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(The) Greatest Thing Facebook Ever Did Was Drop The "The"
Dec 18, 3:55AM
Or so argues this music video about ex-Facebook president Sean Parker's mythical contribution to humanity. Behold as a goofily dressed and bewigged Parker sings about the apocryphal moment (as seen in The Social Network) where he convinced founder Mark Zuckerberg to drop the "the" in TheFacebook and just go with Facebook. 
Yahoo's Head Of Engineering For Communication Products, An 11 Year Vet, Latest To Sign Off
Dec 18, 3:31AM
At the risk of sounding like we're kicking a dead horse — then lighting it on fire — we've been able to confirm another significant departure from Yahoo this evening. Raj Vemulapalli, Yahoo's Head of Engineering for Real Time Communications, is leaving, the company has confirmed to us. Vemulapalli, amazingly, has been with Yahoo for over 11 years. Over that span he has worked his way up the engineering ranks, culminating in his position leading some of the few products that have been bright spots for Yahoo in recent years. That includes the massively-used Yahoo Messenger product, and all of the other messaging integration across the various Yahoo products.
Another Key Feature Of Google +1: Massive-Scale Social Video Conferencing
Dec 18, 2:58AM
Over the past few weeks, we've been able to dig up a bunch of details about Google's secret forthcoming social service. The service, previously codenamed "Emerald Sea" but currently being called "+1", essentially seems to be a toolbar that exists along the top of Google's various properties to allow for easy sharing. We even were able to snag a picture of it. But there's also quite a bit more to it, based on what we've been hearing. For one thing, we've been hearing a bit of talk about specific mobile applications, which may or may not be called "Loop" — after one of the key features of +1 (think: groups). But another feature of +1 is apparently large-scale video conferencing.
Don't: Parade In Front Of TechCrunch HQ Wearing A Chicken Costume
Dec 18, 2:13AM
Late last week, a handful of TechCrunch staff noticed something strange going on in front of our headquarters in San Francisco: there was giant, creepy-looking chicken pacing back and forth in the street, holding a sign over its head that said "TechCrunch Dont Be Chicken, Check Out DoDont". Laura bravely went outside to scope out the situation — she returned to say that the guy had already been out there for hours, and that this was actually the second day he'd been walking around TCHQ (nobody noticed him the first day). So, I did what any other fearless reporter would do: I grabbed my Flip camera and started talking to the giant chicken. As you'll learn in the video above, the chicken in question happens to be one of the founders of DoDont, a site that invites users to voice their recommendations on a binary scale: "Do" something, or "Don't".
Ask a VC: Kairouz on Canada, Splurging on Wine and the Surging NYC Scene (TCTV)
Dec 18, 2:03AM
Habib Kairouz of Rho Ventures was my guest on Ask a VC this week, and as I mentioned earlier this week, he's had a range of Web exits in the last ten years. He's also seen tremendous changes in his home tech market of New York. It's gone from silly Silicon Alley days to tumbleweeds and now to a thriving hub that's stolen Boston's East Coast venture thunder, at least when it comes to consumer Internet companies. In this episode we talk about what New York finally got right, why Rho has offices in Canada, the value of an incubator versus bootstrapping and why Kairouz doesn't think there's as much opportunity in online beer as there is in wine. (Note: Apologies on my audio. We had some issues, but Kairouz is the one answering the questions and his is just fine.)
Yahoo Just Killed… Consumer Confidence In Them
Dec 18, 1:41AM
It has been fairly amazing to watch this Yahoo "sunsetting" news over the past 48 hours. It seemed to go from a bad leak, to huge backlash, to PR disaster, to confusion, to worse PR disaster. Now Yahoo, by way of Delicious (the most prominent service being "sunset"), has responded by lashing out at all the press for the coverage of the fiasco. Danny Sullivan just did a great job of ripping them a new one for this nonsense misdirection. But the issue actually goes much deeper. Yahoo may not be killing Delicious, but they have killed something else: consumer confidence in them.
Zappos Expands To A San Francisco Office, Is Hiring
Dec 18, 12:32AM
Online shoes and accessories retailer Zappos announced an expansion and a move to San Francisco on its employee blog this morning, in a post called "Zappos IP, Inc. Is Looking For 'A Few Good Developers'" "We are very excited to be opening up a small San Francisco office. We're jazzed to go back to the Zappos Family's Bay Area roots and surround ourselves by the many amazing people and companies who make the world a happier place through technology, arts and culture.The San Francisco office in some ways will be a mini-start-up within the Zappos Family."
