Category: Tech news

I used to cover enterprise software for BusinessWeek. You’re probably not impressed by that, and you shouldn’t be. That beat is a combination of a punishment and proving ground because despite being a huge market, most enterprise software purchases are ones that IT managers grow to hate and one that few everyday readers care much about. One thing has made enterprise software an interesting beat: Larry Ellison.

Whether it’s his love of the ladies, his yachts, his mysterious lack of eyebrows, his strategic brilliance, his quick-witted jabs at competitors, random musings that he may buy Apple, or declarations that software is done as a category and he’d just buy everyone up, Larry Ellison has long been the software reporter’s gift that keeps on giving. Tony Stark in IronMan was reportedly based on a hybrid of Larry Ellison and Elon Musk, and I recognize way more Ellison than Musk in the depiction.

Only — pity for reporters– Ellison seems to have tired of the spotlight. Few magazine covers, no billion-dollar hostile takeovers, no wacky press conferences, no weird Shakepearian dramas with former proteges. Just a well-performing stock and growing business. Yawn.

Part of that is because Oracle either bought or trounced arch-rivals with its buy-not-build application strategy, and like most companies, Ellison becomes more interesting when he has a foil. It looks like that new foil is HP. Hallelujah, enterprise software is getting interesting again.

Here are the new players and plotlines in the Valley’s latest drama:

Mark Hurd– The New Protege: Ellison has a long history of deputies he champions and then burns through, and Hurd is the latest champion. Stable, operational, and ruthlessly cost-cutting Hurd is a good yin-yang for big picture, risk-taking, engineering-focused Ellison and those yin-yang relationships tend to work best in Oracle. His longest running lieutenant is the secretive and meticulous Safra Catz who staunchly refused interviews and once barked at me that she was “ALL ABOUT THE BUSINESS” and hated when we’d write personality profiles about executives. Catz is as much a reason people thrive or fail in the Oracle executive suite as the more famously mercurial Ellison.

Leo Apotheker and Ray Lane– The Avengers: The two men teaming up to run HP are two men burned by Ellison, Leo Apotheker who was CEO of SAP in the years Oracle unquestionably trounced it and Ray Lane, one of Ellison’s many heir apparents over the years, who went to Kleiner Perkins to reinvent himself as a VC…to let’s just say mixed reviews. I’m not saying they’re going to go in everyday and whiteboard out how to take Oracle down, but these are two men who’d love to best Ellison at something.

Hardware and Software Colliding–The Battle Royale: So HP and Oracle are traditionally partners more than rivals. But the lines are blurring. For the better part of a decade, HP has been buying up software companies envious of the margins as hardware became more and more mature and commoditized. Oracle has only recently started to get into hardware with its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. But Oracle’s strength has been that enterprises pretty much have to buy its databases and once the foot is in the door, they sell them more and more parts of the stack. So it’s less about selling to small businesses that will continue to drive Oracle’s growth and more about getting into more big verticals and selling each company more stuff.

A few weeks ago I was talking to veteran tech reporter Jonathan Schwartz from USA Today said he thought Oracle might try to buy HP sometime in the future. That seemed far-fetched, but Schwartz may wind up looking prescient. Either way, the battle is on. Otherwise, Ellison wouldn’t have sent this deliciously catty note to the Wall Street Journal. His seemingly-impetuous jabs are always more calculated than they appear. HP and Oracle have been in the same headlines too many times in the last few weeks to stay in mere coopetition territory for long.

This isn’t about Hurd or Apotheker– this is about two colliding giants who need to keep their stock prices up and have found the best way in the past is through acquisitions. Oh yeah, and both have plenty of spies– Hurd is no doubt still plugged into HP and Lane at least knows how Ellison’s mind works. 

Marc Andreessen– The Spoiler? Ok, here’s where I get even more speculative, but it’ll be interesting to see the role Andreessen plays in all of this. He’s the savviest member of HP’s board and an admirer of Ellison’s style, track-record and brilliance. He’s cut from a similar cloth too. He can be charming or utterly eviscerating, and he sees turns in the market ahead of most people. Having covered all four of them, I believe that if anyone could play chess with Ellison it’s Andreessen, not Lane or Apotheker. Separately, Andreessen has said that he thinks enterprise software is ripe for disruption and his firm is going to fund a new generation of Oracle-killers.

Ellison has already launched a volley with his comments to the Journal that the HP board needed to “resign en masse.” Andreessen– you gonna take that? (Please say no.)

