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Facebook Calls User A Spammer, Gets Sued For $1 In Return
Apr 25, 2:01PM
Some time in February of this year, David Fagin noticed he was suddenly being blocked from sending friend requests on Facebook after the social networking giant for whatever reason labeled him as a 'spammer'. When it happened again, Facebook told Fagin that he was in danger of getting his account wiped out completely to boot. Fagin, an AOL News writer, subsequently penned an opinion piece, in which he claims being called a 'spammer' is humiliating, equivalent to being labeled an online pickpocket or con artist. This morning, he announced he is suing Facebook for $1. 
Amazon Launches The Backstory; A Content Hub For Author Interviews And More
Apr 25, 1:52PM
Amazon has launched a new content hub for its Books area, called The Backstory. The content destination includes interviews with authors, guest reviews, authors' favorite playlists, recipes, podcasts, essays and more. Amazon is also debuting "Author Interviews@Amazon," as part of the launch which is a new author interview series. Author Interviews@Amazon launches with five video interviews, including celebrity chef Tom Douglas, Joshua Foer, young adult authors Holly Black and Cassandra Clare, and Gossip Girl producer John Stephens. Amazon says that new author interviews will be announced via the Amazon.com Books Facebook page and on Omnivoracious.com, the Amazon.com Books blog. Customers will be able to post questions on these pages for visiting authors that will be incorporated into each interview.
Nook Color Update Brings Froyo, Email, And Apps To The Color "Ereader"
Apr 25, 1:21PM
The Nook Color has always been considered a wannabe Android tablet and the latest update makes the 7--incher more tablet than ereader. Previously, modders opened up the platform to all sorts of Android tomfoolery, allowing users to run nearly stock Android builds that brought email, proper web browsing and apps to the device. Never mind that nonsense, Barnes & Noble just added those features themselves. The latest update is a doozy. The Nook Color now runs on Android 2.2 and supports Flash, real email, and get this, page turning animations. (Like the iPad!) The Nook Color is open to even more apps, but only designed specificity for the device. Epicurious, Pulse, and Angry Birds are the highlights out of the 125 mostly paid apps but it still can't run any ol' Android app.
Apple Finally Shipping White iPhone To US Stores
Apr 25, 12:31PM
Like this hamster, I am sure you are currently running in circles screaming "Excelsior" at your houseplants and pets, as it was written it has come to pass: Apple is finally shipping the white iPhone 4 and all signs point to availability this week. The white iPhone, to be clear, is the same as the black iPhone 4 but it is white. 
Nintendo Sees Profit Falling 66%, Announces Wii Successor For 2012
Apr 25, 11:56AM
Nintendo posted a new financial report today, and in a nutshell, things aren't looking too good. The company's net profit dropped a whopping 66% to $944 million in the fiscal year that ended March 31, compared with $2.78 billion in the same period a year earlier. Revenue in the same time frame fell 29.3% to $12.2 billion. Nintendo actually posted a drop in full-year net profit for the second straight year, as the company saw weaker sales of the Wii and DS.
Pixelpipe Secures $2.3 Million To Help You Share Content With The World
Apr 25, 11:33AM
Pixelpipe, a San Francisco-based startup that offers a 'content distribution gateway' that basically allows people to upload text, photos, videos and whatnot to a variety of social networking and media sharing sites at once, has raised $2.3 million in funding according to this SEC filing. The company has earlier raised an undisclosed amount of funding from angel investors like James Joaquin and Russ Siegelman, but this is Pixelpipe's first institutional money since it was founded by Brett Butterfield, former director of R&D at Kodak, back in 2007.
CloudTalk Releases Social Messaging Apps For iPhone, Android
Apr 25, 10:39AM
CloudTalk, a social communications platform that enables users to connect through voice as well as text, photo and video, this morning introduced its new apps for the iPhone and the Android OS, sporting a refreshed user interface and new rich multimedia capabilities. Voice, perhaps surprisingly, remains decidedly core to the service, with the ability for users to send and receive asynchronous voice messages from their friends (voice mail 2.0?). When words just don't cut it, users can also add photos and videos to messages.
Dan Abrams' Media Empire Unveils Its Seventh Site, The Mogul-Focused Mogulite
Apr 25, 10:00AM
Mogulite, the seventh site in Dan Abrams' Media Metwork goes live today at 6am EST. In the same family as Mediaite, Geekosystem and The Mary Sue, Mogulite will focus on chronicling the lives of moguls of all stripes, ranging from Mark Cuban to Oprah Winfrey, Arianna Huffington and more! The site boasts The Real Deal's Amy Tennery as managing editor and The Daily Beast's Peter Lauria as consulting editor and will feature content such as an ever changing mogul "Power Grid" (Both @Jack, @Ev, @Biz and @AriannaHuff are on it) and a spectrum of blog posts about the rich and powerful, from "Pizza And Condoms: The Weirdest Kate And William Products" to "What Microsoft CEO Ballmer Gets Wrong About Employee Compensation."
