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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) techcrunch | |
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/z-QgR86wliY/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131942  Last summer, we wrote about the launch of a new service from Google called City Tours that marked the search giant’s first foray into the travel space. The service isn’t exactly flashy, but it’s quite practical: tell it what city you’re visiting, and it can generate an optimized travel itinerary featuring a number of landmarks within walking distance. Unfortunately it had a few shortcomings. For one, its directions were all based on distances “as the bird flies”. In other words, it was up to you to figure out the best way to navigate between these landmarks, because Travel Tours would sometimes direct you to walk directly across a river.
Today, Google is releasing an updated version of Travel Tours that takes advantage of the Walking Directions built into Google Maps, which means you’ll be able to rely on them even if you’re not capable of scaling a building in a single bound. You can see the difference in the images below.
Google’s blog post on the release also notes that you can now import Google ‘My Maps’ into City Tours. My Maps, which launched back in 2007, allow you to manually tag your own points of interest on a Google Map. This means you’ll now be able to build out a map of all the landmarks you’d like to see on your trip, then import those into City Tours to get an optimized itinerary.
The service remains in Google Labs.
New Version
Old Version
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/g00CLTCfME8/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131946  Following a bit of planned iTunes Connect downtime for the holidays, LinkedIn came out with the latest version of their iPhone app today. As you might expect from a 3.0 release, the app has been much improved, namely in its user experience. In fact, it looks a lot more like Facebook’s iPhone app now — which we’ll forgive, since that’s an excellent app.
As you can see, there is a new main screen that features 12 main buttons. Yes, this is just like the new Facebook app main screen that features big buttons. With LinkedIn’s you’ll get easy access to “All Updates,” “Status,” “Profiles,” “Discussions,” “Connections,” “Favorites,” “Inbox,” “Invitations,” “Recents,” “Reconnect,” “In Person,” and “Themes.” Of these, the Reconnect, In Person, and Themes areas are entirely new. Reconnect allows you to find people you likely know on LinkedIn with the click of a button. In Person lets you use the iPhone’s Bluetooth to easily swap contact information with any other LinkedIn iPhone use you happen to be nearby at a conference or event. And Themes allows you to change the color of the main screen icons — you can choose pink, orange, gold, and a bunch of other crazy colors to ugly-up your app to your heart’s content.
Previously, the app featured a more standard bottom-bar iPhone navigation where you could switch between updates, your inbox, search, and other elements. This new layout gives you access to a lot more information quickly. The updates areas (All and Status) has also been been made more Facebook-like as each now features a user profile picture next to each update. You can also now comment on each of these updates right from within the app — again, yes, just like Facebook.
It’s also now very easy to “star” any profile to mark it as a favorite, to give you easy access to it. Doing this also creates a filtering mechanism for the update streams.
Find the 3.0 version of the LinkedIn app, available for free in the App Store here.
 
 
 
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/doctorow-how-destroy-book Cory Doctorow, my former EFF colleague, now novelist and all-around-inspiration, gave a stirring speech entitled "How to Destroy the Book" in November at a Canadian conference dedicated to literacy. Fittingly, it was spontaneously transcribed and posted online at The Varsity.ca. The whole thing is terrific, but the first portion, an elegy to books and what they mean to us, is stirring and highly recommended to anyone who loves books:
When I buy an audiobook on CD, it’s mine. The license agreement, such as it is, is “don’t violate copyright law,” and I can rip that CD to mp3, I can load it to my iPod or any number of devises—it’s mine; I can give it away, I can sell it; it’s mine. But when you buy an audiobook through Audible, which now controls 90 per cent of the [downloadable] audiobook market, you get a license agreement, not a property interest. The things that you can do with it are limited by DRM; the players you can play it on are limited by the license agreements with Audible. Audible doesn’t do this because the publishers ask them to. Audible and iTunes, because Audible is the sole supplier to iTunes, do this because it’s in their own interest....
Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug. We all know this. It’s time we stop pretending that the pirates of copyright are right. These people were readers before they were publishers before they were writers before they worked in the legal department before they were agents before they were salespeople and marketers. We are the people of the book, and we need to start acting like it.
As it happens, the battle over whether you "own" digital goods (like e-books, CDs, and software) or merely "license" them will be a hot issue in court in 2010, with EFF deeply involved in the fight.
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/eZhTCKdTOmo/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131909  Of all the things Google has launched this past year, the most useful may be its Music Onebox feature that allows you to easily play popular music from Google Search results. Following its debut in October, I found myself using it left and right for songs I wanted to listen to. One thing I noticed was that while deals were in place with iLike, imeem, Rhapsody, and Pandora, the majority of the one-click play results were from the streaming music service Lala. This was awesome because most of the songs served up by Lala were the full versions. But fast forward to today, and it’s a much different story: Lala Onebox results are few and far between.
Why? It’s hard to know for sure, but it seems pretty likely that Apple’s recent deal to purchase Lala is at play. At the very least, it would seem that behind-the-scenes politics are dictating the results now being shown. We noted at the time of the Apple/Lala deal that it could change the Onebox offering, and it looks like it has. Plenty of results that used to serve up a Lala play option now default to iLike, which itself is now a part of MySpace Music (as is imeem). In fact, doing a random sampling of 30 popular songs brought yielded 28 iLike Onebox results, and only 2 Lala results. The problem with this is that for the majority of iLike Onebox results, you can only listen to either 30 or 90 second clips, rather than the entire songs, like you could on Lala. That obviously makes Google Music Onebox music much less useful.
A couple weeks ago, BusinessWeek got a comment from R.J. Pittman, Google’s director of product management, stating the Apple’s Lala deal would not alter the Google/Lala agreement. “We are agreeing to continue to leave the service as it is,” he said. (Apple declined to comment on the matter.) But this may simply mean that Lala will remain as one of the Onebox options, but has been taken out as the featured player for most musical content.
“We have enjoyed a good relationship with Apple for many years, and that continues to be the case,” Pittman also told BusinessWeek. That’s true, but there has definitely been a growing divide between the two in recent months as their interests continue to overlap. This has become a big enough issue that Google CEO Eric Schmidt had to step down from Apple’s Board in August despite assurances that he had no plans to do so leading up to that.
It’s not clear if it is Apple or Google that would have wanted Lala to be less prominently featured in Music Onebox, but it’s certainly possible that neither really liked the placement. After all, in pitching the idea to the record labels, Google likely played up the idea as an alternative to iTunes. The music labels have long sought a viable alternative to Apple’s musical powerhouse that could restore some leveraging power to them. Meanwhile, Apple will now have to foot the bill for Lala streaming — and that means paying the labels for every clip longer than 30-seconds, we hear. So they probably don’t want all those Lala clips being served up either.
Regardless of the reason, Google Music Onebox is now a lot less useful, and that’s too bad.
Update: As some people have noted in the comments, results on searches vary — but it’s important to make sure you’re logged out of your Google account and you clear you cookies. The reason is that Google keeps track of your preferences in a cookie.
[photo: flickr/duncan harris]
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/pgolCsxrJoM/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131891 We knew that the holidays were going to be super busy for iPhone developers — in a good way. Gaming community platform PlayHaven and mobile ad exchange Mobclix released data yesterday saying that iPhone game usage is likely to set record in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, called a “Game Rush,” with usage 28 times greater than the same weekly period last year.
One developer, Oliver Cameron of Taptivate, the developer of Voices (an application that morphs your voice into different sounds like Darth Vader, Chipmunks, etc), sent me an email saying that sales have been through the roof for them, and their app is now in the 44th spot because of the “Game Rush” as they’re calling it. It’s one of those “it’s stupid but fun” kind of apps that usually move well when people are looking for quick apps to download.
