Have you ever stopped to evaluate your life in terms of small decisions you made that impacted who you are and what you do? Decisions such as a left turn here, saying hello to a stranger, picking one place to eat over another? Ever wondered what life would be like if you went the other direction, ignored that new person or picked the sub place over the soup place?

Simple decisions like these are sometimes the most important choices we can make in our lives. They often seem meaningless at the time, and yet each choice we make leads us down different forks in our life. Sometime they intersect with, and change, the lives of others as well.

For Jen McCabe, a small decision that changed her life forever was deciding to drive tired, a decision that could have cost her life, not to mention those of others. Fortunately, Jen’s decision – and the accident which followed – wasn’t fatal, but it did destroy her car and shatter her knee. It also made her an entrepreneur.

When I met Jen, I was taken back by her direct and real nature. When I pick guests for “Speaking Of…” I look for character and, more important, a story that defines who they are and which might benefit our community if shared.

Following Jen’s small decision to keep driving and not pull over, she had to learn how to walk again and lost her ability to do things for herself for nearly a year. She realized there are thousands of things you take for granted and that you can often feel alone. Those realizations inspired her to co-found a company called Contagion Health that produced imoveyou.com, a exercise challenge site for helping those that you love get the motivation they need to get their health on track again.

Jen won’t drive tired again, but she wouldn’t change what happened to her. It helped to define who she is and what she wants to do with her life.

Video below (with some awesome advice for entrepreneurs towards the end).

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Speaking Of… Hellraiser with Jen McCabe of imoveyou.com (TCTV)

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…

Fauxhawk robot exterminates wasps, is something of a fashion victim originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 24 Oct 2010 08:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Plastic Pals  |  Asahi.com  | Email this | Comments

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Fauxhawk robot exterminates wasps, is something of a fashion victim

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…

In November 2009, Ben Tseitlin was driving along on the 280 highway between San Francisco and Palo Alto when he noticed something weird. There was a Toyota Prius next to him with a weird spolier-like thing on the roof. And on top of that was some sort of spinning contraption. It was weird enough that Tseitlin decided to take a video of it and posted it to his Facebook page, guessing it was sort of test wind-powered Prius. Little did Ben know at the time, it was actually something much more.

What Tseitlin captured, of course, was the Google self-driving car. The secret project, which Google revealed for the first time today, is a combination of different technologies developed by Google that will allow a car to drive itself — yes, even on the highway. Google has disclosed that they’ve been testing these cars “recently“, but they’ve clearly been testing them for longer than that, as Tseitlin’s video proves. The fact that these specially-equipped Priuses (and one Audi TT) have racked up over 140,000 miles (1,000 of while have been completely human-free) on the road, suggests a longer cycle of testing as well.

One of the most interesting aspects of this whole project is that local authorities were fine with Google road-testing these cars. “We’ve briefed local police on our work,” Google noted today and said that human beings are always present in the driver’s seat when the cars are on the road just in case a manual override is needed. The only accident over all these months involved someone else rear-ending one of the cars.

Tseitlin tells us that he’s actually seen the cars around a few other places as well in the past several months. A commenter on his Facebook post notes the same thing.

Google’s secret project has been driving next to many of us all these months and we never ever realized it. That won’t be the case anymore. Watch Tseitlin’s video below.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Google’s Self-Driving Car Spotted On The Highway Almost A Year Ago…

Oh Quora! You’ve done it again. This time with the utterly fascinating “What startups have been started by former Yahoo employees?” thread which provides a pretty comprehensive list from AClevertwist.com to Ycombinator.com (Quick, some ex-Yahooer start a Z-word startup!) of startups founded by former Yahoo employees, which, as we’ve already pointed out, are a force to be reckoned with.

Inspired by the sheer scope of Yahoo defector startups (Hunch! Ycombinator! Tunerfish! Tinyspeck! Onetruefan!) we and the folks at Pearltrees are working on the above visualization, which currently runs through “M.” So go ahead, click on one of the nodes and explore the ever expanding house that Y! built.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Startups Started By Former Yahoo Employees [Graphic]

Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital was supposed to be my guest on “Ask A VC” this week, but called me this morning to cancel because his attorneys pointed out that doing press interviews while raising a new fund ran afoul of Securities & Exchange Commission rules. Oops. Filling in is Mike Hirshland- or “VC Mike” as he’s called.

Regular readers know the drill by now: Email your questions to AskaVC(at)techcrunch(dot)com. You can leave them in the comments, too, but I’ll prioritize the ones emailed, because they don’t give the guest time to prepare an answer. I purposely invite guests who are leaders in the field and are blunt. So don’t be shy. With a lot of developments in the world of venture capital this week, there should be plenty of questions out there.

If you don’t know Hirshland here are some facts, that may prompt more questions:

1. He is a partner at Polaris Ventures in Boston, but spends almost all his time in the Valley because he says that’s where the best consumer Web companies are.
2. He founded Dogpatch Labs– a bicoastal hang-out spot in San Francisco and New York to help give him a leg up on deal flow in this ultra-competitive world.
3. His investments include Automatic (aka WordPress), ThingLabs (aka Brizzly) and Quantcast.
4. Before Polaris he worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee that investigated Microsoft’s antitrust issues.
5. He’s sort of an over-grown frat boy. I say that with love. You’ll see what I mean Friday when the show runs.

Send your questions now! We’re taping early this week.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

“Ask A VC” Guest Swap: Kopelman Out; Hirshland In

There’s no absolute formula for success in the mobile app world — but if there was, ngmoco would probably be amongst those closest to having it figured out. Just about everything they touch (Gun Range, WeFarm, Rolando, and their Plus+ gaming network) turns to gold; unfortunately, the only stuff they’ve touched so far has been exclusively for iOS.

Back in February, ngmoco CEO Neil Young said they were “encouraged” by Android’s growth, but that they’d be sticking with the iPhone for the time being. Oh, how quickly a big ol’ cash injection can change plans; just a month after an estimated $3-5 million investment by Google Ventures, ngmoco is seemingly looking to dive head first into Android development.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Google’s Investment Pays Off: Ngmoco Building Plus+ (And Possibly…

I’ve ignored more press releases in my time than I care to remember, but I still scan, and sometimes even read, a bunch of them every single day. Comes with the territory, and I’ve long accepted that – I’m sure a lot of PR folks think of those as necessary evil almost as much as we do. Almost.

But as boring as it is to read the same frickin words over and over and over and over again, there are certain times – albeit very, very few – where we manage to distill some actual useful information from the writings (but please, again, stop using words like “leading” and “award-winning” in the first paragraph all the time. Pretty please?).

