Category: Tech news

A survey taken over the last year by Glassdoor, a jobs and career community that allows users to anonymously share an inside look at jobs and companies, confirms that Eric Schmidt looks better when he’s on his way out. As the Google big whig prepares to step down from a decade of service as chief exec, his employee approval rating is at an all time high.

On the flip side of the popularity coin, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz is seeing her honeymoon period come to a close. In what is likely unsurprising news, among tech CEOs, Bartz saw the biggest decline in her approval rating in the past year, compared to the 12 months prior. Between March 2009 and March 2010, she held a 77 percent approval rating among her employees, whereas compared to the following year, her approval rating dropped to 50 percent. Granted, this is still 16 percent higher than that of her predecessor, Jerry Yang. Yang had a 2008 George Bush-like approval rating of 34 percent when he stepped down as CEO.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer saw the second biggest decline among the 12 CEOs evaluated. During March 2009 and March 2010, he held an average 46 percent approval rating, before dropping to 40 percent. Maybe IE9 will be enough to right a foundering ship?

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Oracle’s Larry Ellison both dropped four points during the same period to 83 percent and 73 percent, respectively, while eBay’s John Donahoe went on a hot streak. Between March 2009 and March 2010, the eBay CEO held a 24 percent approval rating among employees, whereas between March 2010 and March 2011, he held a 46 percent approval rating. Go Johnny go.

Lastly, always worth noting is that Apple Man Steve Jobs remains as popular as ever, though his approval rating did drop from 98 percent to 95 percent. I’m sure when the iPhone 5 comes out, he’ll be right back on top.

As to how Glassdoor CEO approval ratings are calculated, the site takes the pulse of a company’s employees similar to the way in which presidential approval ratings are tallied. Employees are simply asked, “Do you approve of the way your CEO is leading the company?”

TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde? 110 percent approval rating. And Aol CEO Tim Armstrong, he’s not too shabby himself.

Google launched the +1 feature of its social layer yesterday and if you’re like most tech journalists you probably likened the move to attaching a Facebook Like button to Google search results.

Well now someone has gone and done exactly that, no joke. Meet +Like, a Firefox, Safari and Chrome extension that lets you see how many people have liked a specific Google search result on Facebook as well as which of your Facebook Friends have recommended a specific piece of content, whether or not that action took place on Google search.

When you “like” something on +Like it gets posted on Facebook as well so you can share content you’re into with your social graph, sort of like what Google is trying to attempt with its Google Profile revamp and +1.

Said creator Koby Menachemi, “We built this extension after reading about +1 on TC . We couldn’t understand why [it’s] not just putting the two things together (Google searches + Facebook’s Likes).” It took Menachemi and co-founder Shmueli Ahdut 3-4 hours using their own Crossrider framework to make the cross-browser extension.

Now Google +1 has key advantage over Google +Like in that you can also use +1 to like Google ads (and presumably monetize them). But seriously if I was Google, +Like would have me shaking in my boots.

(Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on TechCrunch Europe)

I’ve been more skeptical than most about Spotify’s promise to launch in the US, but it looks like Europe’s favourite music service is ready to make good on all of its hype.

We’re hearing from multiple sources today that licensing deals are finally in place with major US record labels and the company’s Valley investors are ready to provide the additional cash needed to pay for costly music licenses. Absent any last minute hiccups, the company’s US service is ready to go live as early as next week.

The catch? Those same sources tell us that in order to finance the cost of a US launch, Valley investors have demanded the company shut down its European service, effective noon on Friday (GMT). The brand new ‘Spotify USA‘ — unavailable to users in Europe — will launch on Monday morning.

Read More…

Earlier this afternoon, Mike posted an exclusive story about an internal war raging within Google.

In the post he mentioned that Google revenue chief Nikesh Arora had recently returned from a two week jaunt in the Caribbean with Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt aboard Rosenblatt’s yacht, ‘The Adsense‘.

A few minutes after the post went live, Rosenblatt called the TechCrunch office and left a voicemail. Boy is he pissed. Not at any of the other details of the story — which he doesn’t deny — but about Mike revealing details of his yacht.

We understand that, in these piracy-infested times, the super-rich are rightly protective of their yachts — but come on dude, it’s called ‘The Adsense‘. That’s news!

Voicemail below.

