Category: Tech news

This probably isn’t too surprising. The Social Network, which had received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics, topped the box office opening weekend with $23 million in ticket sales (some of which was contributed by Facebook itself in a screening for employees on Friday).

While some analysts predicted that the film would open at $25 million, the movie’s performance is impressive. Of course, Sony’s relentless marketing campaigns and the Oscar-buzz surround the movie probably helped drive consumers to the box office.

The movie’s budget was rumored to be in range of $45 million to $52 million, and Sony is expecting The Social Network to bring in a total of $100 million.

Just for a basis of comparison, one of the largest box office opening weekends was The Dark Knight, which brought in $158 million in sales in its first weekend.

You can read our review of The Social Network here.

Photo Credit/Flickr/Eclectic

Ever thought to yourself: hey I would love to have all my Facebook friends’ profile pictures printed on one giant poster and decorate my living room wall with it? Yeah, me neither, but perhaps if you’d learn that you could do it, maybe you’d consider it.

Enter Printing Facebook, which, well, lets you print all your Facebook friends’ profile picture on one giant poster for you to decorate that living room wall with.

First of all, if you’re not in the contiguous United States, you’re out of luck as far as getting the poster shipped to you goes. If you are, and you have $25 burning in your pocket for something like this (including the shipping fee), you can head on over here to order your very own 20×40 real-life Facebook wall.

All “Friends Posters” come printed in high-resolution on quality photo paper, wrapped in tissue paper and rolled in a cardboard tube.

Artist Benjamin Lotan, who cooked up his “Friend Poster” thing just in time for the opening weekend of The Social Network, says this is only the first product in a series of many to come – in an email he says an option to print out your Tumblr blog will be out next.

I really hope for his sake there’s an audience for that – I can somewhat imagine people willing to order print-outs of their Facebook social graph, but their blogs?

I also hope for his sake that Facebook won’t throw a hissy fit over his use of the “Facebook” trademark in his website and service’s name, and for borrowing the look and feel of the Facebook site. Or anyone behind the Facebook movie for borrowing material for this promo clip:

Update: also check out OneMillionPeople, made by the guy who brought you the Million Dollar Homepage.

(Via email – FastCompany also covered the service)

Did you miss Tim Armstrong on stage or the Super Angel/ VC debate? Want to relive the glory of Qwiki’s victory?

Although you can find all our TechCrunch Disrupt videos at Techcrunch.TV, for your convenience, I’ve put together a visual guide, sorted by day, approximate time and category. We’ll be adding additional videos as they are processed.

To the 235,389 people who managed to catch parts of our live feed, thanks for watching!

The Hackathon

Disrupt / Monday, September 27

Monday Backstage Interviews

Disrupt / Tuesday, September 28

Tuesday Backstage Interviews

Disrupt / Wednesday, September 29

Wednesday Backstage Interviews

One of the most interesting discussions at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference was the debate between the “super angels” and VCs. No, I’m not referring to “AngelGate” or the question of which investor group squeezes entrepreneurs the most. Despite what they say, all investors are in the game for personal financial gain; it’s not about nurturing entrepreneurs or doing good for the world. The most interesting discussion—for entrepreneurs—was about whether a startup should raise lots of venture capital and go for the billion-dollar exit, or raise less money and be happy with a few million.

This issue is much more important than it seems: it affects the way you grow your company, and the focus you place on products and customers. When you go for the billion-dollar exit, you have to start with a master plan for owning a significant slice of a multi-billion-dollar market. You need to develop grand products for grand markets. This is good—you need a vision and a long-term focus. The problems begin when you start raising capital and racing to grow at all costs. And that is where the real chasm between the “super angels” and VCs is developing.

At the TechCruch event, “super angel” Dave McClure argued that there was nothing wrong with the $50 million exit. “It’s not a bad thing to be building a small mousetrap”, he said.  McClure told me, after the panel, that he believes that raising too much money can be harmful to a startup—it leads to bad habits and increases the chance of failure. In the race to build billion-dollar businesses, companies lose sight of their customers and crash more readily, after burning through large amounts of capital.  By aiming for smaller markets, startups can have a greater customer focus and build better products. And they can differentiate themselves from competitors going after bigger markets.

McClure is right. When you raise small amounts of money, expectations are small, and you have to bootstrap your way to success. You have to focus on building products very fast, validating that your customers really need them; and on bringing in revenue. The $50,000 to $250,000 that you raise through angel capital doesn’t go very far. You are largely on your own.

When instead you have millions in the bank after raising venture capital, you have the luxury of building products that are more strategic. You don’t need to ask customers what they need; you can let your gut guide you. This is great if your instincts are correct—you might build a Twitter or FaceBook.  But entrepreneurs are almost always wrong.  They really don’t understand their customers; they learn by trial and error. And what happens in the venture industry is that when one big-name VC funds one particular type of company, every other VC jumps on the same boat; it becomes a mad race to gain market share. Witness what is happening in the location-based services market with Foursqare and Gowalla—with all the new competitors. And with all the Groupon clones. Only a handful of the hundreds of companies that are receiving funding will survive. Maybe one—and this is a big maybe—will become a sustainable billion-dollar business.

