Category: Tech news

Did Ubercab just crash and burn? Taxi and limo industry insiders in California today informed TechCrunch that the San Francisco Metro Transit Authority & the Public Utilities Commission of California have ordered the startup to cease and desist.

UPDATE: Since the orders arrived on October 20th, Ubercab has remained in service under threat of penalties including up to $5,000 fee per instance of Ubercab’s operation, and potentially 90 days in jail per each day the company remains in operation past the orders.

The company’s brand name and logo appear to be in metamorphosis; on its website and blog, Ubercab’s logo now reads simply “Uber,” and the company commented to its own Facebook community yesterday afternoon, “more uber than cab.”

Chief executive of Ubercab Ryan Graves told TechCrunch, “We are working with the agencies [involved] to figure out their exact concerns and make sure that we’re in compliance.” He wouldn’t comment beyond that, but pointed to the company’s official public statement posted on its blog today (October 24th):

UberCab Inc. has been issued a cease and desist order from the SF Metro Transit Authority & the Public Utilities Commission of California. While we are looking into the issues raised, we believe that the service we offer is in compliance with the cited regulations.

UberCab is a first to market, cutting edge transportation technology and it must be recognized that the regulations from both city and state regulatory bodies have not been written with these innovations in mind. As such, we are happy to help educate the regulatory bodies on this new generation of technology and work closely with both agencies to ensure compliance and keep our service available for our truly Uber users and their drivers.

Our commitment is to facilitate an improved transportation option that provides safe, reliable, and convenient travel. That will not change. We will continue full speed ahead with the mission of making San Francisco city a great place to live and travel.

Ubercab’s mobile apps let users request a car service to pick them up wherever they are right now, and let users pay for that car service with their phones. The startup takes a cut of the money made by drivers to generate revenue. Earlier this month, Ubercab closed a $1.25 million angel investment led by First Round.

The funding came despite the fact that the San Francisco taxi industry has been rumbling about whether Ubercab’s business is legal since September. A concerned driver brought the matter up at a Taxi Advisory Council meeting, reported The Phantom Cab Driver Phites Back blog.

One of the company’s investors and founders Travis Kalanick said on Sunday, “We’ve seen this before. New technology comes in and appears threatening to incumbent industries at first. At the end of the day, those industries see the benefit of that technology and ultimately find ways of using it in a productive manner, and embracing innovation.” Kalanick also founded the early p2p (peer to peer) search engine called Scour, which drew resistance from Hollywood executives who didn’t want their content distributed online in the 90s.

The incumbent taxi industry’s concerns about Ubercab include the following:

Ubercab operates much like a cab company but does not have a taxi license.
Its cars don’t have insurance equivalent to taxis’ insurance.
Ubercab may threaten taxi dispatchers’ way of earning a living.
Limos in U.S. cities usually have to prebook an hour in advance, by law, while only licensed taxis can pick someone up right away but Ubercab picks people up right away (again without a taxi license).

In contrast, Ubercab— neé Uber — often pitches itself not as a taxi service, but an app that helps ride seekers book a premium car and driver quickly and easily via mobile, and helps licensed limo drivers connect with clients.

More: UberCab Cease & Desist Means One Thing: They’re Onto Something

I’ve got to admit it: When it comes to financial advice, I just don’t trust my friends. And I certainly don’t trust random people on Twitter or other social networks. I don’t think I am alone. Most social finance sites have yet to gain mainstream acceptance. Just look at the pivot kaChing just did by renaming itself Wealthfront (and focusing on professional money managers instead of amateurs who outperform. It’s not that I think amateur investors are untrustworthy, it’s just that I don’t know who to trust.

For that reason, among others (I don’t trade stocks), I haven’t really spent much time on StockTwits either. But StockTwits just turned on a new feature a few days ago that finally made it click for me. It lets you follow stocks on Twitter, not just the people talking about them. All of a sudden, it is not about trying to figure out who you trust, it is about getting all the buzz on the stocks and companies you care about in realtime. This ability to follow stocks instead of people is a perfect example of how to take Twitter’s interest graph and put it on steroids.

People on StockTwits use a convention similar to hashtags whenever they Tweet about a stock. They put a “$” in front of the ticker. So you can find what people are saying about $GOOG or $AAPL. Now you can follow each of those tickers as well, and any mention of those stocks is placed into your StockTwits stream, along with the Tweets from the people you follow on the service as well. You can even follow mentions of private companies such as $TWIT and $FBOOK (hey, those aren’t publicly traded stocks—not yet, anyway). As people start following stocks, you can see their watchlists. Here’s StockTwits founder Howard Lindzon’s followed stocks, for instance, and here’s mine.

Before now, StockTwits was about random and not-so-random people talking about stocks on Twitter. But unless you knew these people already, were you really going to take stock-picking cues from someone named BullzzEye or RaginCajun? No offense. Those guys could be the most amazing traders on StockTwits, I have no idea. I really don’t have the time or inclination to find out either—which could be more my loss than theirs. But again, I don’t think I am alone here in being wary about taking stock advice from random strangers on social networks.

Following stocks instead of people changes the whole equation in my mind. It is no longer about trusting people, it is about collecting data. If I am trading $AAPL or $GOOG, I may very well learn about a market-moving announcement first on Twitter than anywhere else. By following these “stocks” on StockTwits, it is really more of a realtime warning system for traders. In the stock markets, timely information is money. And by following these filtered streams, I get both financial information and product/technology news. So as a news junkie, it is a very interesting filter for me. Also by following Tweets about a specific topic (anyone Tweeting about $GOOG or $NFLX), over time I should be able to figure out who to trust based on the quality of their Tweets on the subject, and then I can start following them if I want.

