Category: Tech news

The web and copyright sometimes butt heads as we learned from the recent Cooks Source fiasco. Google often find itself at the center of these copyright battles and DCMA takedown requests. It looks like Google has made adjustments to procedures to help respond to infringing content by “bad apples”, and address copyright issues that involve Google as a search engine.

Google says it is receiving a growing number of copyright requests to take content down and will now act on these requests within 24 hours. The search giant is in the process of building tools to improve the submission process for DMCA requests, particularly with Google’s blogging platform Blogger and search portal.

On the flip side, Google has improved its “counter-notice” tools for those who believe their content was wrongly removed. Google has also updated autocomplete in Google search to prevent terms that are associated from privacy to appear in the search box.

AdSense’s anti-piracy review will also be improved to work with rightsholders to identify publishers that are ripping off content from others and remove these publishers from serving AdSense ads.

Google also says that it is planning to experiment with making authorised preview content more readily accessible in search results. While it’s unclear how Google will filter this, the company says that it will be working to make authorized content easier to index and find.

Google notes that these changes will be rolled out over the next few months.

Photo Credit/Flickr/MikeBlogs

With all the new Internet TV boxes and services sprouting this holiday season—from Google TV and Apple TV to the Boxee Box, Shufflr, and beyond—there is a lot talk about people cutting their cable cords and just getting all of their TV from the Internet. That is not going to happen anytime soon until the best TV shows and movies become available online at the same time as on TV, but the direction is clear. Today at the SAI Ignition conference in New York City, Boxee CEO Avner Ronen declared, “Resistance is futile.”

Ronen was responding to the question of when will there be something worthwhile to watch on the Web. Getting Web video to your TV is becoming increasingly easy, but there are so many restrictions on the best video (network TV shows and Hollywood movies) that it is still not worth watching on the Web for anybody but geeks. Ronen himself admits that his modest goal is to get “from geeks to early adopters.”

Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone, who was also on the same panel, argued that quality isn’t really the issue. “At some point, 80 percent of major network TV content was online.” The problem is that “it doesn’t stay there.” As a viewer, you have to know when to catch the shows, because unlike all other content on the Internet, TV shows and movies don’t stay online. They get placed online and then plucked off based on the different licensing windows the media companies adhere to in order to squeeze more profits from their shows and movies by making them available at different times through different distribution channels (theaters, DVDs, pay-per-view, cable, and now online).

Internet TV, however, doesn’t really fit into this distribution model because the generation of viewers who are growing up now on Youtube and Hulu want t watch TV or videos whenever they want to, not when the media companies tell them they can.

“The Internet is just a distribution model, it does not dictate business models,” argues Ronen. The existing media companies may not like the new competition that the Internet is bringing, but if consumers move there they won’t have a choice but to follow suit. He predicts that 50 percent of households in the U.S. will have Internet-connected TVs in five years and that “Netflix is going to have more paid video subscribers in two years than Comcast.” People will pay for broadband from one provider and pay for content from others (perhaps Netflix or Hulu or Boxee). Resistance is futile because over time, the Internet will prevail.

Below is a video interview I did with Avner a couple weeks ago on the same topic:

Last September at TechCrunch Disrupt, Microsoft announced that all 30 million Windows Live Spaces blogs would be transitioning to WordPress.com. It turned out that number was inflated, and a subsequent internal email put the real number of transitioned blogs at 300,000.

Well, the number of Windows Live Spaces blogs which have transitioned over to WordPress.com is now at “over half a million” and another half a million new WordPress blogs have been created by Windows Live users. So that brings the total new WordPress blogs created as a result of the partnership to one million.

The total won’t get to 30 million by March, 2011 when Windows Live Spaces blogs will no longer be supported. But many of those are dead blogs anyway. A million new WordPress blogs is nothing to sneeze at. Since the deal was announced, the number of new blog sign-ups at WordPress.com has more than doubled from 400,000 a month to 900,000 a month.

