Category: Tech news

Unless someone at Research In Motion is taking the time to screw with all of us, it looks like we might have an official name for their long-rumored BlackBerry tablet project: BlackPad.

Word of the name comes not from a disgruntled employee, nor from a prototype left at a bar; this one’s straight out of a good ol’ fashion WHOIS lookup on a domain. According to registration records, RIM purchased BlackPad.com just days ago.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Knol, Google’s platform for sharing articles about specific topics, appears to have been shutdown. It’s unclear if this is a temporary or permanent situation. We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

We’ve long been speculating as to when Google will shut down Knol. The knowledge-sharing site has essentially been reduced to a “Craigslist wannabe.” The original idea behind Knol was that people could collaboratively write definitive articles about any topic they like and get rewarded by earning a share of the AdSense revenues for each page they author. Unfortunately, no one seems to be reading anything on Knol and the product never really panned out.

Eventhough this outage may be temporary, it may be time to put Knol out of its misery. Google has previously shutdown other under-performing projects such as Lively and Google Notebooks.

Update 2:49 PM PDT: Google informs us that this down time is in fact temporary, “We’re working on restoring it for users as soon as possible.”

If we’re hearing any one thing from developers that is scaring’em away from Android, it’s that Android apps are just way, way too easy to pirate. Hell, you don’t even have to go through shady third party download sites; just buy an app, copy it to the sd card, and refund the application. Ta-da! (Read: Don’t do that.)

Google’s been talking for some time about a new, considerably more secure system for protecting applications from pirates and dishonest refunders. Today, that system goes live.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Facebook’s worst-kept secret is finally ready for its closeup: the company is starting to roll out Facebook Questions, a Q&A service that allows users to poll all of Facebook. Facebook has been inviting users to apply to join a sneak peek of Questions for months now, so we’ve seen much of this before, but this marks the first time that it will begin rolling out to users who didn’t apply for the beta program. Facebook says that this is intiitally rolling out to 3-5 million users, with plans for a broader rollout down the line.

The motivations behind the launch are clear: millions of people already use Facebook status updates to poll their friends — it’s only natural that the site would offer a dedicated mechanism to do this (and it’s also likely to be a boon for page views, especially once Questions are syndicated to search engines). But if you were hoping the new product would incorporate Facebook’s extensive privacy settings, you’ll be disappointed: everything in Questions is shared with everyone else on Facebook, and every question you ask is tied to your real name; likewise, anyone who answers will have their response tied to their account.

Of course, having all questions set to public does have one nice side effect: you’ll be able to poll from Facebook’s massive audience of 500 million users. Facebook obviously isn’t going to ask your question to everyone else on Facebook; instead, its system is going to try to analyze a user’s interests to determine who would be best able to answer your question. The service will also show the question to some of your friends, so ideally you’ll receive answers from a healthy mix of friends and experts (we’ll see how well it actually works).

You’ll be able to ask a question from a few places: the Questions tab that appears in the site’s left navigation area, the publisher that appears at the top of the page (where you typically post things like status updates), and, most interestingly, the search box. When you start typing a question into Facebook’s search box, the site will start displaying a list of similar questions that have already been asked on the site. If yours doesn’t pop up, or you really want to re-ask the same thing, you can ask it directly from the search field.

Questions can include photos and polls, and you can also tag questions with topics. If you come across someone else’s question that you’d also like to know the answer to, you can opt to follow it. And the site also supports keyboard shortcuts, which should make the soon-to-be Questions addicts happy.

This could be a big, big deal for the site. Given its size, it won’t take long for Facebook to build up a massive amount of data — if that data is consistently reliable, Questions could turn into a viable alternative to Google for many queries. Facebook will also be integrating Questions and their answers into the Community Pages that launched in April, which already include content from Wikipedia and Facebook user status updates. Finally, this is a big SEO opportunity for the site, though a Facebook spokeswoman said that there are no plans to include the content in search engines yet.

Of course, some of this success will lie in how well Facebook’s matching algorithms work, and how good typical answers are — I’m not going to use this at all if the quality is on par with Yahoo Answers. Facebook will be competing on this front with Quora, a Q&A service that was cofounded by Facebook’s former longtime CTO, and has been widely praised for the quality of its content (though whether or not it can maintain that quality as the site scales remains to be seen). Still, even if the quality isn’t quite up to par, the massive built-in userbase means Facebook Questions will be a success regardless.

