Category: Tech news

When Mixed Media Labs raised a $5 million round last November, it raised quite a few eyebrows. After all, the money came from Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm which had backed Instagram. To be fair, they backed Instagram when it was still known as Burbn — before it became what is now a massively popular mobile photo-sharing app. Still, there’s no question that Mixed Media Labs’ PicPlz product was a direct competitor. And Andreessen Horowitz sided with them, while Instagram found other investors.

But as Sarah noted at the time, Andreessen’s bet wasn’t so much against Instagram, as it was a bet on Mixed Media Lab founder Dalton Caldwell. Caldwell, who had previously founded imeem, was said to have a broad vision for a company beyond photo-sharing. PicPlz was just the first product to leverage what they were creating. And while it has achieved moderate success, it has not seen the success Instagram has in terms of users. And now Mixed Media Labs has moved on to their next product, we’ve learned.

Specifically, PicPlz has been spun off as a separate company that will be run by Ali Aydar, a former executive at Napster, imeem, and yes, Mixed Media Labs. We had been hearing for weeks that PicPlz was being shopped around for potential cash deals as Mixed Media Labs sought to focus on what’s next. But ultimately, they decided to simply spin off PicPlz as a separate company while maintaining some ownership.

Reached for comment, Caldwell confirmed the PicPlz spin-off, but declined to discuss the deal further beyond expressing his excitement about what his team is working on next.

So what is Mixed Media Labs working on next? All we know for sure is that it’s inline with the initial goal of a broad idea in the app space. Specifically, we’ve also heard that there will be a strong focus on a business model from day one, unlike PicPlz.

Meanwhile, PicPlz will live on as a service, but Caldwell and the rest of the Mixed Media Labs team will not be involved any more.

The move away from PicPlz comes at an interesting time in the mobile photo sharing space. While Instagram continues to gain users rapidly, other players like Path and Color have been preparing other products as well. Path recently launched their first “joint” — hipster/Dr. Dre lingo for “side project” — With. Color Labs, meanwhile, is said to be preparing an entirely new app after Color failed to catch on in the way they had hoped.

Oh, I could just watch this all day. We’ve been writing about the growing rivalry between Facebook and Google, with its new Google+ social network. But here you have it in gif form, with the Facebook and Google+ favicons superimposed on the dwarf from Game of Thrones (Google+) slapping the child-king (Facebook) over and over again. I am not sure why Google+ is a dwarf, but it doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of watching.

It kind if sums up visually the whole fight between the two companies. Don’t you think?

And where did I find this? On Google+ of course. It was created by graphic designer Ala’a Assamawy . Well played, sir. A meme is born.

When we think of scientists, we often picture distinguished researchers in white coats, methodically conducting experiments in labs that run like well-oiled machines.

Unfortunately things are usually less glamorous. Science labs have a lot going on, and while they’re generally very focused on making sure safety protocols are followed and contamination is minimized, there are some things that are a little less organized. Like ordering supplies — oftentimes reagents are either ordered in excess (resulting in waste) or forgotten about until they’re needed (resulting in delays).

Quartzy, a startup that’s part of the most recent Y Combinator batch, is setting out to fix that problem. The company launched around 18 months ago and has 4,500 scientists worldwide using the service — and there are plenty more who could use help keeping their supplies in check, many of whom are spending thousands of dollars on supplies every year.

At first glance, the service seems a bit like a science social network. You sign in and create a profile, then link up with your coworkers and other colleagues. But founder Adam Regelmann explains that the site isn’t really about connecting with your colleagues in a social sense — rather, it’s about keeping track of which supplies your lab has in stock, and what needs to be ordered . He adds that it’s a problem he’s faced himself as a MD and PhD from Columbia, which is when he had the idea for the company.

Anyone in your lab can log in to see the current inventory status, which helps make sure that they don’t place order requests for things that they don’t need. The site also lists expiration dates, which is important for reagents that only last for a relatively brief amount of time (like some enzymes).

