Google TV is now out there in the wild. There’s no indication of how it’s selling just yet, but my hunch is that like early Android, it may be some time before sales really take off. That shouldn’t be too surprising considering that the platform is built on top of Android. But there aren’t a lot of apps yet that are tailored for these new devices. They need more. And they know the way to get them. Free giveaways!

As they’ve announced on their Google TV blog today, the search giant is giving away 10,000 Google TV units to developers. Yes, 10,000.

The give-away started this morning at the Adobe MAX conference where they dished out 3,000 units. And it will continue over the next couple of weeks as Google will patrol the Google Code forums to look for developers who sound even remotely interested in developing for the platform. Or you can submit a request to get a unit for development.

Says Google:

As we’ve always said, the coolest thing about Google TV is that we don’t even know what the coolest thing about it will be. The experience is in the hands of its users and developers, and everyone is invited. Come play.

The Google TV unit being given away is the Logitech Revue, a device which normally sells for $300.

Sadly, this giveaway is U.S.-only for the time being. And yes, they want some sort of proof that you are actually a developer that plans to make an app for the platform. I’m thinking about learning Java to build a solid fart app for the platform to get a free unit myself.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Want A Free Google TV? Become An Android Developer; Google Is Giving…

Savvy Internet surfer Chris Crompton has found a flaw in Groupon’s email link encryption where adding the search term “addx” (exact Google search = allinurl: addx site:groupon.com) brings up emails of people who have subscribed to the Groupon newsletter. I am unable to tell whether these emails are from people who actually purchased the deals or just signed up for the email list unknowingly.

It looks like this is some kind of Google Analytics tracking flaw for a Groupon marketing campaign, and the emails are from people who have referred deals to others through Groupon’s insecure links. It seems as though when someone clicks on a deal link in a Groupon email and posts it anywhere else online, Google has indexed this sensitive information.

Groupon, which launched its service allowing merchants to create their own deals yesterday, looks like it’s suffering some scaling issues along the lines of what happened to purchase sharing startup Blippy when it exposed credit card numbers through Google search result in April.

I have gotten in touch Google, Groupon and a few of the people whose email addresses were exposed about fixing the sensitive information being leaked and will update this post when I hear back.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Groupon Exposes Customer Emails In Google Results

While yes it would be an amazing feat of hypocrisy if Apple actually advertised against the search term “Sex Game Apps” that is not what is happening here, even though this specific Google Ads juxtaposition is worth noting due to Apple’s stringent attitude towards featuring sexually explicit materials in the App Store.

So what is actually going on? Crunchgear’s Greg Kumparak has a pretty solid theory; Due to the fact that Google won’t advertise for actual sex sites (only sex education-related sites pass muster), when a user searches for blacklisted stuff like “Sex Game Apps” the Google AdWords (and/or Automatic Match) algorithm treats the word “sex” as invisible and focuses on serving up ads triggered by the whitelisted keywords “Game Apps” in bold. Hence, why the iPod touch ad shows up above despite not having any mention of sex. The same trick works for “Nazi Game Apps” and myriad other racy iterations.

While AdWords loopholes like this are nothing new (try “Android Apps Boobs” if you’d like the Android compatible version), Apple’s inadvertent advertising against people searching for something the App Store explicitly doesn’t allow is enough to at least consider a change in policy, on either Google or Apple’s part.

Update: Search expert Danny Sullivan more precisely explains what is going on here in the comments.

“It’s not that “sex” is being treated as invisible or is on a blacklist. It’s because Apple is buying the phrase “game apps” on a broad-match basis — which means anything plus those words will trigger that ad. For example, search for “i hate apple game apps,” and voila — there’s the ad. The fact that the words “games” and “apps” are bolded tell you what they bought.”

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Google Serves Up Apple Ads For Search Term “Sex Game Apps”

Moments ago on its earnings call, Google took an opportunity to talk about the success of its latest products. The first in line: Google Instant, the totally revamped search interface that Google launched last month, which displays search results as soon as you begin typing (rather than requiring the user to hit ‘enter’ or click the search button).

At the time of the launch, there was much speculation on what impact Instant would have on Google’s bottom line — was it designed to boost the number of ads displayed? Well, now we have an answer: Jonathan Rosenberg , SVP Product Management at Google, said on the call that “from a revenue standpoint impact [of Google Instant] has been minimal.” He added that it’s also expensive from a resource standpoint. They launched it, he says, “because it’s so much better”. As evidence of this, Rosenberg said that according to Google’s data, the more people use Google Instant, the more they like it.

Rosenberg then launched into some stats around AdWords to prove that Google does in fact care about money. But, for now at least, Google says Instant is all about the user experience, and not the bottom line.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Google: Impact Of ‘Google Instant’ On Revenue Is Minimal, But…

Mike Elgan criticizes Google for being condescending in a recent column on one of the dead tree IT rags. His first point is that Google PR exec Gabriel Stricker started off a recent press conference with a quip about how fast paced Google innovation is:

He said that the reason Google holds events like this one was that “we hear from a lot of you that with the kind of breakneck pace of innovation that we go through at Google, it’s nice for us to kind of let you catch your breath.” He went on to tell the audience that they would “hear from our Search rocket scientists in a second who will hold your hand through the latest and greatest of what we’re up to.”

So Google is so awesome that the company has to pause so the rest of the world can catch its breath? And we’re all so stupid that Google geniuses have to “hold our hands” as they explain things?

He backs up his point with recent comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt on what users want Google to build, and on privacy issues.

