Category: Tech news

Here’s more evidence that regular people have zero time for things like Google TV, Boxee, and Roku, if only because they’re too complicated for their own good. Hill Holiday, a “caffeine-fueled ad agency,” asked five Boston-area families to participate in a cord-cutting experiment. For one week each family was asked to forgo traditional cable TV in favor of one of the following devices: Apple TV, Google TV, Boxee Box, Xbox 360, and Roku. These devices, of course, are the premier devices for people looking to break free of their cable company while still being able to enjoy television. And how did it turn out for these five families?

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Probably sick of countless press emails asking for an official stance on the countless controversial hyper-mediated events like WikiLeaks and the Tunisan and Egyptian uprisings now being amplified through Twitter, co-founder Biz Stone and Twitter General Council Alexander Macgillivray have co-written the polemic “The Tweets Must Flow” essentially arguing that freedom of expression is a human right.

Key takeways:

*“On a practical level, we simply cannot review all one hundred million-plus Tweets created and subsequently delivered every day.”

*“We keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.”

*“While we may need to release information as required by law, we try to notify Twitter users before handing over their information whenever we can.”

*We’re hiring.

Stone and Macgillivray did not explicitly mention any one particular incident in the post but obviously hinted at recent news events with pointed language like “some tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country,” (Tunisia, Egypt) and “While we may need to release information as required by law, we try to notify Twitter users before handing over their information whenever we can” (which is exactly what the company did recently when the DOJ asked for data from WikiLeaks supporters).

Emphasizing Twitter’s transparency, Stone and Macgillivray state that Twitter has been submitting all tweet removal notices to @ChillingEffects which is releasing them through @ChillFirehose. @ChillingEffects is a project lead by the EFF, Harvard, Stanford and other universities meant to raise awareness of online rights and protections with regards to copyright issue, etc . They also mention that Twitter has a Twitter list devoted to “Freedom of Expression” which includes the ACLU, IP Justice and internet monitoring service Herdict.

Twitter’s Sean Garrett tells us that the post is the result of a year of mulling over important geo-political issues that Twitter is now an unlikely player in, “We thought it important for us to explain our principles for both big things like being blocked in China to much more specific decisions like a DMCA request over a single Tweet. Recent big global events vividly demonstrate the implications of this approach.”

Indeed, the Twitter legal team now lead by Macgillivray has found itself in all sorts of unprecedented legal situations as the service scales, anything from a Courtney Love libel suit to a subpoena from the Pennsylvania Attorney General.

Biz Stone has written on Twitter and activism before, in response to Malcom Galdwell’s assertion that there is no such thing as  Twitter activism (I can’t wait to see what Gladwell has to say about the past two weeks). And while this is the first time I’ve seen Macgillvray write on Twitter issues, something tells me it won’t be the last.

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Galvanized by the unprecedented Internet shutdown in Egypt, angel investor Shervin Pishevar has launched OPENMESH a forum for people who want to discuss ways of preventing governments from blocking communications networks. The site (which is admittedly sparse at the moment) was up within hours of Pishevar tweeting out his ideas, designed and built by followers @Laksman and @garyjaybrooks.

Pishevar, whose Twitter account has served as a mini-#Egypt /#Jan25 news source since the protests started on the 25th, explains the inspiration behind the site.

“The idea is that if the government takes down the backbone for the internet in a country (like Egypt has done), takes down the mobile cellular networks and potentially the fixed line communications line there has to be other ways for people to communicate. Some of these ideas include coming up with ad hoc mesh networking solutions in a city or nation to support peer-to-peer communications.

You could have simple ideas like people communicating over bluetooth on their mobile phones (even if the mobile network is shutdown) as has happened in Iran and now Egypt. You could have WIMAX pumped in via ships in international waters powered by satellite internet connections pointed to nearby cities. You could have mobile routers in backpacks, cars and rooftops all interconnecting to create a further mesh solutions.”

Currently there are few alternatives apart from dialup if a government forces ISP providers to suspend service, but that shouldn’t be the case in the future. “The last bastion of dictatorship is the router,” says Pishevar.

