In a world of Angry Birds and Foursquare, I’m not sure how AT&T came up with this one. This week, AT&T unleashed the Eco-App, a youth-centric iPhone app that tries to promote sustainability through education. It’s hard to argue with a such a legitimate, noble goal but the app itself is a bit of a head scratcher. As explained on AT&T’s website, the Eco-App has two top features: a tool to help teens find nearby recycling centers and educational resources to help teens comprehend the “environmental benefits of paperless billing.”
Eco-app is part of AT&T’s "One Million Eco Challenge,” a broader initiative to raise environmental awareness among kids and teens. To be fair, the app includes useful information, like tips about local environmental events but it just seems awkwardly out of touch, like the cliche reindeer sweaters grandmothers push on unsuspecting teens. I have full faith that a large fraction of America’s youth is interested in environmental issues, we’ll just have to find a better way to reach out to them— beyond paperless billing.
Well, well, well. An eagle-eyed reader tells us PayPal posted a short announcement yesterday on its corporate blog, only to pull it mere seconds later. As you can tell from the URL, PayPal was poised to announce support for “all three major mobile platforms” (also see retweets of the blog post).
That is: support for Apple's App Store, Blackberry App World … and Android Market.
How do we know? Thanks to a little something called Google cache (screenshot below for posterity).
We don’t know why the announcement was pulled, but presumably the news will be spread at PayPal’s X Innovate conference today and someone simply pulled the trigger on the blog post a bit too soon.
Not that word of the deal hadn’t gotten out prior to PayPal’s developer conference (see here, here and here).
Nevertheless, the news will make a lot of Android app developers and publishers smile.
Spotlight Ticket Management, which offers Web-based ticket management software for venue owners and operators, sports teams and the like, has secured a $2.5 million round of Series A financing led by Point Judith Capital.
Sports media entrepreneur Brian Bedol, founder of the former Classic Sports Network (now ESPN Classic) and CSTV (now CBS College Sports), has also joined the round of financing.
Founded by former StubHub executives, Spotlight prides itself in partnering with everyone in the ticket value chain, including leagues, teams, companies, marketplaces, and event providers.
According to the company, the product is already in use by over 1,000 corporations such as NBC Universal, Motorola and 20 teams in the four major professional sports leagues, including the Miami HEAT and Chicago Bears.
As part of the financing agreement, Sean Marsh David Martirano, both co-founder and General Partner at Point Judith, will join the Spotlight board of directors.
Spotlight was founded by Joe Greiner (CEO), Tony Knopp (President) and Aric Haut (COO) – all three had executive sales positions at StubHub before kicking off Spotlight.
An advertising agency that represents American Express took issue with my post yesterday complaining about my failed efforts to get a simple credit card. In the post, titled Damnit Amex, Give Me A Credit Card, I complained about the difficulty of someone in my particular demographic to get credit, and noted the usefulness of Credit Karma, a startup that gives people immediate access to their credit report.
Some users actually saw an ad for the Amex ZYNC card next to the post.
In an email to our sales team, the agency said “We found this on your site today, obviously not a good thing for AMEX or for ZYNC branding.”
I disagree. But let’s continue.
They added “Are you able to take this down from your site? If so, please do as ASAP.”
Nope. The sales team doesn’t have the authority or the ability to remove content from the site. And the punchline:
“If you are not able to monitor this more closely, we unfortunately will not be able to run with TechCrunch in the future.”
Ok. Let’s step back for a minute.
First of all, the agency in question should understand that the post was a significant net positive for American Express. Sure, I was complaining. But I also put American Express’ brand squarely in the center of things. There were a variety of credit cards that I was unable to get, but the Amex Starwood card was the one I wanted. I wanted it, and I couldn’t get it. Who doesn’t get how great that is for Amex?
Neolithic marketing morons who can’t think outside of a box, that’s who. The same kind of person that not only gets upset that their client is the center of attention, but then actually threatens to pull business if we don’t get our editorial in line with their agenda. This isn’t the Wall Street Journal, you know. We don’t like being told by others what we can and cannot write.
Despite the fact that we will certainly never do business with this agency again after this post, I won’t name them. Perhaps they can still save themselves and, someday, thank me.
It’s been a difficult couple of months for Digg. The crowdsourced news site pushed out a major new design at the end of August which met with a lot of criticism and broken axles. There was literally a user revolt and things deteriorated so rapidly that earlier this week the company had to let go more than a third of its employees.
How bad did it get? Here’s one data point from comScore: Digg lost 30 percent of its audience in the month of September alone. Digg’s estimated unique visitors worldwide went from 18.4 million in August to 12.8 million in September. That is a drop of 5.6 million people in a single month. Remember, the new site went live for everyone on August 25, so September was the first full month of the new design. Compared to a year before, Digg’s worldwide audience shrank by 16 million visitors.
Other metrics show the same story or worse. Pageviews sank 70 percent from August to September (from 155 million pageviews to 46 million). Average visits and time spent per visitor were also down.
The numbers for October are not yet out, but I’d be surprised to see any immediate rebound. Can Digg stanch its losses and start to rebuild once again?
MySpace is mere hours away from their big redesign push (our early review is here). If you’ve got nothing to do until midnight California time, spend it perusing this document. It is, according to an anonymous source that claims to work at MySpace, an internal MySpace document showing traffic and engagement by age band.
And it’s on Google, publicly.
The document shows MySpace traffic from August 1 to September 30, 2010. It’s broken down by property (MySpace.com, photos, mobile, music, etc.), age and sex. You can see, for example, that on September 28, 284,579 people between 18-24 viewed their “Account Settings” page.
I downloaded the spreadsheet in the very likely event public access is removed once MySpace discovers the “private” setting. Or they just put it, you know, on their own servers.
“People like stumbling videos more than webpages,” StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp tells us in explaining why the service has decided to revamp their video offering, which they’re doing tonight. While you’ve been able to stumble through videos for a couple of years now, they’re finally making the experience more social. And they’re adding two big names to the arsenal: TED and Hulu.
Previously, StumbleUpon was simply using trending data to find hot videos to take your through. But now they’ve integrated their social recommendation engine into the mix to make the entire experience more personalized. In other words, you’ll now be taken to videos liked by people you’re connected with on the service.
And with this as well as the addition of videos from TED and Hulu, the company hopes the experience becomes more than just watching the latest viral videos on YouTube. In fact, Camp talks about this as being more of a “social TV” experience and “a good alternative to television surfing”.
Of course, right now, this is all still confined to the browser, but Camp does envision a future where they bring this social video browsing experience into the living room. The key to that, he says, is making sure all the content is in HD. In the web browser, that doesn’t matter so much, in the living room, it does.
StumbleUpon plus Hulu is particularly interesting here because it is a bit like traditional television surfing. You can stumble through episodes of shows that your friends like. And if you find one you like, you can stay there and watch it. I asked if they were worried that Hulu might not like this usage (Hulu is notorious for blocking unauthorized access), but Camp said he’s sure they’ll be fine with this, because it’s just about finding what you want to watch on Hulu then watching it the same way, ads and all.
