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Zyngapocalypse Now (And What Comes Next?)
Aug 05, 4:55AM
Significant losses, declining ARPUs, failing mobile acquisitions and shareholder selloffs. A stock price down to $3.01. A product catalog repeating previous mistakes. Media coverage ranging from the mystified to "I told you so". A vague promise to get into gambling. Last week was miserable for Zynga and, as the bellwether of social games, was not good news for the whole sector. As Zynga goes, so eventually go Wooga, EA Playfish and countless others.Analytics Company Crazy Egg Acquires The Hello Bar
Aug 05, 3:00AM
Crazy Egg, a company that helps website owners to visualize visitor activity, has acquired the web toolbar product Hello Bar. The Hello Bar is a customizable, relatively unobtrusive bar that sits at the top of a website and directs visitors with a call to action. For example, the bar on Gary Vaynerchuk's website prompts visitors to "Circle me up on Google+!", while the one at Eric Ries' Startup Lessons Learned points to the video of his Lean Startup track at this year's SXSW.Unbaby.me? Unfriend.me Instead
Aug 05, 1:09AM
Seriously, people? Unbaby.me? You hate seeing baby pictures on Facebook so much that you have to use a Chrome extension to block them? Look, I get it. Parents and non-parents sort of can't stand each other. For god's sake, we can't even hang out at the same bar together without it turning into some kind of turf war. (Yeah, that's right: bar. Apparently, it's not totally irresponsible parenting to consume alcohol in front the kids. See also: my house, every Friday night). But even though Unbaby.me is only the latest development in the whole us vs. them saga of breeders vs. non-breeders, it actually speaks to a couple of long-standing issues surrounding social networking services: that A) you're either doing it wrong, or B) the social network itself has failed you in some way. In this case, I'm voting for A.Predictors Of The Fundraising Market
Aug 04, 11:59PM
Editor's Note: This is Redpoint VC Tomasz Tunguz's third article in a series examining trends in the public and private technology markets. (Here are one and two.) It is widely believed that the stock market is a leading health indicator for the venture industry. In reality, however, the performance of the S&P 500 tells us very little about trends in the fundraising market. For this week's analysis, I evaluated correlating factors for VC fundraising and VC investment using annual data from the NVCA and Yahoo Finance from 2001 to 2011. I examined five possible correlating variables: number of IPOs, aggregate IPO value (proceeds from IPO), number of M&A transactions, aggregate M&A value and the performance of the S&P 500 (year over year change). This analysis time shifts the data by one year.Fly Or Die: iCases!
Aug 04, 11:00PM
It's almost silly to own an iPad or iPhone without a case — they're such fragile devices. But not every case is a good one. In fact, we learned in this episode of Fly or Die that not every case even fits. We decided to look at TwelveSouth's BookBook iPhone case, Hard Candy's BubbleSlider iPhone case, and the Candy Convertible iPad case by Hard Candy. Only one stole our hearts and minds, and even it is a bit bulky.Unbaby.me? Yes, Please.
Aug 04, 10:00PM
When I first heard about Unbaby.me, in a TechCrunch Yammer thread the other day, I was seriously excited. Not just because it provides a useful tool for the bitter and jaded non-parents among us. But mainly because I would be lucky enough to write about it. So what is Unbaby.me? And why is it so important? Unbaby.me is a Chrome extension that recognizes baby photos on social networking sites like Facebook, and replaces them with photos of cats or dogs or cars or whatever you want. You just add to Chrome, update a few keywords, and tell it what to change the photos to. (The default is cats.)5 Reasons Why The Enterprise Is Not So Boring After All
Aug 04, 9:00PM
I get this question a lot: Why do you cover enterprise? People always look puzzled when they ask me this question. It's like they are trying to see deep into my soul. Who is this man who loves enterprise coverage? Is he just dull? Ha! If you think I am dull, so be it. I'll gladly keep covering the enterprise.Who To Blame For Failed IPOs
Aug 04, 8:00PM
Praise be to Box, the cloud storage company that recently waggled $125 million from private investors to continue its growth trajectory, expand internationally and continue ratcheting up its valuation into the billion-dollar range. There's a lot to like in this story, starting with Box's service. I pulled Box into our company and we use it religiously to version control internal documents. It's awesome and Aaron Levie and his team deserve to get rich from their hard work. And 15 years ago, you could have gotten rich from his work too. Levie would have brought his company to the public markets, seeking growth capital, and you could have invested and watched Box grow from a $600 million valuation last year to a $1.2 billion valuation today. Box would have been open to average investors, folks aiming to see capital appreciation in the public markets and a modest return on their small savings. The high tide of Silicon Valley could have raised even the smallest boats. But today, Box remains private. When it does go public, it will no longer be in its high-growth phase. Chances are it will look a lot like the companies that have gone public in recent years, ballyhooed and heaped with expectations that have failed to produce.Grum: Inside The Takedown Of One Of The World's Biggest Spam Networks
