Category: Tech news

Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins has a theory about the Third Wave of computing: first came the PC, then the Internet, and now we are adding a third wave which is a combination of social, mobile, and commerce. It’s become the informal theme of TechCrunch Disrupt (buy tickets here). So who better to kick off Disrupt in San Francisco on September 27 than Doerr himself?

At our first Disrupt cnference in New York last May, Doerr was interviewed by Charlie Rose. This time we are turning the tables and letting him do the interviewing. On the other side of the table will be Zynga CEO Mark Pincus and Bing Gordon, the founder of Electronic Arts and now the partner at Kleiner who sits on Zynga’s board. Zynga, of course, is the social gaming company behind hits such as FarmVille, FrontierVille, and Mafia Wars. It’s revenues are estimated to be anywhere from $500 million on up this year, going to $1 billion next year.

Doerr has told us, “Zynga is the fastest growing business Kleiner Perkins has ever invested in.” Faster than Amazon, Google, AOL, Compaq, Netscape, or Electronic Arts. In a sense, Zynga is the new Electronic Arts, but Zynga doesn’t make video games. It makes social games. It studies what makes players addicted and what make them keep coming back. It tweaks its games, watches what happens, and then tweaks some more, until it finds the sweet spot that resonates with hundreds of millions of people. It builds Internet treasures that become better the more other people cherish them.

How do you create Internet treasures today in this Third Wave? Doerr will try to tease this out from Pincus and Gordon. It will be a fascinating conversation to listen in on.

Our goal with the Disrupt, in addition to launching two dozen companies at the StartuP Battlefield, is to create these interesting discussions, bringing the world’s best venture investors like Doerr or Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz, who is also a speaker, together with the entrepreneurs who are riding the Third Wave.

We’ll be announcing more speakers and the full agenda later this week. But get your tickets now. We’ve extended the early bird ticket price until Monday since we are a little late in getting the agenda out.

I’m rarely excited by technology anymore but Lumus pressed my willies button and didn’t let go. Although it’s a bit hard to explain, the technology is simple: an LCOS projector shoots an image through a glass lens and into specially polished areas of the glass. This area “projects” a simulation of a 60-inch color screen in HD in front of your face and the lenses are see-through so you can look away into the distance or up close at objects in front of you. Because the system is stereo-optical you can transmit two of the same image to both lenses or – and this is where it gets crazy – you can transmit two separate images. That’s right – 3D images in front of your face, anywhere you look and the images are unobtrusive.

Click through for video.

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The City of New York giveth, and it taketh away. On this fine morning when we discover that there’s a proposal to ban smoking from all city parks and beaches we also discover that city parks will be gaining Wi-Fi access points, courtesy of Time Warner and Cablevision, the two big local cable companies. Well, not really “courtesy of,” since there’s a whole bunch of caveats attached to the deal. First thought: we’re about five years past the point where municipal Wi-Fi could be considered “neat.”

Late last year, on the eve of launch, I announced the end of the CrunchPad project, sadly ending a very exciting one and a half year effort to create a very inexpensive touch screen tablet computer.

Our partner, Fusion Garage, had inexplicably decided to simply terminate the partnership over “nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication.” A couple of weeks later they launched the device that we had worked on together under a new name, and we filed a lawsuit for Fraud and Deceit, Misappropriation of Business Ideas, Breach of Fiduciary Duty, Unfair Competitition and Violations of the Lanham Act.

Ugly stuff.

Except at the time we really didn’t know how ugly. After nearly a year of discovery it became clear that Fusion Garage, conspiring (there’s just no other word for it) with their PR firm McGrath Power, had been working for months to dramatically break the partnership, disregard our ownership of the project, and go to market without us. Jonathan Bloom at McGrath was the principle ringleader, and he and Fusion Garage actually planned the entire blowup from beginning to end. The only thing they didn’t expect was an actual lawsuit.

The blowup included a plan to reach out to press that competes with TechCrunch with a confusing story that suggested that we were mostly to blame. There was no evidence of any of that, but a lot of press ran with the easy to write story anyway.

Sound crazy? It is. Truly insane. But it all happened, and the internal emails prove it.