Inputting the inventory information into the system is something each lab will need to do themselves — there’s currently no direct integration with vendors, so your inventory won’t automatically be updated each time you order more supplies. Regelmann says this is partially because the industry is very fragmented, so labs are oftentimes ordering their supplies from many different vendors (some of which use arcane technology) which makes integrations difficult. Update: Regelmann adds that while the service doesn’t tie in directly with these vendors, Quartzy does allow labs to upload their existing inventory Excel spreadsheets to quickly get their labs up and running on the service. And Quartzy also includes online versions of each supplier catalog, so you can quickly add supplies to your database by keying in vendor names and catalog numbers — the system will automatically populate the rest of the information.

Quartzy does more than keep track of your lab supplies. It’s also building out a review database for supplies commonly used in laboratories (you can rate how effective a given enzyme was, for example). At this point the database is fairly small, with around 1,000 reviews, but it’s an idea that has potential.

Also very cool: Quartzy has a feature that’s the scientist equivalent of asking your neighbor for a cup of sugar. It’s quite common in scientific communities for researchers to ask friends and colleagues in other, nearby laboratories for a certain reagent that they only need a small amount of (Regelmann says he’d get five or so such requests per week during his research days).

Quartzy helps with this by letting users run a proximity-based query that lets them see if anyone in their city happens to have what they need. And it’s smart about doing this — any results you see will be anonymized. You can send a message to the anonymous researcher and ask if they can spare a dash of whatever you need (they’ll be able to see who you are), and if they’re interested they’ll respond.

So how does Quartzy make money? So far Regelmann says that the company is focused entirely on growth. Down the line it will let science supply vendors purchase advertising on the site, giving a very targeted channel directed toward a group of people who are typically hard to reach (he explains that many vendors often have time informing scientists about new products). And scientists will get exposed to new products they might not have otherwise known about, so it stands to be a win-win situation.

Quartzy’s team currently includes three programmers in addition to founders Regelmann and  Jayant Kulkarni.

Each one of Cadillac’s lineup of CTS-V flagships are the automotive equivalent of a 9-pound hammer, vehicles of such brutal power and felonious fuel economy they make gearheads cheer, environmentalists scream and small children cry.

Every one of them is big and mean, with an engine two sizes too large and a blatant disregard for fuel efficiency. They are exactly the kind of cars self-righteous idiots point to while denouncing Detroit and General Motors as being hopelessly out of touch.

They can all get stuffed. The weapons-grade version of the CTS wagon is an insanely fun, absurdly fast and remarkably refined vehicle, quite capable of running with the best European cars.

We’ve known Cadillac could dish out some serious hurt since 2009, when the CTS-V sedan elbowed its way through the crowd like a belligerent drunk and delivered a beating to almost anything that crossed its path. The sedan begat a coupe so potent it prompted Cadillac’s return to racing. But General Motors didn’t stop there.

Someone at GM decided that what the world really needs is a CTS-V Wagon because, you know, a 6.2-liter supercharged V-8 good for 556 horsepower is just what you need for running to Costco.

Which, by the way, is exactly what I did with it the first day I had it.

The car GM sent me was as red as the devil with a face just as mean. The V is all creases and angles, with a leering grille and a linebacker’s stance. It’s so masculine it all but drips testosterone. I got in to find a proper manual transmission, with six speeds and three pedals. I could swear I heard a trumpet fanfare.

Six gears are superfluous when you’ve got enough torque for your car and the two behind you. It simply doesn’t matter what gear you’re in when you’ve got 550 foot-pounds of the stuff, which is more than a Lamborghini Aventador, by the way.

Given all that grunt, the car simply surges forward when you stab the accelerator. Drop it down a gear and you get a kick in the ass that never fails to make you smile. Drop it down two gears and you’d better have a firm grip on the wheel and plenty of room ahead of you because you’ve pulled the trigger on an RPG.

I discovered this getting onto the freeway. One moment I’m downshifting into third to take the cloverleaf, the next moment I’m doing 90. It happened literally that fast. The CTS-V does zero to 60 in 4.3 seconds and tops out just short of a buck ninety. That’s approaching supercar territory — in a freakin’ wagon.

It isn’t the terminal velocity that’s so impressive, it’s how quickly and effortlessly you get there. The power just keeps coming, seemingly without end, propelling you forward in a rush so exhilarating it’s addicting.

