Category: Tech news

Email is taking up too much time in our lives.

Do yourself and your recipients a favor by making your emails 3 sentences or less.

If we all do it, imagine the time we’ll have to do other things.

If this was an actual email reply and not a blog post, it would have ended before this sentence started. I’ve been trying a new solution to email overload by limiting emails to 3 sentences or less. You can learn the details in just 5 sentences at three.sentenc.es. The basic concept is to treat all email replies like SMS messages. I take this one step further and try to write initial emails in 3 sentences or less whenever possible.

I first learned about 3 sentence emails from a post by Kevin Rose, where he lists 5 good email time saving tips.

The inbox has become the “dreaded inbox” for so many people. A recent study by Xobni claimed 1 in 5 Americans check email either as the first thing they do in the morning or the last thing at night. 26% of Americans feel they can’t handle or feel overwhelmed by the number of emails they receive during vacation. Another report [PDF] by The Radicati Group says the typical corporate user sends 36 emails and receives 61 legitimate emails during the average day. An IDC study estimates email consumes an average of 13 hours per week per information worker.

Since starting at TechCrunch TV, I get about 100 to 200 emails a day which require action or a response. The newly launched Google Priority Inbox, which is getting postive reviews, helps. Although venture investor Jeff Clavier discovered it can make some mistakes. Google decided his wife’s emails weren’t important. Not good.

Even with Priority Inbox, staying up to 2am and working on emails 2 to 3 hours a day during my commute, I still can’t keep up with the email avalanche and get my inbox to zero.

My inbox problems are nothing compared to the TechCrunch writers. Or, to my boss Michael Arrington. Two years ago, when he wrote a post about email overload and a crisis in communication, he had 2,433 unread messages sitting in his inbox. Today, the count is 8 times higher: 20,131 unread messages. And this doesn’t include additional inbox items from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, voicemail, text messages, Skype, etc.

Let’s assume Mike did nothing else but read emails 24/7 – no writing posts, no talking on the phone, no eating, and no sleeping – well, that one might be accurate. It would take him 1 week to just read his email, assuming each email takes an average of 30 seconds to read and digest.

Now, let’s say all of his emails were 3 sentences or less. The average time to read them would be drop to about 10 seconds. He could get through them all in a little more than 2 days.

I’ll admit the 3 sentence email isn’t going to solve the email problem completely. In Mike’s email post two years ago, he wrote “The long term answer is that someone needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages.” He said if he had the right solution, he would quit his job and go do it. Since then, there have been some minor solutions, but the email giant seems to grow just like Moore’s law.

The new version of Twitter.com released this week might provide some relief. MG Siegler has been using the new service for a few days now. He told me he switched some email communication to Twitter Direct Message (or “DM”), which is now cleaner and easier. And Twitter DM forces you to keep things short.

While more communication is being done by social media networks, email usage is still expected[pdf] to rise in the coming years. A Wall Street Journal article one year ago declared “Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.” I’d say not quite yet.

Mike’s growing email overload creates problems for himself and the sender. He admitted to me, once an email comes in and doesn’t get acted on immediately, it enters the black hole. Even if he wanted to reply, it’s now out of sight and unlikely to surface again. For the sender, you don’t know whether the lack of reply is really a ‘no’, a never got read, or a just wait some more time for an answer.

When Mike does reply, he has mastered the art of the short reply. Most of his replies are just 1 sentence or 1 word. ‘Fine’, ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and an occasional ‘Awesome’. Usually, it’s the folks who are higher up in the organization who have perfected the terse reply. Just yesterday, we reported on unconfirmed 2 and 3 sentence Steve Jobs emails. He allegedly emailed a journalism student that “Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry.” Here’s another 3 sentence Jobs email reply to a customer with a water damaged MacBook Pro, upset that Apple would charge $300 to look into repairing it:

This is what happens when your MacBook Pro sustains water damage. They are pro machines and they don’t like water. It sounds like you’re just looking for someone to get mad at other than yourself.
Steve

Jobs is well known for his short replies. A study of 30,000 corporate emails found that high-status employees “tended to send short, curt messages.” That study includes some other tips on ‘How to E-Mail Like a C.E.O.’

But, a short response still requires clarity and some extra thought. A long, detailed email getting a reply like ‘fix it’ or ‘change it’, may not help unless both parties know what ‘it’ is.

