Category: Tech news

Shares of Chinese video site Youku soared on its IPO today, closing at $33.44, which is 160 percent above its offering price of $12.80. Since Youku’s 15.8 million shares of American Depository Receipts (ADRs) represent 16 percent of the total shares, the closing price gives Beijing-based $Youku a market cap of roughly $3.3 billion. In other words, it is worth more than $AOL (owner of TechCrunch), which has a market cap of $2.7 billion.

Earlier today, I referred to Youku as the YouTube of China, but it is more like the Hulu of China. About two thirds of the videos on YouKu are syndicated from traditional media companies in China. The company was founded in November, 2005 and the site launched in December, 2006. YouKu never really relied on user-generated content because it took longer to develop as a phenomenon in China than the U.S. “Unlike the US, we are still in the development phase for user generated content so we didn’t rely on that,” CEO Victor Koo tells me.

YouKu boasts 40 percent penetration rate among the 420 million Chinese people on the Internet, or about 200 million unique visitors a month in China (comScore estimates a smaller 78 million). Koo describes the IPO as a “graduation ceremony” in China and hopes to leverage it to extend his lead there among mainstream video sites. The company currently relies on video advertising, and recently launched a paid subscription service in beta along the lines of Hulu Plus.

“The revenue growth is certainly growing faster than user growth,” says Koo. Most of its $35 million in revenues for the first nine months of the year came from advertising, and grew 135 percent. Viewer growth is closer to 50 percent. Even with that stellar growth and huge audience, the company still lost $25 million in the first nine months of the year. The reason for this is because advertisers in China don’t value viewers as much as they do in the U.S. Part of that has to do with vast differences in disposable income, but Youku captures more and more of Chinese consumers’ time, then it should be able to eventually charge more for its advertising as well.

But the $3.3 billion valuation is based more on the idea of owning the YouTube or Hulu of China than any tangible economic results at this point. Since it has no earnings to speak of, that gives it a trading multiple of 94 times revenue. The Internet bubble has now officially been resurrected in China via the New York Stock Exchange.

Facebook’s mobile presence has long been an important part of the site — Facebook now gets over 200 million users between its various mobile web sites and smartphone applications. And because so much content gets posted from phones, Facebook has seen fit to port over its extensive privacy controls to mobile. The site initially launched a mobile version of these controls back in August, and soon they’ll be getting an upgrade.

The new controls being announced today have to do with the applications that you’ve connected to Facebook. Between all the apps you use Facebook Connect for, and the ones you’ve installed on Facebook proper, there’s a good chance that you’re sharing your data with a lot of different sites — some of which you may have forgotten about.

To help manage this data flow, Facebook launched a dashboard for connected apps in October — you can see which apps are using your data, how often they’ve accessed it, and what exactly they’re looking at. And over the next few weeks, Facebook is adding these controls to its mobile site.

This may not seem like a huge deal, but remember that web-connected smartphones are spiking in popularity and will outnumber PCs in the next few years. And through efforts like Facebook Zero, Facebook is drawing users who may not even own computers.

The political paralysis over network neutrality might be a microcosm of the broader political paralysis in America. Last week, after FCC chairman Julius Genachowksi laid out his Title I compromise strategy to finally resolve this seemingly never-ending debate, radical left and right wing groups conspired to destroy any possibility of consensus. On the left, activist groups like Free Press called Genachowki’s initiative a “fake net neutrality proposal,” while many of the radical right questioned the FCC’s legitimacy and called for a complete retreat from any kind of government involvement in technology policy.

So can the center fight back against this unholy alliance of radical netizens and Tea Party libertarians that seem intent on crushing any kind of network neutrality compromise?

One of the feistiest voices of this broad center – which now incorporates most of Silicon Valley, many of the larger ISPs and media companies, the Obama administration and prominent technology investors like Ron Conway – is Gigi Sohn, cofounder and CEO of Public Knowledge. While she is certainly closer to the radicals of Free Press than to the radicals in the Tea Party, what distinguishes Sohn – as I found when I skyped her on Monday – is her willingness to try to work with Genachowski to sculpt a compromise to this hideously complex issue.

