Davy Tollenaere's blog

Thanksgiving: a displaced Brit writes…

Davy_en — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:54:26 UT

When I first heard about this “Thanksgiving” thing, I thought it sounded like a great idea.

We Brits spend a ridiculous amount of time each day giving thanks to strangers – we say thanks to people who hold doors for us, thanks to people who stop their cars to let us cross the road, thanks to waitresses when they give us our bill; even thanks again when we hand over the money to pay. But apparently you Americans – innovative people that you are – had found a way to streamline the process.

Rather than waste hours each day expressing gratitude, you had decided to compress all of your thank-yous into one annual 24-hour-period of uninterrupted Thanks Giving. Get all that politeness out of the way in one go. An inspired solution, I thought, and one we should copy back home. Hell, we should have a ’sorry’ day too – we’d reclaim weeks of time.

But apparently I’d got the wrong end of the stick. Having consulted Wikipedia, it turns out that today is not about mundane expression of gratitude, but rather about big-ticket Thank-yous. For friends, family, a baby’s laugh, spreadable cheese. Stuff that really makes it a joy to be alive, and living in the home of the brave.

In just under an hour, I’m heading out to my first even Thanksgiving dinner; I gather there will be turkey involved, and sweet potatoes – whatever they might be. And, despite my British cynicism, I’m very excited. But before I go, given that today’s celebrations began with some Brits moving to the USA and giving thanks for its awesomeness, I thought it might be appropriate to share five things – technological and otherwise – that make me… well.. thankful that a few months ago I too decided to make America my new home.

Here goes…

1. Free refills

Seriously, if the Pilgrim Fathers were pleased with their first harvest, they would have shit themselves at the idea of free refills. Back home, a Coke or a coffee means precisely that: one Coke or one coffee. Here it means as much Coke or coffee as it’s humanly possible to drink. And then some. Why you people don’t take hollowed-out false legs with you to diners I will never understand.

2. Getting cool technology first

I still remember the frustration I felt living in London and writing about technology. Every new, cool tech launch: the iPhone, Hulu, the Kindle, full episodes of the Daily Show on demand… had to be prefaced with the words “It’s not available in the UK yet but…”. Even technology we did get – SMS notification for Twitter, say - risked being shut off at a moments notice the moment the math(s) of subsidising a foreign market stopped making sense. Since moving here, my attitude has completely changed. Now I get all the cool stuff first. Screw my fellow countrymen, I’m buying a Droid.

3. Magic ATMs (and banking in general)

Given that the PIN (n)umber – and thus the modern ATM – was invented by a Brit, you’d think our ATMs would lead the world in terms of features and ease of use. Not so. With a few exceptions, British ATMs are capable only of doling out money and/or swallowing our cards. Here they can read cheques – sorry, checks – and tell you when they’re likely to clear! (The fact that no Brit has written a cheque since 1992 is irrelevant) They allow you to transfer money between accounts! They sell stamps! I imagine, if I asked nicely, they would also perform sexual favours. Seriously, America, kudos on the ATMs. (While I’m on the subject of banking – additional kudos for making it easy to open a bank account here. Two forms of photo ID and I was out of Wells Fargo, account details in hand, in less than 20 minutes. Note to fellow Brits: they set up your Internet banking username and password at the same time. I know. Freaking mindblowing.)

4. Double-decker trains

American trains are pretty awesome on their own. Twice as much leg-room as their British counterparts, at less than half the cost. The urban ones run like clockwork, and the cross-country ones are so comically unreliable that it’s always an exciting adventure to use them. A dude in a hat actually says “all aboard!” like in movies! And as if all that wasn’t great enough, you stack two of them on top of each other. Twice the awesome!

5. American women

Ok, I may be biased, given that my last God-knows-how-many girlfriends have been American. But let’s be honest, there’s a reason why iTunes is full of songs like ‘I wish they all could be Californian’ and ‘American Girls’, and yet there’s a conspicuous absence of tracks titled ‘I wish they could all come from Croydon’ or ‘Welsh Girls are great’. (Useful tip, don’t search for that last one on Limewire). Of course American women are – without exception – crazier than a box of Glenn Becks, but somehow that only adds to their charm.

Bonus item: Glenn Beck

Howard Beale from Network, piped into every home (or hotel room) in the land, daily. What’s not to love?

For all of those things – and so much more: thank you, America. And happy Thanksgiving.

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Gillmor Gang: Silverlight v. ChromeOS v. Chatter

Davy_en — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:37:16 UT

The Gillmor Gang convened Wednesday to ponder the last several weeks of events loosely contained in a discussion of the next generation Web operating system. Three major announcements set the table for this Thanksgiving edition: Google’s ChromeOS, Microsoft’s Silverlight 4, and salesforce’s Chatter collaboration platform. The last might be pigeonholed as enterprise Twitter, but Marc Benioff’s position as a central driver of Web Services since the last collaboration shoutout in Y2K suggests there’s more to Chatter than meets the casual social media eye.

This edition sports some familiar longtime Gangsters, including Ziff Davis Enterprise and ITBusinessEdge editor Mike Vizard and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis, who promises not to agree to time limits on his next bets. Alert listeners of the old RSS-bound version of The Gang will recall Calacanis bet a sushi dinner that Google would launch its own OS. I pinned him down to one year, and unfortunately the bet was joined 3 or 4 years ago. Even if you accept the idea that ChromeOS is a real OS, then the next bet might be when Silverlight merges into the new Windows. Robert Scoble says no Silverlight Office for 5 years. I say 2 years tops.

More recent regular Kevin Marks continues to party down on the notion that HTML 5 will hit the mainstream shortly. Kevin sees Microsoft’s announced support for Silverlight video transcoded to Apple streaming format for the iPhone as a validation of HTML5, but there’s no getting around Microsoft’s aggressive use of Silverlight to push the market ahead of HMTL 5’s progress in the video area. Scoble says that’s not Silverlight on the iPhone, but if you combine the video hack with Miguel De Icaza’s Moonlight recompiling hack to iPhone primitives, it adds up to a porting path for Mac, PC, iPhone, and Android. Sounds like another sushi dinner for me. A feast of possibilities to ponder on a happy Thanksgiving Day.