If you’re interested in volunteering or getting involved in any way you can visit OpenMeshProject.org or tweet @Shervin.

This is sure to cause a backlash among Indian online merchants. Due to restrictions from the Reserve Bank of India, PayPal has amended its user agreement for Indian merchants, imposing a number of restrictions on merchants using PayPal as an online payments mechanism. Now Indian merchants will not be able to accept payments via PayPal that are above $500 per transaction. As stated in PayPal’s blog post announcing the change, “For purchases or payments above this transaction value, you will have to use an alternative payment method.”

The fact that Indian merchants won’t be able to receive payments above $500 per transaction is a big blow to entrepreneurs in the country. As one anonymous developer tells us, “we’re fucked.”

And PayPal is requiring that any payments into merchants’ accounts cannot be used to buy other products has has to be transferred to and Indian bank account with 7 days from the receipt of confirmation from the buyer in respect of the goods or services.

It’s important to note that these restrictions aren’t being imposed by PayPal, but rather by the Reserve Bank Of India. The restrictions will take effect on March 1, 2011.

This isn’t the first time the RBI has imposed restrictions on PayPal. Last year, PayPal had to suspend personal payment transactions from and to India temporarily, when the RBI concluded that PayPal was not in compliance with all relevant regulatory requirements. Shortly afterwards, PayPal removed the ability for Indian merchants to withdraw funds from accounts electronically in compliance with regulatory instructions.

And some think this is the beginning of the end of PayPal in India.

A Santa Cruz-based electric motorcycle manufacturer, Zero Motorcycles, raised another $2.4 million in private equity, according to a new SEC filing.

Earlier this month, California’s Scotts Valley Police Department started using the company’s Zero DS bikes in urban patrols. According to a company press statement, its Zero DS has a range of up to 50 miles (80 km) and is highway legal, safe for off-road bike paths, and drives quietly due to its all-electric drivetrain, making it potentially advantageous for urban law enforcement.

In late 2010, Zero Motorcycles expanded sales of its all-electric bikes to Australia. The company is selling its products in 32 countries today, including the U.S., Switzerland, Germany, Italy, the U.K. and Canada.

Last summer, Zero Motorcycles attained a U.S. patent for a battery interconnect system that reduces the amount energy wasted in the form of heat around the power packs that go into their bikes.

Zero’s competitors include fellow American startups Brammo and Mission Motors, and major bike companies like Honda and BMW that have committed to put out all-electric models, too.

In 2008, Zero Motorcycles raised about $8 million, and in 2010 the company raised another $7.1 million in what appear to be several expansion rounds, bringing the company’s total equity raised to about $17.5 million today.

TechCrunch has requested details about how Zero Motorcycles will apply its latest financing round of $2.4 million. The company did not offer an immediate reply.

Tumblr is growing like a weed, but “the last four or five months totally overshadow everything that came before it,” founder David Karp tells Chris Dixon in a taping today for TCTV (watch the video above). “We are growing by a quarter billion impressions every week,” he revealed. Last week Tumblr did 1.2 billion impressions, or pageviews, and it is adding 250 million every week. Just think about that for a second. Over the last 30 days, that came to 4.2 billion pageviews.

If you are wondering why Tumblr’s been having so much downtime lately, just take a look at the comScore chart below, which shows its own estimate of 2.5 billion pageviews for the month of December, up from 335 million from the year before. All of that is coming from 19 million unique visitors per month globally, according to comScore. (Karp’s numbers are based on his own internal Google Analytics and they are for a slightly different time period, he also notes that Tumblr reports directly to Quantcast).

Karp admits that the company was “unprepared” for that kind of hockey-stick hypergrowth, but with a new $30 million round in the bank, he says his team is working round the clock to keep scaling and catching up with all the sudden demand. Karp says the growth is coming in part from college students, who really took to the service only since September, 2009 or so and, more recently, international growth in Europe, Japan,and Brazil. He also tells me separately that 65 percent of those pageviews come from Tumblr users looking at their Dashboards (which shows the stream of posts from other people on Tumblr they follow).

