Category: Tech news

Picture this:

A hotel party thrown by Tony Hsieh of Zappos. A group of people, crowded around a laptop, laughing at a video of a doctor rapping and singing about ulcers. Suddenly one of the group starts rapping out loud to the video. Now people are laughing so hard that they are crying….

This is how I came to know ZDoggMD, a rare – and virtually undiscovered – talent that I would now like to gift to the TechCrunch community.

ZDogg is a genuine doctor who uses YouTube as a creativity outlet to teach people about things like safe sex, delivering bad news, stayin’ healthy on vacation and hemorrhoids. When Hsieh asked how the world of being a doctor was going for him, ZDogg answered that he loved it but was frustrated with the fact that he couldn’t be himself. He told Tony that he’d love an outlet to share the raps he composes with a wider audience, hopefully to give people a good laugh but also to teach them a medical thing or two. Tony, being the zen like guy that he is, responded, “Why don’t you do it then?”. And so he did. The results are in the links above.

And, as an added bonus, the special song he made for our entrepreneurs and VCs kicks off my interview with ZDoggMD below.

photo © 2005 Peter Shanks | more info(via: Wylio)Eric Butler’s Firefox browser extension Firesheep took the Internet cafe world by storm a couple weeks ago when we and others wrote about the controversial plugin that compromises your social networking connection data. While many people have come up with solutions that involve forcing sites to use HTTPS, Zscaler Security has just released a countermeasure called BlackSheep, which actually detects when Firesheep is hijacking your session.

Firesheep accesses your Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and other logins through cookies — Blacksheep subverts this by tricking Firesheep with a fake login cookie and alerting the user when Firesheep is detected, displaying the IP address of the person using it (see below), and warning the user to log off.

BlackSheep is currently the only available solution that attempts to pit Firesheep against itself. “BlackSheep leverages much of the Firesheep code, but the twist is that rather than being used to hijack sessions, it instead detects when a session is being hijacked and alerts the user,” says BlackSheep developer Julien Sobrier.

And because BlackSheep and Firesheep use much of the same code, you can’t run them both in the same Firefox session. But why would you want to do that?

You can download BlackSheep here.

And learn more about Firesheep in the video below.

When social networks first appeared they looked like they would completely change the recruitment industry. I mean, a profile was exactly like someone’s CV, right? Wrong. Despite LinkedIn doing very well as a hub for recruiters that put the time and effort in (and upgraded to the Pro version) or others using Facebook as a recruiting ‘back door’, it remains the case that social networks tend not to be set up for real day-to-day recruitment purposes. The whole thing is just a bit of a mess, especially where people’s public and private streams start to cross.

Some startups are trying to address this issue. Notably, the newish BranchOut is a Facebook application that works out where your friends, and friends of friends, have worked. It has secured $6m from Accel, among others. Then there is JIBE and Emp.ly. However, while many of these startups are doing the classic Silicon Valley modus operandi of trying to scale as fast as possible and get headspace among users, there is one thing most seem to be missing from the equation: Employers. This is a group who are massively cautious and usually need hand holding. They are even now only just getting used to the idea that traditional recruitment consultancies or job boards are may be affected by ‘social recruiting.’

BraveNewTalent is a startup which has taken an approach from the other end of the telescope. It’s spent time building a network of corporate clients starting in London which has brought in revenues and pushed the startup towards profitability already, but clearly that doesn’t qualify it as a startup which can scale.

What does qualify it is its new Facebook app which just went live here.

I was blown away when I first saw Rana Sobhany on stage.

With nothing more than 2 iPads and a mixer, Rana was mixing tracks and busting beats live in front of the hundreds of attendees at AdAge’s IDEA conference. You wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between her and a DJ with a full set of gear. I realized pretty quickly that what was once a cool PR stunt had now become a full-blown business.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Adobe Flash is under attack again. And you know what that means. Time for more complaining.

Today, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch spoke with Fast Company about the most recent Flash controversy the company has had to deal with. Last week, a report revealed that the lack of Flash on the new MacBook Air may save as much as 2 hours of battery life on that machine. Several subsequent reports noticed the same or similar things. Lynch’s response? “It’s a false argument to make, of the power usage. When you’re displaying content, any technology will use more power to display, versus not displaying content.”

So displaying content uses more power than not displaying content? That’s really the argument he’s using? Why not just say: if your computer is on, it will use more power than if it’s not on?

But the real issue here isn’t really using Flash to display content. It’s that when Flash is just running in the background on websites, it is biting off a huge chunk of battery life — up to 33 percent. That’s ridiculous.