We’ve been through a lot of the regular pre-trial stuff at this point and we’ve amended our complaint to point out the worst of the new evidence that we’ve found. I’m embedding all the relevant documents below. A lot of time has been spent by Fusion Garage’s lawyers to try to keep these documents under seal, but they have recently been made publicly available.

The first document below reads like a novel, and frankly it probably would make a great movie. I’d consider it highly entertaining, I guess, if I wasn’t the central figure being manipulated. Our attorneys actually made a table on page 19-20 to show how they were promising us one thing while conspiring with their PR firm to do exactly the opposite.

For example, the email supposedly from Fusion Garage’s investor was actually written by Fusion Garage and the PR firm. There was a lot of back and forth about the tone and language to make this fraudulent document seem real.

Another example – Fusion Garage employee Stuart Tan, who still lists the Crunchpad as the project he’s working on on his Facebook profile, emails his girlfriend to tell her that he’s “really sucker these people.” He also mentions that he’ll be working on the project from our offices, and we’ve added pictures to the complaint showing the Fusion Garage team working with our team, from our offices, on the CrunchPad.

And the fun doesn’t end there. There are other documents showing the PR firm scripting Fusion Garage’s language so that it doesn’t appear to “suggest that we took crunchpad concept and went further with it and did joojoo and are now announcing it…We need to clearly make the link that this is the crunchpad with a different name.“

And “Right now the script reads as if we built it the way he wanted it and are now taking the product away from him and simply changing the name. This is not where I’d like us to be.”

Finally, the judge assigned to our case has made preliminary findings that “TechCrunch has made a credible showing that it may be able to establish the existence of a joint venture under which Fusion Garage owed it certain fiduciary duties. Such duties may have precluded Fusion Garage from proceeding to market with the joojoo without taking appropriate steps to dissolve the relationship and to compensate TechCrunch” And “Here, the parties’ conduct in jointly working to develop a tablet computer speaks louder than any uncertainties that may have existed between them as to the details of how their relationship would be structured.”

The documents are below.

An article yesterday on Billboard gives some new details into Google’s upcoming music store plans. Over the past several years, there have been no shortage of services that have launched with the hopes of being the “iTunes killer”, but if the details told to Billboard by “industry sources” are true, and if Google can actually get the labels to agree to what they want to do (a big, no huge “if”), Google Music sounds like it could be a very serious threat to iTunes.

Here’s the basic gist of what Google is supposedly proposing: they want to offer an online music store not unlike iTunes, but run entirely through the web browser (and perhaps an app on Android devices). But users would have the choice of downloading some content to their mobile devices to take on the go, or immediately putting it in a cloud storage locker, which users would pay around $25 a year for. From this locker, all music bought could be streamed to any web browser at no additional charge. And again, music could be downloaded to a mobile app for when you’re not going to be online.

Further, Google wants to make it so that every song on their service could be played once in its entirety once for free by any user. Currently, services like iTunes only allow you to hear 30-second snippets of songs before you have to buy them (though they’ve been trying to double this time allotment). After this one free play, the standard 30-second limit would apply. This is a similar model to what Lala offered, and users loved, until the service was acquired and shut down by, yes, Apple.

Lala also offered a social component that users were quite fond of, and social would be a key ingredient of Google Music as well. Billboard says that users might be able to share music playlists with friends — which, when combined with the one free play rule, could be very powerful. Undoubtedly, Google’s upcoming new social service/layer/whatever will be a part of this Google Music experience as well.

All of that sounds amazing. Just about everyone on the web (myself included) has been writing now for months, if not years, that iTunes needs to take its experience into the cloud. It’s going to happen eventually, but we always seem just another step away. Google, with all its online expertise, would appear to be closer. And if the service described above existed, there is no question I would use it. A lot.

But.

The big advantage iTunes does have is twofold: their device ecosystem and, more importantly, their agreements with the labels. While all tracks on iTunes are now DRM-free, for a long, long time they weren’t. So unfortunately, a lot of people are locked into using iTunes or Apple devices to play those tracks.