Camp also notes that they’ve added a lot of Vimeo content into the mix recently. And says that while there aren’t currently any Facebook videos, it’s something they may think about in the future — but it’s tricky because of the privacy issues and API access needed.
As for other large videos site, Camp says they’re looking at them all. Pretty much anyone using embeddable Flash can be easily added at any point, he says.
People with low credit scores according to Credit Karma. Those of you who get that “correlation does not equal causation” understand that this chart doesn’t mean changing your @gmail.com to a @yahoo.com or an @aol.com will make your score dip, just that for one reason or another people using Yahoo Mail tend to score lower.
“Certainly switching email providers will not increase or decrease your credit score. It’s more the case that people with a certain score have a greater likeliness to use a particular email provider. Why this happens is probably due to some demographic skew which then carries to the email domain.”
Hmm … Let’s take a look at the demographics of Yahoo and Aol Mail on comScore.
Of all the mail providers, Yahoo definitely has the most users at 94.6 million uniques a month. In terms of user age, Aol Mail skews most heavily toward the 65+ age range (!), while Yahoo skews 35-44, Hotmail 25-34 and Gmail 25-34.
While a comScore skew doesn’t necessarily mean a majority of users, it does indicate a demographic segment overrepresented relative to the percentage of total Internet users (comScore measures this index as a % of visitors to site / % of visitors for total Internet x 100).
In terms of household income, Yahoo Mail users are skewing towards the under $15k income bracket when compared to the rest of the Internet, even though it looks like a majority of users are in the $40K to $60K range. So the fact that people who make less money (because they’re students or other people with no income) are overrepresented on Yahoo Mail might shed some light on the Credit Karma statistics.
If you haven’t tried out Blippy since the company rather infamously launched last year as the social network for sharing credit card purchases, you should go back and give it another look. Things are quite a bit different now. And a new partnership showcases that.
Blippy has partnered with Sephora to create a version of Blippy specifically tailored to the fragrance and beauty retailer’s brand. From here, Sephora shoppers can easily share purchases, see what others are buying, and talk about all this stuff. While you can still see some purchase prices, it’s less about that, and more about the social aspect of the shopping experience. For example, a user saw someone bought some DiorShow Mascara and asked, “Is it worth the higher price tag (as compared to a $5 mascara)?” A few minutes later, they got an answer (yes).
Sephora loves this because it allows their customers to connect with other another around their brand. Blippy loves it because it’s all valuable social data. In fact, they love it so much that they decided to on their own create 16 other stores for various brands — brands like Amazon, Apple, eBay, Netflix, Safeway, and Target. To be clear, Blippy doesn’t have partnerships with these guys, they just realized the Sephora store idea was a good one.
The release is quick to note that: “Neither Blippy nor Sephora will share purchase information without explicit prior approval from each participating customer.”
The current data across the board says that Blippy users have now shared 2.6 million purchases totaling more than $65 million in sales.
MySpace is preparing to roll out its long-awaited redesign, perhaps as early as tomorrow, at least for new users. It’s not going to be pretty. Well, actually, it is quite pretty—I’ve seen screenshots—but that still might not be enough to help stem the diminishing appeal of the social network. MySpace tried to brief us on the new design under embargo, which we don’t do, so we declined the briefing. Nevertheless, we keep getting snippets of information from various sources.
So let me describe it for you. The design will feature the new MySpace logo at the top, and center around discovering and sharing media—music, photos, and videos. When you log in, a big status bar will prompt you to “Share something!” That can be a status message, a link, a photo, or a video.
As with MySpace now, there is an emphasis on sharing music, videos, and games. By sharing this media, you become a social filter and a tastemaker for your friends. People with a lot of friends can become social promoters of music and other media, and the new design seems to be set up to highlight and reward those people.
The new MySpace is a lot cleaner and more organized than it is now. Instead of a linear activity stream, the new design is broken up more into tiles, or at least that is one view. A stream of what your friends are sharing is one of the tiles, but there are also tiles for videos, celebrities and musicians you are following, and photo-heavy advertisements. The tiles remind me of the look now popular in iPad apps like Pulse and Flipboard.
There is definitely a realtime theme going on as well. You can toggle between what is “most relevant” to you and “live” updates. Another live notifications box at the top shows upcoming events and messages. If you are not logged in, the new homepage will show a rolling counter of things people are sharing, as well as tiles for promoted albums, TV show, celebrities, and trending items people are discovering.
Overall, this is appears to be improvement to the current design. But will it be enough to bring people back to MySpace or bring new people in? If all your friends are on Facebook, they are not going to be sharing their music with you on MySpace. By focusing on media sharing and curation, maybe it can find it’s place again in the social network pecking order.
Among the many things about living in the year 2010 that blow my mind (robot vacuums, smartphones, Google Books), the fact that we are at the beginning of commercial space flight is, incredibly, not constantly on my mind. Yet advances are constantly being made, most visibly by Virgin Galactic, which just this last week inaugurated the commercial facility for vertically- and horizontally-launching aircraft. I mean spacecraft. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to saying that.
Spaceport America, in addition to having a snazzy logo, sports training facilities for Virgin Galactic pilots spacemen, a 10,000ft runway, and will serve as Virgin Galactic’s headquarters for the next two decades. Want to visit? Good luck with that — you should probably just watch this video.
It’s said that you’re not supposed to wear white after Labor Day. Apple, it seems, is sticking with that rule. Yes, the elusive white iPhone has been delayed again.
As Apple representatives have told Reuters, the white version of the device is now not due until next spring. This is the third delay of the device, as it was at first pushed from launch day in June until the second half of July. Then it was pushed until “later this year” in late July. Now for the next question: will it actually beat the next version of the device itself to market?
Like clockwork, Apple unveils a new version of the iPhone each year at their WWDC conference in early June. It usually goes on sale shortly after that in late June/early July. Summer this year doesn’t technically start until June 22, and there’s a pretty good chance that the next version of the device, let’s call it “iPhone 5″, will at least be unveiled in the spring.
Perhaps you missed Apple’s Back to the Mac event at their headquarters in Cupertino, CA last week. You know, the one where they showed off iLife ’11, a sneak peek at OS X Lion, and the new MacBook Air. You can watch the entire 90-minute presentation online for free now. But why do that when you can watch the entire thing in 104 seconds and get the key takeaways?
Okay, not really.
What you will get in the video below is a minute and a half of hilariously awesome superlatives. This is nothing new for Apple. And while this video and the ones that have come before it are cut to be funny, it also showcases something much more meaningful.
First, Apple employees from Steve Jobs on down are great salesmen who understand the importance of positive and enthusiastic language in a pitch. Second, this only works if the people doing the pitching really believe in what they are selling — or if they are really good at lying. With Apple, it really, truly, absolutely does seem to be the former. It’s remarkable. Incredible. Exciting. Amazing. Great. Brilliant. Jaw-dropping. Wonderful.