But, according to author and legal scholar Larry Downes, whom I also skyped on Monday, this center probably won’t hold. Downes believes it’s “almost a certainty” that the dispute is now headed to the law courts for two to three years, where the only real beneficiaries will be hardline conservatives and radicals, and, surprise surprise, the high priced lawyers hired by either side to drag out this critically important issue forever.

If you missed the part one of this special two part series about the latest twists and turns in the ongoing network neutrality saga, you can view interviews with Andy Kessler and Richard Bennett here.

Sohn on compromise

Downes on why compromise won’t work

Last spring, we did a preview post on Offermatic, a new deals site that we described as the “freak love child Of Mint, Groupon and Blippy”. Seven months later, that’s still pretty accurate. And now you’ve got a chance to try it out for yourself: Offermatic has launched to the public. The company is also announcing that it’s closed a $750,000 seed round with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Bessemer, and angel investors.

Offermatic revolves around getting good deals at local merchants and from national chains, but it isn’t just another deals site — there aren’t any printed vouchers, and you never have to show a cashier a coupon. Instead, you link up your credit or debit card to the service, which then automatically analyzes your purchases and offers you deals based on your shopping history.

It’s a very interesting model, because it means that Offermatic can offer highly targeted deals based on the sort of things you are actually buying. Seeing a lot of movies lately? Offermatic might send you 50% off on tickets from Fandango. Just did some shopping at the Home Depot? They might send you a discount— or a competitor like Lowes can pay to send you an offer and try to nab a customer from a rival.

To help mitigate the creepiness factor associated with analyzing your credit card information, Offermatic has turned to Yodlee, the same financial service backend that powers Mint. The site says that it keeps all of your data synonymized, so while it does know your shopping history, it doesn’t (in theory) know who you are. And none of your shopping history is ever shared — this isn’t a social site.

Once you’ve signed up for the service, using it is pretty simple. Offermatic will periodically email you offers based on your recent transactions. If you spot one you like, you click a link, and your credit card will then have that offer automatically ‘loaded’ on top of it. Then, when you make a purchase at whatever merchant or brand made the offer, your discount will automatically be applied to the transaction. There’s still a very small amount of user effort involved (you have to click on the emails for the offers you’re interested in), but it’s pretty low friction.

So far, the system has been working. Offermatic says that its tests show that top retailers are yielding a 14.5% conversion rate, which is far higher than usual.

Offermatic is pretty unique at this point, but it’s going to see increasing competition as other deal providers link transaction history and loyalty cards with special deals. For example, Foursquare recently did a deal with Vons that revolves around the Vons loyalty card; expect similar deals to come from Foursquare and other services in the future.

A few things really stand out as watershed moments in human history. The Polio vaccine and the moon landing are two, perhaps, and maybe there’s that whole Hadron collider thing. But when it comes to true breakthroughs I’d have to add one more to the list: the Whiteyboard. As you recall, Whiteyboards are big panels of dry-erase plastic that you can stick to any wall in the house or office. They are removable without damage to the underlying surface and they’re significantly cheaper than any other whiteboard solutions out there. The company just introduced WhiteyNotes, dry-erase sticky notes, and WhiteyPads, to-do list-type sheets for kitchens and/or kink dungeons.

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Today I got to see Time Warner’s Signature Home $200 a month service package offerings up close and personal at a loft they rented in fancy-pants Soho. The offering, which is comparable to their triple-play program except that you get 24/7 customer service including concierge-style phone service and installation techs who will spend up to three hours at your home setting up all your junk. They even wear little booties so they don’t scratch up your imported zebra-wood and elephant ivory parquet floors.

To be fair, you do get two 500GB DVRs as well as a digital VOIP service with included caller ID that will AIM when you get a call. You can also control the DVRs over the Internet and iPad and iPhone apps are forthcoming. Finally, you get “wideband” Internet through DOCSIS 3.0-tier networking with 50Mbps down and 5Mbps up, an improvment from their current real-world service of about 1Mbps down and “Why Don’t You Send a Letter In The Mail, It Will Get There Faster”Mbps up.

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The National Renewable Energy Labratory (NREL) recently tested thin-film solar modules made by MiaSolé, and verified that their energy conversion efficiency rate hit 15.7 percent, up from 14.3 percent last year.

The company boasted about the number, and several news outlets touted the results. Does it mean the performance gap between thin-film and crystalline solar modules is closing? Could thin-film take a bite out of the market for crystalline panels in the U.S., soon?

