Category: Tech news

After a successful Box Office run and overwhelmingly positive reviews, The Social Network has garnered a number of Golden Globe nominations, including one for Aaron Sorkin for Best Screenplay.

The Golden Globes are known as an accurate reflection of what could come at the Oscars, so this is a big win for the movie, which was released by Sony Pictures.

The Social Network’s other nominations included Trent Reznor for Best Original Score, Jesse Eisenberg for Best Actor, David Fincher for Best Director, Andrew Garfield for Best Supporting Actor and Armie Hammer for Best Supporting Actor (the actor who played the ‘Winklevii’. And perhaps one of the most important nominations—a nod for best motion picture, in the drama category.

While nothing is definite, it certainly seems likely that The Social Network could get a number of Oscar nods come next year.

The Golden Globes will take place on January 16, 2011.

While there are some of us for whom even boiling water correctly is a challenge, there are also future Top Chefs just waiting to be given the chance. You probably have one among your family or friends. And while great cooks don’t necessarily need great tools (it’s-a all in the spirit, eh?), it can’t hurt to have a few high-quality items around the kitchen. A beautiful new knife and cutting board may be the excuse he or she needs to stay home and brew up something delicious instead of going out.

And remember, a high-quality knife or pot can last a lifetime! So don’t be afraid to lay out a little scratch. Consider some of the following items to set your foodie on the right path.

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There are only so many adjectives you can use to describe your achievments. LinkedIn has just released the most overused words and phrases in members’ LinkedIn profiles in the U.S., and the results aren’t surprising.

Extensive experience took the top spot followed by Innovative and Motivated. Other popular keywords used in member profiles include Results-oriented, Dynamic, Proven track record, Team player, Fast-paced, Problem solver and Entrepreneurial. Results are similar for members outside the U.S. For example, France’s most-used word is Innovative while Spain’s most popular buzzword is Dynamic.

LinkedIn, which now has 85 million members, advises professionals who have used any of these words to replace these terms with actionable information and phrases.

What started out as a simple idea to try to explore Russia’s emerging Internet technology over an afternoon event in Moscow quickly gathered momentum. Which is why, on Monday December 13, TechCrunch Europe is coming to Moscow, Russia, for our first ever TechCrunch Moscow (to be held in English).

But we also decided that it would be awesome to have some Silicon Valley players attend virtually, either by video feed or via the telepresence equipment kindly provided by Cisco from their Valley offices. It beats traveling from the US.

So this is an unashamed appeal: if you are Mark Zuckerburg, Steve Jobs or someone of that elite level, then we’d love you to appear on stage via video link. Let’s build some links between Russia and the Valley. Maybe Ron Conway or Evan Williams / Biz Stone is available? We don’t know – that’s why we’re making this appeal. So, Ron, Biz, Steve or Mark – if you’re free, then contact TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher (mikebutcher AT techcrunch.com). Thanks.

For the last week there’s been a frenzy of news around Chrome OS and Google’s Cr-48 — a new, unbranded notebook computer that Google is distributing to early adopters so that it can test Chrome OS before its big public launch. Google has given some of these laptops to the press (you can see our first impressions right here), and it’s letting developers and other early adopters request one through a variety of contests, forms, and other channels.

Unfortunately, not everyone is going to receive a Cr-48 — most people will have to wait til consumer devices ship next year. But we’ve got one more way to boost your odds: the folks at Google have been kind enough to give us five Cr-48 laptops to give away to our readers. Read on to find out how you can get a chance to win.

Editor’s note: Brand dollars are still the biggest unclaimed prize on the interent. Guest author Steven Carpenter handicaps the players who are most likely to get them.

One of the biggest business opportunities in the consumer Internet space is to create products and services that attract a share of the billions of dollars in held-up brand marketing that has yet to find its way onto the web. With the explosion of various kinds of content and the innovative ways advertisers can segment and track users, why are marketers so reluctant to open up the floodgates? Quite simply, because the current online solutions—search, lead generation, display, video—do not provide a high enough return for these kinds of categories and are not consistent with the image these brands have invested so heavily to achieve.