Cameron mentioned that sales were as high as 18,769 downloads of the $0.99 app on December 25th. So if you do the math, that’s $18,581.31 in sales, not including Apple’s 30% cut. If you included Apple’s cut, the app made $12,688 in one day. Those are some pretty crazy numbers, regardless. Check out a graph of Voice’s sales numbers below as well.
The app in total has made a little more then $250,000 sales, which got me thinking: If this app is #44 on the App Store, imagine what the number one and two apps were doing (Skee-Ball and Live Cams). We also just spoke with Colin Smith, Vice President of Freeverse, which said that their application, Skee-Ball sold 47,926 units — which is about 10x what it did the previous Friday. Another one of their apps, Flick Fishing, sold 31,741 units on Christmas day.
We’re also hearing that an app which has been one of the most popular since the launch of the App Store 18 months ago, saw its downloads on Christmas Day double its previous record for a single day.
All of this could well point to the possibility that Apple itself set a record in the amount of iPhones and iPod Touches sold during the holiday season.
Update: More numbers are coming in. Lima Sky’s Doodle Jump, which just hit the 1 million download mark about a week ago, managed to sell 80,000 units on Christmas day alone. Two days prior, they were pushing around 15,000 per day; two days later, they were hovering around 35,000. All in all, they sold 197,821 copies between 12/23 and 12/27 – at .99c a pop, we’re calculating that they took in just shy of $139,000 after Apple’s cut.
Update: Even more numbers to report as Tapulous, developers of the popular Tap Tap Revenge series, check in with good news. They’ve pulled down over 2 million installs of Tap Tap Revenge 3 since going free last Wednesday, 700,000 of which came on Christmas day. Between Tap Tap Revenge 1/2/3 and the Metallica/Lady GaGa editions, Tapulous now has 5 applications in the Top 100 grossing apps.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/5HF8Oiz6lnM/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131889  Music fans looking looking for an alternative to the iTunes/iPod ecosystem are getting a new option this week with the release of Songbird 1.4, which introduces support for CD ripping and syncing Mass Storage Class (MSC) Devices. The first feature is fairly self explanatory (and frankly I can’t believe it took this long to include), but it’s the latter that’s the most compelling: Songbird now features improved sync for a number of popular MSC devices, including the HTC Hero, Motorola Droid, Nokia N900, and the Palm Pre. The new features are available on Windows only for now, with Mac support planned for release early next year.
To be clear, Songbird has actually offered some MSC support before now, but CEO Jerrell Jimerson says that oftentimes devices don’t work as well as they should using generic support. Songbird has been working with manufacturers to try to make the syncing process as seamless as possible. They’ve inked a deal with Nokia, and are also engaged in less formal partnerships with a number of other manufacturers.
It’s been a rough year for Songbird. As we reported back in September, Songbird’s founding CEO Rob Lord left the company after burning through $8 million from Sequoia Capital and Atlas Ventures. The company brought on board Jimerson earlier this year to replace him, who managed to help raise a new round of funding (though it washed out prior investors and Sequoia didn’t participate). But there’s an opportunity for Songbird to serve as a music platform for Apple’s competitors, and it looks like that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Jimerson says that Songbird’s core functionality, which serves as a media player for both content saved locally to your computer and music that’s streamed from the web, remains fully intact. But the company is also looking to make the product more appealing to a broader userbase. And that includes forming more partnerships.
We’ve previously heard that Songbird has a deal with Phillips to install the software in 5 million music players, which would be a big win for the company. Jimerson wouldn’t comment on that, but it seems like it would fit with Songbird’s new strategy.
Songbird’s increasing support for media sync makes it a more direct competitor to DoubleTwist, another powerful iTunes alternative that supports many devices and that also has a brilliant marketing team.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/-AbYGwyCKfc/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131884 
For most of this year, Digg was on a roll, racking up more users, adding Facebook Connect, speeding up its site, launching new features like Digg Trends, and hiring key executives.
But its latest growth spurt stopped in September, 2009 when it peaked at 32 million unique visitors worldwide, according to comScore. In November, its worldwide visitors were down 15 percent to 27 million, which is about half the number of people who visit Twitter.com. Digg was passed by Twitter back in March (see chart below).
Two months of declines is not the end of the world. Even Twitter is seeing its growth flatten, and on an annual basis, Digg is still up 62 percent. Maybe once it launches Realtime Digg, which it’s been working on since at least six months, it will get back on that growth curve. It’s hard to compete with Facebook and Twitter, but adding more realtime elements could be just what Digg needs to stay in the race.
If you were Kevin Rose, what would you do to try to catch up to Twitter again?
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/QCPlzuGCE-I/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131863  Unless you’ve been living offline for the past year, you’ve undoubtedly heard and/or seen “I’m On A Boat,” Lonely Island’s mock hip hop song/video. Today brings a response to it in the form of a group of Apple fanbois rapping about their love of using Apple products. They even have one character autotuned up, just like T-Pain in the “I’m On A Boat” version. No word on if they used the I Am T-Pain iPhone app to get the effect, but a major plus if so.
It’s pretty standard stuff: Love Macs, love iPods, love iPhones — hate PCs, hate Zunes, hate drivers and viruses, etc. Fairly well made, this isn’t nearly as bad as the Bing Jingle, but it’s still a little cringe-inducing. Sample line: “I’m pluggin girls, you at work pluggin in devices.”
These guys clearly have an agenda as they run the site Switch to Mac — you can probably guess what that’s about. This video is technically the follow-up to their “Mac or PC” rap video.
[thanks Banyan]
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/PthlVp828_Q/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131806 The second batch of 150 tickets to attend the Crunchies Awards are on sale now, courtesy of Eventbrite. Balcony seats are $45 (orchestra is sold out.)
Remember that voting is open through midnight PST, Wednesday, January 6. Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote daily for their favorite people, products and companies of the year.
The Crunchies Awards celebrate the best tech accomplishments of 2009 and will be held at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco on Friday, January 8, 2010 at 7:30 pm PST. Along with our co-hosts, GigaOm and VentureBeat, we will announce the winners from 18 different award categories live on stage.
Orchestra and balcony tickets include access to the after party hosted across the street in City Hall’s Grand Rotunda through midnight. There will be a sponsor-hosted bar, savory nibbles and desserts, music and a game room, featuring a mix of traditional and online games to play. Check out more party photos from 2008 and 2007.
There are plenty of ways to sponsor and support the after-party energy. Contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde if you’d like to sponsor: card-game tables, demo tables, photo booths or walls, drinks or food, giveaways and prizes and the like. We have creative packages available in all shapes and sizes. Room for award benefactors and entertainment sponsors for the ceremony too.
Hope to see you there.
FINALISTS: If you haven’t already, please contact us asap so we can get you set up with your two complimentary passes to attend.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/TX1u_lE9oOo/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131853 
What’s not to like about free directory assistance? Investors are pouring yet another $6.75 million into Jingle Networks, the company behind 1-800-FREE-411. The funding round was disclosed today in an SEC filing, and it brings the total amount raised by the company to almost $90 million.
The investors in this round were not disclosed in the filing, but previous investors include First Round Capital, Goldman Sachs, Hearst, and Liberty Associated Partners.
Jingle runs voice ads before giving out directory assistance numbers, and competes with GOOG-411. Last year, before the U.S. financial meltdown, it was looking to IPO, launched a broader voice ad network, and even hit profitability on a per-call basis.
The IPO talk stopped as soon as the advertising recession hit, and you’ve got to wonder how that voice ad network is doing now, and whether it is still profitable per call. I’d be surprised. If they were profitable, why would they have to raise $6.7 million now, on top of the $7.5 million they raised just last February. Maybe this one will get the company back over the hump and ready for an exit.