But Billboard notes that in addition to the music store, Google hopes to scan users’ hard drives to find music they already own and give them access to it in the Google Music system. According to Billboard, this may include not only DRM-free music bought legally through stores, but all music that they can identify. (Something which, miraculously, Lala also did back in the day.) Billboard notes that the inclusion of P2P (read: illegal) tracks would be a key for getting this service up and running with a huge group of users. And Billboard thinks the labels may even agree to it, if they get something in return — something like Google fighting harder against illegal downloads going forward.

Billboard even speculates that Google could exclude P2P sites from search results in exchange. The problem there is if that happened, Google would face a shitstorm the likes of which they’ve never seen from all sides. Users would be pissed that they can’t find their favorite P2P sites, but everyone else would be pissed that Google would once again be going after net neutrality. So I simply can’t believe that’s going to happen.

But even without getting into that whole debate, Google is likely to have a tough road going forward getting the labels to agree to some of their basic desires for Google Music. Billboard says that Google is proposing a 50/50 spit on subscription revenues, but the labels will undoubtedly want more. Google wants a three-year licensing agreement, but the labels will undoubtedly want a shorter one to test out this system. And then there are the track purchasing prices themselves. They sound as if they’ll be similar to what they are on iTunes, but who knows. And, since there is a streaming component to this, what will that mean for the rights negotiations?

Apple’s big advantage is that they already have their label agreements in place. Google doesn’t. That’s exactly why Google has been staffing up with some big guns to negotiate all this stuff. But as everyone is well aware by now, dealing with the media industries takes a lot of time and a lot of compromise.

The word is that Google hopes to launch this service later this year. Can they possibly get all this ironed out in just a few more months? I certainly hope so, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

But if Google is able to get something at least somewhat close to this out there for Google Music, the online music ecosystem is going to change.

[photo: flickr/mark sebastian]

YouNoodle founder Bob Goodson is debuting his newest venture Quid this week, which has been in in stealth for the past two years. Quid’s data platform aims to map the world’s technologies, allowing companies to gain more insight on specific sectors and to allow government entities to figure out which emerging technologies can better serve their infrastructure. Backed by The Founders Fund, Quid is now in private beta.

Goodson tells me that after seeing how both emerging and modern countries depend on technology produced by private companies, he saw a gap in how this data about these companies and their products are being served to governments. And this data, Goodsen says, can also be used by companies to gain insight on new technologies emerging, determine possible acquisition targets or to evaluate a competitive landscape.

Here’s the description of the startup from Quid’s website: Disruptive technology shapes the world, defining political, military, financial, and commercial opportunities and threats. Whether originating in academic research, in National Labs, or in privately-held or public companies, these technologies can emerge with explosive impact, creating and destroying value. Quid is developing quantitative and visualization tools that make these fast-moving, global technology developments visible, navigable, and understandable.

With a team of 40 engineers and scientists from around the world, Goodsen says that he’s trying to create a map of the worlds technologies to see how they are related, comparing data sets with other data sets. The data that Quid mines includes the nature of a technology from a company, growth numbers, number of employees, legal filings, SEC documents, and more. Not only does Quid process and analyze all this data but it maps this data with other data to develop relationships between data sets. For example, at a very basic level Quid’s technology and algorithms would identify that Microsoft offers a competitive product (the browser) with Google and Firefox.

Quid’s data is accessed by companies and government entities via a web application that allows users to run reports and more. And Quid already has a number of high-profile clients using its platform, including Microsoft. Quid will face competition from Gartner and Forrester.

Goodsen is maintaining YouNoodle, which aims to promote entrepreneurial development among young people across the world, as a separate entity.

Today at a special event marking the launch of IE9, Microsoft announced some compelling new features for Bing that will be enabled by the new HTML5/CSS3 functionality available in IE9 (which will presumably work in other modern web browsers, too). Bing will be launching these new features in a preview form in a month.

You may be familiar with Bing’s daily background image (a feature that Google copied a few months ago). Bing is going to start building on this feature by introducing HTML5-based video backgrounds, and interactive photos that take advantage of the Canvas element. The result didn’t add much from a functionality perspective, but it looked great. Another good looking feature: Bing will now include moving backgrounds as part of its weather widgets.