Commensurate with the potential riches, there is an enormous amount of startup energy and experimentation going on in this area. In this installment of the TechCrunch Teardown, I will look at the four leaders—Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Groupon—and how their new interactions—“like”, “follow”, “friend/check-in”, “group coupon”—are fairing with brand advertisers.

The $20 Billion Opportunity

According to Ad Age, the Top 100 Global Advertisers spent over $100 billion in 2009 across the various print, television, radio, outdoor, and Internet channels; based on data from the previous year, 39 of the 100 had budgets of $1 billion or more (see table 1, click to enlarge). Procter & Gamble, manufacturer of 50 leading brands (such as Tide, Dawn, Pampers, Gillette, and Crest), of which 23 generate $1 billion or more in sales, is the world’s largest advertiser, spending close to $9 billion annually. It should follow, then, that the Internet economy as a whole is effected by how the brand managers at these companies decide to allocate their funds online.

As you can see from the last column in the table at right, the leading marketers are only spending $1.8 billion, or 2.6% of their total budgets, online, despite the fact that consumers are spending close to 30% of their time on the Internet. Of the top marketers, only General Motors, Disney, Bank of America, and News Corp. allocated more than $100 million to the web.

So who has found the best marketing value online? Companies that market and sell financial services, insurance, automotive, communications and media, and consumer technology. It makes sense: these are companies with products that can be found easily using search, and whose customers are most likely to be acquired online because they can transact online. To date, Google and vertical content sites such as Yahoo! Finance and Bankrate have been the largest benefactors of these re-allocated dollars.

New Kleiner Perkins partner, and former Morgan Stanley analyst, Mary Meeker, estimates that closing the gap between consumer attention and ad dollars spent on the Internet to be a $50 billion global opportunity. If the Top 100 marketers bring their marketing budgets in alignment with 30% of time spent, I estimate online brand marketing to be a $30 billion global opportunity and $20 billion in the U.S. As evidenced by Google’s recent pursuit of Groupon, its traditional CPC and display advertising may not be sufficient enough to meet these marketers’ needs.

The Four Horsemen

There are four Internet companies currently best positioned to work with brands to create innovative marketing solutions that will appeal to millions of consumers—Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Groupon. I acknowledge it is not exactly a fair comparison for two main reasons: 1) Facebook has enjoyed a 3-4 year head start on the field and 2) each product has a different use case and thus attracts a different audience with distinct revenue opportunities. Each company, though, has found its way into the mainstream and now finds itself with an attractive platform for brand experimentation.

I see the four product experiences these companies offer on a continuum of online-to-offline interaction on one axis, and requiring passive-to-active behavior on the other. The Facebook experience, for example, is largely an online one where a user can say something about herself by associating with a particular brand by “liking” it. This is an incredibly passive expression that requires a split-second action with little to no long-term repercussions. She can choose to visit the brand page and see the news feed at her convenience.

Twitter, on the other hand, is a personal tool for gathering realtime information—no one knows which feeds the consumer decides to consume or to ignore. While Twitter is similar to Facebook in its largely online-focused consumption, it is a much more “active” medium. Users are constantly reminded when they are following a brands’ information stream. As soon as the information becomes unimportant, too frequent, or spammy, she will simply cut off the connection.

Groupon (which I wrote about in an earlier teardown) is the lightest application, ironically, even though it is the only one of the four that requires a user to make a purchasing decision. Transactions occur easily online and the offline experience of presenting a coupon is consistent with decades of proven user behavior.

As of now, Foursquare asks the most of its users in relation to branded campaigns, but it is also the closest of the four to placing customers in the physical proximity of brands and retailers.