So first off this looks to me like an example of media mass manipulation I wrote about recently. At first blush, knowing how the whole press game works, Elgan is pissed off at Google for something or other and wrote this post.

But even if it really is something that’s been nagging him for some time, I just don’t see it. Google is far less arrogant than they were even a few years ago. And even I, possibly the most sensitive and defensive person you’ll ever meet, don’t see Elgan’s examples as condescending in any way.

Remember when Google blackballed CNET in 2005 for posting information about Schmidt?

That was a year after they went public, when companies are typically at their peak of arrogance. And boy was that a condescending thing to do.

More recently I’ve seen a Google that’s been humbled by droves of engineers leaving for Facebook and Twitter, a Google humbled by China, and a Google generally terrified of an upcoming decade where they may not be the center of attention on the Internet.

The Google I’ve seen recently is a humble Google. A Google that appreciates press more and that seems more willing to consider change. Most of the arrogance I see is across town at Facebook, which is exactly what I’d expect from a company on the rise.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Google Arrogance? I’ve Never Seen Them So Humble

We’re back with another episode of TechCrunch TV’s OMG/JK, the weekly show that features fellow TechCrunch writer MG Siegler and myself discussing the latest developments in tech news.

We had a brief hiatus last week (I spent four days and four nights wandering around the desert), so we have a lot to talk about: Apple finally got around to handing down its 10(0) App Store commandments, Google reinvented the search experience, and iTunes got its very own social network.

Check out the links below for more background on the topics we’re discussing:

• Apple Opens App Store To “Other” Development Platforms, Publishes Review Guidelines
• Thou Shalt Not Chatroulette Or Russian Roulette: The Best Of The App Store Rules
• Google Instant: It Searches Before You Type
• Google Instant Coming Natively To Browsers “In The Next Few Months”
• The iTunes Ping Social Question: Follow, Friend, Or Lurk?
• Ping Is Apple’s iTunes For Everything

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

OMG/JK: Instant Gratification

Here’s some infographic perspective on the eve of Facebook’s copycat Facebook Placeslaunch, which has some ringing the death knell for location based startups Foursquare and Gowalla.

A stroll through the Google graveyard is a lesson in how rarely it works out when already successful companies stop focusing on their core competency to go after the little guys. Between Wave, Jaiku, and Foursquare precursor Dodgeball, Google’s a repeat offender in the “failing to kill the next big thing” department.

With the launch of today’s check-in utility, it seems like the Facebook product team might be following in the search giant’s startup-crushing footsteps. After all, when was the last time you asked a Facebook Question?.

Image: Wordstream

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There’s No Success Like Failure: Google’s Biggest Product Flops

Bing’s iPhone app isn’t the only thing getting an upgrade today at Microsoft’s search engine. Bing is also starting to roll out close to 100 new features to its main search engine on the Web. The biggest change is a new major search category under Bing Entertainment, which will include better ways to search for music, movies, TV shows, and games. “We did travel, health, shopping and local last year,” explains senior VP Yusuf Mehdi. “Now the Web has unlocked all of this entertainment, but for many people they are spending too much time looking for what they want to do instead of enjoying it. We are trying to remove all of those hurdles that block you from enjoying it. You should be able to watch a show, listen to online music, or play a game with a few clicks.”

Roughly 10 percent of all searches are entertainment related, according to Mehdi. And 90 percent of people do at least one entertainment search a month. Bing Entertainment is designed to provide a more in-depth and visual search experience for music, movies, TV shows, and games.

One of the most noticeable changes will come in music. Music searches will now come back with lyrics and playable streams for 5 million songs, which have already been licensed through Microsoft’s Zune service. A full stream of each song will be playable once per person, and then 30-second clips will be available in subsequent searches. (In this regard, Bing is catching up to Google, which launched a similar music search late last year). The idea is to make it easier for people to discover music and sample them. There will also be links to Amazon, iTunes, and Zune to buy full downloads.

When you search for an artist or a song, a special Answer Box (informally known as the Bing Box) will appear at the top of the search results page. It may be filled with pictures of the artist, a playlist of popular songs, upcoming events, their Tweets, and a link to the artist’s official site.

Movie searches will create an Answer Box with photo stills, a synopsis, local show times, and links to trailers. The results will be geared to help you plan a night out at the movies, complete with maps, parking, nearby restaurant suggestions and more. For TV shows, you will get TV listings in your area and sometimes playable streams from Hulu, Viacom, CBS and other partners through Bing Videos. Whenever available, trailers and TV shows will play within Bing.

Games searches will be geared toward both hardcore console gamers (teenagers) and casual Web gamers (Moms). For console games, results will be filtered to easily find walkthroughs, reviews, and cheats. Casual game searches sometimes take you to games you can play on Bing like Checkers and Bejeweled.

By bringing entertainment experiences it Bing, searchers might stick around longer. Search used to take you away to what you were looking for on the Web, but data (including music, video, and games) can move anywhere now, even to search engines. It might be time to retire that rule.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Bing Entertainment Brings Full Music Streams To Search, Plus Games,…

When it comes to social games and virtual goods, Silicon Valley is relatively new to an industry that Asia has been building since the early 2000s. Zynga, apparently, wants some of that Chinese talent. DigiCha has a great catch about three job listing that were put on Beijing Craigslist– and then promptly pulled down. The three jobs were Chief Technology Officer, Human Resources Manager and Software Engineer. Given that two of those are management, I’m guessing they’re not hiring just one software engineer. DigiCha’s Bill Bishop expects the announcement to be made Thursday.