Update:

It must be an absolute nightmare being a Hollywood executive in 2011. Four big studios (20th Century Fox, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros.) have announced plans to introduce a premium video-on-demand service, to debut on DirecTV next month as “Home Premiere,” that will screen movies a mere 60 days after their theatrical debut. Renting such a movie will set you back $30. And if you think you’re angry about that, just imagine how theater owners must feel.

AllThingsD already has a scenario where the $30 price tag probably isn’t as high as you might initially think, particularly if you’re trying to have a “moment and daddy need to go to the movies alone for once” night. Once you pay for a baby-sitter, parking, movie tickets, a little popcorn and maybe a soda you’re well past the $30 barrier.

The studios made the announcement at an industry convention in Las Vegas. Oh: they never bothered to tell movie theater owners about this ahead of the big announcement.

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Power struggles within Google’s executive team, which have been brewing since the announcement of long time CEO Eric Schmidt’s departure, are apparently bubbling up to the surface.

Case in point: In an extraordinary move to illustrate its independence, say sources, the Google webspam team actually classified Google Places as spam and a content farm, and temporarily removed it from search results.

Rewind to February 24, when Google announced major revisions to its search algorithms to reduce the amount of “content farm” and other low quality content appearing in Google search results. Google specifically targeted “sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.” See for example, a blog post by Matt Cutts, who leads Google’s webspam team, here.

The changes were targeted at the huge content farms gaining notoriety on the Internet – Demand Media, Yahoo (via Associated Content), Huffington Post, etc. Google was just settling in to the changes when those sites fired back via even more complicated SEO ploys, say sources. And then Google made yet more changes to the way they classify spam and other low value sites.

That’s when everything fell apart.

The Google webspam team has made extraordinary efforts to explain that they are completely independent of other parts of Google. The fact that most content farms generate the large majority of their revenue from Google Adsense ads placed around their content has been a problem for Google. Cutts has been unequivocal on Google’s policy: “Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google” he said back in January on the official Google blog.

That has angered Google revenue chief Nikesh Arora, who has reportedly lashed out at the webspam team privately at various sales events for targeting some of Google’s most valuable partners. Tellingly, Arora recently returned back from a two week jaunt in the Caribbean with Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, reported TMZ, where the two spent time on Rosenblatt’s new $40 million megayacht pictured left and called (I’m not kidding), The Adsense. Demand Media, worth around $2 billion, generates approximately 100% of its revenues from low quality content wrapped in Google Adsense ads

And now Cutts has earned the ire of another longtime Google exec, Marissa Mayer. Mayer controls Google Places, a service that gives information about local businesses and aggregates reviews from sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, among other properties. Google Places, like many other Google properties, automatically show at the top of search results. The content aggregated by Places from third party sites is found, if at all, much lower in results.

Google’s new algorithm changes automatically classified Google Places as spam, say sources inside Google, and for a few hours most Google Places results were inadvertently stripped from Google search results.

The fact that many Place pages only contain content scraped from third party sites and little or no original content was a key factor in the automatic change, say sources. This has been a source of constant tension between Google and the sites they scrape. See, for example, the drama between Google and Yelp last year as Yelp content on Google Places was purged and then re-added.

Place pages were quickly restored to Google search results over loud objections from Cutts and the webspam team.

Cutts refused to comment specifically on this story, although he did say in an email exchange that Google absolutely does not use humans in determining search results and that the algorithms make ranking decisions based on a proprietary blend of a variety of signals, such as how much revenue Google generates from the results. “If Google were to determine that Google properties were not providing high quality results, it would not matter whether or not those Google properties were displaying Google ads,” he said. “It wouldn’t matter for what?” I replied, “I’m not sure you actually said anything.” He has not responded to that last inquiry.

Mayer, for her part, was even less forthcoming. In an off the record phone conversation she said “Screw the webspam team,” and “It’s not like people are going to start using Bing.”

Update: Rosenblatt responds to yacht issue.

For years now, Facebook has offered quite a few ways to access the site from mobile devices, and they’ve proven immensely popular. In February 2010 the site had 100 million mobile users per month — today it’s announcing that it’s up to 250 million. To coincide with the growth stats, Facebook has some other news to announce about mobile.

We hear most often about Facebook’s native applications available for iPhone, Android, WebOS, and other app platforms, but a significant majority of mobile users actually access the site from the web. And up until now Facebook’s web setup has been a bit complicated: users on smartphones like Android and iPhones have been directed to touch.facebook.com, which is optimized for large touchscreens. And users accessing the site from a featurephones (and there are a lot of them) would be directed to the more plain-looking m.facebook.com. Today, that’s changing: Facebook is merging touch.facebook.com and m.facebook.com into the same site.

