On the heels of announcing a payments partnership with Facebook, PlaySpan is making another announcement regarding the startup’s UltimatePay payments product. PlaySpan is launching UltimatePay Mobile, a virtual currency and micropayments monetization widget for smartphone platforms. The initial private beta launch will support Android phones and Nokia phones with WebRuntime installed.

UltimatePay is a ‘Monetization as a Service’ platform for apps, games, videos and digital goods. Based on the user’s location, the payments platform draws from over 85 different payment options. Because of its vast variety of payment options (which include PayPal, pre-paid cards, and a number of credit cards), UltimatePay is designed for a global audience.

UltimatePay Mobile gives smartphone developers a way to deliver a one-click payment experience to mobile gamers, and provide a comprehensive payments offering. The platform allows players to view their balance and transaction history, while allowing them to purchase items in-app without ever having to leave the game.

Of course, PlaySpan isn’t the first startup or company to bring in-app payments to Android phones; PayPal, Boku and Zong all offer in-app payments libraries to developers.

PlaySpan, which recently raised $18 million in new funding, already has a number of partnerships with a number of gaming and media companies, including Ubisoft, Sanrio and others. Perhaps the company can leverage some of these relationships to offer UltimatePay in publisher’s mobile games.

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PlaySpan’s Ultimate Pay Brings In-App Mobile Payments To Android…

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.

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

Finding parking in near concerts or sports events can be an incredibly frustrating task. Because of the event, the cost to park in lots near the stadium or venue can be exorbitant. Plus, lots can fill up fast. Enter ParkWhiz, a Chicago-based startup that allows customers to reserve parking on the fly.

Via a web app and a newly launched mobile HTML5 website, ParkWhiz allows you to reserve parking near concert and event venues in the U.S. ParkWhiz partners with parking lot owners, which range from people who own a single space to large parking management companies, across the country to list their inventory on ParkWhiz.

So far, ParkWhiz has partnered with 300 participating parking locations in over 25 cities in the U.S. Currently, ParkWhiz currently offers parking reservations near Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, AT&T Park, Cowboys Stadium, Madison Square Garden, Busch Stadium, US Cellular Field, Orpheum Theatre, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Beacon Theater, plus 17 airports around the country.

For example, ParkWhiz just helped park over 400 cars (who paid on average of $40 per parking spot) for the Paul McCartney concert at AT&T Park last week in San Francisco. ParkWhiz’s CEO and co-founder Aashish Dalal says the startup has also started to serve coupons for restaurants and bars (in neighborhoods nearby the event space) with parking reservations.

In terms of pricing, there is no fee to list a parking space on the site; ParkWhiz collects a fee only if a reservation is made and handles payment processing for the parking vendors. Generally, the user has to pay 10 percent customer convenience fee to ParkWhiz in addition to parking price, and ParkWhiz will also take a 15 percent cut from the base rate from the parking vendors. In a year, the site has already taken 50,000 reservations, with the goal of hittig 100,000 resetvations by the end of the year.

Of course, ParkWhiz isn’t the first company to use technology to try to solve the problem of finding parking. Car Harbor allows you to rent your parking space, and there are a number of iPhone apps to aim to solve the same problem including Spotswitch and Primospot. Even Google is getting into the parking game, recently launching Open Spot, an Android app that shows you a map with nearby open parking spots marked with colored dots.

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ParkWhiz Is The OpenTable For Parking Spots

OExchange, a simple specification for URL-based content sharing on the Web, was introduced today by a number of online service providers and social networks. The open link-sharing protocol has gained support from Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Digg, Instapaper, StumbleUpon, Clearspring Technologies and a handful more.

So what’s it all about?

OExchange essentially establishes a common way for services like Posterous and Google Buzz to receive content. The protocol defines how third-party tools, e.g. Clearspring’s bookmarking and sharing service AddThis, can dynamically discover and share content to these services, as well as how sharing tools can read and set a user’s sharing preferences.

A number of these services, like Google Buzz and Instapaper, have already implemented the protocol, which together with others such as OpenID and OAuth intends to making sharing content on the Web completely open. OExchange is licensed under the Open Web Foundation Agreement – you can get the specs here.

Chris Messina, Open Web Advocate at Google, has this to say about the new protocol:

“The key to increasing the amount and quality of sharing online is smoothing out the user interaction. By simplifying the underlying mechanism for cross-site sharing with OExchange, people can focus on what they’re sharing, rather than how.”