Online gaming has been hot in China, and the Western tech scene is taking notice. One of Zynga’s biggest competitors, Playfish, already has an office there.

This is different from the Yahoo, eBay, Google round of Valley startups expanding into China, because this time there are already a host of strong Chinese publicly-traded competitors waiting whether they are scrappy upstarts like Giant or giants like Tencent and Shanda. And this time a lot of these companies are going after the talent in China, as much as they are going after the huge Chinese market. Chastened by how badly the dot com bubble crop did, it’ll be interesting to see if the Web 2.0 generation can do any better.

All this means the market for gaming talent in China is getting tighter amid all the interest, and Chinese startups can’t be happy about that. But when it comes to management positions at least there’s one big multinational anyone can poach from: Google. I’ve heard from more than a few sources that Google’s Beijing staff was none-to-happy about the search company leaving them out of the loop earlier this year when it threatened its pull-out of the market.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Is Zynga Opening Offices in Beijing?

Last night, Twitter finally unveiled the details of its long-awaited ad platform, Promoted Tweets. The news, at least at first glance, couldn’t have come at a worse time for TweetUp, the ‘AdSense for Twitter‘ startup that had launched out of the Idealab incubator a mere 24 hours earlier. So did TweetUp have the worst startup launch timing ever? Earlier this afternoon I spoke with TweetUp (and Idealab) CEO Bill Gross — best known as the founder of Overture and the man who pioneered search advertising — who is confident that the startup is not headed to an early grave.

For those that missed the news, Twitter’s Promoted Tweets allow advertisers to display tweets they’ve written in a more prominent position than they would normally receive. For starters, Twitter is showing them at the top of results pages for its real-time search engine, but in the future it intends to roll out Promoted Tweets to third-party Twitter clients and users’ Twitter streams. These Promoted Tweets look a lot like regular tweets, and users can engage with them as if they were ‘normal’. TweetUp has some major similarities —  it also shows sponsored tweets based on search keywords.  But Gross contends that there are some key differences.

The Differences

The biggest difference, Gross says, lies in the search results themselves. For a long time, Twitter’s search engine would only show results in reverse chronological order, with new tweets flowing in in the order they were created. This is great for keeping tabs on breaking news, but it also has a relevance problem — the best tweets get lost in the noise. Twitter recently made a major improvement by pinning up to three of the most  popular tweets matching a given query to the top of results pages, with the real-time stream filling in below them. That’s a big step, but the focus is still largely on the most recent tweets as opposed to the most interesting ones.

TweetUp, on the other hand, puts less focus on the most recent tweets and instead reorders the entire page of results based on relevance, using metrics like retweet frequency, popularity, and how popular links in each tweet are. The site also has an authority ranking for each user on each topic — if you’ve previously tweeted a lot about the iPad over an extended period of time, you’ll probably have a higher authority than someone who is mentioning it for the first time.

Another difference Gross points out lies in how the sponsored tweets themselves are displayed: on Twitter, they’re at the top of the page (for now). On TweetUp, bidding on a sponsored tweet doesn’t guarantee that it will be the top result on a given page. Bidding does boost your authority on that topic and makes it much more likely that your tweet will appear in results, but if a well established expert in the field is tweeting about the same topic, their tweets might appear above your sponsored tweet. This is meant to help the results feel more organic, so that tweets don’t feel “forced” into your feed. Twitter’s official ad platform uses a metric called resonance to get rid of bad ads, but it doesn’t have an impact on the ad’s position onscreen (it’s either at the top of the page or it isn’t).

The last difference Gross highlighted was the market he was trying to address. He believes Twitter is going after the bigger brands and agencies with large CPM buys for its Promoted Tweets, whereas TweetUp is meant to be more of a self-service model, allowing users to bid on the long-tail of keyword matches. Of course, it’s entirely possible that Twitter will offer its own self-service tools, so this may not be a difference after all.

What Will Actually Matter

Ultimately, I don’t think many of these differences will last for long if they are proven to be advantages for TweetUp.  Twitter is almost certainly working to further improve its search results using relevance algorithms. Likewise, if Twitter sees that TweetUp’s self-service model is working well for a long tail of local businesses looking to run their own ads, then I can’t see a reason why it wouldn’t launch one itself.

What will matter is how much distribution TweetUp can get in the next few months. Remember, Twitter is only offering its Promoted Tweets on its own site for now, which means that third-party Twitter clients (which many people use exclusively) are left to their own devices to integrate ads themselves. And TweetUp is making a very tempting proposition: it’s giving developers who integrate the service 50% of the ad revenue. Likewise, publishers can integrate a TweetUp widget that uses AdSense-like technology to display sponsored tweets relevant to the content on their site. TweetUp is also paying some developers up front to integrate the service. Its roster of partners already include Seesmic, Twitdroid (a popular Android client), twitterfeed and Answers.com.

And, in a much-needed nugget of good news for TweetUp, Twitter COO Dick Costolo said earlier today that Twitter would not require developers to exclusively offer its Promoted Tweets, so TweetUp and Twitter’s own ads could potentially co-exist in third-party clients.

That said, once this window of opportunity ends and Twitter does open Promoted Tweets to third parties, there won’t be much reason for a Twitter client to include both TweetUp and the official Twitter search unless TweetUp brings something extra to the table. Which means TweetUp will need to keep its own search engine significantly ahead of Twitter’s, and/or continue to tempt developers with revenue sharing agreements that are better than what Twitter offers.