Digg just can’t get a break. On the heels of news that the company had to lay off 37% of its staff and saw the departures of both its CRO and CFO, last night a report surfaced alleging that Digg was gaming its own system, ostensibly to favor certain partners. If true, this would have further undermined user trust in the site’s democratic voting system, and the evidence was convincing that something out of the ordinary was going on. Now Digg has just responded to this accusation with a blog post that boils down to, “Yes, we do have fake accounts voting up stories, but they’re for testing purposes”. Here’s a relevant excerpt:
Before doing that, I’m going to address a story submitted to Digg that called out activity of a number of our internal test accounts. As with many sites, we continuously run tests on the site to expose vulnerabilities in our own security. In this case, we did have a number of our internal test accounts Digging content from the Upcoming section of the site. We learned a great deal about some vulnerabilities in how users can inappropriately Digg stories into the home page. We have already made some changes over the last few weeks and are going to be making some other changes to the site this week to address a few of the issues we found. Similar to how good security companies try to break their own security, we have always tested and will always run tests to find spam vulnerabilities on Digg.
Most importantly, we should have been forthright with our community about our testing efforts and we’ll certainly do so in the future. Rest assured that Digg does not in any way receive financial gain from this activity and the accounts were not used to submit any content.
Digg founder Kevin Rose followed up on the blog post with a comment explicitly saying that Digg has always used such test accounts:
We’ve never taken a single dime from a publisher for any activity on Digg (outside of standard ad units). We’ve used test accounts since day one and will continue to use them as we validate our various spam/promotion algorithms.
Along side the post explaining the fake accounts, Digg’s Jen Burton detailed some of the new (or at least, returning) features that would be coming to Digg in the next two weeks. These include the ability to sort content by images and video, suggested users, the Bury button, and a ‘Breaking News’ module.
Google TV is now out there in the wild. There’s no indication of how it’s selling just yet, but my hunch is that like early Android, it may be some time before sales really take off. That shouldn’t be too surprising considering that the platform is built on top of Android. But there aren’t a lot of apps yet that are tailored for these new devices. They need more. And they know the way to get them. Free giveaways!
As they’ve announced on their Google TV blog today, the search giant is giving away 10,000 Google TV units to developers. Yes, 10,000.
The give-away started this morning at the Adobe MAX conference where they dished out 3,000 units. And it will continue over the next couple of weeks as Google will patrol the Google Code forums to look for developers who sound even remotely interested in developing for the platform. Or you can submit a request to get a unit for development.
Says Google:
As we've always said, the coolest thing about Google TV is that we don't even know what the coolest thing about it will be. The experience is in the hands of its users and developers, and everyone is invited. Come play.
The Google TV unit being given away is the Logitech Revue, a device which normally sells for $300.
Sadly, this giveaway is U.S.-only for the time being. And yes, they want some sort of proof that you are actually a developer that plans to make an app for the platform. I’m thinking about learning Java to build a solid fart app for the platform to get a free unit myself.
It’s obviously a little early for a full assessment of this new device but we do know a few things. It’s quite small and compact – much lighter than and iPad – and the UI is very handsome. Android users will be kind of miffed that the device doesn’t support the Android App Store, however, because B&N want’s a “curated experience.” So much for the openness of Android.
As a recent Nook convert, I’m excited for B&N if a little wary. At $249 the Nook Color is half the price of the iPad. However, don’t expect this to act as a full tablet computer. It isn’t. It’s B&N’s show and outside software isn’t invited.
When AOL bought us a month ago, we were promised a lot of things: autonomy, resources, inappropriately longcorporate meetings, and fame. So far, AOL has come through on the first three. But fame, by which I mean homepage love on aol.com, had thus far eluded us. But today that changed. Boy did it ever.
Yesterday, we got word from our corporate overlords that they were likely to test a link to one of our stories on their homepage in the near future. Today, when scanning our referrer logs, we noticed something interesting. A massively huge tidal wave of traffic from aol.com.
Just how huge was this wave of traffic? Let’s put it this way: so far today, AOL is not only the number one referrer to TechCrunch, it’s tripling the number two: Twitter. That’s just from one little link to one story on a rotating tile on the homepage. It’s fairly amazing.
I point this out of two reasons. One, to boast about this awesome power we now posses. Two, it’s a great reminder of the power of the big boys — even the ones you don’t really think about anymore. Both AOL and Yahoo still have two of the most trafficked homepages on the web. While they may have fallen out of favor with the tech elite, the so-called “normals” seem to love them. I have to assume these are also the same people that click on web ads.
The new Nook Color has been revealed, and it’s a 7″ Android tablet with a color LCD touchscreen. Talk about bringing a knife to a knife fight when someone else already brought a gun.
It was the wrong move for Barnes & Noble to changes horses mid-race. The only thing e-readers (and this is supposed to be an e-reader, make no mistake) have as a defense against the tablet onslaught is their superior (and rapidly improving) e-ink displays. Amazon knows this, and they know that a huge proportion of their sales are black-and-white. The color stuff market is ceded to tablets — they can have it, too, because e-readers already own the book market. Barnes & Noble just got greedy.
“Apple, Inc. (AAPL) in negotiations to acquire Spotify,” read the tip that came in yesterday via email from an anonymous source. Most tips are just outright false, but we dug into this one a little bit.
Here’s what we heard – Apple and Spotify are in on-again, off-again discussions about an acquisition, but at best it’s very early in the process. No firm price has been offered, no term sheet tabled. Still, it’s interesting that the two are talking.
But way more interesting is this – Last year, around the time that Apple acquired music service Lala, Google and Spotify were deep in acquisition discussions, says a source with knowledge of the negotiations.
Ultimately no deal happened, and the two companies tried to negotiate a deal to have Spotify pre-installed on all Android phones instead.
But the deal almost happened, says our source, and Google was going to pay nearly $1 billion for the service. Ultimately the deal went sideways because Google was demanding that all label deals be grandfathered in. And Spotify wanted a $800 million+ walk away fee if the deal faltered (Google had a similar provision in their Admob acquisition).
Here’s what “grandfathering” label deals means: The deals that music labels do with online music companies contain a provision that if the company is acquired, the deals terminate. That’s exactly what tripped up Facebook when they were looking to acquire or partner with a music startup a few years ago.
So if a company like Spotify gets great label deals, like they have in Europe, those deals have to be completely renegotiated if they’re acquired. It ends up making these companies largely un-buyable.
So the deal never happened. And Spotify is yet to launch in the U.S. after protracted but fruitless negotiations with U.S. music labels.
The service is apparently profitable in Europe based on really attractive deals with labels there. But those five year deals won’t last forever, and will need to be renegotiated soon. What Spotify needs is to launch in the U.S. and soon. Even without a free version.
Google announced today that it intends to give away $5 million dollars to organizations trying to find innovative ways to continue the practice of Journalism. Great. Anything that even vaguely creates more jobs for writers is okay in my book, especially when I look at my tally of how many times you guys say I should be fired.
Unfairly blamed for the decline of media by Rupert Murdoch and his ilk, perhaps the higher ups at Google feel bad about their status as scapegoat for the Internet’s detrimental effect on the news industry and that’s why they’re feeling so generous?
Google will be giving away $2 million to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, with $1 million going to the Knight News Challenge and $1 million going towards continuation of U.S. Journalism grant making, whatever that means.
The remaining $3 million will be spent internationally.
