Category: Tech news

Okay, admittedly, this doesn’t have a lot to do with tech other than the fact that it’s on YouTube. But it’s awesome. And happens to mashup two of our favorite memes in recently memory: Double Rainbow and Hitler Is Upset.

Mike loves the Double Rainbow thing so much that he made a mashup with me, the iPhone, and the two glorious rainbows. Meanwhile, the Hitler thing never gets old. It would just be great if the filmmakers would loosen up and stop taking them down from YouTube.

For now, we may have to enjoy it this way. Behold: Hitler Sees A Double Rainbow. “Don’t tell me what to do, I’m looking at a double rainbow! It’s soooo beautiful!“

Email overload is a problem that’s as common as it is difficult to solve. Fortunately, everyone know it’s a problem, and there are plenty of startups (and webmail providers themselves) looking to fix it. One recent entry to the space is AwayFind. The service, which opened to the public earlier this year, allows you to set up filters identifying the most important messages that hit your inbox— emails from coworkers, family members, or perhaps those that have “IMPORTANT!” in the subject line. When one of these urgent messages comes in, AwayFind can alert you with a text message, phone call (that actually reads the message aloud) or IM.

All of the site’s alert settings are customizable: you can choose to receive an alert every time your boss emails you, or only when you get a new message in an especially important email thread. You can also choose time limits for each alert, and there’s also an auto-responder feature that you can use to direct people to a personal contact page (Awayfind lets you make one, or you can link to your own website).

The site’s signup flow is a little too involved (you’ll have to verify each SMS/voice account you want to send messages to, decide if you want to use the signature feature, and so on). But once you’re set up it’s pretty straightforward, with tabs listing your filters, signatures, and an inbox of messages that your filters have flagged as especially important.

The service works best if you’re using Gmail in tandem with AwayFind’s browser extensions, which are available in Firefox and Chrome, and lets you set up filters directly from your inbox (AwayFind also has an email gadget on the Google Apps Marketplace, which is the company’s fastest growing segment of user acquisition). If you aren’t on Gmail, AwayFind also supports other email accounts through IMAP and Exchange; you just won’t be able to use the browser extension and will have to manage your filters from the AwayFind site.

As with similar services, AwayFind can potentially access your email messages, which may turn off security-conscious users. That said, it uses oAuth to access your Gmail account which is safer than if you were actually handing over your password (which you’ll have to do if you want to use an IMAP account). And AwayFind says it only stores content from your email when you tell it to archive messages.

The service is free for now, with plans to eventually change to a freemium setup — the company is still deciding which features will be free and which will only be available to premium users.

Also see Etacts, a Y Combinator-funded company that helps you keep in touch with the contacts that are most important to you (see our past coverage here).

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Businesses both big and small are flocking to social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Foursquare. The fact is that a presence on these platforms not only allows companies to engage in conversations with consumers, but also serves as an outlet to drive sales through deals and coupons.

And while major brands like Starbucks, Virgin, and Levi’s have been participating in the social web for some time now, the rate of adoption among small businesses is increasing too. According to a recent University of Maryland study, social media adoption by small businesses has doubled from 12% to 24% in the last year. But as these businesses look to Facebook and Twitter to connect with customers, many are finding that some strategies work and some do not produce results. We’ll be exploring these questions at a panel on Social Media and Businesses at our Social Currency CrunchUp on July 30. We’ve found some local and national businesses using social media effectively, ranging from Levi’s to a creme brulee cart, whose case studies are below.  Some of these businesses will be sharing their experiences at the CrunchUp (You can buy tickets to the CrunchUp here).

The Creme Brulee Man: Food from street carts have become a foodie favorite for San Franciscans. Food carts travel from neighborhood to neighborhood, offering their delicacies to a range of local foodies. But without a set location, how do these carts let consumers know where they will be? Well, through Twitter of course. Curtis Kimball, the man behind the enormously popular Creme Brulee Cart in San Francisco, has quickly amassed over 12,000 followers in a little over a year. He knows that most of his business comes from people who follow him on Twitter because Twitter is the only way you can find the cart’s location for the day, says Kimball, a former construction worker turned creme brulee expert. “It gives people a valid reason to follow me,” he says.

The other use of Twitter for Kimball is to tell people what flavor of creme brulee he is serving in a given day. And Kimball says that Twitter gives him the ability to develop a personal relationship with his followers and others. He says he tries to engage his followers by asking for suggestions of what type of custard to serve or where he should park his cart, and he always tries to keep things humorous.