Clean tech analysts and engineers believe that thin-film solar is not likely to catch up to crystalline in terms of efficiency any time soon. Neither will thin-film solar modules steal market share from crystalline in 2011, they predict.

Thin film solar modules are made by a huge number of companies today including: Abound Solar, Best Solar, First Solar, Konica, LG Electronics, MiaSolé, PrimeStar Solar, Nanosolar, Sharp and Uni-Solar. Not all thin-film solar is created equal, however.

Today’s typical thin-film modules look like sheets of glass (image, below). Crystalline modules also look like sheets of glass but are thicker, and framed in metal (image, top of post). Uni-Solar’s thin-film modules, interestingly, are flexible and have a stick-on backing.

A senior analyst with Lux Research, Ted Sullivan, points out that there are a variety of thin-film solar cells in production today: MiaSolé uses copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) solar cells in their product; FirstSolar uses cadmium telluride (CdTe) cells, which are dominant sellers in the U.S. thin-film solar market today; while Konica and Sharp use silicon cells.

Of all thin-film technologies, CIGS modules demonstrate the greatest energy conversion efficiency, and power output per square meter. CIGS cells require less energy for production than crystalline cells. Thin film in general requires less expensive semiconductor material, and fewer process steps than it takes to make crystalline modules, according to NREL research.

Manufacturing costs keep the price of thin-film modules comparatively low, today. Solar analyst Sullivan explained, however, that thin-film solar manufacturers face a different challenge:

“There’s kind of a consistency issue for all [thin-film] players. Ideally, you want modules to be produced identically, so there is no variation between each module [especially once they’re installed out in the field].

CIGS thin-film solar production is the most highly variable as it involves four metal alloys and processes where impurities and other things can have a negative impact on the resulting product.”

MiaSolé’s 15.7 percent rating, he noted, is important because it illustrates that CIGS thin-film solar technology is comparable to the current, low-end potential energy of silicon polycrystalline panels.

But thin-film solar manufacturers have to procure a greater variety of metals from sources far from the United States (mostly China today) leading to market concerns over trade war potential, a shortage of metals, and unfair labor and damaging environmental practices of mines.

Meanwhile, crystalline module prices are coming down a bit as production ramps worldwide. A solar engineer at GridPoint in Houston, Texas, John Gardner says both technologies have their uses, even in a world where they cost about the same.

GridPoint sells and installs software, hardware and services to help organizations switch to clean energy in any form that will work best for their facilities and operations. Gardner says the company uses both thin-film and crystalline solar for client projects, but more crystalline so far, including in power generating systems they’ve installed for federal agencies, retailers and restaurant chains.

Gardner outlined some of the best uses and limitations of each technology:

“In a typical home installation, you’ll have a certain area, or amount of roof space where you want to place solar panels. If there’s a limited space, you’ll probably want crystalline to get the most power per square foot.

Structure or aesthetics sometimes dictate what you are able to install, though. We worked on one project involving a roof that could not handle the weight of crystalline panels.

Or let’s say you’re building a skyscraper with a glass façade. If you integrate thin-film type solar panels there, your building is now generating power with the same skin that was otherwise just glass.

If you have near unlimited space, say to build a solar farm out in the desert, you could consider thin-film because the modules cost less per watt. That said, labor costs to install a higher number of modules could offset the price difference, and crystalline might make more sense.”

On Monday, the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels— SunTech Power Holdings Co. in Wuxi, China— announced it expects to have crystalline modules that have 22 percent conversion efficiency out in the market in the next three years.

That’s one more reason, Sullivan suggests, crystalline panels will remain dominant in 2011, especially in applications where space is limited. “Most of the thin-film technologies out there today will never get to silicon crystalline efficiency, which has just been around longer and is still seeing improvements,” he concluded.