Do you agree that there’s a need for an open URL sharing protocol (which companies like Twitter and Facebook seem to doubt, since they’re not supporting it)?

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Open URL Sharing Protocol OExchange Gets Support From Google,…

Online collaboration tool Wiggio has raised $2.1 million in Series A financing, led by New Atlantic Ventures.

Founded in late 2008, the Cambridge-based company allows users to create online work groups where members can share calendars and files, host web conferences, conduct group polls, and send texts and voice messages. According to CEO Dana Lampert, a large portion of the new funds will be used on Wiggio’s mobile initiatives: the company is on track to roll out a mobile version of its website in mid-June and native apps for the iPhone, Android and Blackberry by mid-summer of this year. The mobile options will have all the functionality of the original site with the exception of video conferencing.

Since its 2009 launch, the free service has attracted 350,000 users and 750 schools. While a variety of small businesses and non-profits are using Wiggio, the company has focused on its core demographic: the college market.

Its user base is relatively modest compared to its larger rivals, like Yammer (which has more than 600,000 users) and Basecamp, but Wiggio is on a steady growth path— in the last 6 months the user base has grown roughly 43%.  Lampert says he plans to expand and diversify the user base by increasing the company’s marketing budget and aggressively courting high school and small business groups.

That enterprise community will be critical as Wiggio shifts from a free to freemium model. Next month, the company plans to release a “pro” version that will include new features like increased customization, security upgrades, hourly back-ups and possibly a new tool that will help groups find the best time to schedule events (Lampert hints that it will be something akin to Doodle’s service).

Currently, Wiggio’s monetization scheme is a bit fuzzy— or at least fluid. The company has not set a price for the “pro” package and is still crafting a strategy for advertising on its website. Since it has a variety of groups, Wiggio hopes to created targeted ads tailored to the user’s market. The hope, says Lampert, is to be profitable by early 2011.

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Wiggio Raises $2.1 Million, Prepares For Mobile Launch And Profits…

Online video streaming is great. But when it comes to zoning out in front of a flashing screen to kill a few hours, TV has it beat by a long shot — building an interesting playlist of YouTube videos simply requires too much effort. Nowmov, a Y Combinator startup that’s launching today, is looking to change that: visit the site, and you’ll find an endless stream of (hopefully) compelling YouTube clips — no brainpower required. The site has already built up an impressive roster of angel investors, including Jeff Clavier, Paul Buchheit, Shervin Pishevar, Ron Conway, Charles River Ventures, and Ashton Kutcher.

Nowmov’s site is very, very simple, at least from the user’s perspective. As soon as you browse to Nowmov.com, the site will begin playing a YouTube video. Move your mouse and you’ll see a basic set of controls that let you pause the video, jump to the next clip, and share the video you’re watching with friends (the site supports keyboard commands, so you can just tap your arrow keys to jump between clips). But for the most part, you shouldn’t really need these controls — the whole point of Nowmov is that you can lay back as if you were watching TV, without having to figure out what you want to watch next. Nowmov uses some trickery on the frontend to reduce loading times, so even when you do decide to skip to the next clip there isn’t a jarring pause.

Nowmov decides which videos to play by analyzing the Twitter public timeline and looking for commonly shared YouTube links (in the future, the site plans to use other sources to gauge popularity, and will also draw video from sites other than YouTube). For now the site isn’t doing any personalized recommendations — it constantly updates its playlist and uses cookies to ensure that you don’t see the same clip twice, but there isn’t an algorithm that learns which videos you like. That will change in a future version, when the site plans to produce personalized channels of content (think of it as a Pandora for videos).

The team has quite a bit of experience with video.  Two of the company’s co-founders  — Thomas Pun and James Black — were longtime Apple engineers working on video encoding and processing; the third, David Kelso, was a technical founder at two startups before this.

There’s definitely a need for this, but Nowmov isn’t the first startup that’s trying to solve it. ffwd has also tried to turn Internet video into a channel-surfing experience, and Magma is focused on video curation, though it isn’t really a  ’lean-back’ site. And YouTube is always trying to bolster its own recommendation algorithms to keep people watching.

Interesting sidenote: Ashton Kutcher is actually directly responsible for this site existing; the Nowmov guys were considering working on another idea until Kutcher told Y Combinator founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston that he wanted something like this. Kutcher decided to invest in and advise the startup, and Nowmov became a reality.