StockTwits has been evolving for some time beyond being a simple front-end for Twitter, and this makes the service even more compelling. But I would rather consume these stock-specific streams on Twitter itself. How cool would it be if you could follow $GOOG on Twitter or any other interest stream for that matter? StockTwits would need to create accounts for each ticker symbol (if that’s possible), or perhaps some sort of set of Twitter lists that people could follow. But this really points to the next step for Twitter itself. It needs to make it easier to follow your interests, not just people.

Yes, you heard this before. The Death of Cable TV. Yet, it hasn’t happened. But now, so many disruptions are happening in the video space, cable tv is really stepping towards the cliff. Don’t expect the cable industry to just give up.

We’ll get some new insights next week when the largest U.S. cable operator (23 million cable customers), Comcast, reports its Q3 earnings and subscriber count. Comcast cable customers dropped nearly 3% in Q2 compared to last year. In Q2 for the industry overall, a record 711,000 subscribers abandoned cable tv, and six of eight operators suffered their worst quarterly subscriber losses ever.

Just this month, a lot has happened:

• Google unveiled its Google TV platform less than 3 weeks ago. You can’t ignore Google. Hey, they just built a car that drives itself. But Thursday, in a battle that will likely become more frequent between old media and new, ABC, CBS and NBC blocked their programs from Google TV. MTV, Fox and HBO are still available, but that could change. Still, one TechCrunch post declared “I’ve seen the future and it begins on my sofa with Google TV.”
• Steve Jobs bragged this week that Apple has already sold 250,000 new Apple TVs. The first Apple TV shipped in 2007. It had its fans but didn’t take off like the iPod or iPhone. The second generation of Apple TV’s launched just last month. MG Siegler really likes the device, but admitted it’s not yet the killer device in the living room. To get there, he said, would require tv network subscription packages.
• “Watch Instantly” is booming at Netflix. A shocking statistic came out this week. 20% of Internet traffic during peak times in the U.S. is coming from Netflix.
  For more on Netflix’s plans, see Sarah Lacy’s interview with CEO Reed Hastings.
• Hulu Plus will be coming to the Roku box in the fall.
  For some, the Roku box may be the first step towards eliminating cable.
• Boxee announced the new Boxee Box will ship next month, both if you pre-ordered from Amazon or want to buy one in stores.
• Flurry reported Apple’s iOS Apps are responsible for the recent downward trend in TV ratings. The actual cause may be a bit broader.
• A TechCrunch post Friday suggested the future of TV is HTML5.

With all these alternatives, a J.D. Power and Associates survey released this month said consumers are less satisfied with the monthly pay-TV bills and cable subscribers are more likely to feel ripped off than telcom or satellite TV customers.

Why Does Cable TV Exist?

When cable tv first started in the 1940s, it was a disruptive technology. Community Antenna Television (CATV) solved a problem. Some homes, in mountainous regions, cities, and locations far away from the over-the-air broadcast transmitters couldn’t get a good signal. By setting up a large community antenna and retransmitting the signal on coaxial cables to those homes, the reception problem was solved. Some claim the first system was set-up in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania and cost subscribers $100 per hookup plus $2 a month.

As the industry grew, cable operators began to pick up distant signals, providing new programming choices for consumers. Even homes that could receive the over-the-air signals signed up for cable. And cable started producing its own exclusive, original channels. In 1975, HBO became the first cable network delivering its signal across the country, via satellite to cable systems, which then re-transmitted it to consumers. Ted Turner (“I was cable before cable was cool“), launched the first basic cable network distributed by satellite, WTBS, in 1976. Cable also offered local community programming, not available on the broadcast networks. I remember watching a news show at home produced at my junior high school. At the time, this blew my mind.
(Disclosure: I owe the cable industry for the first 14 years of my career, working at a place with a name starting with ‘Cable.’ But then I switched to the internet.)

What’s Changed

But all these once ‘cable-only’ benefits have changed. DSL, cable (yes, cable – more on that shortly) modems, and perhaps future fiber to the house mean video has many other routes to the home.

The once exclusive cable-only content is now becoming available elsewhere. At first, cable shows started appearing on DVDs after their first run on cable. But now, there are many more options. Cancelcable.com lists some non-cable ways to find your favorite shows. And local and user generated content now has a global reach and can be shared in a community of viewers with common broad or narrow interest.

There is one key stumbling block for getting more tv shows on the Internet though. Money. And it’s the reason for the network / Google TV dispute mentioned above. An AdAge article wisely pointed out

“The networks aren’t blocking Google TV because it’s Google. They are blocking Google TV because it is putting a web TV show, with web TV show economics, on a TV, which would be incredibly disruptive to their business.”

Revenue per viewer-minute is much less online vs. broadcast. This could change as more ads appear on the web distribution and they become more targeted and interactive. Also, show or channel subscriptions could solve this problem.