Then there is the issue of the exit. If you’re a founder and own 50% of your startup, a $30 million acquisition can be life-changing. With a $15 million payout, you go from poverty to riches. You’re set for life: you can afford to send the kids to the best schools, buy a multi-million dollar house on the hills, live a great lifestyle, and personally fund your next startup (or you can become a “super angel”). The difference to you between $15 million and $150 million (if you go for the billion-dollar exit) is small—the extra millions really won’t change your world that much more. But for VCs, these small exits don’t make sense: because of the big funds they manage and the limited numbers of companies VCs can involve themselves with, they need to make big investments to get big returns. A modest 2x return is of no interest to them. That is why they often block acquisition offers of less than $100 million. VCs see the acquisition offer as an endorsement of the company’s products and usually want to invest even more so they can go for the billion-dollar exit. This usually puts them at odds with the company founders. (There are shades of gray here: VCs can always buy part of the stock that founders own, but all else is the same. And VCs often force companies to replace company founders with “more seasoned management” as the companies grow.)

As well, the lower the price, the higher the number of potential acquirers. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of companies that can do a $50M deal and only a few that can spend $500M on an acquisition.

There are also alternatives to early exits, as I wrote about in this piece: Is Entrepreneurship Just About the Exit? Most entrepreneurs are happy to build a lifestyle business that pays the bills and lets them learn; grow; and “enjoy” the entrepreneurial journey. Angel investors may well endorse this strategy if they can see the steady, long-term returns.

So my advice to entrepreneurs is to always think big and dream of changing the world—but be pragmatic and live within your means. You are more likely to succeed—and possibly to build a billion dollar business—if you stay focused on your customers and grow at a sustainable pace. And if you’re lucky enough to get a life-changing acquisition offer like Mike Arrington just did, follow his example. Go for the billion dollars when you start your next company—by then you’ll have more experience and you won’t be risking the kids’ college education.

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.

At the Tahoe Tech Talk this weekend, someone from the audience introduced themselves as a representative of Wheretheladies.at, a domain whose extreme ridiculousness piqued my interest a) because it is actually real and b) because most events in San Francisco can easily go from a bonestorm to a bronado to a category five hisicane in like a span of 30 minutes.

Founded by Path’s Danny Trinh and Digg’s Jeff Hodsdon, Wheretheladies.at is an iPhone-friendly web service which uses Foursquare to gage how many females have checked into venues in your vicinity, stack ranking and featuring the places that have the most women checking in. Seriously.

The service crawls the Foursquare API to track female checkins based on first names which admittedly leaves room for inaccuracies (here’s looking at you dude Courtney). But, as someone who deals with dorky guys desperate for practice consistently, I think this is brilliant and totally gets an “A” for effort and vision.

Says Trinh, “The few chicks that check-in are a decent sample of where more might be.” Using any female checkins as signifiers of an even larger “lady” ratio, it’s like Trinh and Hodson have totally made an app giving nerds some kind of advantage in natural selection.

And while apps like Assisted Serendipity and Kissmobs attempt to do something similar, Wheretheladies.at has the simplest solution UI-wise  for the moment. The service, which started out as a joke between friends at SXSW, is currently experiencing high volume traffic in San Francisco and is branching out to other cities shortly, targeting New York, LA and then Minneapolis. A Wheretheladies.at iPhone app is also in the works, which, get this, is JUST A BIG COMPASS POINTING YOU IN THE DIRECTION OF LADIES (see screencap to the left).

Ladies and gentlemen, but especially ladies, what we are witnessing here is called evolutionary advantage.  On this bent, Trinh and Hodsdon are not looking for funding and are currently just focusing on “helping our fellow dudes around the world find the ladies.”

Remember three years ago, when Microsoft paid a quarter-billion dollars for 1.6% of Facebook and the exclusive right to run banner ads across Facebook.com? Tell the truth, how many of you thought that was a killer business decision? I can’t say I did at the time. But as that deal is about to expire in 2011, Facebook’s status as a revenue juggernaut is rarely questioned any more.

In fact, I have been mulling over data from both companies, and I’m ready to declare in public my belief that Facebook will be bigger in five years than Google is right now, barring some drastic action or accident. Futhermore, Facebook will grow without needing to cut into Google’s core business of text ads, which are still 99% of Google’s profits. Even if every single Facebook user performs just as many searches with Google as ever—including Google Instant, mobile search, and YouTube—Facebook will inexorably grow as big as Google is today and maybe bigger, because Madison Avenue’s brands are less interested in targeting than they are in broadcasting to vast mother-loving buckets of demographically correct eyeballs, and Facebook has become the perfect platform for that.

What do I mean by bigger? Facebook already has more page views than Google. People already spend more time spent on Facebook than Google. I’m referring to the life blood of any business: revenues.

Google’s 2010 revenues will be $28 billion, give or take a billion. The goal of this writeup is to illustrate the ways that Facebook’s annual revenues could grow from $2 billion to more than $30 billion in five years a diverse set of revenue streams that have one thing in common: people. Facebook’s future revenue streams, like their applications, are naturally social, and engage consumers with social intent, not just a widget or “social layer.” We repeat: social is not a layer you add; it is core to monetization.

Facebook has figured out its business model, and wants to keep it out of the public eye as long as possible. Facebook’s alleged revenue has grown from $275 million in 2008 to $635 million in 2009 to a rumored $2
billion this year, which is much higher than the also-impressive $1.2 billion number circulating earlier this year. Let’s pause and reflect for a moment. Facebook is allegedly already earning double the
revenues Google reported when it filed to go public.