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YC-Funded Nowmov: Sit Back, Relax, And Watch An Endless Stream Of…

As I wrote about back in February, ManageTwitter is easily one of the most useful third-party Twitter services out there. While there are plenty of services that help you find new people to follow, there simply aren’t enough that help you prune those that you already follow. For those of us who have been using the service for years now, and have accumulated a lot of people we follow over that time, this is a problem. ManageTwitter solves it brilliantly. And now Twitter is going to kill them.

As the service posted on its Posterous blog yesterday, Twitter has sent the service an email letting them know that they’re breaking one of their rules. Specifically, this is what Twitter wrote:

We’re writing to let you know that your application, ManageTwitter, breaks our Automation Rules and Best Practices (http://help.twitter.com/entries/76915). Specifically, it facilitates bulk automated user unfollowing, which is not allowed. It’s best for both our users and your users if your application follows the rules, so please make the necessary changes, such as removing the “Select All” option (and requiring users to decide on each user individually) to bring your application into compliance.

The problem is that ManageTwitter’s service isn’t automated at all. It simply offers up suggestions for who you should unfollow. As ManageTwitter writes:

Yes our application does facilitate bulk unfollowing BUT ManageTwitter does not facilitate any *automated* bulk unfollowing, the user has to filter based on criteria. The user is still required to do significant processing to unfollow groups of people. Furthermore the system only allows unfollowing of up to only 100 at a time.

They go on to note that they understand Twitter’s rule, but again, do not believe they are breaking it. It’s possible that the portion Twitter doesn’t like is that the checkboxes next to usernames are automatically selected for deletion (I don’t particularly like this either because most users — even many of the ones they suggest — I don’t want to unfollow) — and if so, that’s an easy fix. I have an email into Twitter asking them if that would be good enough and will update when I hear back.

I can certainly see Twitter not approving of the name for trademark reasons — but they’re apparently not disputing that at the moment, just the bulk unfollow bit.

Or maybe Twitter just doesn’t like the fact that ManageTwitter has managed to help 35,000 users unfollow nearly 6 million people on the service. I can’t imagine any social network would like a third-party service changing the social graph in such a way. But again, this service is very useful to many users, and I believe makes Twitter better — even if it is slightly less connected.

ManageTwitter is asking that you retweet this tweet in support of them.

[Thanks Courtenay]

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6 Million Unfollows Later, Twitter Moves To Silence ManageTwitter

3Crowd a startup that provides management tools for cloud-based services, has raised $6.62 million in Series A financing from Canaan Partners and Storm Ventures. The startup previously raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding from investors, including Jay Adelson, Kevin Rose, Storm Ventures, and Greenwich Technology Associates.

Founded by BitGravity co-founder Barrett Lyon, 3Crowd’s management tools give enterprises greater controls over content delivery and other cloud services, enabling them to use multiple services at once.

3Crowd, which recently launched, help users manage their content across multiple CDNs (content delivery systems) at the same time, using rule sets to determine which CDNs should be tapped depending on variables like the user’s location and which content they’re accessing. The product also looks to make it easy to actually deploy your content to these CDNs — you have to create the account with the CDN, but 3Crowd can then walk you through a wizard to get things going.

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3Crowd Raises $6.6 Million For Cloud Management Tools

For all the credit Facebook has received for its privacy controls and user safety, the site still falls prey to an unsettling number of security issues and potential data breaches. Last month a botched code push accidentally revealed private user email addresses, and before that Facebook accidentally sent private messages to the wrong recipients. Today, security engineer Joey Tyson, AKA theharmonyguy, has detailed a major security hole in Facebook Platform — one that would allow a malicious website to silently access a user’s profile information, photos, and in some cases, messages and wall posts, with no action required on the user’s part.

The exploit, which we’ve confirmed has now been patched, could hijack the session of a previously authorized  third party Facebook application and invisibly pass it off to a malicious app. In his proof-of-concept, Tyson embedded Farmville in an invisible frame on his site. He then used some trickery with Facebook Platform parameters to pass all access rights Farmville had on to a malicious data harvesting application. In short, any of the many millions of people who had previously installed Farmville and visited the apparently benign proof-of-concept site would have their data invisibly harvested. If the user had granted Farmville additional permissions to access their Wall or messages, then the malicious app would have them too. Tyson only used Farmville in this instance because of its massive install base, but he could have used any other third party app.