Over the last few weeks, you may have noticed that the official TechCrunch Facebook Page is more happening than ever, with better updates and, soon, regular weekly contests for our readers. And that’s only the beginning — you’re going to start seeing similar improvements to our Twitter account, Buzz, and most important, TechCrunch itself. Today, we’d like to introduce Elin Blesener, our community manager.

As TechCrunch has grown in readership, it’s become home to a vibrant community of tech enthusiasts, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and plenty of other remarkably intelligent (and good looking) people. Unfortunately, the site has also attracted its fair share of trolls and spammers. We want our comment threads to be places of engaging discussion, constructive criticism, and the occasional funny quip — but we’re finding that things get out of hand all too often. Elin is going to help us get things back on track.

We’ll be releasing a set of guidelines in the near future that focus on helping improve our comments, and Elin will help keep the conversation in check both in our comment threads and across our other social media accounts. She’s also equipped with a banhammer, which she’ll use if she comes across any users who are consistently being spammy or offensive. But we don’t think she’ll need to use it too often.

We also have some other exciting plans to help engage our community, but we’re not ready to talk about them just yet. So welcome Elin! You’ll be seeing her name a lot more often from now on. And don’t worry, your usual gang of TC writers will be as active in the comments as ever.

Blekko, the shiny new search engine that is taking on Google, is getting into product search today with the launch of a new vertical for holiday shopping. As you may have heard, the recently launched search engine differentiates itself from Google by giving users tools to do new types of searches that they can’t do elsewhere.The search engine offers unique query refinement tools to human editors called Slashtags (i.e. /news or /date or /amazon or /blogs) to filter results to what you are looking for (you can read our full review of the platform here).

Blekko’s newly created search vertical, aptly called /safeshop, includes only human selected shopping sites and is designed to thwart spammers and malware distributors. So users can now just add /safeshop to any search to search for retail products on the web, effectively filtering out any rogue or untrusted retailers who may offer a poor experience for online shoppers.

With the sales from online shopping expected hit $32.4 billion this season, more consumers will be flocking to search engines to look for deals and gifts. Google recently upgraded its product search and even launched a fashion-focused vertical called Boutiques.

For a search engine that is going head to head with Google and Bing, Blekko has been steadily gaining traction in its first month open to the public, with more than 1 million queries created per day and more than 30,000 slashtags created in the first week.

Last week, Blekko announced a partnership with fellow search engine DuckDuckGo to power search results for the latter. DuckDuckGo will also provide its Zero-Click Info summaries on a site by site basis.

Looks like President Obama isn’t the only one resorting to Facebook as a way to reach the American people. In a first for a U.S. President past or present, former President George W. Bush will hold a discussion and Q&A live from Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto. The event will start in about 20 minutes at 2 pm PST.

Bush will be talking to Facebook employees about his new book Decision Points, and those of us not employed by Facebook will have the opportunity to watch it on Facebook Live and the Livestream above. According to The Next Web, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself will in fact moderate the discussion along with Facebook General Council Ted Ullyot. Ullyot also happens to have been an attorney for the Bush White House, which might explain why the former President’s only Bay Area appearance is at the social network.

Bush belatedly joined Facebook over the summer primarily to promote Decision Points through his fan page. W. currently has 619,516 fans as opposed to the 16,889,927 people “liking” the decidedly more web savvy Barack Obama.

We’re hoping the Q&A will also extend to the folks at home, or that some Facebook employee will muster up the courage to ask Bush what he thinks about Wikileaks. Stay tuned!

It’s impossible to throw a rock at a media outlet today without hitting a story about Wikileaks. And to make the rock throwing even easier, the subject of this week’s Why Is This News is: Wikileaks – ‘enemy of democracy, just plain fact of life… or both?’

In it, Sarah argues that, for good or ill, the leaking of several hundred thousand diplomatic cables simply reflects today’s reality that no information is ever truly secret in the Internet age. The US government, like major companies before them, simply need to adapt to that reality – improving their behaviour, but also getting better at locking down the truly secret stuff. Paul, on the other hand, just hates everything about Wikileaks, describing it as one man’s pathetic ego trip which reveals almost nothing useful and which, if anything, will massively set back the site’s stated goal of ‘transparency’.