And then there the rare ones that put a smile on our face. Press releases we actually enjoy reading. Not because they’re ballsy (it’s easy to provoke and get attention by running your virtual mouth) but because they’re whimsy and just the right degree of ballsy, rather.

Take for example this one announcing the launch of MeetYourFriends, some social network (posted in full below for your reading pleasure). It has everything: a headline that draws just the right amount of attention, the basic information and mostly lots of self- and industry mocking humor. Bonus points for distributing the press release on Labor Day.

Will MeetYourFriends ever stand out of the social networking crop? Almost certainly, they don’t even stand a chance. But they’ve already gotten my attention by penning a better, more memorable and attention-grabbing press release than most other companies throughout their entire existence, so that’s gotta count for something. Or something.

Update: actually, maybe you should think twice before signing up. I can’t in any way guarantee this isn’t a clever ploy (yet another?) to get gullible users to provide the makers with their personal data. Update 2: just don’t sign up, it’s better for everyone.

Either way, enjoy the read.

Latest Social Network MeetYourFriends.com Threatens to Bury Rivals ‘Within Days’

NEW YORK, Sept. 6 /PRNewswire/ — After resolving not to come up with a pretentious name and an avalanche of gimmicks, social network MeetYourFriends.com goes live to a celebration of simplicity and retro fanfare. Having not just received first round equity funding of $50 million from leading venture capitalists, the site is well set to tap into the growing market of 30- and 40-somethings who just want to talk to each other.

Developed by Neil Bryant, one of the founders of Badoo.com, MeetYourFriends will not be launched in a private beta for only a select 500 users. When visitors come to the site they will immediately find they are not immersed in a stunning 3D multi-verse, where they can interact with each other via fully customizable avatars. “It’s going to be beautiful,” says Neil, who is not going to give an overhyped, media-crazed keynote speech.

MeetYourFriends claim to have identified an emerging demographic of users who, according to Neil, are “keen to engage each other in casual chat” and are aggressively aligning their service portfolio to meet this demand. “We wanted to bring some fresh new ideas into the social networking sphere, and with a unique combination of email and live chat we think we may have just achieved that.”

For those who wish to bring up goats and cows on a virtual farm, MeetYourFriends will not satisfy. The site is a back-to-basics social network that will appeal to fans of The Beatles and sliced bread.

There’s no open API so game developers around the globe are not frantically hacking code together, right this minute, in order to launch the latest virtual pets and aquariums across the network. “We are extremely excited at the thought of all the products that will soon not be appearing on the site, contributing to the users’ rich enjoyment of the service,” says Neil.

Following the predicted growth in mobile Location Based Services such as FourSquare and Gowalla, MeetYourFriends gets in the mix through a revolutionary static PC interface, pinpointing the exact location of the user to their computer. “We think it’s important that our users can access the site whenever they are at a PC. We’re looking at a version for Notebooks right now, but it’s some way off,” says Neil.

To calm fears before they arrive, MeetYourFriends will not change its privacy policy or allow advertising once it’s settled on its laurels. “We think Facebook is nervous,” adds Neil. Global domination awaits.

ABOUT MEETYOURFRIENDS

MeetYourFriends.com is a back-to-basics social network that brings together new friends from across the globe. With simple sign-up and fast search, the website offers instant friendship using Direct Messages and Live Chat. Based on secure and powerful web technology, the social community brings the world to your front door for chat, fun, and friendship. Find out more at www.MeetYourFriends.com.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Yet Another Social Network Launches, But At Least With An Epic Press…

Sprint still not ruling out LTE, says it's not 'mututally exclusive' to WiMAX originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 May 2010 11:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Phone Scoop  |  Light Reading  | Email this | Comments

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Sprint still not ruling out LTE, says it’s not ‘mututally exclusive’…

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?

We know you've got questions, and if you're brave enough to ask the world for answers, here's the outlet to do so. This week's Ask Engadget question is coming to us from Garrett, who needs a few sets of fresh eyes on the netbook lineup that's out there today. If you're looking to send in an inquiry of your own, drop us a line at ask [at] engadget [dawt] com.

"This past week my mom decided she would like to be able to use her computer on the patio. The problem is she only has a desktop, so my question is what would be the best netbook for a not-so-tech-savvy mom? All she really would need is WiFi, access to the internet, and Word. Doesn't have to be too fancy, but she would want it to look nice too. Any suggestions?"

Suggestions? Oh yeah, we're sure these fine folks have plenty of those. We've actually thrown this same question out in 2008 and 2009, but given all the changes since last decade, we figured the time was right to re-visit things. So, help a mother out, won't you?

Ask Engadget: what's the best netbook out there now? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 May 2010 22:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Ask Engadget: what’s the best netbook out there now?

Riding the wave of anonymous randomized chats, Jibblar is a text-only, communal version of Chatroulette.

Taking a cue from the Russian phenom, Jibblar (authored by Peter Nicholls, an Australia-based developer) is a bare-bones site that does one thing well: it allows people in close proximity to anonymously contribute to a chat room. Jibblar grabs your location from the Firefox or iPhone browser and will only facilitate conversation with people in your immediate vicinity (according to Nicholls the range is 0.5 kilometers). The only identifier is your location tag (which you can either pick from the list of options or create a new one if it doesn’t exist) and a randomly assigned number that appears next to your chat.

The site is thin on details (it’s literally one page with a title, chat stream and a sprinkling of text on the right hand side) but it does clarify that a “jib” is their term for chat room and it is most common in schools, universities and pubs. Don’t get me wrong, I love simplicity, but this brand of simplicity breeds confusion by dropping you into several streams of conversation. To quote their site, “WTF?”

When I first tried to use it in downtown Palo Alto, there was one location tag in the chat stream: “LJ Hooker.” The chat itself was just jibberish, with random f-bombs and strange declaratives (“I’m retiring,” “need to get myself a new job,”). Theoretically, this could work well in a pub or at a university—- if you got a critical mass— but I imagine many chats will look like a car crash of phrases, expletives and general confusion. Then again, maybe that’s the point. For example this:

And this:

Nicholls was inspired by Chatroulette. After designing Jibblar, he went to a local pub and handed out pieces of paper with the link “Jibblar.com.” He says within an hour, 20 or 30 people in various states of intoxication were using the service, yielding amusing results. Nicholls admits the service is far from perfect. The iPhone version seems to work fine but there are several, major bugs on the Firefox version at the time of this post (namely, you can’t input text (!) and there are no randomly assigned numbers identifying the users, raising the degree of confusion).