Some of the features shown off weren’t just eyecandy. Bing will start using animations to make jumping backwards in your search history less jarring. It will also make use of small, hovering windows as you scroll down the screen to keep navigation tabs in view. And the last feature shown off appeared to be an automatically generated slideshow that can help you visually explore a query (we’ll have more details on this shortly).

It’s worth pointing out that nothing comparable to Google Instant was shown off, though Microsoft has publicly said that it didn’t intend to directly compete with that feature in the immediate future.

Microsoft oddly doesn’t have screenshots or video footage of the demo ready yet, but we’ll update this post as soon as we get the footage.

Ad sales on Facebook are expected to reach a whopping $1.3 billion this year alone, thanks in part to the social network’s massive reach to over 500 million members. So it would make sense for Ad.ly, which operates an in-stream ad network on social platforms Twitter and MySpace, to be able to target users on the world’s largest social network. Today, the startup is announcing the ability for advertisers to place ads on Facebook Pages, within the Wall stream.

Ad.ly’s network, which currently reaches 100 million unique users, links up advertisers with influencers and regular users and then distribute links to marketing campaigns through the user’s Tweet streams and MySpace updates streams with full disclosure. And Ad.ly’s self service platform enables advertisers to connect with any user who signs up for Ad.ly’s service. So for example, an advertiser for Dell could choose which Twitter power-user or influencer to pitch their ad too and then submit a bid to a particular user. The publisher then approves or denies the request. Once the publisher approves the Tweet, the message is sent out via their account by Ad.ly, with a clear notice within the Tweet that the update is an ad with the language, “sent from Ad.ly Ad Network.”

Ad.ly will now help advertisers place brand promotions and micro-endorsements into Facebook pages on the influencer’s stream. Advertisers will be able to work with Ad.ly’s network of more than 70,000 Influencers, which include celebs and personalities like 50 Cent, Mandy Moore, Marc Cuban, Deepak Chopra and Kim Kardashian, on advertising on Facebook Twitter and MySpace. Ad.ly’s advertisers include a number of high-profile brands such as Microsoft, Sony, Toyota, and American Airlines.

For now, influencers with 5,000 or more “likes,” can use the service. Ad.ly co-founder Sean Rad tells TechCrunch that the number one request from both influencers and advertisers was to be able to use Facebook as a platform. Besides the audience reach, advertisers are bullish on the opportunity to serve branded photos and videos, and other rich media in-stream Facebook Pages (this inline functionality will soon be added broadly to Twitter.com as well).

A number of influencers and celebs didn’t have a large Twitter following, says Rad, but did have a high number of likes on their Facebook pages and were looking to be able to monetize from this via advertising. Unsurprisingly, advertisers found Facebook as a way to to reach a mass market audience. And a large protion of Ad.ly’s existing influencers have already added their Facebook pages to the startup’s system (the full feature will be available via Ad.ly’s site tomorrow).

Rad says that this is the first time that advertisers are able to serve ads in-stream on Facebook. He adds that Ad.ly and other networks are prohibited from serving ads on streams on in regular user profiles but says this new offering falls completely within Facebook’s guidelines.

There’s no doubt that other ad networks, including those focused on Twitter, will look to diversify to Facebook now that in-stream advertising is allowed on Pages. Armed with $5 million in new funding, Ad.ly was probably wise to move beyond Twitter, and expand into other social platforms; instead of depending on one network for ad revenue. And it would also make sense for Facebook itself to start extending its ad network to offer in-stream advertising as well. Rad says Ad.ly is not sharing revenue with Facebook. Yet.

By now many of you probably know that Microsoft is unveiling the full public beta of the much-hyped new version of its browser, Internet Explorer 9, today. For those of you who want to take IE9 for a spin, Microsoft just launched the page where you can download the new browser; under the URL BeautyOfTheWeb.com.

As we wrote in our initial review of IE9, the new browser is built for speed, takes advantage of the latest HTML5 and other modern Web technologies, and has a relatively simple UI. And the IE9 browser will only work on Windows computer, with Bing loaded as the default search engine.

For more on features included in IE9, check out Microsoft’s blog post here.