From Google:
“Journalism is fundamental to a functioning democracy. So as media organizations globally continue to broaden their presence online, we're eager to play our part on the technology side—experimenting with new ways of presenting news online; providing tools like Google Maps and YouTube Direct to make websites more engaging for readers; and investing heavily in our digital platforms to enable publishers to generate more revenue.”
The music industry lawyers just put another notch on their wall. After ten years of existence, peer-to-peer music sharing service LimeWire is joining Napster, Kazaa, and all the rest. It will abide by a court-ordered injunction today and begin to disable the file-sharing and music-searching features of its P2P software. Years of legal battles and the prospects of paying astronomical fines finally did the service in. We are putting it in the deadpool.
The company, LimeCompany, will soldier on. Transitioning to a music store or legal streaming music service, however, will be tough. It fought a good fight, and lasted longer than most other P2P services. Partly that was because there was usually a bigger P2P sharing service freaking out the music industry. Once the lawyers got rid of those, they finally got around to LimeWire.
The music industry is basically organized around litigation on one side and extracting maximum licensing fees on the other from music startups that try to play by the rules. If you want to understand exactly how difficult it is for a music startup to survive, check out this talk by imeem founder Dalton Caldwell.
Well, well. The interweb rumor mill wins again. It’s been said for weeks that B&N was going to out a color Nook and sure enough, the bookseller did just that.
Android powers the second-gen Nook and it uses a 7-inch color, yep, color LCD for displaying the content. Since Android is inside, it’s slightly more than an ebook reader and slightly less than a tablet. There are social networking apps like Facebook and Twitter, along with the ability to display videos as well as the standard ebook content. Sounds a bit like some other devices, no?
We’re live and set up at the Barnes & Noble Nook event in New York. I’ll be updating this page in lieu of using our standard liveblogging software, mostly because it will be only one device this time – probably an LCD color Nook. Keep this page refreshed.
The US solar market took another step forward this week with the federal government’s approval of Solar Millennium’s plan to build a massive thermal power station in Blythe, California. Located between Phoenix and Los Angeles in the arid Palo Verde Valley, this thinly populated city will soon be home to the world’s largest solar project.
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management delivered the final green light, wrapping up a (relatively swift) year-long approval process. Technically, it is the government’s first approval of a parabolic trough power plant, which uses curved mirrors to direct the sun’s heat towards a pipe that contains a heat transfer fluid. The heat from this fluid helps create steam which ultimately powers a turbine
Solar Millennium, a German firm, plans to build four plants on the expansive property with a total capacity of 1,000 megawatts— which is roughly on par with the country’s current total solar capacity. With 1,000 MW at completion, the station would be able to power more than 300,000 homes.
The hope, the company says, is to start supplying the grid with electricity by 2013. In terms of regional economic impact, Solar Millennium predicts that the project will hire 1,000 people during the construction phase and 220 permanent workers (once its operational).
In the meantime, there’s quite a bit of construction to be done which will require significant financing. In a press release, the company said it has secured enough cash for the first wave of construction, which could begin as early as this year, but acknowledged that it is heavily dependent on government incentives and pending loans.
Speaking of the federal government’s approval, Solar Millennium’s CFO, Oliver Blamberger says, “This paves the way for the start of construction of the first two 242-MW plants before the end of the year…This is also good news for our advanced talks with the US Department of Energy on the loan guarantees for which we have applied. A successful conclusion of this process would secure more than two thirds of the financing volume of the first two planned power plants through the American Federal Financing Bank.”
As we mentioned in a post on Monday, the US solar market is ramping up significantly, with capacity expected to grow to grow roughly 30x over the next 10 years to 44G. But the capital intensive industry will need to continue to raise heaps of private capital (and benefit from generous government policies) to get there.
This past June, we noted that Twitter had zoomed past 200 employees — basically doubling in just six months. The rapid hiring pace continues at the startup, though not quite as quickly. The company has just hired their 300th employee a tweet confirms today.
And with that growth comes the need to expand. As we noted back in September, Twitter confirmed that at some point relatively soon they’d likely have to look at new office options. That search is getting close to coming up with a new place, we’ve heard. And they’re very likely to stay in the SoMa district of San Francisco. For their part, Twitter will only say they have “no updates on this right now“.
As a side note, it’s sort of interesting that the tweet today highlights that Twitter “just” hit 300 employees when co-founder Evan Williams’ post back on October 4 pointed out the same number. We’ll assume “full-time” might be the key there. Perhaps the other number counted contractors/part-timers. We’ve reached out to Twitter to clarify.
Last week San Francisco car matching startup UberCab was served a cease and desist order by the city of San Francisco because it did not have taxi licenses or taxi insurance and went beyond the normal scope of a limo service by picking people up right away.
As UberCab (which has now changed its name to Uber) serves primarily tech industry elite, there is much Internet debate over whether this is another case of “Innovation vs. Establishment” or a startup just straight up breaking the law.
Perhaps the most amazing answer comes from Micheal Wolfe, the CEO of JoinWire, who hilariously breaks down the typical SF taxi user experience.
Here is how it works:
You call the number. You get a busy signal, or no one answers.
You call again, nothing.
You get a second phone, you dial Yellow on one and Desoto on the second and hit redial over and over again with both of your thumbs until one answers.
Your wife grabs two more phones and does double redial.
Finally it picks up. You wait on hold for 7 minutes.
A dispatcher answers. He barks, “10 minutes!” then hang up on you (it is always 10 minutes).
You wait 23 minutes with your grandma in the rain.
You call back and repeat the redial/hold routine.
You tell the dispatcher, your guy didn’t show. He says, “10 minutes!” and hangs up on you.
23 more minutes later you give up and go wander around the neighborhood hoping a cab randomly drives by.
You are 53 minutes late for your event raising money for children with sarcoma. Your friends ask if you really do care about the children.
38 minutes later a taxi driver arrives and knocks on your front door. The babysitter answer and says you are not there. The cabbie screams at her and makes the kids cry.
(And if a taxi does show, you get a guy driving like mad with the windows rolled down, cell phone in one hand, and radio blaring).
“You wait 23 minutes with your grandma in the rain” is pretty much spot on here.
Like in the case of Airbnb, UberCab in the fortunate/unfortunate position of being a catalyst for industry change. There’s something not quite right about regulations that allow for a dispatched cab to pick up another fare instead of completing its original transaction yet make it impossible for a service that has obvious consumer demand and puts idle drivers to work to continue its business.
UberCab, which has $1.25 million in funding from First Round Capital, is still in operation, risking a $5,000 fee every time a cab gets sent out and threat of 90 days in jail per each day it’s still running.
Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for that Taxi Magic cab I called last Wednesday.
Apple raised the bar on ultra-portable computers with the latest MacBook Air. There’s no questioning that. Steve Jobs & Co. took the already-thin MacBook Air and shrunk down both its physical size and price tag. Win win, right?
Well, yeah, but the MacBook Air isn’t for everyone. Good thing the PC world has been doing the ultra-portable thing just as long as Apple and offers some quality alternatives. Sure, there really isn’t one model that soundly beats the new MacBook Air in every category, but the same can be said about the Air versus the five computers listed after the jump.