As for a grand plan, Nicholls doesn’t have one. He could see it catching on at schools or in the workplace, any place where gossip thrives, but he’s willing to let the users decide. “I just want to put it out there, give it to as many people as possible,” he says. There’s only one thing that he’s adamant about: its simplicity. “You’re never going to see a sign-up, you’ll always be able to just open it up and chat.” While I could be wrong, I don’t think Jibblar is going to reach Twitter or even Chatroulette proportions, but I have to give Nicholls credit for highlighting the importance of geo-based chat and trying (B+ for effort) to create something dead simple to use.

Update: After our chat, Nicholls took down the Firefox function. He just won bonus points for being a fast adapter.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Jibblar: Part Chatroulette, Minus Nudity

Berlin-based Daily Deal, whose main rival is the Samwer brothers' City Deal, has secured a further 7 million euros, this time from Mangrove Capital Partners and Adinvest.

Stefan Glänzer (an early investor in Last.fm), Michael Brehm (Ex-StudiVZ) and Jochen Maaß are existing seed investors.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

When Clones Attack! German Groupon Clone Gets €7m Warchest

The problem with all of these people who are walking out the door at MySpace isn’t so much the number of them, because MySpace is trying to replace them by hiring more people. It’s the fact that the best people are leaving, and taking a lot of the knowledge base with them.

Three star senior employees left to go to cross-town startup Gravity, we reported earlier this week. And tonight we’ve heard that Jeff Webber, the engineering director that oversees the email, instant messaging and other “communications” platforms for MySpace, resigned earlier this week as well to join a startup. He’s been at MySpace for nearly three years and was one of the star engineers and leaders, says one source.

Other recent departures – VP and General Manager of Mobile John Faith, SVP User Experience Katie Geminder and most of her team. And of course CEO Owen Van Natta. And lots more as well, only a few of which we’ve reported.

The company has no direction, says everyone we talk to at MySpace except the top execs, and internal politics are the only thing that seem to matter. Ambitious new projects like Remaking MySpace have been thrown away just because the wrong exec supported it. Anyone who actually wants to build products has left or is looking for a new job, say many, many sources.

If you’re a MySpace employee and feel differently, please contact us anonymously. Because right now all we see is a ton of fluff and absurdity coming from the top, and massive morale problems at the middle management ranks.

The title of this post is actually a recent quote from a (now former) MySpace employee, and it seems to be accurate. They say a company has to hit rock bottom before it can even think about rebuilding into something new. If that’s the case, the time to start rebuilding is, apparently, right about now. But in our opinion MySpace has no chance at all until it is free of the News Corp. death grip.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

MySpace’s Mid Level Management Structure Is Crumbling

I’m a sucker. It’s true. As much you guys think we rail against Apple, we’re like abused puppies, slinking back to our master’s hard ankles, shivering and awaiting praise. Why did I pre-order the iPad? Well, first I’m a gadget blogger. Second there is no certainty that mother Apple will grace us with an early review unit so I want to hedge our bets. Third? I want to see where computing is headed.

Bear with me here. Apple is not the bringer of fire to a benighted world. Far from it. In my recent writing I’ve been struck by a few parallels with Steve Jobs to Abraham Louis Breguet, a French watchmaker who lived in the 18th century. He was a mechanical genius, to be sure, but he was also a salesman. While the rest of the benighted world was sloshing around in an admixture of feces and mud in the streets of Paris and telling the time by whether the pikemen were stabbing them for being out after curfew, Breguet was selling watches that would not be out of place on the wrist (had they had straps) of a whale in Las Vegas. He invented secret anti-counterfeiting measures but made them part of the allure and not part of a DRM scheme. He designed elegant and beautiful watches in an age of rococo designs but wasn’t above creating a “subscription” watch for the masses who wanted to own a piece of the good life without paying an exorbitant sum of money. Other watchmakers were making commodities and following Breguet’s lead. That’s what’s happening here.

Read more…

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Confession: I Pre-ordered My iPad And Breguet Made Me Do It

According to the site Gigatweet, we are about an hour away from the 10 billionth tweet sent since the dawn of Twitter. More incredible, this milestone comes less than 5 months after the 5 billionth tweet.

The only problem? It’s not an exact science.

Gigatweet isn’t counting to an exact number, but rather is extrapolating out when the 10 billionth tweet will hit based on previous tweet data provided from a range of sources. Most recently, we do know that Twitter is seeing about 50 million tweets per day now, because the service released that information. Other than that, it’s kind of a crapshoot.

To determine when the 5 billionth tweet would happen, watchers were looking at the numbers appended on to the URL of each tweet when it’s sent. The same is true this time around. For example, this recent tweet has the number 9996229078 in the URL. So yes, it would seem that is tweet number 9,996,229,078, but the problem is that Twitter has altered these numbers several times over the years, notably to move up the so-called Twitpocalypse (both 1 and 2).

As Twitter employee Ryan King notes, “Though its more numerology than math, it still scares me that this is my job,” followed by a link to Gigatweet. What he means is that no, it’s not exactly right, but it’s kind of cool, and perhaps close enough.

An interesting side note: the guy who sent tweet number 5 billion, Robin Sloan, now works at Twitter. Who will be number 10 billion? We’ll know in about an hour.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

The 10 Billionth Tweet (Or So) Will Take Flight In About An Hour

FriendFeed is down right now. It has been down for the past 30 minutes or so. Sadly, that’s not news anymore. Not because, like Twitter of old, it’s down all the time, but rather, because it seems like no one really uses it anymore. Case in point, it’s been down for over 30 minutes and there are maybe 50 total tweets about it (and several are from the same users).

That means that of all the tens of millions of people around the world on Twitter, a full 50 of them care enough to tweet when FriendFeed is down. It’s hard to imagine any other service that got to the size FriendFeed did (which, granted, wasn’t huge), only getting 50 tweets if it goes down.

It’s sad, really. FriendFeed was easily one of my favorite services (so much so that I’m still waiting for another service to replace it). But since the acquisition by Facebook, it has been a ghost town. And now, with its 500 Internal Server Error, it’s really a ghost town. The impressive team behind FriendFeed (most are still with Facebook now) have indicated they wouldn’t let the service wither, but that seems to be exactly what is happening.

If it comes back up, I wonder how many of these remaining few dozen passionate FriendFeed users that are tweeting will even notice. Maybe they’ll just give up too.

Update: FriendFeed is still down over an hour later. Their official Twitter account blames a “major power outage.”

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

FriendFeed Goes Down Hard. Both Remaining Users Pissed.

This is the last time we write about this, promise.