Lynch continued, “If you used HTML5, for example, to display advertisements, that would use as much or more processing power than what Flash uses.” That’s a pretty bold claim. Conveniently (likely for Lynch), it’s also pretty much impossible to test since very few web ads currently use HTML5.

The fact of the matter remains that various reports are showing this Flash/battery life issue to be a very real one. If you simply don’t have Flash installed on your machine, you will see much better battery life. I haven’t done any thorough benchmarking, but so far, when using Safari versus Chrome (which has a version of Flash baked-in) on the MacBook Air, I’ve noticed a bump in battery life as well. Further, Flash is the only thing that ever makes that computer run even a little hot.

This hardly surprises me as that’s pretty much been the case on every Mac I’ve owned for the past several years. On my i7 iMac with 8 GB of RAM, Adobe Photoshop runs fine. Light video rendering? No problem. Flash? Fans kick on and the machine gets hot as hell.

Sure, you can argue that the issue is at least partially Apple’s fault as hardware acceleration isn’t as easy to come by on Macs. But this doesn’t change the very real issue which Lynch is calling a “false argument”. Further, none of this even addresses that for most of us, the only time anything ever crashes on our machines is due to Flash.

Adobe has had years to fix these issues. Now as the web’s reliance on Flash is drying up, Adobe is resorting to weird gimmicks (like their silly “ad” campaign), complaining, and some FUD.

“I just think there’s this negative campaigning going on, and, for whatever reason, Apple is really choosing to incite it, and condone it,” Lynch told Fast Company. But this battery life issue has absolutely nothing to do with Apple. The site Ars Technica stumbled upon the issue in their review of the new MacBook Air. Apple hasn’t said one word about it.

“I think that’s unfortunate. We don’t think it’s good for the web to have aspects closed off–a blockade of certain types of expression,” Lynch continued. Ah, the old “open” argument. When all else fails…

In this context that’s just ridiculous. You still can install Flash on any Mac — including the MacBook Air. The real issue in this particular case is that you probably shouldn’t if you value a stable system and battery life.

Again, to that, Adobe’s response seems to be: if you want to save battery life, don’t turn on your machine.

The enterprise social networking space is competitive; which is why companies like Salesforce, Jive, Yammer, Socialcast and others continue to innovate at a rapid pace. Another competitor, Socialtext, which offers an enterprise social software platform built around microblogging, is launching a new version today only six months after releasing Socialtext 4.0 to the public.

One of the major additions to the platform is a more powerful filters and search interface. With Socialtext Explore, users can find not just links to documents, projects, websites and more, but also see the microblogging messages, pages posts, pictures and files attached to shared work. It essentially combines search with bookmarking, allowing employees to see context around any shared work. Users can search microblogging messages by tag, a person, group, or date range.”>launching a new version today only six months after releasing Socialtext 4.0 to the public.

One of the major additions to the platform is a more powerful search interface. With Socialtext Explore, users can find not just links to documents, projects, websites and more, but also see the microblogging messages, pages posts, pictures and files attached to shared work. It essentially combines search with bookmarking, allowing employees to see context around any shared work. Users can search microblogging messages by tag, a person, group, or date range.

Socialtext is also releasing a new Salesforce Connector that allows users to choose any actions completed within Salesforce’s CRM platform and post them as events into Socialtext’s activity stream. The advantage of this integration, says Socialtext, is that an entire workforce (beyond just Sales) can discuss and collaborate over actions on Salesforce. The company also features a similar connector for Microsoft SharePoint, WordPress and Bugzilla.

The Salesforce integration seems similar in some ways to the functions that the CRM company features in its own social networking platform, Chatter. But Socialtext, which is being used by over 6,500 companies worldwide, says that context matters, and adding the ability for an entire workforce to comment on an action outside the platform is helpful to businesses.

Socialtext 4.5 is available on its on-site managed appliance, desktop application,, mobile apps and web-based product. Socialtext’s collaboration tool has a freemium model and a paid service.

The big problem in online advertising is that there is basically infinite inventory. Ads are bought on ad networks and exchanges where one site is hardly differentiated form another. Larger publishers try to battle this by putting together ad-sale packages which bundle together their higher-quality sites and then sell that as a bundle for a premium. For instance, AOL’s sales force could sell ads on TechCrunch, Engadget, and its other tech blogs all as one package. Today, putting together these kinds of package deals is pretty much a manual process.