Critics may say this could lead to over-simplification or a dumbing down of communication. But, emails are not the place to write War & Peace (1,475 pages.) Email has come a long way since 1971 when Ray Tomlinson typed an “insignificant and forgetable” message. It’s a great way to get asynchronous feedback. I’ll admit some emails shouldn’t be condensed, especially if they involve a lot of details or you just want to share some thoughts with friends. But those should be the exception.

Many business emails I read and yes, I write, would benefit from trimming. The next time you sit down to write or reply to an email, think about keeping it short. The three.sentenc.es site recommends you add this to your email signature to help spread the word.

——————————————–
Q: Why is this email three sentences or less?
A: http://three.sentenc.es

Google Instant is great — but I rarely use it. Why? Because I simply don’t go to google.com that often. That’s not to say I don’t search Google a lot — I do — I just use the Omnibox in Chrome for almost all of my searches. When Google launched Instant, they noted that it would be added to browser for people like me “in the next few months“. Well, guess what? It only took them 9 days.

Granted, Google has only enabled Instant as a Chrome Labs, and they have only enabled it for Chromium, the open source browser that Chrome is based on. But most features that come to Chromium, usually find their way to Chrome in relatively short order — though they have to then travel through the different levels of Chrome itself (dev then beta then stable). Sadly, this feature is Windows-only for the time being as well.

To activate Instant in Chrome Labs in Chromium, simply type “about:labs” into the Omnibox (the URL area) and hit enter. You’ll then have to click the link to “Enable” the feature, which will require a browser restart. Once you do that, you should be off and running. GoogleWatchBlog took a video of it in action below — it looks great, though I wonder if it will be slightly annoying if I really am just trying to type a URL.

It’s worth noting that this is actually Google Instant, unlike the instant search workaround in Chrome that was reported last week. That uses a different feature called “match preview” to mimick what Instant does, but it’s not exactly the same.

So when can Mac user expect to see the feature? “We’re waiting to iron out the kinks on windows first,” a team member writes on the Chromium Code Reviews page. Oh well, at least we have the Tab Overview lab — which is awesome (and already in Chrome proper — the dev build).

[thanks Pascal]

All day, the Internet has been erupting with news that the age of notebook and netbooks is over, and the age of tablets — specifically, the iPad, of course — has begun. One of the main catalysts of this eruption was Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn who supposedly told the Wall Street Journal that the iPad is cannibalizing laptop sales, especially netbook sales. Or did he?

Here’s the blurb from the WSJ story this morning:

Mr. Dunn also said internal estimates showed that the iPad had cannibalized sales from laptop PCs, especially netbooks, by as much as 50%.

Now, that’s obviously not a direct quote, but it is a very clear statement directly attributed to him. And it’s a huge statement as Best Buy is the nation’s leading consumer electronics giant. It’s basically saying that not only is the iPad winning, it is ushering in a new era of computing. In other words, Microsoft and all the PC incumbents are screwed.

But wait.

This afternoon, amid the uproar of this statement, Best Buy issued a press release backtracking from the claim. Give Dunn credit, he attempts to use humor to cool down the situation (borrowing a phrase from Mark Twain). “The reports of the demise of these devices are grossly exaggerated,” Dunn says in the release. So is he saying the Journal misquoted him? No — instead he’s doing the classic old non-denial denial:

While they were fueled in part by a comment in the Wall Street Journal that was attributed to me, they are not an accurate depiction of what we’re currently seeing.

Notice that he’s not saying he didn’t say that, he’s just trying to make you infer that he might not have said that. In other words, he probably did say that. Perhaps he was just wrong, or maybe he was feeling some pressure from important PC partners to backtrack from the statement — who knows.

Regardless of the reason for the backtrack, iPads aren’t notebook-killers in his mind anymore. Now, that’s just a “rumor“. Instead, tablets are an “incremental opportunity.” That’s quite a flip-flop.

Microsoft’s official Twitter account immediately retweeted the statement and even tipped Techmeme — though someone else actually beat them to tipping Techmeme. Another Microsoft employee. Just sayin’.

Meanwhile, no word yet from NPD and Morgan Stanley Research if they’re also going to be backtracking from their numbers that notebook sales are going the wrong way.