Kimball says he has no marketing budget and Twitter has been a great way to amass fans. He doesn’t have as much of a presence on Facebook, and he’s not sure the model is as efficient as Twitter. “Twitter can absorb more than Facebook with very little effort,” Kimball adds. Yelp has also been a valuable source of referrals for the entrepreneur. The cart has 224 reviews and is rated with 4 and a half stars.

Joie De Vivre: Joie De Vivre, a company that operates 33 luxury hotels in California is using a variety of social media platforms to drive sales and marketing for its properties. Central to the hotel group’s strategy is disseminating deals and coupons to followers and fans on Facebook and Twitter. Every Tuesday, Joie De Vivre’s Twitter account will Tweet an exclusive deal to its nearly 10,000 followers. Followers have only hours to book the steeply discounted room rate. For example, this past Tuesday, it offered $79 rooms at the group’s Galleria Park Hotel in San Francisco in November and December. The company also operates similar deals for its 5,000-plus Facebook fans on Fridays.

In less than a year, Joie De Vivre has booked over 1,000 room nights through these types of deals—rooms that otherwise would have stayed empty.  The company has also started a partnership with coupons site Mobile Spinach to offer coupons for the group’s restaurants. And the company has partnered with Foursquare to offer deals for check-ins at its various restaurants. In terms of flash sales, Joir De Vivre has done a number of deals with travel sites like Gilt’s Jetsetter as well as RueLaLa, and Nadeau says these deals have done moderately well.

The company’s marketing VP Ann Nadeau tells me that because of the economy the hotel industry’s marketing budgets have shrunk, and social media efforts have proved to be a great way to both drive sales and build loyalty. The company’s social media efforts are not solely deal based. This summer, Joie De Vivre encouraged consumers to enter its Road Trippin’ California contest, which asked people to submit videos on YouTube that share why they love California. Three winners, out of 270 videos that were submitted, were selected to win all-expense California road trips with stays in the company’s hotels.

In terms of using social media for customer service, Nadeau says that each property hotel manager is responsible for monitoring conversations and reviews on Twitter, Facebook, and Yelp.

Stone Korean Kitchen: Co-founded last November by chef Terry Lin, and LinkedIn employees Robby Kwok and Dan Yoo, Stone Korean Kitchen aims to bring modern Korean cuisine to the Financial District in San Francisco. Yoo tells me that as soon as the restaurant launched, he started a presence on social media sites, including Twitter, Yelp, and Facebook. But the challenge of many small businesses with social media is driving traffic to the right social media channel rather than splitting it between various sites. Yoo says that interconnecting content between the various profiles has helped gain Twitter followers and Facebook fans. Currently the restaurant’s Twitter profile has 65 followers and its Facebook page has 107 fans.  Many of these are repeat customers.  For a small restaurant, it doesn’t take that many loyal customers to keep the kitchen busy.

Yoo says that he consistently Tweets links to comments and reviews on the Facebook page. Of course, Yoo also stresses the importance of managing Yelp reviews and responding to customer complaints on social media platforms.

But what really tipped the scales for Yoo was Groupon (disclosure: my husband works for Groupon).  Yoo says that restaurant saw significant traction in both sales and traffic to its Yelp sites and Facebook page when the restaurant signed up for a Groupon deal in April. Stone Korean Kitchen sold 2600 groupons in one day, and saw a packed house for two months for both lunch and dinner. Now Yoo says that they see around 5 to 10 Groupons per day instead of 30 or 40 but the restaurant is still seeing a good number of repeat customers from the Groupon deal, says Yoo.

One effect of the Groupon deal, besides increased sales, was that there were a flux of Yelp reviews. It took the company six months to accumulate 80 reviews on Yelp and after the deal, the restaurant accumulated 90 reviews within three months. Yoo also says that he’s seen a steady increase in Foursquare check-ins following the Groupon deal.

Of course, since Yoo and Kwok are both LinkedIn employees (chef Lin manages the restaurant on a day-to-day basis), they put their heads together to figure out how they could use the professional social network to drive sales. With the ad targeting capabilities on LinkedIn, the restaurant started serving ads that target lawyers and bankers in the San Francisco area, as both industries are centralized in the financial district. They’ve noticed an increase in foot traffic and corporate catering requests as a result.  In the future, Yoo says that the restaurant is working on a promotion with Foursquare. And he is in talks with Twitter on featuring a deal on the social network’s new Earlybird venture.

