Category: Tech news

Back in 2005, when Tim O’Reilly saw HousingMaps.com, he called it “the first true Web 2.0 application.” The site, created by Paul Rademacher, was the first mash-up using Google Maps, and tied it in with Craigslist data. The mash-up was so impressive that it got Rademacher a job at Google. And now, over five years later, he’s leaving the company, we’ve learned.

Rademacher, who was an engineer at Dreamworks Animation before he started HousingMaps, had worked his way up the engineering ranks at Google over the past several years. Most recently, he was the engineering manager for Google Maps frontend. At Google, Rademacher also created the Google Earth Browser Plugin, which brought the impressive software into the web browser for the first time. Here’s his post on it from 2008.

Now he’s the latest talented engineer to leave the Googleplex. And his departure comes right on the heels of the news that Lars Rasmussen, the father of Google Maps, has left the company as well. If there’s a silver-lining for Google, it doesn’t appear that Rademacher is following Rasmussen to Facebook — at least not yet. For now, he’s likely to pursue his own thing, we hear. His LinkedIn profile confirms that he’s left Google, but doesn’t say what he’s doing next beyond continuing to run HousingMaps. Google has yet to respond to our request for a comment.

Update: We’ve figured it out. Rademacher is joining Joshua Schachter on a new startup.

With Election Day 2010 under way, we thought it would be helpful to compile a brief list of useful resources on the web to find information about the mid-term races, candidates and voting polls. Feel free to add your own recommendations in comments.

Google Election Center: The search platform allows users to input their address to find the closest polling location, state election office, links to the state election websites, and lists the candidates who are running in the races at the Federal level.

Facebook Politics: Facebook has developed a dedicated U.S. Politics page where you can find your polling location, and access a livestream of election coverage courtesy of ABC News and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg.

New York Times: The FiveThirtyEight, and the site’s U.S. Politics platform provide a comprehensive view into polling stats on the House, Senate and State Governor seats up for grabs.

PoliticsDaily, Politico and RealPoliticsDaily all provide similar coverage of breaking news coming from the races on both the federal and state levels.

Foursquare “I Voted”: Foursquare is tracking check-ins at polling places throughout the day and evening. Foursquare partnered with data visualization startup JESS3 to create a live, interactive map of each check in at polling sites. Twitter is also encouraging users to add the hashtag #ivoted to any Tweets about voting during the day.

In an inflammatory New Yorker piece last month, Malcolm Gladwell argued that the revolution will not, in fact, be tweeted. Gladwell’s argument that social media isn’t enabling genuine political change elicited a predictable storm of protest – from Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Ev Williams to the co-founder of Hunch, Chris Dixon. Even Paul Carr, Techcrunch’s slightly more coiffeured version of Malcolm Gladwell, leapt into the fray, defending the poor, persecuted New Yorker writer against the retweeting mob.

Last month also saw the publication of Don Tapscott’s latest magnum opus, Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World, a follow up to his best-selling 2007 book Wikinomics (both co-authored with Tapscott’s long time collaborator Anthony Williams). In Macrowikinomics, Canada’s leading digital guru takes the polar opposite position to Gladwell, arguing that democratic networks like Twitter and Facebook are fundamentally changing our world, revolutionizing everything from education to healthcare to politics to media. Social media represents “a turning point in history,” Tapscott predicts in Macrowikinomics. It will, he promises, enable us to literally “reindustrialize the planet.”

So it was with relish that I caught up yesterday with Don Tapscott via Skype to learn more about how we got from Wikinomics to Macrowikinomics, how our industrial world is broken and what the entrepreneur can do to reboot civilization. And, of course, I couldn’t resist asking him whether he agreed with Malcolm Gladwell that the revolution won’t be tweeted.

Why Our World is Broken

A Five Minute History of the Last Five Hundred Years

How We Can Put Our World Back Together Again

How Entrepreneurs Can Reboot the World

Tapscott to Gladwell: “You’re Just Dead Wrong.”

San Francisco-based Mission Motors has gained some recognition in the Valley for its flagship electric motorcycle, the Mission One Superbike. The sleek vehicle, which features a lithium ion battery park, can reach speeds of 150 mph and go for 150 miles on a single charge. The problem is, it’s not quite ready for prime time.

Despite earlier promises for a Q4 2010 release and then a Q2 2011 release, production has been marred by delays and there is now no clear visibility on a delivery date for consumers. Given the recent setbacks, Mission Motors is wisely diversifying its business beyond the Mission One.

On Tuesday, the startup unveiled a new unit: Mission Electric Vehicle Technology, or MissionEVT. MissionEVT will suppy vehicle manufacturers (from motorcycles to cars to trucks) with electric vehicle technology, including “energy storage systems, drive systems and software intelligence,” the company said in a statement. In addition, MissionEVT will also offer integration services for their clients, such as electric drive expertise and test facilities.

