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Startups Live & Die by These 5 Street-Smart Laws of Advertising
May 06, 9:00AM
"Money alone isn't enough to bring happiness . . . happiness [is] when you're actually truly ok with losing everything you have." - Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose Disclaimer: This article's sole purpose is to address the core principles of advertising in a new and edgy way. This is not for the faint of heart or those highly sensitive to socially charged public issues. So suck it up and buckle up. You're about to be taken to school (of hard knocks). Class is now in session.Pair vs. Pair: Pair The App Is Getting Sued By Pair Networks, The Hosting Company
May 06, 2:20AM
It was less than a week ago that Tenthbit, the developers of the buzzy, new social-networking-app-for-couples (or other partners) Pair, picked up a $4.2 million seed round, money the founders said would be used to expand its mobile development and design teams. Now it looks like some of those funds might also need to go to legal bills. Tenthbit is getting sued by pair Networks, a hosting and domain registration company based in Pittsburgh, for trademark infringement. Tenthbit, meanwhile, has also sued pair Networks, to prevent the other suit from going ahead. Pair Networks is asking for an injunction on Pair the app, as well as "other relief as this Court deems appropriate." Tenthbit argues the two do not compete directly, and would therefore not result in any brand confusion.San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee On Shifting Tech Hubs Into Urban Centers [TCTV]
May 06, 2:00AM
For years, companies have been known to flock more to SF's southern suburbs or to San Jose some 50 miles south, where space is often cheaper and the tax situation has historically been more lax. But surrounded by tech-focused supporters such as Ron Conway and Marissa Mayer, Ed Lee has made it a major priority of his administration to bring more technological innovation and startup businesses into the city of San Francisco.Putting Plans to Work: Best Practices for Hackathon Demo Days
May 05, 11:00PM
For anyone who enjoys (or has a knack for) planning, organizing a hackathon is not terribly difficult: it's a matter of understanding your goals, assessing needs, and figuring out how to bridge the two. Naturally, this is much easier said than done. The most important part of a hackathon, by far, are the demos. Why else -- it's what makes the event worth attending in the first place. Sponsoring companies wouldn't offer money to anything that didn't provide exposure. Developers wouldn't forsake sleep if they couldn't show an eager audience the hacks they built overnight. Pulling off demos at Photo Hack Day and Photo Hack Day 2, for example, has proven to be a continuous learning process, with a much more public (and much less forgiving) learning curve. There's no need to be a n00b, I've done a lot of the screwing up for you.Facebook Says Today's Comment Limitations Are Due To Spam Filter, Not Censorship
May 05, 9:22PM
An automated Facebook spam filter, not purposeful censorship, is to blame for startup enthusiast Robert Scoble and some other commenters getting blocked, according to a company spokesperson. Users attempting to comment on blog posts have recently been prevented from doing so, with warning text from the company saying that "this comment can't be posted" because it is "irrelevant or inappropriate." We've heard back from Facebook, and here's what it says has been going on.Chain-Link Confidentiality: A HIPAA-Like Approach To Online Privacy
May 05, 9:00PM
As we put more of our private information online and entrust it to web services, privacy breaches become almost inevitable. One major problem with online privacy is that there is really no enforceable chain of confidentiality. So when a third-party service makes your information available to another party, things can get complicated. A new paper by Samford University law professor Woodrow Harzog argues that traditional privacy laws aren't the best ways to protect private information online. Instead, he suggests an approach that more like the U.S. HIPAA rules that currently govern how private health information can be shared between your health provider and third parties. The system he proposes would be based on established principles in confidentiality and contract law.Is This Censorship? Facebook Stops Users From Posting 'Irrelevant Or Inappropriate' Comments
May 05, 7:31PM
Updated. Today was just another Saturday morning in blog land when Robert Scoble, the well-known tech startup enthusiast, went to post a comment on a Facebook post written by Carnegie Mellon student (and TechCrunch commenter extraordinaire) Max Woolf about the nature of today's tech blogging scene. Scoble's comment itself was pretty par-for-the-course -- generally agreeing with Woolf's sentiments and adding in his own two cents. But when Scoble went to click post, he received an odd error message:If Facebook Could Enter China, Here Are Some Of The Hurdles
May 05, 7:00PM
Mark Zuckerberg's visit to China back in December 2011 created a storm of speculation on whether Facebook was preparing for a full scale entry into the most populous country in the world. Photos of Zuckerberg visiting Sina's headquarters in Beijing, leaked by a Sina employee and reports of him meeting with other major Chinese Internet companies such as Baidu and Alibaba have further fueled rumors that Facebook is looking for a local partner to facilitate its China entry. Putting aside the rumors and speculation, there is little doubt that Facebook is looking for a way to enter the China market and the real questions lie not in the "if," but rather the "how," "when" and whether Facebook will be able to make a success of their China market entry when countless other western Internet juggernauts have bruised and battered themselves against the Great firewall of China.Nathan Myhrvold, ex-MSFT CTO And Patent Powerbroker, Gobbles Up A Major Cookbook Award
May 05, 6:05PM