Dr. Irena Vaksman, Dentist: Social media and dentistry don’t necessarily go hand in hand, but one San Francisco dentist has forged an impressive social media campaign to raise awareness of her recently launched practice. She has a Twitter profile, a Facebook page, a YouTube channel and an website. Dr. Vaksman’s husband, lawyer Robert Vaksman, has been the strategist behind her social media efforts. Robert says that his wife is confronted with the challenge of practicing in a building that houses hundreds of other dentists that have more established practices. He says that it’s a no brainer to be looking at as many social channels as possible for marketing efforts.

While the practice is still young, the Vaksmans say that they are starting to see patients and potential patients begin to communicate with them on the Facebook page, which has 70 fans. Vaksman will publish her Yelp reviews from patients on the site as well as YouTube videos containing educational content about dental procedures. Twitter is still a fairly new forum for the practice says Robert, and he’s still trying to determine the best way to engage with potential customers on the network.

Last October, Dr. Vaksman signed up for a Groupon deal in San Francisco, and received 320 new patients because of the deal, which was for a patient exam and x-ray. The Vaksmans say that the deal propelled the five month old business in the right direction and boosted its patient base significantly. Robert is also looking into partnering with Facebook campaign startup Wildfire to set up a promotional sweepstakes for the practice’s Facebook page.

Levi’s: Now more than ever, retail brands are engaging consumers on social networks to offer deals, allow users to socialize around purchases, and more. Levi’s Jeans was one of the brands that was first to use Facebook as a tool for sales and marketing initiatives and has launched a number of compelling campaigns using Facebook.

As one of Facebook’s initial partners using the social network’s new Like functionality, Levi’s allows Facebook users to like products on Levi’s online store and its Facebook page (which has nearly 500,000 likes) and share their favorite items with their friends. Within the first week, Levi’s got more than 4,000 likes, says Inside Facebook.

The jeans giant also promoted a major campaign in conjunction with SXSW this year, partnering with music publication The Fader to promote a music event at the festival. The company worked with brand marketing platform Involver to incorporate music and video into their page, with the hopes of driving music fans to buy jeans from the Levi’s brand. Most recently, Levi’s has begun to promote retail offerings with geo-targeted event advertisements on Facebook.

In terms of Twitter, Levi’s recently enlisted a “Levi’s Guy,” 23-year-old USC graduate Gareth, to engage consumers on the microblogging platform. He has over 6,000 followers and is responsible for responding to and engaging in conversations about the Levi’s brand on Twitter. The company is currently in the process of trying to find a Levi’s Girl, which will serve as a female foil to Gareth.

Levi’s director of digital marketing, Megan O’Connor, told us that the engagement with both Twitter and Facebook is about creating and informing brand ambassadors that will help drive sales through their own actions and word of mouth.

Starbucks: Most experts will agree that Starbucks has one of the best social media strategies out there.  Now that it is giving away free WiFi, it is even more of a magnet for roving laptop warriors.  And with 10 million Facebook fans, Starbucks is now close to surpassing the Facebook fan base of Lady Gaga. The company has held a number of promotions on its page to drive engagement. For example, Starbucks held a promotion for free pastries on its Facebook page, allowing customers to access a coupon that would give them a free pastry with a purchase of a coffee drink. Advertising on the social network has also helped to drive traffic to Starbucks’ page.

In terms of Twitter, Starbucks has also been incredibly active on the microblogging network, amassing nearly one million followers. Not only does the company’s Twitter stream serve as an engagement tool with customers who are talking about the brand on Twitter, but it is also used as a way to spread news from Starbucks. Starbucks has also participated in Twitter’s promoted Tweets program, which allows advertisers to buy sponsored links on Twitter.

The combination of geolocation and social networks is also a huge avenue for Starbucks and the company was one of the first major brands to broker a deal with popular location-based social network Foursquare. In March, Starbucks started offering Foursquare mayors of retail stores special ‘Barista’ badges that would come with discounts on drinks and food. Starbucks also partnered recently with mobile social network Brightkite to give members special discounts on drinks.

Photo Credit/Flickr/Snickclunck

Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Peter Sims, co-author of True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership with Bill George. His next book, Little Bets, debuts with Simon & Schuster next spring, with previews on www.petersims.com and Twitter @petersims.