But don’t worry — you touchscreen users aren’t about to be downgraded to the other version. Facebook Head of Mobile Products Erick Tseng explains that up until now having two versions of Facebook’s mobile website has led to issues, because the site’s engineers would have to rebuild the same features twice, leading the two sites to rarely reach feature parity. Now Facebook has launched a new framework based on XHP, Javelin, and WURFL that uses the same underlying codebase, while tweaking UI elements on the fly depending on what device you’re accessing the site from.

In other words, Facebook’s engineers only have to implement a feature once on their backend, and if your phone supports it, it’ll show up. In addition to paying attention to a phone’s hardware capabilities (if your phone doesn’t support location, you wont’ be able to use Places), Facebook is also optimizing graphics on the fly — you can see three different versions of the Share button in the graphic below.

The new site started rolling out last night, and will be live for everyone in the next few weeks.

Video game and software retailer Gamestop has acquired TechCrunch50 company Spawn Labs, a startup that develops game streaming technology. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In addition, GameStop also announced the acquisition of game distribution platform Impulse, which is a division of software company Stardock.

Spawn Labs launched in 2009 as a Slingbox for video games. Via, Spawn Labs appliance and computers apps transmit HD-quality (720p) content over the Internet so that players can use the peer-to-peer game streaming service to play games simultaneously.

The Spawn Labs team will work closely with GameStop’s existing R&D group to further develop the product, according to a release. Once the Spawn Labs integration and testing on a new consumer interface is complete, users will have immediate access to a wide selection of high-definition video games on demand on any Internet-enabled device.

Impulse’s platform allows users to access to a library of more than 1,100 games to be downloaded. Impulse also provides content publishers DRM and copy protection tools and allows developers to enable achievements, account management, friend lists, chat, multiplayer lobbies, and cloud storage within their games. GameStop says that it will maintain Impulse as a business and will integrate the platform with its own site in the next few months.

GameStop has been on a bit of a shopping spree. Last year, the company bought Kongregate, a social gaming destination and community site for gamers. For GameStop, these acquisitions are the mechanism by which the retailer is pushing its digital strategy in the gaming space.

A day after Google unveiled its “+1″ product, someone has already taken a close enough look at the code to track down an embeddable +1 Button.

Said button wasn’t supposed to be public yet – they essentially let people recommend any online content on Google search.

Indeed, for now the button appears only next to search results once you’ve switched +1 on, but Yvo Schaap, after some sleuthing, “in a stray piece of JavaScript” found what appears to be buttons that can be embedded on any site just like a Facebook Like, Tweet This or, well, Add to Google Buzz button.

Google in a blog post said they were still working on such a button:

But the +1 button isn’t just for search results. We’re working on a +1 button that you can put on your pages too, making it easy for people to recommend your content on Google search without leaving your site. If you want to be notified when the +1 button is available for your website, you can sign up for email updates at our +1 webmaster site.

A couple of caveats: +1 not only has to be switched on but you also need an active Google Profile and be logged into it. Schaap says you need to be located in the United States, too, but it – occasionally – works for me and I’m in Belgium.

According to Schaap, the button as such actually functions fine, and interestingly its layout can be modified to be positioned horizontally or vertically. Clicking it makes recommended pages appear in the appropriate tab on your Google Profile page.

There are some live buttons on Schaap’s blog or in the side bar of Fanity. Here’s an example of a direct URL.

UPDATE: Google issued this statement on the button: While we’re thrilled that publishers are anxious to integrate the +1 button into their sites, we’re still working things out and aren’t quite ready for this to be publicly available just yet, so we’re disabling this in the code. Webmasters and other publishers interested in using +1 on their sites should get in touch with us here.

For interesting takes on +1 outside of the TechCrunch network:

Search Engine Land: Meet +1: Google’s Answer To The Facebook Like Button
NewsGrange: Why Google’s +1 Can’t Compete With Facebook’s Like
GigaOm: Sure, I Could Join a Google-Based Social Network — But Why?

My love of Boxcar should be pretty clear at this point. Because I’m an information junkie, it’s probably the app I use the most on my iPhone/iPad besides Safari. And earlier this year, they brought the notification goodness to the web as well. Now they’re taking the next step: native Mac support.