When we do the archaeological dig of Google’s actual revenues during its private years, we discover similar pattern to Facebook’s: $86 million in 2001, $440 million in 2002, and $1.4 billion in 2003 . . . and so on. Note, however, this divergence:  Google Web Sites earned more than twice the revenue in 2009 as the gross evenue brought in through Google Network Web Sites, even though in 2004 they were roughly the same. The value of properties Google owns has been much greater and faster growing than all of the external Web sites with whom Google shares revenue. This will almost certainly be even more true of Facebook, given the private nature of much of its content. For many consumers, Facebook is the Web.

Facebook’s second-mover advantage affords the company the luxury of offering both types of Internet money-making product: Advertising and Commerce.  As a result, instead of an open Web-like ecosystem, Facebook could choose to partner with a few friends—Microsoft, Amazon, Zynga, perhaps even Apple—and also lock out Google and anyone else, big or small, who Facebook deems not a friend, to best serve its revenue goals.

So, how does Facebook ride Advertising and Commerce into a future of more revenues than Google? By creating a virtuous cycle of cross-promotion: targeted lead-generations and subsequent transactions feed into the next series of even-better-targeted lead-generations and subsequent transactions, naturally.

Facebook Advertising does not directly compete with the text advertisements of Google’s AdWords and AdSense. Instead Facebook is siphoning from Madison Avenue TV ad spend dollars. Television advertising represented $60 billion in 2009, or roughly one out of every two dollars spent on advertising in the U.S.; the main challenge marketers have with the Internet till recently has been that there aren’t too many places where they can reach almost everybody with one single ad spend. Facebook fixes that problem. Specifically, Sheryl Sandberg went on record in August saying that some brands have increased their spending twentyfold in the past year:

Two years ago the big brands were experimenting with us.  They started buying with us a year ago. Now, they’re going big.

She took this observation even further in a recent BusinessWeek article, “Facebook Sells Your Friends“:

Davide Grasso, Nike’s chief marketing officer, says Facebook “is the equivalent for us to what TV was for marketers back in the 1960s. It’s an integral part of what we do now.”

…

In 2008 [Sheryl Sandberg] left Google for the experience of running a startup—and because she believed Facebook was the better bet to win in brand advertising, which accounts for 90 percent of the $600 billion ad market. “We are in a much bigger market than Google, and we have much, much more runway,” says Sandberg.

She’s not the only one who believes how huge this market opportunity is. Just in the last week, TechCrunc quoted Paul Buchheit in his belief that people are significantly undervaluing Facebook compared with Google, and interviewed Peter Thiel about his conviction that Facebook is undervalued at $30 billion. Of course, these are all self-interested insiders.  I scratched my head at this week’s declarations of undervaluation, until I took the perspective of Mad Men.

Facebook Ads employ demographic characteristics (Age/ Sex / Location and Interests), which corporate brand managers and television ad buyers have been accustomed to purchasing for half a century. By contrast, Google AdWords target on the intent revealed by search queries, a practice that has seemed odd and new to Madison Avenue for the past decade and frankly has many of them worried for their jobs.

But it’s not just Madison Avenue. I keep thinking about putting BusinessWeek’s $600 billion ad market in context; Google seems to be having as hard a time getting into brand advertising as Microsoft had getting into search. By contrast, Facebook is making this look easy. Yahoo just paid $1 per like, and buying fans is only going to get more expensive as the lifetime value of a “fan” is better understood.

Five years from now, could enough brand managers and television ad buyers be so impressed with their returns from Facebook campaigns that they collectively increase their spending on Facebook fivefold to $10 billion annually? Heck yes, even if that entire budget comes out of the current $60+ billion annual TV ad budget (and remember, that is just in the U.S.).  Especially if the entire budget comes out of that, because Facebook is more targeted, has better analytics, and engages its audience directly and interactively through conversations—aka chat and photos.

Plus, Facebook is getting stronger at developing products for advertisers, and once they set their mind on adding algorithmic search and/or an AdWords or AdSense competitor, I’m sure some of the over 100 ex-Google engineers who are now at Facebook will volunteer for the job. Could that also represent a multi-billion dollar advertising stream by siphoning some market share from Google for searches placed within Facebook? Perhaps, though I note again that they don’t even have to go there to reach $30 billion in annual revenues.

Five years from now, billions of dollars of advertising will be spent to direct consumers from one part of Facebook . . . to another part of Facebook, where we’ll be offered real items to buy for ourselves or others (birthday alarm, anyone?), premium services to subscribe to, virtual goods to procure and play with, and deals-of-the-moment available for immediate purchase (or we’ll miss out forever!).

This is where the manyfold revenue streams of Facebook Credits become apparent, and they all have in common this observation: if you give Facebook users a few free Credits with the block of Credits they buy (at Target, online, and soon anywhere), they will spend all of those Credits and then want to purchase more. Rather than a straightforward discount, the new math of Facebook Credits means that consumers will never quite be sure if they’re getting a discount or cash back or more for less. Kind of like frequent flier miles where we’re never quite sure what the conversion rate is. Or eBay auctions where we “win” the ability to spend money.

Facebook Credits are poised to be this generation’s American Express: an “affordable luxury” lifestyle brand and credit card with reward programs, frequent flier miles, and other incentives built right in so that the more you use it, the more you earn.  ”Facebook Platinum”, anyone? I would have thought they’d need a better brand name than “Facebook Credits” but then again, I would have thought they’d need a better brand name than “Facebook”.