One other thing to note: Facebook does not offer any way to ask a question anonymously (remember, everything is tied to your name). While I see the benefit in forcing responses to include a user name (you can better tell if the person answering knows what they’re talking about), I’m less sure that this is a good policy to enforce on the people asking the question. There may well be times when you may have a question that might appear a bit less than professional (“Best place to get my friend hammered for his bachelor’s party?”), or perhaps a little embarrassing to admit to your peers (“Why does my microwave popcorn always start smoking?”).

2010 thus far has been a year of milestones in terms of online population, with Facebook hitting 500 million active users and Twitter reaching 100 million users. This growth explosion is not without its dark side; a rising tide lifts all boats, even the more miscreant ones.

According to a report by Barracuda Labs, both general and questionable activity is increasing on Twitter, due primarily to the company’s open API and easy account set-up. With more than 50 million tweets per day, and 600 million search queries per day, user activity is at an all time high: Nielsen posits unique visits to the site have grown at a rate of 45% compared to last year.

Highlights from the report:

– Only 28.87% of Twitter users have tweeted more than 10 times, have more than 10 followers and more than 10 friends.

– One in every eight Twitter users has at least 10 times more followers than they are following.

– Only one in 10 users is following more than 100 users, and almost half are following less than five.

– Half of Twitter users tweet less than once a day, yet one in 10 users tweet five or more times a day.

– 30 percent of Twitter accounts have never tweeted.

– 15.8% of Twitter users have no followers, 47% decrease from June 2009 when it was 30%.

– 33% have 10+ followers, a 65% increase from June 2009 when it was 20%.

“True Twitter Users”, which Barracuda defines as people who have tweeted at least 10 times, who have at least 10 followers and in turn follow at least 10 people, have increased to 29%, up from 21% in January 2010. Less people now have zero followers (15.8% of all users) and more people have 10+ followers (65% of all users) than in June 2009.

These new levels of user interaction are inevitably punctuated by an increase in “Twitter Crime”, or the percentage of accounts created per month that are eventually suspended by Twitter. According to the data, this rate is now at 2.38% vs. 1.08% in February 2010, which could mean simply that Twitter is ramping up deletions. The average rate of account suspension for the first half of 2010 was 1.67% of all accounts.

June 2010′s numbers are comparable to the high crime rate during Twitter’s “Red Carpet” era in January 2010 (i.e. the @aplusk celebrity dogpile) where a similar growth explosion lead to a 2.20% account suspension rate. Just like in real life, when populations become more dense, malicious activity tends to follow suit by increasing.

According to Barracuda Labs, some strong indicators of illegitimate account growth are a low Followers (people who follow you) minus Friends (people who you follow) number and a low Followers/Friends ratio – presumably because no one wants to follow a SPAM account – as well as a high volume of tweets. Data also shows that a high volume of tweets and a low volume of followers are directly correlated (basically, STFU if you want to increase followers).

Both scammers and legitimate users are engaging on Twitter more, as in tweeting and gaining followers. While illegitimate account deletions do seem to be increasing, perhaps this is because of better policing on Twitter’s part. By paying attention to patterns in scammer behavior such as the correlation between the Followers/Friends ratio, Follower – Friend delta and frequency of tweets,  Twitter could perhaps enact measures that would lower the possibility that your next Twitter follower is @sexyfreeipod.

Forget about checking-in to venues. Apparently, the new thing to do is to check-in to whatever you’re doing — like watching television shows, or reading a book. It’s something that Hot Potato offers, and they’re in the process of being acquired by Facebook. It’s what GetGlue offers as well, and they’re already seeing over 4.5 million ratings and check-ins a month now. And today, the service is announcing a new exclusive partnership with HBO.

Starting on August 1, when you use GetGlue to check-in watching one of HBO’s hit shows, you’ll earn exclusive stickers designed by HBO. If you’re aware of Foursquare badges or Gowalla pins, it’s the same idea, except based around content. The three shows HBO has selected for this promotion are True Blood, Hung, and Entourage — three of their hottest shows.

