Shelves
Mar 10, 9:16PM
The immense popularity of the iPad, and now the iPad 2, has Apple's competitors, in the words of Steve Jobs, flummoxed. What to do? According to a J.P. Morgan Research analyst, it may well be that all of these competitor tablets will be sitting on the store shelves as folks decide en masse that the iPad is the way to go. In other words, competitors try to convince people that their tablet is "better" than the iPad could well be wasting their time. And money, of course. The report, which was obtained by Cnet, was presented by one Mark Moskowitz, and says that competitors trying to play catch-up are going to have a "tough" time, and that, the effort to flood the market with tablets could result in a severe over-saturation. Nothing's quite worse thank sinking a bunch of money into a product's R&D, manufacturing too many of them, then having them sit on store shelves—next to signs that say, "Sorry, we're out of iPads. Check back later!"
Social Analytics Platform BackType Raises a Cool Million in Funding
Mar 10, 8:44PM
Today, San Francisco-based marketing intelligence company, BackType, announced that it has closed a seed funding round of just over $1 million, led by a group of Silicon Valley investors, including lead investor True Ventures as well as Manu Kumar's K9 Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Chris Sacca's Lowercase Capital, Dave McClure's 500 Startups, Founder Collective, Raymond Tonsing, and more. BackType adds to the previous cumulative $315,000 of seed funding it raised in July 2008 and January 2009, from Y Combinator and True Ventures, respectively. It also recently added one of the co-founders of Palantir Technologies as an advisor.
Wanna Be A Movie Producer? Just Give $250 To Jon Heder & Nick Peterson On Kickstarter
Mar 10, 7:29PM
A couple weeks ago, we noted an interesting new project that had popped up on Kickstarter: an animated short film by Nick Peterson and Jon Heder. Heder, of course, is an actor known for his roles in Blades of Glory, Mama's Boy, and yes, Napoleon Dynamite. He clearly could have funded this project himself, but he and Peterson decided to give Kickstarter a try to raise the $27,000 required to make the film. I got the chance to talk with both Heder and Peterson the other day to ask them about the experience so far. The project still has 16 days of fundraising to go, and so far they've gotten about $4,000 in pledges, so they have a ways to go yet. But the two have good insight as to how exactly the process works for this type of project — and it's clearly very much an experiment for them. If it works, they envision doing other movie projects this way — Heder even has some thoughts on if it could work for larger-scale projects.
AdMob Founder Partners With Sequoia Capital On Next Venture: Churn Labs
Mar 10, 7:20PM
In December I wrote about how some successful entrepreneurs are starting incubators in a post called The Rise Of The Gentleman Hacker - "I'm hearing more and more about people who are simply setting up an office somewhere close to their multi-million dollar home in Silicon Valley or San Francisco, hiring a handful of hackers, and just building stuff to see what happens." One of those entrepreneurs is Omar Hamoui, the founder of AdMob. He sold Admob to Google in 2009 for some $750 million. He's started Churn Labs along with AdMob's first engineer, Mike Rowehl. And he's partnered with Sequoia Capital, one of AdMob's first venture investors, on the new project. 
How Much Money Does It Take To Kill Net Neutrality?
Mar 10, 7:05PM
We now know that Net Neutrality, even if what actually passed wasn't all that special, faces an uphill struggle to remain on the books, having been voted down at a House subcommittee yesterday. What caught my eye this morning was the amount of money involved, with the nation's biggest ISPs (AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon) giving out literally thousands of dollars to the committee members' campaigns. Rep. Fred Upton, for example, received some $94,000 from AT&T over the course of his congressional career. That's quite a bit of money, I think you'll agree, particularly given that he's not from a particularly expensive state (from a purchasing commercials and so forth point of view) in Michigan. So I've taken a few minutes to see just how much money the big ISPs have contributed to the members of Congress who voted to de-claw Net Neutrality. I've focused on three companies: Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T. These are the biggest ISPs in the country. I've taken the past four election cycles (so, going back to the general election in 2004) and looked up how much money they've donated to the 15 congressmen who voted down Net Neutrality in the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. My assumption was that Net Neutrality has really only became an issue in the past few years, so going back four election cycles should be sufficient to see any sort of possible influence. 
Snapgoods Goes 2.0, Rolls Out "Classified Ads" For Gear Rental
Mar 10, 6:30PM
Snapgoods.com has just rolled out a 2.0 version of their website, improving the usability and interaction. If you recall, Snapgoods is an "acquaintance rental" or "Collaborative Consumption" service, which means you rent your stuff to people you may or may not know but, presumably, they live in your neighborhood. For example, a photographer needs a tripod, a jar of vaseline, and one of those old-timey photo-taking hoods for his DSLR. Instead of going out and buying those things, he can post a request to Snapgoods and receive a rental offer in a few minutes. The previous version of the site focused on renters offering items to rent. However, there is more back-and-forth with buyers in this version and the interaction has been changed to more of a classifieds model. If you need further explanation think of it as sort of an AirBnB for gadgets. It breathes new life into items that don't get much use and, as Joni Mitchell sang, "Don't it always seem to go/That you don't know what you've got until someone offers you $20 to borrow your air compressor." 