Aug 04, 5:30PM
As Spring cracked the Moscow frosts and March rains doused the streets, a computer in an innocuous server farm somewhere in the heart of the city winked to life. It was 2007, a year when many people became truly invested in online life. Twitter was a year old and the most popular smartphone was the Blackberry Curve - a pure email machine. It was a year ripe with promise for cyber-everything. And a group of hackers, unnamed to this day, wanted to grab their piece. The server first sent a blast of emails containing a link to a piece of software that many around the world wanted to download. Once they grabbed the Trojan Horse, the infected program took over computer after computer, creating something security experts call a botnet - a collection of infected machines controlled by a central command and control unit (CnC).Gillmor Gang: I Can't Hear You
Aug 04, 5:00PM
The Gillmor Gang: John Borthwick, Danny Sullivan, Doc Searls, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — struggled with Comcastic bandwidth and hours on hold as Twitter and Apple tweaked their business models. It seems that Twitter is refurbishing the accomodations within 140 characters to create a nice new home for Twitter apps, in the process giving the FLipboard to aggregators outside the mother ship. Apple, on the other hand, is opening Apple TV and the iPad to Hulu Plus and Amazon Instant Video respectively. @dannysullivan thinks it's bad news for Roku fans, and Doc, who's now working on Rupert Murdoch's boat, is busy stealing content from his own bad self over transcontinental Slingbox. It's TV Everywhere, except here.Dear Yahoo, I Redesigned Your Website (And Took Out 512,240 Pixels Of Banner Ads)
Aug 04, 3:00PM
Dear Yahoo!, I've redesigned your website (five sites, actually) and I'd like to get your opinion. Across five properties -- Homepage, Screen, OMG, Flickr, Music -- I've removed 4 square banner ads, 2 wide rectangles, 2 text ads, and an interruptive preroll. I've replaced those traditional ads with content-based ads that are entirely native to each site's user experience -- promoted videos, promoted playlists, promoted trends, promoted images, and promoted articles. The kicker? I'm confident you could pull this off without having an impact on long term advertising revenue.Facebooking While Rome Burns
Aug 04, 1:00PM
I'm an optimist, I really am, especially when it comes to technology and its ability to transform the world. But today I can't shake the feeling that we as a species are really screwing up. Guess what? "There is no hope of saving the global coral reef ecosystem." How's that for depressing? Meanwhile, even those few scientists who previously doubted that climate change was human-caused are increasingly conceding that global warming is a) very real b) our fault -- and yet, "the American public has grown increasingly skeptical." What do coral extinction, global warming, and global finance have in common? All are screwed up beyond all recognition, and given our current geopolitical systems, all are beyond all hope of repair. To which the innovator's response should be: disrupt the system! But of course there's no money in that. The system is, pretty much by definition, built to distribute money to those who perpetuate it. Still, despite that defense mechanism, there's money to be made in changing the world. Elon Musk is doing it twice over with Tesla and SpaceX. I believe Google's Glass and self-driving cars, among other products of the "Google X" lab reportedly headed up by Sergey Brin, will both become huge money-minting markets. But note that both Musk and Brin were already enormously successful. How many truly ambitious founders who haven't already hit home runs ever get to step up to the plate?Twitter Alerts To Scrape The Olympics Site For New Tickets Are Proliferating
Aug 04, 10:55AM
An unofficial Olympic ticket alerts twitter feed which was accessing the official Olympics ticket site to spot when tickets for events were released has been blocked. But others are now appearing. Adam Naisbitt created @2012ticketalert on Twitter and deep-linked into the Olympics ticket site to allow people to find out about tickets as they became available. It garnered over 11,000 followers this week. A London 2012 spokesman has said its ticket agent had now blocked the feed. Naisbitt is trying to re-start the service. However, a new site has now appeared doing the same thing. Andrew Davey, founder of tech startup Squadify, set up @SqadTicketWatch in the last couple of days.The Federated Web Should Be Easier Than It Sounds