How They Are Doing

You can see how the four different interactions 1) naturally lend themselves to different brands and 2) exhibit a large disparity in terms of the sheer number of participants. And this is not necessarily a bad thing: 44,000 passionate luxury fashionistas at NY Fashion Week may be more valuable to Yves Saint Laurent than 5 million fans on Facebook.

It should come as no surprise that the biggest brand in the entire social ecosystem is Coca-Cola with 20 million Facebook Fans. Whole Foods is the biggest brand on Twitter with 1.8 million followers and the Gap, having sold 440,000 half-off coupons using Groupon, is that startup’s largest brand experiment.

Of the top 50 pages on Facebook, 8 of them are leading advertisers and brands, compared to Twitter which doesn’t have a single brand in its top 50 users. Of Facebook’s top 50 brand pages, 31 of them are food and beverage companies, while 11 are consumer products such as Converse All-Stars and Victoria’s Secret. The most important takeaway is that brands have a far greater following on Facebook than they do on their own sites. Facebook’s best move has been to convince brands to market their Facebook pages rather than driving traffic to their own websites.

The most interesting finding is that what seems to be popular on Facebook is not so on Twitter. If you click on the table at right an dlook at the top 50 brands on Facebook, the “Follower/Fan Ratio” (the result of dividing the number of Twitter followers to Facebook fans) does not get higher than 8% (Disney). This indicates that Twitter might have a more difficult time than Facebook in attracting overall brand dollars with its current product feature set.

This is evident when you look in detail at one CPG company and its portfolio of brands. I did a comparison of the differing success of P&G’s top brands using the two platforms (click on table at right to enlarge). In every case except one (Dawn), the branded experience on Facebook is more popular in terms of numbers than on Twitter. In a few cases, there does not appear to be a reason for even having a Twitter presence. It is interesting to note that the most followed P&G Twitter account is the company’s own corporate PR team.

Facebook still has a lot of work to do and it is far from a foregone conclusion that it has won. While the lightness of its interaction makes getting to scale easier, maintaining enough valuable interactions on the branded pages and engaging long-term customer interest is a huge challenge. For example, according to eMarketer, nearly 1/3 of Facebook users who unsubscribed from a branded page simply were no longer interested in it. And, more to the point, simply because Coke has 20 million Fans does not necessarily mean Coke will pay for the privilege to advertise on Facebook if it cannot see a return.

So what brands seem to be working well on Twitter and far better than on Facebook? Daily deals, such as Dell Outlet, Amazon, and Woot, and companies that place customer service and community at the heart of the brand experience, like Zappos and Etsy, exhibit the most lopsided Follower/Friend ratio. It is important to note that two companies that had horrific customer service challenges over the past few years—JetBlue and Toyota—have fully embraced Twitter as a direct communications channel. The biggest driver of Twitter success as compared to Facebook is the timeliness of the information.

Twitter, then, is well positioned to capture marketing dollars from companies optimizing for deals, retailers that have frequent specials, ticketing and events, movie studios, television shows, last minute deals, airlines, and hotels.

It is still early days for both Foursquare and Groupon in terms of working with big brands. Foursquare has seen traction with high-end luxury and media brands, likely as a result of its headquarters being located in New York and early media partnerships. Of course, Foursquare’s long-term viability as a stand-alone “check-in” company is still an open question with Facebook Places breathing down its neck. This is a strategic move on Facebook’s part to get closer to offline actions, transactions, and local commerce.

While Groupon is the defining company of next-generation e-commerce, it has a tougher road in terms of working with brands and large retailers. These companies tend to be more sensitive to heavy discounting as they don’t want to train their customers to wait for 50%-off coupons. And, they don’t like to be so indiscriminate with their offers.

Overall Assessment

I evaluated the four companies along the six different types of offers and campaigns that I can see consumer brands wanting to engage in:

• Coupons: Simple discount off purchases
• Location: Physical check-in or product scan
• Loyalty: Frequency, “Mayorship
• Time-based
• Special Events: VIP’s
• Inventory Close-Outs

Based on my research, while Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Groupon are the best positioned to capture the estimated $20 billion in pent-up consumer marketing dollars, none of the four are currently optimized to execute along all of the necessary dimensions. There are considerable opportunities for startups to innovate and capture share. I look for this to be one of the most attractive areas for entrepreneurs in the consumer internet for years to come.