But anyone can haul ass in a straight line. It’s the curves that matter, and the V Wagon attacks them with confidence-inspiring ferocity. This car isn’t a wagon, it’s a Corvette with four doors and 25 cubic feet of cargo space (33 with the seats down). The steering is precise, the chassis is balanced and the brakes are fantastic. The ride is firm but forgiving. The V Wagon is easy to toss around for a car weighing 4,398 pounds, although quick transitions are a handful.

The car’s sporting intentions are reflected in the interior. From the feel of the wheel to the placement of the pedals to the short throws of the shifter, everything was designed for spirited driving. Optional Recaro seats — $3,400! — hold you firmly in place while doing donu… er, driving like the responsible adult GM designed this car for.

The General packed the V with all the amenities you’d expect in a car that starts north of $63,000, but there’s a bit too much plastic for something that pricey.

As long as we’re complaining, GM needs to open up the exhaust and let this monster roar. Revving the engine emits a nice rumble, but it’s muted. And then there’s the fuel economy. Dear god, the fuel economy. Drive this car like you know you want to and you can actually watch the needle sweep toward “E.” I averaged 12.5 mpg during a week with the car, but could have done better had I shown more restraint.

Oh, who am I kidding? Even the most ardent environmentalist or EV advocate would have a hard time showing restraint in a CTS-V Wagon. Before you get your knickers in a twist over the fuel economy, remember this: The CTS-V Wagon will never be a big seller. GM will be lucky to sell a few hundred a year, so it’s not like the world will end because this car gets crappy fuel economy.

So why did GM build it? Only someone who doesn’t get cars would ask that question. There is no reason. The CTS-V Wagon exists because it could, because someone at General Motors felt it should and had the chutzpah to pull it off.

God bless him.

WIRED More torque than any one car should have. Just as much fun in the curves as it is on the straights. Passes everything but the gas station.

TIRED Interior falls short of the competition. Fuel economy? Bwahahahahaha. You’re kidding, right?

Photos by Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Being men and women of the outdoors, we prefer as many different choices for shading our eyes as possible.

But carrying multiple sunglasses with various types of lenses is a hassle. So we bring one pair, and when the sun ducks behind a cloud or falls into the trees, we place our shades on top of our heads or in our shirts. Of course, that’s when the klutz in all of us comes out.

Here to solve our decidedly first-world problem is Oakley, with its Fast Jacket sunglasses. The Orange County, California, company has developed a system that matches one frame to multiple, interchangeable lenses.

It’s not the first interchangeable-lens system I’ve seen, but it’s the easiest to use. By thumbing a simple locking system built into the frame, switching lenses is a 10-second task. Simply pull down the lever atop each outer edge of the lens to free it from the frame. The lens doesn’t fall out when the frame is unlocked; a gentle pull will free it. Nudge the desired lens into the frame and pull up the lever until it “clicks” back into place.

The polycarbonate lenses are available in different shades — our frames came with lenses for low light and for bright sun, but you can get photochromic, iridium-coated or polarized lenses as optional extras.

Oakley touts the lenses as being distortion-free, so you get a clear view straight ahead and in all peripheral directions. I found this to be especially useful when golfing. I took the Fast Jackets out for a nine-hole round in the late afternoon sun, which I was directly facing during many of my shots.

For these shots, I wore the Fast Jacket’s dark lenses. I could easily spot my ball against several backgrounds — trees, clouds, sky — and I could follow its trajectory without a problem. Since there’s no lower rim on the frames, visibility when glancing down at the ball was great.

The lenses also have a special coating (Oakley calls it “Hydrophobic”) which is supposed to prevent water from leaving streaks and sheens. I didn’t sweat enough during golf to properly test it, so I wore the Fast Jacket shades on a short kayaking trip around a pier at Hudson River Park in New York City. Even with the water constantly splashing on me (I never said I was a good kayaker) the lens coating passed the test.

The frame is lightweight and curves around the face comfortably. The Fast Jackets don’t have an incredibly sleek look, but the styling will suit those who prefer function over form. A friend who wore them briefly complained about the ear socks’ tightness directly behind the ears. I didn’t mind this, as I found the grippiness comforting while I constantly looked down and then up during my round of golf. I didn’t feel any perceptible amount of slippage from the glasses while I was sweating.

The Fast Jacket sunglasses meet ANSI’s Z87.1 eyewear standards for high-velocity and high-mass-impact resistance, but I chose not to test this while at-bat during my softball game.