Off the top of my head I can think of five potential billion-dollar revenue streams that dovetail into Facebook Credits—Games, Groupon/Pages & Places, Amazon/Commerce, Inbox, and Photos—and if you really pushed me I could probably think of more, like Banking.  (Remember when Peter Thiel thought part of PayPal’s business model was to capture the float? Well, guess who’s bringing sexyback…)

Games. Facebook is running the real mafia wars, taking 30% while letting the game developers do the heavy lifting. (Hello, Disney, EA, and Zynga!).  Can worldwide virtual goods and other in-game payments represent $10 billion annually floating through Facebook in 5 years? You betcha; more so if “social gambling” Zynga-style becomes more en vogue (that is: legal authorities say it’s okay). Facebook’s 30% cut of that? A cool $3 billion.

Groupon / Pages and Places. This one’s simple: Facebook should just copy 2010′s Flavor of the Year, Groupon, and make it self-service for every Facebook Page and Facebook Place.  Early bird got the worm; Facebook will get the gold. (All that glitters is not Gilt.) Imagine if any Facebook Page or Facebook Place could make Groupon-like deals with its fans any time it wants. Now there would be an actual reason to pay Facebook money for ads that can augment the fan base of a Page or Place!

Holy carp, Batman, they’ve been teaching us to fish all along:  Suddenly consumers have a reason to LIKE Facebook Pages and Facebook Places!! LIKE something, get a deal: it’s that simple.  Groupon’s Gap promotion grossed $11 million in a single summer day in 2010; imagine, five years from now, millions of Facebook Pages and Facebook Places offering regular but expiring deals to their fans every single day.  Wild guess: in aggregate an average of $100 million in deals sold every day worldwide, or $36.5 billion of deals sold every year. At a 30% cut that’s a solid $10 billion straight into Facebook’s pocket per year. In the words of Keanu Reeves, Whoa.

Amazon / Commerce. Amazon was so smart to partner with Facebook: my informal survey of 5000 Facebook friends found many of them willing to make their purchases (and share them!) from within Facebook in exchange for extra Credits.  The details remain to be determined for consumer rewards: will it be like Discover (1% cashback on purchases) or like Visa (earn points! get entered in drawings!) or something else entirely? We’ll see.

If Amazon helps Facebook figure out how to make malls-with-walls and consequently make real shopping money, I have no doubt other e-tailers will follow. If PayPal’s 2009 revenue was $2.8 billion with 87 million active accounts, it’s not a stretch to predict that five years from now Facebook too will have 100 million to 150 million active Credits accounts (at least!) bringing in $5 billion in revenue from this business unit alone. Commerce is the grease that accelerates everything, so it seems like it’s just a matter of time before Facebook can acquire PayPal (for its volume, its risk management, and its fraud detection expertise) and fold it in together representing let’s say $12 billion in annual revenue five years from now, creating a true new currency for the world economy.

Inbox. Hotmail Plus, Yahoo! Mail Plus, and Gmail Storage all charge $20/year for premium features. So could Facebook Inbox if it became more mail-like, which is within grasp since Facebooker Paul Buchheit is the creator of Gmail, and he’s highly influential even if he’s not building the new system himself. Bonus points for throwing in an Address Book and Skype-slaying social phone features like Social Voice for free to anyone who purchases Facebook Inbox Pro.  50 million pro accounts at $20/year is a cool $1 billion Inbox product. Nice.

Photos. Fred Wilson may have mocked photos, but they represent big money now that Facebook is by far the world’s largest photo site. And the Facebook Photos product suite is about to be vastly be improved—now with high resolution!—thanks to the addition of the smart, energetic Divvyshot team during Lockdown.  Partners could be literally everyone in this space—Snapfish and Shutterfly and Kodak and Walmart, and a plethora of smaller companies like Zazzle and Picaboo! Five years from now could Facebook help sell 100 million picture books and photo schwag a year, extracting $10 per item from partners?  Easily. $1 billion annually without even thinking hard.

And Photos are just a harbinger of more social applications to come.  Bret Taylor has already hinted at ten other revenue streams. Because he thinks like a startup.

One of the biggest differences between a startup like Facebook and a big company like Google is that at a startup, everyone gets asked all the time how the product plans to make money. This imposes a discipline on the product and the people who develop it. At a big company, every boat does not necessarily have to sit on its own bottom—and this can lead to a “monoculture mindset” that stunts new lines of business and ultimately leaves the corporate ecosystem vulnerable to external forces.

The most famous example of this in our industry is Microsoft’s inability to come to terms with the Web.  When Windows and Office were making money hand over fist, text ads were as small as mouse balls. In some ways, Google is even more extreme, because for the most part no one at Google has appeared to lose sleep over where revenue growth will come from, for a decade. Those entrepreneurial muscles have atrophied, and future revenue potential does not appear to be the driver of any new Google product except Android and Google Instant, and even they follow the simple rule that mo’ searches mean mo’ money, because every search makes Google a dime.

So yes, Google will continue to grow its base of text ads, and other revenue streams like mobile, display, and YouTube should help with starting the growth engine that the recession slowed.

Getting back to Facebook, if I add my rough numbers for Facebook’s TV ad siphoning ($10 billion) + Games ($3 billion) + Places & Pages deals ($10 billion) + Credits & PayPal ($12 billion) + Photos ($1 billion) + Inbox ($1 billion) + Some of Bret Taylor’s other ten applications (???) = over $30 billion (actually, closer to $40 billion)  in annual revenues five years from now. Which is more than Google has in annual revenues today.