Sohu.com Buys Majority Stake In Gaming Company 7Road For Up To $100 Million
Apr 25, 9:58AM
Sohu.com, one of China's leading online media, search and gaming companies, this morning announced that its massively MMORPG subsidiary Changyou.com is to acquire a majority stake in Shenzhen 7Road Technology ("7Road"), an online games developer and publisher. Changyou will acquire 68.26% of the equity of 7Road for approximately $68.26 million in cash (see how that works?), plus additional variable cash consideration of up to a maximum of $32.76 million in performance-based earn-outs.
Personyze Allows Website Owners To Scale Personalization For Visitors
Apr 25, 4:15AM
Israeli startup Personyze is launching its website personalization, segmentation, and analytics platform today. Personyze provides businesses the ability to turn their website into a more personalized site that puts the visitor in the center. The idea behind Personyze is that website owners can quickly and easy ramp up personalization to their visitors. Personyze's SaaS allows owners to return content in real-time based on each visitor's past site activity, online search history, Facebook preferences, location, etc., Personyze can give web marketers the ability to personalize the whole site rather than just the ads and banners or landing pages.
Yes Facebook Developers, There Will Be An f8 This Year
Apr 25, 3:45AM
The Facebook "Like" button celebrated its 1st anniversary this week, on April 21st. It's ubiquity makes it hard to believe that it was a little over a year ago when Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the third annual f8 Developers Conference to announce the button, which is now integrated with around 2.5 million websites worldwide, 10,000 new ones being added daily.
Fidelis College Raises Money to Actually Support Our Troops
Apr 25, 2:11AM
You know what's awful about every politician blindly saying he or she "supports our troops"? It's usually a hollow sentiment uttered just to get applause. You know what's great about every politician blindly saying he or she "supports our troops"? When presented with something that demonstrably helps the troops, there's zero political capital in obstructing it. And hence, Gunnar Counselman may not only have one of the best entrepreneur names I've ever heard, he may also have come up with one of the first Silicon Valley-based, venture-backed online education startups that will help students, make money, and not be crushed by the lame-brain education establishment.
If Music Be Thy Dream Of Filthy Lucre, Press Stop
Apr 24, 9:04PM
I always enjoy seeing science fiction prophecies come true. Last month, Broadcastr. This month, Wolfram Alpha's WolframTones, modestly subtitled "A New Kind Of Music." (Yes, that would be the same breathtaking humility that led them to originally price the Wolfram Alpha app at a hilarious $50. Fortunately, they subsequently bought a clue.) It is pretty cool, in a geeky sort of way: music generated by fractally complex cellular automata, in the style of your choice—classical, dance, rock/pop, hip-hop, etcetera. Every composition is unique, and can be downloaded as a ringtone. They lay claim to the copyright on all the generated music, mind you, raising the interesting question of what counts as "fair use", but I'll leave that rant to Cory Doctorow. What sort of saddens me about WolframTones is that it's yet another nail in the coffin of ten million teenage dreams of musical superstardom. I don't know if its creator Peter Overmann is a fan of the great Australian science-fiction writer Greg Egan, but I do know that he's just recapitulated something Egan described twenty years ago in his book Quarantine, in a paragraph that has stayed with me since:
The Royal Scam
Apr 24, 7:26PM
Roger Nichols died the other day. He was the engineer behind the Steely Dan records, the ones that stood in the great chasm between George Martin's Beatles productions and whatever is going on today. When I think of what could be of the great realtime stream we're all building, I hope and trust it will somehow reach toward the quality of that perfection. It felt like a perpetual motion machine, a unique world inside a glass ball, shimmering in the precision of the world's greatest drummers' time machine. Some felt it lacked emotion, settling for cool perhaps. You could say that, but as the years went by, the clock kept quietly ticking — through the rage of the punks, the bloat of the eighties, the decades we stopped counting. Like a Kubrick film, exacting in its architecture, with tinges of humor and slashes of jump cuts.
@AmericanAir, You Suck
Apr 24, 6:17PM
As I sit here writing this post, I am on board an American Airlines flight from Chicago to New York City. I consider it a minor miracle that the plane is actually in the air. After two cancelled flights on this trip alone, a seat without a cushion, and some trouble counting the number of people on the plane which made us return to the gate a second time after another minor problem, I've lost count of how many errors American Airlines has now made in this comedy that is my travels. Oh, and @AmericanAir also managed to prove that it is an utterly toothless marketing arm of American which fails when it comes to providing actual customer service. I never thought I'd say this as a loyal American Airlines customer who has travelled hundreds of thousands of miles on American over the years, but it may now be worse than Delta. Yes, this is going to be a rant. If that's not your thing, avert your eyes. There isn't any one thing I can point to that makes me never want to fly American again. Rather, it is everything—a succession of flubs and foibles. I like to believe I am a pretty tolerant air traveler, but everyone has a breaking point. 