In late April, JP Morgan invited me to a “thought leaders dinner” to discuss the latest goings on in Silicon Valley and digital media. In a private room at the swanky San Francisco restaurant Kokkari, there were about 20 of us seated around a long rectangular table, including venture capitalists from prominent firms, highly successful entrepreneurs, and a handful of people from J.P. Morgan, including Jimmy Lee, the firm’s well-known Vice Chairman, who sat at the head of the table. (I was, like Kevin Costner’s character in Bull Durham Crash Davis, “the player to be named later.”)

Anyhow, after about an hour and a few glasses wine, Jimmy raised the main question he was curious about: “I want to know from each of you: which company would you go long on and which would you short?” We could pick any timeframe. And, as it turned out, while the long picks varied widely from Amazon to Yahoo!, 12 of the 15 ‘thought leaders’ shorted Google. Jimmy was surprised, virtually astounded: “Wow!” he exclaimed, “You guys are really negative on Google, huh?”

I, too, was surprised. Google has been, after all, the most successful company in recent history (in terms of churning out growth and profits), led by Eric Schmidt, a well-respected CEO. And, we’ve seen book after book about why everyone should be more like Google. I admire Google, its people, and what they have been able to accomplish enormously. It’s astonishing. But the opinions in that room were not based on the company’s past performance. They were based on insights about Google’s future. Below are the reasons people cited for shorting the company (which, interestingly, were fairly diverse):

• Google has experienced a severe talent drain over the past several years, losing some of its most entrepreneurial and innovative people. Although Google’s has high retention rates, Google’s talent challenge is not in terms of numbers, it’s the type of people who are leaving and why they are leaving. The talent drain from Google has been well documented. Venture capitalists in the room (without a vested interest in the companies) argued that Facebook and Zynga are currently considered hot places to work in Silicon Valley. Google has, for example, seen a stream of people leave for Facebook including, more recently, the likes of Erick Tseng, the senior product manager of Android, Google’s critically important mobile initiative.

  People close go Google say upward management is slowly replacing the company’s early culture of innovation. Entrepreneurial types and thought leaders who feel confined or unmotivated are moving. People will even say that it reminds them of Yahoo back in 2004-2005, not the meritocracy they once joined.

• The company has run out of easy growth opportunities and must now find big chunks of new revenue. With the core search business maturing, Google increasingly seems to increasingly feel the need to make some “big bets.” That is a problem that maturing companies face that CEOs call “the tyranny of large numbers.” Even mobile search, which is seeing impressive growth numbers of a small base, is still too small to make a material difference for the company. The company is obviously trying like crazy to find growth pockets, knowing that mobile is a ways off. The recent $700 million ITA acquisition is a great case in point of how it is going to spread out some medium-sized to big-bets to see what sticks. That is, companies must find bigger and bigger chunks of revenue to maintain growth rates. This problem is documented well by innovation researchers Professor Clayton Christensen in The Innovators Solution, and Jim Collins in How the Mighty Fall.
• The company lacks a coherent strategy, especially in mobile. As Schmidt and other Google execs have stated, mobile is core to future growth. A number of people around the table that night had unique insight into Google’s mobile efforts. They argued that growing nascent mobile revenues will take significant time, especially since there aren’t many sizable acquisition targets available in mobile after Google’s purchase of AdMob. Instead, the recent purchase of ITA Software was an indicator of how the company might make some medium to big bets to see what sticks.
• It’s about people, people, people. Google’s engineering-dominated culture isn’t news to anyone. But As Peter Drucker opined in his landmark book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, “Successful innovators…look at figures, and they look at people.” The company has long recruited people who fit a very specific profile.

Product manager candidates, for example, are told they must have computer science degrees from top universities. But while Google’s core algorithm was a brilliant feat of engineering innovation, a growing chorus of voices question whether it can be sustained. That cookie-cutter approach to people misses important opportunities for diversity and creates glass ceilings for non-engineers, both of which stifle innovation. Cultural hubris, another pattern Jim Collins in particular raises, is of foremost concern. It is often said that at Google the engineers lead engineering, product, and even marketing decisions. But when the company has failed, such as with Google Wave or Google Radio, critics have questioned whether the company really understands people.

For these reasons and more, perhaps the question that “in the know” Silicon Valley observers are now increasingly asking is: Could Google be the next Microsoft? That is, much like Google revolutionized search, Microsoft was a pioneer with its market-dominating operating systems and Microsoft Office. But outside the Xbox, Microsoft has struggled severely to produce new innovations. Deeper cultural problems were hidden by amazing performance and success.

