Category: Tech news

Google’s URL shortener just opened up to the public, with a standalone site. Launched last December, Google’s Bit.ly competitor, Goo.gl can now be used for any links on the web. And Google promises that the shortener is the “stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web.”

From the blog post:

There are many shorteners out there with great features, so some people may wonder whether the world really needs yet another. As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality. With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working. You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you’re protected against malware, phishing and spam using the same industry-leading technology we use in search and other products. Since our initial release, we’ve continued to invest in the core quality of the service:

Stability: We’ve had near 100% uptime since our initial launch, and we’ve worked behind the scenes to make goo.gl even stabler and more robust.
Security: We’ve added automatic spam detection based on the same type of filtering technology we use in Gmail.
Speed: We’ve more than doubled our speed in just over nine months.

The new URL shortener also comes with a host of interesting features. For example, if you sign-in to your Google Account, you’ll can access a list of URLs you’ve shortened in the past. And you can see the details the “details” link next to any of shortened URL, where you will find public, real-time analytics data, including traffic over time, top referrers, and visitor profiles.

There’s no API available…yet. But Goo.gl is available via extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Google says an upcoming API can be used to shorten URLs, expand URLs, and view analytics from directly within your own applications.

Twitter also released its URL shortener not too long ago, and Facebook is testing its offering as well. That being said, Bit.ly, the startup playing in the space, is seeing enormous traction despite all of these competitors.

More: Goo.gl’s Awesome Easter Egg To Instantly Turn Any Link Into A QR Code

HP has just named their new CEO. No, it’s not Todd Bradley — a popular guess out of the current ranks (and clearly he was thinking about it as well). Instead, HP’s Board went outside and picked Léo Apotheker, the former CEO of SAP.

In February, Apotheker abruptly left SAP after only seven months in the CEO position – well, the sole-CEO position. He had been co-CEO with Henning Kagermann for a couple of years before that. But he had been with SAP for over 20 years.

More recently, Apotheker had launched a private equity fund to invest in European software, IT, and telecom.

At SAP, Apotheker had led worldwide sales, service, and field operations for five years, HP notes in their release. He was a member of their executive board from 2002 to 2010, when he left.

In addition to Apotheker, HP’s Board elected Ray Lane (a Managing Partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) as both a new member of the Board and as the non-executive Chairman. Apotheker will join HP’s board as well. Both appointments become official on November 1.

Apotheker officially replaces, Cathie Lesjak, who has served as interim CEO in August. She will return to her role as HP CFO.

Thus ends the Mark Hurd saga at HP (well, for now at least). Hurd was forced out as both CEO and Chairman of the Board amid scandal back in August. He quickly joined Oracle as co-President, while led to lawsuits. But those were quickly resolved as well.

Below, find the release:

PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 30, 2010 – The Board of Directors of HP today
announced the election of Léo Apotheker as Chief Executive Officer and President.
Apotheker, who previously served as CEO of SAP, will also join HP’s Board of
Directors. The Board also elected Ray Lane, Managing Partner at Kleiner Perkins
Caufield & Byers, as a new member of the Board and designated him as non-
executive Chairman. Both elections are effective November 1.

During Apotheker’s more than 20 years at SAP, he was a driving force in making it
the largest business software applications company in the world. Apotheker helped
develop and implement the most significant changes in SAP history. During his
tenure, he transformed R&D and technology platforms and expanded business
models and customer segments. Apotheker also helped lead SAP to 18 consecutive
quarters of double-digit software revenue growth between 2004 and 2009.

Lane has served on the Board of Directors of more than 20 public and private
companies and joined Kleiner Perkins in 2000. Previously, he served as President
and Chief Operating Officer at Oracle Corporation. Earlier in his career, Lane also
worked at Booz Allen Hamilton, EDS and IBM.

“Léo is a strategic thinker with a passion for technology, wide-reaching global
experience and proven operational discipline – exactly what we were looking for in
a CEO,” said Robert Ryan, lead independent director of the Board. “After more
than two decades in the industry, he has a strong track record of driving
technological innovation, building customer relationships and developing world-
class teams.”