Google To Expand And Market Movie Streaming Service In 2011
Dec 17, 11:18PM
Google is expanding its feature film streaming service, says a source who's been briefed on the product. The service will likely be an expansion of the current movie rental/streaming test launched by Google earlier this year. Announcements should be made in early 2011, says our source, and will be heavily marketed. Ex-Netflix executive Robert Kyncl, who was hired by Google earlier this year, is negotiating studio deals, says our source. The service will initially focus on top tier films and to focus marketing efforts there, including pairing with Google TV. A deeper library will be added over time. Existing rental titles are certainly not new release top tier films.
Confirmed: Tumblr Raises $30 Million
Dec 17, 10:47PM
For the past several weeks there's been reports of Tumblr raising a boatload of money. That culminated today in an a SEC filing with numbers on the round. $25 million to be exact. It look like Spark Capital, Sequoia, Union Square Ventures, and Next New Network's Fred Seibert participated in the round according to the filing.
Dropbox Hits 1.0, Adds Features
Dec 17, 9:57PM
I'd like to extend hearty congratulations to the Dropbox team for doing what many web-based companies might avoid for years on end: putting out a 1.0 product. It's a bit arbitrary, of course — this useful and popular service has been running great for quite a long time now, and the "beta" tag has always seemed mysterious to me. But they've done what they felt needed to be done to justify dropping it, and the improvements are substantial. The most important new feature is probably the selective syncing: you can now select which computers sync with which folders, so you don't need to worry about your off-site HD footage backup saturating the shabby wi-fi at a coffee shop.
Seesmic: From Near Death to Enterprise Chat Spoiler?
Dec 17, 9:56PM
We're hearing that Salesforce is investing in Seesmic's next round of venture funding, along with other investors. We don't yet know how much or at what valuation but the tie up is interesting. Just a few months ago Mike was saying Twitter deciding to compete with developers had essentially killed Seesmic. That may be true for consumer chats, but enterprise is another matter. And between Yammer's new round of funding and Salesforce's Chatter product, enterprise chat is heating up. Might Seesmic be a spoiler? The two have already been chummy, with Seesmic integrating into Chatter and Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff appearing on stage together multiple times. We'll post more details when we hear them. (Disclosure: This may come as a surprise since Mike is so hard on Loic, Seesmic and the French generally, but he was an early investor in the company.)
Google Takes Another Big Step to Retain Employees: Autonomous Business Units
Dec 17, 9:22PM
There's a lie that companies and entrepreneurs tell themselves in order to commit to an acquisition. Oh, we're not going to change anything! We're just going to give you more resources to do what you've been doing even better! Yeah! They bought us for a reason, why would they ruin things? It usually works for a little while, but big company bureaucracy-- whether it's HR, politics or just endless meetings-- almost always creeps in. It's a law of nature: Big companies just need certain processes to run and entrepreneurs hate those processes because they stifle nimble innovation. Google has a new policy to fight it, according to several sources close to the company. A memo was reportedly sent out a few weeks ago to certain Google business and country heads talking about a new policy of "autonomous units" within the company. It's being referred to in parts of the company as the "NYT effect," a reference to this New York Times article that criticized how bloated and bureaucratic Google had become, citing it as a big reason Google was losing employees to smaller companies.
TC Disrupt People's Choice Winner Miso Media Raises Funding From Google Ventures
Dec 17, 9:19PM
At this year's TechCrunch Disrupt SF event, a small startup called Miso Media won the People's Choice award for one of the niftiest iPad apps I've seen: it turns your iOS device into a guitar teacher. And it apparently wowed a lot of other people too, because today the startup is announcing that it's closed a $600K seed funding round led by Google Ventures, with participation from angel investors including Keith Rabois and Laura Ziskin. One cool thing to note: Rabois was actually one of the judges when Miso Media presented on stage at Disrupt. Miso's app, which is called Miso Music, still isn't out yet — CEO Aviv Grill says that it was submitted to the App Store earlier this month and it should be coming soon. But I got to try it briefly at Disrupt, and it definitely impressed me. Unlike most guitar tablature applications, which simply display the song you're playing and play it back in a MIDI format, Miso's application will actually listen to the notes you're playing and scroll the music accordingly. It's really slick.