The one thing that cable does have going for it is: its relatively easy to use. Make a call, someone comes over to your house and hooks it up, and then you control it with your remote. (Well, you may have waited for hours on hold for someone to answer your call and then waited all day for the installer to arrive.) Up to now, you had to be a tech savvy person to cancel cable and hook up your own system. No one from Google, Apple, or Netflix is going to come to your house and help you hook the new devices up. As Danny Sullivan found out, hooking up your Google TV is not quite ready for prime time or the masses. But, expect it to improve. And other offerings, such as Apple TV, are making it easier. The cable alternatives are moving from technologies only early adopters use to ones the broader market can figure out.

Cable Has Faced Competitors Before
The cable tv industry is no stranger to competition. Cable survived competition from the DVD rental store. (Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy. Apple just killed the optical drive in its new laptops.) Satellite TV providers DirectTV (18.7 million customers in the U.S.) and Dish Networks (14.3 million customers) have some loyal customers, but haven’t been able to stop cable. But, the internet will be a tougher challenge.

The Cost of Cable
One of the biggest problems for the cable industry is its high cost. Growing cost was the biggest reason one study reported one in eight consumers said they would eliminate or scale back their cable, satellite or other pay-TV service in 2010. The cable industry tries to explain that the cost of cable is going down. Check out this graph on Price Per Viewing Hour, on the National Cable & Telecommuncations Association website

Yeah, right. That’s not going to convince any cable subscriber looking at their monthly bill.

The cable industry has resisted “a la carte” pricing, allowing customers to pick and choose which channels they watch and pay for. Cable networks make part of their money from subscription fees paid by customers to the cable operators and then to the networks. So smaller networks could go out of business under such a pricing plan. There’s also a debate over whether “a la carte” pricing would save or cost consumers money. Internet TV already offers pick and pay pricing options. New media can handle this much better than old media. For my money, I think I’d come out with a big savings under an “a la carte” system.

Cable Fights Back
While the cable industry is losing basic cable subscribers, they are still doing fine financially. Comcast stock is up 15% so far this year, vs. 9% for NASDAQ. Comcast’s internet business (cable modem users) is growing. Comcast, teaming up with Time Warner cable, is also pushing TV Everywhere, which puts TV channels online and behind a paywall only cable subscribers can view. And of course, Comcast is planning to merge with broadcaster and cable network giant NBC Universal in a complex transaction. But the new joint venture won’t include Comcast’s cable systems. The deal still needs regulators approval, and the FCC has asked the companies how the merging of the biggest broadband provider and major content firm will impact the distribution of online videos.

There’s also speculation that cable boxes could come with ‘Google TV’ built-in for an additional fee. But, would consumers really choose to pay the higher fee and keep their cable box, when other options will be cheaper?

The Immediate Future
The Death of Cable remains a hot topic. Next month, a panel at Streaming Media West will discuss “Cutting the Cord on TV: Will Online Video Really Lead to Cable’s Demise?”

I actually still have cable. I’m inches away from dropping it, but there are still a few shows not available elsewhere that my wife enjoys. But, it’s hard to imagine those shows won’t be available elsewhere in the near future. I know a lot of folks who keep cable for live sports, but cable surviving as a sports-only service is hard to fathom.

More than a year ago, writer and entrepreneur Paul Kedrosky wrote “Many people are coming to the correct conclusion that in the age of Hulu, Boxess, Bittorrent, etc., that cable TV is an over-priced relic of another entertainment age.” Now that the likes of Apple, Google, Netflix and others are aggressively joining the game, the days of that over-priced relic seem even more numbered.

For more information, check out other TechCrunch posts:

• MG Siegler and Jason Kincaid talking about Google TV, Apple TV, Boxee on this week’s OMG/JK.
• I’m Giving Cable 6 Months, Then I’m Cutting Off Its Head
• Estimate: 800,000 U.S. Households Abandoned Their TVs For the Web
• Andrew Keen interviews Justine Bateman on the Internet not becoming Cable TV

Sario Marketing, the company behind a digital marketplace for unique on-demand content called Textbroker.com, has landed a “multi-million Euro growth financing round” through funds advised by ViewPoint Capital Partners.

The German company plans to use the proceeds to expand into existing markets as well as new markets within and beyond Europe, starting with France.

If you spend any amount of time online you’re probably very familiar with the above website, “Let Me Google That For You.” LMGTFY is a super smug and hilarious site built for those sick of “all those people that find it more convenient to bother you with their question rather than google it for themselves.“

As all of us know, it is super annoying when your co-worker or worse boss sends you an email (!) asking an easily google-able question, therefore making you google the answer to send back and wasting your and their precious time. Granted.

The issue is, just like cell phones have made it easier to forget phone numbers, “google” as verb is now a replacement for the word and action “think.” The search engine has become such a stand-in repository for human knowledge that it has, among other things, compromised the entire genre of games based on trivia.

Consider the example of how Google put an end to the “Phone A Friend” lifeline on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”;

“Because of Google,” Mecurio said. “Everyone would call their friend and the friend would start Googling to get the answer. The contestant would be like, ‘Hey Joe, aspirin. A-S-P-I-R-I-N.’ We could hear them typing on their keyboard!”

Google has basically become an extension of our brain, the epitome of Steve Jobs’ “bicycle for our minds.” Twice this week I have asked questions that would be better suited to a human rather than an search engine algorithm and both times I’ve been met with a “just Google it”-esque response.

One of those inquiries was about directions to a local restaurant and the Google Maps walking directions and the directions I needed to get there safely while walking and biking were two very different things (yes, I know about Google Biking directions, still unavailable on the iPhone). I ended up getting lost in the rain because in the mist I couldn’t see the very narrow bridge across the 101 freeway that the Google Maps directions indicated.