Blekko, the shiny new search engine that we first started covering way back in 2008 when they had a hand puppet as their mascot, is preparing to launch. Next Monday, November 1, they’ll turn the lights on and let anyone in.
If you’re really raring to get in at the first possible moment, the site will technically go live at 9 pm California time on Sunday evening.
We’ve been testing it since July, along with 8,000 other people in the private beta (our beta review is here). Unlike the massive failure that was known as Cuil, the Blekko team isn’t out hyping the site as a Google-killer. Rather, Blekko is being positioned as a place for people to create and share their own search engines based on trusted websites, and to get deep insights into SEO via a very transparent ranking system.
Will you like it? During the beta period, the company says, about 11.5% of users stuck around and started using Blekko at least weekly. That’s a very high percentage of repeat usage for a new search engine. The targeted search engine feature is extremely useful, as you’ll see when the site launches. We’ll have a full launch review up on Sunday evening.
The company has raised $20 million from a variety of investors, including Marc Andreessen and Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC.
Mertado, a social shopping site that launched in April, wants to give social game developers a new way to make money: by incorporating a virtual storefront into their games. Today the startup is launching a new widget that developers on Facebook can integrate directly into their apps, and it’s also offering support for embedding the storefront on publisher sites across the web.
Mertado is a bit like a Groupon for retail goods — every day it presents you with a handful of items available at a discount price, with deals on things like digital picture frames, tote bags, and those As-Seen-On-TV gadgets that you’d never think of buying on your own but are actually pretty useful. The service has been available via a Facebook application and a Facebook Connect-enabled website (the company says its users are split around half and half between the two) and now it’s looking to increase distribution with the new widget.
Once a developer has integrated the widget, Mertado entices gamers to go shopping using a tried and true technique: by offering them ‘free’ virtual credits whenever they purchase something through Mertado. Mertado features support for Facebook Credits (it says it’s the first retailer on Facebook with Credits support), and it can also work with alternative virtual currencies.
When a user activates the Mertado storefront, they’ll see a widget overlaid on top of the game they’re playing. The whole shopping process, from selecting an item to checking out with a credit card, is done from this widget, so the user never gets kicked off to another page (which is good news for developers, who want them to stay engaged with their game). To help get the gamer interested, there’s a very QVCish video describing the product Mertado is currently selling — in fact, the company actually hired someone with QVC experience to do the audio for these, which is a nice touch.
The embedded shopping widget will also work on publisher sites. Mertado isn’t the first to offer something like this (PayPal launched a shopping widget in 2007, and there have been a handful of similar startups). But Mertado says that it’s fairly unique because it isn’t simply promoting goods that are sold through another party — it manages the entire process, including fulfilling orders.
So will this be effective? I think the answer will largely revolve around how good the products Mertado promotes are, and how well it can target them. Offers of free credits may be enough to get users interested enough to activate the Mertado widget, and it could also push them over the edge if they’re considering buying the latest gadget Mertado is hawking. But if the consumer doesn’t have much interest in the product to begin with, I don’t think promises of Facebook Credits will be enough to get them to make a purchase.
Here’s a video walkthrough of how the widget works:
Google's proposed $700 million acquisition of flight data powerhouse ITA Software is running into some serious resistance from the online travel industry. A group of online travel companies including Expedia, Kayak, Travelocity, and TripAdvisor are lobbying the Justice Department to block the deal on antitrust grounds through an organization called FairSearch. Some of these companies were also behind competing bids for ITA Software which failed. Microsoft separately opposes the deal as well. ITA provides flight data, schedules, fares, and availability to many of these travel sites, airline sites and Microsoft's Bing search engine. The FairSearch coalition argues that allowing "Google could use ITA to try to marginalize competitors in ways that raise prices for consumers and limit innovation." They fear that Google will use its search dominance to steer traffic away from their own sites and favor flight search on Google itself. These fears are not completely unfounded.
The Android-powered CherryPad was supposed to amaze us all with its amazing features and low, low price of $188. That said, folks who ordered a CherryPad probably haven’t seen it yet even though news of the device first appeared in September and most CherryPads should have shipped already. One reader, WCS, wrote us saying that he expected his pad to ship on October 15. That date rolled by and on October 20 he received a “tracking number” that tracks no existing package in the UPS, Fedex, DHL, or USPS databases. And then he waited.
And waited.
And waited.
He writes:
The Cherrypal “Support” forum (if you can call it that: replies to questions are not permitted, except by the Administrator, and it appears to actually be a polling platform) is increasingly showing posts from people who have received neither their Cherrypad nor their tracking number. In response, the Administrator claims the delay was caused by a typhoon in the Philippines and that everything is fine and users in California and Italy have received their units. Oh, and the “forum” cleverly substitutes the word “issue” when one types “scam”.
Today, at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco, PayPal is releasing an embedded apps platform that will give PayPal developers a fully integrated set of small business, and buyer and seller tools that enhance PayPal’s payments platform.
PayPal Apps allows developers to embed applications directly on the PayPal website and offer SaaS apps which enhance PayPal's services. It’s similar in theory to eBay’s apps for Sellers. The new platform, which is launching with a number of pilot partners today, will be released to the public next year.
For example, Shipping and order management startup Shipwire Anywhere has partnered with PayPal to gve developers a complete suite of shipping tools and multi-channel order management to manage their shipping without leaving PayPal.
Other initial apps partners include Bill.com, CreditKarma, Expensify, Freshbooks, and Zuora are already building apps into PayPal.com.
If you’re headed to PayPal’s big developer conference in San Francisco today, you may spot an unusual landmark sitting in front of the Moscone Center: a massive, 600 pound block of ice with hundreds of dollars locked beneath the surface. The frigid booty comes compliments of the WePay team, and they’re trolling PayPal’s conference in an effort to tell everyone in attendance that “PayPal freezes your accounts” and that you should “unfreeze your money”… by switching to WePay, of course.
It’s still early in the day, but the block of ice has already led to quite a bit of drama, including a moderate-speed chase involving a palette mover. According to WePay cofounder Rich Aberman, the WePay squad wheeled the ice block over to the Moscone Center on a palette mover and dropped off the cargo without issue. Aberman then quickly dashed away with the mover in tow, which he planned to hide nearby (Moscone security wouldn’t be able to remove the ice block without it).
Aberman made it 2.5 blocks before being chased down by a member of the Moscone security team, who proceeded to grab the palette mover and wheel it back to the block of ice. After getting the ice back onto the mover, he wheeled it off Moscone property. Now Aberman tells me that the WePay team has resorted to wheeling the ice in a circle around the block.
WePay competes with PayPal on the group payments front. The service makes it easy to accept payments from multiple people, which makes it well-suited for everything from event ticketing to splitting your monthly bills with your roommate (without all the lame IOUs).
In some ways, PayPal has this coming — and not just because of its account freeze issues. Back in its earlier days when it was still sparring with eBay, a group of PayPal employees headed to southern California for a major eBay event. The PayPal team then proceeded to offer conference attendees a chance at winning hundreds of dollars — but only if they wore special PayPal-branded T-shirts to the conference the next day. Many of them did, and eBay got to watch its conference get taken over by a competitor. Of course, eBay then went on to acquire PayPal.