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You In? Yahoo Wants To Help Spread Ripples Of Kindness This

Davy_en — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:17:56 UT

The holiday season is in full swing, and that means it’s time to share some of the comfort we enjoy year round with those who are a little less fortunate — and just to be nicer to people in general. This year, Yahoo is kicking off a drive called You In?, where it invites users worldwide to share their “purple acts of kindness” (purple has long been Yahoo’s official color).

Here’s how Yahoo describes the campaign:

“Help us create a ripple of good around the world with purple acts of kindness. Update your status to share what you’re doing to spread holiday joy, then inspire others to join you by asking, “You in?”

Yahoo! will also be doing our own purple acts of kindness inspired by your updates. So whether you pay for someone’s groceries or drop off a coat for the homeless, you’ll be encouraging people around the world to join in acts of kindness.”

The site revolves around briefly describing your good deed in a Yahoo status message, which is then plotted on a global map. Right now messages include things like “Connie is buying coffee for everyone at work today. You in?” and “Dropped off supplies to the local Humane Society and to the local women’s shelter”. And then there are gems like this one: “I just returned a case of wine that was mistakenly delivered to our house. Husband had to be dragged along w/this decision.”

The site also has a pool of Flickr images that people are using to share their acts of kindness.

It looks like we’ve caught the campaign pretty early on: the site only has 161 updates at this point, and the pool of Flickr images only has a few submissions. It’s hard to knock a do-good campaign like this one, but Yahoo might want to consider integrating Facebook and other social networks so that users can share their updates from other platforms.

Aside from ‘You In?’, Yahoo also runs regular monthly campaigns though its Yahoo For Good program.

Via Khris Loux’s Twitter stream.

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Why Google Wave Sucks, And Why You Will Use It Anyway

Davy_en — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 19:55:37 UT

This guest post was written by Martin Seibert, a German Internet media consultant.

Google Wave is a hot topic at the moment. The ambitious group collaboration and micro-messaging platform started rolling out in beta via an initial batch of 100,000 invitations two months ago. Many people still want invitations. Among those who’ve tried it, some criticize it, some praise it. For now it has a lot of usability problems that are described below. Yes, you should look at Google Wave. But there is no need to desperately long for an invitation yet.

Nevertheless, this post outlines how you’ll probably use Google Wave in the future and also gives you advice on how to implement it in your company or your team of coworkers. It also reveals some big usability problems in the current version. Those issues aside, I would like to show you the advantages of the “wave” once again and describe some cool use cases that might make you love it at some point in the future.

Introduction to Google Wave

If you don’t know the wave yet, you might want to see this movie:

Advantages of Google Wave

Innovative interface

The user interface of Google Wave breaks new ground and yet is not unfamiliar as its layout resembles the inbox of your mail application. The timeline that lets you recap how the wave has evolved and changed since your last visit is something that even wikis don’t have today—a feature that will surely be copied extensively in the future due to its intuitive usability.
Waves activate participants to contribute

Furthermore, the user interface motivates further contributions to the wave. This is an excellent way to convince a lot of people to participate.
Real-time collaboration

It is a completely new experience to actually see your friends, colleagues and contacts type in and change content in real time. No other application apart from a few client-side chat tools currently offers such a service via a web interface. If you’re a tech geek, you’ll love that part of Google Wave. It is a powerful innovation when it comes to real-time communication and collaboration. It is competing with the well-known comforts of email, wikis and chat, but in a lot of use cases, I think Wave will win.

What is Google Wave good for?

Brainstorming, early concept creation and discussion is what I see Google Wave being used for extensively in the near future. It can also serve as a multi-user note-taking platform for meetings and sessions in your company or university. If you want to organize an event collaboratively, Google Wave will most likely replace wikis. That’s a punch in the gut for all creators of wiki software. These are just the most obvious uses. As more people use Google Wave and become comfortable with it, they will begin using it in entirely new ways. The real-time communications it makes possible will override its weak points because of the greater efficiency it allows for any group trying to work together. One day the wave is gonna rock! But that is not today.

Google Wave is overly complex (Steve Rubel)

Robert Scoble put it this way: “This service is way overhyped and as people start to use it they will realize it brings the worst of email and IM together: unproductivity.”

What he means is shown in this video I have put on YouTube:

If you look at the public waves being updated at a speed that none of us can follow, you will understand how especially non-tech-savvy users will find it overly complex. I hear them say: “I just don’t want to know all this stuff.”

Even if “all this stuff” is relevant content from your teammates, you’ll have to filter and sort it all out to make it manageable. I believe it’s possible, but Google Wave users will have to learn how to do it.

The interface after login with an open wave

Disadvantages and usability problems

Missing revisions with rollbacks

There is no professional revisioning system in place yet. If somebody messes up your wave and you want to undo it, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise: You have to do it manually. So folks, please do not delete too much content on waves.
No permanent hiding of replies yet

At the same time, Google Wave does not offer a way to permanently hide replies. Result? The main text in the wave is disturbed by images, boxes, colors and text from all participants. This can become a real mess and might even prevent you from reading the important content. The Google Wave team should definitely address this.

(Look at the screenshot above and see how nice the small “+” sign fits in. That should be the default.)
Why can’t I invite everybody yet? Closed preview kills value

Right now Google Wave is not suitable for real usage as too few people have an account. If you can’t invite everybody, the value of a wave decreases dramatically.
Where are notifications for updates of the waves I follow?