Fortunately, Tyson doesn’t have reason to believe this exploit has been abused, stating “It’s unlikely that any real-world attacks used this particular vulnerability, and I certainly have no record of such a case.” But he also notes that it may have existed for a year or longer.

Further, Tyson thinks that Facebook still has problems with the way Platform is set up that expose it to vulnerabilities like this:

I commend Facebook for responding quickly to this issue and for being open to white-hat security reports. But in my opinion, this vulnerability is simply the latest reminder that the Facebook Platform can open users to many problems quite separate from the security of Facebook itself. I personally think that aspects of the Platform’s implementation fail to match user expectations of privacy, as I’ve discussed previously. And while this particular problem may be solved, vulnerabilities in specific applications and the nature of application access continue to put private data at risk of unwanted disclosure.

For more technical details on how the exploit worked, check out Tyson’s post. Tyson has written quite a few other articles detailing flaws with Facebook security, including his Month of Facebook Bugs (he notes that some of these have since been fixed).

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Researcher Uncovers (Another) Major Facebook Security Exploit

A quick glance at that render we'd obtained of the rumored MOTOSPLIT had us thinking we were seeing a large, Sholes-style phone with a musclebound OMAP3 core, but hold up -- maybe this is a lower-end (and stranger) phone than we'd originally thought. Android Community has gotten tipped with additional details and another supposed render of the handset, and the most notable tidbit here seems to be that the phone is said to use dynamic key labels (a la Samsung Alias 2) to let the user pull out a single side as a numeric keypad or both sides (hence the "SPLIT" in the name) for full QWERTY action. In the QWERTY configuration, there's apparently a kickstand around back that would help you set the phone on a desk and type with all the ease of the world's smallest netbook cocked at an awkward 45-degree angle.

The wisdom and usability of this kind of setup remains a huge question mark, but the bigger question mark might be inside the phone itself: we're hearing here that the MOTOSPLIT would use the same core as the Backflip, an old-school Qualcomm MSM7201A. Frankly that seems unlikely at best -- virtually every Qualcomm-powered midrange smartphone to be introduced in 2010 from here on out will be using an MSM7227 or 7627 (including Moto's own Devour), so we're going to cautiously assume this particular piece of the intel is incorrect. Please let it be incorrect, Motorola, we beg of you.

Motorola MOTOSPLIT to have dynamic key labels, lame processor? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink SlashGear  |  Android Community  | Email this | Comments

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Motorola MOTOSPLIT to have dynamic key labels, lame processor?

Could IBM be prepping more of its own location-aware technology and devices? According to a recent patent filing, it looks like it. On Thursday, Big Blue filed for a patent for a “method and system for location-aware authorization.” The inventors appear to be IBM engineers based in Rome, Italy.

According to the filing, the technology would provide a method and technology to control access to a device based on the location of that device. IBM gave the example of a company that only wanted employees to use a particular device in the office or their home and believe that their technology would allow the employer to control where the particular device can be accessed.

Here’s an excerpt from the filing:

The invention provides a method and system for location-aware authorization such as for electronic devices (e.g., mobile electronic devices). One embodiment involves authorizing access to a standalone system such as a mobile device, by collecting user credentials on the device for authentication, obtaining location information (e.g., geographical position) for the device from a locating module such as a satellite navigation module attached to the device, accessing profile authorization information for authenticating the user based on the user credentials and device location information (localization), authorizing access to the device by the user if the profiled authorization settings match the credentials and the position of the device.

Talk about GPS-lockdown.  In an age of mobile workers and telecommuters, such a product might be more of a hindrance than a help for most organizations.  But I could see putting something like that on servers or machines with super-sensitive data that are not supposed to leave the premises.  The big question looms: what will Big Blue, which reported strong earnings for 2009 this past week, do with this technology?

Thanks for the tip Anand S.

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Patent Watch: IBM Figures Out How To Limit Device Access By…

It’s about 9:45 am Paris time here at the sixth annual Le Web conference. Kicking things off is Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, who just launched his new startup, a mobile payment platform and service called Square, talking with Le Web’s Loic Le Meur. There are 2,300 registered attendees at the event, the most ever, and it looks like most of them have jammed themselves into the main floor to see Dorsey talk.

The audience is eating this up. A large screen next to the stage is showing real time tweets related to the talk, and a new one is popping up every second or faster.