The video above is an excerpt from a longer conversation with Chris Dixon for his TCTV show Founder Stories (formerly Startup Sherpa). We will put up more excerpts and the full interview next week, in which Karp explains why the two people he looks up to the most are Steve Jobs and Willy Wonka.

Talk to any large company in Silicon Valley and they’ll be the first to tell you that they foster a culture where innovation is everywhere and engineer imaginations can run wild.

Unfortunately, that’s often just a complete fabrication from the company’s marketing department. But even at companies that really do try to encourage innovation, it’s often tough for engineers to pull themselves away from their workload so that they can tinker on a side project.

That’s an issue that faced YouTube several years ago. No, YouTube doesn’t just pay lip-service to innovation — the company, like its parent Google, allocates a good chunk of time for developers to work on their own projects. But oftentimes engineers simply didn’t take advantage of their 20% time, so YouTube came up with an answer: instead of trying to get its engineers to spend one day a week on side projects, it decided to launch a biannual event where they spend a whole week crafting whatever they can think up.

Earlier this month, YouTube invited me to talk with a few team members about this so-called New Ideas Week and how it got started. They also shared some projects that are currently in the works and got their start during the Week — things like a new version of YouTube built from the ground up for children, and a new Qik-like mobile service for live streaming.

YouTube Director of Product Management Hunter Walk kicked things off by talking about some of the underlying reasons why New Ideas Week exists in the first place. He says YouTube’s goal is to maintain an environment where engineers can test things out, without having to worry if one of their experiments is going to kill their career. The first way to do this is to insulate employees from the “slings and arrows” thrown by partners whenever there is a change to the site. Walk says Engineers are told to test out their ideas with 1% of the site’s users without having to request approval — provided they “don’t do something that would put me in prison”.

From an infrastructure standpoint, YouTube has set up a system that allows engineers to plug-in and monitor their experiments without having to reinvent the wheel. There’s an internal dashboard that displays the current status of each of dozens of active experiments — I managed to catch a glimpse of one, but it was a mundane experiment having to do with YouTube’s lightweight international site. My keen eyes failed me, but Walk did mention an interesting fact about the experiments: at any given moment there is a percentage of users on YouTube who see no advertising at all, which serves as the site’s control group.

Next, I spoke with Oliver Heckmann, an Engineering Director based out of Google’s Zürich office. Heckmann was actually responsible for the formation of New Ideas Week in 2008, after he noticed how little 20% time he and his fellow engineers were getting to actually use.

The results from the first week, he says, “weren’t that great.” But the idea took hold, and the results from the second week, six months later, were much better. This was when a YouTube engineer built a new feature for YouTube’s player that would automatically detect black bars in uploaded footage and adjust the aspect ratio to minimize them.

Of course, there are duds — ”most of the ideas in there are bad”, says Heckmann. For example, one engineer noticed that a huge number of videos on YouTube feature the uploader’s messy bedroom as the backdrop. So, the team tried to build a system that could detect motion and replace the background with something else (Apple’s Photo Booth does something very similar). Unfortunately this didn’t really work. “The demo was awful because background detection is not perfect” Heckmann says. “An imperfect beach in Hawaii is not as good as a messy room”.

YouTube for Kids

More recently, these Weeks have led to some bigger initiatives. The most interesting (at least, that I heard about) was a fully revamped version of YouTube designed specifically with children in mind. Heckmann says that children tend to use YouTube differently than adults, and obviously there is content on the site that kids shouldn’t be exposed to. What’s worse, sometimes kids stumble across this content accidentally because of the way the site’s automated suggestions work.

To remedy this, YouTube is building a version of the site that’s been reworked to have absolutely no text, save for the YouTube logo. Videos that do appear will be based off of whitelists, so there won’t be any chance of accidentally stumbling across something unsavory or scary. At this point it sounds like the project still has a ways to go (it was initially created during a New Ideas week last summer), but it’s on the way.

We also briefly discussed a second product that got its start during New Ideas Week: Qik-like live streaming. YouTube has recently been putting a lot of effort into offering live streaming capabilities to content partners, and it’s going to begin allowing them to stream content directly from their phones.