Glam Media wants to automate that process with a new online advertising product called GlamAdapt Automate. It is the second phase of its GlamAdapt ad serving product, which it launched in 2009. GlamAdapt allows highly targeted ad serving by demographic and audience segment. The Automate product is aimed at media buyers who want to buy only certain sites, and target within those sites. So for instance, if AOL used the technology (it doesn’t, but other large publishers are testing it out), media buyers would be able to place ads only on TechCrunch and Engadget, and then target specifically 18-to-34-year-old males who are into fast cars within those sites.

Today, most ad buying is done on an auction basis, which drives down prices for publishers and treats all ad inventory the same. It makes online advertising a commodity. Glam CEO Samir Arora wants to create a “primetime” segment of ad inventory associated with higher-quality publishers. Targeting “tech influentials,” for instance, makes more sense when they are reading about tech gadgets or tech news than when they are uploading photos to Facebook.

As he’s been testing this out, Arora also found out something else that is pretty interesting. There is a divide between search-optimized sites (code for Demand Media) and brand-friendly sites: “One thing we found was that the higher a site was optimized for SEO, the lower the time spent on it—the higher the value of the ad for SEO, and the lower the value for brand advertising.”

At least, that’s the story he’s selling. Will it resonate with publishers and media buyers?

Nextag, a comparison shopping site for products and services, has acquired online deals aggregating service NextCoupons. Financial terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed, but this is clearly a minor transaction and primarily a way for Nextag to bring in more talent and resources.

NextCoupons allows shoppers to create an account and share offers with the site’s visiting online deal hunters. NextCoupons’ technology provides retailers direct access to the site’s coupon inventory, allowing them to post their own coupons and promotion codes and view statistics on previously posted coupons.

The Santa Monica, California-based company says it offers coupons from over 500 retailers through a variety of delivery methods, including an iPhone formatted site, social networking integration with Twitter and Facebook feeds and browser integration with a Firefox Toolbar.

NextCoupons CEO Joseph Raffetto says its technology will enable Nextag, which claims 30 million+ monthly customers, to further enhance its users’ online shopping experience through greater personalization and social media features.

Nextag specializes in search technology to let users find products, prices and information whenever and wherever they need them. Nextag operates comparison shopping sites in the US (Nextag.com), the UK (Nextag.co.uk), France (Nextag.fr), Germany (Nextag.de), Spain (Nextag.es), Italy (Nextag.it), Australia (Nextag.com.au) and Japan (Nextag.co.jp).

Nextag is headquartered in San Mateo, CA with offices in London, Tokyo and Gurgaon, India.

Consider this your best opportunity for Internet fame. We want your take on the Xbox 360 Kinect. It doesn’t have to be deep or insightful. Just a video of you giving your honest take on the motion control system.

You could have your girlfriend hold your iPhone 4 while you give us a 30-second take or setup up a fancy-pants camera rig. We don’t care. We want them all. Reviews by one pundit on a general consumer devices like the Kinect are worthless. It’s not like reviewing a microwave or coffee maker Consumer Reports-style. Is the Kinect fun? Do you enjoy it? What’s your fav feature? Why do you hate it? That’s what we want to know. Click through for the details.

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Yesterday, a new social browser, RockMelt, launched in a very private beta. You can read my initial review here. But unless you were one of the 500 lucky readers to grab an invite yesterday, or know somebody who did (every user gets three invites), you might have to wait a while before you get to try it out.

In the meantime, you can get a sense of what the browser looks like from this video I shot last week. RockMelt co-founders Tim Howes and Eric Vishria gave me a demo. The demo covers the main ways RockMelt is different than other browsers. The way I think about it is, you can browse with your friends on the left, your favorite sites on the right, and search up top. It is a realtime browser in that you can see when your Facebook friends are online and get notifications when your favorite sites, blogs, and streams are updated with new information.

Some people can’t handle all the notifications. For instance, VC Jeff Clavier wants a leave me the f%$k alone” button, or some way to “turn off all the streams, chats, tweets, etc.” I don’t find it particularly daunting. Maybe he just needs to turn off Growl.

ConcertIn, built by past TechCrunch Meet-up pitch contest winner Jan Horna, essentially turns concerts into Facebook events, allowing you and your friends to talk up the Freelance Whales as well as buy tickets to their next concert.

The service doesn’t look like much on the surface but this “event” featuring the boy band Baby Lala shows you how it works. You create a concert event, buy tickets via BandsInTown’s API, and then discuss the concert with your friends. Short and sweet.