Google is not omniscient. It doesn’t understand that the shouting coming from next door is probably a faster and more importantly more viscerally satisfying indicator of whether the SF Giants just won the NL Championship Series than any keywords I could search. There are countless examples of “Google fail” (available, yes, through Google) that are constant reminders of how the service cannot account for all the intricacies and subtleties of the human experience.

And while it’s great to have access to an index of the largest compilation of information humanity has ever seen at my literal fingertips, I’m going to continue to ask people things like, “What’s the best place to get pizza in San Francisco?” or “How do you complete this function on Excel?,” even if it is on forums like Quora.

How do you think Google got all that information in the first place?

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by HubPages CEO Paul Edmondson on how Hubpages succeeded in amassing visitors.

After the recent TechCrunch post about HubPages, we received several questions about how HubPages got to 39 million unique visitors per month.  Here’s how we did it:

Four years ago, during our launch in August 2006, we wanted to do three main things to create a successful social content community: first, we wanted to make it easy for authors to create a one-page topical website; second, we wanted to drive traffic to the author’s content; and third, we wanted to share the majority of the revenue back with the author.

We had planned for natural search to be a major source of traffic, but it wasn’t until November of 2006 that we started to get measurable traffic from search engines.  To this day, we continue to refine our platform to help authors on HubPages to have the best opportunity to show up in the natural search results.  One of the key metrics we learned was about the longevity of content.  Content created on HubPages peaks in traffic on average nearly three years after it’s created.  This knowledge helped our business become more predictable.  For the author, creating a HubPages article is like putting a little bit of money in the bank that is going to increase its value over the next three years and then continue at that level for the foreseeable future.  The large quantity of content that was created early in the life of HubPages dramatically increased in revenue over 3 years, and allowed us to continue to grow the company.

We became a metrics focused company.  The two key drivers of our business are Hub production and revenue per thousand Hub views.  Based on these drivers, we developed a model that allowed us to do sophisticated micro-marketing including search engine marketing to attract writers.  Through analysis of Hubs created by new authors, our models are able to predict a close estimate of the traffic and revenue that a new author will generate over various time intervals. This prediction model has been significant in our growth.

In the early days, we decided we didn’t want to be the arbiter of quality or try to control what people wrote, but we soon discovered that high-quality authors and advertisers did not feel comfortable with the fully open publishing platform that included adult content. So, in July of 2007, about a year after our launch, we modified our terms of service and took leading steps in the social content category to become a porn-free site.  The short-term impact was over a 30% drop in traffic, but it reaped long term gains.  We also continued to build anti-spam technologies and put in place requirements for publishing on HubPages that improves the overall quality.

Then we wanted to give insight to authors about the type of content we saw working well on HubPages so that they could earn more. We started hosting contests about writing on evergreen topics.  We started incorporating analytics into each page of the site that showed authors their traffic sources.

We continue to invest in specialty tools that teach authors what pages to link to with the Interlinking Tool and how to refine the titles of their Hubs with the Title Tuner Beta.  By taking the data we collected, and putting it inline with the tools, authors became more successful on our platform.

HubPages is a set of technologies, but we really are about authors.  We took pro-writer stances by letting the author choose what they wanted to write on, and giving them ownership of their content, so that the revenue they earn can increase over time.  As the author community grew, we built features that fostered communication – like the ability to follow and compliment other authors.  As a result, HubPages’ reputation as a writing community continues to grow.

Now, going on our fifth year of business and with nearly 140% growth in the last 12 months in terms of visitors, I can see the site growing well into the future based on our three original tenets of making it easy to create content, driving traffic and sharing the revenue.

We had a special guest for this week’s episode of OMG/JK, the show I host alongside fellow writer Jason Kincaid: the new MacBook Air. If you’ve been waiting to see two guys endlessly fawn over something, watch above.

And once we wiped the drool off of our faces, we also discussed Kleiner Perkins’ new sFund, the $250 million fund to back new social applications. And we talk a bit about the Google TV, its awful remotes, and the quickly heating up connected television space.

Here are some posts relevant to the topics we discuss:

• Behold: The New MacBook Air [Pictures]
• MacBook Air Apparent: I Have Never Used My Computer’s Optical Drive
• Free As A Bird: Initial Thoughts After A Day With The New MacBook Air
• John Doerr Talks sFund And iFund But Not fbFund Or aFund
• The Kleiner Perkins sFund: A $250 Million Bet That Social Is Just Getting Started
• Live: Kleiner Perkins Unveils The $250 Million sFund With Facebook, Zynga, and Amazon
• With Google TV, I May Never Leave The Sofa Again
• ABC, CBS And NBC Shut Out Google TV: Fox And MTV Still Available
• Wow, Sony’s Google TV Remote Looks Like A Ten Thousand Button Nightmare

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All the hoopla over the Wall Street Journal’s so-called Facebook “privacy breach” article, it’s subsequent and curiously-timed MySpace followup, and also the New York Times’ take on the ability of Facebook advertisers to target ads for nursing schools to gay men is unwittingly creating cover for a social networking privacy issue that’s much bigger.  It might be surprising to some, but it turns out that U.S. federal agents have been urged to “friend” people in order to spy on them.