But sunlight is the more common hazard, and these shades will protect you from it no matter how much — or how little — of it there is.

WIRED Convenience of lens-changing system is paramount. Comfortable fit. Excellent, distortion-free visibility. Water won’t compromise clarity. Lightweight frame stays on the nose. Nosebuds, frame don’t leave marks.

TIRED Not for the fashionable crowd — expect disapproving looks due to the flashy colors. The fit around the ears is too tight for some.

Photo by Jon Snyder/Wired

Kickanotch Mobile, a mobile marketing services startup based in the outskirts of Kansas City, announced today that it has raised $500,000 in seed funding. The round was led by six angel investors and “incentivized by” Kansas Technology Enterprise Corporation, a private/public partnership created by the state of Kansas to promote technology-based economic development and support local entrepreneurship. The startup plans to use this infusion of capital to continue expanding its cloud-based technology and services, as well as its mobile platform, and to ramp up hiring efforts.

Kickanotch, formerly known as PRONTO! Mobile, launched its mobile application and mobile marketing platform services back in May to offer TV broadcasters, radio stations, publishers and corporations a way to increase brand exposure and better utilize mobile revenue channels and consumer engagement opportunities. The startup works with media companies and small-to-medium-sized businesses to design a custom mobile strategy, assisting businesses in the design and implementation of mobile apps and features that enable them to make customized (and engaging) advertising campaigns and mobile apps.

More specifically, Kickanotch allows its corporate customers to optimize and manage banner advertisements, as well as enhance their mobile presence and user experience with daily deal alerts, social media integration, QR codes, SMS and email marketing, analytics, and lead generation.

As mobile advertising is growing like wildfire and is expected to hit $20 billion in revenue by 2015, Kickanotch aims to not only help businesses design a great mobile app, but to also give them the tools to monetize and create an addictive mobile experience for their customers. Essentially, the startup wants to offer businesses a turn-key mobile monetization solution as well as a mobile marketing manager. Its “Platform Mobile Manager” is designed to do just that. The cloud-based software allows startups and corporations to manage ads, SMS and email advertising, and coupons — all from a single dashboard.

Of course, the startup has plenty of competition in the mobile advertising space, but its solution has already drawn more than 50 broadcast, publishing and corporate brands into the fold in only a few months, so there’s plenty of room for optimism. It’s great to see Kansas supporting and growing local technology companies. That’s just good policy.

For more, check out the site here and meet the Kickanotch team here.

If photo sharing apps Instagram and Color would mate and have a baby, it would likely look something like the Instacolor app made by tinkerer Rakshith Krishnappa.

Basically, the app aims to help Instragram users discover other users in their neighborhood, and lets you view photos posted by people around you in real time.

The app can be downloaded from the App Store now and costs $0.99.

Ever since Color launched its photo sharing app, the $41 million startup has been having a rough time. Co-founder Peter Pham left, or was fired, according to CEO Bill Nguyen, who also told the New York Times that the company is going back to the drawing board.

Their biggest challenge right now: nobody seems to be using the app.

Instagram, meanwhile, is on a roll. They’re at well over 5 million users now and roughly 100 million photos have been shared using the app to date.

Earlier this year, Instagram debuted a realtime API to let third party developers build things like Instacolor, which takes both ideas and morphs them into one app (but uses Instagram as the foundation). Krishnappa also built Gramfeed, a Web interface for Instagram, by the way.

After discontinuing the production of cassette Walkmans last year, Sony is now about to kill another one of their original inventions: the MiniDisc Walkman. And as Japanese business daily The Nikkei is reporting today, Sony plans to pull the plug on the production as early as this September – obviously because nobody is buying MiniDisc Walkmen anymore.

Read more…

Netvibes, a company that provides social media dashboards and news aggregators for brands and agencies, is debuting a powerful new analytics platform tonight. Netvibes’ new social analytics and monitoring platform is launching in private beta but won’t be available to the general public until later in the month.

As we wrote last year, Netvibes launched Instant Dashboards, which allows users to enter a keyword on NetVibes’ site to pull up an instant dashboard that automatically collects all of the latest photos, videos, news, feeds, search results, Twitter conversations and more around that topic in realtime. The company’s new offering, Social Pack, is complimentary to the Instant Dashboard product, giving brand managers the ability to monitor and analyze at the same time.

The platform’s Social Corpus gives you open access to add and control exactly what sources (blogs, influencers, news feeds) to pull data from. Plus, Netvibes features a built-in library of more than 200,000 original content feeds and apps to choose from.

Similar to analytics platforms like Radian6, Netvibes tracks mentions and topics and gives brands insight to make sense of this data. The platform will identify trends, sentiment, influencers and ideas. You can dig pretty deep with data as well. For example, not only will Netvibes tell you who your top influencer is, but the technology will also show you which blog the influencer write for and what is being siad about a brand or product. And Netvibes will instantly create a new app just to analyze those specific keywords revealed by that one influencer and track them over time.

Netvibes also allows you set specific tags to track certain mentions from specific sources. Netvibes allows managers to create an unlimited number of advanced alerts to automatically monitor the effectiveness of campaigns, brand reputation, competitors and even trigger actions, like adjusting campaign budgets, a newsletter response or invoking a URL. Alerts can be sent to any mobile device in real-time.

While the Social Pack platform combined with the news aggregator platform is certainly an information overload, it could be a comprehensive tool for brand managers. Already many well-known agencies and brands are already using Netvibes’ enterprise offerings including Digitas, Coca-Cola, and L’Oreal. Of course, the enterprise dashboard isn’t cheap. The entire Social pack and Dashboard costs $15,000 for dashboard setup, then $2,000 per month.

But clearly big brands are shelling out the cash for Netvibes product. And the company is profitable on a net income basis.

Although many investors are spinning for the chance to invest in Turntable.fm, the hot music startup has not yet picked a DJ, despite reports to the contrary. Business Insider claims that Turntable has raised $7.5 million at a $37.5 million valuation and “that term sheets were indeed signed yesterday.” But reached a few hours ago as he was boarding a plane, co-founder and chairman Seth Goldstein told me, “We have not closed any new financing.”

There is certainly a lot of interest in Turntable from VCs who want to fund its next round. The buzz among venture investors is that there is intense competition for the deal, particularly between Union Square’s Fred Wilson, Accel, and Kleiner Perkins. Wilson is the clear favorite (Turntable is based in New York City), but he is being outbid by Accel and Kleiner.

The rumor is that Wilson is offered Turntable a $25 million pre-money valuation, while Accel and Kleiner offered double. That could have easily been pushed up to $30 million pre-money, in which case the $37.5 million figure would pencil out as a post-money valuation. (Just remember, VCs send signed term sheets all the time. It doesn’t mean the company has to accept the terms).

Not only are top-tier VCs excited about Turntable, there’s even some potential acquirers sniffing around, including AOL, Facebook, and Sony. As far as I can tell, no formal offers were ever made because co-founders Goldstein and Billy Chasen just got this started and don’t want to sell. Plus, they obviously aren’t having any problems raising money.

Why is everyone going gaga over a startup that launched with a completely different product, Stickybits, that never went anywhere? Turntable is a social music site where you enter different listening rooms in which players can become DJs and spin music while chatting with each other’s avatars. Chris Sacca likes to hang out there a lot (he is a previous investor, along with First Round and Polaris). It’s been gaining some impressive early traction, even though you still need to know someone to get in.

It is social music discovery at its best. You can listen to hours of full-length songs selected by other players in a variety of different themed music rooms. The better the DJ, the more points everyone else rewards him with. And if you like a song you can add it to your playlist, or buy it through Amazon or iTunes.

But the business is not a slam dunk. Turntable pays per-stream fees just like Pandora or other “Internet radio” services. The music labels could decide to crack down on Turntable and try to extract higher fees. But Turntable’s early growth and engagement numbers are too high to ignore. People spend hours in these rooms. Maybe this time, the labels won’t kill it before trying to work out a deal. Even then, though, Turntable will have to find other ways to make money—perhaps through digital goods or better avatars, sponsored rooms, or some people might be willing to pay to be a featured DJ.

A few weeks ago, an interesting proposition landed in my inbox: would I be interested in contributing to the politics section of the soon-to-be launched Huffington Post UK?