In many ways, we’re both arguing the same point from different angles. But, hey, at least we’re arguing – which always makes for a fun episode. Video below.

This is the car Batman drives just for kicks. Forget the Tumbler, the Cadillac CTS-V Coupe is where the real fun can be had. 556HP, 511 lb-ft of torque from a supercharged V8 and a robust navigation, hard drive-based media system complete with a pounding Bose system? Yessir, Mr. Wayne. Your ride is ready.

This not-so-modest coupe is in our very capable and awaiting hands for the next week. Winter might be settling in here in mid-Michigan and the CTS-V might have performance rubber wrapping the V-spoke 19-inch wheels, but that’s going to do little to settle my teenage boyish tendencies that might include burnouts. It’s not everyday that a car touted as a BMW M-series killer rests mere feet from my front door.

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From what we can tell from a brief Reuters report, Microsoft is in talks with HBO and Showtime to broadcast and sell a la carte video through the XBox. Microsoft already offers ESPN through XBox Live.

For years pundits have been blathering on about the “Trojan horse” that is console gaming. The Playstation 2, arguably, was the first DVD player many of us ever had while the PS3 is probably the first Blu-Ray player many of us ever used. These devices were also some of the first to stream Netflix and, with this new deal, they’ll start replacing the cable box entirely. Imagine – a full complement of content available 24/7 from a box you already own. That is amazingly compelling and, dare I say it, kind of exciting.

Presumably you’re not going to sit and watch HBO’s regular programming through this service. Instead, you’ll watch a la carte versions of their original shows and exclusive movies, which is definitely compelling to some. The issue, obviously, is the cost associated with this service versus the cost tacked onto your cable bill for the actual channels.

Where does that leave broadcast TV? Well, as Matt pointed out, the best way to watch TV on your TV is to get cable. Still formats and tastes change and while a decade ago you couldn’t imagine buying more than a few singles over a full album, now the album as an art form is all but dead. For better or worse, the “channel” – meaning a group of programs that appear one after the other interspersed with commercials – may be going away.

Working with the XBox team on this is a boon for both HBO and Microsoft. HBO gets a new subscriber based addicted to their programming while Microsoft becomes known as the first company to dismantle the decades old cable companies. Here’s hoping that the rumors aren’t just hot air.

The geolocation wars are well underway. If you need any proof of that, simply look at this thread in Quora. A startup posted a question wondering which place database they should use for their new check-in app. The responses? Foursquare: Us. Gowalla: Us. SimpleGeo: Us. Factual: Us. Locationary: Us.

Each of these companies, along with a few other big ones not practicing the art of self-promotion on Quora (Google, Facebook, Skyhook) are all in the midst of what is sure to be a drawn-out battle to become the underlying location layer that lets a thousand other startups bloom on top of it.

For the past several months, it seems as if Foursquare has been doing really well in this regard. Several other hot startups (like Instagram and Foodspotting) are actually using Foursquare’s Place database as a key component of their app. But then came Facebook Places. Now startups seem to be rushing to implement that so they can leverage the social network’s 400 million plus users and ability to scale. But Foursquare isn’t sitting there quietly watching this happen.

As Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai revealed in his answer on the Quora thread, the company is currently alpha testing a second version of their API. While it hasn’t yet launched publicly, Selvadurai notes that you can email their team to get access to it.

So what’s new in the latest version? I asked co-founder Dennis Crowley and he said that it’s a complete re-write of the initial API. It’s now 1,000 times faster and more flexible, he says. He also notes that it foreshadows some new features that are upcoming and has tighter integration with things like specials. The Google Group for the API has a bit more about what to expect with v2.

Okay this is just awesome. Internet marketer John Boyle has taken creative liberty with the rumors circulating about a Google Groupon acquisition and mocked up a meta “Groupon for Groupon,” which is exactly what it sounds like.

The Fine Print:

Expires …?
Site may be a fad
Limit 1 per customer
Stock & Earnout not included
Not valid with other offers.