The feds operate such social sting operations aided by the fact that there are very few individuals that actually know every single person in their “friend” list on Facebook.  For instance, it is typical to connect to someone because one thinks they might have met them.  Or, a connection might take place because two people share common interests and want to view each other’s news posts going forward.  But that’s not how the government sees it.

In a memo obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) discovered that the Feds see Facebook as a psychological crutch for the needy.  Here’s a direct quote from a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) memo: “Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of “friends” link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know.”  And it gets worse.

The memo explains that these “tendencies” provide “an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities.”  Translation: spy on unsuspecting people on Facebook and MySpace in order to catch the bad guys.

Such tactics are decidedly creepy (how many completely innocent people are they spying on), but the argument could be made that if you have nothing to hide, then why worry?  Here’s why: many people post items to their profiles that they forget to update or that are not necessarily true, and which they certainly wouldn’t be saying if they knew they were under investigation.  Indeed, a recent study initiated by UK insurance company Direct Line concluded that “people are more likely to be dishonest when chatting using technology, such as Twitter, than they would be face to face.”

Why is it that people might lie more on social media than in person?  According to Psychologist Glenn Wilson, “we sometimes use these means of communication rather than a face-to-face encounter or a full conversation when we want to be untruthful, as it is easier to fib to someone when we don’t have to deal with their reactions or control our own body language.”  This leads to a few common sense conclusions.

First, government officials need to take note that one should not believe everything one reads on the Internet—even if it is generated by a “person of interest.”  Second, as the EFF’s Jennifer Lynch pointed out, “the memo makes no mention of what level of suspicion, if any, an agent must find before conducting such surveillance, leaving every applicant as a potential target.”  In a country that prides itself on freedom of speech, government should not be in the business of creating an atmosphere that could chill expression.

On October 18^th, Congressmen Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Joe Barton (R., Texas) sent Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg a letter in which they expressed their concern about marketing companies that “gathered and transmitted personally identifiable information about Facebook users and those users’ friends.”

To many tech folks, it seems more than a bit hypocritical for government representatives to be going after Silicon Valley companies for using social networking data when the government is doing exactly the same thing itself (and more).  In addition to bureaucrats urging agents to befriend targets, the EFF also discovered that the Department of Homeland Security used “a ‘Social Networking Monitoring Center’ to collect and analyze online public communication during President Obama’s inauguration.”  And, recall how Google Maps has been used to track down hoes with “unpermitted” pools in Long Island, NY.  Those Big Brother moves are much more disconcerting than Facebook applications using referrer URLs to better target ads.

Editor’s note: Guest author Sonia Arrison is a senior fellow in technology studies at the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute and has been writing about privacy issues for over a decade. Follow her on Twitter @soniaarrison.

Photo credit: Flickr/nolifebeforecoffee.

While there are many players in the mobile advertising market, there’s no doubt that there’s a little bit of a rivalry between Google’s ad network AdMob and Apple’s new foray into mobile ads, iAd. Some say iAd is taking some of AdMob’s share in the mobile ad market thanks to better performance. One of the cornerstones to iAd’s claimed success is that the format was developed by the company that actually makes both the device and OS and provides a more engaging experience. The same theory is probably what has made RIM enter the mobile ad wars, recently launching a mobile ad platform for BlackBerry phones. But AdMob contends that its platform is still appealing to advertisers because it allows brands to reach consumers across many different mobile platforms with similar engaging ad formats, whereas programs like iAd restrict advertisers to one device. Oh, and there’s the minimum $1 million ad buy Apple reportedly requires to serve ads through its network.

Of course, it’s not surprising that AdMob is pushing its multi-platform network as its competitive advantage; the openness of Google’s network is its badge of honor. But some well-known advertisers are actually choosing AdMob because of its multi-platform support for many devices, especially with the ability to target both iPhone and Android users (which is a steadily growing population).

For example, Seattle’s Best Coffee chose AdMob for its campaign promoting the coffee company’s “Latte In A Can” product. Robson Grieve, the President of Creature, the ad agency responsible for the campaign, said that AdMob was the most logical choice because it was the “best chance to get a cross plaform consolidated campaign.”

The campaign included ads ranging from standard banners, animated banners with text links, to full page interactive interstitials on both Android and Apple devices. So far, he says performance has been great. More than 139,000 users were delivered to Seattle’s Best Coffee’s mobile site from the ads, and the full page expandable units had an interaction rate of 5.7 percent. The Interactive Interstitial formats earned a click-through rate of 5.4 percent, while CPM placements averaged a CTR of 0.9 percent.

Another well-known brand, car manufacturer Infiniti recently ran a cross-platform campaign across a range of devices including iPhone, Android and iPad with a series of advertisement formats that promised the interactivity and engagement of Apple’s iAd.

Of course, Google’s AdMob also helps companies target Android devices as well. Restaurant reservation platform OpenTable also chose AdMob to promote its Android app. The company ran CPC text ads on mobile websites and more than 16,000 Android apps on the network. During the campaign, daily downloads of the app increased by 125 percent and installs took place over 75 different Android devices. OpenTable also ran and iOS app promotion campaign with AdMob as well, and saw positive results.