There are no means of monitoring waves. This is Google Wave’s biggest weakness. I don’t get an email, Gtalk alert, or any other notification in the communication systems I already use today when there is new activity in a wave. As I am still heavily using RSS feeds (in contrast to other TechCrunch authors—by the way, almost 4 million TechCrunch readers use RSS feeds as well), I’d love an RSS feed of the waves I want to keep an eye on. Unfortunately, this isn’t yet an option.
Too slow for a real chat

For a real chat, Google Wave is much too slow. The performance of live transmissions varies from good to very poor and back without any understandable pattern. Today, you’ll want to keep using Skype or Jabber clients for chatting. I expect this to change, once we see local implementations of Google Wave in companies. Most of the server power can then go to the companies’ employees, clients and partners.
Google Wave is unstable

If there are peeks, Google Wave seems to have trouble with the load of lots of users. Here is a screenshot that I see way to often.
Portability: no exporting of waves possible yet

There isn’t an export feature to my beloved wiki yet. I’d love to have the wave content “natively” (not as an embed) in my Confluence, Foswiki (TWiki), XWiki, Mindtouch, DokuWiki or MediaWiki whenever I want it. To Google and wiki vendors: please give us that kind of portability.
Google accounts should not be required

Why do I need a Google Account to participate in a wave? That is a big problem if you want to engage with clients and non-tech-savvy users.
Who is really online?

Google Wave tries to display who is online by showing a green dot on the profile picture, but it’s not reliable yet. In fact, I’ve even seen people writing content who were identified as being offline.
Remember: don’t share confidential information in waves

As soon as you invite somebody to a wave, he can access it forever. If the discussion reveals secrets you don’t want to share with all participants, you’re out of luck: there is no way to get anybody out of the wave. The only chance you have is to create a new wave from the existing one. If you don’t want to do that, you’d better keep confidential information out.
No markup editing like in wikis

There is no source code view in Google Wave that you would want to use as an experienced wiki user to control what appears and how.
Waves lack readable URLs

Waves already have permanent URLs. But how readable is this? “https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact,minimized:search,restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252Be-cg7PN0A.1″. The Google Wave team will have to come up with more readable versions that are short and self-explanatory. This one should instead read: “https://wave.google.com/wave/google-wave-learnings-advantages-usecases-and-usability-flaws/252Be-cg7PN0A/fullscreen/”

To-do’s for you to use Google Wave in your company

The following list to be a bit premature. As one cannot install Google Wave yet, this is just a checklist to help you prepare for it.

1. Technology

Server infrastructure and a good sysadmin: You will clearly need a server and a skilled admin to set up a Google Wave server, if you want to use it in your company. If you want a lot of employees, partners and clients to use it, you should prepare to invest in good hardware to make the real-time experience a good one. Up until now no one has been allowed to install the preview version of Google Wave. This means that nobody knows how difficult or easy it will be to install it and how easy it will be to connect it with other public wave servers. Still, it should be helpful to have a sysadmin around who knows what he is doing.

HTML5-compatible browsers: Google Wave is an HTML5 application. If your company still works on Internet Explorer 6 or below, you will not be able to use Google Wave flawlessly. Therefore, make sure all participants have access to up-to-date browsers.

Fast web connection: A decent web connection for both servers and clients is highly recommended to have a good real-time communication experience.

Firewall configuration: Your admin should know how to configure your firewall so that your Google Wave server can communicate with the world.

2. Organization

Define the goal of the wave and make sure everybody understands the purpose and the content of your wave. If you don’t, a lot of “side-noise” will arise.
Create wave guidelines: You should set up guidelines for your wave participants to make sure they understand what the wave is for.
On-boarding: Make sure that everybody you want to work with has a Google Wave account. (I know, this is quite difficult today. And that’s why Google Wave isn’t that useful yet.)
What application is to be used? Differentiate the systems in your company so that everybody understands when to use emails, wikis, chats, databases and when to use Google Wave. How to set them apart? I don’t know. This will emerge organically.
Give Google Wave a purpose: Make sure people understand how to use Google Wave. You don’t want them to turn it down before even testing it thoroughly. That is especially true for the non-geek users.
Not too many wavers on one wave: You should beware of inviting too many people because you can’t kick them out afterwards.

3. Culture

Do not delete content without permission: My brother had created a new wave to evaluate Google Wave. We were all filling in texts, comments and arguments. Within a very short period of time, a really cool document had evolved, and I thought: “you should make this a blog post.” So I started to restructure it, changed arguments and content into text, and deleted the comments afterwards. The bashing and flaming that triggered from people who were angry with me for killing their content was enormous.
Make rules and copyright clear: After I had restructured our wave and taken all the bashing for deleting the obsolete comments, the first participants asked if they could use the content in their blogs. We became aware of the as-yet unanswered question: “Who owns a wave? Who may do what with it? Who is allowed to use its content?” Make sure to clarify this in advance with your coworkers.
Be aware of the complexity: The basic use and advantage of Google Wave should be clear to your employees once you roll out Google Wave. If the purpose is not clear, its complexity will quickly drive away many of your colleagues. Good luck trying to convince them to come back.
Get ready for live feedback stress: A special problem in a wave is that you get answers to what you write while you’re still writing it. Every other means of communication leaves room to formulate and write your message first. In Google Wave the stress of a personal meeting with live communication can occur. (See the video above if you don’t know what I mean.)
For now, consider only inviting geeks: Today, nobody can really control documents in waves, and there’s no real revision yet. And waves change a lot. Therefore, it’s better to invite people who can give good feedback. The more wavers, the more complex a wave will become.

Overall evaluation and outlook

If you criticize Google Wave, you should keep in mind that it is a “preview” now. It’s not a beta, and it’s not a final release. The Google Wave team has set out to create “email as it should be in 2010″. And from what I see, they have a good chance of doing so, but 2010 is less than two months away. However, I am willing to bet that this piece of software will eventually overcome Robert Scoble’s criticism.

For professional collaboration, I still recommend the wikis mentioned above. But if you’re into real-time collaboration, Google Wave will eventually be your choice. Just make sure to bring advanced web skills.

Sources

A lot of the content for this blog post was created in a wave. As no one knows who owns the content in a wave, I would like to list all who participated: mseibert (That’s me!), jseibert, eicker, bfri, Silke, Sam, Gerrit, Ton, Paul

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Sidebar Delivers Personalized Mobile Apps And Content To And

Davy_en — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:30:49 UT

We recently wrote about Sidebar, an app that wants to help smartphone users with the process of finding the perfect apps for their phones. Sidebar is debuting its first app and guess what? It’s not an iPhone app-it’s an Android app! While Sidebar’s Android app is built for all Google-powered Android phones, the app has been configured specially for the newly released Verizon Droid. Android users can download the app here.