TechCrunch Surges To Lead In UCSF Challenge, Crushes Hopes Of Twelve Year Old
Dec 17, 9:06PM
This whole UCSF Children's Hospital challenge got kind of rough in the end. A bunch of individuals and organizations have been competing to raise donations - whoever got the most individual donors gets to name a room in the new hospital. Things got so heated, for example, that we sort of lashed out at HP. For that I'm sorry. But you should have seen the ribbing going on via email. Zynga came in and crushed everyone with, um, more than 160,000 individual donations. Everyone else was in the hundred donation range, so the hospital decided to name two winners to keep things going. Until yesterday we were a distant 12th on the list with 74 donations. But we asked everyone attending our two TRON screenings last night to make a donation to the hospital as well, bringing in an additional 784 new donors and $7,030. That brings us nicely to the lead, crushing the hopes of Paddy O'Brien, a 12-year-old bone cancer patient now in remission (pictured above), who would have otherwise won. He has 425 total donations, meaning we've beat him and now get to name the room whatever we want. Victory is sweet. 
FitFu Wants To Get You Exercising At Your Desk, And Everywhere Else
Dec 17, 9:02PM
It may or may not be the residual effects of Tim Feriss' "4 Hour Body," but fitness apps seem to be all the rage (I'm looking at you "5 Minute Abs"). YCombinator backed FitFu, an iPhone app for casual exercise, fits into this category and moreso. With FitFu, founders Jof Arnold and Benjie Gillam are targeting people sitting at their desk all day, a situation where taking a few minutes to do some situps might be the difference between flab and abs. FitFu uses pretty slick animation (creative was designed by agency Despark) and voice over to encourage and remind you to do little bits of movement throughout the day. The app uses an accelerometer to measure reps, so you actually have to move to have your exercises be counted. FitFu also ingenuously adds a social element i.e. you can compete with your friends with regards to number of reps completed, keeping you motivated through competition.
Yahoo Has Hit Rock Bottom And Is In "Absolute Disarray"
Dec 17, 7:48PM
Yahoo has hit rock bottom. They've now, finally, had their layoffs. Those that are left are keeping their resumes fresh and don't expect to stay there over the long term. Everything we hear from employees boils down to this - the company is in "absolute disarray." Take yesterday as an example. They botch news about closing down products like Delicious. The Upcoming team is apparently wiped out, but a seemingly timestamped blog post appeared on Wednesday, after the team was gone, asking for feedback on a new design for the site. Except the blog post doesn't have a link to the new design, and still doesn't as of today. Probably because whoever wrote it is gone, along with the rest of the team. And today Yahoo realized that people really care about sites like Delicious and put up a blog post saying that they're going to sell it, not shut it down. Which is great except the Delicious blog is now offline and returns an error (we reprinted it here). And finally, yesterday Yahoo announced internally that they would be shutting down an instant messaging product called MyM. Have you heard of it? Neither had we. Oh wait, we did—in 2008. It turns out it was an internal project that was never launched and formally shut down nearly three years ago. Apparently the executive team didn't know that.
Startup Sherpa: Chris Dixon And Stickybits CEO Billy Chasen Talk About Pivoting (Part I)
Dec 17, 7:33PM
Welcome to Startup Sherpa, a new show we are piloting on TechCrunch TV. Rather than have one of us at TechCrunch interview subjects, we thought we'd try something different. Startup Sherpa is more a conversation between founders that we get to listen in on. Super angel investor (Founder Collective) and Hunch founder Chris Dixon is our host, and in each episode he will be talking to other founders and investors about the challenges of building a startup. Today, his guest is Billy Chasen, the CEO of Stickybits and the creator of chartbeat. Stickybits is an iPhone app which encourages you to check into products by scanning their barcodes. Originally, the idea behind Stickybits was broader and encouraged consumers to attach their own barcodes to objects and places, and use the app to upload photos, videos and messages which others can unlock by scanning the code. The app still does that, but the company recently pivoted to focus more on existing product barcodes and get brands to drive adoption through incentives and rewards.
Yahoo Trying To Unload Del.icio.us, Not Shut It Down
Dec 17, 6:57PM
Yesterday, a leaked internal Yahoo slide brought us the news that Yahoo will soon be shuttering Del.icio.us, the bookmarking service it bought a few years back. Today, Yahoo has released a statement on the group's blog. We've embedded the the entirety of the blog post below. Yahoo says that while Delicious doesn't have a "strategic fit" at the company, it will not be shutting the service down entirely for now. In fact, it looks like Yahoo is going to find a new home for Delicious (a.k.a. sell).