But it turns out that a week before the super-liberal TED crowd was shocked by comedian Sarah Silverman’s repeated use of the word “retarded” on stage (so much so that TED organizer Chris Anderson tweeted how “god-awful” she was), she had agreed to donate her time to a fundraiser for children with Down syndrome.

She was ridiculing Sarah Palin’s whole argument that the word “retard” can’t be used.

The crowd, mostly bay area wine and cheese liberals, should have been cheering her on. But it went over their head, and TED stepped in it.

So just to recap, TED invites Sarah Silverman, a shock and insult comedian, to the event to give a talk. She turns up and shocks and insults, but for a good reason. The crowd doesn’t get it even though it plays right into their politics, and the event organizer trashes her publicly. Silverman hits back on Twitter, and there’s a quick cameo by Steve Case in the whole drama. Then it turns out Silverman is already donating her time to help fight the very issue she brought up in the talk.

In honor of the whole episode, TechCrunch is purchasing 10 tickets to Twenty Wonder on March 6 in Los Angeles on behalf of TED and Chris Anderson. If you’d like one of the tickets, let us know below and the first ten get them (say if you want two to bring a friend). Or buy your own. It’ll go to a much better cause than the $6,000 TED attendees spend to feel good about themselves for a couple of days.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Last Post On Sarah Silverman v. TED

The first installment of Google's fancy Nexus One design series focused on the sound quality of the device, and on the overall design. Well, part two is here now, and this time, we get to watch while HTC project manager Tomasz Hasinki and Android software engineer Romain Guy give us the goods on the Nexus One's OLED display and the interactive, 3D framework. We're expecting a couple more videos in the series, so grab a very tiny bowl of popcorn (it's pretty short) and check out the video, which is after the break.

Continue reading Nexus One video series, part two: Google schools us on OLED displays

Nexus One video series, part two: Google schools us on OLED displays originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Feb 2010 05:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Google Nexus One YouTube Channel  | Email this | Comments

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Nexus One video series, part two: Google schools us on OLED displays

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

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Zynga Investor Calls Scamville Debate Irrelevant And Unfair

When Daniel Raffel emailed and asked if we’d be interested in publishing his list of favorite stuff from 2009 we quickly agreed. He has worked on some of the more interesting projects in Silicon Valley over the last couple of years, and has his finger on the pulse of new technology. His post is below.

As the year winds down, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at my favorite tech launches this year. As I started assembling my list and bouncing them off friends I started to group them into the following categories: New Projects, New Products and Services, Feature Updates, and iPhone Apps. This list is an admittedly subjective batch. For instance, you’ll notice I am clearly interested in these trends: games, geo services, HTML5, identity, mobile, music, social updates, and web development. I’d love to hear what you think were exciting developments this year!

New Projects

Dive into HTML5
There are so many reasons to be excited about HTML5. Mark Pilgrim’s book illuminates many of them. When it’s finally published on paper in early 2010 it is likely going to be one of the most beautiful computer text books ever.

Music Hack Day
Get a bunch of passionate, competent technologists in a room and inspire them to hack on music projects all day, cool! While I didn’t get to personally attend the Boston event I was inspired by my friend Brian’s wrapup and Anthony’s too. Both posts contain great tips for anyone running a good, hackfest. Hope to see these events continue and look forward to attending one myself.

OAuth WRAP (Web Resource Authorization Protocol)
For a variety of situations where a developer simply wants to integrate with an API via POST the OAuth dance can a bit of a headache. OAuth WRAP is not much different than OAuth except that a client only has to pass the Access Token in the HTTP Authorization header, so it completely eliminates the need for signatures. All server-to-server WRAP calls happen via SSL. An additional benefit of eliminating signatures is that one can curl OAuth-WRAP requests without requiring any special libraries. There is an active working group fleshing out a spec and I expect to see widespread adoption of this in 2010 coming via products from the major service providers (specifically Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!).

Playdar
Started by Richard Jones, Playdar is “designed to solve one problem: given the name of a track, find me a way to listen to it right now.” While it’s definitely not ready for the general public I am very excited by the progress it has been making. And, I am looking very forward to the types of projects it is likely to enable in 2010. In the meantime, if you’re super curious checkout a few demos to see where things are starting to head.

PubSubHubbub and Simple Update Protocol
Polling feeds is no fun, it’s costly and too slow. These protocols are exciting to me because they offer novel solutions so that products depending on realtime updates can more efficiently, and quickly, aggregate update notifications.

Webfinger
Webfinger is an emerging standard that is being designed to return metadata for a given email address over HTTP. It could be used to publish metadata about an email address such as a URL to the user’s Profile, a link to a user’s Calendar, etc. This is strategically important for OpenID because it can be used to determine if an email address is OpenID-enabled and if so kick off the OpenID authentication flow.

New Products and Services

Cloudkick
With more businesses moving their infrastructure to the cloud there will be a need for new tools that help businesses manage their ops. Cloudkick provides a hosted service for managing infrastructure on multiple cloud platforms. They are already managing over a hundred thousand servers. As they build in support for more and more platforms it’s a natural assumption that they will attempt to support functionality that will allow users to migrate from service to service. As an early user I have been impressed with the teams response time to issues I have encountered. While Cloudkick isn’t ready to compete head to head with Ganglia, Nagios and other popular ops projects I’m looking forward to continuing to use the service.

Flavors.me
Technically, not launched yet, but I’ve been playing with it for a little bit. Think of it as a simple vanity site for people with either no web development chops or little interest in investing time building/hosting their own website. The default templates are very aesthetic and can be easily customized. Since there is little functionality on the site other than creating a simple, web based, business card, it’s a bit unclear how much juice they have. That said, I like how easy it is to create a public profile and share your identity with the public.

Foursquare
There’s a competitive aspect to Foursquare that makes it both satisfying and addictive. After using it for a few months earlier in the year I decided to abandon it because I didn’t see the point of using the service. A compulsive urge sucked me back in and I have to admit that it has led to some wonderful, serendipitous moments. I’ve taken a look at a few other competitors and frankly there isn’t a huge difference (for instance, Gowalla is prettier but I have far fewer friends on it, and it has terribly obnoxious Facebook integration). The LBS space is getting crowded with FSQ wannabe’s so I’m eager to see how they continue to evolve and add user value. It will also be interesting to see if any of these apps can build a sustainable business around them, at the moment FSQ seems best positioned with their Mayor deals/etc.