“Our company will be able to expand into new markets, bringing the advances we have made in EV technology to multiple vehicle platforms and manufacturers,” CEO Jit Bhattacharya said in a statement. “This creates a tremendous high-volume opportunity for Mission’s powertrain technology, while solving a critical need for vehicle manufacturers trying to keep pace with the rapid electrification of vehicles.”

The powertrain technology offered by MissionEVT is based on the research and development for Mission One. According to Bhattacharya, this development process yielded several core building blocks— in areas like battery storage and software— which can now be molded applied to other vehicle types.

Gmail is a great communications platform for personal and professional use but its task manager is fairly simple. Google recently launched Priority Inbox, which does help prioritize email, but tasks are can be a separate tool that people use for organization. Today, the folks at Wizehive are launching ClearMyInbox, a plug-in that adds a comprehensive task manager (like Producteev) to any Gmail account. The app is in private beta but we have 1000 invites for TechCrunch readers; just use the code “tcrunch” here.

Similar to Rapportive, ClearMyInbox displays your task list to the right of the Gmail screen. It allows you to turn emails into tasks, create tasks, manage your own task list, move items up and down lists, mark items as complete, and assign tasks to others from within Gmail without having to log into another system. And you can sync your tasks and task lists with an iPhone app and with WizeHive accounts.

Similar to WizeHive, ClearMyInbox organizes tasks and task lists into Workspaces. You can share workspaces with different groups of people (ClearMyInbox currently limits you to creating 3 workspaces). The tool is free and currently works with Chrome and Firefox.

Back in June, News Corp put two more of its newspapers, other than the Wall Street Journal, behind a paywall: The Times of London and the Sunday Times. We kind of expected it to be a disaster, but now we actually have some results. The company announced that it signed up 105,000 paying subscribers, plus another 100,000 who were already subscribers to the print newspaper.

But what did the Times lose? According to comScore, the Times UK website saw its online readership decline by 4 million unique visitors a month worldwide to 2.4 million, or a 62 percent drop. Pageviews fell off an even steeper cliff, plummeting 90 percent from an estimated 41 million in May, 2010 to 4 million in September, 2010. People did what you’d expect them to do when faced with a paywall at a news site. They said, “No, thanks” and clicked away to another site.

So is this tradeoff worth it and will other newspapers like the New York Times suffer the same fate once they erect planned paywalls? Mathew Ingram at GigaOm explains why this experiment looks like a failure.

Before we pile on here, let’s take a look at those numbers. Basically, those 50,000 monthly subscribers are paying $12.80 a month, or $640,000 a month total. Let’s say the other 55,000 pay-as-you-read crowd is generating another $160,000 a month in subscription revenues (I am being generous here and assuming two days a month per person at $1.60 per day). That comes to $800,000 a month, or $9.6 million a year in online subscription revenues.

What did they give up in online advertising revenues? At 41 million estimated pageviews a month, assuming a $5 CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions), that was only $200,000 a month in online advertising revenues. I am not counting the Sunday Times site here, but the lion’s share of the traffic went to the Times UK site. Maybe the average CPMs were higher if the online ads were bundled together with more expensive print ads, but in order to match its paltry subscription revenues the Times online ads would have to command a $20 CPM, which is really high for a general news site.

Depending on the actual CPM, financially they are doing at least two to four times better than they were before. And that is with only about 1.5 percent of their former readers becoming paying subscribers. You don’t need that many subscribers to make up for lost advertising revenues online. But the way the (offline) media business works is that subscriptions and advertising go hand in hand. the more subscribers you can show advertisers, the more they are willing to pay.

On the Web, that calculus breaks down, so media companies are forced to choose between going after advertising revenues or subscription revenues, but rarely both. Whether or not going behind a paywall makes sense depends on two things: 1) how many paying subscribers can you get with a paywall versus 2) how big an audience can you get with a free site.

Could the Times UK double or quadruple its online audience if it were still free? Alternatively, could it raise its advertising rates. That all depends on how good its articles are and whether they can attract a growing audience. On the other hand, maybe it’s easier for the Times to add another 50,000 or 100,000 paying subscribers. The fact that News Corp decided to put the paper behind a paywall speaks volumes about which path it thinks is going to be easier.

But media businesses require advertisers. They always have, they always will. Advertisers want to reach broad audiences. The number of loyal readers willing to pay for an online subscription to the Times will peak eventually if it hasn’t already. Once it does, where will the Times go from there?

If you want to be a phone company you can’t go dead. Ever. People rely on their mobile phones for everything these days, so when calls aren’t going through it’s a really big deal. And as far as we can tell, Google Voice is currently having some serious issues.