Aug 04, 6:00AM
Twitter's suspension of journalist Guy Adam's account earlier this week should further discussions that have been bubbling over the past couple weeks about the need for a more open alternative to Twitter. Although Twitter reinstated Adams' account, the company's actions show why such an alternative is important. It's not about giving developers more API tools to play with. It's about building more resilient systems for free speech online.Snug Nugget Launches A Pay-What-You-Want Book Bundle
Aug 04, 1:13AM
While I can't quite imagine what a "snug nugget" really is without descending into the scatological, but what the company does is quite interesting. This new website offers bundles of books with a retail value of about $30. They expect users to pay about that and they donate 14.3% to charity. The current crop of books looks promising if you're into thrillers and fantasy and hopefully they'll continue these bundles with bigger names to draw in some more donations. All of the books are DRM free and come in Kindle, ePub, and PDF format. You check out via Paypal and Google Checkout.AKQA Chairman Tom Bedecarre Says Advertisers Want More 'Elbow Room' On Facebook
Aug 04, 1:01AM
In the final discussion of our Facebook ecosystem CrunchUp today, AKQA Chairman Tom Bedecarre and Facebook VP Greg Badros took the stage to address Facebook's advertising strategy. Bedecarré wasn't as skeptical as his new boss Martin Sorrell (whose advertising conglomerate WPP just announced that it's acquiring agency AKQA, and who has said that Facebook is "not necessarily an advertising medium"), but he made it sound like the company has a lot of work to do to win over advertisers. The numbers tell part of the story. Bedecarre (who's the middle figure in the photo) said that WPP is upping its spend on Facebook ads this year from $200 million to $400 million — that's nice progress, but less than 1 percent of its total $65 billion in spending.Users Claim Twoo Is Spamming Their Friends, Social Network Says It's "Just Not Clear Enough"
Aug 04, 12:25AM
Users are complaining that Twoo, a social networking service, is sending unwanted messages to their contacts. Co-founder and CEO Lorenz Bogaert counters that this is a misunderstanding and the company is working to fix it. Users, both those who have emailed me and who have posted public reviews in the app store, say that the mobile app is intentionally designed to be tricky and cause the user to invite their entire address book.With Condiment, StyleDiary Founder Patricia Handschiegel Combines Lifestyle Content And Commerce
Aug 04, 12:05AM
Patricia Handschiegel, who founded fashion media company StyleDiary (and eventually sold it to StyleHive) is back with a new startup bringing together lifestyle content and commerce. Handschiegel says she's been interested in that combination since her time at StyleDiary, but thanks to the acquisition, she didn't really pursue it. Nowadays you hear a lot more about bringing content and commerce together, but Handschiegel says that for the most part, it an area being tackled by e-commerce companies who start posting articles or other kinds of content featuring their products. With her new site Condiment, she's taking the opposite approach, focusing on content first and then building the store.Man Builds A Real, Working Wall-E That's Still Eternally Hunting For Eve
Aug 04, 12:00AM
Mike Senna, a California-based roboticist, has built a real, working Wall-E that can move around, wave, and call out his own cute name in a rattly, digitized voice. Mike is the guy who built a real, working R2-D2 and his latest project is a real masterpiece of animatronics and robotic motion.Facebook's Big Challenge: Building A Stable Platform For Developers While Maintaining User Experience
Aug 03, 11:00PM
Today at The TC CrunchUp at the Fox Theater in Redwood City, a group of founders and entrepreneurs took the stage to talk about the future of Facebook's platform, where it's been and where it's going as a result. Although the company's stock has been limping of late, Facebook continues to be impossible to ignore -- by the end of June, for example, the platform was seeing 955 million monthly active users, with 81 percent of those coming from outside the U.S., and more than 230 million people playing games on Facebook.com every month. Although it may seem like Facebook has plenty on their plate in terms of stock downturns, ad monetization strategies and more, Facebook Director of Product Management Doug Purdy said that a big challenge facing Facebook today is building a solid and stable platform for third-party developers via its APIs.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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