I still think the odds are stacked against TweetUp. But Gross is an industry veteran — he’s responsible for the search advertising model that turned Google into a giant (his own company, Overture, went public and was acquired by Yahoo for $1.6 billion). So while it’s never surprising when a startup executive claims that their company will survive apparently insurmountable odds, Gross may have what it takes to pull this off.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Is Twitter’s Ad Platform TweetUp’s Early Death Knell Or…

The battle between Google and Apple continues. RJ Pittman, a prominent product manager at Google, has left the company to join Apple. We’ve been tipped off to a tweet he sent out two days ago that said “My last day at Google. Incredible experience. Amazing people. Moved mountains. Next chapter. Hello Apple.” Pittman has since removed the tweet from his Twitter feed, but judging by the tweets still visible in Twitter search, it’s true.

We’ve also received an email that Pittman  sent to his coworkers and friends about the move (we’ve redacted a paragraph about hanging out with his family during his time off):

Yesterday was my last day directing traffic at Google. It has been an incredible ride, and an amazing experience. Google is one of the most fascinating companies to work for. Working at Google scale is pretty incredible and the people are one of a kind, to say the least. It’s been an amazing 3 years of my career. It was very hard to say goodbye to all the people I call family at the Googleplex around the world. The company afforded me the opportunity to be ‘me’ inside the walls of a 20,000 person company that generates $20B in revenue. For that, I will always be grateful. I learned so much about the world, our users, and most of all…me. I left with a very heavy heart yesterday. Leaving was much harder that I expected. Admittedly, I’m feeling a bit useless today, my first day as a Xoogler. But I’m hoping this feeling will wear off soon. (Noogler is our term for a newly hired Googler, and Xooglers are the band of ex-Google alumni)

I was sprung from Google by a little company down the road that you might have heard of called Apple. Some might say I owe most of my career in technology to a little start up company that created the computer that I first learned to program, the Apple II, in 1980. By 1984, my life would be changed forever with the introduction of the most revolutionary creation of the decade, the Macintosh. A year later I would find myself spending more time with my first Mac than any other living being for my foreseeable teenage future. I’ve owned almost one of every Apple product released since then, and still own my first Mac that started it all some 25 years ago. In a strange but not so strange way, this is a sort of homecoming for me, despite never having worked for Apple. Life works in curious ways, and I love it when every so often it comes full circle. I couldn’t be more excited for what lies ahead. They’ve created a pretty neat role for me, which I will be able to talk about soon after I’ve started working there.
…

It’s unclear exactly what project Pittman is working on (his email only says that it’s a “pretty neat role for me”) and there’s little chance Apple’s PR team is going to give us any guidance. That said, my hunch is that he was recruited at the behest of the Lala team.

Apple acquired the streaming music service in December, less than two months after Google and Lala worked in tandem to launch Google OneBox Music Search. Pittman was one of the key players on that project, and worked closely with Lala to get it off the ground.

That said, Apple could be after his other talents — Pittman had previously presented at the launches of other search-related products, including a Google Labs event. And before that, he founded Groxis.

We’d previously heard that Google and Apple had a gentlemen’s agreement not to poach each other’s employees. Obviously, that’s no longer the case.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Google Product Manager RJ Pittman Defects To Apple

At last year’s TechCrunch50 conference, Socialwok made a big splash, winning the award for best demopit startup and launching its enterprise-friendly, FriendFeed-like layer for Google Apps. The web-based application was praised for launching a social network that wrapped around the very unsocial Google Apps. Today, the startup is launching a gadget to allow users access all the features of Socialwok without leaving Gmail.

Previously, you could access Gmail, YouTube, Google Calendar and even conversations in Wave from Socialwok’s Friendfeed-like interface. You can even sign in with your Google Docs credentials. But with the new gadget, Socialwok’s interface will appear within Gmail’s main canvas. Users can view, post and comment on updates; access feeds, files and Google Docs and search for posts, people, feeds, and files.

Socialwok, which employs a freemium model, has steadily been adding features and improvements to its application, including releasing a new version of its HTML 5 mobile version for Android and iPhone browsers. And the startup has managed caught Google’s eye. Socialwok was chosen as one of the showcase companies for AppEngine technology at this year’s Google IO Developer Sandbox (Socialwok is powered by Google App Engine). And the startup wroteGoogle Docs killer which was acquired by the search giant last year.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Adding A Social Layer To Gmail Just Became A SocialWok In The Park

Zynga investor Fred Wilson remained mostly quiet during the Scamville debacle in October. But he’s starting to talk now, and he isn’t happy.

In a post about Etsy a few days ago a commenter brought up the Zynga/Scamville stuff. Wilson replied “Citing techcrunch on the zynga stuff is a joke.” He waded into the subject again today on another of his posts, saying in a number of comments “i’ve tried hard to stay out of that debate because it is a false debate…zynga makes almost all of its revenue on virtual goods…the “scammy ads” thing is total red herring that everyone got excited about but is almost entirely irrelevant” and “nobody who got involved in that shitstorm took the time to really do the work and look at what Zynga did and did not do. or compare it to Google and everyone else who does way worse on a daily basis…the whole thing totally annoys me. it’s not fair.” He also said numerous times that we didn’t have our facts straight, and that we didn’t take the time to understand what really happened.

Hogwash. Fred Wilson is a brilliant investor, but he’s conflicted and wrong yet again.

There were a total of 22 Scamville posts (see updates) on TechCrunch alone. For the most part we left Zynga alone, until we were slammed in the face with CEO Mark Pincus on video saying “I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues” (how do you take that statement out of context?). Pincus also said “we need to be more aggressive and have revised our service level agreements with these providers requiring them to filter and police offers” in a post about Scamville. And Facebook took one of their games offline for a few days for a violation of their terms of service around scammy offers.