Nathan Myhrvold, erstwhile Microsoft CTO and now patent powerbroker extraordinare, has hit the news this weekend, but it's not for his latest licensing deal with a mobile phone maker, or for a lawsuit against a tech company (or three) that refuses to pay up for patents that his company, Intellectual Ventures, owns -- but for a different kettle of fish altogether. Myhrvold has won the James Beard Foundation book award for cookbook of the year -- the top prize in one of the industry's most prestigious accolades -- for a book that deep-dives, appropriately enough, into the science and technology of cooking. His book, the self-published Modernist Cuisine, is a six-volume, 2,438-page effort that he co-wrote with Chris Young and Maxime Bilet (and a 20-person team of cooks), which is selling for $625 (or $455.11 on Amazon).With A Talent War In The Valley, Perhaps Romania Has The Answers?
May 05, 5:46PM
Today, in 2012, there is a talent war like no other. The Valley is abuzz with a hiring frenzy. Startups can't compete with Yammer, Zynga, Twitter, Facebook and the rest for developers. Perhaps the answer is to look elsewhere? To countries where the old Soviet education system produced maths and science graduates by the truckload? To Kiev, Belgrade, Slovenia and others? And perhaps to Romania. For Romanians, perhaps for the first time in history, the world is now flat. Forty-five years of Stalin-esque communism meant sports and education were the only acceptable ways to compete in Romania. Soviet-era industrialisation ended up producing a country where almost half of the educated population were trained to become engineers. Today, in 2012, they are more likely to be coders. And now they can take their place with the rest of the world on the level playing field of technology.Gillmor Gang: The UnLike Filter
May 05, 5:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — surfed the Social Holodeck for signs of intelligent life and overload. Meanwhile: @scobleizer and his Facebook UnLike engine, @dsearls and the Intention Economy, @kevinmarks on the patents protection racket. If @jtaschek is right, the Facebook IPO will unleash a startup spending spree the likes of which we've never seen. But what I'm waiting for is the app to end all apps, or at least autodelete an old one every time I download a new one. Now that will be an algorithm to apply to the push notification queue.Jailbreaking the Degree
May 05, 4:00PM
Jailbreak verb. 1 To get out of a restricted mode of operation. 2 To enable use of a product not intended by the manufacturer.
Currently, the degree is the only meaningful "unit" of education to which employers give any credence. Of this dependency, TIME magazine writes, "The tight connection between college degrees and economic success may be a nearly unquestioned part of our social order. Future generations may look back and shudder at the cruelty of it… It is inefficient, both because it wastes a lot of money and because it locks people who would have done good work out of some jobs."HTC Won't Hook Up One X Owners With Bootloader Unlock
May 05, 3:49PM
HTC won over some hearts a while back when it released its bootloader unlock tool for a good number of devices. It basically allows owners of Android phones to load custom ROMs onto their phones in exchange for any warranty rights they may have been enjoying. It's a fair trade considering a solid percentage of Android power users prefer Android based mostly on the fact that they have this option, but without solid hardware the ability to load different versions of Androids becomes less and less appealing. And so is the case with the HTC One X. It's an excellent handset, and possibly the best HTC has ever made. But unfortunately, the company won't be offering the bootloader unlock tool for this particular handset.ZocDoc Rolls Out In Tampa Bay; Says Gen Y Is Clueless About Health Care
May 05, 3:00PM
ZocDoc, the professional booking platform for doctors, is rolling out to another market as of this week: Tampa, Florida - and incidentally, company CEO Cyrus Massoumi also happens to be a Florida native. But that's not why Tampa was chosen as the next major metro area to join the lineup of ZocDoc's regions served - the company says that it chooses new markets based on demand from both patients and doctors alike. In conjunction with the launch, ZocDoc also released the findings from a new survey it commissioned which highlights why ZocDoc happens to be in such demand: it's solving the frustrating problem of finding a doctor and booking an appointment - something which the youngest generation of patients is apparently the most ill-equipped to handle, at least according to the findings.Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Xobot
May 05, 1:00PM
Poor old Android is having a bad year. (Especially compared to last year.) Apple's iPhone is soaring in China, and apparently overtaking Android in the crucial American market. Oracle's lawsuit against Google has led to several rather awkward claims, eg that the word 'license' in the phrase "we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need" referred to "not a license from anybody", a kind of license with which I was previously entirely unfamiliar. CEO Larry Page's own testimony was labelled as evasive: "His denial of knowledge and recollection contrasts with evidence," wrote Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents. What a headache. Way back in 2005, Android head honcho Andy Rubin wrote in a prescient email: "If Sun doesn't want to work with us, we have two options: 1) Abandon our work and adopt MSFT CLR VM and C# language – or – 2) Do Java anyway and defend our decision, perhaps making enemies along the way."Just imagine if they'd taken the first road. It's not widely understood in the industry that Microsoft's .NET infrastructure is more open than Java in many ways; it and its flagship language C# are ISO and ECMA standards, available to anyone and everyone, legally bulletproofed by the Microsoft Community Promise. Imagine if the Android OS ran on an entirely different technical architecture. Wait, no. Don't imagine it: examine it. Like a vision from a parallel universe, it now exists.
