Category: Tech news

The caliber of the partnerships that location-based startup Foursquare keeps landing continues to be impressive. A new tie-up with VH1 will see the cable network promoting Foursquare through the commercial below — all Summer long.

Foursquare has had commercials before — like this Bravo one in February — but this one should be the biggest draw for the masses yet. Foursquare has linked up with VH1 and Live Nation for an “unlock it to rock it” promotion. The commercial not only plays up the ability to win Foursquare badges, but also a contest that will have a winner getting access to a year’s worth of concerts for free.

The commercial showcases key Foursquare functionality: the ability to check-in to places around your city and get tips. VH1′s Foursquare account also gives you the added bonus of getting tip from celebrities — well, if you consider that a bonus.

It took quite a bit of time for other hot startups like Twitter to get this kind of mainstream exposure. Foursquare is getting it much, much faster. And again, this will be playing on VH1 all Summer (Foursquare head of business development Tristan Walker also hints that the promotion will extend past this Summer).

Looks like you’ll have to wait a little longer for the White iPhone 4. Apple just released a statement saying that the white model of the new iPhone won’t be available until later in 2010.

In late June, Apple released a statement saying that the white iPhone 4 will not be available until the second half of July due to manufacturing challenges. As with this most recent release, it is unclear from the statement what those challenges are. But we received an update last week during Steve Jobs’ ‘Antennagate’ speech that the White iPhone would ship at the end of July.

It appears things have changed within a week.

Apple said that the shortage of the white iPhones will not affect supply of the more popular black models. But for those of you who were pining for a white device, you will have to wait until later this year. The iPhone 4 was available for pre-order in Black starting June 15. At that point, it was assumed you’d be able to purchase the white model of the phone in stores on June 24. But clearly, these “Manufacturing challenges” have prevented Apple from releasing large quantities of the phone to the public.

Here’s the full statement from Apple:

White models of Apple’s new iPhone® 4 have continued to be more challenging to manufacture than we originally expected, and as a result they will not be available until later this year. The availability of the more popular iPhone 4 black models is not affected.

Of course you can always try to build your own white iPhone 4 if you don’t want to wait.

Okay, after our last post on Darth Vader and the iPhone 4, we’re getting pinged way too fast with all the videos we left out but should have included. So behold: the best of the iPhone 4 videos.

If you have any others you know of, be sure to let us know and we’ll throw them in here.

If all the rumors are true, Apple is preparing to totally overall its entire computer line from the MacBook Air, Mac Pro, and iMac. Apparently the retail supplies of iMacs are dwindling and and according to AppleInsider, Apple told at least one distributor not to expect any new shipments. The last time this happened, the new Mac Mini appeared shortly afterwards.

Hope you didn’t just buy an iMac. The next refresh should be nice. It might even come with a desktop version of iOS and a gigantic touchscreen.

So yesterday, I notice there’s a new article up on Google’s main blog, head on over there and see it’s merely a post featuring the latest video in the company’s Search Stories series, video ads which essentially aim to highlight how all kinds of people use Google Search. They’re nice and all, if pretty pointless in my book, but nothing particularly spectacular about them.

But this latest one, labeled ‘Brother and Sister’, caught my attention because of something entirely different than the narrative or the concept.

First, watch the video:

Did you take notice of the search results that are shown, and at times clicked upon?

Take a look at the screenshot below if you didn’t pay attention to them.

Here are the sites that are shown throughout the video:

1) TellMeHowTo.net – property of Clarity Media; an online community of users sharing hints and tips on how to do just about everything.

2) eHow (shown 3 times) – part of the Demand Media stable; an online community of users who publish how-tos, images and video clips and receive a percentage of profits earned from traffic and advertising.

3) Instructables.com – independent service; an online community of users who share what they do and how they do it, a place where people go to learn from and collaborate with others.

4) Teenadvice.About.com – About.com is part of The New York Times Company; the site banks on ‘guides and contributors’ to offer solutions and advice on, well, again, just about everything.

5) TheKnot – a listed niche media company that caters to brides and, to a lesser degree, grooms by serving just about everything you might ever want to know about weddings; while the main content comes from professional editors, a core aspect of TheKnot is its online community of users who actively share information, tips and whatnot on its message boards.

Notice a pattern here?

I realize full well it may not seem fair to everyone to be calling all these sites mere content farms – that all depends on what you think the term entails, or doesn’t.