Keen On… Jane McGonigal: Is Reality Broken? (TCTV)
Mar 10, 6:21PM
Yes, it is. At least according to gaming guru, Jane McGonigal, the author of the hit new book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. For McGonigal, who began gaming as a ten-year-old and is now Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, reality needs to be refashioned as a game in order to build our self-confidence and make us less fearful of real world failure. "If I can do it in a game," McGonigal told me when she came into the TechCrunch studio last month, "then I can do it real life too." Gaming has certainly changed McGonigal's life. After suffering a serious brain injury in 2009, gaming helped cure her depression. She fell in love playing an electronic game and spent the first month of her marriage playing games (isn't marriage, in reality, one long game?) She even thinks that gaming has improved her sex life, suggesting that the subversiveness of electronic gaming gives her a "thrill." Video ahead.
SocialShield Fights CyberBullying With New Features
Mar 10, 6:00PM
SocialShield, a startup that helps parents monitor their kids' online behavior without violating kids' privacy, is unveiling a new version of its platform today. SocialShield, which recently raised $10 million in funding, gives parents high level visibility into what kids are doing online and on social networks, and who they're interacting with online and via mobile phones. SocialShield, which requires that both parents and children opt-in to the service, monitors kids' picture sharing, social gaming and other social activity on networks that kids use the most (currently Facebook, Myspace and Twitter). Rather than giving parents access to kids' accounts or copies of their online communications, Social Shield sends parents alerts when activity indicates potential danger. 
LinkedIn Today Is Live: A Walkthrough
Mar 10, 5:56PM
It's nice to see a big web company put out a compelling new product instead of just sitting on its laurels while it's waiting for its IPO. Today, LinkedIn did that with LinkedIn Today, its social news product for business people. LinkedIn isn't trying to compete with Twitter, Facebook, or Flipboard here. Instead, it wants to be the Wall Street Journal of social news. How does it do? At first glance, not bad. The top stories I see right now are the LinkedIn Today announcement (duh), Rovio's $42 million funding, Eric Schmidt's Commerce Secretary candidacy, and various social media and SXSW related stories. Many of these you can find on Techmeme, but the real value is when you drill into industry-specific news. Here's a quick walkthrough. 
DOMO Lets You Share Your Interests And Connect With New People Around You
Mar 10, 5:12PM
Tokyo-based Tonchidot, legendary TechCrunch50 finalist and maker of the popular Sekai Camera augmented reality service, has released a new (free) app for iPhone and Android. But DOMO (Japanese for "nice to meet you" or "thank you") isn't an update or variation of Sekai Camera but another (ingenious) way to "augment" reality. DOMO is being offered as a "pre-social" app, which makes use of your interest graph and location to make it easier to connect with people who are similar to you and physically near you ("pre-social", because these people are initially strangers). 
LinkedIn Today: A Social News Product For Professionals
Mar 10, 4:54PM
Professional social network LinkedIn is holding a press event today to talk about the company's new product strategy. We're liveblogging the announcement. As we heard from Mrinal Desai, LinkedIn is expected to announce a new social news feature today. That product is LinkedIn Today: a social news product for professionals. LinkedIn has been actively churning out products that allow users to leverage the massive amount of data published from the social network's more than 90 million professionals. News make sense considering that it is probably one of the more actively shared content categories on the network. Here's a screenshot of what LinkedIn Today looks like:
Now You Can Actually Use Q&A Site Hipster, If You're At SXSW That Is
Mar 10, 4:37PM
Hipster, the oddly named local Q&A site that was up for three months in Boulder, CO, shut down in order to relaunch, went viral despite being in "stealth" a month ago, almost got bought by Google and Groupon pre-launch, didn't end up launching at the Launch conference and so on, has revealed itself to the public today, just in time for yes, SXSW.
New Energy Star Standards Require 40 Percent More Efficient TVs, Cable and Satellite Boxes
Mar 10, 4:37PM
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Wednesday announced an upgrade to its Energy Star requirements for televisions, and cable and satellite boxes. According to a press statement from the agency: Effective in September 2011, these products must be 40 percent more efficient than conventional models in order to win the Energy Star label. Energy Star expects to update 20-some other product requirements this year. Manufacturers of TVs, cable and satellite boxes in the U.S. don't have to comply with the new Energy Star standards — unless they want their products to be eligible for rebates, like those highlighted by regional availability on GreenOhm.com and a number of government websites run by states with rebate programs... 
Video: Hands-On With The Quirky Switch Modular Pocketknife
Mar 10, 4:18PM
We've been dreaming of the Quirky Switch for months now, ever since it was first announced back in April, 2010 and now that dream is a reality. The Quirky Switch is basically a modular pocket knife that lets you create three sizes of knife using various pieces. I got a unit and discovered that this thing is truly DIY with a full complement of add-ons including a pen, a bottle opener, and various screwdrivers, that you actually have to screw together using your bare wit and weak little pinchers. I got a huge kick out building this thing and while the price, at $79, is a little steep, you essentially get three pocket knives for the price of one if you're careful how you place the pieces. 
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