Read more…

This a guest post by Tim Ocock who first worked at Symbian when the consortium was created in the summer of 1998. Returning in 2001, he worked in a dual commercial/technical role that necessitated almost unrestricted access to both the ‘shopfloor’ engineering teams and upper tiers of Symbian’s management. He left in 2004 to found Symsource, one of the few dev houses specialising in Symbian still in business today. He is currently Technology Director at Steely Eye Digital Media, a full service digital agency in London’s Soho, leading the webification of mobile and appification of desktop web.

Symbian is the biggest smartphone operating system by market share, the oldest smartphone platform still in use, used by almost every major OEM at one time or another. Yet one could be forgiven for thinking Symbian is dead and buried, with news of layoffs at Nokia, management departures at the Symbian Foundation and rough reviews of the latest flagship N8 device. How does a platform powering 9 million new devices every month have almost no credibility with developers, analysts and press alike? This is the story of one of the most successful failures in tech history.

According to audience measurement company comScore, the U.S. online display advertising market is growing like a weed. Data from the company’s Ad Metrix online ad intelligence service indicated that nearly 1.3 trillion display ads were delivered to U.S. Internet users during Q3 2010, marking a 22-percent increase compared to the same period last year.

The average U.S. Internet user was delivered more than 6,000 display ads over the course of the quarter. King of the hill is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Facebook.

According to comScore, the social network led all online publishers in the third quarter with no less than 297 billion display ad impressions, representing 23.1 percent market share.

You were right, Tim Armstrong (aka my new boss), about Google (aka his former employer) and Facebook eating away display ad share from AOL – and others, of course.

For what it’s worth, the comScore data is line with some of the things we’ve heard recently from many a Facebook employee, some of them senior level ones: that the company is on track to record $2 billion in revenue this year, mostly coming from display advertising.

For the record, comScore data for display advertising units includes both static and rich media ads but not video ads, house ads and tiny ads (less than 2,500 pixels in dimension).

According to comScore’s data, Facebook’s market share has increased 13.9 percentage points from 9.2 percent in Q3 2009. Yahoo! Sites ranked second during Q3 2010 with 140 billion impressions (11 percent), followed by Microsoft Sites with 64 billion impressions (5 percent) and Fox Interactive Media with 48 billion impressions (3.8 percent).

AT&T ranked as the top online display advertiser in the third quarter with 21.1 billion impressions, accounting for 1.6 percent of display ads. Scottrade ranked second with 14.9 billion impressions (1.2 percent), followed by Verizon with 14.6 billion impressions (1.1 percent).

Rounding out the top ten were: Netflix (1.0 percent), GM (0.8 percent), Walt Disney (0.8 percent), Toyota (0.7 percent), and Procter & Gamble (0.6 percent).

Suntech Power Holdings Co. (NYSE: STP) has inked a deal to supply and install another 9.43 MW of solar panels at a plant in Thailand owned by Bangchak Petroleum, the companies announced today. The large scale plant will be grid-connected by late next year with a total capacity of 44 MW.

Thailand’s national goal is to meet 20% of its total energy consumption with renewable sources by 2022. The country is one of the largest energy consumers in Southeast Asia— according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration it was the world’s 23rd most electricity consuming nation, and was in the world’s top 25 carbon dioxide emitters in 2008.

Upon completion, the plant will generate renewable energy for metropolitan Thailand, primarily, which will be purchased and distributed by the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) and the Provincial Electricity Authority (PEA) under long-term power purchase agreements. In August this year, Suntech won the first phase of this deal, and was chosen to provide 34.5MW of solar panels and technical support for the new, Thai solar facility.

According to a joint press statement, EGAT researchers project that Thailand’s energy demand will grow by an average 4.22% annually by 2020. The country (like the U.S.) seeks to achieve greater energy security through the utilization of local, renewable energy resources.

Though founded in China in 2001, Suntech has North American headquarters in San Francisco, Calif. and operations in Arizona. The company is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2008, it acquired El Solutions— a California clean tech startup that supplied solar power generating systems for Google, Disney and other corporations— in order to build its U.S., residential rooftop and corporate solar business.

Sattahip, Thailand image via: Dmitry Klimenko

Sorry, folks. Someone clearly couldn’t keep their mouth shut and let it slip that Fancast.com was Google TV‘s backdoor to Hulu. The majority of the content no longer streams to Google TV units like it did just last week. NBC, ABC, Fox — it’s all blocked. Only Viacom’s content still works, but that’s too be expected considering the partnership between Google and the media conglomerate.

This is getting a bit frustrating. It’s like buying a fancy speed boat, only to discover when you get home the local wildlife nuts convinced the authorities to impose strict speed limits. It’s no fun even if it does save an endangered species and doesn’t seem like the restrictions will be lifted anytime soon.

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