One thing is for certain: it’s a pivotal time in Google’s history. If the company does not put these types of issues on the table, the chorus of short sellers will increase. But with mountains of cash, access to great people and big problems, I see the moment as an opportunity. It’s a chance to reflect, ask some tough questions, openly discuss the challenges, and incorporate some fresh thinking and people, so that this great symbol of global innovation can evolve and grow.

What do you think—are you long or short? Is Google at risk of becoming the next Microsoft or on the verge of a creative explosion?

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, an what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of stuff, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.

They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They’re nice and all–I’m not saying that–but they’re also touchy as heck. Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last
Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. I was giving away a Droid X sponsored by a company called Rebtel and they wanted me to post it on CrunchGear and TechCrunch and ask people to comment to win.

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You can definitely call me an Apple fanboy: I’ve bought practically every device that Steve Jobs has made since 1985—when I got my first Macintosh. I own an Apple TV, several iPods, a Macbook Pro, a Macbook Air, an iMac, two iPhones, and two iPads (one was a gift). For various reasons, I need to use Microsoft Outlook and Windows, so I run these in a virtual machine on my Mac. But this fanboy is listing his iPads for sale on Craigslist. Why? Because they’ve become like the paperweights on his desk. I just don’t use them.

When the iPad was first announced, I predicted that it would be a game changer. I touted, to my Twitter followers, that grandma would soon be able to tell her cable company to take back its cable modem. She would no longer have to deal with the complexities of configuring Wi-Fi connections on her router.  All she would need in order to surf the web and check email is the $15/month AT&T 3G service.  Junior would soon be able to traverse new virtual worlds and learn world history while playing games on this slick new device.  I also expected that I wouldn’t need to carry around my bulky laptop; instead I would have a device that provided almost the same features as my laptop, but had the elegance and simplicity of an iPhone. I really believed that this cool new device would solve the world’s technology problems and reduce the number of electronic gadgets I had to carry around.

I still think that Grandma and Junior should keep theirs, but it just doesn’t do its magic for me any longer. Here’s why:

First, I can’t easily load my Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents on the iPad or access the year or more of e-mails that I carry around on my 32 GB USB drive.  The iPad has no USB port, and its means of transferring documents—through iTunes—is pathetic.  Apple’s cloud strategy seems to be centered on iTunes. This is fine for buying movies and music, but not good for document management and retrieval. Yes, there are apps that provide a drop-box service. But I have thousands of research papers and other documents that I need to be able to search and retrieve; a drop box doesn’t provide what I need.

Second, Apple’s Microsoft Office-like products on the iPad are just cheap imitations. Apple’s Pages is a decent word processor, and Numbers is okay as a spreadsheet manager, but these don’t hold a candle to Microsoft Word and Excel. Moreover, I can’t use the excellent cloud-based word processing tools that Zoho offers, or the decent tools in Google docs. The iPad doesn’t recognize the rich-text format that these applications use, so it doesn’t display a keyboard when you try to type.

Third, I usually need to view different applications in multiple screens when I am writing. I want to have my web browser appear in a split screen next to my text editor, and I want to be able to jump between applications—just as I do on my Mac and in Windows. The multi-tasking in iOS 4 allows me to listen to music as I work, but doesn’t do much more for me.

Fourth, on many of the websites I visit, I can’t watch Flash presentations. I am tired of the blue legos telling me that Flash isn’t supported.

Last, I didn’t miss the camera that didn’t come with my iPad until I got my new iPhone, but now I can’t fathom why it isn’t there. Facetime, on the new iPhone, is a killer app. It changes the way you use your phone and the way you communicate with your friends and relatives. The iPad lets you make Skype calls over Wi-Fi, but there is no Facetime app—and that’s because there is no camera.

I know that the iPad’s book reader is awesome, and that the device can play some cool games.  But these are things I also have on my Macbook Air—and there I have a full keyboard, larger screen, and multiple windows in case I want to take some notes. The iPad doesn’t replace my laptop, and it doesn’t replace my iPhone. So, for me, it’s neither here nor there; it’s simply an extra gadget that I need to carry around.

I am sure that the iPad 2 will have the camera and magnificent new features. And I will, without doubt, get in line and wait for hours with my fanboy comrades on the day it is released. So, Steve, have no fear. You still have a loyal fan. But until then you won’t see me carrying around an iPad or tweeting about how it is going to change the world. (And Steve, no worries about that iPhone antenna, I agree this issue is blown out of proportion.)