To earn these stickers, all you have to do is use the GetGlue iPhone app or one of their web browser extensions and check-in to say you’re watching one of the mentioned shows. There are also several other stickers for each show that you can earn by doing other things such as commenting on shows or checking-in multiple times to a show. GetGlue won’t reveal the secrets to earn them all (it is a game, after all), but they make it seem as if loyal fans (meaning loyal GetGlue users in this case too) will be able to get all the stickers.

GetGlue also sets itself apart by sending users actual stickers when they ask for them. Thousands of these stickers have been sent out to users already, I’m told. It’s a gimmick, but an interesting one that seems great for promotional purposes.

These types of deals are becoming an increasingly important means for these services to rope in users. Rival Miso has also been doing similar deals (here’s one for the movie Hot Tub Time Machine). Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, and all the other location check-in services have also been signing similar deals left and right in an attempt to lure in users to their respective games. And it’s more than that, as we’ve seen with Foursquare, if a brand is really sold on the idea, they’ll even start promoting you — like VH1 and Bravo.

That said, these deals usually don’t mean a lot (if any) money for these startups yet. These badges and stickers aren’t easily monetizable, GetGlue CEO Alex Iskold tells us. That said, they establish a relationship with the brand, and eventually the plan is to offer other things to them in exchange for money — such as detailed analytics about who is checking-in to their products.

It was just last month that GetGlue said it was doing 1.5 million ratings and check-ins every month — again, now that’s surged to 4.5 million. The plan for the service’s over 500,000 users is to offer up content recommendations based on these check-ins and ratings. So the more, the better, obviously.

You can find GetGlue’s iPhone app here. Iskold says iPad and Android apps should be out in a matter of weeks as well.

Last May, Kanye West was pissed off. Why? Because people were impersonating him on Twitter. He was so mad that he even wrote a blog post about it — entirely in CAPS. It began, “(This spaz comes courtesy of losers making fake Kanye West Twitter accounts) I DON’T HAVE A FUCKING TWITTER… WHY WOULD I USE TWITTER???“

Well, apparently someone has convinced the hip hop star why he should use Twitter, because as of two hours ago he’s on the service and tweeting away.

The first tweet from his verified account reads, “Up early in the morning taking meetings in Silicone Valley.” In true Twitter fashion, he quickly followed up with, “Lol I spelled Silicon wrong ( I guess I was still thinking about the other type of silicone ITS A PROCESS!! : )” And then like all good Twitter users, he proceeds to link to self-promotional content for the next half dozen tweets.

What’s interesting about those links is that they’re to big sites that covered his impromptu freestyle session at Facebook’s headquarters yesterday (sadly, we got no shout-out even though we were the first — no love Kanye?). But what’s most interesting about that is that he actually complains about Twitter in his freestyle, noting that Twitter users were directing racial slurs at him after the whole Taylor Swift fiasco — you know, the situation that led to brilliant sites like this. Now, just a day later, West has apparently made peace with the service and has started doing what he didn’t have time for last year — tweeting.

West seems to have changed his blog since last year, so the old link to his rant doesn’t work anymore, so I’ll paste it below. Meanwhile, his latest blog post confirms that the new Twitter account is in fact his.

(This spaz comes courtesy of losers making fake Kanye West Twitter accounts) I DON’T HAVE A FUCKING TWITTER… WHY WOULD I USE TWITTER??? I ONLY BLOG 5 PERCENT OF WHAT I’M UP TO IN THE FIRST PLACE. I’M ACTUALLY SLOW DELIVERING CONTENT BECAUSE I’M TOO BUSY ACTUALLY BUSY BEING CREATIVE MOST OF THE TIME AND IF I’M NOT AND I’M JUST LAYING ON A BEACH I WOULDN’T TELL THE WORLD. EVERYTHING THAT TWITTER OFFERS I NEED LESS OF. THE PEOPLE AT TWITTER KNOW I DON’T HAVE A FUCKING TWITTER SO FOR THEM TO ALLOW SOMEONE TO POSE AS ME AND ACCUMULATE OVER A MILLION NAMES IS IRRESPONSIBLE AND DECEITFUL TO THERE FAITHFUL USERS. REPEAT… THE HEADS OF TWITTER KNEW I DIDN’T HAVE A TWITTER AND THEY HAVE TO KNOW WHICH ACCOUNTS HAVE HIGH ACTIVITY ON THEM. IT’S A FUCKING FARCE AND IT MAKES ME QUESTION WHAT OTHER SO CALLED CELEBRITY TWITTERS ARE ACTUALLY REAL OR FAKE. HEY TWITTER, TAKE THE SO CALLED KANYE WEST TWITTER DOWN NOW …. WHY? … BECAUSE MY CAPS LOCK KEY IS LOUD!!!!!!!!!