Bugatti teardown photo credit: Flickr/David Villarreal Fernández

There’s been a lot of speculation around when these Yahoo layoffs will roll out. As we heard a few weeks ago, Yahoo plans to cut as much as 20 percent of its workforce. Other news outlets have reported that it’s around 10 percent — either way, it’s going to be significant (10 percent of the company’s staff would around 600 employees). We heard that layoffs started taking place two weeks ago, particularly in the Yahoo Groups and Flickr product groups. Others have reported that layoffs would actually be starting around December 13th, which is approaching next week. But it looks like Yahoo may have already started to hand out pink slips, according to this Tweet from Yahoo senior software developer Zach Graves.

Graves writes, “The number of people carrying boxes out of Yahoo tonight is not surprising, nor the last of it.”

It’s unclear from his Tweet where these layoffs are taking place, but it’s just one of many reports that seem to confirm this. Of course, this report is anecdotal, but that fact that it is coming from a Yahoo employee (vs. an anonymous tip) does suggest that layoffs may have already started and are gradually being executed at the company.

We’ve contacted Yahoo for comment and will update the post when we receive a statement from the company.

The Gillmor Gang traveled to Moscone Center for a special live edition at Dreamforce 2010. Salesforce.com’s premier conference has ballooned to more than 30,000 registered attendees, and now covers Moscone North, South, and West venues. Regular Gang member and Cloudblogger John Taschek and analyst and ZDNet columnist Phil Wainewright held down the enterprise perspective, joined by new Salesforce chief scientist JP Rangaswami and Forbes associate editor Victoria Barret.

Barret focused her recent cover story on Marc Benioff, and particularly the use of Salesforce Chatter as a tool to address the Facebook/Twitter wave and its impact on the culture of business in the realtime age. She had watched the previous day’s keynote from him, finding herself surprised it was almost better to mix video and realtime streams from attendees and those watching on the Net.

The Gang covered topics including the Death of Office at the hands of realtime streams and the end of email (couldn’t happen soon enough). We could barely hear each other over the din of the Expo behind us, which oddly mirrored the siloing that goes on between document-centric productivity applications, and where cc really stands for ass-cover as Rangaswami put it. Those who question the value of realtime collaboration have only to wait for the next Exchange server meltdown.

It is 25 degrees here in NY and I feel like a wuss. We California people aren’t cut out for the weather out here. I’ve got thermal underwear (top & bottom), another shirt on top, pants, sweater, jacket, long coat, gloves and a hat on. So, the next time I bitch about it being 50 degrees and windy in San Francisco, I need to remind myself to STFU. These people endure some serious cold. Look at that photo to the left of Nick Gillespie. I think that’s what he wears when it is this cold.

So, what would draw me out of San Francisco weather to NY this time of year? The celebration of John Stagliano‘s acquittal presented by the Reason Foundation and hosted by this week’s TCTV guest Nick Gillespie. John Stagliano’s federal obscenity charges, his acquittal and this celebration warrants an entirely different post, so I’m not going to get into it too much here. The event was held at the famous NY’s sexy and edgy “The Box” and the attendees were incredible. We all came out to celebrate something we hold near and dear to our hearts: free speech.

Here’s a quote from a piece he wrote with Matt Welch that Gillespie read to us last night:

Our right to free speech is built upon the sacrifices of people who risked a hell of a lot — their livelihoods, their social standing, their freedom — to make it easier to speak freely. From colonial printer John Peter Zenger, who helped establish freedom of the press against the British crown, to Allen Ginsberg, whose generation-defining poem Howl endured countless censorship attempts, to Molly Norris, the cartoonist who has been driven into hiding after suggesting “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” as a response to death threats leveled against the creators of South Park for poking fun at religion, free speech is always endangered, always under siege.