Sidebar will ask you a series of demographic questions (gender, age, location) and a series of questions to determine your interests and content preferences (i.e. what type of news do you prefer, do you play online games, what types of outdoor activities are you interested in). Once Sidebar figures out a rough sketch of who you are, the app will begin to recommend mobile content to you. Content consists of videos, games, music, apps, ringtones, podcasts, promotions, news articles. The app will load no more than 12 content recommendations per day, which will last for 24 hours until the next batch of recs are sent to you. Recommendations include a short synopsis of the app or content and a screenshot or image. If you like the rec, you can save it and and download or access it later.

While the Android Market no doubt needs an improvement, its promising that nifty apps like Sidebar are coming to the Android before hopping on the iPhone train. We’ve seen Sobees and Seesmic take a similar approach. Because the iPhone market is so saturated, it could make sense for developers to perhaps gain a following from other smartphone users, and perfect their iPhone offerings in the meantime.

Sidebar seems like a compelling app for an Android user. Although the number of apps on the Android Market doesn’t yet reach the magnitude of content on Apple’s App Store, there still is a value in receiving customized recommendations for mobile content. Android’s app store features top paid and free apps, but doesn’t have an in-depth personalized recommendation feature that competes with Sidebar. And the app suggests other types of mobile content, like ringtones, videos, news and more.

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Mystery Buyer Coughs Up $1.5 Million For Russia.com

Davy_en — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 16:19:37 UT

The domain name russia.com has been purchased by an undisclosed buyer for $1.5 million through marketplace Sedo, reports Yakov Sadchikov over on the Quintura blog.

Currently an online guide for travelers who would like to visit the country, Russia.com is an operation of Paley Media, a Seattle, WA-based consultancy firm that runs the show for many a country domain name, including Algeria.com, Scotland.com, Nepal.com and Ukraine.com. The domain names are themselves owned by NewMedia Holdings, a company that registered the domain name russia.com back in 1995.

It’s unclear why NewMedia / Paley Media decided to offload the high-value domain name, but I reckon one million and a half dollars is a fair price for a website that currently attracts a mere 9,000 unique visitors per month according to Compete. On the other hand, Korea.com was sold earlier this year for a reported $5 million.

We recently wrote about dominance of number of .com domains and also noted that .com domain registrations were starting to turn around again after a poor 2008. It looks like values of .com domains may be rising again: insurance broker Insure.com just sold its name and corresponding website for a whopping $16 million last month.

Other large domain purchases this year include the sale of Candy.com for $3 million, Toys-R-Us’ acquisition of Toys.com for $5.1 million, the sale of Fly.com to Travelzoo for $1.8 million, and the sale of Ad.com for $1.4 million.

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Corel Buys Out Corel

Davy_en — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 15:18:10 UT

Apologies for the confusing headline, but I couldn’t resist.

This morning, long-time software maker Corel Corporation turned over full ownership to Corel Holdings, a limited partnership controlled by an affiliate of Vector Capital, majority investor of the company behind many familiar software programs like WordPerfect, CorelDRAW, WinZip, Paint Shop Pro and WinDVD (most of them obtained through acquisition of smaller software firms).

The LP of the private equity investment firm, which already owned approximately 68% of the Corel Corporation, announced this morning that it has successfully completed its tender offer to purchase all outstanding common shares of the company, evidently not including those owned by Corel Holdings and its affiliates. The shares were purchased, in cash, at a unit price of $4.00, excluding interest and less applicable withholding taxes. Painful, because Vector had already offered to buy the company for $11 per share in March 2008.

With benefit of hindsight, Corel should have probably accepted that offer, of course.

Corel Holdings is now commencing an offering period of its tender offer to acquire all remaining common shares of Corel Corporation, which will expire at December 4, 2009.

Vector Capital assumed control over Corel Corp for a reported $133 million in 2003. The VC firm subsequently moved to take the company public in 2006, but retained majority ownership. The partial spin-off wasn’t much of a hit: Corel initially priced its IPO at $18 to $20 and later revised that to $16. But the company saw shares open at $15.36, and it has never once traded above that price (as is often the case when stocks open at a lower price point than initially set). Shares currently change hands for about one quarter of the opening price.

Corel Corp earlier this week justified the offer to take the company private, saying that complete ownership is necessary to inject capital quickly and avert a default on its loans. The company, once a fierce rival to Microsoft on the productivity software playing field, had been on the ropes for quite some time now. Corel was required to keep its total debt level below 2.75 times its trailing 12-month EBITDA, but on Monday indicated that it expected to fail that test this month.

The economic downturn sure rocked this company, established in 1985, very hard. Let’s see how it will fare now that it’s under Vector’s wings in its entirety again.

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DFJ-Backed Clixtr Marries Photos With Location, Launches Web

Davy_en — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 14:21:48 UT

Clixtr, a startup that first presented itself to a wide audience at this year’s TechCrunch50 Conference (our take), kicked off things with a relatively limited offering – a paid iPhone app – but is now upping its game with the launch of an accompanying location-aware photo sharing website.

It’s also dropping the price of its iPhone application to zero, so if you and the rest of the family will be taking pictures today over Thanksgiving dinner, take notice.

The fledgling company, founded by MIT and Stanford grads, aims to turn smartphones into what they refer to as ’smartcameras’ or ’social cameras’. The basic idea behind the service is that when you’re at an event, be it a birthday party at your home or at a massive rock concert, photos from multiple people attending could be turned into one single, centralized photo album for all to enjoy.

To make this work, even when pictures are taken by people you do not know, Clixtr uses location as the tying factor. The app essentially combines the capabilities of the iPhone’s camera and built-in GPS to geo-tag photos and determine when photos are being taken at the same location. Clixtr thus enables users to automagically create instant, location-aware, group photo albums in real-time (lots of buzzwords there, but that’s the way it works).

Before, Clixtr users could only add photos to albums using the now free iPhone application (which cost $2.99 at launch), but with the launch of the corresponding website at Clixtr.com anyone can now contribute to the group albums. Since the application can also detect which other events are happening around you based on where you’re taking photos, Clixtr can double as a discovery engine for other happenings going on around you.