Togetherville, a Facebook-like social network for kids 10 years of age and younger, is launching a new feature called School Communities today that aims to “give kids a voice” when it comes to how their schools are run. The feature also represents a big change to the way the site is building its social graph, making it far easier for children to connect with their friends.

It’s easy to forget (and many kids probably ignore it entirely), but Facebook maintains a firm requirement that everyone on the site be thirteen years of age or older. That’s where Togetherville comes in — the site appeals to parents by promising a safer, more secure environment, where parents can moderate who their children are connecting with. Parents approve each of their child’s friends, and can also connect with other parents using Facebook’s social graph.

Before now, though, the process to find your child’s friends was more tedious than it probably should have been — if your kid wanted to ‘friend’ another child, then you would have to be friends with the other child’s parents on Facebook. The new ‘Schools’ feature makes this easier: during signup you’ll enter the name of your child’s school, Togetherville will present your child with a list of their friends, and they can ask to connect with them (pending each parent’s approval).

The addition of schools also brings another dynamic to the social network: communities. Parents can now talk to each other about current school-related issues on the school’s community page (which is analogous to a Facebook page), and it also gives kids a chance to speak their minds.

But while parents will be to engage in a straightforward conversation forum, the kids side of things is a bit more complex. Every so often Togetherville sends out mass polls to all of its users — questions like, “What’s your favorite subject and why?” When a child responds to one of these questions, their answer will appear in the feeds of their friends, and their parent will be asked for permission to publish the response on the community page of the child’s school (they’ll also be asked if the response can be published as part of anonymized data aggregated across all of Togetherville).

CEO Mandeep Dhillon says that this gives kids a unique chance to share their thoughts on their school — if enough students talk about an issue, then maybe the grownups will take notice (I suspect that student requests will result in a lot of noise, but the trends may be worthwhile). He also says that the community feature will be rolling out for uses beyond schools as well, like coordinating soccer teams.

OpenFeint, the comprehensive social gaming platform from Aurora Feint, has landed a deal with Verizon to feature the platform’s top Android Games on Verizon phones.

OpenFeint recently added Android game developers to its rapidly growing community, launching its plug and play social game development to developers to the public a few weeks ago.

According to a recent OpenFeint newsletter sent to developers, the social gaming platform struck deal with Verizon, Rogers Wireless and Bell Mobility to offer their consumers Android game recommendations, all curated by OpenFeint (meaning, OpenFeint has picked the best of its Android games to be featured on those operator services).

So why is this a big deal? There are a couple of reasons why OpenFeint’s deal is interesting. First, OpenFeint used to be social gaming platform exclusive to the iPhone; and actually gained a lot of traction on the platform, powering social gaming services for over 30 million users and growing at a monthly pace of 25 percent. But Apple recently launched its own gaming platform, GameCenter, for developers which poses competition to OpenFeint.

In turn, OpenFeint is expanding to the Android platform, and deals with Android-phone carriers help expand the reach of their games. For Verizon, this is a way to create its own app and
games discovery experience without relying solely on the Android Marketplace, which has sub-par discovery features. We already know that Verizon is launching a V CAST App Store on Android that will exist outside of Android’s own Market (thanks of course to Google’s open platform, since this can’t be developed on Apple’s closed platform). Clearly Verizon is looking to provide features, such as curated apps and recommendations, that the Android Market lacks. Of course, Google is trying to create a better Android Market experience, but those efforts could be for naught if Android carriers like Verizon beat them to the chase.

One thing I’m particularly proud of: we have provided a free live stream of nearly every conference we’ve ever put on. We’ve found that we still have plenty of people that want to attend in person. But for those who can’t make the event, the content is available to watch, gratis. Very few other large events do this.

The numbers from TechCrunch Disrupt: San Francisco earlier this week are staggering. We’re still gathering the on demand view data from TechCrunchTV. But we’ve just received the high level numbers from Ustream, who powered the live stream of the event.

235,389 unique viewers tuned in at some point during the event (there were about 2,000 people there in person). Over 65,000 hours of video were viewed, and a total of 316,426 streams were served.

That’s more than twice as many people that tuned in v. TechCrunch Disrupt: New York in May, when 94,000 unique viewers were logged.

We’re committed to continue to provide TechCrunch event content for free via video, and we thank our partners, like Ustream, for helping us make this happen.

COICA, the bill that made waves last week as an affront to free speech and due process rights, was recently postponed, to the net’s great relief. While it seems to have been the kind of inflammatory election-year FUD bill we see very often in this country, it brought up several issues that are worth taking action on.