Nick was the voice of Alyssa Milano for a few years. Even though he was a ghost writer for her, he’s yet to meet her, so if you know someone who knows someone, we should create a meeting between the two. I think it needs to happen.

Nick Gillespie is the Editor-in-Chief of Reason.com/tv which he co-created with Drew Carey. Reason.tv is the online video component of Reason magazine and reason.com. Gillespie dedicates much of his life to our liberty, and regardless of what political side you are on, he has some awesome advice on how to use your medium to get your message out. So, this is a special interview for all of you aspiring writers out there.

Listen to Nick’s views on net neutrality, being connected, who to write for and more here:

The French entrepreneurs’ fund, ISAI, has just announced that its investing in Commerce Guys, a Franco-American company that develops open source Drupal e-commerce solutions. This is the third investment for the fund run by some 70 French entrepreneurs from these companies, which previously invested in carpooling platform Covoiturage and the high-class online marketplace, InstantLuxe. And while the transaction amount has not been disclosed, I’ll venture a wild guess that it most likely lies between the €500,000 and €1.5 million range – which would be in-line with the rest of ISAI’s investments.

Editor’s note: As the Web goes mobile, every Web company needs to build mobile products. Author Elad Gil, director of Geo at Twitter, has a lot of experience in that area. Way before selling his company Mixer Labs to Twitter last year, he kickstarted Google’s mobile efforts back in 2004, when Google’s mobile team “consisted of 1/4 of an engineer dedicated to maintaining an old WAP search server on the brink of collapse.” Gil pulled Google’s first mobile team together, recruited the first engineers, started discussions with carriers, and was involved in Google’s early mobile acquisitions which set the stage for Google Mobile Maps and Android. In this guest post, he shares what he learned.

In the early days of Google’s mobile team, we needed to navigate a series of misunderstandings most people have about consumer mobile app development, and how to build a great consumer mobile team and product. Given the ridiculous growth of mobile today, many companies I know are trying to start their mobile divisions and they are making the same mistakes over and over. Similarly, many mobile consumer startups are making a series of common mistakes. This post draws on my experience building Google’s early mobile team to point out how to overcome the myths people still believe about making super successful mobile applications.

Myth 1: You need to hire mobile experts.
Reality: Hire great athletes; mobile “experts” will be useless in 6 months

The natural impulse of someone doing mobile development for the first time is to assume that mobile is somehow different from other software development. This leads to the hiring of mobile “experts”, many of whom lack solid consumer product experience. They may have worked on handset design, SMS based services, or for a large carrier. While mobile client development obviously differs from web development (since you can’t just push a bug fix to all devices), it is very similar to any other form of consumer client development.

This means that while people with deep mobile experience may bring knowledge about a specific technology or the limitations of mobile clients, they often lack the deep consumer experience that is actually much more important for the success of your consumer app.

Additionally, any specialist knowledge the expert may have had will be learned organically by your team within 6 months. This means the value of a “mobile” person will diminish dramatically over time. As with all roles, I would advocate hiring great consumer generalists to fill the spot, as they will have a much larger positive impact over time.

a. Don’t hire “mobile engineers”

The first thing people want to do is hire an “iPhone engineer” or “Android developer”. The best mobile engineers I have ever worked with were great generalist engineers who picked up iPhone (variant of C) or Android (Java) development. By focusing on hiring great engineers and having them pick up the programming language and platform (including learning its limitations) you will:

• Expand the pool of potential people you can hire. Grow the team faster!
• Avoid a “specialist” culture at your company. In general, I think it is good to build a culture of great generalists/athletes rather then specialists for your company. You want people who are hungry, brilliant, and adaptable, and who can move between teams and contribute to the next big thing for the company once they jumpstart your mobile efforts.
• Ensure the quality of your team stays high. Your existing engineers should interview the potential mobile hires and test them on general computer science skills.