The Awesome Cup

I closed out the day with John Harding, another Engineering Director for YouTube (he’s based out of their San Bruno office). Harding had the privilege of unveiling one of the team’s internal secrets: a trophy that gets passed around the engineering team that’s called “The Awesome Cup”. You can see it in the photo above.

It’s pretty self-explanatory — any time someone does something especially awesome, they’re awarded the cup. It then sits on their desk until they deem that one of their coworkers does something equally awesome, at which point they hand it off. Previous tasks that reached this level of awesomeness include the revamped Watch page and the audio comment preview feature, which was based on an xkcd comic.

Harding also talked about a few of the products that came out of YouTube’s most recent New Ideas Week, which was in December. One subtle but important feature concerns YouTube Leanback — the version of YouTube that’s seen on Google TV. Before now Leanback would only stream one piece of content at a time (the same way YouTube proper does). But now it will actually start buffering the next clip in your queue while you’re watching the first, so there’s no lag when you flip to the next video. He says that in all, around 25 projects were conceived during the last Week — but, unlike Heckmann, he couldn’t think of any that were especially bad. Something about loving all his children equally.

YouTube isn’t the only company that holds special events to spark developers’ creative juices. Facebook is well-known for its all-night hackathons, which have given rise to some of the site’s most important features, including Facebook Video. Of course, many of Facebook’s ideas aren’t so great either — one fateful hackathon led to the creation of Facebook Fax, which let you fax photos to friends. Which, if memory serves, they used to punk me.

Now that Facebook has entered the space, Google appears to be ready to take it more seriously, and Foursquare is gaining some real traction, the other players in the location field need to start defining their roles. Of the other players, Gowalla has been doing some interesting stuff around check-in aggregation. But their more interesting play may be around travel. And a small change today points to that.

As you can see on place pages for various airports, Gowalla has begun connecting your travels from destination to destination. So if you check it at SFO then five hours later check in at JFK, they know that you were on a cross-country flight and create a new graphic to showcase that, complete with your miles traveled. Below that they tell your friends about your journey. And they’re even able to see if you had a layover at another airport.

Is it a small feature? Of course. But again, it does point to some of the interesting things Gowalla could do with location in the travel space. Other recent features they’ve launched, such as Highlights, also showcase this. With Highlights, you can make a list of your favorite things a city. This is based around pre-set topics, so there’s a best place for “People Watching” and a best “Watering Hole”, for example. But you can only have one set place for each topic, and so obviously, the emphasis here is to name things in your home city. But imagine if they turned this on for vacations, so you could leave recommendations to your friends?

They’re sort of doing this with the ability to leave notes at venues around the world, which entices your friends to go visit and check-in there so they can unlock the message.

Another small addition to the Gowalla website is that they now show you a map connecting your most recent check-ins. Again, this could be interesting from a travel perspective. Imagine being able to give someone a link visually showcasing where you when on a recent trip.

Some of these concepts are things that startups like TripTrace and others are working on as well. But Gowalla has the benefit of being a pretty widely used (and very solid) mobile application already. In other words, they already have the great tool to populate this data. Now it’s just a question of what they’ll do with it.

Disruptions can happen to any industry anywhere in the world, which is why this year TechCrunch Disrupt is going global. The conference we launched last year in New York and San Francisco is coming back to both cities, but we are also adding a third Disrupt in Beijing. All three conferences will be filled with all-star speakers, the best new startups that launch on our stages, and the coup of working WiFi.

The first Disrupt will once again take place in New York City on May 23-25, preceded by our ever popular Hackathon on May 21-22 in which pizza-fueled developers gather to hack together a product in 24 hours. Anything can happen at these events. Last year, Charlie Rose kicked off the event by interviewing legendary VC John Doerr, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz told Michael Arrington to “#@*k off,” and a real company emerged from the Hackathon—GroupMe, which later raised $10.6 million. During the main event, we launched two dozen startups, and the winner was an international startup, Soluto. That told us something.