The bill is ostensibly to “combat online infringement, and for other purposes,” but broadly speaking, it would grant “root access” to one of the fundamental technologies running the web: DNS. Here’s the question: if such an important technology could come so easily within a breath of being in the clutches of politicians and lobbyists, why do we rely so much upon it?

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Product: Vaio Z-Series VPCZ125GX/B

Manufacturer: Sony

Wired Rating: 7

No question, there is lots to love about Sony’s Z-Series Vaio, model VPCZ125GX/B.

Performance is blazing, nearly at the top of the charts and surprising for a machine this diminutive: The 13.1-inch notebook weighs a paltry 3.1 pounds, yet it packs a high-end 2.4-GHz Core i5 CPU, 6 GB (yes, six) of RAM, optical drive, and switchable graphics, courtesy of an Nvidia GeForce GT 330M. All of this gives the Vaio Z-Series not just power enough to tear up a spreadsheet, but plenty of juice for gaming, too. Seriously, this unit can outperform all but the most dedicated gaming notebooks during frag-time.

But wait, there’s more! How about integrated Verizon WWAN? A backlit keyboard? A 256-GB solid state hard drive? Three and a half hours of battery life? SD and Memory Stick slots? Even upgraded screen resolution, to 1600 x 900 pixels?

Why, there’s so much to like about the Z-Series that one almost overlooks its flaws. That is, until they come roaring back to punch you in the teeth.

Said flaws number two, and they’re rather large. First is the display. LED backlighting is appreciated, as is the enhanced resolution, but there’s no explanation why, at full brightness, the screen remains one of the dimmest we’ve ever reviewed, beaming a dull gray-blue color where we expect to see vibrant white. It’s a glaring and frankly unacceptable flaw on an otherwise knockout system.

As bad as that is, the second issue is probably of greater concern to the average sub-billionaire shopper. At $2,349, this laptop is one of the most expensive we’ve tested all year. Yes, it performs like a high-end gaming notebook, but it’s priced like one too. For a machine that will likely be positioned as an executive toy, that’s an impossibly tough sell, but if you really need ultimate power at an absolute minimum weight, you’ve found it.

WIRED A powerhouse computer in an ultra-thin and light package. Looks good. Filled with features above and beyond the call of duty.

TIRED Ungodly expensive. Ultra-dim display is baffling and wrong. Wireless toggle switch is easy to bump off. Keys are a little small, touch-typing can be rocky. LCD is disconcertingly floppy.

I’d like to believe that if Facebook changed the order of “Developers” and “Careers” in the footer of their site, it wouldn’t lead to a huge user backlash. But history suggests otherwise. Okay, maybe I’m slightly exaggerating, but I’m honestly not sure. It seems that if Facebook does anything to change their site, it’s grounds for user backlash. And yet, these past couple of weeks, Twitter has been drastically changing their site, and we’re seeing almost no backlash. Why?

I asked Twitter’s VP of Product Jason Goldman that very question backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt a couple days ago. His response? Twitter needed to execute on a new experience that was still Twitter-like, and they did that. It was about taking the core experience and extending on top of it.

That may sound incredibly obvious, but as we’ve seen time and time again (and on many more services than just Facebook), that’s not easy to do. Goldman admits that New Twitter went through a number of variations — some of which were more “app-y”, as Goldman put it. But they settled on something that at its core was similar to the Twitter website that everyone had grown to know and love.

He also noted that Twitter brought in a range of users from outside the company every week to test it out and see their reactions. That’s an interesting approach because many companies opt to “dog food” their products instead (test them with their own employees). Obviously, the downside of bringing in outsiders to test is leaks, but that didn’t happen here — well, not until the final minutes before launch.

Goldman admitted that part of the good feedback is probably luck. As in, they were lucky to make the right product choices for New Twitter.

Currently, New Twitter is available to slightly less than 50 percent of all Twitter users, so they’re not quite out of the woods just yet. But that’s a huge base using it without much complaint. I think it’s pretty safe to say that they nailed this metamorphous.

Watch Goldman talk about this and more in the video below.

[photo: flickr/fibonacciblue]

Another one bites the dust. Mobile ad exchange Mobclix has been acquired by London-based mobile marketing agency Velti, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the transaction. We originally reported the rumors of a Mobclix deal last week. While terms of the deal have not been disclosed, we hear the size of the acquisition is north of $50 million.

Mobclix’s exchange allows app developers to sign up with their ad inventory and ad networks, like Millennial Media and Jumptap, bid for the spots based on age, gender, location, and other factors. The ads being served change automatically, based on which ad network is bidding the highest to reach the users of that particular app.

