Category: Tech news

There’s a lie that companies and entrepreneurs tell themselves in order to commit to an acquisition.

Oh, we’re not going to change anything! We’re just going to give you more resources to do what you’ve been doing even better!

Yeah! They bought us for a reason, why would they ruin things?

It usually works for a little while, but big company bureaucracy– whether it’s HR, politics or just endless meetings– almost always creeps in. It’s a law of nature: Big companies just need certain processes to run and entrepreneurs hate those processes because they stifle nimble innovation.

Google has a new policy to fight it, according to several sources close to the company. A memo was reportedly sent out a few weeks ago to certain Google business and country heads talking about a new policy of “autonomous units” within the company. It’s being referred to in parts of the company as the “NYT effect,” a reference to this New York Times article that criticized how bloated and bureaucratic Google had become, citing it as a big reason Google was losing employees to smaller companies.

Not everyone gets to be an autonomous unit, but those who do have the freedom to run like independent startups with almost no approvals needed from HQ, according to our sources. For these divisions, Google is essentially a holding company that provides back end services like legal, providing office space and organizing travel, but everything else is up to the pseudo-startup. We’re told the memo cites Slide as the first working example.

It’s unclear how different this may be from Google’s acquisition of YouTube, which also had the promise of autonomy. But even when Google was still private, sticking to such promises was a challenge. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has openly talked about his frustration when a pre-IPO Google bought Blogger, saying that a big hope was having more resources to hire people, but the process of hiring people was so fraught with logistics and red-tape that hiring was a nightmare.

TechCrunch has not been able to find a copy of this “NYT effect” memo, although while digging, we were told that Google is getting so aggressive on leaks that an average of two people are being fired every month for the offense. (Sorry, guys, but at least Facebook is hiring nearly everyone in Silicon Valley.) We have talked with a few people with or close to Google in other countries that have seen the memo or heard of it, another person who was able to negotiate a deal all of the sudden with an international Google unit that was blocked by corporate months before, and people very close to Slide who say that the company has been running remarkably independently and only a handful of people have left since the deal closed.

One source told us autonomy was not part of Slide’s negotiation, rather it was a decision made a few months ago. As a result, Slide has become more independent since the acquisition, not less, according to this person. Slide even had its own Christmas party last night, and there was nary a Google sign from what we heard. (For comparison sake, TechCrunch is run very distinctly from the rest of AOL, but even we are rocking with the whole Silicon Valley AOL crew later tonight. That should be interesting…)

Even if the policy change is exaggerated by our sources, no one has disputed how distinctly Slide is being run, and that is surprising. Most people– including us– had assumed that the biggest reason Google bought Slide was to acquire talent like CEO and founder Max Levchin and to make the product a key part of its Frankenstein-like social initiatives. It’s not like Slide was YouTube, a distinct consumer brand that was a part of the zeitgeist with hundreds of millions of regular users. Slide has spent most of its life as a work in progress– from photo sharing to push media to SuperPoke and other Facebook apps to games and virtual goods.

According to someone very close to the company, Slide is still evolving and working on something new. Rather than being part of Google’s overall social strategy, whatever Slide is building now is likely a hedge on that greater social strategy not working. This person doesn’t know for sure what the new Google-Slide product will be, although this person’s guess is it goes back Slide’s early days of sharing photos in creative, self-expressive ways. Slide has long seen that the key to social is photo tagging and sharing, and was reevaluating a new way to use that hook on mobile well before the recent explosion of iPhone photo apps like Instagram, Picplz and Path. (I spoke with Levchin briefly this morning, but he declined to comment on anything.)

If you have the memo, we’d love to see it.

At this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt SF event, a small startup called Miso Media won the People’s Choice award for one of the niftiest iPad apps I’ve seen: it turns your iOS device into a guitar teacher. And it apparently wowed a lot of other people too, because today the startup is announcing that it’s closed a $600K seed funding round led by Google Ventures, with participation from angel investors including Keith Rabois and Laura Ziskin. One cool thing to note: Rabois was actually one of the judges when Miso Media presented on stage at Disrupt.