Zynga had claimed in the past that fully 1/3 of their revenue came from offers. Some of that wasn’t legitimate, likely tens of millions of dollars, and other companies have said that the bad stuff tended to push out the good stuff.

There is an excellent argument that you can continue to find most of these scams on Google and other search engines. But a big difference is the incentive that social games give users to enter into these scams via virtual currency, as well as the fact that they targeted teens without credit cards by pushing mobile subscription offers. Google is wrong to post these ads. But that doesn’t make what Zynga has done right.

I think Pincus took the right steps to move his company in the right direction, and I think the industry is on the right track now, and Zynga looks to be a legitimate business even without scammy offers. I support Pincus as an entrepreneur. But to deny that there was ever a problem is irresponsible. And to suggest that we didn’t take the time to understand the facts is outrageous. In addition to the 22 posts where we spoke to dozens of sources on and off the record, I asked Pincus to go on video with me to tell his side of the story without editing. He declined.

Zynga continues to be a very close partner to Facebook. They share a major investor, DST. A facebook board member, Marc Andreessen, is also an investor in Zynga. And Zynga is Facebook’s largest advertiser. The fates of these two companies are deeply aligned, and there has been more than a little evidence of wrongdoing. The relationship between Zynga and Facebook needs more scrutiny, not less.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Zynga Investor Calls Scamville Debate Irrelevant And Unfair

Old media loves nothing quite so much as writing about their own impeding death. And we always enjoy adding our own two cents – the AP not knowing what YouTube is, the NYTimes guys reading TechCrunch every day, etc.

Speaking broadly, I like what Reuters, Rupert Murdoch and Eric Schmidt are saying: the industry is in crisis, and the daring innovators will prevail. Personally, I still think the best way forward for the best journalists, if not the brands they currently work for, is to leave those brands and do their own thing.

But as one of the innovators in the last go round, I think there’s a much bigger problem lurking on the horizon than a bunch of blogs and aggregators disrupting old media business models that needed disrupting anyway. The rise of fast food content is upon us, and it’s going to get ugly.

Old media frets over blogs and aggregators that summarize content and link back to the original source. They can’t make a business in that world, they say, so they run the other way and try to find a way to protect and charge for content.

These are the cavemen, or whoever, who were afraid of fire when it was discovered because it burned, or was too technologically advanced to really understand. The smart guys used it to cook their meat and keep them warm, and multiplied.

For our part, we throw a party when someone “steals” our content and links back to us. High fives all around the office. At least there’s some small nod in our direction. And the aggregators like TechMeme can figure out who broke the news. Page views are lost, but reputation is gained.

But for every link there are dozens of sites that outright steal our content with no attribution. Not just spam blogs, even the NYTimes does it. This isn’t a copyright issue – the stories are rewritten by actual people. But it’s far cheaper to simply take the news and rewrite it – if you can get away with it – than to hire people who do actual journalism. Over time, it becomes a competitive tax that is difficult to bear.

But even then, companies like ours can find a way to compete.

So what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.

On one end you have AOL and their Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media. That leads to a whole lot of really, really crappy content being highlighted right on the massive AOL home page. This article, for example, is just horrendous. One of AOL’s own blogs trashes the company’s spinoff, rambles for miles without any real point, and adds a huge factual error to top things off (”the company is losing money”). Hiring a bunch of people who couldn’t keep their old media jobs and don’t have the stomach to go out on their own and then slapping little or no editorial oversight onto these masses of sub-par journalists leads to an inevitable conclusion – cheap, crappy content. And that crappy content is given a massive audience on the AOL portal.

On the other end you have Demand Media and companies like it. See Wired’s “Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model.” The company is paying bottom dollar to create “4,000 videos and articles” a day, based only on what’s hot on search engines. They push SEO juice to this content, which is made as quickly and cheaply as possible, and pray for traffic. It works like a charm, apparently.

These models create a race to the bottom situation, where anyone who spend time and effort on their content is pushed out of business.

We’re not there yet, but I see it coming. And just as old media is complaining about us, look for us to start complaining about the new jerks.

My advice to readers is just this – get ready for it, because you’ll be reading McDonalds five times a day in the near future. My advice to content creators is more subtle. Figure out an even more disruptive way to win, or die. Or just give up on making money doing what you do. If you write for passion, not dollars, you’ll still have fun. Even if everything you write is immediately ripped off without attribution, and the search engines don’t give you the attention they used to. You may have to continue your hobby in the evening and get a real job, of course. But everyone has to face reality sometimes.

Forget fair and unfair, right and wrong. This is simply happening. The disruptors are getting disrupted, and everyone has to adapt to it or face the consequences. Hand crafted content is dead. Long live fast food content, it’s here to stay.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

The End Of Hand Crafted Content

Google has quietly rolled out its own online dictionary, complete with multilingual support and accompanying photos. The new site was first discovered by the LA Times Tech Blog, and you can access it at Google.com/Dictionary.

It works exactly as you’d expect: type in a word, and Google will give you the definition, part of speech, and maybe a similar phrase or two. If you’re logged in, you can star a word for future reference.

The new dictionary obviously isn’t good news to the many other web dictionaries. Answers.com, in particular, stands to lose out, as it is currently Google’s default whenever a user clicks the “define” link on a Google results page. The Times article says that Google now uses its own dictionary as the default, but I’m still seeing Answers.com as the source, so apparently the switch isn’t live for everyone.