The startup, which launched at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, also lets advertisers buy across a variety of apps based on demographic, geo-targeting, and behavioral characteristics. And Mobclix offers analytics via a recent acquisition of Heartbeat.

Velti, which is a public company on the London Stock Exchange, offers a SaaS technology platform that allows agencies and brands to plan, manage, and optimize mobile advertising and marketing campaigns in real time. The company says that in 2009, 2,000 mobile campaigns were run on its platform by more than 450 brands, agencies, and mobile operators in more than 35 countries. Velti has acquired a number of companies over the past year, including mobile ad technology Media Cannon and AdInfuse.

The exit is a little anticlimactic, considering that the names being bantered about with respect to Mobclix’s possible acquisition were RIM, Microsoft and other well-known technology companies. But the sell further reinforces the point that as Apple (via Quattro) and Google (via AdMob) take over mobile advertising, independent startups may not be able to compete. Acquisitions may be the best option for smaller ad networks.

Rumor has it that RIM is actively looking for a mobile ad network, and sniffing around Millennial Media. Nokia may also be eying a mobile network as well. Smaller mobile ad network mSpot just got bought by business software company Marketron. I’d expect to see more market consolidation as these independent ad networks continue to get snapped up. After all, mobile advertising is a $1 billion market and everyone wants a piece of the pie.

Earlier today, Google formally released Goo.gl, their URL-shortener, to the public. They’re calling it the “stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web.” But it also may be the coolest thanks to an easter egg.

As Google’s Matt Cutts’ just tweeted out, if you simply add “.qr” to the end of any goo.gl URL, it will create a QR code. Scanning this with any QR code reader will take you to the URL.

So, for example, this URL: goo.gl/umo0, is the shortened link for this post. If I make it: goo.gl/umo0.qr, I’ll get the image above.

This functionality actually isn’t entirely new — but previously it was way too hard to use goo.gl (it was limited to a few Google products). Now that more people will likely be using goo.gl, this is very useful and worth pointing out again.

These QR codes are great for mobile use, and Google in particular has been using them a lot for things such as easy installation of Android apps.

Facebook has established itself as the biggest photo sharing service on the Internet — by far. But until fairly recently, the maximum size of uploaded photos was a frustratingly small 604 pixels, doing nothing to take advantage of the increasing ubiquity of high-resolution cameras. And that’s a problem when your friends are using Facebook as the primary way to share memories of special events like weddings, graduations, parties, and chubby bunny contests.

Things started to improve in March which it boosted the maximum resolution 20% up to 720 pixels. And now the Photos app is getting much, much better: Facebook is boosting the maximum photo size by 8x, up to 2048 pixels. Now you won’t have to squint when you go to relive your memories a few years (or decades) down the line. This may also make the app more attractive to users who have been turning to Flickr for high-quality uploading.

In addition to the boost in maximum photo size, Facebook is also making some UI changes. The site is going to start rolling out a new light box-based photo viewer that lets you view photos without jumping between pages. Facebook has also improved its UI for tagging friends, making it easier to tag the same person in multiple photos. Finally, Facebook has once again rebuilt its photo uploader for stability and performance improvements.

The features aren’t live for everyone yet, and will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

We sat down with Digg co-founder Kevin Rose after TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday to talk about the recent Digg Version 4 launch and the user revolt and media circus that ensued. Rose addressed the lessons he had learned during the tumultuous redesign, including what he would have done differently if given another opportunity.

Highlights:

“We’ve taken heat from a lot of people who don’t like the changes because they take the power out of their hands.”

“It’s always a battle for us, it’s like an arms race. We have the same problems Google does with people trying to manipulate search results with SEO, except on the social voting side of the house.”

“If I had to do it all over again I would have kept all those features we had on the old site, and let the users try them out first and see if they had a taste for the new features and only then, if they really liked them then rolled them out to everybody else.”

“We couldn’t keep the servers up or the site live, so it was frustrating to even access the new features.”

“We took away a lot of the features the core users were using, because we thought we had great alternative and replacements.”

“Twitter did an amazing job with their rollout, they let you switch back to the old Twitter if you didn’t like it, they were constantly collecting feedback via the hashtag. They could jump back anytime to see what users were liking and what users were not liking.”

Rose, who was recently replaced as CEO by Matt Williams, also went in to future product plans for Digg, such as a leaderboard and “Interests” pages for different verticals, a product that Rose says will be launching in the next couple of weeks, with the eventual goal being a Digg that allows you to jump into niche interests and form communities around those interests.