No word on if and when the company plans to extend its service to include other smartphone platforms.

Clixtr founder and CEO Fergus Hurley waved goodbye to his PhD program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT to incorporate the startup back in 2008, and went on to raise an undisclosed amount of seed financing from Silicon Valley VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in March 2009.

What’s your take?

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Microsoft’s Dance With Newspapers Continues

Davy_en — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 14:06:21 UT

We’ve been doing some more digging on the definitive moves by Microsoft to woo newspapers over to Bing and away from Google, a story we broke two weeks ago.

Since then there have been some follow-up by various media outlets, notably the Financial Times this week which confirmed that Microsoft had had discussions with News Corp to “de-index” its news websites from Google.

Who approached who first? The FT said the impetus came from News Corp, although our information is that Microsoft is also talking to a range of newspaper publishers in Europe as well, such as German publishers like Axel Springer.

So here is what our sources are coming up with.

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What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?

Davy_en — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 12:36:14 UT

Today is Thanksgiving in the U.S. Traditionally we take stock of the things that we’re thankful for on this day each year. And I realized that one of those things is Steve Jobs. I’m thankful that he returned to Apple in 1997 and did the things he has done since. It wasn’t at all a certainty that he would ever return to the company that he cofounded two decades earlier. In fact, it was only luck and coincidence that pushed him back there.

It was late December 1996. I was an associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the largest and most well known law firm in Silicon Valley. I’d fought for my job there, and I was lucky to be in a small group of lawyers that worked on some of the hottest deals at the firm – Netscape public financings and acquisitions, Pixar’s corporate deals with Disney, and NeXT Software, among others. Steve Jobs ran Pixar and NeXT, and whenever he did something that needed a law firm, he called my boss. Well, my boss’ boss – Larry Sonsini.

That month Larry got a call. Steve was going to try to sell NeXT Software to Apple. He’d presented to the Apple board of directors, and his characteristic anti-charm won them over. They’d shortly pay about $400 million to get NeXT, with Steve Jobs returning to Apple as an advisor. It wasn’t long before he took the CEO job and started a more than decade-long run of hit products that have disrupted the computer, music, television, movie and telecommunication industries.

We worked night and day on that deal for six straight days, barely leaving the office and usually sleeping on the floor under our desks. When we were done, one of the partners drove me over to Steve’s house to get his final signature on the documents I remember stuttering in his presence about my first computer, an Apple II+. A few days later Steve left me a voicemail about an administrative issue. I saved that voicemail for years, until I left the firm. It was, all in all, a formative moment for me.

And even today, not that many people fully realize how unlikely it was that the deal would ever happen. Apple was also negotiating with BeOS was probably a better product fit with Apple than NeXT. Apple offered a rumored $200 million for Be, but Gassée held out for far more. And so Apple went with Jobs at the last minute.

Here’s what the NeXT Software website showed immediately after the announcement:

What if Apple had bought Be, and Steve never returned to Apple? What would the company, and our world, look like today?

Apple Then, Apple Now

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple the company had just completed a fiscal year where they lost about $1 billion on $7 billion in revenue. The company was worth about $4 billion. Rivals like HP and Dell were worth about $62 billion and $8 billion, respectively.

Today Apple is worth a staggering $184 billion on revenues of $36.5 billion and net income of $8 billion. The company is now worth far more than HP and Dell combined. Hewlett Packard is worth just $119 billion, and Dell is worth $28 billion. You could throw another Dell in there and Apple would still be worth more.

In 1997 Apple had a snoozy product line that included the ill-fated Newton, the Performa, the Power Macintosh, the PowerBook a bunch of printers and a few servers.

User dependence on desktop software meant that only the very loyal or the very strange used Apple’s products. Everyone else wanted a common desktop platform.

Fast Forward to today. Apple has the sexiest products in the business: iMacs, Macbooks, iPhones, iPods and more. Even the Mac Mini has a place in my home, powering my television.

In the last three months of this last year alone, Apple sold 3 million Macs, 10 million iPods and 7.4 million iPhones.

But the hardware isn’t even the start of what Apple has done in the last 12 years. They’ve accelerated the pace of change in the music, film and television industries as well with the iPod and iTunes. And they’ve redefined the mobile phone with the iPhone.

If Gassée, or anyone else, had become the CEO of Apple back in 1997, how many of these products would exist today? Would Apple have ever made the first iPod, entering into an already saturated MP3 player market in the beginning of this decade? How likely would the iPhone have been? And next year we’ll see an Apple Tablet computer. Does anyone think anyone but Steve Jobs would have pushed that product to market?

I don’t think any of those products would have launched. Or if they did they would have been as notable as the MP3 players and phones launched by competitors like Dell and HP. Quick, who can name any of those products? Who’s owned one?

Our World Without Steve Jobs At Apple

Fortune recently named Steve Jobs the CEO of the Decade, and with good reason. Not only has Apple performed financially – it’s worth about as much as Google, and has a larger market cap than AT&T, HP, Intel, Dell and countless other huge tech companies.

But forget all that. What would our world look like without him? We’d likely still be in mobile phone hell. Chances are we still wouldn’t have a decent browsing experience on the phone, and we certainly wouldn’t be enjoying third party apps like Pandora or Skype on whatever clunker the carriers handed us. Even if you use an Android, Palm Pre or newer Blackberry today, you must thank Apple for pushing open the doors to mobile freedom. Think back to the phone you had in 2006, and then tell me you don’t love Apple for the iPhone alone (yes, I’ve moved on, but the iPhone was the genesis).

Steve Jobs was also the man who talked the major music labels into dropping DRM. He nearly single-handedly disrupted the entire industry. And it’s amazing how many laptops and desktops today mimic the look and feel of Macbooks and iMacs.

Apple certainly hasn’t done everything right (MobileMe comes to mind, and I have had nothing but trouble with the Macbook Air). And their stance on the iPhone is irritating and, well, sorta evil.

But all of that’s ok. Because without Steve Jobs’ Apple the world would be a less colorful place. The man is a living legend and deserves his place in history. This Thanksgiving, Steve Jobs is one of the things that I’m thankful for. And I bet you are too.