Google has actually offered some dictionary features for a long time. If you Google a query using the format “Define:word“, the search engine will present you with a handful of definitions it finds on sites scattered across the web. Some of these definitions usually come from well known online dictionaries; others, from obscure web sites, which can make the results inconsistent. These aggregated definitions have been available on Google.com/dictionary before now, and now compliment Google’s own in-house definitions.

For those wondering if Google might further expand into territory traditionally owned by reference books — it already has. Last year it launched Knol, a user-edited encyclopedia. That venture hasn’t gone very well: after failing to draw much interest as an encyclopedia, people started using Knol as a poor man’s Craigslist.

Image by ElektraCute

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Google Expands Its Reference Section With Its Own Dictionary

Gazopa, a search engine that uses features from an image to retrieve similar images, has been in private beta since it launched during TechCrunch50 last year. To recap, Gazopa lets users upload a picture, enter a URL of an image, create a drawing or right-click on an image anywhere on the web (via a plug-in) and retrieves similar images. A thumbnail of a video is enough to look for similar videos.

Results are mainly filtered through analyzing the color and shape of the object or person pictured. Upload a picture of a red car, for example, and Gazopa will find pictures of similar cars on the web – without you having to type any keywords (search via keywords is also possible though).

Since September 2008, more than 40,000 users have tested the service, which entered open beta today. And Hitachi America, the company behind Gazopa, has used customer feedback to improve the quality of search results, tweak the site’s design and add a number of features in the past year.

One of the most notable additions is the Gazopa iPhone app (iTunes link), which is pretty cool and lets you take and upload photos with your iPhone to quickly get similar images off the web. The app has all of the main features of the web version and is free. There’s also a new Gazopa Drawing Facebook application.

Gazopa now allows users to browse through Flickr images and filter out those without a Creative Commons license. When you hover over a particular image, Gazopa will show you its size, how similar it is to the one the search is based upon, licensing details and a URL that will take you the picture’s Flickr page. Another new feature is the news tab under which users can find images related to the latest news. Those images can be filtered by time (uploaded within one month, a year etc.), shape and size.

Granted these aren’t earth-shattering new features, but GazoPa has indexed over 60 million images so far that can be searched even if they have no or inaccurate meta data. The open beta version is still a bit buggy but more than OK for a test run. One major point that leaves room for improvement is that searching for inanimate objects with distinctive features seems to lead to significantly better results than searching for human beings that look similar. It would be nice if Gazopa could at least distinguish between men and women, for example, which isn’t always the case.

Asked what differentiates his service from Google Labs’ similar search service, Gazopa project leader Hideki Kobayashi said that Google doesn’t let users find similar images of all images displayed and that uploading a picture by yourself isn’t possible. Gazopa also competes with “reverse image search engine” TinEye, which, however, doesn’t necessarily look for “similar” images but tries to find exact matches of pictures instead.

Here’s a demo video for Gazopa’s open beta version:

Screenshots:

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Similar Image Search Engine Gazopa Enters Open Beta

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine just can’t seem to stay out of the red light district, no matter how hard they try.

There’s no denying it is hands down the best porn search engine on the planet (although ChaCha is pretty good too). But Bing also had a snafu with Google ads that showed the search engine for “pornography” queries. Google took the blame for that one (see updates to that post), and at least it only showed up for people actually querying the adult term.

Now, a new controversy has popped up around a Microsoft ad unit that scrapes a page for content and then shows relevant Bing queries. The ads normally work fine. But last week Bing started showing an ad unit that contained sexually explicit terms, including at least one that I had never heard of before (the swizzle stick). Best of all, the ads were displayed on a WonderHowTo web page showing only Home & Garden content.

You can see the queries that were self-generated by Bing for the ad unit in the image. This isn’t just R-rated run of the mill porn stuff. This is stuff that’s still illegal in some states. Particularly that top query.

Microsoft is saying this is a bug, and they’ve taken down all of these add units on all sites until they understand what happened. The unit is supposed to scrape only the page being viewed. In this case, WonderHowTo has sexually explicit content on other areas of the site, which may be triggering the ad content.

Said Microsoft’s Senior Director Online Audience Business Group Adam Sohn, who wasn’t too happy with the ad: “We are very cognizant of what we want the Bing brand to stand for, and this is not it.”

My response – “well, at least it’s educational.”

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Bing! So That’s What A Swizzle Stick Is.

Realtime search for the most part is still mostly about searching Twitter. So it is probably a good idea for fledgling realtime search engines to make it easy to share specific Tweets found in the search results back on Twitter. SInce most of the results are Tweets, and search is just another form of navigation and discovery when it comes to the realtime stream, you want to be able to retweet directly from your search results.

OneRiot already does this, and today Collecta is adding a similar sharing feature. Although, Collecta also lets you share any result on Facebook, Mixx, Reddit, Delicious, and Stumbleupon as well (but, oddly, not on Digg). Collecta launched last June.

You normally wouldn’t think about sharing regular search results other than as a link, but realtime results operate under a different dynamic. Collecta’s results also now include a little avatar in front of each one, giving it more of a social feel, and making it more familiar to Twitter users. Is this search or a new way to navigate the stream?

With realtime search, you are mining the conversations around the Web, tapping into the collective consciousness. So each result should be a jumping off point to start a new conversation.

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Collecta Now Lets You Share Your Search Results In Realtime

If this were a column about religious affairs, I would undoubtedly focus this week on the shocking news that Beelzebub himself has joined a coalition opposing child abuse in the Catholic church.