Is this analysis sloppy, hasty, laden with assumptions, and likely incorrect? Sure. But does it illustrate the possibilities of a very powerful Facebook five years from now? Yes. Yes it does. The main message that I want to send with this note is: This is not a game, because this is a very big market. The stakes are very real.

This is not about the revenue streams Facebook has; it’s about the revenue streams they’re about to have. Take to heart the hockey lesson from Wayne Gretszky’s father: “skate
where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.“

Remember a better time back in 2004 when Jason Kottke boldly predicted that Google would become “the biggest and most important company in the world in 5-8 years” by selling access to the world’s biggest, best, and most cleverly utilized map of the web?  Kottke was right except for one detail: the most improtant company in the world is Apple, not Google. In any case, I am going to make a similar prediction:

Facebook is going to become the biggest and most important company in the world in 5-8 years by selling access to the world’s biggest, best, and most cleverly utilized map of the closed Web that’s been shared among friends.

If Google agrees and wants to avoid that future, what should Google do with its $35 billion in cash and its Google Me team? Unfortunately, Google can’t friend Facebook. Maybe they should friend the Quora community? I’ve found that illuminating.

Talking on Quora with a woman who interned for Google and then Facebook (and now works for Quora), I was struck by her words:

I’m afraid another failed social effort might mean the beginning of a serious decline [for Google]. This is both a function of external perception and internal sentiment. Users will only have so much patience for Google’s experimentation, and things like pulling the plug on Wave can’t be good for the company brand.  Plus, Google needs to be able to sustain employee morale, especially given the highly publicized talent wars of late… I also think Facebook needs some competition.

I concur.

Mark Zuckerberg told Michael Arrington that to make insanely great social products, “you have to design [social into products] from the ground up.” I wholeheartedly agree! My question is, why does everyone think that Facebook has won the social networking game and that no one else should even try to make a better social network? They only have a 600 million person head start; that’s less than a tenth of the planet, people.

Doesn’t anyone with resources even want to build a better social network anymore? It sure doesn’t seem like it. Google is developing an abstract social layer; Twitter calls itself an information and content network; LinkedIn is a professional network with sprinkles of social pixie dust; MySpace is a discovery channel; Yahoo is a mumble mumble; and the last great hope, Apple Ping, is a faux-ial network, unwittingly proving Zuckerberg’s main point to Arrington with how much it blows:

As 2010 draws to a close, only a movie and an open source project (Diaspora) have the chutzpah to call themselves a social network. The future of social networking may very well depend on those of us without resources to invent an alternative to Facebook, to create more choice for consumers. Does anyone have the brains, the heart, and the courage to travel down this yellow brick road? Maybe this article ill offer a smart but scrappy entrepreneurial engineer in a garage somewhere the inspiration she or he needs to build a better social network. I just gave you thirty billion reasons why I believe this market is the market to go after if you want to make a fortune, have fun, and change the world. And I will do anything in my power to help you. I know a venture capitalist ready and eager to put $25 million to work to get this party started. And heck, I might even consider coming out of retirement for this opportunity. Call me. Or better yet, Google Me.

Editor’s note: Guest author Adam Rifkin is a Silicon Valley veteran who organizes a networking group for entrepreneurial engineers called 106 Miles. His last guest post was about his frustrations with Gmail.

Image credit: Mister Sweaters; Photo credit: Erick Tseng.

Few things piss me off more these days than the carriers taking advantage of Google’s openness to load up Android phones with crapware and their own proprietary garbage. But you know, a big part of the problem is us.

When Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on stage during our TechCrunch Disrupt conference this past week, he spoke briefly about Google’s thinking with regard to this issue with the carriers. He acknowledged that while yes, some carriers are loading Android phones up with their own software before you buy them, you have the choice not to buy those phones. Clearly, his mentality is that it’s on us, the consumers, to vote with our wallets to show the carriers what we do and do not want. I have a bit of an issue with this line of thinking, but that’s for another post. For now, let’s focus on this — are we to blame for bloat?

There are plenty of signs that point to “yes”. The Android phones from Verizon and Sprint that are the most loaded with bloat, the Droid phones and the EVO, are also the best-selling Android phones. The one Android phone that was fresh and clean, the Nexus One, sold so poorly that Google pulled it from the consumer market only a few months after it went on sale. Part of that is the carriers fault (they never wanted to fully support such a phone that, if popular, would eventually lead to them having less control over the industry), but consumers are still voting with their wallets for these bloat phones.

The fact of the matter is that most people get infatuated with the idea of “more”. Right or wrong, most people will not believe that a new device or piece of software is better than an old version unless it has more features. In the case of some of these Android phones, part of that means shiny new apps included on the device by the likes of Sprint and Verizon. People walk into a store and are sold on the fact that the EVO has some bullshit NASCAR app on it. Nevermind the fact that most people probably won’t use it. It’s the idea of it being there just in case as a “perk” that entices people.

Another great example is this thread in the Chromium forums. Since 2008, there have been over 500 comments begging Google to add the “Set image as wallpaper” feature to their Chrome web browser. This was a feature made popular by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer way back in the day (Microsoft may be the the king of bloat), and some people can’t seem to live without it. Never mind the fact that it sucks — that it takes an often low resolution web image that is in no way meant to be a desktop background and converts it into one either by humorously centering it or tiling it or best of all, stretching it.