Update, 12:15PM PST: After over an hour of issues, Google says that the problem should be resolved. Here’s Google’s statement:

“We had an issue this morning that affected some outbound calls placed through the Google Voice mobile app. Inbound calls or calls from the web were not affected, and the issue has now been fixed.”

Both Michael Arrington and I use Google Voice exclusively for our phone calls. And this morning, we simply can’t place calls: we’ll dial a number, hear the familiar rings as we wait for our contact to answer, and… nothing. The phone just keeps ringing forever — it never even gets to the recipient’s voicemail. The worst part is that most people probably don’t even realize that anything’s wrong, because when you initiate a call  it sounds like everything is working fine because you still hear those familiar rings.

We’ve tried a handful of different setups to figure out what’s going on. We’re both on Nexus Ones, so it’s possible (though unlikely) that the problem is associated with this handset in particular. Update: Based on comments below it’s affecting other handsets as well. When we place a call directly from our Nexus Ones, it actually does go through to the recipient, but it comes from a random number and when they go to pick up they hear silence.

We also tried initiating a call using Google Voice’s web interface (you enter the phone number you want to call, and it calls both your phone and your contact’s phone). This doesn’t work at all.

The only thing that does seem to work is Google Voice’s integration with Gmail. Which is great if you’re sitting at a computer, and useless if not.

The only consolation is that inbound calls are still working. Google is looking into the problem, and while it doesn’t seem to be affecting all users, there are clearly a significant number of people having this problem. Google has given us this statement:

“We’re aware of the issue, which is affecting some Google Voice users, and are working on a fix.”

This isn’t the first time Google Voice has had issues with reliability — it had a major outage back in April 2008, when it was still GrandCentral. I’ve also encountered sporadic problems over the last year that I’ve used it (though no worse than I used to have from AT&T).

Google TV launched on two retail product lines: The Logitech Revue and Sony Internet TV. I have both of them and there are definitely some clear distinctions between the two. I’m not sure one is entirely better than another, but it’s strange, although not without precedent, to see Google TV implemented differently. It’s just more fuel for the Android comparison.

The Logitech Revue seems a bit more consumer-friendly where the Sony Google TV Blu-ray player has Sony’s distinct industrial feel throughout the hardware and the software. The Logitech option ships with a touchpad-equipped full keyboard where Sony opts for a QWERTY keypad controller slightly smaller than the a PS3 controller. One does the Internet better, while the other plays nicer with more AV hardware. There’s enough difference here to at the very least cause several interested shoppers to pause, stare at the two for a bit and then move on in a daze.

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Following in the footsteps of Zynga, Electronic Arts has just announced that it has entered into a five-year strategic relationship with Facebook. Similar to the Zynga deal, Facebook Credits will become the exclusive payment method in EA games on Facebook.

EA, which owns Zynga competitor Playfish, will enter into a 70-30 percent revenue share for Facebook Credits, according to a release. Playfish operates a number of popular social games on Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, and other social networks, including Pet Society, Restaurant City, Country Story and Who Has The Biggest Brain?

Pet Society and Restaurant City are two of the top 10 games on Facebook measured by daily active users, and EA also operates soccer and football games on the social network. Other Facebook games under the EA brand include Monopoly and Pogo.

While EA is giving 30 percent of its Credits revenues to Facebook, it’s likely that the company has cute a better deal on advertising with the social network, as was rumored to be the case with the Zynga deal. EA’s relatively late to the to the Credits game considering its presence in the social gaming ecosystem. Zynga’s deal was announced in the Spring of this year, and Playdom, CrowdStar and RockYou signed similar partnerships in July.

I’m also wondering if this announcement could somehow be related to a rumored new social gaming portal that Facebook is set to announce in mid-November.

Something has been happening to the European startup scene in the last couple of years, and it is starting to manifest itself in an upswell of networking the likes of which I have not seen since I started blogging full time for TechCrunch way back in 2007. From the primordial soup of the developer community have sprung up events for startups, entrepreneurs and investors until, finally, last weekend Europe stumbled on the natural evolution of all this networking: an event which resembled and will perhahps come to rival The Lobby event in Hawaii. That’s an event where tech entrepreneurs gather to talk just amongst themselves for a change, and hang out. And that’s exactly what F.ounders, a new invite-only event in Dublin, did this past weekend. But let me unpack this trend.

Mobile advertising and ad optimization company Smaato is releasing a new whitepaper today with some huge projections for the mobile advertising industry.

According to Smaato, the US is the second largest mobile advertising market globally in terms of spending, falling just behind Japan. In 2010, Smaato says US mobile advertising spending is expected to be worth $797.6 million. For the US, this equates to a little under 8,000 mobile advertising campaigns, and an average of 21.8 new campaigns per day. Smatto says that the U.S. mobile ad market will move closer to Japan (more than $1 billion in 2010) next year with a forecast of $1.24 billion for 2011 and $5.04 billion for 2015. eMarketer released similar findings a few weeks ago, but Smaato’s finding are more bullish on projections for 2015.