What Should You Do With Your Crappy Little Services Business?
Apr 24, 5:52PM
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable There's a line of thinking in Silicon Valley that you should build product businesses rather than services businesses. This thinking is largely driven by the venture capital industry who are in search of high margin, highly scalable businesses. It's nearly impossible to get a services company financed by VCs. You're a small fish. But technology service businesses can be hugely profitable, rewarding & life-changing experiences for entrepreneurs. So how should you think about whether to build a services business or how to finance your existing one? Read on ...
Backstage at Cirque Du Soleil's 'KÀ': Part Two – "Our Stage Is The World's Largest Giant Kitchen Drawer" [TCTV]
Apr 24, 5:00PM
This time last week, I wrote about my backstage tour of Cirque Du Soleil's KÀ, at the MGM Grand. I also promised to go back and talk to the show's technical director, Erik Walstad for TechCrunch TV. In the video below, Erik talks about the technology behind Cirque's most complex show, and in particular the two gigantic moving stages that form its centerpiece. Then we head to the auditorium to see that technology in action, as Erick's team reset the show ahead of the night's performance. As I wrote last week, a video can't begin to do the show - or its technology - justice, but Erick's explanation of how the 'Tatami Deck' stage is just like a kitchen drawer is at least better than anything I could possibly write about it. (And finally, there's a special feature tucked at the end of the video. Spoiler alert: if you love English narrowboats, you won't want to miss that.)
OneRiot's 'Social Interest Score' Defines Mobile Audience Segments For Advertisers
Apr 24, 5:00PM
As we wrote earlier this year, OneRiot launched a social targeting service for mobile ads, that offers highly targeted ads within mobile apps. Similar to Klout's social influence score, OneRiot has developed a "social interest score" to define mobile audience segments based on social interest categories. With the new social targeting service, OneRiot allows advertisers to reach targeted audience segments on mobile, from busy moms to tech influencers to sports guys to fashionistas. Segmentation and targeting are based on factors such as audience interest profiles, demographics, social influence and realtime conversations. OneRiot's audience profiles are created by mining and analyzing public big data social streams from services (i.e.Twitter). The company says that this data is derived from users that heavily engage with content on their mobile device that is relevant to their current social activity, including status updates, tweets, photos, advertising and more. 
Food Is The New Frontier In Green Tech
Apr 24, 4:55PM
This is a guest post from Ali Partovi, angel investor, startup advisor and serial entrepreneur. He co-founded iLike, acquired by Myspace in 2009, and LinkExchange, acquired by Microsoft for $265 million in 1998. His portfolio has included successes as far-ranging as Zappos, Facebook, DropBox and OPOWER. Around Earth Day, we're reminded about global warming and pollution, as well as the "green" technologies and consumer choices that may save our planet. We don't hear as much about agriculture, one of the world's largest polluters, nor do we appreciate the environmental impact of our diet. According to research by the World Resources Institute, agriculture is mankind's biggest contributor to climate change, generating at least 26 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide — more than from all electricity and industry or from all the world's planes, trains and automobiles. Feeding the growing world population using today's practices is increasingly unsustainable. Just as we need new technologies in areas like renewable energy, we need more "renewable" approaches to producing the most primal form of energy: food... 
Higher Education's Toughest Test
Apr 24, 4:05PM
In the debate sparked by Peter Thiel's "20 Under 20 Fellowship" (which pays bright students to drop out of college), one fact stands out: the cost of U.S. post-secondary education is spiraling upward, out of control. Thiel calls this a "bubble," similar to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, where hopeful property owners over-leveraged themselves to lay claim to a coveted piece of the American dream: home ownership. Higher education is another piece of this dream, offering a chance at social advancement and the potential for a high return on investment. During the sub-prime crisis, brokers financed home sales on the belief assets would appreciate. A similar situation is brewing on U.S college campuses, where institutions extract high tuitions from consumers in exchange for degrees and credentials that are thought to be like homes—assets that will always appreciate in value. An investment in college education has historically been a smart bet. However, in the same way sub-prime housing models didn't accommodate for potential price falls, the belief that the value of a college degree will always appreciate is potentially flawed. And, if the value of a degree stagnates while its price tag soars, our higher education system will become unsustainable. Some are going so far as to claim that some university degrees already lead to a negative return on investment.