It doesn’t matter that the feature is a crime against aesthetics. THE MOB WANTS IT GOOGLE — ADD IT OR DIE!

With the vast majority of products, I would argue that more isn’t better, it’s just more. There’s something beautiful about keeping something simple. But consumer pressure won’t let most companies do this. Naturally, I think Apple is the best at it, but even they give into bloat sometimes — for example, does anyone use the iPhone’s Voice Control feature? What about half of the features in iTunes?

My point is just that if we truly do want to change something like carrier bloatware, it is going to be up to us. We need to stop buying crap. Google has proven that they aren’t going to put their foot down — it’s simply not in their best business interest. And they probably know that even if they did, we’d likely yell at them for it. We’ll get pissed off when our Android phone only comes with 10 apps pre-installed. We’ll wonder where the other 30 apps are that we’re never going to use. More. More. More.

What happens when that $145 tandem skydiving coupon you bought doesn’t seem like a good idea anymore? Or what if you can’t use it because you’re just bogged down with work? Fear not! Now you don’t have to let it go to waste… New site Lifesta.com has launched a daily deal exchange where Groupon-like coupons can be bought and sold.

Self-describing itself as ‘StubHub for daily deals,’ Lifesta helps folks buy deals they missed or sell vouchers they won’t use. Lifesta manages the entire transaction, from payment to voucher handover. No communication is required between buyers and sellers and if for some reason a buyer bought an invalid voucher, Lifesta will refund them their money. This by the way, has only happened a couple of times. In both instances due to the business having closed down. (Groupon had refunded the original sellers).

It’s not that people aren’t buying and selling daily deal coupons today, it’s that they do it through bulletin boards, which only fulfill the posting aspect, leaving voids for the actual transaction facilitation and the voucher handover. Plus, you also have to deal with back-and-forth emails and phone calls until the handover is complete.

With Lifesta, everything is much more seamless: Sellers upload their vouchers (usually PDF or image) and set their price. Buyers then browse for their desired voucher, pay online and download the voucher.

Eran Davidov, Lifesta’s CEO would not disclose specific numbers, but did say that since its launch in July, the site has been growing 50% month-over-month, both in the number of uploaded vouchers for sale, and in total sales.

Tawkon, one of my favorite Israeli startups of the past year, was in San Francisco at the Disrupt Alley last week to debut the release of its cellular radiation measurement app for Android. This follows the company’s $9.99 Blackberry version, and its unsuccessful bid to push the same app through the iPhone App Store.

If you haven’t followed our coverage of the company, Tawkon developed a technology that collects and analyzes RF-related data it extracts from a mobile phone. It is then able to display a measurement of the estimated radiation a cell phone user is exposed to when using his or her phone. The “harder” the phone has to work to maintain a cellular connection, the more radiation it emits. So for example, if the phone isn’t near a cell tower, or if its own antenna is obstructed, it will increase power to its antenna, which causes it to emit more radiation.

Available for free, the new Android version of Tawkon includes:

• Real-time Radiation Indication – Thanks to multi-tasking support on Android, a small icon on the home screen changes from green to yellow to red, indicating low-moderate-high levels of radiation exposures.
• Live Prompts & Feedback – Automatic alerts when exposure to radiation rises during a call. Live feedback confirms that suggested actions such as moving to a new location were effective.
• Personal Stats – Find out how much radiation you avoided by using Tawkon during the last call, day, week, month and six months.





We received this video mail from TechCrunch reader Aditya Kapur shortly after TechCrunch Disrupt, with the subject line “Thank you for Hammer Time.” In it Kapur describes how awesome our Google Ventures/SV Angel party was and apologizes to Ron Conway for “screaming like a little girl at a Justin Bieber concert” within earshot of the powerful VC.

Highlight: “I could not believe that I was this close to MC Hammer.”

Thank you for reading Aditya. We had a great time as well and, if it means anything to you, we’re thinking about renting out our very own Erick Schonfeld to parties, hospitals and retirement homes in order to spread the joy that his “Hammer Time” has brought into our lives.

App store analytics provider Distimo has released a new report today, analyzing the top applications on Apple’s App Store for iPadand iPhone, BlackBerry App World, Google’s Android Market, Nokia’s Ovi Store, Palm’s App Catalog and Windows Marketplace for Mobile for Q3 2010 in the U.S. You can download the free report here.

According to Distimo, the iPhone App Store has the most Games (55% free, 55% paid) among the 100 most popular applications, followed by Windows Marketplace for Mobile (23% free, 45% paid), and the Apple App Store for iPad (25% free, 40% paid). Games are least popular in BlackBerry App World (12.5% free, 28% paid) and Palm App Catalog (33% free, 16% paid). Distimo’s analysis doesn’t include games on the Android Marketplace because Google ranks them in a separate category from other apps. There are approximately 15,000 games on the Android marketplace.

The most popular free applications on all the platforms are iBooks (for the iPad), Type n Talk (the iPhone), BlackBerry Messenger (BlackBerry App World), Pandora Radio (Android Market), ZumZum (Nokia Ovi Store), Facebook (Palm) and Microsoft My Phone (Windows Marketplace).

In terms of paid applications, Distimo reports that Pages (iPad), Angry Birds (iPhone), BeBuzz (BlackBerry), Beautiful Widgets (Android), ToonWarz (Nokia Ovi Store), mCraig (Palm) and Meon (Windows Marketplace) are all the top apps on the respective app stores.

Both the apps for Netflix and iBooks are among the ten most popular free applications for the iPhone and iPad.

