http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/343834140/

http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=20365

MySpace’s upcoming music joint venture with 3 of the 4 major labels (EMI is still a holdout, but from what we hear they may be ready to fold soon), first announced in April, will launch in September. Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, mentioned that date and gave other details about the joint venture in an interview today with Adam Lashinsky at the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Half Moon Bay, CA.

This is the first time a launch date has publicly been revealed. MySpace is counting on the music store as a new growth business - and bringing in the major labels as equity partners helps ensure their long term buy in. The seemingly successful Hulu business model which brought in News Corp and other content owners last year will set the example.

Music almost certainly plays a part of MySpace’s continued dominance of Facebook in the US Market. Facebook continues to rely on iLike for music - Myspace, by contrast, has already had a decent music offering and hosts pages for 5 million artists. MySpace says that 65% of their users embed music on their MySpace pages, and over 5 billion songs are streamed on MySpace each month.

There are still a lot of details that need to be explained about the MySpace music venture, and we still eagerly await announcement about the CEO of the new venture.

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

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/blogspot/MKuf/~3/343758068/knol-is-open-to-everyone.html

A few months ago we announced that we were testing a new product called Knol. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, we're making Knol available to everyone.

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people's heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/343800452/

http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=20362

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on stage right now at Fortune’s Brainstorm conference being interviewed by Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick. Here are my notes live:

Q: What is Google’s next great revenue stream?

Schmidt: How about text ads?

Q: The biggest knock against Google is that it is a one-product company. how do you respond to that?

Schmidt: Google is a one-product company. It is called Google. We think about features, not products. People usually talk about text ads when they say that. While the vast majority of our revenues comes from text ads, there is no single large category of text ads or geography. It is well diversified. We serve text ads against content that is not searchable.

Q: We select for people who share our values. We don’t value experience very much. We also select for people who want to work with other people. Because it is collaborative.

Q: But you are known for saying that it is hard to manage larger groups?

Schmidt: If you look at the history of software development, all the interesting things that have been built have been built by two people. It is the nature of software technology.

Q: Isn’t working in larger teams going to be necessary?

Schmidt: this is an unsolved problem. You start small, then you have big projects. You follow a traditional S Curve, but the time you have become like this you are entirely predictable {talks about 20 percent time as driving creativity and helping to recruit top technical people]. It serves as pressure cooker release valve.

Q: Almost every challenge you have has to do with scale. I hear more people saying I don’t feel safe that Google should have so much information about me.

Schmidt: Because of the way technology works, all the technology companies are aggregating information about people. It is a political debate. Countries differ on this question. England has the largest number of closed circuit cameras by a factor of ten, but they also let you sue the papers if you feel you are defamed.

We get into constant problems with some prosecutor who subpoenas information we don’t want to give them, and we resist it. Which is why we don’t fully operate in China. Our argument is that information is not available in your domain. So countries are now trying to rewrite their laws to say this information cannot be available anywhere on the Internet.

Q&A from audience:

Q: What about mobile?

Schmidt: Our wireless initiative was a perfect outcome. It was the cost of an outcome. I am on the board of Apple. Last night I was in Palo Alto and there was a line outside. It shows the device is a step forward. IPhone’s competitors all have dec A phone is GPS, a camera, a computer, and a browser. The Phone is tehfirst one with a really functional browser. We show full ads, so that is a huge for revenues/

The new category of apps that have not come out yet really is a breakthrough. One winner of the Android apps, it looks around, names the buildings it sees and tells you what is happening inside of them. That is a really interesting product. In mobile there are a lot od product that have that WOW factor, because of the use of GPS.

I think all the most interesting next-generation social apps will be mobile.

Q: [Sam Whitmore asks if Google does any work for the government related to the Patriot Act]

Schmidt: Regarding the Patriot Act or any of the three-letter organizations, absolutely not. We do provide the federal government with some search and other services through our [government] sales group.

Q: enterprise plans?

Schmidt:
The easiest for us to enter the enterprise is to address high pain levels like e-mail, messaging, calendaring.We have something like a million companies using these services, mostly small. My view is that it will be a many-year process, but we will create tools that will eventually go to the top.

[Interview is over].

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

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/343799504/

http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=20361

Comscore has just released the latest data on Facebook growth patterns, which clearly show that Facebook’s recent push to expand abroad has paid off. The site has seen extremely high growth rates across Latin America, The Middle East, and the Asia Pacific. Europe, which accounts for a much larger user base, continues to grow at a steady clip as well.

North America still accounts for nearly 40% of Facebook’s monthly growth, but its rate remains fairly constant, hovering at an increase of around 47,000 uniques over the last seven months.