[image via]

Started as a way for University of Michigan students to gossip during class, founder Dan Rich says he was inspired by the simplicity of sites like Texts From Last Night and FML when he built Syncronizer, a community where you can follow chat conversations about anything from “Jersey Shore” to “Econ 503.” In fact Rich brings up stealth startup BNTER, started by Texts From Last Night founders Lauren Leto and Patrick Moberg, as a possible competitor.

Here’s what I like about Syncronizer: Like Facebook, it’s another socializing platform germinating from hotbed of all social interactions, a college campus, and despite the fact a lot of the conversations degenerate into the usual fratty deliberations on boobs and beer, it seems as though there is something unique happening here.

The idea of following group chats instead of people is also novel, and socializing becomes more about tracking interests and less about individual personal nodes. You now have the ability to communicate with friends and strangers in both visible and invisible modes, and, in the case of “Econ 503″ some rooms are closed to non-members. The site bridges the gap between public and private so users can pick and choose which conversations to track through your dashboard.

The main difference between a Syncronizer chat and a normal group chat room is that Syncronizer chats stick around for a long time. That and simplicity of use, say Rich, “Everything on the site works with a single click- visibility/anonymity, tracking a room, restricting a room, etc.”

Rich says he was attempting to flip the Twitter model of following people on its axis, so instead of broadcasting updates to anybody and everybody, the conversation becomes the focus of the follow.

“So, for example, you might want a place to discuss plans or stories with a large group of friends you know very well. You could create a room and invite your friends, and restrict access so that only your friends can view it. But at the same time, you may want to also remain engaged in a public conversation about your favorite tv show.”

Self-funded, Rich’s future plans include improving the chat aggregator’s search functionality so users can better find rooms of interest to them, and developing ways that Syncronizer can further connect people with conversations that are relevant.

As regular readers may or may not recall, I recently quit Twitter. My reasons for doing so were legion but one of the biggest was the fact that, as someone whose job it is to write about himself, I’d noticed that Twitter had adversely affected my ability to work. Not because it was distracting – which it was – but mainly because I realised that since joining Twitter I realised I’d all but stopped writing my blog.

When I wrote my previous book, back in 2008, my blog archives proved a really useful way to go back and fact-check my recollection of events, not to mention double-checking exactly dates and times of my travels. When it came time to write the next book, though, I was slightly alarmed to discover my Twitter archive mainly furnished me with 2300 (of the 10,000+ I’d actually written) micro-notes packed with some useful insights as “heading out to buy eggs” and “Just saw a man nearly getting hit by a car”, not to mention a couple of hundred context-free OH’s, none of which was attributed.

My plan was that, after quitting Twitter, I’d be able to focus on writing stuff that actually paid the rent, and then go back to using my blog to fill in the gaps. And that’s what I’ve done.

But but but.

But there definitely remains a murky middle ground at the lower end of the scale (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) – stuff that I want to draw attention to, that perhaps deserves a wider audience than the two or three friends I might happen to run into while the thought is fresh in my head, but that doesn’t justify a whole blog post. There’s also the issue that, with RSS usage trailing off, Twitter has become the default way to keep track of new columns, posts, books etc from writers who you follow.

So what’s the answer? Return to Twitter? Definitely not. Write one-line posts on my blog? That’s just weird, and it doesn’t solve the ‘following’ problem. So what does that leave?

“How about a Tumblr?”

That’s the question I’ve heard a dozen times from friends who are writers. It’s also, apparently, the solution that has John Mayer settled on, having also quit Twitter (copycat, John Mayer!). On the face of it, it seems like a good plan: move my blog over to Tumblr (I already have an account, apparently – although I don’t remember registering it) and benefit from an lower maintenance platform to write shorter – but still substantial – posts plus the ability to follow and be followed by others.

I have questions, though. What should I do with my old blog posts? Can they be ported over, and should they be, given I’d be at the mercy of someone else’s SAAS solution rather than my current backup-able dedicated hosting thing? Also: will Tumblr prove just as distracting as Twitter? Does it inherently lead to shorter, pithier re-blogging rather than actual posts? No one I’ve spoken to seems to have good answers to any of these questions – perhaps I just don’t have Tumblry enough friends? – so instead I’ve decided to crowd-source the decision.