CIGS panels image via: Department of Energy Solar Decathalon

Crystalline panels image via: Wayne National Forest

At Le Web I ran into Rodrigo Sepúlveda Schulz, serial entrepreneur and now investor. I asked him about the startup market in France, a market which – despite his reputation as a huge globe-trotter – he is intimately acquainted with, being based out of Paris. What was interesting was the extent to which he was quite down on the market, even as we often hear from TechCrunch France that there has been a lot more startup activity in the last 18 months. Unfortunately for these French startup heroes, the over-riding business culture of France is not helping them. Here’s Rodrigo:

Wikipedia chronicles the lives of plenty of the most important figures to ever walk the Earth. Unfortunately, for those countless people who fail to discover an element or pen a bestselling novel, Wikipedia’s editors are quick to strike down biographies that anyone might try to write about them. And when they die, their stories — which may not be important to the public but are priceless to their family and friends — have a habit of fading with them. 1000memories thinks there’s a better way.

The site, which launched last July, sets out with one big, important goal: helping family and friends cherish and share the memories of someone that’s passed away. This week, the company has launched some key new features to make this sharing easier and more effective than before.

Founder Rudy Adler says that one of 1000Memories’s biggest challenges has been to find a way to weave together the memories that its users have shared to that they really capture the lives of the departed. One of the problems before now was that various kinds of content people uploaded — photos, stories, and so on — were broken into different categories, and you had to navigate between them. Now, 1000Memories features a ‘quilt’ view, which compiles this content into a single page, presenting an entire life in a single glance. It sounds like a simple change, but it’s very effective.

Another new feature is the ability to tag people in photographs. This may sound a bit ‘social networky’, but Adler says that it’s been a top-requested feature. After all, people tend to change in appearance as they age, and you may not recognize that the boy standing next to your grandmother in a 50-year old photograph is in fact your uncle.

Finally, the site has expanded its biography section. Users can now co-edit a text area that serves as the departed’s life story — the basic facts of where they grew up, where they lived, their important relationships, as well as the key events in their lives. And there’s also a section of ‘quick memories’. These sound silly — you just jot down random habits, favorite foods, and jokes that the deceased used to tell. But it makes it easier for everyone to contribute something, and oftentimes it’s these little things that bring back the best memories.

1000Memories isn’t talking about user numbers yet, but the company has grown a bit — it’s hired two full time employees, in addition to its three founders.

Today during the Media Panel at LeWeb ’10 in Paris, France, there was one thing on everyones’ mind: WikiLeaks.

“This is a turning point for the Internet — it’s not just about WikiLeaks anymore,” Weblogs SL’s Julio Alonso said. ”What happens to WikiLeaks will get applied to others later on,” he warned.

“This is the first attempt at censorship of the Internet by all the governments of the planet,” Wikio’s Pierre Chappaz added. “Despite all the attacks, I’m optimistic that the information will survive,” he added.

When moderator Adrian Monck asked if this would cast a shadow on the United States in particular, Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera said he thought it already has in some ways. Rivera noted that just the tone of the crowd at LeWeb proves that to some extent. He also singled out U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman suggesting that The New York Times could be a target because of their publication of some of the cables. “It underscores that there’s really no essential difference between what WikiLeaks is doing and what The New York Times does,” he said. Rivera said that is something to be concerned about.

“We’ve pushed the theory of Internet censorship to the very edge,” The Wall Street Journal Europe’s Ben Rooney added.

“We have to speak about what’s happening,” Chappaz said. ”I’m amazed by the silence of the traditional media. This is a systematic attack. We have to explain to the traditional media. The stakes are about the free press,” he continued.

Alonso agreed. “The first line of defense is speaking about it,” he said.

Rivera added that the leakers aren’t going to lose this war. He cited mirror sites, Twitter accounts, Facebook messages, and all kinds of things that keep popping up to continue the data spread. “The leakers will win,” he said.

The panel seemed fairly convinced that even if P2P networks had to replace DNS, the information would indeed end up winning.

“The Internet is too strong. They’ll have a hard time getting it under control,” Chappaz wrapped up the panel with.

The Internet IPO is back—if you are a Chinese Internet company. Youku, the YouTube of China, saw its shares pop more than 100 percent in its IPO today. Shares were priced at $12.80, but they are currently trading at $27.60.. That is a 116 percent jump.

According to its SEC filing, the company lost $25 million on total revenues of $35 million for the first nine months of 2010. The company raised $120 million prior to the IPO, and another $203 million at the IPO.

