Category: Tech news

Electronic payment solutions provider VeriFone Systems this morning announced it has acquired the assets of WAY Systems, a provider of mobile POS solutions and gateway services for mobile merchants.

The purchase price consisted of an upfront payment of $6 million and an earn-out payable in one year of up to an additional $3 million dollars should certain performance targets be met.

VeriFone says the acquisition will not have a material impact on its financial results.

Target just announced that it would be the first brick and mortar retail store to sell Facebook Credits gift cards. The cards will be available at Target stores across the country beginning Sept. 5.

Facebook Credits gift cards will be sold in increments of $15, $25 and $50. The $15 Facebook Credits gift card has been created exclusively for Target. This a big move for the social network’s virtual currency; which is expected to make up one-third of Facebook’s revenue in the next year.

Facebook has scored a number of deals with gaming companies to allow its members to use Facebook Credits to buy virtual goods through Facebook credits, including partnerships with Zynga, Crowdstar, LOLapps, and RockYou.

The social network also recently struck a deal with Malaysian payments company MOL Global (the company that bought Friendster) to sell gift cards for credits at retail stores in Malaysia and Singapore.

Zynga also made a similar move earlier this year.

The textbook rental market is heating up as school season gets in full swing. Chegg recently made its first acquisition of CourseRank, and Barnes and Noble is also playing in the space. College textbook rental startup BookRenter is also taking part in this growing market, reporting 725 percent growth in revenue from textbook rentals since last September. The company says that revenue is expected to be in the range of $20 to $50 million in 2010. Of course, this is still behind competitor Chegg, which is expected to see revenues in the range of $130 million this year.

Like its competitors, Bookrenter wants to be the Netflix of textbook rentals. By renting textbooks, Students are able to save money by loaning textbooks for a fixed duration, usually a semester, and end up spending only the fraction of the cost of outright purchases. The system is simple: a student searches for a book on the website using a title or ISBN, and places an order by selecting a rental period and delivery option. The book(s) are delivered complete with return UPS labels for easy shipping.

BookRenter also partnering with a number of colleges to set up a virtual rental store on their sites. Partners have access to the same selection of textbooks available on BookRenter’s site (which are electronically sourced from the largest textbook suppliers.) Since March, BookRenter has partnered with 260 campus bookstores, serving over 3.2 million students.

Of course, BookRenter, which just raised $10 million in new funding, is playing in a competitive space. But from the way Chegg and Bookrenter are growing in terms of sales, there cloud be plenty of revenue to go around.

Over the weekend, over 200 teams of developers met up to participate in Node.js Knockout, a 48 hour coding competition with one basic rule: you *had* to use node.js to build your app. The deadline was midnight on Sunday, which means that the finished applications are currently being subjected to the scrutiny of the expert panel of judges and – perhaps even more terrifying – the general public. The winning team walks away with a whole bundle of prizes, including an iPad for each member.

So what is node.js? Without getting super technical, it’s a framework for JavaScript that allows developers to easily write programs that run on the server, rather than in the browser like JavaScript normally does. Node’s design takes advantage of this fact by using a novel approach to I/O that allows a lot of users to access the program at the same time. If that whets your appetite, Simon Willison gets into some more technical details. Side note: if you like to build things (especially under arbitrary deadlines), using node.js or anything else, you should come show us what you’ve got at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon on September 25-26 here in San Francisco.

Voting for the best application is open now through Thursday night at midnight, so head over and cast your vote. Here are our favorites:

Swarmation – This multi-player game reduces each participant to a single pixel. Players must work together (or not) to move their pixels to form patterns that are chosen by a Tetris-like unseen overlord. Gameplay is super smooth and it gets very interesting to watch the strategies employed by each player. Huge time sink potential.

Drawbridge – This one has some serious potential to turn into a revenue-generating business.
Multiple people can share a sketchpad to draw out quick notes, ideas, whatever. It can be tough to control using a trackpad, but a mouse is better. The real win would be if the team can get it to work on the iPad – unfortunately it doesn’t right now, but that’s definitely an app I would pay for.

Jackalope – You’ll want to open two windows for this one: the admin pane and the demo site. As you mouse and click around on the demo, you can watch all of your actions reflected in real time on the admin page. Now imagine getting this data from all the visitors to your site, in real time. Another one that has a clear potential for revenue.

Salamander – Multi-player snake. Eat the apples to grow – trap your opponents in the corners of the board. Similar to Swarmation in that it’s a simple concept, easy and fast to control, interesting to watch player behavior, and (of course) a massive time sink.