Update: CEO Scott Kliger responds, saying that the company’s main service is still profitable, and that this round will be used to expand its mobile ad network, Jingle Connect. He writes:
First, all of our current investors participated in this round. Second, the voice service is profitable and has continued to be profitable despite the difficult economic climate for advertising during the end of ‘08 and the first half of ‘09. This round, however, is intended to dramatically expand the growth of our mobile ad network, Jingle Connect which was launched in mid-2008 and has seen sequential growth of over 300%. We believe we have an enormous opportunity in the convergence of the geo, local and mobile ad spaces for both voice and visual and we look to extend that lead with these funds.
Did we mention that there is a Geo Land Rush going on?
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/19924 http://creativecommons.org/?p=19924 Though our 2009 Commoner Letter series has officially come to an end, we are pleased to announce one final letter, this time from our Founder and Board Member Lawrence Lessig. Professor Lessig needs little introduction, so I’ll leave it to him tell you in his own words why supporting the mission of Creative Commons is vital for anyone who cares about building a culture of free and legal online sharing. If you, like Professor Lessig and hundreds of thousands of creators and consumers around the world, care about sustaining CC in the long term, then I encourage you to give back to CC and invest in the work we do. As an added incentive to answer Professor Lessig’s call for support, Attributor and wikiHow are currently matching gifts made to CC – so donate today and make your year-end gift really count!
It is the end of another year, and I find myself frantically reaching out through as many channels as I can to get friends of the commons to support Creative Commons. I’ve been writing emails — yes, actual hand-made emails — to everyone who’s given significant contributions to us before but not this year. I’ve been writing to others who should be giving but haven’t so far. And I’ve been writing more machine made emails (like, for example this) to everyone else.
My freneticism about this is in part personal, part not. The part that’s not is the stuff that you’ve been reading about — about Creative Commons — in all these letters. You’ve helped us build something important and valuable, that is supporting a much bigger and much more valuable ecology of creativity that everyone should be celebrating. If I had thought at the start to predict when I knew we had marked our space, it would have been when the White House, Al Jazeera, and Wikipedia all adopted CC licenses. That happened this year. And now that it has happened, we all have an even stronger obligation to make sure this thing that thousands helped build over the past 7 years continues to grow and succeed and inspire.
But the part of the frenetic that’s personal is that I worry that I myself am not doing enough for this amazing organization that I helped found. That I’m an absent father — or worse. That because I felt I had to devote the majority of my energy to a new, and truly impossible project — fighting “institutional corruption,” especially as it debilitates our government — I was leaving this child on its own a bit too early.
I can’t hide that I fear exactly this. This year in particular, despite our receiving more contributions than ever in our history, we are struggling to meet our goal. The desert that is corporate contributions has hit us hard, and that forces all of us (and especially, absent fathers) to work harder.
That is why I asked the team at Creative Commons to let me write this last Commoner letter for the year. Tough times force us to shake out the old, and focus on the future. Creative Commons will be an even bigger part of a much saner future. A world is beginning to recognize the place for reasonableness and balance. They are beginning to practice that using our tools.
But you need to help us to continue building that future. One click will get that started. Please, as you complete the list of great orgs to support this year, be certain you have reserved a space for us. This year more than any other before, we need that support. Donate today.
Thank you.
—–
Lessig
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http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/19928 http://creativecommons.org/?p=19928 We’re absolutely thrilled to announce that our longtime friends Attributor and wikiHow have come together in the final days of our annual campaign to generously match the next $5,500 in donations! wikiHow has committed to giving $3000 and Attributor $2500, so please join them and show you care about the future of Creative Commons and building a culture of sharing. Even if you’ve already donated, please consider giving whatever you can today – it will automatically be doubled!
We’re proud to have the continued support of both wikiHow and Attributor, who, since each company’s founding, have been dedicated advocates of the commons and have demonstrated how we can use the Internet as a powerful digital tool to promote collaboration, innovation, and the sharing of information.
wikiHow is “a collaboration to build and share the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual.” Every month, millions of people turn to the multilingual site to learn how to do something new, and it relies on the knowledge, creativity, and contributions of people around the globe to make it a unique and useful tool. wikiHow supports Creative Commons because, in the words of its founder, Jack Herrick, “I’d like to live in a world where knowledge can grow and be built upon by many. Creative Commons creates the infrastructure to make this information sharing possible.” Check out wikiHow’s redesigned Web site.
Attributor provides the free service FairShare, first previewed at the CC tech summit in 2008. FairShare lets you assign a CC license to your work and receive information on how and where it is shared with others. Results come back as an RSS feed and include information about the percentage of your work re-used, whether you’ve received attribution and if ads are present. According to Attributor VP, Rich Pearson, “We’re a proud supporter of Creative Commons and do everything we can to spread their vision of saving the world from failed sharing.”
Please join Rich, Jack, and the rest of the folks at Attributor and wikiHow in investing in Creative Commons and a bright future for the world of online sharing. Your support helps, and every contribution counts, so please give what you can and donate today!
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/hfhN3DuUGOQ/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131841 
Best Buy is offering a deal for consumers to get a free TweetDeck app with the purchase of a CD under Interscope Records, which includes artists such as 50 Cent, Flyleaf, Weezer, OneRepublic, Black Eyed Peas, Timbaland and others. With the purchase of one of the CDs, which range from $10.99 to $13.99, the buyer will receive an Interscope branded TweetDeck application that is pre-loaded to connect them to the social media content of the 16 various artists.
Best Buy is promoting this as a “Special Offer.” You get a “free Tweetdeck app when you order a CD.” The irony of the deal is that it’s not really a deal. You can download the regular TweetDeck app for free, both as a desktop application or as an iPhone app, and then create a list for the 16 artists to follow. I created a Twitter list of an assortment of the artists whose CDs are being peddled within five minutes.
While more manual labor may be needed to add the MySpace and Facebook accounts for these artists (TweetDeck supports both social networks within its apps), the deal almost seems like a hoax. Except it’s just bad marketing. It’s generally not a good idea to make a big deal about giving away something for free that is free to begin with.
To be fair, TweetDeck allows many brands to create their own customized versions of the desktop app. For instance, we offer a TechCrunch-branded TweetDeck app here. It’s really free (no CD purchase required). But then again, we’re not famous rock stars.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/qPo0RKi-UZw/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131820 
Google recently revealed that the Federal Trade Commission was intensely reviewing the search giant’s recent $750 million acquisition of mobile ad network AdMob. Last week, Google said the FTC has made a second request for further information about the deal. Today, two consumer groups, Consumer Watchdog and the Center For Digital Democracy, have asked the FTC to block the deal on anti-trust grounds and possible privacy issues.
In a joint letter to the FTC (embedded below), the two groups say that Google’s acquisition of AdMob would lessen competition in the mobile advertising market, having a potentially negative impact on consumers, advertisers and application developers and others. AdMob is the leader in the mobile advertising space, which is chock full of competitors, including Greystripe and others. We’ve all been speculating on what the impact of a Google-backed AdMob would have on the rest of its competitors, and the mobile advertising market in general.
The letter also raises concerns about consumer privacy. The groups claim that both AdMob and Google have access to large amounts of data relating to consumer behavior, including their location. It’s important to note that consumer groups typically make these sorts of complaints during antitrust reviews because it’s when these groups have the most leverage and the ears of regulators.
Google has high ambitions for AdMob, which was one of Google’s largest acquisitions since it bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in 2008. The rise of mobile advertising attracted Google to this space and with the acquisition of AdMob, the search giant could indeed dominate a growing space. AdMob, which some say is approaching a $100 million business within the next three years, could be an extremely profitable channel, especially when the platform is plugged into AdWords and DoubleClick.