Dorsey is kicking things off talking about his initial vision for Twitter (our first post). “I knew the concept was huge,” he said on stage. “The hardest part of any idea is getting started.”

Dorsey says he’s been surprised by the velocity of growth, and the ways that users have changed it – retweets, @mentions, hashtags, etc., were all invented by users.

Jack’s now giving the audience one of the first live demo’s of his new startup, Square (see here for a video of our demo). Square lets users make payments over a mobile phone, starting with the iPhone. The hardware will be given away for free, he says.

Funny enough, the demo isn’t working properly, although Loic says it worked perfectly back stage. Dorsey switched from wifi to Orange’s mobile network and the payment went right through.

Dorsey is highlighting the social aspects of the service. A picture of the payer pops up if they’re a registered user, adding security to the transaction.

The service is in limited beta, says Dorsey. And a number of retailers around the U.S. are accepting payments via Square.

Dorsey says the service will go live for all next year, hopefully by March. He also responded to a question I asked about Apple’s explorations into this space – they will become a direct competitor. Dorsey says they’re focused on the user experience, getting people in without contracts, merchant accounts, etc. Apple is doing things differently.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Le Web Kicks Things Off With Jack Dorsey

The types of marketing offers (we refer to them more descriptively as scams) that have plagued ecommerce sites like Intelius are now facing U.S. government scrutiny. These scams are kissing cousins to the Scamville social gaming offers that we’ve written about recently.

Next week the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation will hold a full committee hearing on Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and their Impact on American Consumers. This expands on a committee investigation into the marketing practices of a number of firms that supply these offers to partners.

They could sell tickets to this thing. I’d pay good money to be there.

Last week sixteen companies that conduct sales over the Internet were sent letters requesting information about their relationships with the three marketing companies being investigated by the panel – Vertrue, Webloyalty and Affinion.

The companies that received letters: 1-800-FLOWERS.com, AirTran Holdings Inc. (AAI), Classmates Online Inc., Continental Airlines Inc. ( CAL), FTD, Fandango Inc., Hotwire Inc., Intelius Inc., MovieTickets.com Inc., Orbitz, Pizza Hut, priceline.com, Redcats USA, Shutterfly Inc. (SFLY), US Airways Group Inc. (LCC) and Vistaprint USA Inc.

Adaptive Marketing, which works with Intelius, is a subsidiary of Vertrue. We outlined how these offers mislead consumers into agreeing to unwanted credit card subscriptions here.

Immediately after an ecommerce transaction takes place, buyers are presented with an offer to take a survey and/or get a partial rebate on their purchase. If they click yes, their credit card information is transferred to the ecommerce company and the user begins a difficult-to-terminate subscription to a worthless service.

Ecommerce sites that use these types of offers can get CPMs for the ads ranging from $2,000 – $2,500, say experts we’ve spoken with, and they make up a material percentage of revenue.

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

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Next Week: U.S. Senate Committee Hearing On Aggressive Internet Sales…

Last weekend I wrote about how the big social gaming companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on Facebook and MySpace through games like Farmville and Mobsters. Major media can’t stop applauding the companies long enough to understand what’s really going on with these games. The real story isn’t the business success of these startups. It’s the completely unethical way that they are going about achieving that success.

In short, these games try to get people to pay cash for in game currency so they can level up faster and have a better overall experience. Which is fine. But for users who won’t pay cash, a wide variety of “offers” are available where they can get in-game currency in exchange for lead gen-type offers. Most of these offers are bad for consumers because it confusingly gets them to pay far more for in-game currency than if they just paid cash (there are notable exceptions, but the scammy stuff tends to crowd out the legitimate offers). And it’s also bad for legitimate advertisers.

The reason why I call this an ecosystem is that it’s a self-reinforcing downward cycle. Users are tricked into these lead gen scams. The games get paid, and they plow that money back into Facebook and MySpace in advertising, getting more users. Who are then monetized via lead gen scams. That money is then plowed back into Facebook and MySpace in advertising to get more users…

Here’s the really insidious part: game developers who monetize the best (and that’s Zynga) make the most money and can spend the most on advertising. Those that won’t touch this stuff (Slide and others) fall further and further behind. Other game developers have to either get in on the monetization or fall behind as well. Companies like Playdom and Playfish seem to be struggling with their conscience and are constantly shifting their policies on lead gen.

The games that scam the most, win.