Today, we will begin taking submissions for Disrupt NY.  If you are a founder building a company that is going to change the world, we want you to launch at Disrupt. Nowhere else offers the audience, investors, or media spotlight that Disrupt offers. Please submit your application HERE on our Disrupt application site powered by Producteev.  We will be accepting submissions starting today and for the next eight weeks through Sunday, April 3, 2011 at midnight PT. We accept companies on a rolling basis, so please submit as soon as you’re ready for consideration.

Disrupt San Francisco will take place in September. And yes, you saw that right, we’re heading to Beijing, China for TechCrunch’s first international Disrupt at the end of October. Specific dates to be announced shortly.

TechCrunch has long been a blog that covers more than just the Silicon Valley echo-chamber and in the future we want to be anywhere top entrepreneurs are building companies. It’s hard to think of any place more exciting, challenging and lucrative than China right now. As home to the world’s largest Web audience and two of the five largest Web companies in the world, China proves the best Web entrepreneurs are no longer all in Silicon Valley.

We’ll we working with Kai-Fu Lee’s Innovation Works to bring it all together.  And just like in New York and San Francisco, we’ll have a Hackathon, lively onstage debates showcasing big names from both Silicon Valley and China, and a Battlefield startup competition.

So mark your calendars and save the dates.  Applications for Disrupt New York are now open.

If you’d like to become a foundational part of the Disrupt experience and learn about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde for more information.

Speaker inquiries, please submit here.

Earlier this month, I reported on the imminent shutdown of BlueTunes, which provided a solution to upload locally stored music to the cloud. Turns out someone sorta kinda threw BlueTunes a lifeline right before it hit the deadpool.

Online storage startup MiMedia has reached an agreement with BlueTunes for its users to become subscribers of its online music storage offering, and more.

The transaction closed earlier this week. Terms were not disclosed.

Erik Zamkoff, MiMedia founder and CEO, says BlueTunes users will be provided with the same functionality they previously enjoyed, while also enhancing their ability to store and access not only music but also photos, videos and other files via the cloud.

Former blueTunes users will be able to access their data via the MiMedia website (using their blueTunes username and password) starting January 31.

Whatever, it’s Friday: looks like American singer/rapper T-Pain (real name: Faheem Rasheed Najm) got himself a tattoo while in Hawaii.

He eloquently tweeted about the event thusly: “I get a tatt every time I come to Hawaii. I think this ones pretty sweet, unless facebook shuts down soon 0_o”

There’s really not much I can add to this, except that I’m not really impressed with his new tattoo. Lucky for me, I DON’T HAVE TO [Like] IT.

Related: Israeli Man Tattoos YouTube Logo On Bicep. Chad Hurley Mildly Impressed

Update: Bonus video – our own Greg Kumparak interviews T-Pain at CES:

There is a growing trend of companion applications to television shows that bring a second screen to interactivity with TV shows and movies. Apps like GetGlue, Miso, and Tunerfish all add a second platform where users can check-in to a show, earn points and rewards for participation, and interact with social networks. A new player is about to launch in the space that adds a white-label platform for audience engagement for television shows. TV Tune-In, developed by Rogue Paper, is a real-time, companion viewing and mobile app development platform for media companies to help drive viewership, conversation and interactions for television shows and content.

TV Tune-In’s CMS allows media companies to develop branded iPhone and iPad apps for television shows and channels. The apps aims to attract fans around live viewing of their favorite show, event, or sports team. Users can actively comment, Tweet and Like their favorite show, chat with friends, play trivia games, watch exclusive video content, photos and more. As users interact with the application, they can earn rewards like virtual badges. One compelling feature for TV Tune-In is the ability to time-shift interactions and commentary in case you aren’t watching a show live.

The idea behind the platform is that media companies can launch their own interactive “second screen” experience, as opposed to forming deals and partnerships with other startups. And TV Tune-In has struck two high-profile deals with big-name media companies to create branded iPhone and iPad apps for popular television shows (Rogue Paper declined to name the partners but will announce the deals in the next few weeks).