At the company’s annual developer conference today, PayPal debuted its much awaited micropayments product. According to a release issued by the company, the new product is an “in-context, frictionless payment solution that lets consumers pay for digital goods and content in as little as two clicks, without ever having to leave a publisher's game, news, music, video or media site.”
PayPal equates the product as the online equivalent of dropping a quarter into a game machine. Pricing is set at 5 percent plus 5 cents for purchases under $12, which PayPal says is lower than the fees typically charged by payment processors. For example, under standard PayPal pricing, a $1.00 transaction would incur a fee of $0.33. With micropayment pricing, it would cost $0.10. While PayPal for digital goods will be available late fall this year, Facebook will soon integrate the new digital goods payment product.
The company also announced a number of other partners including Autosport.com, FT.com, GigaOM, Justin.tv, Ooyala, Plimus, Tagged, Tyler Projects and Ustream.
As we’ve written in the past, this product is huge for the payments industry because it can be used for an easier payments experience across a variety of industries, including gaming, online content and premium video.
While the payments structure is slightly different than PayPal’s traditional take, this could bring in serious dough for PayPal considering the existing reach of the payments plaform. In 2009 alone, PayPal processed more than $2 billion in transactions for digital goods (out of $72 billion in total). In the first half of 2010, the company has processed more than $1.3 billion, and is in track to see $3 billion by the end of the year. In fact, over 50 percent of direct in-app transactions for virtual goods within social gaming environments are going through PayPal.
If Google Street View and Chatroulette mated and gave birth to a lovechild, it’d look a lot like MapCrunch. For the record, this is not a TechCrunch network site, and would have probably been better off with a name like MapRoulette or StreetviewRoulette or something.
Either way, if you want to be taken to a random location on Google Street View (in North America, Europe, Asia or Australasia), either by clicking a button or automagically after a couple of seconds, MapCrunch is the mash-up place to be.
Granted, it’s a silly little idea and site, but I still find it kind of mesmerizing, at least for a couple of minutes, to watch these random sceneries from all over the world pass by.
Big plus: unlike Chatroulette, chances are pretty thin you’ll see some random dude masturbating every few seconds.
Pro tip: enable the ‘Slideshow’ feature and just lean back.
There are a vast amount of product comparison sites on the web and a number of social shopping sites that allow online shoppers use their social graph to share purchasing decisions. Today video search engine Blinkx is trying to combine the two functionalities with the launch of Cheep, a social shopping service.
Through a browser add-on (which currently only works on Firefox or IE), Cheep recognizes when you're looking at a specific product and will show you current price comparisons from around the Web, as well as reviews and ratings. Cheep will appear as a small bar at the top of your screen when you're looking at a product page. The startup has indexed millions of products nearly 200 online retailers, including Amazon, BestBuy and Walmart, so chances are that Cheep will be able to find the product you are viewing within your browser.
Beyond the add-on, Cheep is also a standalone social network that encourages users to share their shopping activity, including purchases, wishlists, likes, reviews and more; with other Cheep members. The startup is also creating profiles for millions of products, which users can share on Facebook and Twitter.
I doubt I’d really use the online community side of Cheep but the browser add-on could be useful. The ability to receive automatic, contextual information such as alternative reviews or prices for a product without having open another browser tab for a search is appealing.
First, call me a negative Nancy but the rumors that Apple could buy Sony – Lord knows Sony needs some better management – are false. This sort of thing seems more like a solo Steve Jobs move than a move by Apple proper. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at where all this speculation comes from.
In his earnings call, Jobs said, when asked what they would do with the $51 billion in cash it has lying around:
"We would like to continue to keep our powder dry, because we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future.”
Amazon has just released a new free iPad app, called Amazon Windowshop that the company says is a complete “rewrite” of Amazon.com specifically for the iPad. Optimized for touch screen tablets, Amazon Windowshop makes it easy to swipe through the store to browse products on the iPad.
Similar to Amazon’s website, the app features product lists including "Featured", "Bestsellers", "Recommendations", "New Releases", "Most Wished For", "Most Gifted", and "Movers & Shakers".
Amazon presents products via a grid-like interface, but will include pop-outs of specific products with high-resolution images, user reviews, descriptions and videos related to that product (which includes 30 second samples for the music items).
For Amazon Prime members, the app will indicate which products qualify for Amazon Prime and include Amazon 1-Click checkout. You can also share products from the app via e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter, save an item for later by adding it to your Wish List, and more.
Essentially the app is a suped up version of Amazon.com that is designed specifically for the iPad. It almost feels like a catalog, because of the layout and images. As the holiday season draws near, Amazon is undoubtedly ramping up its online shopping offerings, and capitalizing on the continued growth in the the consumer use of the iPad.
Viator, which operates a one-stop-shop for researching, planning and booking tours and activities all over the globe via Viator.com, has moved to acquire Sydney-based OurExplorer.com, an online resource for discovering and booking private tour guides around the world.
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Founded in 2008, OurExplorer.com has grown into a global online network of professional tour guides who specialize in destinations like London, New York and Paris, as well as more off-the-beaten-path destinations.
OurExplorer says it has gathered information on more than 2,000 registered tour guides in more than 500 destinations to date, enabling travelers to quickly locate local guides in the destinations they are visiting.
Each registered OurExplorer guide has a personalized profile that details their destination of focus, areas of expertise, years as a guide, licensing and pricing information and ratings by customers. Travelers seeking out a customized local experience in their destination can use the OurExplorer network to find a local expert that will meet their personal preferences and craft a private tour that will complement their activities itinerary.
The OurExplorer brand will continue to operate under its existing name.
VeriFone, which offers solutions that enable electronic payment transactions and related services at points of sale, will extend mobile payments acceptance with PayPal and integrate traditional card payments with its new partner’s Mobile Payments products.
In addition, PayPal Mobile App will soon work with VeriFone's PAYware Mobile for iPhone (which is the product Square competes with, as it also enables merchants to accept payments via a software-hardware combo for the Apple smartphone).
Furthermore, the PAYware Mobile App will be enhanced to support PayPal Bump technology that enables iPhone users to bump their phones together to transfer money between them.
VeriFone will, upon integration, promote PayPal and Bump acceptance to its reseller channel. PayPal, in turn, will co-market VeriFone's PAYware Mobile to its own user base.
The integrated capabilities are expected to be available next year.
A small Turkish startup called lunar technologies has raised $1 million for one of its ventures, Trend.ly, managing director Ercan Yaris tells me. The money comes from undisclosed angel investors, two of them partners in one of the biggest telecom companies in Turkey. Trend.ly is a very basic site any way you look at it. Visitors can go to the site to enter any two-element poll (live examples: love vs. sex and Jessica Biel vs. Scarlett Johansson) and have the community vote on them by 'liking' one of the other. Then again, the site has been live for less than 2 months now. Yes, that's two months.