LtrFTCfinal –
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/gNRF5bYP1Rs/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131816 
Google is getting serious about realtime search, adding Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace streams into results and adding a recent “updates” option which is addictive. But behind the scenes Google is also getting ready to push out an entirely new way for indexing the Web. Codenamed “Caffeine,” Google has been testing it since last summer in one datacenter, and is now getting ready to push it out across all of Google. Some SEO-minded tipsters say that they are starting to notice faster search response times, but Google is sticking to the party line that Caffeine won’t roll out until after the New Year (in part so that everybody can enjoy the holidays).
When Caffeine does roll out, what can you expect? Most people won’t even notice. The look and feel of Google results won’t change. Caffeine is an under-the-hood upgrade to Google’s search index algorithms. But it will significantly speed up how fast Google can present results, especially across different media types such as photos and videos. Overall, search will be more realtime because Google considers the speed of its index to be a competitive advantage.
An independent study conducted in September by SEO firm Summit Media suggests that for generic search terms, Caffeine gives more weight to news and social media results, while more specific keywords are more likely to turn up websites about that topic. The Summit Media study compared Caffeine against Google’s current index for about 10,000 keywords. Summit’s findings include:
- Rankings are unlikely to fluctuate. Taken across all of the keywords for a client there should be a tiny percentage change in ranking.
- Websites that do lose rankings are likely to be relying on older, archived content that’s not been updated in years. Keeping your site fresh to be crawled by Caffeine will be important.
- There have been no changes to give one sector any new advantage over another.
- Generic terms against long tail terms in Caffeine show a greater priority for News, Information and Social Media – which fits with generic terms being less clear in terms of the searcher’s intent.
- Only 5% of urls contain exact matches for the searched keyword, 6% of the total point score is made up by exact match urls.
When Caffeine does go live, not only should Google feel zippier, but many of the results will feel more newsy and realtime, particularly for generic searches. I wonder if Websites that come up more in long-tail searches will try to catch the Caffeine buzz by mimicking news sites or plastering Twitter and Facebook updates on their front page. I just hope Caffeine can tell the difference between real news and fake news.
Photo credit: Flickr/mararie.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/STOswiGeL0o/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131792 
Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Rohit Khare, the co-founder of Angstro. Building his latest project, social address book Knx.to, gives him a deep familiarity with the privacy policies of all the major social networks.
I’d be wishing everyone a happier New Year if it were easier to mail out greeting cards to friends on Facebook and colleagues on LinkedIn. I’d like to use knx.to, our free, real-time social address book, but their ‘privacy’ policies prevent us from downloading contact information, even for my own friends.
At least those Terms of Service (ToS) that force us to copy addresses and phone numbers one-by-one also prevent scoundrels from stealing our identity; reselling our friends to marketers; and linking our life online to the real world. Right?
Wrong. When RockYou can stash 32 million passwords in the clear; when RapLeaf can index 600 million email accounts; and when Intelius can go public by buying 100 million profile pages; then our social networks have traded away our privacy for mere “privacy theater.”
With apologies to Bruce Schneier’s brilliant coinage, “security theater” (e.g. the magical thinking behind forcing passengers to sit down and shut up for the last hour of international flights), social networks have been dogged by one disaster after another in 2009 because they pursue policies that provide the “feeling of improved privacy while doing little or nothing to actually improve privacy.”
As long as the same information that social networks piously prohibit their own customers from using is being bought and sold on the open market by giant marketing companies, social networks are only pretending protect your privacy.
Industrial-Scale Identity Theft
Last week’s headlines brought news that RockYou had accumulated 32,603,388 identities over the past few years — and negligently stored them in plaintext in an incompetently protected database.
RockYou’s official bluster about “illegal intrusion” should fool no one: blaming Imperva, the firm who exposed the flaw, or accusing the hacker(s) of being the identity thieves is misdirection: it was actually RockYou who stole those credentials, and RockYou should be held to account.
I realize that I’m using the incendiary terms “identity theft” and “stole,” even though I would agree that users voluntarily consented to type their passwords into RockYou’s forms. I assume that both users and RockYou’s developers actually only intended to share some particular bits of information: a contact list, a user photo, a friend’s gender; but the bottom line is that instead of sharing that specific data, RockYou retained enough secrets to impersonate those users at will.
- Don’t blame the victims. Bemoaning the absence of open standards for users to share their own data; or complaining about the weaknesses of users’ password choices is merely changing the subject.
- Don’t blame “security” technology. More encryption, better encryption, or stronger firewalls would not help, since the default RockYou username in this case was a user’s primary email address. For anyone who chose to use a popular Webmail service, that granted access to every other online service they’ve ever used — because of those ubiquitous “Forgot your password?” buttons to email it back to you (just ask Twitter how much fun that is).
- Don’t blame RockYou’s partners, who hosted their widgets. They just wanted to give their users some fancy new slideshows and scoreboards and other features to put on their pages; that shouldn’t have required an all-out war for viral growth that demanded users to log in and advertise their new widgets to all of their friends.
The fault, dear Reader, is not in our stars; it lies with sites that pretend to waive all care and duty by idly warning their users not to share their account passwords with anyone else.
In the absence of vigorous enforcement of those ToS agreements, any RockYou developer who passed up the opportunity to, say, phish MySpace passwords was putting their own employer at a disadvantage to any other startup that was willing to race them to the bottom.
APIs: Automating Privacy Intrusions?
RockYou minimized the scope of this breach by maintaining that it only affected their “legacy platform” for widgets rather than its larger “partner applications platforms” that use “industry standard security protocols.” After all, the advent of social networks’ partner APIs was supposed to make impersonation and scraping obsolete.
Those APIs came with their own new ToS agreements that added new, overlapping, and sometimes-contradictory restrictions as they worked through all of the implications of letting third parties in on the fun. The ACLU released a fun quiz that makes quite clear how much information is at stake, from your hometown to your friends’ sexual orientation.
For example, if you upload a photo of me that I find embarrassing, I could prevent you from tagging me in it, but I can’t forbid you from keeping your own photo online (or keeping it private, bugs aside). I can’t even forbid another friend of ours from caching a copy in his or her browser.
However, the Facebook API ToS can (and does) prevent a third-party application from caching a link to the photo for more than a day (a week on Orkut). Unfortunately, direct links to the photo server didn’t double-check the privacy policy, so a third-party app would be at risk of leaking images users thought were private, unless the developer remembered to make a separate API call every time to re-verify every photo on a page.
He (or She) Who Must Not Be Named
In an ideal world, a third party developer shouldn’t have to store any personally-identifiable information (PII). In many jurisdictions, PII is akin to toxic waste, because of the regulatory burdens and civil, even criminal, liability for acquiring and disposing of it.
Here again, Facebook is the pacesetter: it’s possible to display “She liked 7 photos uploaded by Mr. Smith two weeks ago” using little more than a numeric user id. The developer writes a sentence in Facebook Markup Language (FBML), and Facebook’s servers will dynamically substitute the name, gender, item count, and ensure grammatical agreement of pronouns, singular/plural choices, and time intervals.
OpenSocial gadgets have to copy PII into the browser to format a sentence like that. LinkedIn’s partners even have to copy PII to their own servers, since their Open API is currently incompatible with AJAX authentication.
Even though copying PII is the root of all privacy risks, there are three reasons it can be necessary: latency, history, and agility. Without caches, slow API calls can make an app’s performance suffer. Without archives, analyzing only the most recent events can mislead an app’s trend detection or recommendation services. Without “offline” access, waiting for a user to log in again delays an app’s reaction to events in real-time.
There aren’t many technical countermeasures once data has been copied. LinkedIn spent more than a year tinkering with their public API, but the only substantial difference is that it now encrypts every member id with the identity of the developer and application to trace the source of a breach. I applaud them as an industry pioneer — though they’re so dependent on search-engine optimization that they still include the public numeric ids in the profile page URLs anyway.