Earlier this year Facebook finally managed to catch up to MySpace’s total unique visitors, largely on account of its rapid global expansion (MySpace continues to dominate in the US market).

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

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/AmazonWebServicesBlog/~3/343764597/walkscore-and-o.html

Everyday, we hear new stories about a cool new startup and its success story.

Today, It was WalkScore.com. The website offers some great information about which neighborhood/city is more walkable than the rest (San francisco was #1 and Seattle was #6). Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. I think it is a great site for those who are consider moving to a new neighborhood or those who simply like the car-free lifestyle, especially because the gas prices are setting new records everyday.

This Seattle-based innovative startup hit almost all the major newspapers, blogs and websites last week from SF Chronicle to Washington Post, Los Angeles Times Blog to ABC News, From USA Today to MSNBC.

In an email, Matt Lerner from WalkScore says:

We would never have weathered being the #1 story on Yahoo! yesterday if it weren't for Amazon!  THANK YOU!

We're a hybrid-philanthropy business which means we prioritize social good over profit--and therefore we're on a pretty tight infrastructure budget :-)  What's so great about Amazon cloud computing is that it was very cheap from an infrastructure and dev standpoint for us to scale up quickly.  In a nutshell we have only one physical web server and didn't want to deal with the expense of a hardware upgrade so:

• We set up 4 EC2 instances to serve the walkability heat map tiles you see overlaid on top of the Google maps. Here is Seattle for example.
• We moved all of our images, CSS, and JS files to Amazon S3 which took a big load off of our one web server.
• We were able to accommodate a spike of about 80K unique visitors during a three hour period thanks to Amazon

One great article which I would like to highlight is How We Built a Web Hosting Infrastructure on EC2. Its a nice read if you are trying to host your website on Amazon EC2.

-- Jinesh

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/07/wiggy-trick-to-invoke-methods-in-ruby.html

via Hampton "Hambla" Caitlin

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/AmazonWebServicesBlog/~3/343739744/can-scanning-as.html

Does your desk look like this photo? No comment on where the photo was taken, of course... There's hope!

Pixily just launched, with a business model that could be described as "NetFlix in reverse". They offer a plan that allows you to send them one envelope per month (envelopes can contain up to 50 items) filled with documents that you want scanned and made searchable. This base plan costs $14.95 per month, and of course higher volume plans are available.

Prasad Thammineni, CEO of Pixily, came to our AWS Startup Event last fall in Boston, where I had the opportunity  to meet him. Pixily is based in Waltham, MA and a big user of AWS--in fact, a Prasad says "We use EC2, S3 and SQS. AWS has helped us democratize expensive technology and make it accessible to consumers and small businesses. This technology until now was available to only large enterprises."

You can read more about Pixily in this Boston Globe article. The article included this gem:

"Pixily has economized by building the entire website atop Amazon's Web services infrastructure, which allows a company to rent servers and storage space as needed. "That gives us the flexibility to add more servers based on our demand, as traffic increases, instead of paying for them at the outset," says chief technology officer Vikram Kumar"

 -- Mike

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/343698151/

http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=20358

Thought this might be interesting for the jet-setters in the Web 2.0 world. Monster Cable, the makers of cable, just sent us the new Beats by Dr. Dre, a pair of noise-canceling “studio” headphones aimed at the mid-range audio consumer. At $349, these are priced at exactly the same point as the Bose QuietComfort 3 which I’ve used for over a year now. I’ve been wearing the Beats for the past hour and found them on par with the QC3s in terms of noise reduction. They have very crisp bass and a nice separation as well.

Best of all the, the Beats use AAA batteries instead of the QC3’s battery pack, which means you’re not stuck if you forget to recharge. I’ll be taking a flight tomorrow and I’ll bring these along to test - I’m just about sold on the QC3s when it comes to noise reduction but I’m game to try these out in a real-world scenario. Look for a full review next week but until then pop over to CG to look at some more photos.

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

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/343639209/

http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=20351

Slide was not too happy when Facebook temporarily pulled one of its most popular applications, Top Friends, from the social networking site for exposing too much profile information to people who were not friends.

Ahead of today’s F8 developer conference, I asked Slide CEO Max Levchin what Facebook could do to make developers’ lives easier. Not surprisingly, he’d like to see clearer rules about what is and is not allowed, as well as more formal, contractual partnerships between Facebook and app developers. (Facebook is expected to announce a tiered partner system today, and Slide may not qualify as one of the “preferred” partners because of the issues that led to Facebook’s police action).