You can always count on Hunch founder Chris Dixon for interesting Tweets.  He just sent out this one:

turns out patent trolling might not pay. Intellectual Ventures has negative 78% return.http://bit.ly/bSfamC

The link is a PDf download of a document from the University of Texas Management Company listing all of its private investments in venture funds and private equity funds, along with their internal rates of return (IRR). One of the worst performers is Intellectual Ventures, the patent portfolio fund started by Nathan Myrhvold that has a reputation for patent extortion. One of its funds, the Invention Development Fund I, has a negative 73 percent IRR (Dixon mistakenly thought it was negative 78 percent, but close enough). Another fund, the Invention Investment Fund II, has a negative 10 percent return. The two funds combined are delivering a negative 36.66 percent IRR for the University of Texas.

These figures only show the returns to the University of Texas, which may have invested at the wrong time. They are from inception to May 31, 2010. The University of Texas invested a total of $28 million in those two funds, and may still get a return on its investment, but this glimpse into how Intellectual Ventures is doing for one of its limited partners suggests that at least those two funds are having trouble.

The University of Texas is doing better with some of its more traditional venture funds. For instance, its average return across seven Austin Venture funds is 28.76 percent, with Austin Ventures IV up 73.14 percent. According to the document, Union Square Ventures 2004 fund is up 48.37 percent. But there are some lackluster VC returns too. For instance, the IRR on Union Square Ventures 2008 so far is negative 15.75 percent and Integral Capital Partners is showing a lackluster 1.56 percent IRR. Again these numbers are admittedly only snapshot, but they are informative nonetheless.

The document is embedded below.

Last year, we covered the launch of Home-Account, a mortgage search and counseling service. Though launched in the implosion of the housing market, the site raised funding from an impressive group of investors, including Charles River Ventures, Marc Benioff, Ron Conway, Mark Pincus, and Jeff Clavier. One of the seed investors in the round was personal finance site Bills.com, which put close to a million dollars in Home-Account. Today, Home-Account is announcing that it has been acquired by Bills.com. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

A Kayak.com for mortgages, Home-Account offers a free and paid service for those who are looking for mortgage or to re-finance. Home-Account helps consumers find the right mortgage for their needs and credit histories from its partner lenders. Home-Account doesn’t make commissions from the buyers or the lenders, like some online mortgage services like LendingTree.com and LowerMyBills.com. It makes money solely from the consumer subscriptions. Home-Account’s founder Mark Goldstein says that since the company’s launch last year, the startup helped close “hundreds of mortgages.”

Since Bills.com was an investor, the company worked closely with Home-Account and found that it would fit well with Bills.com’s mission to be a resource to help people make better financial decisions. Ethan Ewing, President of Bills.com says that the company plans to take the Home-Account platform, and scale to other financial decisions, such as paying off credit card debt.

Weebly, the startup that lets you build a website with an easy drag-and-drop interface, is looking to help you give your site a little extra flair: they’ve just launched a new image editor called ImagePerfect that allows users to craft nifty custom header images with a few clicks. It may not be a Photoshop killer, but it took Weebly CEO David Rusenko all of one minute to build the Mustang image above (in other words, it’s pretty easy to use).

No, this isn’t anywhere near the first web-based image editor (also see services like Aviary and Google-owned Picnik). But it is tightly integrated into the Weebly experience — instead of kicking you into another window when you go to edit an image, ImagePerfect slides nicely into view, allowing you to modify your image in context with the rest of the page.