Miso’s app, which is called Miso Music, still isn’t out yet — CEO Aviv Grill says that it was submitted to the App Store earlier this month and it should be coming soon. But I got to try it briefly at Disrupt, and it definitely impressed me. Unlike most guitar tablature applications, which simply display the song you’re playing and play it back in a MIDI format, Miso’s application will actually listen to the notes you’re playing and scroll the music accordingly. It’s really slick.

Grill says that the company will be using the money to expand its library of supported songs. It already has the rights to many songs via the Sony/ATV catalog, and can license other songs on a one-off basis from Hal Leonard. The trouble is that producing tabs to go along with these songs is a time-consuming task, which is where the funding comes in. Miso will be doubling in size (from three to six people) come the new year. Grill says that the company also plans to add support for new instruments down the line, and to further improve the audio detection. It’s also working on getting the rights from Universal and Warner.

The company will make money via in-app downloads by charging a few dollars for each song you want to learn how to play. Provided these songs are consistently high quality (unlike the numerous awful guitar tabs all over the web), I can see this doing very well.

This whole UCSF Children’s Hospital challenge got kind of rough in the end. A bunch of individuals and organizations have been competing to raise donations – whoever got the most individual donors gets to name a room in the new hospital. Things got so heated, for example, that we sort of lashed out at HP. For that I’m sorry. But you should have seen the ribbing going on via email.

Zynga came in and crushed everyone with, um, more than 160,000 individual donations. Everyone else was in the hundred donation range, so the hospital decided to name two winners to keep things going. Until yesterday we were a distant 12th on the list with 74 donations. But we asked everyone attending our two TRON screenings last night to make a donation to the hospital as well, bringing in an additional 784 new donors and $7,030.

That brings us nicely to the lead, crushing the hopes of Paddy O’Brien, a 12-year-old bone cancer patient now in remission (pictured above), who would have otherwise won. He has 425 total donations, meaning we’ve beat him and now get to name the room whatever we want.

Victory is sweet.

Ok, fine. We’re withdrawing from the race and merging all of our donations with Paddy. His Machiavellianly adorable strategy of tugging at your heartstrings isn’t beatable in a PR war. We surrender. He deserves the win. He gets the win.

Here’s the final tally before our last minute 784 donations. You can see Robert Scoble way down there at the bottom.

It may or may not be the residual effects of Tim Ferriss’ “4 Hour Body,” but fitness apps seem to be all the rage (I’m looking at you “5 Minute Abs”). YCombinator-backed FitFu, an iPhone app for casual exercise, fits into this category and moreso.

With FitFu, founders Jof Arnold and Benjie Gillam are targeting people sitting at their desk all day, a situation where taking a few minutes to do some situps might be the difference between flab and abs.

FitFu uses pretty slick animation (creative was designed by agency Despark) and voice over to encourage and remind you to do little bits of movement throughout the day. The app uses an accelerometer to measure reps (you can choose from 8 exercises), so you actually have to move to have your exercises be counted.

FitFu also ingenuously adds a social element i.e. you can compete with your friends with regards to number of reps completed, keeping you motivated through competition.

The app basically eliminates all excuses to not complete exercise emphasizes co-founder Arnold, “People were saying ‘Oh I can’t do many reps,’ then we made an app that would eliminate excuses you make as you go into an exercise. It’s stuff you can do at home, or on a plane or in an office.”

Having vertical experience with previous apps PushupFu, CrunchFu, SquatFu and PullupFu, Arnold and Gillam are ready to focus on FitFu as a full time startup. The London-based FitFu, or what would happen if Pixar redesigned the WiFit, is in the YC winter class of 2010 and currently has 120K of UK seed funding. You can download the app here.