Google Chrome Browser
Ever since the beta launched for OS X I’ve been spending more and more time in this browser. It’s elegant and very fast. There are definitely missing features but honestly 85% of the time its current feature set suffices. If Firefox and Safari mated this would definitely be its more evolved offspring. I’ve had mixed luck with Chromium and installing extensions but then I have no business running nightly builds. In fact, I’m impressed with how hard they make it to find the link to nightlies, smart. I’m looking forward to bookmark syncing and non-buggy extension support in 2010. In the meantime, I’m happy with the beta – it’s great to see so much attention to detail, you don’t get there packing on every single feature you can think up.

GDGT
C|Net has to be a bit worried because GDGT feels like the new place where folks are talking about tech products and figuring out what they wanna buy. There are significantly more reviews, I can quickly qualify the reputation of the contributor(s), there’s a community to ping for advice and suggestions, and there are significantly more useful stats to help me make a purchasing decision. For someone interested in making informed decisions about the gadgets they buy this is a great new resource. For those who are passionate about the gadgets they already own this is a great place to evangelize and discuss hacks/etc.

Hunch
I have a tendency to enjoy making well-researched, informed decisions. So it seems natural to share what I’ve learned once I’ve invested the time and found the perfect water bottle or picked out a portable digital audio recorder. Hunch provides simple tools that make it easy to roleplay through scenarios that have already been explored by others. One might choose to think of it as a wikipedia for decisions.

Kickstarter
It’s exciting to see a platform that enables makers to raise the funding they need to do their thing. It’s also inspiring to see so many successful projects that have already launched. There are all sorts of ways to pursue the things you’re most passionate about and Kickstarter is one more toolkit in your arsenal. BTW it also feels great to fund someone with a creative idea.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii
I probably hadn’t turned on my Wii in over a year until this game came out. The gameplay is essentially a 2D scroller that’s very similar to the original Super Mario Bros for the NES. The characters have a few new moves and the levels are significantly more creative than earlier franchises in the series. I never got tired of the original game and this version feels like it has a lot to keep me coming back for more. The multiplayer version is also very entertaining.

Square
It’s hard to remember the last time I paid for something and had a delightful point of sale purchasing experience, but that’s exactly how I feel everytime I pay by credit card at Sightglass Coffee. The software that a customer interacts with at a Square vendor is just lovely. But, it’s the business plan (and hardware approach) that’s brilliant – Square is reducing the barrier for small businesses to setup a merchant account and providing inexpensive hardware that enables them to offer credit card services for next to nothing. I’m sold as a consumer and a small business owner. I’m very excited to see this running on more devices and in more types of sales environments in the near future. I also hope to see them explore premium readers with more advanced industrial designs, such as the Incase reader that Apple stores are already using.

Feature Updates

Android 2.0
While Android is still a bit too rough for me to consider ditching my iPhone (and 3rd party apps) for the 2.0 software update demonstrates that it’s quickly catching up to the iPhone OS. If you use multiple Google services the integration is all the more compelling. At this continued pace, 2010 is going to be a massive year for the Android ecosystem.

Apple iPhone OS 3.0
It’s rare to get excited again about a phone that you’ve had for years but the Apple iPhone OS 3.0 update included many great new features that brought my 1st gen iPhone back to life . It also rubbed in how much faster my new iPhone 3GS really was. The features I most appreciated were: cut/copy/paste, ability to create meetings via Exchange using ActiveSync, and wider use of landscape mode in a variety of apps. I’ll spare you the internet tethering gripe.

Apple Snow Leopard
I’m a big fan of doing less stuff better so I was very supportive of seeing Apple focus the majority of this release on under the hood performance enhancements. Their investments show too, I have a few older Macs around the house and upgrading to Snow Leopard freed up on average around 10gb of disk space, required less operating RAM during most common tasks, and caused all of my macs to feel a lot more responsive (fewer spinning wheels of death.) While there were basically no new features that got me excited the speed enhancements were well worth the minor upgrade costs.

Boxee Beta
While I haven’t logged significant time playing with the latest beta of Boxee the user interface changes are very promising. This is on my list of things to further investigate. It’s exciting to see innovation in both the 10-foot experience and internet TV space.

Facebook
Facebook launched a number of impressive new things this year, the things that stand out the most to me are: an awesome new iPhone app, the Facebook Connect for iPhone SDK, a live streaming box for 3rd party sites, the Facebook Desktop Notifications app, and what felt like a few re-designs. It’s inspiring to see a company stay true to its original objectives and still manage to innovate.

Flickr Photo People Tagging
One of the most compelling Facebook features is the ability to tag a friend in a photo, doing so creates a viral thread that triggers a lot of clickthru’s and engagement. It was safe to assume that Flickr would eventually add similar functionality and this year they did. I was pleased to discover that people tagging on Flickr was designed with additional sensitivity around a users privacy. You can explicitly define which contacts of yours can people tag you in a photo. And, Flickr explicitly spells out what happens if you remove a photo tagged with your identity (nobody else can add it back). There’s nothing wrong with borrowing a feature a competitor has but this is an excellent example of how to add your own flavor to it.

Google Voice
GrandCentral was shutdown this year and logically rebranded as Google Voice. After being ported to the Google platform and re-launched users were given a slew of awesome new features. While I’ll admit I’m still holding out for a number portability feature I’m a fan of how disruptive they are attempting to be. And, I’m a fan of numerous enhancements they’ve shipped this year alone, some of my favorite include: voicemail to text transcription (needs more tuning), free web based text messaging, the ability to change your number, and easy steps to allow you to forward your mobile voicemail to Google.

Kindle Software Update 2.3
There’s nothing like a little competition in the ebook market to cause Amazon to add basic features to the Kindle 2 that it could (and should) have supported all along. Regardless, thanks to this software update it’s nice that my Kindle 2 now natively supports PDFs.

Firefox and Webkit Support for Geolocation APIs in HTML5
It’s very satisfying to see my browser starting to have a clue regarding where I am. While very few services are actively using this functionality today the fact that browsers now support it is wonderful!

Firefox Support for the HTML5 File API
It’s unfortunate that most webservices have to use Flash to support decent file uploading experiences. Now that Javascript can read the contents of local files web developers will have the opportunity to create more refined file sharing experiences for both online and offline applications. I’m not sure if this is currently available in Webkit but beta’s of Firefox 3.6 support it.

Spotify
For the past 2 years I’ve been using Spotify as my default streaming music player and it just keeps getting better. This year I was impressed by two specific features: their massive increase in library size and their approach to the mobile experience. If you depend on the cloud for your tunes the size of the library matters. Spotify has spent the past year aggressively growing their library by tens of thousands of tracks per week. That’s much easier said than done, particularly when you’re trying to add compelling media that people actually want to listen to. I am consistently impressed when I search for something random and find they have it. While Spotify will never have absolutely everything under the sun their library consistently satisfies my very demanding appetite for both the latest releases and older classics. This year Spotify also released mobile applications that allow you to locally cache media on your phone so that you can listen to your favorite music whether or not you have a internet connection. In the year ahead I look forward to seeing how they innovate around discovery, sharing and library resolution (ie building up a list of stuff they know I already have in my local iTunes Library.)