For example, on the early Google mobile team we had a PhD student from Yale with no industry experience, an expert on enterprise Java from BEA, and a research scientist at Google. These people helped form a formidable core for mobile engineering at Google.

b. Don’t hire “mobile” Product Managers (PMs)

Just as you should hire generalist engineers for your mobile team, you should similarly find a great consumer product manager to run it. The worst hiring mistakes I have seen people make is to hire PMs with telecom or handset backgrounds to run their consumer products. You need people who understand that the phone is primarily a social device—for example, people love to take photos and share them with their friends (see Instagr.am, PicPlz, and PicBounce)—and that the screens are still small, so focusing on a few key features or interactions is key.

Myth 2: Your mobile codebase is different from regular code.
Reality: Its just code. You should treat it as such.

Obviously, developing for a client app that can’t be fixed via a push to AWS has its own challenges. But the mobile codebase should be something any engineer can contribute to at any time—even if it is just to run internal test apps to try out new features.

Similarly, don’t let your team use mobile as an excuse to avoid following good software engineering practice. A good release process can apply anywhere.

Myth 3: You need carrier or handset deals to distribute a mobile product.
Reality: Focus on standard consumer distribution first, not carriers or handset manufacturers.

When launching a mobile consumer product, many companies make the mistake of focusing on carrier or handset partners for distribution rather then just putting it out there for users to try.

a. Focusing on carriers means you will build the wrong product.

When dealing with a new consumer app, carriers and handset manufacturers will have all sorts of ideas, some of which may be bad, about how you should change the product before they agree to distribute it. This will likely ruin the consumer experience. They may also ask you to support a wider variety of handsets than makes sense for you to build for. Further, all the time spent negotiating with carriers will also distract you from spending your time building things that will delight users.

b. People naturally spread great consumer products.

Think of all the consumer apps that have widespread use and adoption from scratch (Angry Birds, Foursquare, Gowalla, Bump). None of these launched with any traditional teleco deals.

c. If your app is a big success, carriers will come to you for deals.

If your mobile app is being used (or your desktop app has wide enough distribution), carriers will approach you to add your app to their phones. Think Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc…, as well as, back in the day, IM clients.

Don’t get me wrong—carriers and handset pre-installs can widen your distribution dramatically. However, as a startup or new mobile effort, you should focus on direct-to-consumer distribution first. Only deal with these intensive partnerships once you have proven traction with your core app experience and want to reach out beyond the relatively large population that discovers apps via the app store and friend recommendations.

Myth 4. You must build for all platforms from Day One.
Reality: Start with iPhone or Android only first.

One of the big fears when building a mobile property is that only a subset of the market can be addressed via each platform (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, XHTML, SMS). These days, the best consumer apps are launching on iPhone or Android only first. This provides enough distribution/addressable devices to see if the app can gain traction. Once it gets traction, other platforms can be supported. A great example of this is Foursquare, which launched exclusively on iOS and grew from there.

In part you should choose your platform based on your market and distribution approach. iPhone or Android (as well as increasingly HTML5) are good bets for the US, and increasingly, the rest of the world. You should only build XHTML or SMS based apps if you are focused on the low- to mid-range of developing markets.

Myth 5. (Once the app launches) We are mobile geniuses!
Reality: Stay hungry and keep questioning your mobile directions.

Congratulations! You got your mobile app out the door and it is growing 50% month over month. There is an old saying that a rising tide floats all boats. The rapid growth in the overall smartphone market may make your mobile efforts look brilliant due to this ongoing, massive market shift. Make sure to challenge your team’s thinking on their mobile choices, and don’t believe the mantra that “mobile is just different”. Focus on building an awesome consumer experience and you really will end up looking like a genius.

Mobile is a huge opportunity and will be the primary way many services are accessed in the future. Hopefully as you start a new mobile consumer startup, or build a mobile team for your existing web property, with the tips above you can avoid the mistakes people frequently make for mobile app development.