But clearly, all these sites rely on users generating content to a certain degree, either in exchange for cash or other benefits, or simply for the sake of being part of an online community of like-minded souls who actively engage in content creation and curation.

In my mind, Google in its latest ‘Search Story’ perfectly highlighted that amazingly often content produced by non-professional writers tends to come out on top when one does certain types of searches on the Web (the same goes for Q&A sites, which also shows in the video).

That’s the whole point of course: companies like Demand Media, Yahoo’s Associated Content and AOL’s Seed thrive on throwing online masses of search engine friendly but often poorly researched or written content, produced by amateurs at low cost.

I mean, sweet Lord, did you read this?

You can debate if this is the future of online journalism or the definitive end of hand-crafted content all you want. What Google’s video inadvertently shows is that the strategy is clearly working – these sites are getting an enormous amount of traffic from search engines, all of which gets monetized quite efficiently in most cases (that’s what the whole business model depends on).

Thanks to Google for reminding me of Michael’s last sentence in his essay on the rise of (crappy) content farms: “Long live fast food content, it’s here to stay.”

Regardless of what you think about the whole iPhone 4 antenna debate, there’s no denying that it’s fueling a massive amount of creativity on the Internet. We’ve got the iPhone 4 antenna song (which Apple even played at its press conference), the cute “End Call” antenna covering stickers, the College Humor take on the press conference, and, of course, the Taiwanese animation for Antennagate with light sabers.

The Taiwanese video features Bill Gates (or some other Microsoft guy) as Darth Vader. Vader also plays a pivotal role in new video today by Russell Arch. No, it’s not as good as the Taiwanese one (nor the iPhone vs. EVO videos), but it’s still pretty funny. It starts off slow, but it gets good at the end.

The choice lines:

• “Are you seriously defending the new phone by saying that it almost performs as well as the old phone? Is that what the plan is?”
• “So everybody gets hit with 4 times the radiation just because these idiots can’t work together?”
• “Ha ha, and get what, the EVO? I mean those poor saps are having light leaks and their screens peeling off after a couple of days.”
• “And don’t even get me started on the Droid X. Uh, let’s see, you take the original phone, remove the physical keyboard, make it as big as a toaster, and still don’t add a front-facing camera? Yeah, that’s progress.”
• “Look, just level with me: it’s AT&T isn’t it? If it is just cough or something.”

See also: The Best Of The iPhone 4 Spoofs

In season 1 of AMC’s hit show Mad Men, Rachel Menken comes to the advertising firm Sterling Cooper because she wants to give her department store, Menken’s, a makeover, so to speak. She wants to transform it from a successful department store into an elite one. “What kind of people do you want [coming into your store]?,” Creative Director Don Draper asks Menken. “I want your kind of people Mr. Draper. People who don’t care about coupons — whether or not they can afford it. People who come into the store because it is expensive,” Menken replies.

Based on what we’re hearing, HP has been having similarly themed meetings in recent months. They want to transform themselves — from HP, the successful tech juggernaut, into Apple, the sexy one.

When you think of HP, what do you think of? For most consumers it’s either printers and sort of crappy, cheap computers that you get at Best Buy. But that’s not what HP aspires to be anymore, sources familiar with HP’s thinking are telling us. They want to be Apple. They want be the makers of high-quality consumer gadgets all connected by way of a digital ecosystem. An ecosystem they own and operate. One tied together by webOS.

While it should hardly be surprising to hear that any company wants to be Apple given that company’s recent success, HP is one of a very few — and actually maybe the only company with the required assets to potentially pull off such a makeover. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to — but it’s possible. And they know that, and that’s exactly what their strategy is going forward, apparently.

On the face of it, it may not seem to make a lot of sense. After all, HP makes nearly double the revenue that Apple does each quarter. But despite this, it’s Apple that actually makes more profit. And it’s Apple that has more than double the market cap of HP. In the eyes of investors, Apple is the up-and-coming rockstar, HP is the aging one. And they’re closely tied to their counterpart, Microsoft, who is also seen as aging.

And that’s what HP is trying to break away from.

WebOS is the key to all of this. It’s the software layer that HP’s hardware has been lacking — forcing them to go with Microsoft instead. But the Palm acquisition in April changed all of that. From the moment that happened, HP has made no secret that the reason for the deal was to “double-down” on webOS.