Tweet Quest – This one is actually really fun. You’re a knight in shining armor with nothing but your wits and your sword (at first) to help you make your way through a rat-infested dungeon. Hook it up to your twitter account and it imports the avatars of the people you follow – and photoshops them onto the bodies of the rats that you must destroy. That doesn’t sound like much but it really is what makes the game what it is – seeing the alerts that I had defeated both Heather Harde and Paul Graham pretty much made my night.

Kenexa Corporation, which provides business solutions for human resources, has agreed to acquire compensation and talent management solutions provider Salary.com. The NASDAQ-listed company has made an all-cash tender offer and merger for $4.07 per share, or approximately $80 million.

The agreement has been unanimously approved by the board of directors of both companies.

Kenexa expects to complete the cash tender offer and close the transaction during the fourth quarter of 2010. Aside from customary closing conditions, the completion of the transaction is also subject to a majority of the outstanding Salary.com shares being tendered.

Salary.com provides on-demand compensation software that helps businesses and individuals manage pay and performance. The company offers market pricing and compensation analysis software that helps companies benchmark, compensate and reward its employees.

Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan in a statement said Salary.com’s value proposition spans both software and proprietary content, and that their compensation management solutions complement its own suite of talent acquisition and retention services.

Greenpeace, the organization with noble goals but a prickly way of going about things, has asked Facebook to stop using coal at its new data center in Oregon. Given Greenpeace’s history (seen here annoying Deutsche Bank), I should expect some attention-seeking prank if Facebook doesn’t comply. Watch out, Zuckerberg.

Back in July 2009, Twitter made a big stink about developers using the term “Tweet” in their Twitter apps. The Twitter API team had contacted a third-party developer—TweetKnot—informing the company that it had “grown uncomfortable” about the use of the word “tweet” in the app’s name. That was before the company effectively secured the trademark with the USPTO, notably.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone promptly clarified the situation in a blog post, stating that it has “no intention of ‘going after’ the wonderful applications and services that use the word [tweet] in their name when associated with Twitter.”

That may well be, but it isn’t stopping Twitter from continuing to try and get the mark registered in the United States.

On Thursday, August 26, 2010, Twitter apparently filed a U.S. federal trademark registration for TWEET, in connection with computer software, online advertising and marketing services, business data analysis and more.

From what I can tell, someone actually owns the trademark for ‘tweet’ in the US, namely Paul Rosario. The description provided to the USPTO is automatic fluid-composition control machines and instruments, electromechanical controls for use in bird remediation / pest control etc., so not exactly related to Twitter users’ understanding of the term.

Strangely, the company also filed a new trademark application for “Twitter” on the same date (August 26). The reason I think that’s weird is because Twitter had already filed for the trademark back in April 2007, and from what I can gather it was effectively registered under their name in May 2009. Perhaps they’d like to include other classes this time.

For what it’s worth, I also checked trademark registrations in Europe and noticed Twitter already owns both “twitter” and “tweet” there.

I’ve asked Twitter for clarification and whether or not the company plans to use the trademark against owners and developers of Twitter applications and services with (one of) both terms in their product or company names. It’s the middle of the night in California, but I’ll update the post as soon as I get a response.

Audience measurement company comScore has acquired Nedstat, an Amsterdam-based provider of web analytics and video measurement solutions for approx. $36.7 million.

ComScore says the purchase will help the company accelerate its global expansion strategy, particularly in European markets.

Meet the iPad Orchestra, brought to you by the brand spankin’ new to the iPad App Store Seline HD. While I usually hate to be the thorn in the side of progress, if this is what the future of classical music looks like then I would like no part.

Because I’m actually into watching the fat guy with the gong awkwardly squirm all symphony long just to hit his instrument once. Somehow an iPad tap doesn’t have the same resonance, literally.

Amidio’s Seline HD, which sells for $5.99, makes this alien-like abstraction of an orchestra possible by allowing you to choose from 20 instruments voices — flutes, bowed strings, reeds, etc — and nine corded synth paths.

Unfortunately the shirts that say FLUTE, VIOLIN, etc are sold separately.

If you actually like iPad Orchestra, then you might also like Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra or “Mopho” as they like to call it. Here they are, performing at the 2009 Crunchies:

It seems as if the ads for Sony’s upcoming movie The Social Network — you know, the Facebook movie — are everywhere on the Internet. They’re here on TechCrunch, they’re on VentureBeat, they’re on Techmeme — they’re just about everywhere but Facebook itself. In fact, they’re even on rival MySpace. In fact, the movie is sponsoring a whole section of the other social network. Yes, the Facebook movie is sponsoring MySpace.

Again, this isn’t too shocking considering that the ads are everywhere on the web. But it has to be a little bit of a slap in the face for MySpace, which was once the king of the hill in the space but has long since been passed — and lapped — by Facebook. Now, not only is MySpace’s rival important enough to warrant a movie, but that movie is paying to help keep MySpace afloat.