Ryan continued, “Léo has been a leader in anticipating the transformation taking
place in our industry, and we believe he is uniquely positioned to help accelerate
HP’s strategy. He has demonstrated success in the U.S. market and also has vast
international experience – which will be a major asset as HP continues to expand
globally, particularly in high-growth emerging markets. HP has the right assets and
market positions, and now we have the best team to realize the company’s
enormous potential.”

“HP has a powerful mix of businesses, products and services, one of the most
innovative cultures in the industry, and an accomplished management team who
have played a critical role in its success,” said Apotheker. “I am deeply honored to

be joining the more than 300,000 dedicated HP employees.”

Apotheker continued, “Given HP’s diversified products and services, its financial
strength, and its leadership position across markets, no other company is as well
positioned to drive – and profit from – the revolutionary changes under way in the
marketplace. As we move forward, HP will continue to be a valued partner with our
customers as well as a fierce competitor. I look forward to working with the
outstanding people at HP to write the next chapter in the company’s long and
proud history.”

“I am excited to join the Board of this pioneering company, and look forward to
working closely with Léo – and the rest of the Board and senior management team
– as they capitalize on the changes taking place across the industry,” Lane said. “I
have known and admired Léo for almost 20 years. He is ideally suited to build on
HP’s strong foundation, leverage its many assets and keep the company at the
forefront of innovation.”

Apotheker will succeed Cathie Lesjak, who was named interim CEO in August
2010. Lesjak, who has served as HP’s Chief Financial Officer since January 2007,
remains CFO and continues to serve as a member of the Executive Council. Ryan
said, “Cathie is and will continue to be an important part of HP. We are extremely
fortunate to have one of the deepest, most talented senior management teams in the
industry and to have someone of Cathie’s caliber lead HP during this interim
period. On behalf of the entire Board, I would like to thank Cathie and our senior
management team for maintaining HP’s focus on serving customers and continuing
to execute our strategy.”

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.

Journalist Monty Munford is the only other person I know who seems to just roam the planet on a whim, finding interesting things in somewhat random countries. (Appropriately, I met him at a cricket game in Mumbai. I was researching my book on entrepreneurship around the world and he was just wrapping his latest Bollywood film.)

A few weeks ago he wrote a post for us about Somaliland using mobile and wire services to become a cashless society. Yesterday, he sent me a note from Helsinki. As far as I can tell he flew there just to get an Angry Birds toy for his kid. He did a little reporting for us on the phenomenon while he was there. Reminds me of the early days of Facebook when a young Mark Zuckerberg had “It’s CEO, Bitch” business cards and supreme confidence he could take over the world. He kinda turned out to be right. Will Rovio’s Mighty Eagle Peter Vesterbacka?

From Monty:

“At the moment the guys at Rovio are probably the happiest company in the world. Completely self-funded and already highly profitable the company is big-headed and they have big plans.

Peter Vesterbacka’s self-styled job title is The Mighty Eagle (named after a new character in the game) and he happily describes the previous power of the carriers as ‘like being under the control of our previous neighbours, the Soviet Union’. He can hardly contain himself as he tells of how they keep turning down offers from Hollywood and ridiculing the studios for ‘promising to make us famous’.

After previously developing more than 50 games the Finnish company have only made one game in 2010 and have struck gold. They recently announced that the Angry Birds beta for Android had hit more than one million downloads after selling more than seven million on the iPhone. This for a game that an original team of four made for less than $100,000.

Rumours that the company is moving into the toys business are true. The initial production will see 20 characters in different colours and while Christmas may come too soon, expect these toys, powered by a ‘military-strength’ rubber-band, to be catapulted across school and offices next year.

Angry Birds will also be flying across social networks to Facebook with a game slated for 2011. Citing Super Mario as the brand they wish to emulate the company also plan to ramp up to console and probably everywhere else.

Anywhere else, Vesterback’s buoyancy and self-importance would be grating, but his enthusiasm is infectious and this is a fabulous of the little guy sticking it to the man. What’s more he has a pretty cool business card.”