Just listen to what HP executive Todd Bradley had to say today at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, CO. “I think you’ll see us with a family of slate products, clearly Microsoft for the enterprise, and a webOS product,” Bradley said. “Our focus is working with still our largest software partner, Microsoft, to create a tablet, a slate, for the enterprise business,” he continued. What he’s doing there is carefully positioning HP’s relationship with Microsoft on new products going forward as being focused on the enterprise side of things. Previously, it was stated HP would do a Windows-powered slate for consumers. That is no longer the case. That tablet will be built to run webOS.

Does that mean HP is going to ditch Windows altogether anytime soon? Of course not. As the largest maker of PCs, HP is Microsoft’s largest customer. But for the new products HP is planning, it’s going to be all webOS. And on the desktop side of things, they’re working on webOS-syncing software that will run on Windows (and Macs), we hear. So again, they’re basically trying to recreate the ecosystem that Apple has.

HP executive Jon Rubinstein (the CEO of Palm) also confirmed at the same event today that webOS 2.0 is coming later this year. This new version is likely to be the first one that will start to tie all of these HP products together.

Speaking of Rubinstein, his pedigree here can’t be overlooked. He was the executive at Apple in charge of the iPod until he left in 2006. He’s the one who oversaw the framework for the ecosystem Apple has in place today. There was some talk leading up to the Palm acquisition if Rubinstein would stay or go — he’s apparently onboard with this new “let’s turn HP into Apple” idea. That shouldn’t be surprising given that this was the basic strategy at Palm with the Pre.

But Palm failed simply because they didn’t have the resources to do what they wanted to do (challenge Apple’s iPhone directly). HP does — and then some. And while HP is not a player in the mobile space right now, they plan to be once again with webOS.

From what we’re hearing, HP wants to create a seamless experience for all of their hardware. That’s PCs to notebooks to netbooks to tablets to mobile phones to printers. And they want to do so with a much more controlled product line than they’ve previously had. They want to move towards more premium products, ones with higher margins. That will make the profits go up, just as it has with Apple.

Of course, whether or not HP can make any of this happen is a pretty big “if.” One obvious problem with them being Apple is that they don’t have their own retail stores, like Apple does. HPs are sold everywhere from Best Buy to Costco, but those stores tend to attract people looking for bargains. And those that aren’t, buy Macs there.

Second, HP’s strategy in mobile phones will meet resistance not only from the iPhone, but from Google’s Android phones. But Google appears to be positioning Android as the sort-of Windows of the smartphone era. That is, they’re all about getting their software as widely distributed as possible. Like Microsoft with PCs, Google don’t make their own hardware for Android (though they had a hand in designing the Nexus One, which is all but dead now). HP would be making its own hardware to run webOS. Again, like Apple.

Android also poses a potential threat in the tablet field. But again, Google won’t be making this hardware. As I said at the beginning, because HP is a hardware maker that just happened to purchase a great piece of software in webOS, they have a shot at pulling off what Apple has. Whereas most other rivals, even Google, cannot. Android may be ubiquitous by this time next year, but the experience won’t be as seamless as it is within Apple’s ecosystem. And, HP hopes, their ecosystem. As Apple has proven, people are willing to pay a premium for that.

This is HP’s big bet on the future. They’re betting on the Apple way. And that’s the right way for them to bet because they’re a hardware company. With a shift towards mobile starting to take place, as well as new products like tablets starting to rise, HP seems smart to get ahead of this trend. They’re not Microsoft or Google where profits are in licenses and advertising, respectively. With the webOS buy, they’re much closer to Apple. The profits there are in premium products, buoyed by the seamless ecosystem.

That’s where HP is heading.

[images: AMC]

Disney and social gaming startup Playdom are in “very” late stage acquisition discussions, we’ve heard from, oh, about seven independent sources, including sources close to Playdom, over the last several days. Internally the two parties have referred to the deal as “Project Platinum” based on due diligence documents we’ve reviewed.

Some sources have said the deal is signed and in the closing process. Others say it hasn’t been signed yet and could still unravel.

Disney is already an investor in Playdom – last month we reported that Disney’s Steamboat Ventures participated in a new injection of $33 million into the company. Playdom has raised a total of $76 million, and the most recent valuation of the company was around $345 million.

We’ve heard a wide range of speculation on the price Disney is paying for Playdom but haven’t confirmed anything yet. It’s probably safe to assume it’s a multiple of that $345 million valuation, though. Zynga, Playdom’s much larger competitor, has likely been valued at more than $2 billion in recent financings.

Does the deal make sense for Disney? There are a number of arguments that it does. Disney is weak in the social space, and despite making investments in MMOs, such a the acquisition of Club Penguin in 2007, digital revenues continue to make up a tiny percentage of overall revenue.