Yes, Boxcar is here for the Mac. The app resides in your toolbar and when clicked shows a drop-down with all of your notifications as they come in in realtime. You can set it so a sound goes off with every new message and if you have Growl installed you can get a visual notification as well.

“This is another step in offering Boxcar wherever you’re at. We believe in delivering messages to people – not devices. We want to deliver messages to you, wherever you’re at. That will be on your phone, tablet, desktop, TV or car. It doesn’t matter to us, as long as it gets to you,” creator Jonathan George tells us.

He also notes that even though notifications are not as vital on a traditional computer with more robust multi-tasking capabilities, people have been using the Mac version to get away from things like a full-fledged Twitter client which can distract you. Instead, Boxcar only notifies you when they must: when you have an @reply or DM, for example.

One interesting thing about Boxcar for Mac is that they’re not releasing it via the Mac App Store. George says they want to use this initial release as a large-scale beta of sorts, and Apple’s requirements for their store make some of what they want to do difficult. Instead, a release through that store will likely come down the road.

So for now, you can find Boxcar for Mac on their website here.

As you may have heard, yesterday Salesforce announced the $326 million purchase of social media monitoring company Radian6, the CRM company’s largest acquisition to date. While we know that Salesforce has been actively pushing its social strategy with the debut of a Twitter and Facebook-like Chatter and the Service Cloud 3, $300-million plus is a lot of money for the CRM giant to shell out for a single company. In a press call with Salesforce executives and analysts yesterday, the company’s CEO and founder Marc Benioff said that Radian6 currently has a revenue run rate of $35 million and is expected to add $40 to $50 million in revenue to Salesforce’s top line this year.

At $326 million, Salesforce paid nearly ten times Radian6′s revenues, which is rare. So why did Salesforce want Radian6 so badly? First, Salesforce is aggressively pushing a social strategy and it’s a dog eat dog world in the social enterprise space with a massive number of companies trying to capture marketshare for social applications. Salesforce is actively marketing Chatter but the Yammer and Jive competitor isn’t a clear cut leader in the space. Radian6 boosts the company’s footprint in social, and provides an established set of well-known clients, such as Dell, GE, Kodak and UPS.

Salesforce has already stated its intention to integrate the two applications to ‘create the bridge between public social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and online communities, and Salesforce Chatter, the private, secure social network for the enterprise.’ According the company, ‘Chatter feeds will no longer just contain the activity happening within the walls of a company, but will be filled with real time insights from fans on Facebook pages, followers on Twitter, comments on blog posts and more.’

Another reason why Salesforce bought Radian6 (and paid through the nose) was that it was in a rush to add social media monitoring to its family of products. When an analyst asked Benioff why Salesforce didn’t just develop the technology in house, he said that he needed to move quickly as more competitors move into the world of social enterprise. Salesforce CMO Kendall Collins said it would have taken at least three years for Salesforce to build the technology in-house.

Collins tells us that the company looked at entire space of social media monitoring companies, but narrowed it down to a few select companies. In the end, he says, Radian6 was the leader in terms of technology, clients and talent.

Clearly, Salesforce is making it known that it is willing to pay the big bucks for social. Even the company’s latest investments, including Seesmic and HubSpot, have been made in social applications for businesses.

And for social media monitoring, this exit is probably the largest acquisition to date. Lithium bought ScoutLabs for $20 million to $25 million last year and Jive bought Filtrbox for an undisclosed (and probably small) amount.

It’s unclear if Salesforce’s massive bet will pay off in the end. Yes, it will have a social media monitoring application within its comprehensive portfolio of products. But what’s to stop a competitor (i.e. Microsoft or IBM) from buying a smaller (and less expensive) but equally as feature rich app like HootSuite or ViralHeat?

Photo credit/Flickr/blatantnews

Yes, it’s happened. Three days after Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey comes back in to head product, the dreaded #Dickbar, or the Quickbar that inserted trending topics and promoted ads into your tweet-stream on the iPhone, is dead.

Business Insider reported that the Dickbar was a mistake in the first place, having been developed by a junior product manager with no senior oversight. And this would make sense, considering Twitter backtracked after its launch, taking the step to pin it to the top of the app weeks ago and today deciding to do away with it altogether.