So here I go. It pains me to give the appearance of Mashable-esque comment bait, but I’m genuinely interested: what do you think? Is Tumblr a more feature-rich platform for serious blogging, or is it floss-filled lightweight bullshit for people with short attention spans? I’d be particularly interested to hear from serious bloggers who have made the switch from WordPress to Tumblr.

Let me know in the comments.

(Image stolen from Tumblr’s ‘Topherchris‘)

There’s no absolute formula for success in the mobile app world — but if there was, ngmoco would probably be amongst those closest to having it figured out. Just about everything they touch (Gun Range, WeFarm, Rolando, and their Plus+ gaming network) turns to gold; unfortunately, the only stuff they’ve touched so far has been exclusively for iOS.

Back in February, ngmoco CEO Neil Young said they were “encouraged” by Android’s growth, but that they’d be sticking with the iPhone for the time being. Oh, how quickly a big ol’ cash injection can change plans; just a month after an estimated $3-5 million investment by Google Ventures, ngmoco is seemingly looking to dive head first into Android development.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

This week, Why Is This News has gone on the road! Two roads in fact: one towards Tianjin, where Sarah was attending “Summer Davos” and the other towards Las Vegas where Paul was, well, hanging out by a pool.

Fortunately, thanks to the magic of Skype, we were still able to cross time-zones to talk about Sarah’s highlights from China, sustainability, water and the final word on the woman in technology debate. (Spoiler: the chicks are alright)

Video below.

Cuil, the much maligned search engine that at one time had hopes of toppling Google, has gone offline. And from what we hear from former employees, it’s not just a temporary outage, it may be done for good. Those employees who are still with the company apparently weren’t paid this week, and they’re starting to say they’re looking for new jobs.

The company had raised $33 million in venture capital in 2007 and 2008. we first started covering Cuil in late 2007 when it was in stealth. It launched in July 2008 but a month later their VP Product had bailed. By December 2008 it had little traffic and since then things have only gotten stranger.

To be clear, we’ve confirmed nothing right now except that the site is down, the rest of what we’re hearing is from former employees. We’ll update as we hear back from the company and/or investors. Meanwhile, it’s in the DeadPuil.

It’s starting. The inevitable “wait-a-minute-this-start-up-isn’t-the-second-coming-of-Christ-after-all” backlash has officially hit Groupon. First there was the dodgy fake deals in Brazil, then there was a business owner saying offering a Groupon deal was the worst business decision she ever made, then there was the sketchy photography offer. These are all serious issues, but clearly don’t reflect the general performance of the site or views of the majority of its merchants. Still you could almost hear the schadenfreude popping throughout the blog and Twittersphere.

Generally I think the hype cycle is one of the lamest things about the tech/social media blogosphere—no one is as great or as horrible as we all make them out to be. But this turn of the cycle might be helping Groupon. Simply put, the company could use a discount on some humble pie.

It’s a law of startup nature that the easier a business is to create and rip-off the less defensible it is. To wit, there are upwards of fifty Groupon clones in most large countries—several hundred in China— and they’re almost all making money and flooded with small businesses wanting to offer deals through them. There seems a limited network effect because the deals are one-off, many of the clones don’t require exclusivity, and Groupon hasn’t had much of a first-mover-lead on the copy-cats. The company has said that customers look at Groupon deals like an ad purchase—so the company is more like Google than eBay, just a part of a small businesses’ marketing strategy not their entire virtual storefront.

And yet, despite all this, Groupon seems wholly unconcerned about any threats to its business. In our August 20 interview with Rob Solomon he seemed to be a bit ahead of himself, saying it was a trillion dollar market opportunity that had completely disrupted offline advertising and indeed possibly “the biggest category the Internet had ever seen.” I asked several times about threats to the company’s momentum, and he said no one else had innovated on the category, the company had perfected the model and that the ability to do these deals at scale was a major advantage. He was clear that Groupon doesn’t see any threats on the horizon other than keeping up with its inevitable growth.

Really? I can think of a few threats:

1. Yelp: It’s not the sexy new kid on the Web 2.0 block but Yelp as a massive install base, has stronger network effect in many cities already, has already copied your business model and seems to be selling at scale just fine. They may well stumble as they add more cities and more deals, but if this is really a trillion dollar opportunity, I’d argue Groupon hasn’t been tested on the scale issue yet either.