I still think Google’s coolest 20 percent project of all time is Liquid Galaxy. You know, the “eight 55-inch LCD screens showing Google Earth in a unified, surround view” thing that Google sets up around to different conferences they are a part of. It’s sort of like the Star Trek Holodeck. It’s awesome.

And now you can build your own — or buy one! Google has open-sourced the entire project, including the Ubuntu sysadmin scripts to the mechanical design of the custom frames. And they’ve released a new version of the public Google Earth that supports it.

Of course, Google realizes that most people may not have the skills and/or the means to actually build their own — so there are other options too. Google set up a quick-start page to help you, or you can contact their supplier, End Point, who can build your own version for you.

The cost? $72,000 to $80,000 — plus maintenance.

Or you can buy just the parts you need separately.

One thing I love about Disqus is their mobile commenting abilities. Traditionally, commenting on mobile devices has been awful, but Disqus makes it pretty on the small screen. That said, it’s still a pain to moderate Disqus comments while on the go. So Disqus has a new product to take care of that.

The commenting start-up (which we use here at TechCrunch) is releasing a set of mobile applications to handle comment moderation when you’re away from your desk. The Android, iPhone, and webOS platforms will all be getting this app. It’s out today for Android, and will be out shortly on the other two platforms, Disqus notes (they’re in review).

Here are the features of the app they list:

• Approving, marking spam, and deleting content
• Filtering by status
• Background notifications
• Search
• Reply
• View Context

So trolls be warned, we can now kill you from all angles. Oh, and we’ll have a new effective weapon shortly.

Tokyo-based augmented reality startup Tonchidot has raised $12 million in Series B funding from various Japanese companies, including the country’s second biggest telco KDDI, major media conglomerate Recruit, ad agency SPiRE and venture capital firms DCM, Itochu Technology Ventures (ITV), and JAFCO.

Tonchidot closed a $4 million series A funding round led by DCM and with ITV participating back in December 2008. The $16 million raised in two rounds is an impressive chunk of money in Japan’s startup scene.

The TechCrunch50 company is known for Sekai Camera, its hit augmented reality (AR) application that’s available for free on the iPhone, Android, iPad, and on the web. In March this year, Tonchidot introduced OpenAir, an API that allows third parties to deliver content within Sekai Camera. (More info on how Tonchidot did after TC50 2008 can be found in my post from July.)

“SoLAR” games as the third wave of mobile gaming innovation

Now some of the fresh money will be used for expanding the company’s app platform (Sekai Apps) that makes it possible for third parties to release social/location-based/AR games within the Sekai Camera application. Named “SoLAR”, Tonchidot says these titles will constitute the third wave of innovation in the rapidly growing mobile gaming space – following “traditional” mobile games and location-based services like Foursquare or Booyah.

Here’s the official SoLAR Apps promo video:

SoLAR stands for “Social, Location, Augmented Reality”. The first two SoLAR titles already added to Sekai Camera are third-party action game Kaboom and a unique Twitter app called CooKoo (Sekai Camera users can access them directly from a menu). CooKoo is a quirky mix between Twitter client and AR-powered, location-based social game that transforms your tweets into pigeons.

Tonchidot promises more SoLAR titles, mobile payment solutions, Facebook and Twitter connectivity, and other features in the near future. We’ll keep you posted.

According to an SEC filing, DNS service provider OpenDNS has raised more capital, $4.5 million to be specific. We’ve confirmed the additional financing with the company and learned that this was an inside round handled by Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners (they took a stake in the company in July 2009).

Chief executive David Ulevitch (see this SFGate profile for more about the man) tells me there wasn’t really a need for more venture capital – the business has been running profitably for a while now – but that OpenDNS had the chance to be “opportunistic”.

OpenDNS essentially delivers a free, fast, ad-supported DNS resolution service with features like typo correction, phishing protection, and optional content filtering alongside more robust paid offerings for enterprises. Ulevitch tells me the company continues to grow like a weed and that they can definitely use the extra funding to ramp up hiring and product development.