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Investimonials Wants To Be Your Guide To Quality Financial P

Davy_en — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 04:05:28 UT

If you’ve ever tried searching the web for financial advice, you probably know just how much junk there is out there. Sure, there may be a few diamonds in the rough, but oftentimes the best results go to the finance ‘experts’ who are good at SEO – not the ones who know what they’re talking about. Investimonials is a new site launching this week that’s looking to offer an unbiased view of the variety of financial brokers, services, videos, and books out there. And to do that, it’s turning to the site’s community to submit their own reviews (it’s essentially a TripAdvisor for financial goods).

The new site was founded by Timothy Sykes, a controversial financial expert who was named to Trader Monthly’s 2006 “Top 30 under 30″ and had a once-successful hedge fund that shut down in 2007 after taking heavy losses. Since then, though, he’s mounted a comeback and is now one of Covestor’s top ranked traders (though some people aren’t fans of his tactics).

Sykes says that his goal with Investimonials is to help users cut through the spammy and scammy financial sites that litter the web, by offering a comprehensive hub of user reviews for each product. Investimonials will be launching with eight categories, including the top rated Brokers, Newsletters, DVDs, Books, and websites, with plans to have “dozens” over the next few years. At launch the site has 3,000 products ready to review, though the vast majority of them haven’t been reviewed by anyone yet.

Sykes says the primary competitor in this area is EliteTrader, which has been around for a decade and has around one thousand total reviews (the site also looks pretty dated).

Investimonials incentivizes users to write reviews and share their personal contact information by offering ‘iv bucks’, which can be traded in for prizes. Many of these are Sykes’s own products, though there are a variety of prizes from others as well.

Investimonials seems like a good idea, though it’s going to have to be very transparent if it wants to avoid constant accusations of bias. And as with all review sites, it’s going to suffer from the chicken-and-the-egg problem – until it has a lot of reviews about products, few people will have a good reason to use it.

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SupportSpace Raises $10 Million Series B

Davy_en — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 03:49:27 UT

SupportSpace, a company that provides on-demand remote tech support solutions, announced today that it has raised $10 million in funding. The round was led by Emergence Capital Partners and also included previous investors BRM Group and Gemini Israel. SupportSpace has raised $24.25M in total funding so far. Kevin Spain of Emergence Capital Partners has also taken a board seat as part of the funding.

SupportSpace, founded in 2006, aims to help expand their remote tech service by offering a SaaS (software as a service) platform for the management, marketing and delivery of remote services and a network of virtual experts.

To get tech support using SupportSpace, you choose a service or an online expert, then connect to the expert and watch your problem being resolved on your screen in real-time.

According to SupportSpace Co-Founder and CEO Yair Grindlinger, SupportSpace will use the funds to enhance its infrastructure, expand its team, and acquire new partners.

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Aviary’s Chrome Extension Proves That These Add-Ons Are Go

Davy_en — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 03:07:12 UT

I have something to admit: I’ve never been a big extension guy. When I was still using Firefox, I liked them, but the downside, browser bloat, turned me away. But now that we’re starting to see the first steps of true extension support in Chrome, I think I could be swayed.

While people have been developing extensions for Chrome for a little while now, none were officially supported. But now that Google is reaching out to developers to start making these for real, we’re already hearing about some good ones. One such one was sent to us tonight by Aviary, makers of browser-based creativity tools.

Aviary’s new Chrome extension is simple, but very useful. Once you install it, it adds a little icon to the right side of the URL bar. Clicking on this icon gives you a drop down menu of options. Most give you easy access to Aviary’s suite of tools, but the first option is key. It’s the one that allows you to capture the visible portion of any web page you are on with one click. From there, the image is loaded into whichever Aviary tool you set as the default editor.

So, for example, if I use the Aviary Image Markup tool as my editor, I’ll capture the web page, and be moved into the editor in seconds. From here I can manipulate the screenshot and easily save it to Aviary. More importantly, I can save it to my desktop without having to save it to Aviary at all. This makes for one extremely fast and easy screen capture tool.

But the best part of Aviary’s extension is that it doesn’t slow down Chrome. While the actual Aviary editor takes up some of your CPU, the extension itself ads no bloat to the regular browsing experience. I actually have three extension installed right now and none are slowing Chrome (Chromium) at all. This gives me great hope.

A few notes about Aviary’s plug-in: First, it’s not available yet only because Google has yet to launch its Extension Gallery. Supposedly, that’s coming soon for end-users but for now extension support is limited to developers being able to upload their creations. Second, the extension works fine in Chrome for Windows (and I believe Linux), but to use it on the Mac you have to be using the latest build of Chromium (the newest dev build of Chrome for Mac doesn’t support it yet).

Aviary also makes a similar extension for Firefox, that has seen over 100,000 installs, we’re told. That version also features two features the Chrome extension doesn’t yet: Full page captures (not just the visible part of the page) and Flash capture support. We’re told both will be coming in an update to the extension.

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Google Turning Times Square Into A Giant Voice Search Experi

Davy_en — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:45:47 UT

There are few things more terrifying to me than the idea of going anywhere near a shopping establishment on Black Friday. But if I lived in New York City, I think I would this year because Google, Verizon, Reuters, and R/GA are teaming up to take over the largest displays on Times Square to allow for a giant Google Search by voice experiment/Droid advertisement.

What does this mean? On Black Friday, anyone who calls 888-376-4336 and does a Google Search by voice, will see their results displayed on either the Reuters sign or the NASDAQ sign in Times Square. So, if you say something like “new Jonas Brothers CD,” the display will come up with a giant Google Map complete with signs showing you where you can find that. Also included is the embarrassment that everyone in Times Square has just seen what ridiculous thing you are searching for.

This is all a big promotion for Droid, the new Android phone built by Verizon and being heavily pushed by Google. And the promotion has actually been going on for the past couple of weeks in New York, but it previously has only run during 90 minutes timeslots in the afternoon or night. On Black Friday, it will be running for 20 hours straight. I would love to know how much that advertisement cost.

Here’s a site with the countdown to the event complete with the message: “Droid will do Times Square for 20 hours…” Minds out of the gutter, folks.