Here’s the reasoning. The company says that US has over 300 million active mobile subscriptions, of which, almost one-third use their mobile phone to browse. This number is only expected to grow in the next few years. Because of the high number of mobile users, the average mobile advertising campaign spend is between $75,000 – 100,000, which is much higher than in other countries.

And the report contends that the mobile advertising market is is still young and has not fully matured. Smaato says that mobile has yet to penetrate over 50% of the US mobile population in terms of advertising. As smartphone usage increases, interact rates will increase and advertisers will be more willing to shell out ad dollars.

While it’s still difficult to know just how huge mobile advertising will become, we do know that the market seems to be growing at a fast rate as technology giants like Apple and Google throw their hats in the ring via acquisitions. Steady increases in the use of smartphones, new innovations in mobile ad formats and other factors are all contributing to market that is growing like gangbusters.

Dell has just announced it has agreed to acquire Software-as-a-Service integration company Boomi. Terms of the deal were not disclosed and, as usual, the purchase is subject to customary closing conditions. Dell did not say when it expects to complete the purchase of the startup.

Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell had yesterday teased the press about an impending acquisition in the cloud computing space (see Reuters).

The comment, made at an event in Hong-Kong, sparked a guessing game among tech reporters, but it turns out Dell is picking up a rather small company – Boomi has raised only $4 million in venture capital according to CrunchBase. Nevertheless, it’s a startup that does offer a compelling SaaS platform for many a company.

Boomi offers an application integration platform, dubbed Atomsphere, which aims to help its clients reduce the cost and complexity of integrating applications by allowing easy transfer of data between cloud-based and on-premise applications. The company says its solution removes the need for appliances, software or even coding.

Headquartered in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, Boomi says its solutions are used with the world’s leading cloud-based apps, including Salesforce CRM, as well as financial (QuickBooks, Zuora), human resources (Taleo), content and service-desk management (NetSuite).

Boomi says it manages “millions of transactions” a month and has completed “tens of thousands of cloud integrations” for “hundreds of customers” globally.

The acquisition marks Dell’s third this year – it had earlier bought Ocarina Networks and Exanet. It also lost a high-stake bidding war with HP for storage company 3PAR.

As a professional blogger (TM) I find myself dealing with lots of photographs. While the majority of them are press shots of devices, many times we need the odd photograph of a local Best Buy or a hairless mole rat. In very rare cases, the owners of said photos ask us to remove the photos, which we do. Now, however, there’s a better way to tell if a photo is part of a stock photo collection or has been uploaded by a professional photographer and/or costs something to use. It’s called PicScout ImageExchange and, at its heart, basically adds a little icon to photos that belong to others in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Clicking the icon brings up a purchase page and you’re all done, happily motoring through the countryside with your fresh, new image.

The service lets you can buy the photo from the stock agency or the actual photographer and then use the photo in your own projects. The system also includes a service called ImageTracker that allows photographers to tag their photos and then scan the Internet for unauthorized usage.

The website itself is arguably bad simply because it’s quite barren with little real explanation and is thus discouraging to the average photographer on the go. Simply put, the service is essentially a tagging system for photos that does not depend on anything embedded in the photo. You could feasibly Photoshop a photo to within an inch of its life and PicScout would still find it.

Non-intrusive, highly scalable technology identifies unique patterns within an image
PicScout digitally fingerprints your images with proprietary technology and includes them in the ImageIRC
Without dependence on embedded code, correct matching survives many forms or generations of alterations, even matching highly manipulated images to original sources.
PicScout crawls the web and identifies matches, even when images have been cropped, colorized or altered significantly, including watermark removal
PicScout documents each commercial use with a screen capture and full company details and generates regularly scheduled client reports

On the user’s end all you really see is, thanks to PicScout’s plugin, is the little icon. In many cases, that’s all that’s needed to turn a photography thief into a customer.

The service has been around for a few years now but they’ve recently released an API for programmers as well as features to help track your images in the wild. The service can also help content creators track the popularity of their images on the Internet.

While the service has yet to help me in finding a picture of a naked mole rat, its nice to know photographers – and the people who love them – have some recourse when it comes to figuring out whom to pay.

Google will now pay you to find and report vulnerabilities in its various Web properties. The company made the announcement yesterday, and it applies to sites like google.com, youtube.com, and orkut.com. Should you report a qualifying bug, you can expect to walk away with at least $500.

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LiveU, which markets solutions for live video transmissions over wireless networks, this morning announced that it has raised $11 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Pitango Venture Capital and joined by existing investors Carmel Ventures and Canaan Partners.

LiveU has raised a total of $23 million in venture capital to date.