Photo credit: Flickr/JD Hancock

The most baffling thing about the Wikileaks Cablegate kerfuffle is the massive foot-shooting overreaction across the entire American political spectrum. Here in the rest of the world (okay, in Canada), we’ve already moved on, because (to date) the cables are more shrug-inducing than explosive—but US senators are still in the throes of a bizarre frenzy of rabid chest-beating and tooth-gnashing.

Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, has called for Julian Assange’s prosecution, despite the general consensus that he hasn’t actually committed any American crime. Mitch McConnell, a Republican, has a slightly clearer-eyed view; he wants the law changed so that Assange can be prosecuted as a terrorist. Joe Lieberman wants a criminal investigation of not just Assange but also the New York Times.

What exactly do they hope to accomplish? Do they think that if they do somehow manage to convict Assange—who, remember, was only the publisher, not the leaker—they will have eliminated the threat of Internet information dissemination forever? Don’t they realize that with every boneheaded speech and op-ed, they ratchet up the free publicity and do Wikileaks a huge favor, when a dignified silence plus a few veiled threats would have been far more effective? Can they really be so stupid?

Well, yes. The US government is like Wall Street: behind their veneer of all-powerful control, most of the people who run things are not particularly bright. I just read Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, which depicts the financial collapse of 2008 as a catastrophe caused not because Wall Street was corrupt—which would have been almost okay—but because it was lethally stupid.  His next book should be about Washington.

The American diplomatic corps actually comes across as smart and competent in the Wikileaked cables. Unfortunately, the politicians they report to seem anything but. The scariest truth that Wikileaks has confirmed is that most of the world’s decisionmakers, like most Wall Street ‘wizards’, are petty, bureaucratic, dogmatic, myopic, and hostile to any innovation, largely because they’re not very intelligent. Not that smarts are everything, but it’s hard to tackle complex problems when you don’t fully understand them. It’s easy to forget this in the tech world, which is (relatively speaking) a results-oriented meritocracy … until you step into most governments or megacorporations, and find that suddenly the ambient IQ has dropped 20 points.

The tech sector is the only thing America has going for it these days. (Unless you count crumbling infrastructure, runaway debt, paralyzed government, or a trillion-dollar military bogged down in pointless faraway non-wars.) Unfortunately, the American government seems too dumb to realize this: so they maintain stupid visa laws, while ignoring smart alternatives; keep playing fast-and-loose, at best, with net neutrality; and, oh yes, plan to wiretap (and—thanks to Wikileaks—censor) the entire Internet, at great cost, apparently in the hope that bad guys will never discover the magic of public-key encryption.

You probably don’t want to read about political idiocy here, and I can’t blame you. But it may be time for the tech industry to start paying much more attention to the political world, because as Wikileaks vividly illustrates, these days almost every political issue has tech aspects—and hence, down the road, tech repercussions.

If you’re as addicted to startups as we are, you’ll love Betali.st. Inspired by the just as minimal Museum of Modern Betas, Betali.st creator Marc Köhlbrugge has started curating an online list of not yet public startups that are currently or will soon give out invites to their private betas. Bookmark it in your browser if you want to be first to try the next Twitter or Instagram, call dibs on your account name or just see what the competition is up to.

Eat your heart out tech hipsters.

Bad news from Japan’s multi-billion dollar social gaming industry earlier this week: Tokyo-based mobile gaming heavyweight DeNA (current market cap: US$4.5 billion) was investigated on Wednesday by the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) over antitrust issues.

The allegation: DeNA, which recently paid US$400 million to acquire American smartphone game maker ngmoco, pressured Japanese mobile game developers to release titles exclusively on Mobage-town (its mobile social gaming community) – and to not provide games on rival GREE‘s mobile platform.

The JFTC’s decision to conduct a spot inspection of DeNA’s headquarters came as not too big of a surprise after TechCrunch Japan first reported about rumors circulating in the country’s social gaming sector in August.