And some users aren’t dumb, either. For every user who gets tricked into some fake mobile subscription, there’s another who can beat the system. That’s where the legitimate advertisers, like Netflix and Blockbuster, get hit. Users sign up for a free trial with a credit card, get their game currency, then cancel the membership and start over. Netflix has a policy of only paying for a user once. But game developers use a complex set of partner chains to launder these leads and try to get them through for payment. Netflix sees an overall lowering of quality and pays less for leads. Game developers, desperate to monetize, then search for ever more questionable offers to make up the difference. In the end, the decent advertisers are out, and only the worst of the worst remain.

Left alone, the system really will slide into a full blown disaster. The platforms (Facebook and MySpace) are in a position to regulate this, and even have rules prohibiting some scams. But those rules are routinely ignored by developers, and are rarely enforced by Facebook and MySpace.

There can be only one reason Facebook and MySpace turn a blind eye to user protection – they’re getting such a huge cut of revenue back from these developers in advertising. If they turn off the spigot, they hurt themselves.

Zynga may be spending $50 million a year on Facebook advertising alone, fueled partially by lead gen scams. Wonder how Facebook got to profitability way ahead of schedule? It was a surge in this kind of advertising. The money looks clean – it’s from Zynga, Playfish, Playdom and others. But a large portion of it is coming from users who’ve been tricked into one scam or another.

And recent moves by Facebook to shut down application spam only make the problem worse in some way – game developers have to spend more money on advertisers to get users now that the viral channels are shut down. That means the games have to monetize even better. Which means more scams.

It’s time for this to stop. Facebook and MySpace need to create and enforce rules against it so that game developers aren’t tempted to get a competitive edge by scamming users. And if Facebook/MySpace won’t protect users, then the government will have to step in.

There’s an easy way to determine if something is a scam or not. For any particular offer, ask yourself if anyone would buy the product or service if the terms were clearly spelled out for them, and they weren’t being bribed with in-game currency. The answer for many of these is a resounding “no.” A few examples are below.

Examples Of Scams:

A typical scam: users are offered in game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey. Four simple questions are asked. The answers are irrelevant. When the user gets to the last question they are told their results will be text messaged to them. They are asked to enter in their mobile phone number, and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they’ve done that, they’ve just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription. Tatto Media is the company at the very end of the line on most mobile scams, and they flow it up through Offerpal, SuperRewards and others to the game developers.

As you can see in the image below, nothing in the offer says that the user will be billed $10/month forever for a useless service.

Another scam: Video Professor. Users are offered in game currency if they sign up to receive a free learning CD from Video Professor. The user is told they pay nothing except a $10 shipping charge. But the fine print, on a different page from checkout, tells them they are really getting a whole set of CDs and will be billed $189.95 unless they return them. Most users never return them because they don’t know about the extra charge. Woot. Again, sites like Offerpal and SuperRewards flow these offers through to game developers. See here for more on the Video Professor scam.

Of course, there’s no mention of any of these payments in the offer itself:

An Industry In Denial

Yesterday I attended the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco. In the Q&A session of one panel I asked Offerpal CEO Anu Shukla to explain the ethics of her business, and outlined my ecosystem of hell argument above. Shukla went on a tirade, calling my points “shit, doubleshit, and bullshit” (yes, really), but never really addressed the points. A video of the exchange is below, care of Alexa Lee.

Offerpal now has a blog post up on the exchange, but they still don’t address the issues. They offer misdirection, denials and a shield of rules that are never actually enforced.

Sadly, most of the audience of game developers was on Offerpal’s side. Many of these developers see quick dollars with lead gen scams and they don’t really care about how users are affected.

In one session earlier in the day, IGG Cofounder Kevin Xu recommended that game developers “get users in the door to play free, then monetize the hell out of them once they’re hooked.” Sadly, it’s simply human nature to push the rules until they break. It’s time for Facebook and MySpace to protect their users from this stuff and make sure it stops.

p.s. – An interesting development. Offerpal defended their mobile survey scams on stage and in the blog post referenced above, saying there was no scam involved. But today those offers have quietly been pulled down from all the games I’ve checked. If there’s no scam, why remove them? At least some good is coming from my ongoing rants.

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

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Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell

Maybe you’ve read some of the stories this past week about how FriendFeed’s traffic is way down following their sale to Facebook. The stats don’t look good, as the site’s traffic may have plummeted as much as 30% following its peak just prior to the sale. But to anyone who has meaningfully used the site since its inception, you probably didn’t needs stats to tell you what should be obvious: FriendFeed has turned into a ghost town.