Exporting PII with legal strings attached is the best policy we can hope for. While Amazon’s ToS requires its associates to display accurate, up-to-date prices, Twitter has only recently realized the implications of searching deleted tweets and doesn’t yet oblige its API partners to update their copies when tweets are deleted or protected.
Buying Back Your Own Data? Priceless.
If PII is so hard to protect, then the only way for social networks to protect their users’ privacy must be to prohibit partners from accessing contact information in the first place. I might not be able to export my holiday card mailing list from my favorite social network— a roach motel for our data — but giant marketing corporations can buy and sell our private information with impunity.
I could go to Rapleaf right now to buy an analysis of any list of email addresses to learn its makeup by gender, income, residence, and all manner of other demographic data. Who’s to say how short that list could be—it’s a slippery slope from aggregate info to personal info. Or I could shop at one of Intelius’ many fronts and affiliates who are selling PII explicitly (TRUSTe-certified!). Or I could barter some of the stray business cards on my desk on Jigsaw to fill in the rest of the puzzle. All of these businesses depend on PII data harvested from social networks.
How is that possible? None of the social networks that we’ve integrated with has an API for reading email addresses — but all of them have no problem asking you to “Invite your friends!” After all, most social networks remain hypocritical enough to phish passwords to other social networks themselves as soon as they ask you to “Invite your friends” for their own viral growth!
Putting aside the hypocrisy of phishing passwords to scrape those friends’ email addresses in the first place, the subtler flaw is that social networks are more than happy to search their member database for those addresses to share a list of suggested friends. That’s how a Rapleaf could take a mailing list, pretend that those are all friends of theirs, and slowly accumulate a “reverse phonebook” that maps emails to social network profiles.
Or you could just crawl their websites. Social networks depend on search engines for traffic, so they almost universally have public pages for every member with well-known URLs and directory listings by name for crawlers to index. A mini-boomlet in funding “people search“ startups underwrote this massive exercise, but they sold their archives to less-than-savory marketers.
Now, merely indexing public web pages can’t be evil—but reconciling online identities and 3rd-party advertising cookies with real-world credit reports, government records, and other databases can be. Adding in all that information doesn’t increase Mr. Smith’s anonymity; Jeff Jonas has made a small fortune proving that semantic reconciliation dramatically collapses uncertainty. Just think about combining Spock’s 100M profiles with Intelius’ 20B other data points; or Wink’s 200M profiles with Reunion MyLife’s 34M members and 700M records…
Whose Data Is It, Anyway?
The philosophical question at hand is what rights do I have in my friends’ information. When I accept a business card from someone I’ve just met, I don’t believe I have the right to re-sell it on Jigsaw in good conscience (they’d disagree 18M times). If it’s a colleague’s card, on the other hand, I might take the initiative to forward a new lead, or even buy a gift subscription to a magazine. Does that constitute a violation of their privacy, or spam?
Social networks haven’t let their users make their own decisions on this issue. Through selective enforcement of their policies, some startups get locked out while big partners get exemptions. Power.com ended up in (and out of) court. Plaxo found out the hard way that they couldn’t assist their paying customers to OCR Facebook email addresses; or to synchronize with LinkedIn. It says a lot about LinkedIn’s draconian ToS that even with paying customers demanding it, Comcast hasn’t signed up for their API. Even if users manually download their own LinkedIn address books, it won’t even include links back to folks’ public profile pages.
Don’t Accept Incompetence
I also claim that social networks are engaging in Privacy Theater because there’s no shortage of examples of organizations on the Web that process vast quantities of PII while providing real privacy protection. Do you think that the “bad guys” haven’t gone after Webmail services to phish passwords and harvest contact information? Aren’t e-commerce sites sharing product information and reviews out to legions of affiliates without leaking your purchase history? How long do you think RockYou would have gotten away with it if they were asking for your online banking username instead of your email address?
Social network sites have not (yet) demonstrated the high degree of proactive surveillance and enforcement characteristic of other organizations that deal with PII on the Internet. Users see worms on MySpace and viruses on Facebook, but not on Hotmail — because they defend against cross-site-scripting attacks. Users find malware distributed on Slide, but not on Wikipedia — because they filter content aggressively. Users are blocked by DDoS attacks and DNS attacks on Twitter — but Amazon stays up because they can react in real-time (mostly). How much more quickly do Cease & Desist letters for putting up a fake PayPal logo go out than for impersonating a Facebook Page?
From personal conversations, I’m beginning to wonder if the recent rise of Hadoop is part of the problem, surprisingly. Trying to detect patterns of abusive crawling and suspicious bursts of activity from partner apps by analyzing yesterday’s log files alerts you too late to react. The culture of many social networking websites seems to emphasize page load times (especially after the great Friendster meltdown), which isn’t quite the same as the enterprise IT, networking, and transactional database backgrounds of other leading Web architects. And unlike the formal (and informal) networks of security officials at online financial institutions to track distributed threats, I fear we have little evidence of coordinated responses to privacy threats that correlate identities across social networks.
I have first-hand experience that it takes more time (and more money) to ship applications that comply with social networks’ privacy policies. If we weren’t living with Privacy Theater, that might not have been a wasted investment. Inevitably, Gresham’s Law kicked in, and the good guys are being driven out by the bad guys (spammy apps, scammy apps, sneaky apps, conniving apps).
Privacy Theater: The Show Must Go On…
Naturally, I prefer to think of myself as one of the ‘good guys.’ I prefer to believe that privacy protection is a competitive advantage that users (citizens!) really value. Until this outrageous RockYou breach, I didn’t fully realize how irrelevant that is.
I’d argue that the hapless state of ToS enforcement by the major social network platforms only provides the feeling of improved privacy while doing little or nothing to actually improve privacy: that’s privacy theater.
Unfortunately, that analogy is still unfair: TSA may screen children at the airport, but at least their security theater doesn’t obscure the fact we haven’t had a catastrophic security failure in the US air transportation system (yet). Our major social networks’ privacy theater is distracting us from ongoing, large-scale identity theft and misuse of private and personally-identifiable information.
If the industry expects self-regulation to forestall government regulation, well, here’s what I think it would take: An immediate ban on all of RockYou’s applications by all of their partners, pending a public audit of all of their apps. That’s taking a page from the audit provisions of LinkedIn’s ToS and adding sunlight by publishing the results.
Sounds harsh? I thought the market was supposed to provide swifter, surer justice than some pesky regulator with its clunky old notions of due process and presumptions of innocence. API agreements are a private matter between ruthless corporations. Heck, if they really wanted to put the rest of the ecosystem on notice, they ought to audit every application funded by Sequoia, Partech, DCM, and Softbank, all lead investors in RockYou.
It’s not like lawsuits are being filed, as Marissa Mayer announced by going after work-from-home scam artists in an interview with Mike Arrington at LeWeb. It’s not like this is Scamville 2.0, since this isn’t stealing users’ cash, only their dignity. It’s not like there’s a legal spotlight on the issue, since there’s only $9M set aside for a hazy new privacy foundation in the latest Facebook class-action settlement. It’s not like it’s a political issue in the headlines, since a Facebook Chief Privacy Officer is running for Attorney General, the top law-enforcement office in California. It’s not like it’s as complicated as “don’t be evil,” since I can give you one simple tip to eliminate privacy theater: enforce your ToS and obey others’ ToS — or else stop setting unrealistic expectations and just let users have their data back!
(Photo credit: Flickr/FaceMePLS).
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/MrgL1NAs6r8/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131796  Alex Albrecht is on Wikipedia. Therefore, he is important. Not only that, but he also made a cool iPhone app that hit the store for just $1. Cheap. Like all the other iPhone apps. Unlike most other $1 iPhone apps, this one is pretty fun.