It’s no secret that both Foursquare and Gowalla are expanding their location-based social networks past the check-in, developing other incentives for consumers to use the services. Gowalla, in particular, has focused on adding innovative features to its platform to make the social network more interactive, through photos and comments. Most recently, the startup added local highlights, which allows users to essentially tap into their social graph to not only see what’s popular in a particular location, but also provide contextual information around what are the best sights, places, restaurants and activities in a particular locale. Today, Gowalla is adding a few more features for businesses that help the network move beyond the check-in, including City Pages, Verified Businesses and Venues; and the Stamp Calendar.
Gowalla will now include City Pages for more than 30 metro areas worldwide. For a given metropolis, Gowalla will combine all of the most popular happenings, places, and activities in a single page, courtesy of the network’s Highlights feature. City Pages will also include a map of local activity that shows where the most check-ins are taking place and includes the best spots that are highlighted by other users. Since Highlights launched, more than 10,000 Passport Holders have added 30,000 Highlights worldwide. So for example, the Austin city page will list the top food destinations, the best live music, the most popular places (according to check-ins) and more categories of destinations.
The second feature rollout allows businesses and venues to verify and claim their locations on Gowalla, add contact information, location details and more. Verified locations can also customize the messages that appear when people visit their location with Gowalla. Eventually, businesses will be able to add deals and other contextual information to their verified page.
Lastly, any verified business or venue in New York, San Francisco or Austin can now purchase custom Passport Stamps that users can earn for check-ins, that will also include a featured listing on Gowalla, similar to an advertisement. Featured listings will include a prominent placement on Verified Business Pages and within the Gowalla mobile applications on iPhone, Android and Blackberry.
Gowalla has included this feature for some time, but has been implementing this on a case-by-case basis. Now these custom badges are part of a self-serve platform. While these custom badges previously sold for a few thousand dollars a piece for businesses, Gowalla is will begin charging verified businesses $5 per day for custom badges (the price will go up by $5 as a business publishes more unique badges within a month, says founder and CEO Josh Williams). Eventually this feature will be rolled out to other cities. Via a “Stamp Calendar,” businesses can reserve certain times for their custom badges to be promoted.
It’s clear that with City Pages and Business Listings, Gowalla is turning its platform into more of an information destination for locales, as opposed to simply a check-in focused social network. As Williams tells me, “Check-ins are one form of looking at the location but we are exploring ways to move beyond the check-in.” He says that in the near future, Gowalla’s mobile clients will be updated with “significant” new features.
But business listings and badges could also represent another move by the network beyond just check-ins: revenue. The self-serve platform that allows businesses to identify their page could be complimented by coupons, deals, and even advertising. And the customized badges could also bring in a steady revenue once Gowalla ramps up the feature across the country.
Apparently, the Photobucket that came out of the merger didn’t technically have a chief executive at the helm, although CFO Tom Munro served as acting President. The company this morning announced that Munro has now been officially appointed CEO after an executive search was initiated by Steamboat Ventures, the Disney-affiliated venture capital firm backing Photobucket.
Prior to Photobucket and Ontela, Munro was CFO of Vallent, a $70 million software company that was acquired by IBM in 2007. Before Vallent, he served as CFO of Quotesmith.com during their initial public offering.
Photobucket isn’t exactly the first site that springs to mind (not to mine, at least) when it comes to sharing photos and videos online, but the company claims it’s still a juggernaut in this field.
The company claims over 100 million registered members upload over four million images and videos per day via the Web and their smartphones or connected digital cameras.
Earlier this month, Photobucket announced that it has inked a deal with T-Mobile USA to incorporate automatic photo and video upload functionality in the pre-installed Photobucket Mobile Application on the T-Mobile G2.
I’ve been in love with the simple bookmarking service Instapaper for a few years now. The release of the iPad has made it even better. You see, my daily routine now involves using the Instapaper app on the iPad to read all of the longer articles I don’t get to while sitting at my desk. But quite often, it’s hard to find longer articles. That’s where Longreads comes in.
As a service on Twitter, Longreads has actually existed since April 2009. Over 7,000 people follow the account to get between three to five long article recommendations a day from various publications around the web. And today, the man behind the project, Mark Armstrong, is finally launching a website for Longreads. The idea, he says, is to create a sort of “Techmeme for long stories”.
But it’s also broader than that, Armstrong says. “The Longreads community is growing as people continue to look for material that’s perfect for their iPhone, Kindle and iPad. And these devices are changing the way people write for the web — it’s no longer just about short, snackable blog posts consumed at work when the boss isn’t looking; it’s also now about immersive, in-depth storytelling for people to enjoy during commutes, airplane flights and while sitting on the couch at home,” he says.
So what kind of articles appear on Longreads? Posts longer than 1,500 words, but shorter than 30,000 words. What’s nice is that Armstrong also breaks these down into approximately how long it will take an average person to read them. For example, a 4,000-word post may take 16 minutes. That’s perfect if you know you have about 15-minutes to kill.
The main purpose of longreads.com is to serve as an aggregator and archive for the service. Notably, it has a nice big search box that lets you search for long articles by topic or source. And you can filter articles based on what length you’re looking for.
Armstrong notes that he hopes Longreads will also help publishers better organize their longer content in a way that readers are going to demand going forward. And he’s clearly not the only one that thinks this type of demand is there. Amazon just announced their “Kindle Singles” — electronic content between the size of short articles and long books, between 10,000 and 30,000 words.
Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google's published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop, and provides practical services around the technology, similar to what Red Hat does for the Linux framework.
Cloudera has steadily launched a number of applications around its technology including Cloudera Enterprise, which includes authorization management and provisioning, integration configuration and monitoring and resource management. The startup also rolled out Desktop Management platform that allows for copying and browsing the data files stored on a cluster; creating, running and saving jobs for later reuse or customization; and helps monitor the health of a Hadoop cluster and alerting operators in case of problems.
Via Cloudera, Hadoop is currently used by most of the giants in the space including Google, Yahoo, Facebook (we wrote about Facebook’s use of Cloudera here), Amazon, AOL, Baidu and more. The company’s founder, Christophe Bisciglia,left Cloudera earlier this year.
The new funding will be used to for further product development and services to promote the adoption of Hadoop. In February of this year, Cloudera’s CEO Mike Olson told GigaOm that the company could have the legs for an IPO down the line. It should be interesting to see if the company can make a solid business out of commercializing an open source framework, or if a bigger technology company makes Cloudera a better offer for an exit.
In what looks like a very good fit, location-based service WorkSnug is partnering with Skype to help mobile workers locate Skype Access-supported WiFi locations in coffee shops using its augmented reality app for iPhone. Skype Access lets users pay for WiFi on a per-minute basis using their Skype credentials and credit at 200,000 hotspots, provided by the likes of BT Openzone, Boingo, and Barnes & Noble. While WorkSnug's iPhone app and service helps mobile workers locate potential working spaces – coffee shops, libraries, formal co-working spaces etc. – and provides ratings on such things as Internet connectivity, "community feel", power sockets, and, more to the point, the quality of coffee.
Last Wednesday, I got my hands on one of the new MacBook Airs. I haven’t touched my MacBook Pro since. It’s six months old. RIP.