Twitter Lists
Twitter has long had a discovery problem. Finding and surfacing what you want to follow isn’t easy. The lists feature still requires you to invest time if you want to make one but it also gives you the opportunity to track things that others have put the time into assembling (such as food carts in San Francisco or Great Chefs.) For me, the nicest part is your main feed isn’t polluted so you can casually and passively track things without adding a lot of noise.

YQL
YQL is a developer tool that treats the internet as a giant source of data. The team was on a tear this year, amongst other things they launched the execute element to enable arbitrary server-side code to run inside tables, open data tables to enable anyone to create their own API bindings for YQL, hosted storage tables to build on top of Yahoos cloud store (sherpa), and “query aliases” that let developers name their YQL queries using meaningful short names.

iPhone Apps

Dropbox
My data, backed up, and now available on my iPhone too. Brilliant.

Drop7
A very creative puzzle game that will quickly get you addicted.

Eliss
An addictive game that sets the bar very high: creative use of multitouch capabilities, beautiful graphics, innovative gameplay, and great music. Overall, an inspiring piece of work on multiple levels.

Evernote
The Evernote iPhone app got a series of major updates this year that makes it an even more useful productivity tool for note taking and backup/sync.

Orbital
I particularly enjoy games that you can drop into for a few minutes. This game has great graphics and a simple concept that turns out to be rather complex to master.

Tweetie 2
Super attractive Twitter client for the iPhone, lots of nice little touches.

Zillow
Ever checked out a new neighborhood and wondered what property there might cost? This application is extremely interesting to launch and drive/walk around with.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

From A Geek’s Geek: Daniel Raffel’s Favorite New Projects,…

A year ago Apple launched iWork.com in beta, which allowed users of their office suite of applications to publish documents online. It’s a light feature set compared to Google Docs and Office 10 – just viewing and commenting. But a job posting suggests Apple may be creating a true collaborative cloud based version of the iWork apps.

The job posting popped up on CrunchBoard on December 22. Apple is looking for a mid level engineer to “be part of the core development team” and “engage in an area from design to development” of a new javascript rich internet application for the iWork team:

The Productivity team (i.e. iWork) is seeking an energetic, highly motivated software engineer in building a scalable rich internet application. The person will be part of the core development team and engage in an area from design to development of the software system.

Besides exceptional programming skills and devotion to creating great software, we look for one or more of the following kinds of expertise or experience:

• JavaScript language and browser technology – understanding from inside-out, or
• Computer graphics – the mathematics, algorithms and programming, or
• Experience developing scalable rich internet application, or
• Experience developing presentation/collaboration or word processing projects

BS or better in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering

Apple has job postings all the time. But what caught our eye on this one is the language around building an application, from design to development. That suggests something different than just joining the existing team. Apple is putting together a whole new team, for a new project, and they need outside expertise.

Want the job? Apply here.

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

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Apple Expanding iWork In The Cloud?

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken the stage at Startup School, where Y Combinator’s Jessica Livingston is interviewing him. I’m liveblogging the interview below.

Mark Zuckerberg: “I love being here. These are like, my people.”

Q: I want to go way back, before Facebook. What did you learn from those experiences?
A: I mostly built stuff that I liked. When I got to college I started messing around with other programs. There’s this story —  I was making Facebook the week before finals, and there was a class where you had to learn all these pieces of arts. I was supposed to be studying, but instead I was learning Facebook. A few days before the exam I was screwed. I took all the images, make a website, where you could add notes to each image, and it was a ’study tool’ where everyone else filled in all the notes that I needed to pass the class. After that the professor said it had the best grades of any final he’d ever given. This was my first social hack. With Facebook, I wanted to make something that would make Harvard (and more open that) more open.

Q: How were the first users using Facebook?
A: Looking people up, but it was so simple. There were no messages. You could look at profiles, poke people. Everything else built over time. People say launch early and iterate, Facebook is clearly a good example of that. YC has a shirt that says “do something people want” and I think that’s a great way of looking at it.

Q: Tell us all the dumb things you did.
A: Where do you want to start? *pause* What kind of stuff do you want to start with?
We weren’t even set up as a company at first. I started it with different friends at Harvard who were really smart, and they didn’t have the same levels of commitment. I moved to Silicon Valley, lots of folks didn’t want to move out. A lot of the early founder group was fractured. I didn’t want to be involved with setting up the business at all. We had this guy Eduardo . Instead of setting up standard company, we set up as Florida LLC. I don’t know all the things wrong with that, but lawyers out here said that was number one to unwind. In the beginning we weren’t trying to make it as big as possible. We wanted to provide value. Instead of launching schools that would be most receptive, we did least receptive. We launched at Stanford, Columbia, Yale where each of them had their own community already. When we launched Facebook at those schools and it took off, we realized it could be worth putting our time into it. My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There’s a lot of that in Silicon Valley. We wanted this to be valuable.

Q: But that’s a problem for startups — it’s not valuable til people start using it (chicken/egg problem).
A: Facebook is inherently viral. There are lots of sites that include a contact importer, and for lots of them it doesn’t really make sense. For Facebook it fits so well. It wasn’t until a few years in that we started building some tools that made it easier to import friends to the site. That was a huge thing that spiked growth. Before that organic spreading on campuses. One amazing thing, we launched at schools with most people asking for it. We didn’t have enough money for all the schools, we had servers for $85 a month, kept getting more as we needed them. At Dartmouth, half the student population signed up in one night.

Q: Who were your first investors. How did you pitch them?
A: I’m not good at pitching anything. I never eally pitched. There’s Eduardo who did some. Moved out here Peter Thiel was our first investor. Sean Parker helped set us up with first outsourced accounting firm, introduced us to Peter. There were already hundreds of thousands of users. It was clear that if we executed we would continue to do well. I was 19, I doubt I was at all impressive. For the first two years the only advice he would give me was “don’t mess it up”. Gets back to the “build something people want” motto. Early on we were clueless, all of us came from having users and growing at a sustainable rate. When we were first meeting with Peter, we didn’t have Facebook.com. We were TheFacebook. That’s a winner.