Tron: Legacy Review Round-Up: A Mixed Reaction (At Best)
Dec 17, 6:07PM
Tron Legacy pops up in your local movie theater today, and the question on everyone's mind is: is it rubbish? If you ask the critics, then yeah: it's really not that good at all. Shock. But when was the last time "the critics" saw eye-to-eye with the American people? Give Joe Public some cool special effects and you're easily making $100 million. 
The Fall And Rise Of Twitter In English Literature
Dec 17, 5:22PM
Words come and go, and now thanks to a new Google database of 500 billion words in 5.2 million books, you can chart the popularity of words in literature and other books going back hundreds of years. The database is can be accessed by scholars or anyone through a Google Labs project called the Google Books Ngram Viewer. You type in a word, and it charts the usage of that word over time. Naturally, I typed in "twitter", to see how that word has come in and out of vogue. The result is in the chart above, which shows the word gaining popularity from 1750 and peaking a little over a century ago around 1900. Then the word went into along decline until this decade when it started to shoot up again. The graph above is smoothed over, it doesn't really start to take off until 2006 (see unsmoothed graph) when Twitter was founded, and the word took on an entirely new meaning. Strangely, though, there was an uptick starting even before that around 2003. Maybe Jack Dorsey read it somewhere and it stuck in his mind.
PayPal: Holiday Mobile Payments Up 300 Percent
Dec 17, 5:11PM
We know that mobile sales have been performing well for PayPal's parent company eBay, with the marketplace hitting record numbers for the shopping season. PayPal is announcing today that its payments business is also flourishing throughout the holiday shopping season, with a 300 percent increase in mobile payments from the official start of the shopping season (November 15) until now (December 15) compared to the same period last year. PayPal previously reported a 27 percent increase in total payment volume on Black Friday 2010, compared to the previous year. Generally, PayPal saw an approximately 310 percent increase in mobile shopping on Black Friday.
12 Days Of Christmas: Zune HD
Dec 17, 4:30PM
The Zune brand may be the whipping boy of the blog world, but everyone who's ever gotten their hands on my Zune HD has been seriously impressed. You know why? Because it's awesome. It's got great battery life, a beautiful and intuitive interface, and you can buy and stream stuff right from the device. So we want to give one to you. It even comes with a month of Zune Pass, no strings attached. What do you need to do? Leave a comment below listing your top three albums of 2010.
Nuthin' But A "Z" Thang: Zynga Premieres Mafia Wars Music Partnership With Dr. Dre
Dec 17, 4:00PM
Social gaming giant is partnering once again with a high-profile rap star for its game Mafia Wars. In August, Snoop Dogg joined Zynga in blowing up a 4-ton armored truck in the middle of the desert in Nevada. And today, Zynga is announcing its first ever in-game music partnership, via its popular Mafia Wars game, with rap star Dr. Dre. Mafia Wars, which revolves around a player's criminal empire by creating clans, is currently being played by 19 milllion people each month on Facebook and the iPhone. The deal essentially allows Mafia Wars players access to watch the music video for Dr.Dre's first single,"Kush," from Dre's soon to be released album "Detox." A stream of the video, which also features Snoop Dogg and Akon, can be watched within the game. 
Wildfire Launches A 'Compete.com' For Twitter And Facebook Accounts
Dec 17, 4:00PM
For many years, the tech industry has gauged the success of websites by tracking usage stats like the number of unique visitors and page views the site receives each month. Wildfire, a service that helps companies run contests and social media campaigns via Twitter, Facebook, and email, is launching a new tool that looks to do the same for social media presences — in other words, it lets you visualize who has the most Twitter and Facebook followers, and how quickly they've grown over time. You can access the new monitor at http://monitor.wildfireapp.com. The tool is pretty straightforward: enter the Twitter or Facebook accounts that you want to compare, and the site will plot out the total number of follower/fans they have. If you don't want to bother finding the appropriate links to each profile, you can just enter the name of the company, and the tool will associate it with the proper social media accounts automatically (enter 'Wal-Mart', and it will show you Wal-Mart's Twitter and Facebook accounts). 
9 Spectacular Tron Gifts For You And Yours
Dec 17, 3:34PM
Tron is here and it's hard not to get excited about the sequel to one of the movies that defined the genre early on. Good thing Disney knows how to muck up a brand with merchandising and loose licensing agreements so there's a world of Tron gear out there, just waiting for your credit card. So click through, fellow Tron-ite. There's something here for nearly everyone including computer accessories, wearables, and so much more. Make the Tron Guy proud.
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