4.2 means different things to different types of geeks. To SciFi-geeks, it’s the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything divided by 10. To Apple-geeks, it represents the most important software update in months. Why? Because it’s the first build of iOS 4 (with its folders, multitasking, etc) compatible with the iPad.

Steve promised that 4.2 would hit sometime in November — but as is customary at this point, it just went live a bit early for developers.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Educational startup Grockit is expanding its reach today from social learning to streaming video. The startup has launched Grockit TV, a set of live courses to supplement its SAT and GMAT test prep service.

The courses are streamed live and also available as archives, but to encourage students to watch the live stream together (where they can interact via chat), the live stream of the course is free. But if students want to download a course or re-stream it, students will get all 20 hours worth of test prep and college admissions videos for $99. Best of all, Grockit CEO Farb Nivi is one of the teachers (he is a former Princeton Reviews national teacher of the year). The first 50 readers to use the promotion code “techcrunchlove” will get a free Grockit TV video course plus its premium online adaptive test prep.

Grockit has been quietly testing a few GMAT courses, and plans to stream its first SAT session on October 10. Founder Farb Nivi is excited about the potential to bring in more new students to Grockit through social marketing. Students can log in with their Facebook or Twitter accounts and invite their friends on Facebook or Twitter to come join them (online study session!). In the tests so far, some students are “bringing in double digit numbers of people to Grockit per single share,” says Nivi.

Grockit has tiptoed into video last June when it began to include YouTube Edu videos into its courses, but this goes a step further. And it won’t stop with test and college admissions prep videos. “We’ve got plans for Grockit TV content beyond test prep” says Nivi, “including K12 academic classes and programming for parents and students and teachers.”

Grockit is on a roll. Yesterday, it became the first educational app on the Google Apps Marketplace. Nivi just hired a CEO from Google, and closed a $7 million B round last May.

Earlier this year, OpenFeint, the comprehensive social gaming platform from Aurora Feint, announced that it would be adding Android game developers to its rapidly growing community. Today, OpeinFeint is releasing its platform for Android Apps and will be launching 20 games for Android in the next month.

The games launching via OpenFeint’s Android platform include dot (ustwo), Fruit Ninja (Halfbrick Studios), MiniSquadron (Supermono), Super Slyder (Sandlot Games), The Moron Test (DistinctDev, Inc.), and Tic Tac Toe (Posimotion). OpenFeint is also announcing the release of its Feint Spotlight app, where Android gamers will be able to discover new games, connect to the community, and win prizes.

OpenFeint’s mobile social platform and application for smartphones includes a set of online game services such as leaderboards and achievements running in a cloud-based Web environment. The company’s offering for the Android developer community includes a standard SDK, a game discovery store and mobile payment options. Aurora Feint has also incorporated Google Checkout into the developer SDK.

Since being introduced over 18 months ago, OpenFeint’s platform now reaches 37 million mobile players and is being used by 3,000 games. And with a cross platform gaming network, called Playtime, over iPhone devices and Android phones, gamers can play with friends who who use different smartphone operating systems.

OpenFeint faces competition from Apple’s Game Center solution for developers, which also provides a real-time gaming platform. And it should be interesting to see what features Google will offer to developers for its upcoming gaming platform.

Grid2Home, a “smart grid” technology startup in San Diego, obtained a round of seed funding from Granite Ventures, the company announced today. Grid2Home’s software and solutions enable smart appliances, energy meters, electric vehicles and the like to communicate with power systems, and thereby operate more energy efficiently.

Grid2Home’s “communication protocol stack” and software can, for example, let home owners switch between different energy types that they’d like to use, relying on power generated by a rooftop solar installation to heat a pool in most instances, but changing to power from the utility if solar cells are depleted, or power from the utility is within a certain price range.

With the funding from Granite Ventures, Grid2Home also announced the appointment Rick Kornfeld as chief executive and president, and Doug Rasor as chairman of the board.

Product: Pro Volare Hair Dryer

Manufacturer: Babyliss

Wired Rating: 7

While you can’t actually drive the Babyliss Pro Volare hair dryer, its 2,000-watt Ferrari-built AC V-12 engine will leave you windblown enough to look like you just did a couple of laps in a drop-top Daytona. In other words, you’ll look rich — and honestly if you’re dropping $400 on a blow dryer, you probably are.