Q: What would you do now different?
A: I’d get the right domain name. The moral is that we could get the domain. We ended up “tens of thousands” for the domain. I think we used Register.com which was also a mistake. The core people at the company a lot is still in tact. Management team has improved over time. Was hard to get people good at managing businesses early on. Now we have Cheryl, but early on there’s no way we could have gotten her. There’s nothing wrong with making these mistakes and not getting it right at each step along the way.

Q: What did you do differently at Facebook?
A: We didn’t realize what we did differently because we didn’t have context. I look at some companies that call themselves technology companies, and there are lots of managers who aren’t technical. So we were always committed to maintaining technical people in the company. One of our major marketing roles is an engineer. That kind of tech culture is important to have in the DNA of the company. Google is a tech company that I really admire. And as we’ve grown it’s clear how we’re different. I look at Google and think they have a strong academic culture. Elegant solutions to complex problems. We pride ourselves on strong hacker culture, building things quickly for lots of people. We have small team — ratio of engineers to users is by far more than any other company (1 mil+ per engineer).

Q: How do you keep this environment?
A: We do try to attract people, but our goal isn’t necessarily to keep people forever. Some companies are really good at training people. A lot of people for a long time went to IBM because it was great to learn sales. We want Facebook to be one of the best places people can go to learn how to build stuff. If you want to build a company, nothing better than jumping in and trying to build one. But Facebook is also great for entrepreneurs/hackers. If people want to come for a few years and move on and build something great, that’s something we’re proud of. Steve Chen when he started working on YouTube was working on Facebook. They left, did something cool. I’m not encouraging people working at Facebook to leave. We’re not pretending that we’re building a company that hackers would want to stay at forever.

Q: I ask lots of successful founders did you know it would be as big as it is? Tell me a couple moments when you went, woah, this could be huge.
A: I guess it just kept on growing, so our expectations did too. The interesting thing about the Facebook story. A lot of founders say they have some huge vision. A lot of people I hung out with at Harvard was this trend for more and more information becoming available, this was leading to increasing openness. Didn’t think we’d have a chance to influence it. So I did this little project, which over time grew. A few years in, we were sitting around and said this maybe could impact this. So I think probably around the time people kept using Facebook after they graduated from college. We started to realize it was something that was pretty universal.

Q: Did you ever have a scaling issue?
A: Yeah. We limited growth in the beginning because we didn’t have money. As we got more money we’d rent more servers for $85 a month. When we first took money we decided the biggest thing we could do was accelerating user growth. When economy when south we decided to get cash-flow positive. We got around lots of problems early on but limited growth on purpose. Some of the stuff like photos was pretty crazy. With photos there was a 2 month period where people weren’t sleeping much in the company. That was kind of crazy.

Q: What have you learned about running a big company?
A: Not clear that I’ve learned much (joking). Tech companies when they’re small can move so much faster. It’s been reinforced for us how much we need to keep moving really fast even as we get big. Otherwise inertia slows thing down. Last time at Startup School. People tell you “you can’t do this, there’s all this stuff you have to know”. My message last time was that no, don’t let those people tell you that. I think it was taken out of context that I don’t value experience at all. I think a lot of you are here because you want to take your shot at something and build something.

—
open to questions
—

Q: We know so much about people’s history because of Facebook. I want to know how you’ll make this available to people 2000 years from now. It’s just bits. How will anyone know what we were up to when it’s all digital.
A: I like to pride myself on thinking pretty long term, but not that long term. So you win. Marc Andreessen told me a long time ago when he was Netscape Microsoft had longer time horizon which helped them win. Back to your question. We feel we’re part of this movement to become more open. I think a lot of companies have this sense of purpose, but that might not be forever. Microsoft just released Windows 7. How much innovation is happening with operating systems? There was a huge period of time where the OS innovation was most important. Now I think pushing more opening is going to be most important. I think the answer to your question, if tech stays strong people will be building comapnies to take this into a long time in the future.

Q: One of the stories I heard about you was when you made changes. You were reported as saying “the most disruptive companies do what they need to do. What was behind that rationale”
A: One saying we say a lot is the biggest risk you can take is to take no risk. In evolving world if you don’t change you will lose. Change is really disruptive for people especially when it’s a web service, people aren’t opting in to the change. On a website you don’t want to keep forking your code. You want to push people to use one version. When I was talking before about making the company move quickly. I’ve heard values are worthless unless they’re controversial. We’re willing to give up a lot to make sure we can move quickly. We want to have one code base (we did Facebook Lite, which was a bunch of Y Combinator folks who did that).

Q: Can you talk what it’s like in order to speak publicly so people don’t pounce on you? Seems like you’ve changed since 2006.
A: Have I not said enough offense stuff? Is this less interesting?
Q: Yeah… probably less interesting (oooooh from the crowd)
A: Maybe we need more controversial questions.

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

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Startup School: An Interview With Mark Zuckerberg

Hopefully you just read Michael’s post about Why Desktop Touch Screens Don’t Really Work Well For Humans. The answer is so simple that a lot of people overlook it: No one wants to hold their hands at monitor-level all the time, you’d get tired very quickly. If you’re looking for a quick answer as to why many touch screens like the TouchSmart line haven’t seen success in the past, that’d be it. But that’s not good enough. We need a solution, because as much as some people would like to hold on to the past, we’re not going to be using a keyboard and mouse forever to interact with computers.

Certainly, having a touch screen computer that sits at an angle like an architect’s desk is one solution. The issue there is that you need the screen to be big enough so that your hands don’t completely obstruct what you’re doing. Hopefully Microsoft will unveil some version of the Surface that works like that. But another potential solution comes by way of a brilliant concept video for something called 10/GUI.

If you haven’t seen this demo before, you should watch it (below). It brings up some key issues surrounding the future of touch input from both a hardware and software perspective. 10/GUI’s solution is to create a multi-touch pad that lays on your desk in the area that a keyboard or mouse would. You then use this pad to interact with the monitor in front of you, just as you would with the more traditional methods of input.

The key difference is that rather than have one cursor on the screen, you potentially have ten (one for each finger). While all your fingers could be resting on the screen, a “click” would not occur until you applied pressure from one or many of your fingers. The result is pretty cool — manipulating the user interface in a way not completely unlike the computer interaction in Minority Report (which is still my ultimate dream), though not three dimensional, of course.

But 10/GUI realizes that using this touch technology still may not be ideal for manipulating current computer operating systems. Specifically, the idea of the window-based interface becomes less ideal as you add more and more windows. 10/GUI’s solution is something called Con10uum, which is basically a linear way to organize windows. When matched with some of the multi-touch gestures, the system seems to make some sense.