One of the most compelling things about FriendFeed has always been just how easy it was to have a conversation on the site. Someone posted an item, and within seconds, many had robust conversation threads updating in the speed of realtime beneath them. This also lead to the occasional trollish activity, but overall it was great.

But since the acquisition, those conversation threads have largely slowed to a crawl, or worse, don’t exist at all on many items. Previously, FriendFeed had committed to keeping the site running indefinitely despite their new jobs at Facebook. And it has remained running, but the site’s innovation, always its key attribute, has been completely halted. And perhaps as a vote of no confidence, previously rabid users are now largely staying away.

And that’s really too bad. One of the key things I used FriendFeed for was to get information. There was a great system in place that would allow interesting things to bubble up based on people commenting on and the liking of items. Not all of it was great (baby pictures, while cute, get in the way of information), but overall the system worked. It was crowd-sourcing at its finest. But that obviously doesn’t work too well when the crowd has vanished.

Sure, there are some items on the site that still garner a good amount of conversation and likes, but as a whole, my experience post-sale has been severely tainted.

So why not just move on to Facebook, you may wonder? Because while there are similarities between what Facebook does and what FriendFeed does, FriendFeed is still much better at it. Hopefully soon we’ll begin seeing the effects of the FriendFeed team at Facebook, but so far that hasn’t happened. It’s still too slow to share, automatically imported items take forever to show up, the filtering system needs work (I want to be able to hide just a certain type of item from one friend, like I can on FriendFeed, rather than hiding everything), as does the relevance of the main stream.

That last item looks like it could be close as it would appear that Facebook Lite’s “View Top Stories” will soon make its way to Facebook proper. That’s a good step, but it’s basically FriendFeed’s “Best of day” area, and doesn’t do something like push recently liked stories to the top of the stream.

But more to the point, Facebook is an entirely different beast than FriendFeed. Facebook is still first and foremost a social network for people you know and want to connect with, FriendFeed was much more about information sharing and conversation. And that’s what I miss. There are plenty of others ways to get information on the web, but FriendFeed was like a playground for information. It was fast and fun.

And the team’s rapid pace of innovation pushed others, like yes, Facebook. Moving over to Facebook obviously didn’t make the FriendFeed team any less brilliant, but I worry about their ability to rapidly innovate in a much larger company, one that has to worry about its legacy of over 300 million users.

This week, one former FriendFeeder already left Facebook. He reasoning was that he didn’t want to telecommute anymore (he lives in Seattle), but he didn’t seem to mind doing it while he was still working on FriendFeed. Read into that what you will.

The bigger picture is that we see this happen all too often. A larger service buys a smaller one and proceeds to run the smaller one into the ground. Not on purpose, but because they have bigger goals for their own products. Google is particularly good at it. Jaiku, Dodgeball, you could even put Feedburner in there. Now we’re seeing Facebook do it too. The users are just along for the ride, helpless when this happens. They take our playground, and put glass on the ground. We can still play, but it’s not as fun. And eventually, everyone leaves with bloody feet — and doesn’t want to come back.

We should consider ourselves lucky that Twitter hasn’t agreed to be purchased yet, it could have very well suffered the same fate.

Look, I’m happy the FriendFeed team was able to get an exit that they clearly felt good about. And I realize that some services, no matter how innovative or how passionate their user base is, sometimes fade away. It’s just sad to see it go. It used to be my playground.

[photo: flickr/Alejandro Hernandez]

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

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

This Used To Be My Playground

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)

This guest post is written by Marcelo Calbucci, the founder and CTO of Sampa — a personal homepage creator that will be shutting down next month. He’s writing a series of posts about the lessons learned from the venture at http://blog.calbucci.com. He’s also the publisher of Seattle 2.0, a web resource for tech entrepreneurs and startups in Seattle.

Consumer startups are tough. You have two basic choices: A paid offering or a free offering (or freemium). If you charge people a penny, you’ll turn off the bulk of your visitors. If you offer free services, you might grow to be the next YouTube, WordPress or Facebook. Most entrepreneurs are not risk-averse and the dream of being big is just too appealing and the majority of us take the “free-route”.

Once you offer something for free, all shades of people will try to benefit from your service. You’d think a service like Sampa with a strong family and baby branding would just repel small business, teenagers, criminals, etc. but that’s not the case at all. And I suspect most blogging services; photo-sharing or web-site building solutions face the exact same issue we did.