According to some sources I have talked to over the last few days (and months), DeNA executives approached a number of local game makers saying they will see a negative impact on their business on DeNA’s Mobage-town platform when they release games on GREE (I live in Japan). One developer told me that soon after ignoring this “advice”, he saw his games dropped off the search results on Mobage-town – which currently lists about 600 different titles. (Needless to say, this is by no means evidence that DeNA did anything wrong or broke the law, especially as the investigation still continues.)

Neck-and-neck race in a huge market

Japan’s mobile social gaming market is the world’s largest, and DeNA and GREE are the leading players, which means the JFTC raiding DeNA’s offices is a pretty big deal.

Just a few numbers: DeNA is on track to generating over US$1 billion in revenue this year (mainly through sales of virtual items) and currently counts 22 million users. GREE expects revenue to hit up to US$700 million in the current fiscal and has about the same number of users (market cap: US$2.9 billion). What’s amazing is that about 99% of the business both companies do is Japan only and mobile only.

DeNA and GREE have been in a neck-and-neck race in the last few years. For example, both companies are spending more money on TV ads than big consumer brands like Toyota or Sony, trying to attract programmers with unusual incentives, and even don’t refrain from suing each other for copyright infringement (a relatively rare incident in Japan).

Expect to hear more from these companies in the future, especially when they accelerate their internationalization efforts (DeNA has been active in the US for years, and GREE is rumored to follow suit in the next few weeks).

I’ve been an Android fan for a while now, but I can’t remember the last time I had anything good to say about its integrated application marketplace, Android Market. Compared to the iPhone’s App Store, Market’s experience has always looked less visually compelling, and in general it’s been harder (and less fun) to navigate.  Today, the Google team has announced that Android Market will be getting an upgrade over the next two weeks. And good news: this update will be going to all Android users who are on version 1.6 or higher, which means it will go out to the vast majority of devices.

I haven’t gotten access to the application yet, but judging by the screenshots the Market has gotten a fresh coat of paint, and looks much more modern. Promoted applications — which until now have been tiles at the top of the screen that would change every few seconds — will now be featured in a swipable view that looks a lot like Apple’s CoverFlow.

Data about each application will now be consolidated into a single window pane. The Market will also include a content rating system (this is not shown in the screenshots, so you can’t really see what this looks like yet). And app targeting has been improved while size restrictions are loosened:

To make it easier for developers to distribute and manage their products, we will introduce support for device targeting based on screen sizes and densities, as well as on GL texture compression formats. We are also increasing the maximum size for .apk files on Market to 50MB, to better support richer games.

One major change that I’m sure developers will applaud involves Android’s refund window. Historically Android has offered a 24 hour return window for users who purchased an application and decided they didn’t want it; this time limit has now been cut down to 15 minutes. Google’s explanation is that this is because it will “help developers manage their businesses more effectively”, and that ”most users who request a refund do so within minutes of purchase” anyway. It’s probably because developers feel frustrated when users buy a game or utility, use it for a full day, and then get a full refund (and there may be some accounting issues, too).

And, from the I-can’t-believe-it-didn’t-have-this-already department, Android Market now has separate categories for Widgets and Live Wallpaper applications. And it looks like the Android typeface (which always made things look a little less polished for some reason) has apparently been abandoned in some menus.

Of course, this new release is still missing one key feature: a web version of Android Market. This was previewed during Google I/O way back in May, promising to let users browse through Android applications from their web browsers, and then wirelessly ‘push’ the applications they purchased to their phones with no tethering needed.

My hunch is that this functionality (or parts of it) is latent in this new version of Android Market, and that Google will activate it once the web component of this is done. Here’s what the team had to say about upcoming releases:

However, we’re not done yet. We plan to continue to rapidly enhance Android Market for both users and developers and make it the best content distribution service for the Android ecosystem.

Please stay tuned as we continue to deliver new capabilities in the coming weeks and months.