Yahoo has hit rock bottom. They’ve now, finally, had their layoffs. Those that are left are keeping their resumes fresh and don’t expect to stay there over the long term. Everything we hear from employees boils down to this – the company is in “absolute disarray.”

Take yesterday as an example. They botch news about closing down products like Delicious. The Upcoming team is apparently wiped out, but a seemingly timestamped blog post appeared on Wednesday, after the team was gone, asking for feedback on a new design for the site. Except the blog post doesn’t have a link to the new design, and still doesn’t as of today. Probably because whoever wrote it is gone, along with the rest of the team.

And today Yahoo realized that people really care about sites like Delicious and put up a blog post saying that they’re going to sell it, not shut it down. Which is great except the Delicious blog is now offline and returns an error (we reprinted it here).

And finally, yesterday Yahoo announced internally that they would be shutting down an instant messaging product called MyM. Have you heard of it? Neither had we. Oh wait, we did—in 2008. It turns out it was an internal project that was never launched and formally shut down nearly three years ago. Apparently the executive team didn’t know that.

In May I spoke with CEO Carol Bartz on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. The headline was the last few seconds of the talk. But that wasn’t really what was interesting about the interview. What really riled Yahoo up was when I asked if they were really even a technology company any more. I think it’s now clear to the world now that they aren’t. They’re just a nightmarish Dilbert-cartoon version of the old Yahoo, where employees fear for their jobs and stumble around the office trying to protect themselves, not build anything new and ambitious.

There is only one way a company recovers from this. They must have new leadership. And soon. Because at this point they are little more than a holding company for some lucrative Asian Internet assets. This can’t possibly be what the board of directors hoped for when they hired Bartz less than a year ago. So much has changed, so fast.

Welcome to Startup Sherpa, a new show we are piloting on TechCrunch TV. Rather than have one of us at TechCrunch interview subjects, we thought we’d try something different. Startup Sherpa is more a conversation between founders that we getto listen in on. Super angel investor (Founder Collective) and Hunch founder Chris Dixon is our host, and in each episode he will be talking to other founders and investors about the challenges of building a startup.

Today, his guest is Billy Chasen, the CEO of Stickybits and the creator of chartbeat. Stickybits is an iPhone app which encourages you to check into products by scanning their barcodes. Originally, the idea behind Stickybits was broader and encouraged consumers to attach their own barcodes to objects and places, and use the app to upload photos, videos and messages which others can unlock by scanning the code. The app still does that, but the company recently pivoted to focus more on existing product barcodes and get brands to drive adoption through incentives and rewards.

In the first segment above, Dixon and Chasen talk about when it’s the right time to pivot, and whether that is even the right term to use. Chasen notes: “When you are running a company, . . . the path where you begin at is not necessarily where you end.” You have to listen to your customers, on the one hand. On the other, some of the best products are a result of CEOs who stubbornly refuse to pivot and lead consumers where they want them to go like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. When do you think a startup should change course and when should they hold firm?

We have two more Startup Sherpa segments with Stickybits which we will post soon about the challenges of trying to change consumer behavior and serving two masters at the same time (consumers and advertisers). Please let us know in comments which startup founders you’d like to see Dixon talk to in future episodes.

Yesterday, a leaked internal Yahoo slide brought us the news that Yahoo will soon be shuttering Del.icio.us, the bookmarking service it bought a few years back. Today, Yahoo has released a statement on the group’s blog. We’ve embedded the the entirety of the blog post below.

Yahoo says that while Delicious doesn’t have a “strategic fit” at the company, it will not be shutting the service down entirely for now. In fact, it looks like Yahoo is going to find a new home for Delicious (a.k.a. sell).

Of course, unsurprisingly Yahoo is blaming the press for its own PR mismanagement, writing “Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press.” Umm, what? If they would have said all of this yesterday and been more responsive, then there ould not have been so much speculation. It took Yahoo 24 hours to admit that it admit that Delicious won’t be shut down after all?