The concept is simple: Duel enables you to host a duel on your iPhones. (Don’t fret, parental-types; though this iPhone duel will pay homage to the duels of the Wild Wild West, it will differ in one major way: nobody’s gonna get shot.) Instead, should you lose, you will simply find your fellow dueler’s ugly mug laughing hysterically in your face. Here’s how you duel: All you need is two people with two iPhones. Both need to have the app (so you could argue this app really costs $2, which is still cheap). You connect your iPhones via Bluetooth, and then you raise your phones vertically. The timer on the phones counts down from 3. Once it hits zero, you turn your phones horizontally to shoot. First one to shoot wins.
Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/vfts6h_aCcw/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131788 
If you live in the New York City metropolitan area, as I do, and try to buy an iPhone from AT&T’s website, you will probably get the same message I did after I entered my zipcode: “Sorry this package is not available in your area.” Apparently, this is a big story. (Hey, it’s the tail end of a long holiday weekend, and there is nothing else going on). For instance, the Consumerist called some hapless AT&T customer service rep who confirmed that “the phone is not offered to you because New York is not ready for the iPhone.”
Given AT&T’s history of bandwidth problems, especially with the iPhone, the idea that AT&T’s network can’t handle the iPhone is not entirely outlandish. Remember Operation Chokehold, and the resulting tiff between Fake Steve Jobs and AT&T? It was a failed attempt to bring AT&T’s network to its knees by everyone using their iPhones at once as a way to protest how much AT&T’s data network sucks. When AT&T called him irresponsible, Fake Steve responded:
I mean, consider this fact:
AT&T, a huge wireless provider in the United States, cannot reliably connect calls in New York City.
How can this be? —Fake Steve Jobs
And now, here it is, on a silver platter: AT&T is no longer selling iPhones to people in New York City! Well, at least not online. Is this AT&T’s sneaky way of limiting bandwidth consumption in its largest market? If only, then we’d have a story.
After I went to AT&T’s website and generated the message above, I logged in, since I am a customer. When I tried to upgrade my phone to a newer iPhone, I encountered no problems. Then I called customer service, and was told they could ship me a new iPhone, no problem. I called once more, but this time didn’t say that I am an existing customer. The only phone available was an 8GB refurbished iPhone. AT&T’s online store was out of stock of everything else. Then I tried one last time and gave a different Brooklyn zipcode. The sales rep again told me the online store was “currently out of stock” and that “you have to go into the store.” It appears that AT&T’s phone and online orders come from a different warehouse (duh) than the ones which service its stores.
So if you really want to buy an iPhone in New York City, go to an AT&T store, or an Apple Store. Or try Apple’s website. That seems to be taking orders for New York City residents just fine ( I got up to the checkout).
And, yes, I’ve contacted several PR people at AT&T. But like I said, it’s the holidays.
Update: AT&T PR responds with this cryptic one-liner: “We periodically modify our promotions and distribution channels.” Thanks, way to clear things up. There are also reports that fraudulent activity may be the cause of the problem.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/hDBe5zE2NCM/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131740  2009 is coming to a close, which means it’s time to reflect on the events that shaped the last twelve months. And there’s nothing like a whirlwind animated musical to put everything into perspective. Cue JibJab, which has just released their annual Year In Review: a two minute video romp that recaps the last year in all its glory. The video is packed will everything from momentous events like the induction of our first black President to moments of unparalleled stupidity (Balloon Boy). Even Three Wolf Moon made the cut.
This is the fifth year that JibJab has produced their Year In Review, and we’re told it will be seeing airtime on a number of national television networks tomorrow. For those wondering how the video was made, the company has put together a thorough blog post detailing its production.
Aside from the video, CEO Gregg Spiridellis tells us that JibJab is having a very strong holiday season. The entertainment portal, which offers customizable Flash videos, greeting cards, and a variety of other content, drew 33 million unique visitors in the last month according to Quantcast. Spiridellis adds that the site has served 90 million video views this quarter alone (which was likely helped in part by its always popular ElfYourself feature).
Watch the video in the embed below:
Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/pp9iZRg1UeI/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131734  Only the truly adventurous are running Chrome OS on their computers today. But it’s the elephant in the room whenever Jolicloud, an ambitious netbook operating system startup, is discussed.
We first covered the startup in late 2008, when netbooks were mostly running Windows XP or Linux. In June, when the first invites to Jolicloud went out, it looked like a winner.
But less than a month later Google announced Chrome OS, their own operating system tailored to netbooks.
Jolicloud soldiered on, raising a high profile $4.2 million venture round and finally, earlier this month, releasing a public beta of the product at Le Web in Paris.
I caught up with CEO Tariq Krim and Director Partnerships Brenda O’Connell backstage at Le Web and asked them how Jolicloud would compete with Chrome OS.
Krim doesn’t have a full answer, but he says that part of the answer is Jolicloud’s focus on partner services like Dropbox. Google will rely mostly or entirely on Google services to run Chrome OS, although you’ll be able to access website services.
Jolicloud netbooks will be able to run local high definition video, which is hard to do over the browser today. And with services like dropbox users can store files locally on their netbooks and sync them to the cloud. Chrome OS users won’t be able to store files locally on their machine, other than via offline browser access.
It’s not clear Krim believes that’s much of an advantage, though. He says in the interview that hardware is becoming unimportant and that people will start to spend that money on cloud services instead.
Jolicloud is negotiating partnerships with hardware manufacturers to ship their OS directly with devices. Eventually consumer decisions will say whether there’s a place for Jolicloud in a suddenly crowded netbook OS market. Krim, who has fought Google successfully before with Netvibes (which competes with iGoogle), seems reasonably optimistic.
The video is below:
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/12/27/cloudpipeChangesForToday.html More work on CloudPipe. Yesterday's notes here.
Getting some feedback finally, though some of it has been bitter and condescending.
Please everybody. Be respectful of everyone, including yourself.
And remember: Tis the season to be jolly!
Peace on earth, goodwill to men. Ignore the grouchyness and try to find the substance. Even better if people self-edit and leave out the michegas.
Now on to the substance...
1. There is support for not normalizing the items, and that is still the plan. It's true, there's a lot of code out there that understands all the varieties of RSS and Atom. I've been saying that all along! 
The reason to do fatPing is to start a bootstrap that makes everything more efficient. In this, the leadership will come from the content systems and the aggregators.
2. I've made a change to the body of the fatPing element. Instead of including the XML elements inline, I encode the text and pass it as CDATA. This means that it will make it through XML parsers that care about namespaces being declared. An example, I was passing through an item from the TechCrunch feed (they support rssCloud, btw) and they have elements from the DC namespace. My packet doesn't declare this namespace, so the Firefox XML parser declares it invalid (they're right about that). I have to encode the text because they might include CDATA elements, and that would break the XML. Let's see if this works!
3. The point has been raised that there is no "standard" way to include a <cloud> element in Atom feeds. As I said in the comments, I will not be the person to dictate that, or suggest a way to do it, even mildly. I've learned that Atom is a 300-degree stove. When I touch it I get burned. However, I am the author of an aggregator that consumes Atom feeds. If you are the author of software that creates Atom feeds, you could (just saying hypothtetically) create a namespace that contains the <cloud> element in it, as spec'd by RSS 2.0, and include it in your feed. If you told me about it, I could implement support for it in River2. That way we keep it all among implementors. There can be no doubt that you have the right to do that, and I have the right to support it. If anyone wants to get grouchy and irritable, let em!
4. To notify the CloudPipe server what feeds you want realtime notification on, send a POST to the same endpoint you call for the long poll (instead of a GET). The body of the POST is the OPML text for the feeds you want to follow. The server returns immediately while it processes the request.
5. The biggest development of the day is the draft spec is now ready for review. Please read the "Document Status" section carefully and believe what it says.
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/zWwDWD3MYjs/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131722 
Between the presents, family time and the eggnog, iPhone users will be hitting their device for competitive entertainment, says gaming community platform PlayHaven and mobile ad exchange Mobclix. According to data released today, the two companies predict that iPhone game usage is likely to set record in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, called a “Game Rush,” with usage 28 times greater than the same weekly period last year.
PlayHaven says as the number of games on the App Store increases (there are currently more than 15,000 games available), consumers can turn to their iPhone for entertainment vs. consoles. PlayHaven also predicted that in the coming year, discovery of games and applications is increasingly going to originate outside the App Store. By the end of 2010, PlayHaven’s founder and CEO, Raymond Lau, said up to 25 percent of iPhone app purchases may originate at some location other than iTunes or the App Store as companies like PlayHaven seek to capitalize on the increasing complexity of app discovery in a universe of more than 125,000 titles.
Lau may be right. More and more app directories have emerged to help users make sense of the 100,000 plus Apps on the App store. Appolicious, mPlayit, Chorus, Sidebar, and many others not only provide customized recommendations for your application tastes and interests, but also lead users directly to the App Store to purchase and or download the apps. Many of these directories also allow you to share your apps on Twitter and Facebook.
Mobclix and PlayHaven’s “Game Rush” forecast is based on analysis from Mobclix’s mobile ad exchange. Mobclix used historical app download data and calculated a projection based on the increased number of Apple mobile devices sold during the year.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/12/1938-chicago-duesenbergs-ocelots-and.html Here's a Duesenberg:  Here's an ocelot:  Here's silver nail polish:  And here's a memory of Chicago in summertime 1938: I climbed into the chair. The dwarf was slapping polish on my Stepsons. A thin stud with at least a half a grand in threads on his back took the other chair. He was wearing silver nail polish. He was reeking with perfume.
A gleaming black custom Duesenberg eased into the curb in front of me. The top was down. My peepers did a triple take.
A huge stud was sitting in the back seat. He had an ocelot in his lap dozing against his chest. The cat was wearing a stone-studded collar. A gold chain was strung to it.
He was sitting between two spectacular high-yellow whores. His diamonds were blazing under the street lights. Three gorgeous white whores were in the front seat. He looked exactly like Boris Karloff in black-face. Some links in this blog post are affiliate links, which pay small sales commissions.Iceberg Slim pimped, hustled, stole, lied, tricked, got tricked, and spent time in prison. When he was young he did a lot of reading in prison and when he was old he did a lot of writing in prison. For all his crimes, he was a good man, and I say that because he hardly ever used an adverb, and adverbs are wicked things. Just kidding. Like everything Slim wrote, Pimp is amazing, yet there are parts more horrifying than anything by Stephen King, because the horror in Iceberg Slim is all stuff that really happened to people. Iceberg Slim lived in the ghetto as a black American before our civil rights movement took place. It was not a good place to be. He rose above the ghetto, from time to time, for very short periods, but he didn't do it by being nice. It was a less a matter of rising above the ghetto than one of lifting the ghetto itself higher up. However, it's one hell of a read.
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/UnLsXRtBf_A/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131698 
This guest post was written by Erik Fikkert, Lead Reviewer, AppVee. Also check out AppVee’s previous picks of the best apps in the App store
The iPhone and iPod touch have become immediately recognizable names around the world. Apple recently announced that the iPhone is the most popular mobile phone in the US. In addition, the iPod touch is generally regarded as the media player of choice, offering much more than just music. Perhaps the key to their success is the ever-growing app store which currently boasts over 100,000 apps. For those of you not crazy about math, that’s a huge number—you would have to purchase and download over 11 apps an hour, every single day for a year to test them all. While it is safe to say the majority of apps available are less than appealing, there are a few gems that stand out from the rest. We took a look and compiled a list of the best apps 2009 had to offer.
2009 brought some of the best apps to the iPhone and iPod touch to date. Gaming has now advanced to a point that rivals the Sony PSP or Nintendo DS. As the mobile market grows and hardware continues to improve, we are going to see some amazing things come our way. If 2008 was about experimentation, 2009 was about innovation. In 2010, developers will push this innovation to enhance our mobile experience—whether through augmented reality, cloud-based computing, or something completely new.
Below you will find our top 10 overall apps, our top 15 games, and top 5 innovations. Tell us which apps are on your top 10 list in comments.
TOP 10 APPS
Facebook 3.0
Access your friends, notes, pictures, and events using almost every feature the actual site offers. This app, based on the enormous social networking site, has seen many changes and just keeps getting better with time.
LINK: AppVee’s Facebook 3.0 Review
TechCrunch’s Facebook 3.0 Review
Fandango
View trailers, see showtimes, purchase tickets and read reviews using this free movie app. This is a must have for any moviegoer, giving you all you need to know about movies in your area at your fingertips.
LINK: AppVee’s Fandango Review
Beejive 3.0
One of the first applications to take advantage of push notifications, this multi-client instant messaging app is in a class of it’s own. Using its push features, iPhone and iPod touch users can easily hold IM conversations with their friends anywhere.
LINK: AppVee’s Beejive 3.0 Review
TechCrunch’s Beejive 3.0 Review
LogMeIn
Brings your desktop to your iPhone or iPod touch. Link up with your computer and access your computer screen from afar. The interface is easy and feature-filled, delivering the best VNC experience to your device.
LINK: AppVee’s LogMeIn Review
Mobile Navigator
Filling the void left by the default maps application, this app offers turn-by-turn directions from your device just like any dedicated GPS would. It provides a landscape GPS with plenty of features and a user interface that makes sense.
LINK: AppVee’s Mobile Navigator Review
MobileCrunch’s Mobile Navigator Review
Dropbox
Sync up with your Dropbox account and have access to all of your files right from your device. You can download files, upload photos, and maintain control of your folders.
LINK: AppVee’s Dropbox Review
TechCrunch’s Dropbox Review
Textfree Unlimited
No one likes paying to text. This app offers free texting via push notifications. The interface is similar to the default SMS app and is a great alternative to paying your phone company.
LINK: AppVee’s Textfree Unlimited Review
Google Mobile App
This app has revolutionized search on the iPhone with its voice search and in-app browsing. Speak a search query and the app will accurately recognize it and do a Google search. Not a Google fan? Check out the Bing app.
LINK: AppVee’s Google Mobile App Review
TechCrunch’s Google Mobile App Review
TweetDeck
All the wonderful features that can be found in the TweetDeck desktop app are packed into this iPhone version. With a sleek interface and great features, this app is one of the best of the many Twitter apps out there.
LINK: AppVee’s TweetDeck Review
Craigsphone
Offers the entire Craigslist experience in one easy package. Buy, sell, and save more by searching through posts and bookmarking ones for later use.
LINK: AppVee’s Craigsphone Review
Ustream
One of the first apps to bring live television to the iPhone, Ustream gives you the ability to see many live streams of all types of content on your mobile device.
LINK: AppVee’s Ustream Review
TechCrunch’s Ustream Review
TOP 15 GAMES
Flight Control
The line drawing game that started it all, this app is very simple but insanely addicting. Each level gets harder as you play and keeps you coming back for more.
LINK: AppVee’s Flight Control Review
Peggle
Combining awesome graphics, addictive gameplay and a little bit of randomness, Peggle is an exciting mix. This game brings a casual experience to the iPhone that has yet to be rivaled.
LINK: AppVee’s Peggle Review
Rolando 2
The sequel to the hit game, this app takes the Rolando tilt formula and cranks it up. This game is an improvement in almost every way to the original and really shows what iPhone-specific gaming can provide.