To be clear, when I say the proposition was interesting, I don’t mean I was interested in accepting it: as a general rule, I try to only write for free when I have something to promote. I mean I was interested to learn that Arianna Huffington and Aol were willing to direct time and resources into launching HuffPost UK: a project that, if you believe some UK media critics, is so clearly doomed to failure.

You don’t need me to tell you that the Huffington Post US [Disclosure: HuffPost is owned by Aol which owns TechCrunch which BLAH BLAH BLAH] has been a huge success. With its mixture of partisan editorialising and celebrity soap-boxing, it provided a counterpoint to the stuffiness and balance of much of the American news media. At the same time, thanks to a billion slideshows of cats suffering wardrobe malfunctions, it managed to generate sufficient advertising dollars to hire a team of full-time reporters to cover real news, thus positioning itself as a semi-credible rival to traditional newspapers.

And yet, for all of HuffPost’s undoubted success in the US, it’s hard to see how a dedicated UK edition can do anywhere near as well — and not just because Britain has barely a fifth of the population of the US (California and Texas combined offer more potential readers than the whole of the UK).

For one thing, as Toby Young argues in the Telegraph, UK readers are less interested than their American cousins in what celebrities think about the world. Articles like Rob Low complaining about the “Household Betrayal” of his former housekeeper are a real traffic driver in the US; in the UK they would be met with howls of indifference.

But, of course, celebrities represent a tiny percentage of HuffPost’s roster of contributors. For every Hollywood actor, the site boasts a hundred left-wing politicians with votes to win, a thousand authors with books to promote and a million professional writers with axes to grind — surely they’ll keep the high quality content flowing? Perhaps — but there too HuffPost UK has a problem, in the form of the Guardian’s highly trafficked, left-leaning blog platform Comment Is Free (CiF). Named after the mantra of the newspaper’s former owner and editor, CP Scott (‘Comment is free but facts are sacred’), CiF already boasts an impressive list of high profile contributors, opining on everything from the recent elections in Turkey to the emotional depth of a cow.

More impressive still, is the fact that CiF pays many of its contributors (including, occasionally, me) for their work, with rates hovering around £90 ($140) for an 800 word column. It’s not much, but it’s infinity times more than HuffPost UK is offering. In the US, Arianna Huffington was able to use her considerable personal influence (and magnetism) to seduce high-profile contributors into helping get her site off the ground. Since then, times have changed: Huffington’s unwavering magnetism has to compete with the fact that many people would rather sell their kids into slavery than work for free for America Online. And in any case, if writers really want to work for free, they can always contribute to the HuffPost’s US site and enjoy far, far more visibility.

All of which raises the sickening specter of a site filled only with the linkbait crap and celebrity gossip that HuffPost UK can get for free. But even there HuffPost UK faces a challenge in attracting an audience, with stiff competition coming from the UK’s rich and vibrant tabloid press. The London-based Daily Mail is sucking up page impression by the million in both the UK and the US with its populist mix of celebrity fluff, royal rumors and
‘x-gives-you-cancer’ horseshit. Toggling quickly back and forth between the front pages of HuffPost UK and DailyMail.co.uk, one could be forgiven for thinking the former is simply a differently formatted version of the latter, albeit with the odd bit of CiF mixed in by mistake.

So why then, given all those challenges, would Huffington think that launching in the UK is so important? Could it be that, having studied at Cambridge, Arianna craves some approval from the old continent? Hardly. Or perhaps now that she’s spending AOL’s money rather than her own, Huffington simply doesn’t give a damn about the economics. That theory doesn’t stand up to scrutiny either: as any starving HuffPost contributor will testify, Arianna’s grip on the purse strings hasn’t shown any signs of loosening since the acquisition — with dead-weight staffers being fired to pay for new editorial hires.

Which just leaves one tantalizing possibility: that, as with the sale to AOL (which proved to be a breathtaking external coup d’etat), or even founding HuffPost in the first place (many media pundits wrote it off as a vanity project doomed to bankruptcy and failure), Arianna Huffington understands the economics of online content better than her critics.