Most entrepreneurs and investors will look at data analysis and talk about averages or totals: Averages number of blog posts per user per week, average number of sign-ins per user per month, viral coefficient, total number of active users, etc. Entrepreneurs who are more sophisticated will split their “averages” and “totals” in two or three groups. For example, fixing one of the dimensions into users that sign-in 30 or more times per month (very engaged), between 10 and 29 times per month (engaged), and between 0-9 times per month (on the brink of leaving) and then run the averages and totals for the different groups (e.g. “very engaged users upload 25 pictures/month, engaged users upload 7 pictures/month, etc.”)

Very few startups actually look at demographic and psychographic data as a way to group their users. Primarily, because it’s hard to get gender, age, income, interests and intentions without asking the user, and once you ask them you might just scare them way or get the wrong information.

One time we went to pitch Sampa to a VC in Seattle, and out of the blue he mentions this other startup growing amazingly fast – had nothing to do with our business. After the meeting I went to check the startup website. Their Compete and Alexa growth was just amazing. Their website contained profiles of all users since it was a public social network. So I clicked on the profile of the 20 people featured on their homepage (“most recent users to join”). Of those, about 75% were girls between the age of 9 and 13 – likely the worst demographic to make any revenue from.

Did the startup know about this? Oh, yeah. Did that VC that was looking at investing on them? Likely not.

In the middle of 2008 we decide to do a qualitative analysis of our user base. People of all kinds were creating sites on Sampa. There wasn’t an automated way to know if it was a baby site, a family site, a small business, a technology blog, etc. We looked at more than 300 sites, randomly selected and created a spreadsheet with the category, the demographic of the author (if we could figure out) and we plugged that into our own analytic system to split our averages and totals for each site category. The results sucked!

Just 20% of our users were on the target audience. That meant 80% were not building any kind of family or baby site. Ok, maybe we can live with that. But it turned out that more than 25% were by pre-teens. There are two problems with that: First, It’s actually illegal in the US and most countries to allow a younger than 13-year-old to sign up to your service without parental consent. Second, pre-teens are not a great audience to build an advertising-based business model.

However the data showed an even worse picture. Pre-teens were a quick burning flame. They would come, upload lots of pictures, write lots of blog posts, “bling” their site, invite 20+ friends and they would be completely gone in a month. That behavior skewed our data enough that once we looked at our growth, viral rates, and everything else, our business didn’t look so great.

Being Proactive Can Backfire

Can you force uses to comply with your Terms-Of-Service and still be successful on a UGC service? Yes, you can. Facebook manage to be very aggressive on the enforcement of their TOS, and so did Flickr. However, if you look at most Web 2.0 startups, they are not doing that at all. The most prominent case is YouTube, which allowed copyright infringement on their website and can plot a $1.6B exit based on their “turn a blind eye” strategy.

We didn’t do that at Sampa, and I’m sure we could have seen 2 or 3 times more growth if we had used the same strategy. We proactively removed pre-teens websites. They weren’t easy to find, but every time we found one, we would remove the website and notify the owner she was 12-years-old. They would be mad at us and tell that “Jamie, Emily and Sally also have a website on Sampa”, and we would say thank you and delete all their friends websites too.

We would also proactively delete porn websites. There is nothing wrong with porn. It’s not illegal or immoral in my view, but it didn’t go well with our family-oriented business proposition. Also, most UGC porn sites are infringing in someone else copyright and we just didn’t want to deal with DMCA or lawyers.

We also found criminal websites, from people trying to steal credit-card and passwords to the ugly side of online pedophilia. We had the FBI come over twice to collect evidence.

And let’s not forget link-farms. Although we had CAPTCHA and email confirmation for new websites, every once in a while someone managed to create dozens of websites in a single day all full of links to some bank, real estate agent, mortgage broker, auto dealer, etc. I’m sure the business that were benefiting from it didn’t know they hired a “black-hat” SEO.

Pretty much every Social Network-builder, website builder or content sharing site deals with the same issues we dealt with. A good number of entrepreneurs (and most investors) will be oblivious to those facts and just think that everything is going great and the growth is sustainable and proof they are creating great value and soon will be able to turn a huge profit or to sell for hundreds of millions of dollars, until someone takes the time to figure out what people are using their service for and finds out it’s really not what they thought it was.

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

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

The Little Secret of Web Startups