Back in March, OpenDNS announced that over one percent of the world’s Internet users were using its services. Ulevitch says it’s even more now, though he declined to put a specific percentage on it. Either way, OpenDNS is clearly getting big, fast.

The company boasts 32 employees today, and Ulevitch is hoping to grow to 40 by year’s end.

Total number of internal TechCrunch meetings in the five years prior to AOL Acquisition: 1

I’m not even sure our AOL acquisition has legally closed yet. But today we celebrate our new corporate overlords with…an internal all hands. EVP David Eun, Heather’s new boss, scheduled a whopping 3.5 hour all hands meeting today starting at 11. Everyone’s here in the office pretending like it’s perfectly normal to be awake and in the office at this ridiculous hour. And God help us if news breaks, because we’ll all be in the conference room acting out a Dilbert cartoon.

I really don’t like internal meetings, even if they do serve a purpose. We once had an all hands here at TechCrunch but it ended after a few minutes because I wanted to go back to my office and do anything else besides be in a meeting. I really hope this doesn’t become a regular thing.

Ok, I’m off to go review HR policies, or something. On the upside, there’s a guy here named Brian from corp dev and I think with enough pressure he’s going to tell me all the other acquisition deals AOL is working on.

Update: The agenda! We get gifts!

At TechCrunch Disrupt, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt told the audience that the next step for Google Search is to show more personalized results. It’s unclear when Google will roll out a more personalized search experience, but startup Evernote, the ‘memory enhancement’ service that allows one to capture, organize, and find information across multiple devices and platforms, is hoping to bring this to you now. The startup is releasing a new Google Chrome Extension that includes Simultaneous Search, which lets you search both Google and your Evernote account at the same time.

Here’s how it works. When you beginning typing your Google search, your Evernote notes will also show as a result on top of your Google search result. Evernote will also show you the number of notes that match your query; and you can click on the result to see a list of all your notes that matched the search. Evernote says the extension also works on other Google search portals, including Google Images and Google Shopping. And the startup is planning to expand this functionality to other search engines and browsers.

With the new extension, Evernote users can also email their clips and notes to up to ten friends right from inside the Evernote Extension popup.

For any Evernote power user, the extension seems like a great way to combine your everyday search with your content on the note taking platform. Evernote has been growing like a weed, reaching 4 million users in August, and nifty features like these should only help the service continue to increase its userbase.

Buzzd, a social city and nightlife mobile app that pulls its data from Twitter and other buzzd users for a bigger picture of the places that are hot in a given location, is debuting a new Android app today. The app will aggregate check-ins from Gowalla, Foursquare, Facebook, Loopt, Brightkite and Buzzd itself to give users a realtime view of the most popular venues in their areas.

The buzzd network compiles information from its base of over a half-million active users and other real-time sources to provide users with activity updates for almost half a million venues across the United States, the U.K. and Canada. The Android app now aggregates over 500,000 check-ins per day from Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt, Yelp, Whrrl and other real-time location -based services sources to present activity at bars, clubs, restaurants and other points of interest. That data is then added to the app’s “buzzdmeter,” which gives you a real-time measure of activity at popular bars, restaurants and nightclubs in your city.

Besides a UI overhaul, the new app has tighter Facebook and Twitter integration, and now allows users to find the friends on these social networks that user Buzzd. You can also now simultaneously post buzzd ratings to your Facebook wall and/or Twitter feed.

Buzzd currently counts one million users, with 500,000 of those users actively using the service. It is a tough market to play in considering the popularity of Foursquare, Gowalla and now Facebook Places. But Buzzd is trying to focus on aggregating information on the actual venues, so perhaps the app can find a way to attract users. Buzzd actually aggregated the most popular venues according to check-ins for the Summer of 2010 in the U.S. (see chart below).

In the game or Risk, the main objective is to take control over every land mass on the planet. With an update to Street View today, Google has just completed that.