According to comscore, Youku attracted 77.8 million unique visitors worldwide in October, up 53 percent form the year before. Youku is a cross between YouTueb and Hulu, mixing user-generated videos with more professional fare for the growing Chinese audience.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1442596/000119312510260191/df1.htm

So you went as an Angry Bird for Halloween and your kids are getting Angry Bird plush dolls in their holiday stockings. But that leaves nothing for you, the hard-working family provider. Clearly Santa should bring you some Angry Bird merchandise this year, too. It’s only fair. You’ve been a good kid.

Good thing Gear4 just announced a line of Angry Birds iPhone 4 and iPod touch cases that will dress up your device as either an Angry Bird or smug Pig King. Be warned though. While the cases are constructed out of hard plastic and are probably plenty durable, they’re not going to allow you to chuck your phone through plates of glass or wood beams. Yeah, that’s not a good idea although here’s hoping that someone does and uploads the tomfoolery to YouTube.

Both variants run $24.99 each and will probably be one of best things you get this year. Well, that is of course, if you stocking isn’t stuffed with any of these items from our epic cheap stocking stuffers gift guide. But even then, these cases are still awesome as cases can get.

MindJolt, the game distribution company that was acquired by MySpace founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe earlier this year, has landed a big new parter: Broadcast Interactive Media (BIM).

That name probably doesn’t ring a bell, but BIM helps run the online presences for hundreds of local television networks, newspapers, and radio stations across the country (here’s an example Fox station out of Illinois). Now, BIM is going to offer these 900 publisher partners access to MindJolt’s library of casual games. And those sites represent a lot of eyeballs: MindJolt says that it’s going to be exposed to 110 million people per month through the partnership.

MindJolt has a catalog of 1,300 casual games, which it distributes across partner sites as well as its own game portal MindJolt.com and a Facebook application that has over 10 million monthly active users. Between these channels MindJolt reaches 20 million players per month.

MindJolt COO Colin Digiaro says that the goal with the BIM partnership is to help these local news sites boost engagement — many people only visit them when local news is breaking, and these sites want to change that. Games may not be the first thing you think about when you head to a local news site, but Digiaro says that there’s a “high degree of overlap” between people who visit these local news sites and those who play MindJolt games. That said, it will be up to the publisher sites to determine how prominently they want to feature the games, so the impact will likely vary a lot from site to site.

MindJolt also recently launched a monetization product called AdJolt, which includes ads and a virtual goods system. These revenues get split between the game developer, MindJolt, and the publisher parter site, but MindJolt declined to get into specifics as far as how much would be going to BIM in this partnership.

The company did say that since launching AdJolt, it has increase the revenue of game developer partners by 50-70%, and that it’s doubled MindJolt revenue in 90 days.

MindJolt has a few competitors, including HeyZap and Mochi Media, both of which also let publishers embed a large library of casual games and monetize them.

At Le Web 10, everyone saw the awkward expression on Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley‘s face when host Loic Le Meur asked him just how large the acquisition offer was that the company recently turned down.

Le Meur guessed around $140 million (whether that offer came from Facebook, Yahoo or another company wasn’t really mentioned, but they are the likely bidders and the topic of the on-stage conversation was Facebook when the question dropped).

Crowley didn’t deny it, and then went on to acknowledge that number is “ballpark”.

Which means Foursquare turned down a $140 million-ish offer, probably from Facebook, when they’d only raised about $1.35 million in seed funding – they went on to raise $20 million more after the buyout talks died down. Visionary, or foolish? Brave, or bubble?

For what it’s worth: Foursquare just passed 5 million users, and is seeing 2 million check-ins and 25,000 new users on a daily basis.

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, who ironically got lost on his way to Le Web, just broke some stats about the company on stage at the conference. Crowley said that despite the fact that many people have the perception that Foursquare is at 200 hires, the company is actually just about to hit 40 employees whereas a year ago it was just four people.

These new hires have joined to accomodate recent growth: Foursquare hit over 5 million users last week and is at 2 million check-ins and 25K new users a day, Crowley confirmed onstage. Crowley also revealed that sers are split up geographically between 60% US and 40% international, with the average Foursquare user checks in 3-4 times day.

In perhaps the largest reflection of growth, Foursquare just hired an engineer that only deals with statistics.

Crowley also implied to Le Web founder Loic Lemur that he turned down an offer in the “ballpark” of $140 million, most likely from Facebook or Yahoo. Pretty nifty for something that “wasn’t meant to be a company.”