I know that sounds outrageous. Or like hyperbole. But it’s not. When I wrote up my initial thoughts, it was after only a few hours of usage. I hadn’t even used it outside the house yet. But now I have. I’ve used it almost everywhere I’ve been for just about a week now. There’s no question in my mind that this has replaced my MacBook Pro as my go-to machine.
But here’s the really crazy thing. It’s not just the size of the thing that I love so much (I have the 13-inch model) — which is amazing — it’s the speed. This thing boots up in less than 15 seconds, ready to go. My i7 iMac with 8 GB of RAM takes something like 2 minutes. My i7 MacBook Pro takes at least 30-45 seconds, and it has an SSD drive.
Applications seem to load quicker. Files transfer quicker. The thing shuts down in about 3 seconds. Macworld has the initial benchmarks. They don’t lie. It just screams.
And by speed, I also mean “power”. Remarkably, for the first time that I’ve used one, this MacBook Air doesn’t feel underpowered. At all. Again, for the past 6 months I’ve been using a combination of an i7 iMac and an i7 MacBook Pro. Judging from processor, clock speed, and amount of RAM, both should be significantly faster than this Air. For certain tasks, they undoubtedly are. But for pretty much everything I’ve done this past week — basically, my regular work and play habits — I really can’t say I notice a difference. This definitely surprised me.
Again, Macworld’s initial benchmark numbers seem to at least partially back up such a crazy claim. I have the baseline 13-inch MacBook Air with a 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, and a 128 GB flash storage hard drive. Their tests have this thing performing better than the 13-inch MacBook Pro with a faster Core 2 Duo processor and double the RAM. And it’s not that far off from the i5 Pro model.
They largely credit the flash storage hard drive. And that’s undoubtedly a huge part of the performance. But another part is likely that previous MacBook Airs have run underclocked to deal with heat issues. That doesn’t appear to be happening with these models. So they can purr along at full speed. And it shows.
Earlier tonight, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber wrote a post wondering where this new Air fits into Apple’s MacBook lineup? It is a good question considering the base model is the same $999 price as the base MacBook model. He thinks it might fit in as a secondary computer. I agree — for now.
There is one thing holding back the Air: storage space. Thanks largely to Apple themselves, we live in a world where we have digital music, photos, movies, and TV shows that take up dozens, if not hundreds of gigabytes of storage. Because of this, a 128 GB hard drive isn’t enough for many people these days if they’re going to be using the Air as their primary machine. Increasingly, even 256 GB isn’t enough. Hell, I’m nearing 1 TB of media on my iMac.
But. We all know that Apple has aspirations to move all of this media to the cloud. If they can do that and cut the chains around these machines, they’re going to fly. Off the shelves. In a hurry.
Here’s how I see it: if storage didn’t matter, I think this 13-inch MacBook Air would almost immediately be Apple’s best-selling Mac. It’s that good.
It’s funny that I haven’t really even talked about the size of the machine yet — that’s the glittering lure that ropes people in. But the Air has always had that. What it didn’t have previously was a great price and killer performance. Now it does. Just in the past six days, five people that I’ve showed this thing to have already bought one. That’s the stuff iPhones and iPads are made of. It has the “wow” factor.
And regardless of if storage capabilities hold it back or not, I have no doubt that the Air does point to the future of the MacBook lineup. They’re soon all going to lose their optical drives, gain flash storage drives, and work for hours on end. In fact, the only machine I can think of that I might enjoy more than this one is one that lasts even longer. To get that, I’d accept a model that’s slightly larger (15-inches), slightly heavier (maybe 3.3 pounds), but had 10 hours of battery life. That’s the future MacBook Pro right there.
Speaking of battery life, again, this thing shines pretty nicely in that category as well. Apple says it will get 7-hours, and based on my usage, that’s close. I’m usually seeing between 5 and 6 hours depending on what I’m doing and screen brightness. A couple times I have gotten about 7 hours.
As for the supposed 30 days of standby time? It’s hard to imagine me not using this thing for 30 days at a time, but I will say that I’ve gone to bed with it at 50 percent power and woken up several hours later with it at 49 percent power. And yes, the thing wakes up from sleep instantaneously. The only thing you have to wait for is for your WiFi to connect.
As for the screen? Again, I thought it would be an issue switching from a 15-inch MacBook Pro to this, but it’s really not. This thing has the same 1440-by-900 resolution as the standard 15-inch MacBook Pro screen, so, there you go.
People also can’t seem to believe when I tell them it doesn’t run hot. But it doesn’t. The only times I’ve felt it getting a little bit warm is when I’ve run — surprise, surprise — multiple Flash movies. But the heat doesn’t come close to my MacBook Pro. That that doesn’t come close to my old MacBook Pro which was an upside down stove at points.
It’s hard to know what else to say. This is the computer I’ve been waiting for. It makes me feel foolish for spending almost three grand on a brand new souped-up MacBook Pro six months ago. I just can’t think of a time I’ll ever want to or need to turn it on again.
Goodbye, MacBook Pro. Your candle burned out long before your hard drive ever did.
This week, 
“People like stumbling videos more than webpages,” StumbleUpon founder 
If you haven’t tried out 
Among the many things about living in the year 2010 that blow my mind (
Digg just can’t get a break. On the heels of news that the company had to lay off 
Google TV is now out there in the wild. There’s no indication of how it’s selling just yet, but my hunch is that like early Android, it may be some time before sales really take off. That shouldn’t be too surprising considering that the platform is built on top of Android. But there aren’t a lot of apps yet that are tailored for these new devices. They need more. And they know the way to get them. Free giveaways!
It’s obviously a little early for a full assessment of this new device but we do know a few things. It’s quite small and compact – much lighter than and iPad – and the UI is very handsome. Android users will be kind of miffed that the device doesn’t support the Android App Store, however, because B&N want’s a “curated experience.” So much for the openness of Android.
When AOL 
“Apple, Inc. (AAPL) in negotiations to acquire Spotify,” read the tip that came in yesterday via email from an anonymous source. Most tips are just outright false, but we dug into this one a little bit.
Google 
We’re live and set up at the Barnes & Noble Nook event in New York. I’ll be updating this page in lieu of using our standard liveblogging software, mostly because it will be only one device this time – probably an LCD color 
The US solar market took another step forward this week with the federal government’s approval of 
Last week San Francisco car matching startup 
Apple raised the bar on ultra-portable computers with the latest 
Google's proposed 
The Android-powered 
If you’re headed to PayPal’s big developer conference in San Francisco today, you may spot an unusual landmark sitting in front of the Moscone Center: a massive, 600 pound block of ice with hundreds of dollars locked beneath the surface. The frigid booty comes compliments of the 
At the company’s annual developer conference today, PayPal debuted its 
There are a vast amount of product comparison sites on the web and a number of social shopping sites that allow online shoppers use their social graph to share purchasing decisions. Today video search engine 
First, call me a negative Nancy but the rumors that Apple could buy Sony – Lord knows Sony needs some better management – are false. This sort of thing seems more like a solo Steve Jobs move than a move by Apple proper. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at where all this speculation comes from.
A small Turkish startup called 
In what looks like a very good fit, location-based service 
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