I’d remark upon the sheer chutzpah of El Diablo, and his glaring hypocrisy in funding a law school to investigate his sworn enemy’s practices. An investigation which, thanks to his involvement, now reeks of self-interest. Self-interest and sulphur.

But this isn’t a column about religious affairs, so I’m not going to discuss that. Instead, as this is a column (broadly) about technology, I’ll confine myself to the entirely unrelated news that Microsoft is joining a coalition to oppose Google’s settlement with the US publishing industry over Book Search. I’ll also touch on the totally unanalogous fact that they’re funding a New York Law School investigation into their biggest rival’s anti-competitive behaviour.

Avid TechCrunch readers would be forgiven for having missed this latest development in the Google Book Search saga. After all, in recent weeks this once-fiercely bipartisan publication has thrust itself headlong into an orgy of Google adulation - a veritable golden shower of fanboyism - apparently triggered by Arrington’s discovery that his Android phone is a bit better than the iPhone.

Nary a day goes by without the Dear Leader splurging more praise over his precious new handset and the undeniably paradigm-shifting fact that it allows him to use Google Voice. In that context, writing a negative story about anything happening in Mountain View might be considered at best inadvisable, at worst sacrilegious.

But as usual I’m not afraid to be the voice in the wilderness. To risk ostracism by asking the questions that need asking: namely, doesn’t Microsoft actually have a point? I mean, where the hell does Google get off criticising Apple for anti-competitive practices when they’re about to be investigated by the Department of Justice for the exact same thing?

Some background, if you need it. Back in 2005, the US book industry - as represented mainly by The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers - launched a class-action suit against Google over the Search God’s plans to scan the world’s books and make them searchable through Google Books.

Late last year, after millions of dollars in lawyers fees had changed hands, a settlement was agreed between the parties. Much of it was uncontroversial - a win-win, even: Google would pay a token $60 scanning fee to authors of in-copyright (US) works in return for being allowed to display short extracts of the books as part of their search results. For out-of-print books, users could also pay to download digital copies of the entire work, with a reasonably decent commission being paid to the publisher or author for each download. For in-print books, users would be referred to online retailers or libraries to buy or rent. So far, so fair.

But one aspect of the settlement wasn’t so uncontroversial, and that was the issue of so-called ‘orphan works’ - books which are still in copyright but where the identity of the copyright owner is, for one reason or another, unclear. As part of the settlement, the book industry agreed that, with certain restrictions, Google could scan orphan works without being held liable for breach of copyright claims if the rights owner subsequently came forward. In return Google agreed to create an independent (and open to all) rights registry letting authors of orphaned stake their copyright claim.

At first glance, the deal over orphaned works seems as reasonable as the rest of the settlement - these are books for which no-one is being paid and which otherwise would be hidden away in libraries and second hand bookstores. But still Google’s competitors are crying foul.

The Internet Archive is particularly annoyed, arguing that they too are scanning millions of books for the public good, but without any blanket copyright protection for orphaned works. And so, through a group they call Open Content Alliance, they hope to pressure the Department of Justice to extend the terms of the settlement to everyone, not just Google.

For the other companies joining the Alliance - including Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon - there are more obvious and nakedly commercial reasons to oppose the settlement. But that doesn’t make their objections less valid. Back in April, Erick Schonfeld wrote a passionate - and compelling - argument for the immunity to apply to everyone so that Google wouldn’t have a monopoly position where they could effectively charge whatever they like for downloading digital copies of orphaned works.

So, yeah, Google love-in be damned - let’s ask the tough quesions. If Google really does care about making the world’s information free, surely bringing rivals into the orphaned works party is the very least they can do? Whatever happened to ‘don’t be evil’?

Yeah.

No.

Erick may be dead right in demanding the orphans be freed, but the Open Content Alliance is dead wrong in both their method and motives for making that happen. Let’s take a quick look at some of the loudest Alliance members, shall we?

First there’s Microsoft - the kings of the anti-trust violation, the monarchs of monopoly. This is a company that gave the Internet Archive ten million dollars to scan books, only to pull the plug when they realised that they couldn’t make any money from their own book search service. The truth is, Microsoft couldn’t give a damn about making information free - remember Encarta? -but they’ll stop at nothing to prevent Google from succeeding where they failed. If Google Genocide launched tomorrow, you can be sure there’d be a lawyer from Redmond whining to a judge that they should be allowed a piece of the action.

At least Amazon wears its biases on its sleeve - in March, Google signed a deal with Sony to put 500,000 public domain titles, scanned by the former, on to the latter’s e-reader device. At a stroke, Sony’s library of ebooks overtook Amazon’s (then) 250,000-strong database. And unlike Sony, which uses the open ePub standard for its titles, Amazon still insists on using its own ridiculous proprietary format. If they really were serious about making books more widely available, they could start by fixing the crappy PDF support for the Kindle.

And then there’s Yahoo. Poor old bandwagon-jumping Yahoo. Nothing to see here; let’s move on.

And yet if you look past the most vocal members of the Alliance, there are countless member organisations with bags of credibility, including thousands of libraries and universities. And there’s the Internet Archive itself, and their legal expert, Gary Reback. Both boast solid credentials - the Internet Archive has worked tirelessly, and non-commercially, to digitise out-of-copyright books, while Reback is probably the valley’s most high-profile anti-monopoly activist.