And this raises the question of whether Yahoo originally planned to “sunset” Delicious and now just changed its mind in the past 24 hours because of all the uproar from users and the press.

I guess judging from the company’s PR strategy throughout the reports of layoffs, we shouldn’t be surprised.

Many of you have read the news stories about Delicious that began appearing yesterday. We’re genuinely sorry to have these stories appear with so little context for our loyal users. While we can’t answer each of your questions individually, we wanted to address what we can at this stage and we promise to keep you posted as future plans get finalized.

Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?

– No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.
What is Yahoo! going to do with Delicious?

– We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users. We’re in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now. And we’ll share our plans with you as soon as we can.

What if I want to get my bookmarks out of Delicious right away?

– As noted above, there’s no reason to panic. We are maintaining Delicious and encourage you to keep using it. That said, we have export options if you so choose. Additionally, many services provide the ability to import Delicious links and tags.

We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the past 24 hours has been to many of you. Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press. We’ll let you know more as things develop.

Tron Legacy pops up in your local movie theater today, and the question on everyone’s mind is: is it rubbish? If you ask the critics, then yeah: it’s really not that good at all. Shock. But when was the last time “the critics” saw eye-to-eye with the American people? Give Joe Public some cool special effects and you’re easily making $100 million.

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Words come and go, and now thanks to a new Google database of 500 billion words in 5.2 million books, you can chart the popularity of words in literature and other books going back hundreds of years. The database is can be accessed by scholars or anyone through a Google Labs project called the Google Books Ngram Viewer. You type in a word, and it charts the usage of that word over time.

Naturally, I typed in “twitter”, to see how that word has come in and out of vogue. The result is in the chart above, which shows the word gaining popularity from 1750 and peaking a little over a century ago around 1900. Then the word went into along decline until this decade when it started to shoot up again. The graph above is smoothed over, it doesn’t really start to take off until 2006 (see unsmoothed graph) when Twitter was founded, and the word took on an entirely new meaning. Strangely, though, there was an uptick starting even before that around 2003. Maybe Jack Dorsey read it somewhere and it stuck in his mind.

The Ngram Viewer is case-sensitive. So if you do a search for “Twitter” proper, it shoots up even higher. For some reason the data only goes to 2008, so imagine what the chart would look like if it went all the way to today. These searches are across all English-language books in the database, but you can also narrow it down to just English fiction or different languages. The charts are broken up into different time periods, which you can click on to get book search results containing the word you are graphing.

Speaking of the rise and fall of words, they can also tell us something about the relative importance of different centers of power in the public imagination. Do a search for “Paris, London, New York, Boston, and Rome,” for instance, and you can see when interest peaked and started to taper off for each one. Yeah, things don’t look so good for America (as represented by New York City).

We know that mobile sales have been performing well for PayPal’s parent company eBay, with the marketplace hitting record numbers for the shopping season. PayPal is announcing today that its payments business is also flourishing throughout the holiday shopping season, with a 300 percent increase in mobile payments from the official start of the shopping season (November 15) until now (December 15) compared to the same period last year.

PayPal previously reported a 27 percent increase in total payment volume on Black Friday 2010, compared to the previous year. Generally, PayPal saw an approximately 310 percent increase in mobile shopping on Black Friday.

Additionally, the company is announcing today that it has seen a 67 percentage increase in online charitable donations from the official start of the shopping season compared to last year.

The fact that overall mobile payments for PayPal, which is a popular mobile payments vendor, are up by 300 percent this year is just another sign that e-commerce is going to perform well this holiday season.

The Zune brand may be the whipping boy of the blog world, but everyone who’s ever gotten their hands on my Zune HD has been seriously impressed. You know why? Because it’s awesome. It’s got great battery life, a beautiful and intuitive interface, and you can buy and stream stuff right from the device. So we want to give one to you. It even comes with a month of Zune Pass, no strings attached.

What do you need to do? Leave a comment below listing your top three albums of 2010.