Says Rose,“If we can tap into the longtail of content, then we’ll have a much larger site than we have today.”

And, contrary to reports, Rose was kidding when he spoke about leaving

We’ve had a bit of a tumultuous relationship with Jonathan Mann over the past year. It was August 2009 when Mann (who is sometimes also known as “therockcookiebottom” or “songadaymann“) wrote his jingle about Bing. I called it the “worst jingle ever” but Microsoft clearly disagreed as it won their competition. Mann responded by writing a song about me which was actually pretty good. And then he went on a streak of awesome.

There was the song about Microsoft brainwashing kids with his Bing jingle. There was the Steve Jobs song. And there was the song about the iPhone 4 antenna issue, which Apple even played at their “antennagate” event. And now he was kind enough to write a song about our acquisition by AOL.

Mann is actually on the road at the moment, and doesn’t have all his equipment that make his songs magical, but wrote us the song anyway. This is actually the second song about our big move (which we really appreciate). Watch Mann’s video above. And below, check out his awesome Bronado song (though that one is NSFW). I think it’s even better than this one.

The image accompanying this post is encoded with JPEG compression, a standard which, while it has been improved somewhat, has been more or less in its present form for almost two decades now. Over those two decades, images have changed their role on the web dramatically, and consequently the number and quality of images on the web have been increasing exponentially. Yet the way we make those images easy to share and transmit hasn’t caught up with the times.

Increases in bandwidth, it must be said, have made the matter one of very little urgency, and it’s important to admit that it takes less time to load a content-rich webpage (the front page of CrunchGear averages 1-1.5MB) than it did to load a barebones page in the old days. But even so, it’s just as true that images take up the bulk of the bandwidth and making them more efficient means making the web more efficient. It looks like Google is trying to do just that with its new WebP image format.

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The Internet is rife with Google Translate failures, but this is the first we’ve seen on Google Maps. Apparently the Rio De Janeiro = Landfill issue on Google Maps is known within Google and is caused by a mixup between a landfill site near Rio and a poor Portuguese to English translation, where the Portuguese is okay but the English is um, suspect.

I’ve never seen this kind of mistranslation on Maps before and from what I can glean it only affects Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Sao Paulo and other Brazilian cities are, from what I can see, immune. It is currently unclear whether Google is working on a fix.

Much has been said about Apple’s foray into “social networking” (at least into what they consider that term to entail) with the introduction of Ping, part of the company’s iTunes software.

Some are positive about its chances, saying it is merely the seed of amazing things to come, others much less so.

I concur with the latter group and deem the product to be horse dung, 160 million potential users be damned.

Yes, they recently did make it a thousand times better when they added the ability to like / share a song you’d already purchased in the past.

But that only tells me just how badly it reeked before that (I’m actually quite positive some people at Apple got stomped for not adding support for Ping within users’ existing iTunes libraries from the get-go – at least I should hope so).

And it appears to me that it’s still a feature no one quite seems to have been waiting for.

Yes, you say, but had Facebook and Apple not jointly pulled the plug on Facebook integration at the last minute, I’d see things more clearly. I would realize how awesome it will be once you can actually connect with your real friends, transfer music recommendations and share purchases in and out of Ping, courtesy of Facebook.

Well I say it wouldn’t make the product suck that much less, and it won’t once it eventually gets implemented in some way (Facebook’s CTO is “very confident” it will, apparently).

I’ll happily stick my foot deep in my mouth if it turns out Facebook integration is what Ping needs to shine, but I’m decidedly bearish on the chances of that happening any time soon.

Don’t get me wrong: Ping needs Facebook integration to make it a little more useful, or fun for that matter. But a little useful or fun is not what people want – there are so many better music discovery and relevant social networking services out there that the only thing Ping has going for it is its potential audience thanks to the success of iTunes. But purely as a product, it simply stinks right now (particularly on the desktop), and people realize as much.

We’re a month in since Ping made its debut. No doubt, you’ve checked it out en masse. You’ve started following some of your friends and perhaps even a couple of artists, and some even people started following you. But have you really used the product a lot since? Have you discovered a lot of music thanks to it? Have you effectively connected with any of the people you follow, let alone with the artists pimping their wares on the service?

I simply don’t see any of that changing fundamentally when Facebook integration ever comes to fruition, if it ever does.

At its debut, Jobs talked about Ping along the lines of “Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes. But it’s not Facebook, it’s not Twitter.” He was absolutely right about the second part. There’s no Facebook or Twitter element at all; only iTunes showed up to that party he mentioned.

And as a result, it’s not a very lively one.