It’s a bit like if Yankee Stadium was going to be renamed to Fever Pitch Park, after that (bad) movie about the Red Sox.

Further, when you click through to the movie area of MySpace, there’s another The Social Network ad. And that ad has one social sharing option: Facebook.

I know MySpace is supposedly cool with Facebook now in a defeatist kind of way. They just launched a Facebook sync tool to hook into the Facebook stream. But still.

Perhaps sadder than all of this is that no one has even bothered to make a Facebook movie trailer spoof for MySpace yet — probably the most obvious one. Twitter has one. YouTube has one. MySpace? They just have a movie section sponsored by the Facebook movie.

YCombinator-funded Adioso today launches its third iteration as an online destination for adventurous travelers who want to take vacations but are not constrained by specific days or even places. Yes, the online travel space is saturated, but the more mainstay search services like Kayak and Sky Scanner only let you find specific dates and destinations, failing if your desire is more vague.

In contrast, Adioso allows you to search flights with complete flexibility, like if you want to go somewhere in Europe in November but are not committed to specific area or time. Examples of the natural language-enabled broad or open-ended searches specific to Adioso:

Chicago to Boston next week

San Francisco to Europe late September under $800

San Francisco to anywhere

Says founder Tom Howard:

“There are really no other services that let you know where you should go, and what days are the cheap days. You go to a website and you’d spend two hours trying to find the cheap deals, there was nothing that said these are the good days at this location.”

Before Adioso, the only solution to the “What are the good days at this location?” kind of query was to manually do separate searches on different sites until you stumbled across what you were looking for. Adioso’s model necessitates some programming chops however, as open-ended search is harder to enable than constrained.

Future plans include expanding the service’s airline and destination inventory as soon as the Adioso platform has stabilized, currently Adioso only covers a selection of airlines in Australia (the home country of founders Howard and Fenn Bailey), Asia, Europe and the USA.

Howard and Baily hope that service will create opportunities both for casual travelers (the most rapidly growing segment of the travel industry) as well for airlines who are looking for ways to best monetize left over seats on undersold flights.

Perhaps you’ve heard: Apple is having an event tomorrow. Normally, this means that a sea of tech bloggers descends upon the Bay Area to cover it live for those sitting by their computers at home. But this time things are a bit different: Apple is actually streaming the event live — something they haven’t done in a very, very long time. Cue Double Rainbow: what does this mean?

It’s been so long since an Apple event has been live streamed that no one can seem to agree when the last one actually was. The consensus seems to be that it was a Macworld keynote (which IDG put on but Apple produced) back in the 2003 or 2004 timeframe. But what’s interesting is why Apple streamed one of these last ones: as some recall, it was at least in part to show off their then-new streaming technology — QuickTime Streaming Server. Might that be a hint about the intentions for tomorrow’s event?

Specifically, I’m wondering if Apple is streaming this event because streaming media will be a key part of the event. iTunes-in-the-Cloud is the big streaming service everyone is waiting for — but all indications are that this is still not ready to go just yet. What does seem ready to go are things like Netflix for the new iTV device. Guess how that would work? Yep, streaming.

What’s not yet clear is if Netflix has built an app for this new device just as they have for the iPhone and iPad, or if Apple worked with them to build it into the system. If it’s the latter, it’s certainly possible it will be using the “industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming” Apple is touting in their live stream press release. Interestingly enough, HTTP Live Streaming is also a part of Quicktime Streaming Solutions alongside the aforementioned Quicktime Streaming Server.

The other streaming wildcard here are the rumored new $0.99 television show rentals. It’s certainly possible that these will be downloadable content like current iTunes movie rentals — but perhaps Apple is intending to test out new streaming capabilities with them as well. After all, this new iTV is thought to only have something like 16 GB of storage space on board — that’s enough for only a handful of television shows in HD. You’d really have to rent them and them watch them right away if they are downloadable.

So while it’s entirely possible that Apple just randomly decided to flip the switch to start streaming their events live after all these years — it seems just as likely that it’s a calculated move by Apple to tie everything they’re doing with streaming together around this event. If that’s the case, you can bet CEO Steve Jobs will mention it on stage — something like “it’s the same technology we’re using to stream this to all those people on Apple devices watching this live around the world right now!”

They just better hope the stream holds up. If not, us lowly bloggers will still be there as backup.

Update: A number of people have commented that the live stream may be a direct reaction to the issues Jobs had during the WWDC keynote getting his iPhone to work with the WiFi because of all the signals in the room. That’s definitely a possibility as well — you can imagine Apple telling guests to turn off WiFi hot spots in the beginning and noting that the entire event is being streamed if they’re worried about their readers missing anything.

That said, Yerba Buena (where the event is being held) is much smaller than the keynote room in Moscone West. That means there will likely be a lot less people with WiFi devices.

Still, you can imagine Jobs wanting to do everything possible to avoid the awkward situation last time.

Update 2: Others are suggesting this may be a test of the new massive data center Apple has built in North Carolina. We do know that is coming on line at some point this year, so it’s certainly possible.

I’ve heard from two sources close to the Digg CEO search that there were a glut of good candidates. That’s something companies always say, and I frankly found it hard to believe.

I don’t necessarily mean that as a knock on Digg. I was surprised there were a ton of “great” CEO candidates to run any company in the unsexy critical-mass-but-not-flavor-of-the-month category—period.

Both sources told me the same thing: The existence of a secondary market means that top talent is churning through startups faster than ever. While Digg’s eventual hire was Matt Williams formerly of old-man-of-the-Internet Amazon, sources told me that potential candidates were also coming from hot, pre-IPO Web darlings.

I’ve asked around and had a few entrepreneurs and VCs confirm the trend: The secondary market is upping the talent churn to levels not seen in the Valley since the late 1990s. Then, it was because companies were being started and going public within 18 months. Now it’s because a new Wild West asset class of secondary private stock trades are having a similar effect—with everyone in Silicon Valley’s new favorite substitute for the IPO.

I was particularly surprised to hear some entrepreneurs and VCs say they are getting senior management candidates from Zynga. Zynga?! Isn’t Zynga still newly hot enough to be the one doing the poaching? It bears noting that Zynga CEO Mark Pincus is a hard-driving entrepreneur, and some of those looking for other jobs may not be exactly missed, just as the revolving management door in the early days of Facebook wasn’t necessarily, shall we say, unwelcome.

Still, assuming this as widespread as I’m hearing, is this a good thing or a bad thing for the Valley? It depends on what you do here. If you’re looking to climb the corporate startup ladder, it’s great because you can respectably job hop and still cash out at a faster rate. If you’re good, or at least able to make people think you are good, you move up with each hop. But if you’re looking to build a company, the trend is brutal because the talent is churning too fast to, well, actually build a real company.

At a high level, there’s an argument that it makes the Valley’s greater ecosystem more mercenary and one that it makes it less mercenary. It’s more mercenary because startups attract more people who want a quick equity flip. Remember the scourge of blue-shirts-and-khakis in the late 1990s? No one wants that back, except maybe the Bubble Lounge. On the flipside (pun intended), at least the mercenaries have a way to get out—meaning those who stick around are those who care about the mission. And we’re not talking about an immediate flip—this new reality only holds for the companies hot enough to have a secondary market for their shares or a big deal like those being done by Elevation and DST. It’s by any measure, still a pretty contained scourge compared to 1999. But it’s also one that by its very definition includes the companies startups are most likely to want to poach from.

But one thing it does for sure is cement the Valley as the place to start a consumer Web company. It is apparently easier than ever to assemble a team if the hype, valuation and idea are right.

Tel Aviv-based Attenti announced today its acquisition by 3M, most notably the makers of Post-Its, to the tune of $230 million in cash. Formerly Dmatek, Attenti is the world’s leading supplier of remote people-tracking technologies such as ankle bracelets, voice recognition devices and alcohol monitoring technologies.

The purchase, which will benefit 3M by providing the company with GPS and radio frequency technology, is the second in a line of security-related acquisitions this week; 3M bought fingerprint ID company Cogent Inc yesterday for $943 million.

Yoav Reisman, Attenti CEO on the sale:

“3M’s culture of innovation fits well with our own and its R&D capabilities and global reach will help accelerate the growth of our business.”

Francisco Partners and the Israeli branch of Sequoia Capital jointly invested in Attenti in December of 2008, the sale represents a hefty exit for both.

You hit a site; it’s down. You immediately reload; it’s still down. You start to freak out. “How the hell are they down again!? Is anyone in charge over there?! WTF?!” But quite often, it’s just you. And you look like an ass for your rant that you just spewed on Twitter (or on Facebook when it’s Twitter that is down). Thankfully, it looks like Chrome can now potentially save you from that embarrassment.

Tech geeks are very familiar with sites like Down For Everyone Or Just Me (which was incidentally created by a then-Twitter employee and sold earlier this year). You go there, enter a URL and see if others people around the world are having trouble accessing the site as well. But the latest version of Chrome appears to do the same thing for you now, as the blog Rudefox pointed out today.

While trying to load Chatroutlette today (like the rest of us) only to find that it was down, the author got a fairly typical browser note that “Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to chatroulette.com.” But what’s interesting is that below that, it reads “Other users are also experiencing difficulties connecting to this site, so you may have to wait a few minutes.“

See, there are some benefits to Google watching us. They can now save us a trip to Down For Everyone Or Just Me.

[thanks Tom]