Q&A With Survivor Host Jeff Probst On Surviving Social Media
Apr 24, 2:00PM
This Q&A with Survivor host Jeff Probst was conducted by guest writer Narendra Rocherolle, CEO of The Start Project. He and his partners hold the curious distinction of selling their company, Webshots, twice. Narendra is an occasional contributor to TechCrunch, you can read a Q&A with Lance Armstrong here. He is @narendra on Twitter. The CBS show Survivor is completing its 22nd season—a run with a business and social impact that are reserved for extraordinarily few productions in Television history. Survivor launched the Reality TV genre and has managed to continue to do well during a decade where the very foundations of TV have been shifting. The show's host Jeff Probst has been a mainstay and a driving force behind the show's continued innovation in storytelling. I recently caught up with him to get some unfiltered thoughts. If you have questions or comments you can direct them to @jeffprobst on Twitter! Survivor is a deceptively complex media property because you have multiple narratives: the game, behind the scenes details, and deeper looks into the actual participants. Building on these narratives, you are now live tweeting during Survivor shows (both East and West coast feeds). Where did you get the idea? I am a big Howard Stern fan and one weekend he tweeted while watching a re-run of his movie, Private Parts. That was the inspiration for me to do the same thing with Survivor fans. I wanted to continue the conversation and give them more of what they crave, which is behind-the-scenes information and personal insight. In addition, I learn valuable information about what is and is not working for the show. It's a very satisfying, albeit time consuming, effort.
We're In The Middle Of A Terrible Blubble!
Apr 24, 7:16AM
If you're an early stage venture capitalist or angel investor there is no time like the present to declare a bubble, say valuations are out of control and predict the demise of the tech industry in the very near future. Since they're in the business of buying low and selling high, any angle that suggests that the buy price should be even lower sounds great to them. If there's any evidence of said bubble all the press will eat it up. Mostly because they were out buying Internet stocks in 2000 instead of doing their jobs and reporting on the fairly obvious signals that the Nasdaq was about to implode. They won't get caught with their pants down and their hand out again. Declare a bubble early and declare it often. And there is some evidence laying around. Valuations on a few select private tech startups are pretty darn high right now. And valuations on early stage "Series A" startups have surpassed the all important $4 million line and are now averaging in the $6 million - $8 million range. That's bad for seed fund economics. Which leads to paragraph 1 above, followed by paragraph 2 in the press.
(Founder Stories) The GroupMe Guys Reveal How To Land A Job At A Startup
Apr 24, 4:22AM
All week long we've been running clips from the Founder Stories interview with the GroupMe Guys, co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci. In the video above, they answer some rapid fire questions about how to impress startups during an interview (give great product feedback), what do they look for in "social engineers," and what is the hardest part of running a startup (delegating and hiring). Host Chris Dixon mentions Paul Graham's essay on how founders should split up their time into a Maker schedule and a Manager schedule, and how in practice that turns out to be impossible. "Balancing the founder stuff on top of your actual responsibilities" is really tough, says Martocci.
Q&A With Geoff Cook: How We Solved The Chatroulette Porn Problem
Apr 23, 11:54PM
At the end of last year, social networking site myYearbook shifted its focus more towards games and introduced a live video chat feature which could have completely backfired. But instead of turning into the next Chatroulette, the site has managed to keep the unwanted live porn vids to a minimum. While Chatroulette still has an estimated nudity rate of 1 in 50 videos, myYTearbook was able to cut its nudity rate down to 1 in a 1,000. In a Q&A with myYearbook CEO Geoff Cook, he explains the strategies he used to get there. Q: When you decided to add live video chat to your site, what were you thinking? I mean, seriously, what were you thinking? When we decided to build a Live Video gaming platform, the best example of Live Video at scale was Chatroulette, and it was full of porn. At the time, 1 out of every 10 video streams on Chatroulette was obscene. Chatroulette was growing in part because it was obscene—it was the accident victim and the public was the rubbernecker. Chatroulette's traffic peaked in March 2010—the same month that Jon Stewart screamed into the camera "I hate Chatroulette!" to end a segment that would be the service's high water mark.
Obama-Zuckerberg and Expeditionary Economics
Apr 23, 7:20PM
Thanks to the revolutions happening in the Middle East, our leaders have been touting social media as the new force for democracy. President Obama went out of his way to schmooze Facebook employees this week. He told them that when it comes to solving the challenges our country faces and to precipitating changes in the rest of the world, they were "at the cutting edge of what's happening". It's great that Silicon Valley is getting all this love and affection. But could this attention end up killing the golden goose? Think about it: if you are an evil dictator, looking for an excuse to block Facebook and Twitter, what better propaganda weapon than a picture of President Obama getting chummy with Mark Zuckerberg? Yes, I know that the U.S. government didn't invent Facebook or even figure out how to use it until recently; and that it doesn't control Facebook's policies. But don't those pictures and video clips tell a different story?
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