2. The Digg-Button Problem: Sometimes the most transformational consumer Internet businesses wind up just being features. Think of how radically Digg changed the distribution of news with its Digg buttons that are now a staple of the Internet and larger companies like Facebook and Twitter. Groupon too may become less of a distinct business, and more of a way of offering discounts that loads of businesses adopt, it could even become a classified revenue replacement for whatever daily newspapers are still in businesses. Is it really a company or just a brilliant new way of marketing? I’m not sure we know yet.

3. An utter lack of focus: I give Groupon huge points for sheer ballsiness. I have never seen a US-based startup explicitly go after a global opportunity so quickly. The company has become nowhere close to locking up the US market or even picking all the low hanging fruit, and best case when something grows that fast they’re going to start stumbling here or there and as we saw this week, competitors and the press will be ready to pounce on them when they do. It’s like a fat man at an all-you-can-eat buffet—even if the food is there for the taking he can’t eat it all at the same time.

I say this out of love, Groupon. Because I have been waiting for a smart company to disrupt ecommerce for a long time and God knows we all need more ways to sell ad-like-products-that-actually-work on the Internet. (cc:Yahoo) But Groupon’s demeanor reminds me of two moments I’ve seen before in the Valley. The first is when Tom Siebel declared his customer relationship management software was so predictive he could “see around corners”…and then he turned a corner and his business fell off a cliff and never recovered. The other was when a WebVan executive—infuriated by a story I wrote that the business wasn’t defensible enough—screamed at me “We have built for scale! You should see our warehouses! It’s like the Jetsons in here!” And a month later, WebVan was delisted from the Nasdaq, and soon after the WebVan ads were being scraped off of every cup holder at, then, Pacific Bell Park.

Simply put, startups should be more paranoid. Groupon needs to be humbled by something small, so later on it’ll be able to anticipate something big.

Gawker just published some emails where Apple CEO Steve Jobs comes off as pretty rude to journalism student Chelsea Issacs. We here at TechCrunch we have a tradition of Peter Kafka-esque skepticism when it comes to emails from journalism students, but especially ones that seem to be at the center of some shady Internet fame seeking business themselves.

“In 1998, Isaacs was the most desirable hand model in the United States and Canada. Isaacs has been described by the Cantolino Press as having an “electric presence that is both entertaining and very believable” with “an extremely evolved sense of the human psyche.”

The whole thing comes off as incredibly fishy, especially right after the “Steve Jobs Ninja Stars” incident and especially on this especially slow news day. So after asking Chelsea Issacs whether this was some kind of grand blogger setup and receiving no response, I sent Steve Jobs an email of my own. And am waiting to hear back, from him or anyone at Apple really.

Hey Steve,

Is this for reals? Seems like this journalism student is trying to figure out if we TechCrunchers fact check … 🙂

Alexia

Here is the alleged Jobs/Issacs exchange as emailed to us below. Parts that seem notable in bold.

On Sep 17, 2010, at 12:44 PM, Chelsea Isaacs wrote:

Please take a look at the email correspondence I just had with Steve Jobs. I am a student in a journalism course and after asking him a question, he responded rather rudely. See for yourself. Thanks.

—————————————————–

From: Steve Jobs

Date: September 16, 2010 6:27:36 PM PDT

To: “[email protected]”

Subject: Re: Mr. Jobs – Student Journalist Concerned about Apple’sMediaRelations Dept.

Please leave us alone.

Sent from my iPhone

—————————————————–

On Sep 16, 2010, at 5:32 PM, [email protected] wrote:

You’re absolutely right, and I do meet your criteria for being a customer who deserves a response:

1. I AM one of your 300 million users.

2. I DO have a problem; I need answers that only Apple Media Relations can answer.

Now, can they kindly respond to my request (my polite and friendly voice can be heard in the first 5 or 10 messages in their inbox). Please, I am on deadline.

I appreciate your help.

—————————————————–

From: Steve Jobs

Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2010 17:10:12

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re: Mr. Jobs – Student Journalist Concerned about Apple’s

MediaRelations Dept.

Nope. We have over 300 million users and we can’t respond to their requests unless they involve a problem of some kind. Sorry.