(If Reback’s name sounds familiar it’s because in the 90s he was instrumental in persuading the DoJ to investigate Microsoft for anti-trust violations - and also because in a recent interview with Michael Arrington he said that, he doesn’t think Microsoft should have been split in two because the investigation itself was enough to make the company change its ways. Apparently in Reback welcoming Microsoft into the Alliance, the enemy of his enemy is now his friend.)

All of which leads me to the real question that needs to be asked this week: what on earth are the Internet Archive and Gary Reback and the libraries, universities and other legitimate members of the Open Content Alliance thinking?

The stated aims of the Alliance - to ‘build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material’ - are solid, and their position that Google’s legal immunity over orphaned works should be extended to all is laudable. But by palling around with anti-trust terrorists, self-interested champions of DRM and conflict-funded law schools, they’re undermining all of that by making themselves look like corporate shills.

If I were the Alliance’s legal advisor, I’d recommend that they leave the anti-trust nonsense to Google’s conflicted rivals and instead focus their efforts on lobbying for a change to the US Copyright Act. Google has already said that they would support a change in the law to shore up the status of their searchable rights registry and to protect all users of unregistered orphan works from breach of copyright claims.

The Alliance should be working with Google to make that change happen - and that includes Amazon who really has no business siding with a bunch of sour-grapes-fuelled anti-trust cheerleaders.

Beyond that, if I were advising the Alliance, I’d tell them to shut up about extending the settlement to all comers. Google has spent millions of dollars being forced into the deal they now have with publishers and it’s frankly ludicrous to expect them to share those hard-fought spoils with their biggest competitors.

Google Books may be a commercial enterprise, and it may be establishing a position where it can dictate terms to authors and publishers. But it also happens to be the best book search product the world has ever seen. Really, it’s incredible. And if the likes of Amazon and the Internet Archive started working with it rather than against it, it could also be the answer to rewarding book authors in a digital age, tidying up the mess of orphaned works, making books accessible to a new generation of readers and - hell - shifting a few million more e-books and e-book readers. And with a change in the law to allow everyone to exploit orphaned works, many of the anti-trust issues that Reback hates so much would vanish too. That really would be a win-win.

But of course I’m not anyone’s legal advisor; I’m just a guy who writes a technology column for money. And, as I may have mentioned before, an author. And a former co-founder of a publishing company. I mean, really this isn’t my field. I’m just glad that once again Google is in the right, and their rivals are in the wrong. The TechCrunch/Google circle jerk can continue for another week.

Awesome. Someone pass me the Gool-aid.

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Say what you like about the Google Books Kool-Aid, but it tastes much…

It’s been just under a year since Yammer, the ‘Twitter for businesses’, launched at TechCrunch 50 and won the conference’s top prize. Since then the service has seen steady growth, with over 40,000 networks signed up for the service. It’s also become an absolutely essential tool inside the TechCrunch office, which is why I grew alarmed when I noticed that the service is currently down. But a quick visit to the site’s blog reveals that this was planned downtime, and for good reason: when Yammer comes back up, it will feature a host of impressive features in what may be the service’s biggest update since launch. We got in touch with CEO David Sacks, who outlined what we can expect when the service comes back later tonight.

Some of the new features include:

• Revamped iPhone App — The big new feature here is Push notifications, which will allow you to get updated whenever you get a message without having to burn through SMS messages. The app also integrates a camera mode for taking photos, improved text entry (you can auto-save drafts and type in landscape mode), and improved performance. The app is currently pending approval in the app store, so we may have to wait a few more days to download it.

  

• Likes — Yammer is adopting the feature popularized by Friendfeed and later “borrowed” by Facebook. However, Likes in Yammer aren’t just virtual pats on the back — every time you Like something, it will be shared with everyone in your network, which means that Liked messages grow virally.

  

• Threads — You’ll now be able to view messages in a threaded view, in a manner that looks very similar to Facebook, or you can revert back to the Twitter-like stream Yammer has used until now. The stream works fine for small groups, but it can become unwieldly when multiple conversations are going on at once, which makes the threaded view a welcome addition. For now this will be limited to the web version, but the desktop client will support it in the next few weeks.



• Improved Search — Search has been improved to include a number of advanced options, including limiting searches to a specific user or to coworkers in a certain group.

Other improvements include more security options (you can make passwords automatically expire after a certain time period), a ‘broadcast’ mode for network admins that lets them send a message throughout an entire network, and an improved interface.

All in all this is a great update for Yammer, which continues to improve on an already-solid product. Last month Yammer unveiled a rebuilt client for Adobe AIR, which was also a big improvement over the old app. That said, I could do without AIR’s quirks — I wish Yammer offered some native clients.

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Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Yammer’s Big Night: Launches Threaded Conversations, Push-Enabled…

Have you tried out this blind search tool yet? It provides results from Google, Yahoo and Bing in three columns but doesn’t tell you which column is which search engine. You then tell it which one you think shows the best results, and you then see which answers are from which engines. I keep choosing Yahoo as the best results.

A few search engine experts we’ve spoken with over the years say that users tend to think Google results are better just because they’re from Google. If you take any search engine and put the logo on top, it tests better. So Yahoo results with a Google logo will always test better than, say, Google results with the Yahoo or Bing logo. People are just used to thinking about Google as the best search.

This search tool strips out all the branding, so you’re forced to really think about which results you like better. And early results showed a much more even distribution than Google’s 70% market share would suggest: Google: 44%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 23%.

The score keeping feature was removed when people found a way to game it, but you can still run the test against yourself and see which search engine you really like the best. Too bad the one I seem to like will shortly be mothballed.

The tool was created by Michael Kordahi, a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft.

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Which Search Engine Do You Choose In The Blind Test?