Because of the nature of the platform, it looks like RIM publishes the best apps on its App World. Research In Motion develops four of the ten most popular free applications in BlackBerry App World: BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry App World, Facebook and Twitter. In fact, Palm and Microsoft are also the publishers of the Facebook application in its own stores

The data isn’t really that surprising, but it is interesting to see the app breakdown over three months versus one month.

It isn’t often you get to see people enthusiastically using a brand new app in the wild; At the Tahoe Tech Talk today, while on a three hour panel Q & A with angel investors Chris Sacca, Dave McClure, Travis Kalanik, Dave Morin, Kevin Rose, Ben Kaufman and Gary Vaynerchuk, I got to see this exact thing happen, as the aforementioned seven wouldn’t stop texting and laughing onstage.

While I still have no clue on exactly “what” was being shared (my guess is they were either colluding or making fun of McClure) after some investigation I figured out the “how.” They were all using Fast Society, a seven day old app that sets up instant temporary group texting through your iPhone, as well as instant conference and group location sharing if you’re so inclined.

Like the digital version of kids passing notes in class, group chats on Fast Society have an expiration date; You can set up a chat for a group of up to 15 people, for three hours minimum and three days maximum. Founder Matthew Rosenberg tells us that the next version will let you set limits of up to seven days and 25 hours.

While in the same space as Plannr, and GroupMe (which was built at the TC Disrupt Hackathon) the app requires no signups, no usernames, no passwords just your phone number. And the text groups are temporary, so you don’t have to be stuck with your fellow conference panelists once they have out worn their welcome.

Also, and this is the most important element, none of the onstage panelists are currently Fast Society investors — they genuinely were really into the app, which was built and is bootstrapped by Rosenberg, Andy Thompson, and Michael Constantiner.

Rosenberg explains the motivation behind creating it.

“We were at a Bloc Party concert in NYC and having a hard time getting our friends together, it was impossible to coordinate everyone in a group. Then we thought, we should just build it ourselves.”

Plans for an Android and a Blackberry version are currently in the works.

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Matthew Scherb, an attorney at the San Francisco office of Winston & Strawn LLP. He litigates complex copyright, trademark, and Internet-related disputes.

In 2000, the now-defunct iCraveTV allowed its users to watch live television over the Internet.  It retransmitted broadcast television without obtaining permission from or paying broadcasters, framed the retransmission with paid advertisements, and users watched while paying nothing.  A federal court in Pennsylvania found iCraveTV was likely on the hook for copyright infringement.  iCraveTV shut down, and the court’s decision appears to have had a blanket chilling effect on Internet-based television.  No one came along to take iCraveTV’s place.

Fast forward to 2010: Seattle-based ivi has arrived.  Like iCraveTV, ivi lets you watch live television on the Internet.  Also like iCraveTV, ivi has not sought permission from or paid broadcasters.  Unlike iCraveTV, there is no paid advertising: ivi draws revenue from a flat monthly fee.  For a premium, ivi offers DVR “time sifting” features such as pause, rewind, and fast forward.  ivi currently streams programs from New York and Seattle affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and a few other networks.  So, next Thursday you could watch an episode of The Office as it airs on WNBC (an NBC station in New York) or, next month catch Major League Baseball’s World Series on KCPQ (a Fox station in Seattle).  You might cheer the return of Internet television.  You might be glad to see a potential competitor to your cable or satellite provider.  But does ivi’s retransmission of broadcast television run afoul of copyright law?  Will it face the same fate as iCraveTV?

We may soon find out.

In mid-September, broadcasters and copyright owners (including the major networks and Major League Baseball) sent ivi a cease-and-desist letter.  They accused ivi of copyright infringement and demanded that ivi stop streaming their television programs.  Fearing a lawsuit from its accusers, ivi preemptively filed a lawsuit in Seattle federal court on Monday, September 20.  ivi seeks an order declaring that its Internet television service is legal.  In quick response, the broadcaster and copyright owners filed their own lawsuit against ivi in New York federal court on September 28.  If ivi wins or obtains a favorable settlement in these cases before it runs out of money, it can proceed with a stamp of approval from a federal judge or from its accusers.  A loss could torpedo its ambitions.

ivi’s legal hopes likely rest, in the first instance, on a rarely-invoked but potentially powerful exception to copyright liability: the “passive carrier exemption.”  The exemption makes it lawful to retransmit a transmission intended for the public so long as the retransmitter lacks control over the content of the original transmission or over the recipients of the retransmission. ivi believes that by retransmitting freely-available, over-the-air broadcasts and offering basic DVR-like services, it is nothing more than a passive carrier and exempt from copyright liability.

The iCraveTV case never dealt with the passive carrier exemption.  Because iCraveTV framed its retransmissions with advertisements, it probably could not have claimed the passive carrier exemption in any event: by adding advertisements, it was arguably modifying and exercising control over the original broadcast transmission.

Major court decisions involving the passive carrier exemption are, like the iCraveTV case, also a decade old.  They offer mixed signals.

In 1999, the same New York federal court now hearing the broadcasters’ and copyright owners’ lawsuit against ivi denied the exemption to a company called Media Dial-Up.  Media Dial-Up retransmitted radio broadcasts via telephone to its customers who paid a fee for access.  Even though Media Dial-Up did not control the content of the radio broadcasts or limit reception to particular individuals, the court refused to classify Media Dial-Up as a “carrier.”  ”In an era of rapid technological change,” the court wrote, “possibilities for the capture and retransmission of copyrighted material over the Internet . . . are enormous.”  If Media Dial-Up could be a passive carrier, it “would threaten considerable mischief.”  The court called this “common sense.”