On the other hand, Dictionary.com recently ran a similar ad campaign with Apple’s iAd on iPhone devices, and saw its overall iPhone mobile app eCPM (effective cost-per-thousand impressions) increase by 177 percent. Dictionary.com declined to reveal CTRs but did say that iAds are performing two to three times better than the average mobile display ads. Other brands have also seen positive engagement results with the iAd platform. For example, an ad for Dove products saw a “double-digit” percentage of users who wanted more information about the product that was advertised, with 20 percent of viewers returning to the advertisement. In august, Nissan reported CTRs for its iAd were five times the click-through-rates of same campaign on websites.

Of course, it’s tough to make an accurate comparison of AdMob’s data without comparable data from Apple’s iAd platform. We’ve received some statistics from the developer side on how much iAds are earning (which have been a mixed bag). A source with knowledge of the technology tells us that iAd CTRs are 0.5 percent to 0.8 percent generally, sometimes as high as 1 to 1.5 percent. One iAd developer claimed iAd CTRs as high as 11.8 percent (that’s compared to the 0.9 percent for the Seattle’s Best campaign). This seems high and could be an outlier. And this is not an apples to apples comparison (no pun intended) because we’re not sure if the CTRs are for the same type of ad format.

This iAd data on CTRs is inline with other reports as well. On this Apple developer forum, a user anecdotally reported that the developer’s app was seeing zero clicks on 700 iAd impressions. In contrast, the developer writes, AdMob reports around 10 clicks per 2000, in his experience. Another developer writes, ” I had 3000 impressions and 23 clicks on AdMob (0.77% CTR), I had 2200 and 14 clicks on iAds (0.61% CTR).”

Jason Spero, Google’s director of mobile for the Americas (he previously ran North America for AdMob before it was acquired by Google); says that because mobile is a collection of devices with different size screens, OS platforms, speeds and more, Google is trying to minimize the technology that advertisers need to deal with.

There are a few things we know for sure. With a $1 million minimum ad spend, iAd is definitely not going to replace AdMob’s more flexible advertising network. And with continued growth in the number of iPhone users, Apple’s iAd platform will be appealing for those big brands who can afford it. However, mobile advertising is on track to become a $1 billion market next year and there seems to be enough room for everyone to play nicely and make a few bucks.

Seeing a need to help 60 million Americans manage their $4 trillion dollars in retirement accounts, Mike and Ryan Alfred launched BrightScope in 2008. They headed to Washington, DC, to obtain electronic data on 401K plans from the Department of Labor. They assumed that since every employer is required to provide the government with this information, it would be readily available to any citizen.

But the brothers were wrong. Labor Department officials first said that they didn’t have these data; and when challenged, they offered to provide millions of pages of printed reports—at a cost of five cents a page. The entire data set would have cost a fortune, filled 1400 boxes, and been impossible to use. Undeterred, Mike and Ryan started a lobbying campaign.  With the help of several Senators, they caused the government to relent and give them electronic copies of the reports they needed.

This was before Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, and CTO, Aneesh Chopra, joined the White House, and before President Obama vowed to provide the American people with the data they owned and the ability to use it—so that entrepreneurs like the Alfreds wouldn’t have to go begging. Eighteen months ago, data.gov was born, with the release of 47 government data sets of information. Today, there are more than 250,000 data sets and hundreds of applications that use them.  New data sets are being made available every week, and localities like San Francisco, New York City, the State of California, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts have launched web sites. Countries such as Canada, Australia, and the U.K are also releasing their data. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world worldwide web, is behind the U.K. effort. And legendary publisher Tim O’Reilly is championing a new movement, called Gov 2.0, to maintain the momentum of change.

With the data they obtained, Mike and Ryan were able to create a web site that allows consumers to learn how their retirement plans compare with others. Some retirement plans charge more than 4% a year in fees. How is anyone going to get to retirement paying 4% a year in fees? The BrightScope tools allow consumers—and employers—to easily learn when they are getting ripped off and quickly determine that a change needs to be made. The company is growing rapidly: last year it booked $100K in revenue; this year it expects to net $3 million and achieve profitability; next year it expects to hit the $10 million mark.

The opportunities aren’t just in mining financial data. Sonpreet Bhatia launched My City Way—a mobile applications platform, available in 30 cities around the world, that provides information on things like public restrooms, transit, traffic, tourist attractions, and restaurants. This is based on data provided by the local governments. So when you’re traveling to San Francisco and need to know what BART train to catch or the latest restaurant-inspection results, you can look up San Francisco Way App on your iPhone. If you hate the NYC traffic situation, check out live traffic cameras or find a good parking spot using NYC Way App. Other city-based applications provide everything from volunteer opportunities to lookup of information on traffic-ticket and bill payment. My City Way has had more than a million downloads in its first year and expects to hit the 15 million download mark next year.

The list of available data sets is endless:

• The federal government is opening up health data, the information it has on health care at the national, state, and county levels, by age, gender, race/ethnicity, and income; data on the quality, cost, and accessibility of public health (such as obesity rates and smoking rates); community-health indicators and rankings; and more. Entrepreneurs are already building applications that allow citizens to understand health performance in their area and others; “dashboards” that monitor public health; and social-networking applications that allow people to share best practices in health care, compare performance, and challenge each other.
• The Education department is, similarly, making available data on the performance of students in different schools by grade and other factors. Entrepreneurs can build applications that challenge these schools to perform more highly and provide parents with information about different possible institutions within which to educate their children.
• San Francisco City is providing information on everything from its purchase of pens and pencils, to the demographics of its health plans, to cruise schedules for ships that dock at its ports.