Disney has exceptional brands, from characters to movies, that can benefit from having social games being built around them. Social games generate revenue, sometimes lots of it, and it’s also free marketing. Expect to see social games around movies being released in advance in the future.

Earlier this month Disney acquired Tapulous.

The Funded’s Adeo Ressi’s prediction that 2010 will be the year of the angel investor, seems to be coming true.

In the second quarter, venture capitalists invested $6.5 billion, an impressive 34% increase from the prior quarter. Not so impressive? The amount of money they pulled in. According to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association, venture capital funds only raised $1.9 billion in the second quarter— a 48% drop from the prior quarter. While VC fundraising can be somewhat cyclical, $1.9 billion is far lower than any quarter during the recession.

In fact, that’s the lowest level raised in roughly seven years.

On today’s episode of TechCrunch NOW, Ressi and I discussed this growing gap between VC investment and their ability to raise funds and what that means for the market as a whole. “Venture capitalists are living on borrowed time, no matter how you look at it there’s going to be a reconciliation,” he says. “They’re spending money from ages old today and in the future they’re going to have a lot less money at their disposal to invest.”

According to Ressi, the investment landscape is dramatically shifting, as venture capital becomes a less prominent asset class and a new generation of entrepreneurs-turned-angel investors fill the power vacuum. Amusingly, he says, he knows more and more venture capitalists who are tackling smaller angel investments, as they adapt to this new paradigm. See video above.

We’ll be sure to get the other side of this debate on an upcoming episode of TechCrunch NOW.

(Note: Great news! You can now now subscribe to the daily RSS/Podcast feed of TechCrunch Now by clicking on these links: )

Reading over the press release for the new “Antenna Meter” application for RIM’s BlackBerry devices, I’ll admit that I was bored. Okay, so it’s exactly what it says it is: an antenna meter. But aha! The two companies behind the app, Xtreme Labs and Fixmo, know how to pitch it. It’s not an antenna meter, it’s a “death grip” meter. Immediately, I’m much more interested.

As you’re undoubtedly aware by now, “death grip” is the term given to smartphone signal loss when a phone is held in your hand a certain way (that covers the antenna). Notably, this has been an issue with the iPhone 4. But Apple called a press conference a week ago to basically say that the problem isn’t unique to their device. And in fact, they showed that it affects other devices by rivals as well. One of those was a BlackBerry device. And RIM was not too pleased about that.

But other than issue a stern statement citing RIM as a “global leader in antenna design” (and potentially taking down videos showing the death grip) we haven’t seen much out of them to prove how good their antennas actually are. That’s what this app intends to do. While the release doesn’t mention “death grip” specifically, it’s clear what this is aimed at. Fixmo’s co-founder Rick Segal cites the “noise and unfair implications leveled at Research In Motion” as the basis for this app.

The pitch to me was more straightforward, “We also have a feature that encourages you to try out different ‘death grips’ on the BlackBerry to see resulting fluctuations in antenna signal strength.”

Something tells me we won’t be seeing an app like this in Apple’s App Store anytime soon. But if you want to try it out for BlackBerry, you can go here on your BlackBerry web browser.

CloudCanvas, a startup incubated in the Founder Institute, has launched their free HTML5 image editing suite to the public today. The product aims to blend capabilities of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop into a single, easy-to-use web based offering.

CloudCanvas allows both novice doodlers and expert designers to create, store, edit and embed images into the suite. The suite, which supports both vector and bitmap images, includes a standard roster of simple image tools similar to offline image editing suites (i.e. Photoshop), including polygons, circles, painting, layers, brushes and others. And the suite includes more advanced editing tools such as bezier curves, blurring, drop shadow and bevel filters.

Additionally, CloudCanvas is integrated with Google Images search and DeviantArt libraries to import images into the suite and includes over 30,000 clipart and templates within the suite. The suite also includes 500 fonts ready to use on the web and support saving in PNG and SVG formats.

The virtue of CloudCanvas is that it supports HTML5; and doesn’t run on Flash. CloudCanvas even has an iPad optimized version for touch drawing and illustrating, allowing you to take images right from the desktop to your handheld and back seamlessly. While CloudCanvas is free, the site will eventually include premium features and media sales, such as fonts and stock photography, in the future. As a special incentive for trying the suite out, CloudCanvas is offering a prize of $500 for each of the best three original images created with the product by September 12th, 2010.