LINK: AppVee’s Rolando 2 Review
MobileCrunch’s Rolando 2 Review
Pocket God
The king of all time-wasting games, this app puts you in charge of some prehistoric pygmies who are completely at your mercy. Regular updates and features make it a pleasure to continue feeding them to the fishes.
LINK: AppVee’s Pocket God Review
Enigmo 2
Taking the puzzle genre to new heights, this app gives players everything they loved in the first game and puts it all in three dimensions. And you thought the first one was hard…
LINK: AppVee’s Enigmo 2 Review
N.O.V.A.
One of the best first person shooters that can be found in the app store, N.O.V.A. puts the Halo formula into your pocket with a complete single-player and four-player multiplayer experience.
LINK: AppVee’s N.O.V.A. Review
Labyrinth 2
Building on the app that started it all, this version gives you more than just holes to worry about as you will have to solve puzzles and dodge all sorts of objects. The game also offers the option to create your own boards and share them with the world.
LINK: AppVee’s Labyrinth 2 Review
Skeeball
Everyone loves skeeball. Now it has been brought to the iPhone in a fun way. One of the most recognizable arcade games, this app is simple and addictive.
LINK: AppVee’s Skeeball Review
Zenonia
As a full-fledged action RPG, this app brings the complete role-playing experience to the iPhone. Zenonia features attractive graphics and rewarding gameplay.
LINK: AppVee’s Zenonia Review
Real Racing
Arguably one of the best racing games for the iPhone, this app has great graphics, tight controls and immersive sound, making it one of the coolest racing experiences ever on a handheld.
LINK: AppVee’s Real Racing Review
MobileCrunch’s Real Racing Review
Sims 3
Start a family and watch them interact in this full-featured Sims experience tailored specifically for the iPhone.
LINK: AppVee’s Sims 3 Review
CrunchGear’s Sims 3 Review
Rock Band
EA’s answer to the popular Guitar Hero franchise, this app employs some big names in the music industry and lets you tap your way to fame.
LINK: AppVee’s Rock Band Review
Super Monkey Ball 2
This exciting balance game gets a small overhaul and some great new maps making it the king of its kind.
LINK: AppVee’s Super Monkey Ball 2 Review
Doodle Jump
Another highly addictive game that sells for cheap but never grows old. The game is casual and simple, a perfect addition to any iPhone.
LINK: AppVee’s Doodle Jump Review
Words With Friends
A Scrabble clone with a great interface, this app allows you to play multiple games against players all over the world by alerting you via push.
LINK: AppVee’s Words With Friends Review
TOP 5 INNOVATIONS
Red Laser 2.2
A step forward in innovation, this app scans barcodes using the iPhone camera and then returns pricing from various online sites. While still in its infancy, this app could revolutionize the way we shop.
LINK: AppVee’s Red Laser 2.2 Review
MobileCrunch’s RedLaser Review
Hitchcock
Storyboarding in your pocket. Hitchcock allows aspiring cinematographers to create movie layouts while on the go.
LINK: AppVee’s Hitchcock Review
I Am T-Pain
Impress your friends by altering your voice with autotune. This app was an instant hit and gives you the ability to be a star the next time you are ‘on a boat.’
LINK: AppVee’s I Am T-Pain Review
MobileCrunch’s I Am T-Pain Review
Mailtones
Ringtones for email. Mailtones allows you to identify who just emailed you by their individual sound tone. Offers a new level of customization for your inbox.
LINK: AppVee’s Mailtones Review
Leaf Trombone
Leaf Trombone is a fun app that lets you play a slide instrument on your iPhone. Create your own songs and share them with the world.
LINK: AppVee’s Leaf Trombone Review
TechCrunch’s Leaf Trombone Review
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/-u1clC83WIc/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131711  If you’re on Twitter, that means you registered an account with a password that isn’t terribly easy to guess. As you may know, Twitter prevents people from doing just that by indicating that certain passwords such as ‘password’ (cough cough) and ‘123456′ are too obvious to be picked.
It just so happens that Twitter has hard-coded all banned passwords on the sign-up page. All you need to do to retrieve the full list of unwelcome passwords is take a look at the source code of that page.
Do a simple search for ‘twttr.BANNED_PASSWORDS’ and voilà, there they are, all 370 of them.
This isn’t a security issue, of course, and in fact it’s helpful to distribute the list so you can check if your favorite password that you use for other services might not be as fail-proof as you’d like to think. For the full list, simply download this TXT file, but here are a couple:
- password
- testing
- naked
- stupid
- twitter
- 123456
- secret
- please
- beavis
- butthead
- internet
- hooters
What would be interesting to know is if Twitter got this list from somewhere else, or if they actually analyze which passwords were most commonly chosen by its tens of millions of users in the past, rendering them ‘too obvious’. If the latter, that means this list is probably representative of most Web services.
(Thanks to Dario Manoukian for the tip; a quick search turns up a post on The Wundercounter featuring the list too)
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/X7Slr6OU4Rs/ http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=131656  For years, runners have been able to take advantage of Nike+, a nifty accessory that lets your iPod communicate with your shoes to turn it into a personal running coach of sorts. Soon, cyclists will have access to a tool that’s in the same vein as Nike+, but far more powerful. It’s called Pedal Brain, and it allows your iPhone or iPod Touch to receive and interpret data from a variety of exercise devices that use the ANT+ wireless protocol. ANT+ is used by cyclists (including many professionals) to accurately measure and analyze their performance over a ride, but until now there hasn’t been a way to connect these devices to your iPhone.
That’s where Pedal Brain comes in. The bootstrapped startup is making a small device called the Pedal Brain Synapse that plugs into your iPhone or iPod Touch and allows them to receive this data, which is then interpreted by an iPhone app. The application shows you how you’re performing in real-time (you’ll want to mount your iPhone in plain view) and can also use GPS to show the position of your team members. Once you’ve completed your ride, you’ll be able to log on to the Pedal Brain site to get more detailed analysis. The site will also have an integrated platform for coaches, so you sign up to get your own trainer to help plot your future rides and track your progress.
Pedal Brain founder Matt Bauer acknowledges that there are a handful of other cycling applications available for the iPhone, like Map My Ride, but says that these only offer basic data. That’s because they rely on your phone’s GPS for data, which can help gauge the distance you’ve travelled but can’t measure many of the things that ANT+ devices can. Bauer explains that power (in Watts) is a common metric used to gauge your progress, and can’t be accurately determined using GPS alone.
Pedal Brain’s iPhone/iPod accessory, which has already been approved by Apple, will be available through local bike shops this spring. The company is targeting a March release date and plans to sell the device for between $130 and $190. The online service will be subscription based, though users will be able to get a limited version for free (you won’t be able to track your data for longer than a couple weeks).
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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Previous 
I've been trying to find an easy way for my mom to manage her own digital camera, and have settled on getting her a netbook computer she can travel with. I'll set it up so it's easy for her to take the SD card from the camera and plug it into the netbook and upload her pictures to Flickr. It'll be pretty easy, but then I was just driving home from dinner and realized that someday, maybe very soon, it will be even easier.
It's almost January 1st, 2010 and we've been mulling over our favorites of 2009 — and the previous decade. Here we present the first installment of our "Of the Decade" lists.
"Innovative" is nearly a bankrupt word in this business, but with a little perspective one might be able to tell which products were so. Here are our choices. Guess what's not on it?
Hot news, everyone. I just received word from a reliable source deep within the confines of a Chinese brothel, that that our own John Biggs is making a 9.789-inch Apple Tablet in his basement. Now, you wouldn't know that this random house in a quiet Brooklyn neighborhood is actually the home of a Apple design genius, but that's what our source says, so it must be true. And all those random reports about 
A handful of sites are linking to a post on NetbookNews.de, which links to a post on a UK-based site called IBTimes titled Google Chrome OS-based netbook tech specs are out.