Slide’s VP of Strategy, Keith Rabois, goes even further. He warns that if Facebook keeps shifting the foundation on top of which app companies are built it will threaten their viability. This might all sound like sour grapes, but coming from the biggest provider of apps on Facebook it does carry some weight.

Levchin, who was one the co-foudners of PayPal, also thinks that Facebook needs a universal payment system so that developers can start charging for apps like they can on the iPhone. The question is whether anyone would ever want to pay for a Facebook app.

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

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/343654009/

http://www.techcrunch.com/?p=20352

V-Enable, a voice-enabled mobile 411 system, conducted a study by taking a random sampling of 20,000 searches in major metropolitan areas from customers of several V-Enable partner carriers including Alltel and MetroPCS. The findings clearly represent interesting trends caused by the recession. For one thing, people are eating more pizza! The results for the top restaurant searches for the period between October 2007 and June 2008 are:

1. Pizza Hut
2. McDonald’s
3. Domino’s Pizza
4. Starbucks
5. Papa John’s Pizza
6. Little Caesars Pizza
7. Taco Bell
8. Burger King
9. Wendy’s
10. Denny’s

Sit-down restaurants like Olive Garden, Applebee’s and Red Lobster, have dropped off the list, while recession-proof comfort food like Pizza Hut and Domino’s shoot to the top of the list. 380% more searches for Pizza Hut have been conducted during the period, and searches for Domino’s Pizza have increased 980%. High gas prices are keeping people at home ordering in, and they are opting for cheaper alternatives. Financial analysts have explored this area extensively, and have deemed several of these restaurant chains “recession-proof stocks.”

There are several other search-related economic indicators from V-Enable. U-Haul, a company that was never on any top 50 list, jumped to #23 in general search, possibly because of a rise in foreclosures. Macy’s dropped from #17 to #49 in retail, a direct correlation to the fact that people just don’t have the discretionary income that they used to. Motel 6 has never showed up on a top 50 list, but they are now #37 in general search, quite possibly because travelers can’t afford the costly alternatives. Mobile search happens in real-time and is unaffected by SEO, making these statistics arguably more reflective of consumer sentiment than web search.

V-Enable is a mobile information system, where users can speak the name of a restaurant or residential listing and receive location and contact information. The company also has live operators working behind the scenes so that users can call and get human assistance, if necessary. V-Enable sent us similar retail statistics in December. The company is backed by $10.1 million over 3 rounds from Siemens Mobile Acceleration Corporation, Sorrento Ventures, SoftBank Capital and Palisades Ventures.

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

Been so long since I did a proper update and so busy that I don't really know where to start, and it's one of those times where the longer I leave it, the greater my dilemma. So I may as well just post something.

First off, some Very Bad News. My teacher, friend, muse, mentor and object of my obsession, Gypsy Charms, has been lured away from Edinburgh by a job offer so good that she simply can't afford to pass it up. I wish her every possible success (and then some) and what she is going to be doing is very much for the greater good of the UK burlesque community, but I am feeling a wee bit bereft. Her partner, Viva Misadventure is going to be taking over the teaching side in Scotland and I love Viva, but Gypsy is a force of nature and I am at a complete loss for the words to describe how sad I will be to see her go.

So, with that out of the way, some good things: I am losing my hair. I know that doesn't sound like a good thing, but actually it is just my own deliberately misleading code for "I'm getting a haircut". See what I did there? Very witty. In the last year I think I have maybe had one haircut, and that was self-administered, so this is long overdue. I'm going to, like, a proper salon and everything! This is a little celebration for myself in honour of the fact that I actually am getting paid for work over the summer. Yay!

July work has been....interesting, to say the least. Will probably do a more detailed post about it at some point but suffice to say that one week was very difficult, the other was an absolute dream, that the community centre staff who supported me were at least as wonderful as the woman who hired me was clueless (which, believe me, is saying something) and that the joy of what I do is that no matter how bad the situation is, there are always rewards to be had. Also, just for reference, running workshops is not just a case of pouring paint and passing out scissors. Just in case you are ever in a position to hire someone to run workshops, please bear that in mind.

And it sounds like the heavy work has finally stopped on the house next door amd it is blissfully, unexpectedly quiet this afternoon. I am also unreasonably amused that the conversion has involved raising the level of the steps by a few feet whilst the position of the door has not changed, so at the moment it appears as though the house had been customised to suit a midget.

Also I have come up with possibly the Best Burlesque Name Evar for a male friend who has recently started performing. Sir Lance o'Lust! (who will probably be performing with his Ladies of the Knight). Yes, I am cool. Touch me, like I'm Jesus and you are a leper.

Oh yeah.