Rusenko says that the company looked at other web-based image editors, but they couldn’t find one that would tie as seamlessly into their site as they wanted — so they built their own. ImagePerfect doesn’t have as many features as standalone image editors, but it has more than enough tools for what the typical user will need: opacity, gradients, a variety of text and image options, layers, and other effects. You can import images from Flickr, your desktop, or a URL. The tool is built in Flash, but the images you create appear as standard JPGs on your Weebly site.

At this point ImagePerfect can only be used to edit header images, but Rusenko says that Weebly plans to let users utilize it for other purposes in the near future. Likewise, the service also intends to offer some header templates (which users can customize with ImagePerfect). And you’ll soon be to make the image frames rotate through a series of photos.

In other Weebly news, Rusenko says that the company has well over 4 million registered users, and 22.5 million monthly uniques globally from visitors coming to sites on the Weebly network. He also says that both the Weebly for Education and its deal with web hosting provider Endurance are going well.

Short Version
If Charlie the Unicorn has taught us anything it’s that the road to success is fraught with setbacks and, if you’re not careful, your best friends will cut out your kidneys.

It is with these life-lessons in mind that we examine the Dell Streak, a 5-inch Android 1.6 tablet that shows much promise but is hobbled by Android OS fracturing.

Mobile advertising is currently a billion dollar market and we’ve witnessed tech giants like Google and Apple move into the space with the acquisitions of mobile ad networks AdMob and Quattro Wireless, respectively. AdMob is now part of Google’s mobile advertising business and Apple is using Quattro to power its new ad format, iAds. But there is another player that has silently been growing its business under the radar to become a dominant network in mobile advertising: Millennial Media.

Currently, Millenial has the largest U.S. reach out of all the networks in terms of audience size according to Nielsen; with ads reaching 63 million of a total of 77 million mobile web users in the U.S., or 81% of the U.S. mobile web.

Despite being one of the “big three” in the still-small mobile ad space, Millennial is relatively unknown, while its competitors have seen prominent coverage in the media. Besides its monthly reports on mobile ad traffic, Millennial has avoided some of the drama that has been taking place in the industry. I caught up with the company’s CEO and co-founder Paul Palmieri to talk about how Millennial catapulted from a bootstrapped Baltimore-based startup to the largest independent mobile advertising company.

Palmieri is a seasoned vet in the wireless and advertising industries.  He ran the consumer mobile data arm at Verizon and developed a fledgling mobile ad network at Advertising.com. Unfortunately, as the bubble burst, Advertising.com cut Palmieri’s group before it was eventually sold to AOL. But Palmieri always thought there was more potential in the mobile advertising industry, especially as mobile web usage grew. While iPhones and Android phones were nonexistent in 2004, Palmieri knew that the market would produce more technologically advanced phones than the current offering at the time, the Palm Treo. In 2006, he teamed up with another Advertising.com alum, engineer Chris Brandenburg to work on developing a company that could monetize mobile display advertising.

Fast forward another four years, and now Millennial Media, which Palmieri jokingly calls the “quiet giant,” is competing with the likes of Google and Apple in mobile advertising.  The company is still small with only 85 full-time employees. I was actually surprised that Millennial had less than 100 staff members considering it is one of the largest mobile advertising networks in the world. Palmieri counters that Millennial’s proprietary technologies have helped not only keep customers happy but also helped keep the company lean.

The company offers a mobile media planning platform, called MYDAS, that quickly creates and implements advertising plans; in fact, all sales reps carry iPads to meetings to demo the product and actually create campaigns on the technology. Umpire, another Millennial product, is a realtime ad serving platform that allows publishers to dynamically switch between ad networks based on impressions and performance.

Millennial also provides advertisers with highly optimized audience creation and retargeting technologies, which include preset anonymous audience segments that Millennial has identified through its own interactions. Ad viewers are enrolled in “Audiences” based on their observed behaviors on sites, survey participation, and click-stream data. Once enrolled, users can be specifically targeted in campaigns that Millennial’s advertisers purchase and leverage for future re-targeting purposes.  Millennial claims this ability to target ads to highly segmented audiences promises advertisers with a 5-times lift in interaction rates.  The  company also notes that it makes a clear disclosure of these techniques and provides a simple opt-out mechanism. Nevertheless, online ad targeting is a political hot potato, and when you add in location targeting, it could get tricky.