What is happening with the opening up of government data is nothing less than a silent revolution. There are literally thousands of new opportunities to improve government and to improve society—and to make a fortune while doing it. Unlike the Web 2.0 space, which is overcrowded, Gov 2.0 is uncharted territory: a new frontier to explore, grow things on, and settle on.  It’s fresh soil for unlikely seedling ideas that, if they take root, could lead to very successful ventures.  So I encourage entrepreneurs to stake their claims as soon as they can.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

Well this is sort of interesting. Apparently, Twitter has just kicked off something they’re calling their “Hack Week”. But instead of it being a time when various third-party developers get together to hack on things off of Twitter’s APIs, Twitter employees themselves are going to see what crazy cool things they can come up with.

A post on their engineering blog outlines this. “We’ll all be building things that are separate from our normal work and not part of our day-to-day jobs,” the post notes. This sounds a lot like Google’s “20 percent time” — Google employees are encouraged to spend up to 20 percent of their time working on interesting side projects not directly related to their actual work.

In the past, as they dealt with scaling problems, Twitter hasn’t had such a luxury. But with New Twitter out the door (and its new backend), they apparently feel comfortable enough to screw around on some crazy stuff. That could be good news for us, the users. Some of the coolest stuff Google has come up with has been from 20 percent projects.

Here’s the key blurb:

There aren’t many rules – basically we’ll work in small teams and share our projects with the company at the end of the week. What will happen with each project will be determined once it’s complete. Some may ship immediately, others may be added to the roadmap and built out in the future, and the remainder may serve as creative inspiration.

“Of course, we’ll keep an eye out for whales,” the post humorously notes as well.

Twitter has a Twitter account for the week as well where they’re asking for ideas.

Update: One interesting other tidbit is that this type of thing is exactly how Twitter itself was born. A few years ago, Evan Williams podcasting company, Odeo, wasn’t doing so well in the face of tough competition from big players like Apple, so a bunch of employees broke into teams to come up with new crazy ideas. A young engineer named Jack Dorsey came up with Twitter…

Gift card affiliate startup JungleCents announces today the closing of a seed round of financing in which billionaire Mark Cuban is the only investor. Along with Cuban as an advisor, the JungleCents board includes Hollywood producer Peter Safran, Guy Kawasaki and Bill Reichert from Garage Ventures.

While JungleCents would not disclose the amount of funding received, this looks like it was at most a $1.5 million seed round.

The concept behind JungleCents is a lead generation model similar to how airlines and travel companies such as Orbitz pay affiliate sites like Kayak between $10 to $30 for bringing in new customers. JungleCents, taking a cue from sites like Commission Junction, aims to reroute  customer acquisition costs into their giftcard model, accepting giftcards from companies in lieu of cash and then running those giftcards as daily deals off the JungleCents site in order to hook in users.

Negotiating deals with companies like Whole Foods, Beyond the Rack and Amazon, JungleCents offers their $20-$50 discount gift cards in limited quantity for a limited time. Founder Sameer Mehta describes the site, “sort of like a Gilt meets Groupon, but with higher margins and a stronger value proposition.”

Unlike Groupon, JungleCents offers giftcards instead of coupons and its deals are national instead of local, “It’s clear to us that JungleCents has a different niche- focusing on online merchants, big national brands, and offering consumers cash value that they can apply to their selection, vs. a discount on a specific item, ” says Mehta.

Mehta plans on using the extra funding to hire more people and extend out JungleCents marketing efforts but insists that having Mark Cuban as an investor is less about the money and more about the knowledge he brings to the table, “We get more value added from Mark’s investor contacts, and his knowledge is what it will take to push this deal to the next level.”

Cuban most recently invested in tracking startup BlueCava.

Image: JD Lasica

Whenever I ask Google about the versions of Chrome and Chromium, they’re quick to point out that the numbers don’t mean much these days. That said, they still show how quickly the search giant is able to get features implemented that they want to see in their browser. And they’re apparently not happy with the already fast speed at which things are progressing. They want things to go faster. So they’re working to speed things up even more.

A posting in their Chromium Google Group notes they’d like Chrome 8 to hit the beta stage sometime in the next several days. That’s pretty crazy considering that it was only 3 days ago that Google officially released Chrome 7. ”I’m working to shorten the beta cycle for this release as much as possible,” a developer wrote a couple days ago noting that meant they had to focus on blocker bugs (the bugs stopping a version from hitting beta). The developer also notes that this is a part of making sure Google’s ultra-fast six week release cycle remains feasible.

Chrome 8 hit the dev channel a couple weeks ago, and seems pretty solid already, so they’re likely to hit their target. Notably, this version brings the option to have Google Instant baked into the Omnibox.

And with version 8 about to go beta, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise the Chromium (the open source browser on which Chrome is based) already hit version 9 today.

It’s certainly possible that we’ll see Chrome 9 released before the official build of Internet Explorer 9 (currently in public beta). Even if the numbers don’t mean much, I’m sort of wondering what happens in the next year — are we really going to see Chrome 14, 15, 16, etc?

Chrome OS, meanwhile, continues to progress towards the version 1.0 launch. They’re currently on build 0.9.93.0, which uses Chrome version 8.0.552.9.

Back in August, while we were in the middle of confirming an exodus of talent from Palm after their acquisition by HP, I specifically asked them about the status of two guys: Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer. Palm refused to say anything about them. Perhaps now we know why.