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Thumbtack Takes On RedBeacon As It Looks To Bring Local Serv

Davy_en — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 22:25:29 UT

Last month we saw the launch of TechCrunch50 winner RedBeacon, the startup that lets you book local service providers directly from the web. Today it’s getting some strong competition from a new startup called Thumbtack, a local service booking engine that’s looking to offer both a comprehensive directory of providers and a greater degree of trust than you can find elsewhere.

Featurewise, Thumbtack is a mix between RedBeacon, Yelp, and OpenTable. Like RedBeacon, it lets you sign onto the site and issue a request for a service, which service providers can then bid on. CEO Marco Zappacosta says this portion of the service is nearly identical to RedBeacon, complete with a bidding engine for providers to set pricing. But Thumbtack also offers provider profiles, where these providers can list some of their specialties and price points. There’s also a section where you can book a service directly from a profile page as you would on OpenTable, complete with an availability calendar.

One of the biggest issues with local services like Thumbtack is the chicken-and-the-egg problem. These sites generally launch with a relatively small number of services, which means that users can have a hard time finding what they need (and without users, providers have little incentive to join the site). Thumbtack has tried to address this by spending the last year recruiting providers – at launch, the startup says it already has 10,000 of them, ranging from tutors and handymen to rap teachers and henna artists. Thumbtack is also using some clever incentives to get companies to sign up, like offering discounted business cards and other marketing materials. Zappacosta explains that Thumbtack can order these goods in bulk because they work with so many companies, and then pass the savings on to businesses that sign up.

The other big issue with this kind of site is the creepiness factor – many of these services involve inviting these people into your home (say, to fix a sink) or to a private event (wedding caterers). Along with user reviews, which are standard for this space, Thumbtack is taking a few extra steps. If a service provider is licensed they can post that in their profile, which Thumbtack will verify for free. Thumbtack is also giving providers a handful of premium verification options, such as electing to undergo a background check by a national agency (prices vary from $8 to $49 depending on the level of verification). Providers who successfully pass these checks are rewarded with badges on their profile pages, giving users more confidence in their service. Every provider is also run through the DOJ sex offender registry.

Thumbtack plans to make money by building a payment system off of PayPayl’s adaptive payments API. They’ll take a cut out of each transaction that occurs on the site, and for services that require in-person estimates (like plumbing) they’ll take a lead-gen payment. They’ll also be taking a cut every time a provider elects to get verified through one of the third party background check services. Thumbtack is offering its service nationwide beginning today, but as with RedBeacon their primary focus is the Bay Area, with plans to expand down the road.

Thumbtack is doing a lot of things right with its site – I particularly like the idea of having providers verified through background checks, which helps differentiate it from sites like Angie’s List, Craigslist, and RedBeacon (which lets providers display their licenses but doesn’t do background checks). That said, Thumbtack faces the same challenges that RedBeacon will have. For one, it’s going to have to train users to turn to their computers rather than their yellow pages for these local services. And while 10,000 businesses is a good start, it’s going to take a long time for the service to build up a robust community of users and reviews. The background checks are a nice touch, but they don’t do much for helping users discern which providers offer a high quality service.

For another service that’s taking a different approach to matching users with trustworthy service providers, check out Workstir, which provides suggestions based on your social graph.

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Yahoo Loses The Brains Behind Boss

Davy_en — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:09:25 UT

The brains behind Yahoo Boss, a young engineer named Vik Singh, is leaving Yahoo to become an entrepreneur-in-residence at Sutter Hill Ventures. Earlier this year, Singh was named to Technology Review’s 35 Under 35 list at the age of 24. Singh is exactly the kind of talent Yahoo should be trying to hold onto, but that is hard to do now that it is ceding search to Microsoft.

Singh is more diplomatic. Contacted for comment he confirms, “I’ll be starting next week actually. I’m really pumped but I’m going to definitely miss Yahoo! It’s been such a great company to work at but I just got this really bad case of the entrepreneurial bug.”

Yahoo Boss, which was largely Singh’s idea, is one of Yahoo’s most successful projects among developers. It “>opens up the power of Yahoo’s search index and algorithms to other sites. Yahoo Boss is a set of APIs and Web services which let people build their own customized search engines. (We use it for our search engine here at TechCrunch). Since it launched a year and a half ago, upwards of one billion search queries a month are powered through the service.

Prior to Yahoo, Singh cut his teeth at Microsoft Research in the lab of computer scientist Jim Gray, who was tragically lost at sea two years ago.

Singh already has some ideas about what he wants to work on at Sutter Hill, but he is keeping them close to his vest at this point. He does offer this: “There’s a line my mentor Jim Gray used to say to me all the time: ‘We gotta party on the data!’ I know it’s vague, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do.” Party on, dude.

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Google Profiles Turn Into OpenIDs

Davy_en — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:24:46 UT

As part of its push to go more social, Google has been attempting to unify its various account profiles into one Google Profile. And now it’s more useful. Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick has just tweeted out that Google Profiles can now be used as OpenIDs.

What this means is that you can sign into any site that accepts OpenID simply by using your Google Profile domain. Luckily, a few months ago Google started allowing these profiles to have vanity URLs, like /mgsiegler, instead of the previous /32090329039402903. Chris Messina, a huge proponent of the open web movement, has just sent out a picture of what signing in with OpenID via your Google Profile looks like (below).

Despite its good intentions, OpenID has yet to take off in mainstream usage. The problem, it seems, is largely about presentation. Most people have no idea which of their various accounts can be used as OpenIDs, or really even what OpenID is. Google backing it a bit more with these profiles obviously helps, but will it take OpenID mainstream? Probably not.

More interesting may be the second part of Fitzpatrick’s tweet. “Also, gmail webfinger declares that now too.” It’s not entirely clear what he means by that, but it would seem to suggest that we’re getting closer to being able to use our Gmail addresses as a web ID. WebFinger is a protocol being worked on by Fitzpatrick to allow you to attach information to your email address (in this case, you Gmail address), so it can be used as a solid means of identification.