The original idea behind Google Street View was a good one: give everyone in the world a view from any street in the world. Of course, when it launched in May 2007, Street View was only available in five cities in the U.S. But the update today — over three years later — completes an impressive feat for the product: it’s now available on every continent. Yes, all seven. Yes, that includes Antarctica. Yes, a place with no real streets.

To be fair, clicking around Street View on Antarctica, it doesn’t seem nearly as robust as Street View in other places. In fact, it seems like many of the views are just of big Panoramio pictures (Google’s geo photo service). I can only find a couple of spots that let you scroll around 360 degrees as you can with most of the rest of Street View. But then again, also to be fair, Antarctica doesn’t really have any streets. Sure, there are probably some roads for research facilities, but who knows how long they last in the icy wasteland.

Along with the Antarctica update, Google also added Brazil and Ireland to its Street View roster today.

Oh, and as a random sidenote: most versions of the game of Risk don’t actually include Antarctica as a landmass you have to conquer. So Google is going above and beyond here.

Update: Google wanted to clarify that panoramas are available for an area of Antarctica called Half Moon Island — the rest is Panoramio photos for now. A full map of where Street View is available here.

comScore just released its latest online video data in the U.S. for the month of August; showing that viewership remained steady since the previous month. According to comScore, 178 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in August for an average of 14.3 hours per viewer (178 million users watched online video in July as well). The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in more than 5.2 billion viewing sessions during the course of the month and 85.1 percent of internet users in the U.S. viewed online video in August

Unsurprisingly, YouTube.com took the stop spot in terms of viewers, with 146.3 million unique viewers. Facebook.com jumped one position to capture the #2 spot with 58.6 million viewers, for a total of 243 million viewing sessions, continuing on its growth in video viewership and surpassing Yahoo. Yahoo came in third with 53.9 million viewers, followed by VEVO with 45.4 million. Google Sites in total had the highest number of overall viewing sessions with 1.9 billion and average time spent per viewer at 270 minutes, or 4.5 hours.

Americans viewed more than 3.8 billion video ads in August, up from 3.6 billion July. Hulu generated the highest number of video ad impressions at 790 million, followed by BrightRoll Video Network with 469 million ad views. Video ads reached 45 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 28 times during the month.

Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 30 over the course of the month. The top video ad networks in terms of their potential reach of the total U.S. population were: Break Media at 46.4 percent, BrightRoll Video Network at 45.0 percent, and ScanScout Network at 44.5 percent (Hulu isn’t included in this because it is not a standalone video ad network).

The average duration of the average online content video was 4.8 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes. And video ads accounted for 10.7 percent of all videos viewed and 1.0 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

It’s no secret that Facebook’s video viewership and content is growing by leaps and bounds. And it’s pretty impressive that the social network has more viewers online than content and media sites like NBC, Fox and Turner.

After he debuted the latest in a series of wacky stunts, dating service and scholarship fund Grouspawn, I caught up with Groupon CEO Andrew Mason backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about the recent Groupon backlash, the company’s success problem and how transparency can scale to hundreds of millions of dollars in deals in 150 cities around the world.

Highlights:

“We wanted to make sure that Groupon babies were the smartest babies out there …”

“It’s cheaper to allow customers to punish us quickly, and we’ll take the heat on that if it leads to a better product.”

“Everything that was part of the Groupon experience when it was in one city all exists on the same level now.”

“If you’re open with people and provide context for the decisions that your making, customers will stick with you.”

“Are you wearing bronzer?”

Currently valued at $1.35 billion, Groupon (which does not currently disclose its traffic and userbase stats) is unique in its explosive growth, having created an entire movement of daily deals site clones.

Internet marketing services company eBridge has raised $2.5 million in financing from Comerica Bank in a bid to broaden the scope of SMB-focused tools and services currently offered through its local business division, eBridgeInteractive.

eBridge has been in operation since 2003, using technology and a service-oriented approach to help small and medium-sized businesses maximize their visibility on the Web.

Initially focusing on local search, eBridge in 2009 expanded its offering to include more business services such as social media monitoring, hyperlocal domain names, copywriting, marketing video production and reputation management.

eBridge says it aims to continue looking for other future sources to support its growth.