As both have confirmed on their personal blogs today, as well as the HP/Palm Dev Center blog, they’re leaving the company as well. This is a big blow to the Palm platform as the two lead the important developer relations team for the company. It was their jobs to get people excited and developing for webOS. Now that task falls to HP.

The two lasted barely a year at Palm. When they were hired last September, it was considered a big coup, as the two are hugely respected in the web development community thanks to their work with Mozilla, and well-known thanks to their involvement with the blog Ajaxian. And the company wasted little time getting them out there on the talking circuit to ramp up interest in webOS.

So why are they leaving? Almaer compares working for a big company to a wedding, and a small company as a first date. As he writes today, “I am not looking to dance down the aisle just yet, no matter how pretty the bride is 😉“. As such, he and Galbraith are starting their own new company. They aren’t sharing too much just yet beyond the fact that they’re interested in mobile, HTML5, JavaScript, and the idea of “open”.

Here’s a key blurb from Almaer’s post:

If you look at our history with mainframes, PCs, and gaming consoles, they have all be closed proprietary systems. As developers we have been beholden to the vendors. When we are both aligned, things can work out, but as soon as the company has a change in strategy and we misalign, developers are often left by the wayside. This mirrors the world of dictatorships. If you could guarantee your dictator is fully aligned with you there is a good chance that the system will be far more efficient than a democracy. History has taught us though that 99.9% of the time this isn’t the case. The Open Web gives us an escape valve. It has its own problems and complexities (just as democracy), but that is all critically worth it.

So who is left of the key Palm team? Pretty much none of the execs beyond CEO Jon Rubinstein. And a bunch of other key people have trickled out over the past few months as well.

Almaer and Galbraith will be consulting for HP as the works continues on webOS. But it’s pretty much a child being raised in a foster home at this point. Sometimes that works out, sometimes it doesn’t. Let’s hope it’s the former in this case.

If you are a entrepreneur– especially a first time entrepreneur or an entrepreneur outside of Silicon Valley– you need to stop what you are doing and watch this video. Yes, it is 45 minutes long. But it’s worth it.

Last night at a Founder Institute event, super angel Mike Maples gave a talk about what he calls “pivots” and “thunder lizards.” Thunder lizards are startups born from atomic eggs that “emerge with attitude” want to disrupt and chew up their competition– both new world and old. They are big, chaotic, relentless and when successful, become huge companies. What helps make a thunder lizard successful is something Maples calls the “pivot.”

This isn’t about product iteration– the pivot has to do with business model. Business model shouldn’t be confused with “business plan,” Maples says. A business plan is a static thing, a business model charts money flowing out to create a product and money flowing back in from that product. A startup’s entire reason to exist is to have  more arrows going back in than arrows going out, and it’s always changing.

To some corners of the business world that may seem obvious, but in today’s build-a-product-throw-it-out-there-and-flip-it startup culture it is actually contrarian. A big reason? Pivots are really hard and painful to do.

In the talk below, Maples walks you through three examples he invested in: ngmoco, which did a pricing pivot; Chegg, which did a product pivot; and Odeo/Twitter, which did an entire company pivot. Maples doesn’t do that thing that startup PR departments love. He doesn’t sugar coat how horrifying and uncertain these moves were at the time. He doesn’t make the startups or investors sound like they’d seen the future through some magical product/market oracle. He shows that each of these pivots were made out of semi-desperation, and he talks about how risky each move was. In each case the entrepreneurs had something, but not enough to make a big business and they had to throw that thing they’d already slaved over away in order to get to the larger business. Watch the video for the details.

I keep hearing from other super angels out raising funds that LPs are ga-ga over Maples and until this talk I wasn’t sure why. Now, I get it. In one talk, he details severals ways his investing model is distinct from the broader super angel movement: He still believes this business is about homeruns. He still believes you have to have a business model. He believes product fit isn’t just lots of people using your product, it’s about being able to make money delivering it, otherwise, it’s “wasted innovation.” He still believes that huge upside usually requires huge, gut-wrenching risk.

Maples isn’t new school, he’s old school working in a very new funding reality where costs have collapsed, funding rounds are smaller and, as he says in the Q&A, entrepreneurs have all the power. “If you can’t get into thunder lizards can you really make a return?” he says. “If you don’t have a competitive advantage to get in the top 15 deals of the year, you don’t have a business. That’s been true the last 15 years and that will be true the next 15 years.”

We saw a great example that the homerun nature of venture capital is still in tact yesterday when Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers announced its sFund at Facebook. Coming out of the late 1990s there were two top funds: Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Sequoia kept believing in and investing in the Web– even during the post-crash aftermath. After the Friendster flame out, Kleiner Perkins did its own pivot to cleantech, with some partners even going so far as to say Web 2.0 wasn’t as big an opportunity. Clearly, the firm is zagging back. The reason they have credibility? Part of it is the firm’s history, but a lot of it is Zynga, and to a lesser degree ngmoco. Did Kleiner lose a step? Probably. They certainly missed a few of the Web 2.0 homeruns. But in the long run it may not matter that Kleiner didn’t believe in the movement when others were funding Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, because they got one of the top five companies in the wave and that’s what this business is about.

And, while we always like traffic-driving fights at TechCrunch, I give Maples class points for not taking pot shots at competitors, saying “I try really hard not to comment on how other people do their job.” He just puts up results. And the stories of the three companies he talks about show not only how those entrepreneurs can pivot, but how he as an investors pivots with them.