Wappwolf's Automator Now Connects/Syncs Google Drive, Dropbox And Others
May 05, 11:32AM
Previously we've covered Dropbox Automator, a sort of IFTTT for Dropbox. (IFTTT, if you haven't heard, automates tasks to trigger when a particular action has occurred, e.g. if a Facebook profile picture changes, then update a Twitter profile, etc). Like IFTTT, Dropbox Automator is capable of triggering a similar series of actions, based on what kind of files have been added to your Dropbox folders. Now, the startup that makes Dropbox Automator, Wappwolf, has produced Google Drive Automator.New Orleans' First Tech Incubator, Launch Pad Ignition, Debuts Its Second Batch Of Startups
May 05, 6:22AM
Launch Pad Ignition, the first tech incubator to make its home in the Big Easy, today officially unveiled the seven companies that participated in its second annual session. The accelerator's 12-week program began the second week of February and culminated yesterday with its own New Orleans rendition of the patented "Demo Day," appropriately called "Launch Fest," which we've been told is "Jazz Fest plus startups, on steroids." Launch Pad's model is a bit different than that of the traditional accelerator, in that Co-founder Chris Schultz tells us it's geared towards building traction, not offering big early funding.New Start Up CodeNow.Com Lets You Build And Test Code In Real Time, In Your Browser
May 05, 6:21AM
Trying new APIs is tricky. You can spend hours setting things up, gaining permissions, and learning syntax before you even get to write one line of code. That's why CodeNow.com is cool. In short, it allows you to try APIs before you invest too much time into them and, as an added bonus, it acts as a code repository. The site is currently in private beta but it's accepting users tonight.The Rise of Big Data Apps And The Fall of SaaS
May 05, 5:00AM
With the influx of information flooding the web – 90% of the web having been created in the last two years alone – web businesses are looking for ways to understand and use big data to drive their business. Just as SaaS and the cloud completely revolutionized the way businesses operate, so will Big Data applications (BDAs). BDAs are web-based applications that interpret and use massive amounts of enterprise and web-scale data to deliver more intelligent results for their subscribers. BDAs leverage the best of the cloud; they're web-hosted, multi-tenant and use Hadoop, noSQL and a range of recommendation and machine learning technologies. But the real question is – so what? So what if the underlying data structures use Hadoop or noSQL? No CEO of a major business gets excited about a value proposition around more scalable data structures. That's where BDAs come in. BDAs don't just repackage your data in a cool interface or offer productivity improvements in data scalability, they harness the world's data to deliver you a better outcome – like more revenue.Facebook Likes Just Got Cray Cray
May 05, 4:02AM
In light of its impending multi-billion-dollar IPO, its user base of 900 million and its increasingly sprawling design and user experience, some people have come to believe that Facebook has gone crazy. Excuse me, "cray cray." What's more, even though it's only two-odd years old, Facebook's "Like" button is now ubiquitous on the Webs. But with how quickly these young people are picking up new technology these days, let's be honest, "Liking" things is for old people. Everyone else has moved on. That's why Ben Schaechter, Sam Grossberg, and Paul Kompfner have coded up a new Chrome extension, which went live this evening, called CrayBook. (Check it out in the Chrome Web Store here.)If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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