With its brilliant red finish, multiple heat and speed settings, and use of a ball-bearing engine (a first in a hairstyling tool), the Volare is one elegant rig. The grill is made with nano-titanium, which conducts far-infrared heat better than the ceramic grills found in most other models. Geeky stylists will also tell you one of the byproducts of a hair dryer is positively charged cations, which often cause frizzy coifs. The Volare’s titanium components coupled with an internal tri-port ionic generator are designed to emit negatively charged anions and cut the frizz out.

Conair claims the Volare capable of pushing air to a hurricane-worthy 80 mph. For us, that’s a speed really only necessary if you’re using it to save money at the laundromat. That said, it dried my fine, medium-length chestnut locks in five minutes flat. For a dryer of this wattage, we were expecting a roar that would wake the neighbors as well as an appreciable amount of vibration in the body, but thanks to the lubrication-sealed ball-bearing design, the Volare runs smooth and quiet.

We loved the extra-long tangle-free cord, which allowed for great maneuverability and full arm extension while drying. The six heat and speed settings were useful, especially for turning it down a little, as the wind-tunnel effect on our first couple of drives caused the underside of our hair to dread, which is a plus only if you’re heading to Burning Man.

The dryer comes equipped with two sizes of diffuser add-ons, which focused all that hot air, and got our hair smooth and straight, although not as shiny, silky, Gisele-y as we are used to with salon-quality dryers. If you’re going to spend this kind of money, you want to leave the house looking like an understudy in a Pantene commercial.

WIRED So pretty, even bald dudes wanted to touch it. 10-foot tangle-free cord seemed really long at first, but was actually the perfect length for comfortable drying. Long engine brushes and ball-bearing design mean you get 2,000 hours of drying time. Hang ring is cool: simple but great touch. Very quiet for a dryer with this kind of horsepower.

TIRED Ferrari-like price — although our stylist friends say a pro-level hair dryer can cost $500. Turbo-speed button is overkill: It blows so hard it tangles. Doesn’t leave hair very shiny.

Product: ThinkPad T410s

Manufacturer: Lenovo

Wired Rating: 9

At the top of Lenovo’s product heap is the ThinkPad line. The top of the ThinkPad line is the T-series. And the top of the T-series, even in Lenovo’s own estimation, is the T410s.

Few laptops can be all things to all people, but the ThinkPad T410s comes dangerously close.

First there’s the screen: The 14.1-inch laptop offers improved resolution, at 1440 x 900 pixels, and a display so bright it should come with sunscreen. (Seriously, it’s not just the brightest notebook display in our records, it’s brighter than some desktop monitors.)

Specs leave nothing to complain about: 2.4-GHz Core i5 chip, 4-GB RAM, an Nvidia NVS 3100M graphics processor, and the aforementioned bad-ass screen. Only the 128-GB SSD hard drive is perplexing: Either up it to a proper 256 GB or forgo SSD for a big, regular hard drive, Lenovo.

Space concerns aside, the benchmarks are record-breaking. The T410s had the highest numbers on general performance apps among anything we’ve ever tested, and it’s no slouch in the gaming department, too: While short of our all-time highs, for a business machine, it’s more than graphics capable. And all of this comes in a perfectly thin, 3.9-pound package, which earns it yet another record by making it the lightest 14-inch laptop we’ve tested, as well.

Naturally, few ThinkPads come at a discount, and the $1,985 price tag is likely too steep for most (try subbing that HD in lieu of the SSD to trim the cost a bit), but our sole operational complaint is one of battery life. That ultra-bright screen clearly exacts its toll on your power cell, with the T410s turning in just 83 minutes of DVD playback while operating at full brightness. It may not be able to make it through back-to-back episodes of Mad Men, but you’ll certainly love it while it’s running.

WIRED A multiple record-breaker: Top performance and brightest screen among all laptops we’ve seen. Very slim and extremely lightweight. Rock-solid ThinkPad keyboard with well-thought-out controls. Love the textured touchpad. Sturdy as a granite pillar anchored in Dolomite.

TIRED Battery life needs a serious boost. Expensive. No HDMI connector.