Of course, then you get into a whole different game. Companies are already scooping up patents on different multi-touch gestures left and right. For example, here are some of the ones that BumpTop has for its system. Apple has others. Microsoft undoubtedly has some of its own too. It’s beyond ridiculous that you can patent a gesture, and this could lead to real issues in the future if multi-touch computing does take off. Nevertheless, that’s where we are.

Again, 10/GUI is just a concept created by R. Clayton Miller. You can read more about it here.

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

[thanks Basti and Daniel]

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

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

10/GUI: One Very Slick Desktop Multi-Touch Concept (Video)

Google’s ‘unexplained phenomenon’ is generating lots of buzz this weekend. The company had done nothing but change its logo to a variant where one of the two O’s in its name was seemingly being abducted by an alien spaceship and tweet out a cryptic message that was translated “All Your O are belong to us,” a play on the good old “All your base are belong to us” meme. But it sure got people talking.

The Telegraph thought it had solved the mystery, but Andrew Healey begged to differ and offered multiple alternative answers and why they were all wrong. Search Engine Land editor Danny Sullivan got a vague statement from Google about the whole ordeal which mentioned an update would be coming in the following weeks.

This statement and the translated version of the Google Korea blog post about it (thanks GoogleUnexplainedPhenomenon.com) led us and many others to believe this is likely the first of a series of hints that Google will be using to provide clues to a puzzle.

And TechCrunch reader x pete offered a really good lead in the comments of our earlier post that could well have solved the mystery early.

Check out the website for the O Campaign, which is a “non-profit campaign forging alliances between the public, academia, corporations, and institutions in effort to efficiently channel resources for high-paced development of cutting-edge research in cancer prevention”. Looks like something Google would be involved with, right?

Now check out who is co-directing this admirable campaign: Thalas’ Joseph James Jung, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philantropist who currently spends his time collaborating with chief executives and boards of selected companies, universities and organizations. The first company that gets mentioned in his bio? You guessed it: Google.

Is this the explanation for the unexplained phenomenon and will Google be symbolically donating one of the letters of its company name to the campaign? Or just another wild stab in the dark?

The truth is out there, and we’re clearly not the only ones looking for it.

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

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Is This The Real Answer To Google’s ‘Unexplained Phenomenon’…

Seriously, these never get old. An enterprising soul has tonight re-created the pivotal Hitler scene from the movie Downfall, but done so with subtitles explaining why Hilter is so mad that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed.

This meme seems be done for just about everything on the web these days, but this one is particularly good because it’s full of good insider-y references. And it closely echoes some of the actual backlash against the news today which played out on FriendFeed.

Among the choice lines:

• “It was a complete talent grab.”
• “I even remember what it was like before Robert Scoble got here!”
• “I used FriendFeed to argue about Obama and talk about health care, and to like tons of pictures from NASA that were awesome, not to spend my time posting pictures of bacon and talking about mangoes!”
• “Of all the companies, they went with Facebook. They could’ve been acquired by Google and I would’ve been happy for them. Or even Twitter: That I could understand. But Facebook?! What the hell?!”
• “Don’t worry, we still have Plurk.”

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

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Video: Hitler Is Not Pleased About Facebook’s Acquisition Of…

AT&T has made even more people than usual angry when it started blocking/filtering parts of 4chan late last night. The popular message board, famous for being able to brew online (and offline) shitstorms like no other web property could, saw portions of its publication - including /r9k/ and the infamous /b/ - blocked for AT&T customers across the United States. Quickly enough, there was a lot of rallying going on, with 4chan members and fans virtually gathering to plot digital riots and all-round mayhem.

An update on the situation as of 8 AM Eastern Time: access to 4chan has apparently been restored, with AT&T reportedly confirming the hours-long block of portions of the site, “following the practices of their policy department.”

AT&T went on to say that they contacted (or at least attempted to contact) the owners of 4chan, which Moot vehemently denies. AT&T told CentralGadget that they have specific reasons why they blocked these parts of the site, but they would not disclose them, further stating that they have requested specific things and changes from 4chan’s owners to which they have failed to comply.

Meanwhile, 4chan is apparently under DDoS attack, supposedly because of the attention the site has been getting for the past 12 hours. The site is sometimes down, sometimes up but very slow, according to various reports. Note that this is not AT&T’s responsibility and quite possibly even the reason for the company to have made the dangerous decision of restricting access to the message board in the first place.

Updates coming, including some of the actions taken by 4chan members and friends to retaliate.

Update 1: this thread on Digg (760 votes and counting) pointed to a now-removed fake article at CNN’s iReport about the death of AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson.

Update 2: there’s pledge up at ThePoint to boycott AT&T and cancel the Internet service with them.

Update 3: YouTube alert

Update 4: an announcement on the Project AT&T forum reads: “All rioting/’war’/protests have been suspended for the time being.”

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

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Shitstorm Averted? AT&T Restores Access To 4chan (Which Is Now Under…

Human powered search startup ChaCha has been good for so many chuckles over the last few years. One of their investors called them as disruptive as Google, for example. Another time we posted their answer to a question about what time a show in Seattle opened its doors (trust me, you’ll love the answer, which I have also embedded in this post). We’ve just generally picked on this company incessantly - see our posts here, start from the bottom and work up.

So when I saw an email from the company’s PR person this evening, I had high hopes to be entertained. They didn’t let me down.

“ChaCha Funding” read the subject line. One thing this company hasn’t failed at is raising large amounts of cash - maybe as much as $58 million. In the email they ask me if we’d like exclusive funding news, so long as we only talk to them. I said sure but went ahead and looked up the funding filing on the SEC website anyway (they raised $4 million). But the best part was their almost immediate response letting me know that they no longer wanted to talk. This entire exchange, from offer to acceptance to revocation of the offer, took 27 minutes.

So there you have it. ChaCha has raised another $4 million from some investor or investors. Whoever it is, we may never know.

From: “”
Date: July 23, 2009 8:36:28 PM PDT
To: “Michael Arrington”
Subject: RE: ChaCha Funding

ChaCha was informed they cannot make this funding news public in accordance with rules regarding public disclosure. I’m sorry, the company will not be speaking with any media about its filing.

From: Michael Arrington
Sent: Thu 7/23/2009 11:31 PM
To:
Subject: Re: ChaCha Funding

Ok

On Jul 23, 2009, at 8:01 PM, “” wrote:

Today ChaCha filed form D with the SEC, closing additional funding.
I will be able to provide you with more information about this round
EXCLUSIVELY in exchange that TechCrunch only publish news from
sources at ChaCha, as opposed to other third parties.

Would you be interested in receiving the funding news?

Best,

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

ChaCha Never Lets Me Down, Even When They Let Me Down. They Raise $4…