From the Twitter blog:

“Rather than continue to make changes to the QuickBar as it exists, we removed the bar from the update appearing in the App Store today. We believe there are still significant benefits to increasing awareness of what’s happening outside the home timeline. Evidence of the incredibly high usage metrics for the QuickBar support this. For now, we’re going back to the drawing board to explore the best possible experience for in-app notification and discovery.”

While this move calls into question Twitter’s grasp on it overall monetization strategy (is it ads over user experience or user experience over ads?), for now users interested in shaking off their #Dickbars can download the new ad-free app from the App Store. And in case anyone misses it, you can replicate the experience here.

eBay has been quick to start integrating Milo’s local product inventory technology into its products after picking up the startup for $75 million in December. eBay added Milo’s local results in its barcode scanning apps, RedLaser for iPhone and Android, and GiftsNearby, as a shopping tool for consumers to find gift options available for pick up at local retailers in their neighborhood. Today, eBay is launching its deepest integration with Milo—on it’s search platform.

Milo’s local availability results will show eBay shoppers which local stores in their neighborhood currently have a desired item in-stock and how much it costs at each location. Milo currently provides access to millions of products from approximately 50,000 stores across all 50 states.

eBay shoppers will now have the choice to opt-in to a feature that will include local shopping tab in search results to check a product’s local, or in-store, availability directly from the eBay search results page. In addition, product pages for MP3 players and GPS devices now also include a local shopping tab, which will displays in-stock results from nearby stores.

For now, the local search feature has been integrated with eBay Garden, but we’re expecting it to be extended to other search portals in the near future.

In addition, eBay is providing retailers who use QuickBooks a way to easily upload their inventory onto Milo and eBay through a new inventory management plug-in. Essentially, this makes it a whole lot more easier for retailers to integrate their offline merchandise onto Milo and eBay.

For eBay, local appears to be one of the key strategies that will drive the e-commerce company in the future. Forrester estimates that online research to offline buying is a $917 billion market that will eventually reach $1.3 trillion and account for nearly 50% of total retail sales by 2013. This is a way for eBay to get in on this revenue source.

This deepest integration also means that eBay will go head to head with Google on product search, as the search giant’s newest version of its Product search portal was updated with local inventory listings from 70 popular retail brands, many of whom also list with Milo.

Between eBay’s local strategy, and its ambitions in fulfillment with its recent $2.4 billion acquisition of GSI Commerce, the company has definitely upped its game in the battle against Amazon and others.

GameSalad, formerly Gendai Games, has raised $6.1 million in funding, led by Steamboat Ventures, with participation from Greycroft Partners, DFJ Mercury, DFJ Frontier and ff Asset Management.

GameSalad’s game creation tool allows non-programmers to build, develop and publish 2D casual games games for the iPhone and iPad. The benefit of using the platform is that developers can design, publish and distribute original games for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Web without needing to write a line of code. To date, GameSalad has been used to create powered over 8,500 titles in the iTunes App Store including more than 30 top 100 U.S. Games in Apple’s App Store.

The new financing will be used to grow GameSalad’s technical and product teams and further develop its game creation technology. We hear the company, which is currently based in Austin, is also planning a move to San Francisco in the next few months.

A few weeks ago, after the debut of the Opera App Store, app marketplace GetJar banned Opera’s mobile browsing app Opera Mini from its own mobile app marketplace. The reasoning: Opera’s App Store was available in the app and competes directly with GetJar’s marketplace. Today, it appears a truce has been made, as Opera Mini 6 is now back in the GetJar store.

GetJar remains committed to offering consumers the best possible content regardless of category, phone or platform, said Patrick Mork, CMO of GetJar. Opera Mini has been a great partner and one of our top apps for many years and our users will be happy to have a bigger and better version of Opera Mini back in our store.

It’s unclear how Opera and GetJar resolved their differences. When GetJar first banned Opera Mini from its app marketplace, Mork wrote that the company “spent many months negotiating with Opera to avoid this scenario and are disappointed that GetJar consumers will no longer have access to Opera Mini.” It appears that GetJar was blindsided by the fact that Opera opened up its own app store. A reader had suggested previously the possibility that GetJar bid for Opera’s inclusion of its app store in its mobile browser products but lost out to Appia, who is powering Opera’s app store.

The whole brouhaha does bring up an interesting point when it comes to competition and the flux of app marketplaces. At what point do competing app marketplaces and developers draw the line?

Well, all’s well that ends well.

Photo Credit/Flickr/Mel B.