Highlights:

$350 Million in Revenue
Turned down Yahoo!
Featured on TechCrunch
Global reach

So far the counter says “0 bought” but that might change in the coming weeks. And at negotiation prices reportedly reaching upwards of $3 billion, the search engine could probably use the discount.

On a more serious note: We still haven’t heard anything official on the matter from Groupon CEO Andrew Mason and Google has returned our inquiries into the matter with the usual “we don’t comment on rumors” schtick. Heh.

We’ll keep you posted if we hear anymore information, humorous or otherwise.

Social gaming is an international phenomenon. While Zynga is the leading social gaming company in the U.S., in Brazil it is a company called Vostu. The company has been growing rapidly and just closed a $30 million series C financing led by Tiger Management, with Accel Partners joining the round. Accel partner Jim Breyer, who sits on Facebook’s board, will take a board seat on Vostu. Previous investors Intel Capital and General Catalyst partners also participated. Investors purchased about 10 percent of the company in this latest round, giving Vostu a post-money valuation of roughly $300 million, according to a source with knowledge of the deal. Including previous rounds, Vostu now has raised a total of $46 million.

Vostu boasts 20 million active players a month, a tenfold increase from the beginning of the year. With only 40 percent Internet penetration in Brazil, that means that about a quarter of all Brazilians who are on the Internet play a Vostu game. Vostu currently has six social games (including a farm game, poker game, as well as soccer and crime role playing games) which are played on Brazil’s largest social network, Google-owned Orkut.

Almost all the revenues comes from virtual currency, which players spend inside the games. It is almost all micropayments, with a little advertising. Vostu coins can be bought via cash at convenience stores through prepaid scratch cards, or via SMS and charged directly to their cell phone bills.

The company was founded in 2007 by three Harvard classmates: CEO Daniel Kafie, chief scientist Mario Schlosser, and Joshua Kushner (who is also an active seed investor through Thrive Capital). The founders have said that Vostu is profitable. Vostu is managed from New York City, but employs more than 200 people in two game-creation studios in Buenos Aires and Sao Paolo.

It’s always slightly flattering when a ten billion dollar company tweaks its business model just to please me. Well, ok, that’s a slight exaggeration: not just to please me, but to please me and the other writers at TechCrunch.

I’m referring of course to Netflix’s decision to offer a streaming-only subscription package; the first time they’ve allowed members to view movies online without also having to pay for a bunch of DVDs in the mail.

It’s obvious why they’ve made the decision now. Clearly, as avid TechCrunch readers, they read MG’s post about how his purchase of a Macbook Air has killed the optical disc. “Oh crikey” they said (in an inexplicably British accent) “if that’s the way the world is going, we’d better act quickly, or risk being left behind.”

But of course Netflix is a multi-billion dollar company so they’re hardly going to make game-changing decision on the whim of a single TechCrunch writer.

“Wait a minute,” a second person at Netflix probably said, “isn’t MG’s TechCrunch colleague, Paul Carr, currently working his way through all of Hitchcock’s back filmography on DVD? Obviously he is still watching DVDs.”

“Yes, I thought of that,” said the first, “but I’ve checked his queue: he’s just finished ‘Spellbound‘, and ‘The Paradine Case’ is due on Monday. After that, he’s done. And…” – at this point he might have paused for triumphant effect – “AND – according to my source at Apple, he’s getting a MacBook Air this week.”

The second Netflixer could probably hardly contain his surprise. “Wait! Paul’s going DVD-drive-less too?! Well that settles it…” And so it did. Now, for just $7.99 a month, neither MG nor I nor any of the millions of people who ride our opinion-forming coat-tails need pay for DVDs we can’t use.

By sheer coincidence, the move also coincides with the news that for the first time this “holiday season”, Netflix will spend more money in streaming costs than they will in postage. As the New York times puts it, they’ve “gone from being the fastest-growing first-class mail customer of the United States Postal Service to the biggest source of streaming Web traffic in North America during peak evening hours”.