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Social gaming giant is partnering once again with a high-profile rap star for its game Mafia Wars. In August, Snoop Dogg joined Zynga in blowing up a 4-ton armored truck in the middle of the desert in Nevada. And today, Zynga is announcing its first ever in-game music partnership, via its popular Mafia Wars game, with rap star Dr. Dre.

Mafia Wars, which revolves around a player’s criminal empire by creating clans, is currently being played by 19 milllion people each month on Facebook and the iPhone. The deal essentially allows Mafia Wars players access to watch the music video for Dr.Dre’s first single,”Kush,” from Dre’s soon to be released album “Detox.” A stream of the video, which also features Snoop Dogg and Akon, can be watched within the game.

Mafia Wars is also featuring a number of Dr.Dre-inspired game experiences including limited edition virtual goods within a “Hustlin’ wit Dre” portion of the game. Players will be able to collect Dr.Dre-inspired virtual goods such as headphones, a vintage car, and weapons. And players can purchase the new single via an iTunes link available within the game.

These partnerships and campaigns have proven to be successful in the past. With the Snoop Dogg deal, Mafia Wars reached 10 million visitors in its first two weeks, and more than 2 million viewers dialed in to watch the truck blowup on Ustream.

Generally, Zynga’s games are growing like gangbusters even without celebrity deals. The gaming company’s newest game, Cityville, is already seeing 6 million daily active users, making it the fastest growing game in the company’s history.

For many years, the tech industry has gauged the success of websites by tracking usage stats like the number of unique visitors and page views the site receives each month. Wildfire, a service that helps companies run contests and social media campaigns via Twitter, Facebook, and email, is launching a new tool that looks to do the same for social media presences — in other words, it lets you visualize who has the most Twitter and Facebook followers, and how quickly they’ve grown over time. You can access the new monitor at http://monitor.wildfireapp.com.

The tool is pretty straightforward: enter the Twitter or Facebook accounts that you want to compare, and the site will plot out the total number of follower/fans they have. If you don’t want to bother finding the appropriate links to each profile, you can just enter the name of the company, and the tool will associate it with the proper social media accounts automatically (enter ‘Wal-Mart’, and it will show you Wal-Mart’s Twitter and Facebook accounts).

Media Monitor will add a little context to the data by showing the percentage change over recent time periods, and you can overlay multiple company profiles onto the same graph.

It’s a neat tool, but Wildfire isn’t the first service to offer these kind of analytics. TwitterCounter lets you easily visualize a user’s growth over time, and AllFacebook’s Pages tool does something similar for Facebook fans.

Disclosure: We recently used Wildfire to run a sweepstakes for the Cr-48.

Tron is here and it’s hard not to get excited about the sequel to one of the movies that defined the genre early on. Good thing Disney knows how to muck up a brand with merchandising and loose licensing agreements so there’s a world of Tron gear out there, just waiting for your credit card. So click through, fellow Tron-ite. There’s something here for nearly everyone including computer accessories, wearables, and so much more. Make the Tron Guy proud.

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Former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein was elected to join Amazon’s board, the company announced today via an SEC filing. Rubisntein is currently a senior VP and general manager at Hewlett-Packard, following HP’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm earlier this year.

Before joining Palm, Rubinstein was in charge of Apple’s iPod division and was the company’s senior hardware executive. At Palm, he tried to take on his former employer by developing WebOS smartphones which compete with the iPhone. Going after Apple took him off Steve Jobs’ Christmas list.

Amazon also competes directly with Apple on various fronts, including music and movie downloads and digital books. Rubinstein’s experience at Apple with the iPod and how the iTunes Store operated, although a bit dated now, could prove useful to Amazon as it tries to move from selling physical to digital media.

Rubinstein will become only the fifth member of Amazon’s unusually small board. He will join Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Madrona VC Tom Alberg, Kleiner Perkins VC Bing Gordon, and academic John Seely Brown.