Huffington has made no secret of her desire to expand the HuffPost internationally, having already tested the waters with HuffPost Canada — so why not choose the UK as her first overseas outpost? The US and the UK are, after all, two countries divided by a common language and, if anything, the existence of the Comment is Free and the popularity of the Daily Mail prove that there’s definitely a market in the UK for the HuffPost’s editorial mix. In any case, it’s hardly a huge financial risk: by all accounts the HuffPost only employs a handful of staff in its UK office, certainly far fewer than can be found at either Daily Mail or Guardian HQ. If Huffington gets the original journalism / aggregation balance right — as she has in the US — the site could become profitable, very quickly. At worst, it can add a few million page impressions to HuffPost’s global reach without hemorrhaging too much cash.

Certainly Huffington seems pleased with the initial performance of the site — and rejects the idea that the HuffPost has to compete with existing publications like the Mail or the Guardian at all. While working on this post, I emailed her some of my concerns about the UK launch and asked her for an on-the-record response. Less than a minute later, her reply arrived…

“We don’t need to beat anyone to succeed. This either-or is a very old model…not about the linked economy in which we operate. We are launching in 12 countries. Launching in [the UK] first outside North America made perfect sense. And we were lucky to launch on a big news day [the News of the World phone-hacking scandal] that showed how Huffpost — liveblog and all-original reporting and aggregation — delivers the news in real time with all the engagement tools our readers want.”

So there.

Google and Facebook are at war. This is old news. They both want to be the center of the Internet — but there can be only one center. For a while, it looked like things were quickly shifting Facebook’s way after years of dominance by Google. Then Google+ appeared — already the most compelling social experience Google has ever offered.

While it’s still far from clear what the actual impact of G+ will be on the Internet at large, it’s pretty clear already that it’s something Facebook is going to have to take seriously. And they are. Despite Mark Zuckerberg downplaying it, Facebook did just launch a video chat feature a week after Google did in G+. And last summer, Facebook rushed to get the new Groups done in time to beat Circles to the same punch.

But where things are going to be really interesting is on the social sharing front. Facebook has long been in the lead here — and is proud of it. But after just a week, it sure seems like Google+ is seeing some impressive numbers as well (with only a fraction of Google users using it). And a small change Google quietly made yesterday shows just how seriously they’re taking this.

As we noted a couple days ago, it is possible to track the referrals coming in to your site from G+, but it’s not straightforward. Yesterday, Google made it much more straightforward.

When you click on a link now in G+, it redirects it through the plus.google.com domain. Why? Because Google+ uses HTTPS to be more secure, but that strips referrer information that would normally be passed to sites like TechCrunch. So they have to redirect to another non-HTTPS domain to pass that data. Previously, it was simply through a google.com/url domain (which we were tracking). Now it’s a plus.google.com domain — much easier to track for a casual analytics user.

And sure enough, as of yesterday, plus.google.com is showing up as a referrer to TechCrunch — and yes, a big one despite us not actively using it to send out articles just yet (and again, the limited number of users).

Facebook does a similar redirect to ensure that the pageviews they’re sending others’ way are correctly counted. Others, like Twitter, do not generally do this, which likely makes their sharing stats appear lower than they actually are.

I suspect we’ll begin seeing all three of these Internet giants begin to more actively monitor and showcase this data. Others, like StumbleUpon and LinkedIn are in the mix as well.

Remarkably, StatCounter says that StumbleUpon now sends more traffic to sites than Facebook in the U.S. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is showing massive growth in terms of referrals (to TechCrunch, at least) — though, to be fair, their popular LinkedIn Today feature is powered by Twitter data (which again, Twitter doesn’t get the referral credit for at all).

Nearly two years ago, I noted that the social sharing war was tipping heavily in Twitter’s favor due to the fact that it was far too slow to share content on Facebook. The quick rise of the Tweetmeme button (since replaced by Twitter’s own Tweet button) all over the web showcased this. But things have changed in the past two years. Notably, Facebook has gotten much better at facilitating sharing — hello Like button. And when you do that with 750 million users, sharing will happen.

Meanwhile, posts like this one show Google already has a team working on a strategy for how brands and companies (like TechCrunch) can best facilitate sharing on Google+. They expect to begin testing this shortly — believe us, they’re rushing to get this done ASAP.

The Google assault in this social sharing war is now well underway. They’ve failed in the past with Buzz, but Google+ is clearly much better than Buzz. And while the +1 Button on the web seems fairly useless right now, when they further tie it into G+, the sharing situation will get really interesting.