You might think this would be cause for some delight on the part of the movie studios. Sure, eight dollars a month, shared between them and Netflix is a drop in the ocean when compared to the price of a single DVD. But DVD sales are plummeting, while faster broadband speeds have moved casual movie piracy from arduous (two day downloads), to manageable (six hour) to utterly trivial (less than the time it takes to watch a movie). As is the case with iTunes for the music labels, the question is not whether DVD customers are depriving them of revenue by going to Netflix, but whether would-be pirates are instead choosing to consume movies legally from a source that is prepared to write billion dollar royalty checks to the studios.

The answer to that question is, clearly, yes – and for that the studios should be hugging Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, as tightly as book publishers should be hugging Jeff Bezos for creating the Kindle. He’s essentially rescued their business from the very edge of the pirates’ plank.

But as anyone who has had read a Peter Biskind book will tell you, studio execs are not rational people. In fact, when they set their mind to it, they can act – not to put too fine a point on it – like sulky, mentally-subnormal children. And so the New York Times explains that, while gladly taking billions of dollars from Netflix, the major studios are all investing heavily in designing their own streaming services. Never mind that siloing movies in that way is as idiotic as individual studios opening their own cinemas (sorry, America: movie theaters) screening only their own movies. Movie fans almost never shop by label, they shop by movie — and the reason Netflix is so successful is that they offer the whole gamut: from AI to Zulu. Moreover, people won’t want to dick around subscribing to multiple services, or searching multiple sites to find the movies they want: they’ll just drift back to piracy; at which point everyone loses.

And yet, the studios are doing everything they can to mess with Netflix: limiting the company’s access to new releases, and insisting that whole swathes of their catalogues can only be watched on DVD rather than streaming. It’s frustrating for the end-user – especially those of us who no longer have DVD players (attentive readers will recall that I live permanently in hotels so owning a standalone player is impractical to say the least), it’s damaging to Netflix’s business and it’s ultimately counter-productive for the studios.

And so, given all those things, there’s one thing I just don’t understand: why, rather than trying to outfox Netflix, they don’t work together with the company to develop a new, two-tier subscription/pay as you go service. It might work like this…

For $7.99, as is currently the case, subscribers could stream thousands of movies a month for no additional cost. But in addition, they could also – for a slightly higher monthly subscription rate – stream any of the movies that are currently only available via Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service. To allay the studio’s concerns about making higher value movies available by streaming, though, viewers could be limited to watching, say, ten of these ‘premium’ movies a month. That’s roughly the same number they could get through under the current cheapest by-mail plan. For a higher subscription rate, the number of premium movies streamable in a month would increase, much like the number of DVDs in the mail does now.

The studios still get their cut (in fact they potentially make more because they can be paid by stream rather than just by individual DVD) and Netflix saves half a billion dollars in shipping costs a year, all of which can be channelled to licensing payments.

Which just leaves the new release DVDs that the studios are desperately trying to prevent Netflix from offering, apparently to protect bankrupt competitors like Blockbuster. In fact, they should do the opposite. They should allow Netflix subscribers to view brand new DVD movies on the day they’re released, but on a pay-as-you-watch (or 24 hour “rental”) basis. I would gladly – and I mean delightedly – pay $10 to stream a new movie, even movies I would have no intention of buying on DVD. Much like I do for music with the iTunes store, and books with my Kindle, I could easily see myself impulse-spending $50 or more a month on movies – which is more than I’ve spent on plastic DVDs in the last two years. That’s on top of my $7.99 a month subscription.

Of course I know I’m being ridiculous. I mean, I must be. There must be some obvious reason I’m missing why such a deal is impossible for the studios to accept. It can’t be a rights problem – studios regularly negotiate pay-per-play deals for new movies with airlines and hotels – and it can’t be that no-one has thought of such an obvious idea. The only impediment I can think of is stubbornness: that studios are so delusional as to what happens when one makes it difficult for people with fast Internet connections to obtain media legally that they’re willing to drive their business off a cliff in the hope of success where publishers and music labels have failed.