Founded by Sima Sistani and Stephanie Boyle, Rogue Paper has assembled an impressive group of board members including Twitter CEO Dick Costolo; Antonio Lucio, CMO of Visa; Walter Delph, VP at NewsCorp Digital; James Finn, Head of Innovation and Business Strategy at O2/Telefonica and Doug Mandell.

TV Tune-In may be on to something. While apps like Miso and GetGlue grow in terms of users, media companies could provide a similar interactive experience in-house. Licensing TV Tune-In’s platform has the potential to be a cost-effective way for a television content company to access fans and develop and control their own second screen and interactive mobile applications.

In the seemingly never-ending discussions about Europe vs. Silicon Valley – how much digital ink can be spilled on ‘why Europe will never be the next Silicon Valley’, ‘why Europe will definitely become the next Silicon Valley’ and ‘Silicon Valley and Europe: a comparative look at fauna and flora’ anyway? – I’m quite amazed by how often pundits point out we could use more role models in Europe’s tech industry.

The idea seems to be that, inspired by their story of how their startup became the next Google, aspiring entrepreneurs need only look at people who’ve built or even exited companies and became fabulously famous and wealthy in the process. I disagree.

After reporting Q4 2010 earnings yesterday, AT&T has published additional statistics on the number of mobile broadband connections the telecommunications company has facilitated in the last quarter. The company says that in terms of emerging devices (this includes non-phone wireless connections), 2 million connected devices were added to the network in the quarter.

Included in this category are what AT&T refers to as embedded computing devices, which are tablets, netbooks and laptops. AT&T says that more than 6 million connected devices have been added to the network over the past five quarters. The total number of emerging devices, including postpaid and prepaid embedded computing devices, connected to the AT&T network – both for consumers and businesses is nearly 11 million.

Business users and consumers can use AT&T wireless connection plans for more than 940 specialty devices, including eReaders, netbooks, digital photo frames, personal navigation devices, telematics, home security monitoring and smart grid devices. The company says its wireless network will add support for a number of additional devices this year, including Vitality’s GlowCaps, which are pill caps designed to help patients take medications regularly through a series of reminders, including light, sound, text message and phone call alerts.

AT&T will provide a wireless plan for the Pandigital Novel eReader and the new Garmin GTU 10. And AT&T says that it has signed an agreement with BMW to add a suite for safety and infotainment services to the car company’s future models.

Of course, as the iPhone arrives at Verizon, wireless connections via non-phone devices could be a growing business for AT&T. The company saw 27.4 percent growth in wireless data revenues, up $1.1 billion versus the fourth quarter of 2009, driven by messaging, Internet access, access to apps and more.

It should be interesting to see if this particular sector will continue to grow for AT&T.

When you buy a new smartphone, is the first thing you look at what the specific absorption rate (SAR) is of the device you’re interesting in spending cash on? Me neither, but according to some health organizations, we should be paying attention to mobile phone radiation.

Rather than try and convince people to stop using their smartphones for phone calls (ain’t gonna happen), Israeli startup tawkon has developed applications that let people minimize exposure to cellular radiation while they continue using their mobile phones.

Essentially, tawkon monitors and analyzes your mobile phone’s radiation using proprietary technology, enabling you to “talk on” as usual and receive prompts to avoid radiation when you really need to. According to the company, radiation levels emitted from mobile phones can fluctuate significantly during a call, due to a variety of dynamic factors.

Tawkon alerts users when those radiation levels cross a predefined threshold, and offers suggestions to reduce exposure, based on real-time environment and usage factors.

Apple has opted to reject the somewhat controversial application – for whatever reason – and hasn’t communicated with the startup in many months. The company does have applications for BlackBerry devices, and recently launched an Android-compatible version.

Now, the company is releasing a “limited edition beta” version specifically designed for Google’s Nexus S (which, in case you’re still with us, boasts a SAR more than 50 percent lower than the Nexus One, its predecessor).

Its timing is impeccable – starting next month, the City of San Francisco’s cell phone right-to-know ordinance (PDF) goes into effect, requiring retailers to disclose Specific Absorption Rate values for cell phones.

Here’s a video of the tawkon Android app: