Category: Tech news

eBay is launching its rewards program today: eBay Bucks, which allows any eBay shopper who lives in the U.S. and is a registered member of the marketplace, to earn 2 percent cash back on most items purchased through the site with PayPal.

Consumers can earn ‘eBay Bucks’ made both on eBay’s website and via its many mobile apps. The catch-users have to redeem ‘eBay Bucks’ towards other purchases on the marketplace. Rewards money is accumulated during a three month period and at the end of each period, an eBay Bucks certificate is issued to consumers, who then have 30 days to redeem their eBay Bucks towards purchases with PayPal on eBay.com.

I was curious which purchases are excluded from earning rewards. eBay says that the Bucks program excludes all purchases from Classifieds, Business & Industrial Capital Equipment, Real Estate, and eBay Motors categories (except Parts & Accessories in eBay Motors). eBay has been implementing Bucks through a pilot program over the past year and says that consumers enrolled in eBay Bucks spent five times more on eBay than those not participating in the program.

Cashback programs haven’t had the greatest success in the past. Bing shuttered Cashback recently due to lack of traction. eBay’s offering would certainly be used by loyal customers but it’s unclear if it will be able to bring outside traffic to the marketplace.

The fact that U.S. eBay sales are showing weakness and not growing as rapidly as international sales could be a possible reason for the rewards program’s exclusivity to the U.S..

Zynga has hired former Facebook Chief Revenue Officer and MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta as EVP Business, reporting to CEO Mark Pincus. Van Natta was most recently in the news in February, when he stepped down as CEO of MySpace after just less than a year on the job. Van Natta has been an advisor to Zynga until now, says the company.

Van Natta will also join the company’s board of directors, joining Pincus, Bing Gordon, Reid Hoffman and Brad Feld.

In January, while he was still running MySpace, I sat down with Van Natta in Switzerland for a long video interview.

Zynga continues to soft sell the idea of an IPO, saying not to expect one any time soon. But they are clearly putting together an executive team that will take them to that level when they’re ready. In addition to Van Natta they also recently brought on a new CFO, Dave Wehner.

Van Natta is considered one of the top deal guys in technology, and has helped scale larger startups operationally. At Zynga he’ll be managing all of business operations, including revenue, corporate development, international, customer service, marketing and communications. He’ll also be reunited with GM Corporate Communications Dani Dudeck. Dudeck, who gave an in depth interview with TechCrunch here, left MySpace to join Zynga shortly after Van Natta stepped down.

Fast growing is certainly the only way to describe Zynga these days. Most of their competition has been acquired or otherwise sidelined, and the company is quickly forging business deals with the largest portals to help wean Zynga off their dependence on Facebook. Yahoo and Google are in the bag.

And they’ve also been acquiring companies at a brisk pace: XPD Media, Challenge Games and Unoh in just the last few months. Given Van Natta’s appetite for acquisitions, expect more of them, soon.

This review is by photographer Rich Svinkin.

“Nice Equipment.”

It took a second to process that the wedding photographer was talking about my camera. It was the shock of phrasing, not the awe displayed, that startled me. When I’m carrying this beauty around I get stopped by strangers all the time. Camera junkies are boundary blind like dog lovers. And like a champion breed, the M9 takes some effort to tame and train if you aren’t a professional. But if you go into it eyes open and put the effort in, get ready for blue ribbon results.

As soon as the rumor broke that Apple would be renaming its struggling Apple TV to iTV, to better fit with the company’s i[Device] naming system, I thought to myself, “Isn’t ITV the name of a television network in England that always misses key goals in soccer games?” Yes, yes it is. In fact, the network isn’t too keen on Apple using the name iTV, and has promised to “vigorously defend” its IP.

If newspapers came with warning labels, they might look something like the ones Tom Scott came up with. The British “geek comedian” created warning stickers you can print out and put on newspapers (PDF below). They include:

Warning: This article is basically just a press release, copied and pasted.

Warning: To meet a deadline, this article was plagiarised from another news source.

Too bad you can’t stick these on blogs (present one excluded, of course).

(Hat tip to Nick Bilton)

Like many projects in Silicon Valley (see: Twitter), Chrome To Phone started as a mere side project at Google.

Dave Burke, Google’s Engineering Manager for Mobile and the chief architect for Chrome To Phone, was just tinkering around with Google’s third party developer tools in his free time. Fascinated by the divide between mobile and desktop, he stumbled upon Chrome To Phone. “I created an early version that I sent around internally, and then I started getting sort of notes and e-mails from people going ‘Wow, this is really useful, thanks for creating it!’ And over time people started using it more and more because it really just addresses a need today and I guess it just generated some momentum after that,” Burke says.

On Thursday, Google officially launched Chrome to Phone to the public, it’s a useful extension that allows you to push information, like web pages, phone numbers and maps directly from your Chrome browser to your Android phone. Burke says this is just the beginning, he has a laundry list of functions he plans to build. Next up? An update that will reverse the path, to Phone To Chrome. And yes, he’s already working on it.

“We get quite a few suggestions for enhancements so the first one that came out was: “Chrome to Phone is great when can i have Phone To Chrome. So this is the reverse case, you’re on your phone, you see an interesting article, and you want to take it to your desktop,” Burke says. High on his to-do list is also a feature that will let you access the history of your actions, so you can quickly pull up an old link or map on your phone.

There has also been chatter on the web, as to whether Chrome To Phone could evolve into a TV remote type of device— especially given the impending launch of Google TV. For example, with a “Chrome to TV” extension, you could pull up a video on your laptop’s/iPad’s browser and then push it to your Google TV, essentially turning your computing device into a very large remote. After our video interview, I asked Burke about the concept, he said Google isn’t working on it yet but it does make a lot of sense.

See above for our full interview with Burke above. Below is a 2-minute demo video.

Foodspotting and Zagat Survey, two major food focused brands we’ve featured here before, have today announced an iPhone app integration move that pretty much sets the pace for mobile social dining in the future (You listening Michelin?).

Zagat, who has previously hooked up with Foursquare, is the first partner to utilize Foodspotting data in their apps using the Foodspotting API. Because of the move, Zagat users will now have access to thousands of Foodspotting photos and guides. Foodspotting CEO Alexa Andrzejewski suggests that the partnership will be the first of many, hinting that the Foodspotting API will be open to the public very soon.

To celebrate the partnership, Foodspotting users will now be able to earn a “Zagat badge” (see top left) when they add food photos to the Foodspotting app from any Zagat-rated restaurant in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York.

From Andrzejewski:

“We’re excited to have Zagat be the first partner to leverage Foodspotting data to enhance their restaurant listings. By integrating Foodspotting photos, the Zagat apps will not only be a great resource for helping people decide where to eat, but they’ll also help you decide what to eat once you’re there.”

Zagat Mobile Lead Ryan Charles told TechCrunch that the integration leaves room for many co-branded opportunities, “Looking down the road, we plan to add special offers including promotional access to our website for Foodspotting users who complete the badge related tasks.”

The full Zagat/Foodspotting integration will be available on future versions of both mobile applications.

The two parties did not disclose the terms of the deal.

i/o ventures has partnered up with notable females Arianna Huffington, Donna Karan and Sarah Brown to put together the first Women In Engineering Prize, and will be announcing the winner at the first WIE Symposium on September 20th.

The deadline for hopeful female founders to apply is Sept 10th, and the lucky and hard working winner will receive 25k in investment, become part of the i/o program, get free office space for a month as well as a trip to New York to attend the conference.

i/o’s Paul Bragiel and Ashwin Navin initially put the award together because they noticed a lack of women applying for incubator funding at i/o, and was wondering if this was possibly because women lacked clear cut mentors in Silicon Valley.

This wasn’t unique to i/o either. Bragiel said, “I’ve talked to various other incubators and there were very few females there, so we figured we’d market directly to women and make it clear that there were opportunities specifically for them.”

The award will target young female startup founders looking for exposure and access to the i/o incubator, which mentors founders from product launch through the next stage of company development, sharing what has proven to work for product scaling, revenue growth and fund raising.

Bragiel holds that the competition and prize are the first of their kind, “The goal in our collaboration is to help more companies founded by women get exposure they need to the best investors and mentors both in the valley and world wide.”

Female entrepreneurs should also consider this an open call to go mentor at i/o. Aspiring WIE Prize winners can apply here.

TweetDeck is preparing to release its first Android app in beta tomorrow. I got a hold of the beta build and some screenshots. The app adds some new elements which go beyond TweetDeck’s popular iPhone app, and even introduces some new elements not yet found in its desktop app. But this app shows the direction where TweetDeck is going. As CEO Iain Dodsworth noted in a blog post yesterday that it “also represents the future of our iPhone and iPad applications.”

The mobile app, which is TweetDeck’s first foray onto Android phones, supports multiple streams beyond Twitter, namely Facebook, Foursquare, and Google Buzz. (The desktop is also multi-stream, but the iPhone app only supports Twitter and Facebook). The biggest departure, though, is a blended stream that combines updates from all four services, color-coded with different backgrounds for each one. TweetDeck’s other apps maintain a separate column for each stream. The Android app supports columns as well, and if you have an existing TweetDeck account, it populates them with your existing preferences.

There is also a new “Me” column which pulls together all messages that mention you from across multiple streams, including Twitter @replies, Facebook likes and comments, and Buzz updates on your posts. It is essentially a unified vanity search column. When you compose a message, you can pick which service you want to send it out on from the same screen (much like the desktop app)

The app takes full advantage of the Foursquare API. In addition to being able to see where your friends are checking into Foursquare, TweetDeck acts as a full Foursquare client. You can check into a location, leave a shout or a tip, or see a location on a map. Each location has a detail view which shows you all your friends who checked in there recently and any messages they left.

A general map view shows all nearby Foursquare venues and any geotagged Tweets. Friends who have check in nearby are also placed on the map. The app has a contacts page with quick links to each of your account profiles, and slots for the people you talk to the most.

One thing it doesn’t have that is in the desktop app is user streams, which delivers Tweets as fast as they are produced without any limits or throttling. Apparently that feature kills the battery life on mobile.

This is a beta, which means TweetDeck is still working on it. For instance, it doesn’t handle multiple Twitter accounts as smoothly as it should or video uploads. But these issues will be fixed in the near future. Another thing to note is that seems to be an older build of the Android beta floating around, which has even more bugs. Better to wait for the official beta release which should come tomorrow.

Last month, Google let people know that the pace at which they deploy builds of Chrome would be greatly increasing. The thought is that work is happening so quickly in Chrome but much of it is stuck in the developer channels (or in Chromium, the open-source browser on which Chrome is based) because of code freezes and long waits to deploy the stable versions — so why not just speed the whole process up? Google is wasting little time doing that as the latest version of Chrome, version 6, is being released into beta today.

So what do we get with Chrome 6? As users of Chromium and the dev channel builds of Chrome will know, the entire browser UI has gotten a facelift. The buttons (back, forwards, reload, etc) are now seamlessly integrated into the toolbar. The two menu drop-downs have also now been consolidated into one. And the Omnibox has also been tweaked to make it a bit simpler.

But the biggest changes in Chrome 6 come in the JavaScript speed increases, Autofill, and the syncing capabilities. With the latest version, you’ll finally have full Autofill capabilities that you’re likely used to with other browsers (though Chrome’s version is pretty slick). This means that anytime you have to enter your name, address, phone number, or credit card information, it can all be automatically inserted by the browser. Google notes that your credit card information is never saved without your explicit permission. It’s also worth noting that your credit card data is not included in the browser sync, which has also been updated with Chrome 6. Other Autofill data is now included in sync, as are extensions.

In terms of performance, Google says Chrome 6 is 15% faster than Chrome 5 beta in both the V8 benchmark test and the SunSpider benchmark test (two JavaScript tests).

With Google now saying that new stable builds of Chrome are due every six weeks, you can expect Chrome 6 to go stable quickly. And then in the Fall we should probably be on the look-out for Chrome 7, as well.

This week’s episode of Speaking Of… is with the originator of the modern Batman movies and creator of the Batman franchise, Michael Uslan.

I’ve found that you never know where or when you’re going to receive amazing entrepreneurial advice. You have to keep your eyes, ears and heart open and then you’ll stumble into some amazing people who have extraordinary stories to tell that you can learn from. Entrepreneurial advice for tech companies doesn’t need to come from someone who’s been in our trenches. Businesses are businesses and we can all learn from each other, no matter what industry we’re in.

Michael Uslan’s story is the typical story of success. From the outside, it seems like an obvious win, but from the inside there was a long and painful struggle to get to the other side. It took Michael 10 years of pitching a dark and serious Batman in order to get it made into the first movie. It was written up as an “overnight success”, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Here is one of my favorite parts of our interview:

“I’m a blue collar kid from New Jersey. My Dad was a mason, my mom was a bookkeeper. I couldn’t buy my way into Hollywood. I didn’t know anyone in Hollywood, didn’t have any relatives in Hollywood. My last name isn’t Warner. I only have one brother and for me its the story of how I, at every opportunity, tried to put my foot in the door and tried to make a path – carve a path. If I had said when I was a kid, “Oh, I’m going to produce the greatest Batman movie ever – dark and serious”, might have well as said I was going to jump across the Grand Canyon. You can’t do it. But, if you keep taking steps that lead you on a certain path, and don’t let anyone – friends or anyone else veer you of course, you can, if you have the passion. If you have a high level for frustration, you can do it. That’s how I did it. These dark serious Batman movies, the Batman franchise, was built on my bloody knuckles.”

Michael tours colleges and universities to share his story and is releasing his autobiography, “The Boy Who Loved Batman” on Chronicle Books in fall of 2011.

After the controversy with Apple and Steve Jobs over its analytics offerings, Flurry is making further moves towards the Android platform, launching its app recommendation engine AppCircle for Android phones. Flurry launched AppCircle for the iPhone last month and has attracted over 600 participating applications with a combined publisher reach of 22 million iOS device owners.

Flurry’s AppCircle attempts to match up app developers who want to gain more users with those who want to make money from promoting other apps. The service leverages Flurry’s recommendation engine in combination with Flurry Analytics to recommend the appropriate app to the right user at the right time from within participating Flurry network of applications.

AppCircle is built on top of Flurry Analytics, a service used by 45,000 applications on iPhone, Android,
BlackBerry and J2ME platforms. It’s unclear how many of the applications in Flurry’s network are Android apps, so the reach of the app circle is questionable.

For App publishers who want to earn money, they can integrate Flurry into their applications, which allows Flurry to serve targeted application recommendations to their consumers. Publishers earn 60% of the price for each app download. For promoters, application developers create campaigns and set bids on how much they are willing to pay for a new user. Flurry’s recommendation engine will match relevant promoter apps to display within publisher apps, and then use bidding to rank the order in which impressions are shown. Publishers can also use their own virtual currency to encourage downloads.

After the crackdown on Flurry from Apple for violating privacy policies, it is not surprising that the startup is broadening its horizons to other smartphone platforms. But Android may not be a save haven for long. In theory, it seems like a good idea to help developers who want more users be able to connect with publishers who want to make money; but I wonder if it’s only a matter of time before Google starts doing this with AdMob.

Google is finally expanding its Google TV ad service beyond the Dish satellite network, its initial partner for the past two years. Today, it announced a new partnership with DirecTV, the rival satellite TV network controlled by News Corp.

The two satellite networks together give Google ads a combined reach of 30 million homes, which is starting to become meaningful. Google puts software on the set-top boxes to help it target TV ads in a more granular fashion. It is not clear whether these ads actually perform better than run-of-the-mill TV ads, but Google has partnered with Nielsen to provide demographic data for the audience it reaches with its ads.

Gaining a second major partner is a big step for Google, and it took two years to do it. (Other than these two, a handful of cable channels are also partners such as the History International, Hallmark, Hallmark Movie, Bloomberg, and the Tennis Channel). The satellite networks are generally faster to adopt newer technologies than the cable networks. For Google TV Ads to become more than a side-project, the cable networks will have to sign up as well, and they are a little more fearful of turning data over to Google. But if these ads start to perform better than typical broadcast ads, or even some of the targeted ads cable companies are experimenting with on their own through companies such as Black Arrow, then they may buckle and start showing Google TV ads. That is exactly what Google is hoping for—that it can deliver better ads with better data.

Twitter is still growing at a fast clip, according to recent numbers from web analytics firm comScore. A recent study found that in June, nearly 93 million Internet users visited Twitter.com, an increase of 109 percent from the previous year. Twitter saw 93 million visitors in May of this year. It seems that the network is seeing increased traffic from international markets, particularly in Asia and South America. Indonesia reported the highest traffic, with 20.8 percent of Internet users in the country visiting Twitter.com that month, followed by Brazil and Venezuela.

It’s important to note that these stats aren’t necessarily a good measure of the total number of people people using Twitter’s platform (it only includes data for people who have been to Twitter.com, and not any applications that access Twitter through the API).

In terms of region, Latin America experienced the strongest growth, surging 305 percent year-over-year to 15.4 million users in June. Asia Pacific ranked as the second-fastest growing region, climbing 243 percent to 25.1 million visitors. The Middle-East Africa jumped 142 percent to 5 million visitors, while Europe increased 106 percent to 22.5 million visitors. North America only saw a 22 percent increase to nearly 25 million visitors in June. This last stat isn’t surprising considering that Twitter has more saturation in the the U.S. than in international markets.

comScore also analyzed Twitter usage via mobile phones for the six mobile markets currently reported by company (U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Spain and Italy) which unsurprisingly showed that Twitter is seeing increased traffic among smartphone users. In the U.S., 8.3 percent of smartphone users (4.2 million people) accessed Twitter.com in a month via the browser on their mobile devices. In Europe, 2.8 percent of smartphone users overall accessed Twitter.com (1.7 million users), with the U.K. experiencing the strongest penetration in the region at 5.8 percent, followed by Germany with 3.1 percent and France with 2.1 percent.

The total web traffic numbers are impressive considering that these don’t include third-party apps, like Tweetdeck and Seesmic, which are relatively popular amongst users. And it’s also important to mention that with the World Cup, Twitter was seeing record amounts of usage and traffic worldwide. In June, Twitter COO Dick Costolo shared the company’s internal stats, which show that Twitter gets 190 million visitors per month, and 65 million tweets a day.