With another party actively engaged, the question will turn to which of those sharing buttons will you choose to click on? Some people do all of them now. But that won’t last forever. The social sharing war is on.

Two weeks ago a number of Facebook developers logged into the site to horrible news: their applications had suddenly been disabled without warning. The culprit was Facebook’s spam-fighting bot, which automatically tracks the amount of negative feedback an application receives from users and blocks apps that are faring especially poorly (since they’re probably spammy). But the bot was acting more aggressive than it should have been, and developers didn’t have a way to tell how frequently users were blocking their app updates in the first place.

Today, Facebook is rolling out some new features to address this.

In a blog post announcing the news, Facebook engineer Mike Vernal writes that developers will now have access to a ‘News Feed’ tab as part of Facebook Insights (their analytics product). Developers will now be able to track how frequently the posts their applications generate are hidden or marked as spam by users (the more they have, the worse standing they’re in).

And Facebook is also taking a more gentle approach to app banning. Previously when an app crossed the spamminess threshold it would simply be deleted. Now Facebook will only cut off the notification channel that’s producing the spam. And if an application is deemed to be spammy across multiple notification channels, Facebook is also introducing a new ‘disabled’ mode that will still give developers access to their applications, even though users won’t be able to use it.

Perhaps the biggest news, though, comes at the bottom of the post:

In the coming months, we will be moving from per-channel enforcements to a more sophisticated ranking model where the amount of distribution that content gets will be a direct function of its quality. Good content will be seen by more people, poor content will be seen by fewer people (and potentially no one). We think this is the right long-term model, as it rewards apps that focus on great social experiences while minimizing negative experiences.

Facebook already does this to some extent with its News Feed (high quality content is seen by more people). But it sounds like this will also be seen in other channels, like Chat and the notifications tab.

Update: Tickets are now sold out. Be sure to check back next week for our next set of tickets.

We only have a couple more weeks left until our 6th annual summer party at August Capital. Our first two batches of 100 tickets sold out in under an hour. Today we are releasing 100 more. The party will follow our Mobile First CrunchUp on July 29th and will be held in Menlo Park from 5:30 – 10:00pm. There will be a mix of startup demos, drinks, giveaways, networking and fun on one of the prettiest roads in Silicon Valley. The tickets tend to sell out very fast, so be sure to act quickly if you would like to come. If you’re not able to get a ticket today, stay tuned for a ticket giveaway this weekend. We will also release our next set of tickets next week.

Tickets are now on sale here.

Tickets to our Mobile First CrunchUp are unfortunately sold out. We still have a limited number of press passes available though. Contact me to request press pass consideration.

Here are the logistics for our summer party.

6th Annual Summer Party at August Capital
July 29, 5:30 – 10:00 pm
2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park CA 94025, Map
Get Tickets @ Eventbrite: $40 based on availability. Tickets to be released weekly in batches. Stay tuned to TechCrunch for releases as they sell out quickly. #tcaugustcapital

Sponsorships
The combined CrunchUp – Summer Party also gives us a great sponsorship platform for startups and brands to reach both conference and networking attendees. Please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.

At yesterday’s launch of video Skype messaging, Mark Zuckerberg showed this slide of Facebook user growth graph plotted with the launches of Facebook apps like Photos, Messages and the Like Button. Zuckerberg held that each bump in growth was fueled by a technological innovation and that as sharing moves further along the curve he is waiting for the technological innovation that will propel it upwards.

When asked in the above interview what this innovation could possibly be (Project Spartan, perhaps?) Facebook Director of Product Engineering Andrew Bosworth gave a somewhat surprising answer.

“Certainly we have some ideas and obviously some things we can’t talk about. But a big part of what Zuck wants to do is enable people in the world, not just at Facebook but anyone who wants to be the next bubble on that law of sharing graph, to build those things.

It’s not about what Facebook does in terms of the apps space, it’s about what the social infrastructure enables to be built. As much as we have some things that we’re working on, I think some of the most exciting things are things we’re not working on, that somebody else should be working on to fill out those bubbles on that law of sharing graph.”

For the perspective of someone who is aiming for one of those bubbles, check out this post-announcement interview with Skype’s Head of Consumer Product & Design Rick Osterloh, where he talks about the user growth benefits of building on the Facebook platform, among other things.