Of course, there are other powerful browser-based editing suites that CloudCanvas will compete against, including Aviary, and Photoshop itself.

Amazon announced today that it had reached an agreement with Andrew Wylie, head of the successful New York agency whose clients include such authors as Oliver Sacks, Salman Rushdie, and Philip Roth, as well the estates of William Burroughs, John Updike, W.H. Auden, and the like. Amazon and the Kindle e-book store will have exclusive rights to publish several books by authors Wylie represents, cutting all other players (such as authors’ paper book distributors) out of the deal. It’s a big win for Amazon, but the start of a painful period for consumers.

Picture all the e-books that are out there as being in a big pie. Amazon is cutting a piece of the pie out and putting it in their own pan. Pretty soon, the other players will be furiously cutting their own pieces out of the pie and isolating them in their own pans. The end result is a messy and fractured marketplace that’s difficult and confusing for consumers to navigate.

Continue reading…

Analytics is a crowded space, with plenty of services looking to help you turn your visitors into engaged, paid customers. KissMetrics is the latest to join the fray, and it’s offering a solution that’s both straightforward and powerful. As it comes out of stealth, the company is also revealing its funding: in 2008 it closed a $1 million seed round led by True Ventures, and in mid-2009 it closed a $3 million round led by Polaris Ventures. The company also has investments from SoftTechVC, Felicis Ventures, and Angels including Dave McClure, Mark Goines, Shervin Pishevar, Bobby Yazdani, and Nils Johnson.

At this point, KissMetrics is built around one type of analysis: the conversion funnel, which shows you how many users are dropping off during your signup flows (and can hopefully help you figure out why). You can customize these graphs by tracking different variables, but Cofounder Hiten Shah says that you won’t find a dizzying array of other options. The goal, he says, was to get this one key tool to work very well before branching out (though other tools will follow).

KissMetrics started off around two years ago as an analytics service for Facebook applications, but shifted to its broader current model after noticing how many companies were building their analytics tools in-house. That story may sound familiar: the founders of Mixpanel, another analytics company, drew similar inspiration from their time at Slide.

So how does KissMetrics differ from Mixpanel and the other analytics services that are already out there? Shah says that other services generally track clicks and events, but that they don’t track users. KissMetrics, on the other hand, can be used to track the activity of a user even before they’ve even joined your site — it essentially builds an anonymous history for each user, and then associates that history with their username once they create an account. For example, if you were to visit a site five times without converting, but then visited a sixth time and did convert, the site’s owners can use KissMetrics to look back at the history of the first five visits to try to identify where they went wrong.

While this technology could potentially be used for things like cross-site advertising, Shah says KissMetricsonly creates these user histories on a per-site basis (he explains that this minimizes privacy issues). In the future, he says that KissMetrics products will evolve toward helping optimize marketing and customer acquisition.

The service is free for the first thirty days, then offers tiered monthly pricing plans based on how many events you’ll be tracking. These plans begin at $149 a month and go up to $699, with custom plans for especially large sites.

KissMetrics’ advisors include Eric Ries, Sean Ellis, Jeff Veen, Jeff Hammerbacher, and Ed Baker (CEO of Friend.ly), many of whom have extensive experience in analytics.

Make no mistake, we get some weird stuff sent to TCHQ, especially when it’s addressed to our Belgian reporter, Robin Wauters. Which is why I always make a point of opening his mail before it’s sent on.

Today, though, was a special day.

Today, wrapped innocently in tissue paper, came “Barbie Video Girl”: a genuine Barbie doll, featuring a hidden webcam in her necklace. It’s hard to get across in text alone how messed up this thing is, so I hopped on to Skype with CrunchGear’s John Biggs in New York for the first episode of a new video segment I’m calling “What’s Fucked Up In Toys… With John Biggs.”

Slightly NSFW video below.

Here come the slates. Send in the slates. Todd Bradley, EVP, Personal Systems Group, for HP just announced that their Windows 7 tablets will arrive “this fall” — something we suspected after said slates showed up on HP’s website with SKU numbers and all. The rumored (and almost certainly real) webOS slates were touched on tangentially, with the non-answer that we can expect a “family” of slate devices. Jon Rubinstein pretty much confirmed that they’re coming out, but wouldn’t give any dates.

The Windows 7 tablets, supposedly called Slate 500s, will support pen and finger input, and according to Rubinstein are going to be targeted at the enterprise sector — a strategy we suspected after reports of the Slate’s death were shown to be exaggerated.

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