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The 5 Rules of Black Friday

Davy_en — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:09:40 UT

Black Friday is almost here. It's a great time to score some deals, but don't go at it willy-nilly. Follow these 5 simple Black Friday rules to avoid the scams and wasting time.

Snapture iPhone App Adds Twitter And Facebook Sharing

Davy_en — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:25:27 UT

One of the most popular paid photo apps for the iPhone, Snapture (iTunes link) just got a few upgrades. The new features include the ability to share photos on either Twitter or Facebook, a new tap-to-focus capability, and different color modes (black & white, sepia, negative). Posting to Facebook or Twitter should be standard for any photo app. It instantly makes the photo app social.

The Snapture app, which costs $1.99, shows you the picture you just took in a small picture-in-picture window so that you don’t have to go to the camera roll to see if it’s any good. It also offers multi-shot mode and pinch-to-zoom. And you can share by email as well.

Snapture has already been downloaded more than 700,000 times, which is not bad for a paid app. Assuming $2 a pop, that’s a $1.4 million app. Not bad for a slightly better mousetrap.

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Gift Guide 2009: Gifts for the Technologically Impaired

Davy_en — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:12:54 UT

If you’re like me, you’ve got a fair number of family and friends who don’t quite share the same level of enthusiasm for technology as you. But the thought of buying someone a gift that wasn’t a gadget? Insanity. Pure insanity. In that spirit, here’s a list of products that ought to make easy-to-use gifts for the technologically ambivalent in your life.

Smartbook Says Bloggers Can’t Use The Word Smartbook Anymo

Davy_en — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:26:31 UT

For most of us, the term ’smartbook’ (a device that’s somewhere in between a smartphone and a netbook) is nothing but the latest tech buzzword du jour. For German company Smartbook, however, it’s apparently a chance to score some free publicity by vigilantly defending a multinational trademark and threatening to sue everyone who dares use it in conversations.

Let me kick off by saying that Smartbook AG does indeed own a trademark on the word smartbook in most of Western Europe, Australia, Singapore, South Korea and a couple of other countries. The company sells laptops that are named Smartbook, so I guess the company is well within its rights to try and protect their trademark in any way it deems appropriate.

In the past, the company has gone after companies like Qualcomm and Freescale, who use the term as a generic denominator for portable Internet-ready devices that are neither smartphones or netbooks in product descriptions (and this dedicated website). That is understandable, and Qualcomm for one has already somewhat complied with the request by restricting access to some of its website for visitors located in Germany.

But Smartbook AG has also targeted media outlets who use the word generically to describe some next-generation devices. For instance, electronics industry newspaper EE Times has removed all references to the word, and even downright deleted an article that dealt with the legal threats put forward by Smartbook against the media company. Do a search and you’ll find some articles (including the one that has now disappeared, second result) referencing the term ’smartbook’, but you won’t see the word mentioned in any article.

And the German company is growing more aggressive. Today, Sascha Pallenberg from blog and video publisher NetbookNews got in touch with us to let us know that he has recently received a letter from a German lawyer asking him to refrain from using the term ’smartbook’ on his online network.

Now it appears the company is actively going to pursue international bloggers and press too, no longer limiting themselves to those in German-speaking countries (watch out, CNET!). And conveniently, exactly at the same time the company is announcing its international expansion. Add to that the fact that Steffen Wilde, Smartbook AG’s outside counsel, told a Forbes reporter that they’d be willing to sell the trademark (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) and we can safely conclude that the small Cologne company is raising all this ruckus for attention and money.

And I realize we’re helping them with the former. Not very smartbook of us.

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Online Advertising In The U.S Begins To Stabilize

Davy_en — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:02:43 UT

Online advertising revenues in the U.S. seem to be stabilizing. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IA and PricewaterhouseCoopers released losses during the first half of the year). As you can see in the chart, there was a big drop-off after the fourth quarter of last year, and the first three quarters of this year have been flat.

On a global basis, we might already be seeing a recovery, at least for search advertising. The online advertising revenues of the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL) increased 1.2 percent in the fourth quarter. Google accounted for all of that growth, however, so we are still waiting for display advertising to find its footing.

It is likely that in the U.S. alone, search advertising is also leading the recovery. But now that Google is mixing more visual elements into search ads (are those display or search ads, perhaps display ads will see a boost as well.

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Just In Time For #Thanksgiving, TurkeyTwitter Gathers All Th

Davy_en — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:18:36 UT

Want to know what people are thankful for this Thanksgiving? You can be sure many will be Tweeting about it. Tomorrow if you search #thanksgiving or #thankful on Twitter search, you will get a good sense of what thanks people are sharing on Twitter.

Or you can go to TurkeyTwitter, a site thrown together by Joshua Premuda which gathers all Tweets with the hashtags #thanksgiving or #turkeytwitter. (I think he should add #thankful as well).

There is a lot of noise on the site with a lot of tweets about people preparing for thanksgiving or wishing everyone safe travels rather than just the Tweets about what they are thankful for specifically. That’s why a #thankful hashtag is necessary. But please, be creative. This is not just another social media marketing opportunity and it’s not the Oscars. (”I am thankful for all my followers” is an actual Tweet).

Me, I’m just thankful I’m not a turkey. What are you #thankful for?

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Ustream Brings Its Viewer App To Android Market

Davy_en — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:55:46 UT

Ustream has just launched a version of its Ustream Viewer for Android Market, giving users the ability to access any Ustream footage while they’re on the go, free of charge. You’ll be able to use the app for streaming video both over Wi-Fi and 3G.

This is actually Ustream’s second application for Android. The first is its Broadcaster app, which allows you to stream video footage live from your phone to the web. The app launching today is for viewing only, but it will let you watch any Ustream feed – be it a red carpet premiere or footage of someone’s puppies – while you’re on the go.

Ustream is timing the app’s launch with a live KISS concert in Los Angeles, which you’ll be able to stream straight to your Android device (you’ll also be able to watch it on the iPhone or the web as usual).

Ustream launched the iPhone version of the viewing app last January, when it was downloaded a whopping 113,000 times in 24 hours. It’s worth pointing out that the iPhone doesn’t have a Broadcaster app, because Apple won’t approve them (Qik and a handful of others have been kept off the iPhone because of this).

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