Just two years later, in 2001, a Massachusetts court reached the opposite result.  It applied the exemption to Insight, a company that facilitated retransmission of Boston-area television broadcasts, including National Football League games, to Bell Canada for a fee.  It noted that Congress had intended courts to give “carrier” an “expansive” definition.

Will ivi distinguish itself from iCraveTV and Media Dial-Up and align itself with Insight?

If it can, ivi will have succeeded in making the passive carrier exception a powerful shield for itself and others, perhaps other Internet retransmitters such as Ustream or Justin.tv looking to offer new services or cable and satellite retransmitters looking to make the leap to the Internet.

As for television broadcasters, though they may prefer to control the market for Internet television themselves, they may actually benefit financially from having their broadcasts retransmitted on the Internet and other media.  They will reach more eyeballs and could presumably demand higher advertising fees.

Stay tuned for the court’s decisions and also keep an eye on Congress, which can revoke or modify the passive carrier exception.  Congress created special, compulsory licensing regimes for cable and satellite retransmitters as those technologies matured.  Cable and satellite retransmitters do not infringe copyright when they retransmit a television broadcast, but they must pay a royalty fixed by statute.  Congress could choose to impose a similar regime on Internet retransmitters. Meanwhile, if ivi cannot qualify as a passive carrier, it can argue that it qualifies as a “cable system” and try to take advantage of the compulsory license.

“Windows is the past. In the future, AOL is the next Microsoft.”

— Steve Case (1999)

Like most serious writers, I’ve always dreamed of working for AOL. So you can imagine how thrilled I was when Heather and Mike took to the stage during Disrupt, alongside AOL Chairman Tim Armstrong, to announce that TechCrunch has been acquired by the 90s chat-room giant.

You can also imagine how relieved I was to hear that our new corporate ownership wouldn’t affect our editorial independence. A fact reiterated in the press release that Mike allowed Armstrong to publish on our homepage.

The real meat of the deal was explained to TechCrunch employees and contributors yesterday, in our first ever “all hands” meeting, hosted by David Eun, President of AOL Media and Studios. In an act of Mike-Judgeian corporate defiance, Mike published the full agenda ahead of the meeting, leaving us to salivate at highlights like “HR to hand out offer letters / AOL gifts.” (to clarify: these were very separate items) and the time set aside for “administrative happiness”.

The rest of the meeting, though, was designated as an “internal AOL meeting” and as such was strictly off the record. However, after giving that warning, the very next thing that Eun said was that we should all “keep doing what we do”.

Here then are the details of the meeting…

The first order of business – and indeed the whole thrust of the gathering – was to reassure any of us who might think that TechCrunch (the world’s number one technology blog, and a growing start-up) and AOL (America’s number one killer of start-ups) might somehow not be a great fit. Eun and his team expertly calmed our fears though, adding: “We don’t want you to feel that you can’t criticize AOL.”

Phew!

“…but of course neither should you feel that you need to go out of your way to criticize AOL.”

Oh.

But even if our editorial voice will remain unchanged, that’s not to say that AOL is going to take a completely hands-off approach to the company. Indeed, along with their offer letters, each employee was handed a welcome pack which gushed that TC staffers are “the mega to our byte” (rejected phrases include “You’re the 56 to our K” and “You’re the one cup to our two girls”).

So then, what changes can we expect to see at the all-new AOL-TC? Here are my top seven take-aways from the meeting…

1. Included in the welcome pack was a bullet-pointed list of AOL corporate principles, including the promise that “we take fun seriously”. To this end, TechCrunch employees will be expected to attend a two hour meeting every Saturday afternoon, during which they will participate in Mandatory Fun. Absentees, or those who refuse to wear the mandated clown nose and comedy hat, will be terminated for cause.
2. In line with standard AOL policy, any employee who decides to leave the company will be required to call an 800 number where they’ll be kept on hold for two hours before being connected to a bored call centre worker who will try to aggressively persuade them to stay. Whatever the eventual outcome, AOL will continue to debit $19.95 from the employee’s bank account until the end of time.
3. From now on, all TechCrunch staffers will be expected to state their age, sex and location before posting on Yammer.
4. To placate staffers still concerned about the deal, AOL will host a series of motivational talks with the founders of other acquired start-ups. First up: Bebo’s Michael Birch, with his inspiring lecture “How I achieved true happiness by selling my company for $850m and then not working a single day at AOL”
5. To celebrate the acquisition, AOL will finance a romantic comedy based on the events of the past two weeks. Starring Tom Hanks as Michael Arrington, Meg Ryan as Heather Harde and Greg Kinnear as Tim Armstrong, the movie has the working title: You’ve Got Fail.
6. Twelve months later, the company will develop a sequel. With the working title “Unvested Development”, it will neither be romantic nor comedic.
7. My first column for the all new AOL-Techcrunch will, inexplicably, also be my last.

Short Version:

Sony sent us 4 games along with the PlayStation Move. Two of them make me want to turn off the PS3, curl up into the fetal position, and cry my pain away. One is decent. One of them is so damn good that I want to invite everyone I know over for a glimpse into the future.

The platform that Sony built here has incredible potential — now it’s up to game developers to make it worth while.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>