But that too would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it?

So what’s stopping Netflix and the studios agreeing to a hybrid subscription/pay as you go plan? If you work for Netflix or a movie studio, please offer your suggestions in the comments: I’d genuinely like to know.

There’s an easy way to tell that Google Earth is getting so advanced that it’s getting dangerously close to looking like actual Earth: touted new features are kind of humorous. While version 4 brought the sky, and version 5 brought the oceans, now version 6 is bringing trees. Yes, trees. I fully expect version 7 to highlight the addition of dirt.

Kidding aside, the latest version is obviously the best one yet. And trees are obviously a hugely important part of the Earth. To get them into Google Earth, the search giant has made 3D models of over 50 different species of trees. And they’ve included over 80 million of them in various places around the world including Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, and Tokyo. They’re also working with some conservation organizations to model threatened forests around the world.

The other big addition to this latest version of Google Earth is Integrated Street View. To be clear, Google has had a form of Street View in Google Earth since 2008, but now it’s fully a part of the experience. This means that you can go all the way from space, right down to Street View seamlessly. That’s because Google has included their Street View mascot/button, Pegman, in the main navigation controls now. Just like in Google Maps, you just pick him up and drop him anywhere highlighted in blue, and you’ll be taken to the detailed Street View.

And you can now fully navigate the Earth using Street View in Google Earth. Simply use your keyboard or mouse to move around.

Google Earth 6 also makes it easier to discover and explore historical imagery. This feature was added in version 5, but it wasn’t easy to find. Now you’ll be able to see when it’s available right at the bottom of the screen.

Google Earth 6 would definitely be Treebeard’s favorite version of Google Earth yet. Check out more in the pictures and videos below.

According to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster (you know, the guy who is usually wrong), Apple is selling a whole mess of MacBook Airs and iPads this year. Sadly, his assessment is based on seven hours spent in Apple stores across the country, but the limited data his efforts have provided does point to some clear trends that we’ve been following over the past few months.

As we discussed this morning, PC growth is slow but constant. Desktop towers are, however, the last thing on most folks minds these days. Devices like the iPad capture the imagination and, more important, they are the first devices to be truly portable.

For most of the past decade, we’ve suffered under a the yoke of slow progress. Laptops ranged from about 4 pounds on the very low end all the way up to twenty pounds on a very bad day. Generally, however, the average fleet laptop – think the ThinkPad or a nice Dell Inspiron – weighed in at about 10 pounds, all told, with extra battery and power adaptor. That was quite a bit to carry around, especially with all of the accoutrements.

Ignoring the odd gaming laptop fanatics, portable devices in general came in two sizes: big enough to hurt you while racing for your flight and big enough to replace your boat anchor in a pinch and they were very expensive. This also reduced the desire in the average user to buy a powerful laptop and led us to the dark period known as the netbook revolution when laptop owners, seeing these amazingly thin yet underpowered devices, thought they could get something done with them. Sadly, the confluence of power, usability, and cloud interconnection only just really meshed recently. Except for the underpowered netbook, there was nothing that you could carry that could get most of your work done with minimal fuss.

Now, however, we’ve entered an interesting period in portability. Devices that were once too underpowered to be useful – namely tablets and cellphones – are becoming true assets and because most work is now on the cloud, we can get away with only carrying a tablet to a sales meeting. This doesn’t mean that devices like the iPad and the Galaxy Tab can replace a full laptop. However, they can act as word processors, presentation editors, and spreadsheet noodling devices in a pinch.

More important, however, is the rise of useful networked media devices. Rather than have a full-sized laptop on the coffee table we have the surprisingly usable new MacBook Air and by the bedside we have an iPad. I haven’t tuned on my MacBook Pro in a long time. Maybe MG was right after all.

Everyone and their dog is coming out with real portable devices next year. CES will be awash with them. From Acer to RIM to HP it’s like the netbook revolution writ large – but with one crucial difference: these new devices will be superbly usable and amazingly light, which should make road-weary travelers much happier in 2011.