Sent from my iPhone

—————————————————–

On Sep 16, 2010, at 4:37 PM, [email protected] wrote:

Thank you for your reply. I never said that your goal should be to “help me get a good grade.” Rather, I politely asked why your media relations team does not respond to emails, which consequently, decreases my chances of getting a good grade. But, forget about my individual situation; what about common courtesy, in general — if you get a message from a client or customer, as an employee, isn’t it your job to return the call? That’s what I always thought. But I guess that’s not one of your goals. Yes, you do have a creative approach, indeed.

—————————————————–

From: Steve Jobs

Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2010 16:19:13

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re: Mr. Jobs – Student Journalist Concerned about Apple’s Media

Relations Dept.

Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry.

Sent from my iPhone

—————————————————–

On Sep 16, 2010, at 3:22 PM, [email protected] wrote:

Dear Mr. Jobs,

As a college student, I can honestly say that Apple has treated me very well; my iPod is basically the lifeline that gets me through the day, and thanks to Apple’s Final Cut Pro, I aced last semester’s video editing project. I was planning to buy a new Apple computer to add to my list of Apple favorites.

Because I have had such good experiences as a college student using Apple products, I was incredibly surprised to find Apple’s Media Relations Department to be absolutely unresponsive to my questions, which (as I had repeatedly told them in voicemail after voicemail) are vital to my academic grade as a student journalist.

For my journalism course, I am writing an article about the implementation of an iPad program at my school, the CW Post Campus of Long Island University.

The completion of this article is crucial to my grade in the class, and it may potentially get published in our university’s newspaper. I had 3 quick questions regarding iPads, and wanted to obtain answers from the most credible source: Apple’s Media Relations Department.

I have called countless times throughout the week, leaving short, but detailed, messages which included my contact information and the date of my deadline. Today, I left my 6th message, which stressed the increasingly more urgent nature of the situation. It is now the end of the business day, and I have not received a call back. My deadline is tomorrow.

Mr. Jobs, I humbly ask why Apple is so wonderfully attentive to the needs of students, whether it be with the latest, greatest invention or the company’s helpful customer service line, and yet, ironically, the Media Relations Department fails to answer any of my questions which are, as I have repeatedly told them, essential to my academic performance.

For colleges nationwide, Apple is at the forefront of improving the way we function in the academic environment, increasing the efficiency of conducting academic research, as well as sharing and communicating with our college communities.

With such an emphasis on advancing our education system, why, then, has Apple’s Media Relations team ignored my needs as a student journalist who is just trying to get a good grade?

In addition to the hypocrisy of ignoring student needs when they represent a company that does so much for our schools, the Media Relations reps are apparently, also failing to responsibly handle the inquiries of professional journalists on deadlines. Unfortunately, for a journalist in the professional world, lacking the answers they need on deadline day won’t just cost them a grade; it could cost them their job.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Chelsea Kate Isaacs

Senior

CW Post – Long Island University

And besides, if this is real, Jobs is totally in the right.

Update: Issacs responds.

Absolutely not.

—————————————————–

From: Alexia Tsotsis
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2010 19:04:41 -0700
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Steve Jobs’ Emails to Me: “Leave us Alone”

My question: Is your Steve Jobs email part of a project to see if you can trick the media?

See:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/11/elyse-porterfield/

I’m pretty good at telling the truth, so be honest with me.

There will be many times you will want to remember during your years at college, and many you will be unable to remember. In both cases you’ll be glad to have taken pictures, though you may wish to keep them off Facebook. And of course there is the whole question of what you’re going to take these pictures with. Well, there’s no shortage of cameras to choose from, but depending on budget and your photographic aspirations, we can probably narrow it down a bit.

Here are our recommendations for the college-bound shutter-hound.

Continue reading this article…

Google Voice applications have had a pretty tumultuous history in the App Store. At first, Apple approved them, and the people rejoiced. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, they were pulled, with “duplicating features that the iPhone comes with (Dialer, SMS, etc).” cited as the reasoning. The people were, understandably, pretty friggin’ mad.