On the device side, Palmieri highlights that Millennial’s platform independence creates more diversification and thus reaches more mobile users. In a given month, 45% of the impressions on the network are from smartphones, roughly 39% from feature phones, and around 16% from connected devices such as tablets and gaming systems.

One of the little-known secrets of Millennial is that it’s more than just a mobile ad network. The company also operates and manages private mobile ad networks for large media companies and conglomerates that have multiple apps and sites, essentially powering a self-service ad network for these companies. Millennial also has a deal with a “prominent internet media company” (Palmieri declined to name the company) that has completely outsourced its mobile advertising to Millennial.

While Millennial may not generate the press hype that AdMob and Quattro have seen, the company has certainly attracted the attention of technology’s leading venture capital firms. The company has raised $38.3 million to date in venture funding from Charles River Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Bessemer Venture Partners and Columbia Capital.

While Palmieri won’t disclose concrete revenue and sales numbers, he told me that revenue has been steadily growing and the company is well past its target revenue for the first half of the year. According to IDC research published last December, Millennial Media was on target to make $35 million in U.S. mobile advertising revenue for 2009. AdMob’s revenue was estimated at $31 million (we reported a $40 million run-rate at the end of last year) and Quattro Wireless was reported to have seen $20 million in revenue for the year. Palmieri says the company isn’t cash-flow positive yet but will hit that mark this year.

Still, Millennial is playing in a competitive space with two of the most powerful tech companies on the planet, Google, and Apple.  Either one could have bought Millennial, but they decided to go with its rivals instead.  Remember, Apple makes the iPhone and iPad—two devices that dominate the mobile advertising market. And Google is behind all the Android devices.

With the launch of iAds, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that he expects 48% of spending on mobile advertising in the United States from July through December of 2010 to go to Apple’s iAd platform for the iPhone and iPad. But Palmieri says he isn’t worried. “We’ve been offering the same rich-media formats as iAds for years now,” says Palmieri. While there is certainly a novelty to iAds, Palmieri expects Millennial’s ads to perform as well if not better than Apple’s ads.

Millennial has also been making acquisitions to boost its offerings to advertisers and publishers. Earlier this year the company acquired startup Tap Metrics, a company that provides mobile analytics to developers. And the company is actively looking to make more purchases in the space, says Palmieri.

The looming question in everyone’s minds is whether Millennial will sell to a big technology company looking to take a piece of the mobile advertising pie, such as Microsoft. While Palmieri says that an acquisition isn’t something he’s totally against, his focus at the moment is on taking the company public in the next year or so.

George Zachary, a partner at Charles River Ventures and board member of Millennial, also feels confident that the startup can be a public company in the next year. Zachary credits the company’s success partly to the core ideals of the founders in not wanting to sacrifice quality, despite growing fast.

If mobile advertising is going to be as huge as everyone thinks, there is plenty of room for more than two players.  Millennial is proving that a non-Silicon Valley based startup with the right technology, talent and leadership can find success in a competitive field that includes both Google and Apple. And with a possible IPO in 2011, it looks like Millennial won’t be a “quiet giant” for much longer.

GoodData is rapidly becoming a key example of the technology innovation emerging from Central Europe – and laying a bet on Europe seems to be paying off for Fidelity Growth Partners Europe, the venture and growth equity investor, which backs European entrepreneurs exclusively.

It’s invested $2 million in the startup, the second investment for the £100 million fund, leading an overall $6.5 million investment round. GoodData provides an on-demand business intelligence services. Other returning investors include General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz and Windcrest Partners.

Time, Inc. and Apple are going through a rough patch. Time wants to be able to sell digital subscriptions of its properties, including Sports Illustrated, via the iTunes Store, but Apple won’t let that happen. This puts Time in a weird spot: it can either sell its magazines like any company would sell any widget on the iTunes Store (giving Apple complete control in the process), it can negotiate a new situation with Apple so that it can take control of the selling of digital subscriptions, or it can try to strong-arm Apple into getting its way—perhaps by pulling all of its content off the iTunes Store.