Over the past few days, the developers of at least two such applications have been indicating that they’d been hearing good news from Apple, suggesting that the Apps would be making an Apple-approved, no-jailbreak-required return. Sure enough, they’ve just started popping up in the App Store.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

What is it about doing video interviews with me that makes VCs start swearing? Dave McClure, David Hornik, Fred Wilson and now Redpoint’s Satish Dharmaraj. OK, in most of these cases, I’m the one who starts the swearing, but still, I have a feeling most people don’t have to put “NSFW” on this many posts about wonky old venture capital. I’m thinking about just renaming the show “Fuck You Money.”

Appropriately, the theme was “assholes” on this week’s “Ask a VC.” We talked about Fred Wilson’s hope that the industry weed out the assholes and asshole-ish VC behavior that Dharmaraj refuses to engage in now that he’s moved from the entrepreneur side of the table to the VC side of the table. We also talked about his angel investing in India– and why Redpoint as a firm doesn’t invest there. We talk about what the role for business people is in a engineer-obsessed Valley. We talk about why VCs rely on their networks for deal flow and why that’s not quite as well, asshole-ish, as you might think. And we talk about the diminishing importance of patents. There’s some swearing in that segment too.

Next week, our guest is Josh Kopelman, the original Super Angel. Send your questions to askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com.

When you want to hang out with your friends online, you go to Facebook. When you want to look for a job, you go to LinkedIn. Well, maybe not for long. BranchOut, a startup that is essentially building a LinkedIn for Facebook, raised $6 million in a series A round. Several news sites reported the funding yesterday when the SEC filing came out, but other than Accel Partners, none of the investors were known. Here they are:

In addition to Accel, which led the round (partner Kevin Efrusy sits on the board), the other two VCs were Mike Maples of Floodgate and Tim Chang of Norwest Venture Partners. But the round also attracted a lot of high-profile super angels, including Napster founder Shawn Fanning, former Facebook platform manager Dave Morin (Fanning and Morin are now co-founders of Path), Bebo founder Michael Birch, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, Tickle founder James Currier, former Tickle CEO Stan Chudnovsky, Blippy founder Philip Kaplan, Googler Ben Ling, Naval Ravikant, and Josh Elman (former Facebook, now Twitter).

Many of the angel investors are, appropriately enough, friends and former colleagues of BranchOut CEO Rick Marini, who was also a co-founder of Tickle. (Michael Birch of Bebo fame also used to work there).

The basic idea of BranchOut is to find jobs through your real friends. It is a Facebook app that lets you search for companies and then it shows you all your friends who either work there or know somebody who does. It only goes two degrees of separation out, unlike LinkedIn which goes three. It doesn’t show the names of the people who work at the target companies, just their titles. You ask your friends for an introduction.

Why is this better than LinkedIn? Well, because it is on Facebook. “Basically we have this thesis that the social graph will change a lot of internet businesses,” explains Efrusy. “We fundamentally believe it will change jobs and recruiting. If you look at how most people really get their jobs it is through their real friends.”

Right now BranchOut gets all of its data from Fecebook profiles, including employment histories, but it plans to add more data from other sources, perhaps even LinkedIn. It also allows you to post jobs to your friends for free, and will eventually let companies post jobs for a fee.

The overly ornate website copy of investment trends startup Quid (tagline: “Mapping the world’s technologies”) has now become a subject on Quora, and is therefore famous enough to warrant objective analysis. So here goes …

First of all I literally spat out my morning coffee when I saw the header “Our Secondary Typeface.” Secondary typeface!? How about a primary business model?

Other highlights:

“Quid is from the Latin ‘quid,’ what.” What?

“In law, quiddity is used to refer to a fine point, the essential difference. Shakespeare includes it in a speech by Hamlet, referring to a lawyer, “Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures.” WTF?

“This contribution is particularly evident in the swash tail of our Quid ‘Q.’” Swash tail!

“We selected it for its clarity, its modernist tone, and its ability to both complement and contrast with Bulmer and Baskerville.”

“Our team brings backgrounds in engineering, finance, physics, computer science, biochemistry, and design to bear on this lacuna.” Lacuna!

Quid recently launched in private beta and is backed by Founder’s Fund for an undisclosed amount. Oh, and I almost forgot, good news for those who have recently finished their Rhodes Scholarships in Classics/Particle Physics and are looking for a gig in between singing in an Art Rock band, learning their 16th language and joining the French Foreign Legion! Quid is hiring.