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

I had a theory about today’s Apple iPhone 4 Press Extravaganza. Apple was just too eager to get all the press that cares about Apple stuff into one room at the same time on one day’s notice. They were either going to (1) get Steve Jobs to hypnotize everyone with a reality distortion field “there is no problem” and have them walk out dazed and confused but with vague warm feelings towards Apple. Or (2) they gathered all the press to one place to simply kill them. It was 50/50 in my book. Apple went with no. 1, probably based on a coin flip.

There were two key messages from the event. The first message is that there is no iPhone 4 antenna problem. All phones suffer from this, and the iPhone is a superior phone. The second message is that even though there is no problem Apple is going to give everyone a free bumper that will make the non existent problem go away.

Anyone not in a hypnotic daze will clearly see the conflict between the two statements. If there is no problem, no fix is needed. If a fix is needed, by definition there was a problem. Jobs never did address the disparity in the Q&A session following the presentation.

We grabbed our own MG Siegler and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber when they returned to the office for a debriefing video. The uncut version is above. We did do some creative editing to get Gruber to say that the iPhone is the worst phone on the market, but he didn’t really say that, as you’ll see from the longer video above.

Siegler and Gruber struggled repeatedly to apply logic to the debate and eventually threw up their hands in despair. But still they believe that Antennagate doesn’t exist, but that it is perfectly reasonable and generous for Apple to apply a fix (free bumper) to the non existent problem.

At the end we just tried an intervention. It’s a first step towards recovery.

By now everyone has seen the first official trailer for the Facebook movie. While there’s no question that there’s a lot of talent behind it, I’m actually quite surprised that it looks good. But that’s just my opinion. What does someone portrayed in the movie actually think of it? Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has weighed in on Quora.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Moskovitz takes some exception to what was included in the movie versus what was left out. For example, he’s never even met the Winklevoss twins, who play heavily in the film’s plot. Instead, Moskovitz wishes the filmmakers would have included more of of the other people in each co-founders’ lives that supported them at the time. Yes, there’s a reason Moskovitz made Facebook and not movies.

He also calls it “cool to see a dramatization of history.” But his money quote is this:

A lot of exciting things happened in 2004, but mostly we just worked a lot and stressed out about things; the version in the trailer seems a lot more exciting, so I’m just going to choose to remember that we drank ourselves silly and had a lot of sex with coeds.

Moskovitz makes it seem as if he’s read both the book and the script of the film and takes exception to the attacks on CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Still, he thinks the trailer actually shows some of Zuckerberg’s more positive qualities.

“At the end of the day, they cannot help but portray him as the driven, forward-thinking genius that he is,” Moskovitz concludes. “And the Ad Board *does* owe him some recognition, dammit,” he jokes (a reference to the end of the trailer).

Two days ago I wrote about a thermostat you can adjust from your phone, and today Allure Energy announced another twist on the idea. The company connects your thermostat to a BlackBerry or iPhone app that tracks how far you are from home and adjusts your thermostat accordingly. Think of it as a location-based service for interacting with your thermostat.

When you leave in the morning, the system calibrates your home’s thermostat so you don’t waste energy while you’re away. Likewise, it senses when you’re on your way back, returning the temperature to your perfect degree of cozy.

“We are doing for home energy management what TiVo did for the VCR,” CEO Kevin Imes said in a statement. The technology could attract those who find programming their thermostat too much of a challenge or hassle. The company says the system could increase energy savings by up to 30%.

There is no Antennagate.

Well, that’s not true. But what Jobs called Antennagate at today’s press conference is more than just the design flaw in the iPhone 4 they insisted was a non-issue. It’s a design flaw with the entire way the issue was handled — by them and by us. The feeding frenzy around the iPhone 4 has been a months-long affair, for a combination of two reasons: one, that Apple has a unique position in tech coverage, and two, that controversy generates traffic. The result is outrage, confusion, expenditure, flamewars, and everything else that’s been happening online since the launch.

Sorry about that. We’re not perfect.

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Server downtime is a fact of life for most web administrators, and there’s no shortage of products and software that make it easy to monitor when something has gone awry. Of course, an inbox full of urgent emails telling you your server is frying isn’t too helpful when you’re sound asleep.That’s where PagerDuty, a startup that launched a year ago, is looking to help. Today the company is announcing that it has received funding from Y Combinator; it’s also forged a deal with monitoring platform CloudKick, is launching an API, and is losing its beta tag.

PagerDuty lets you set up and prioritize alerts for an entire team, with the ability to send SMS and voice messages along with the standard email alerts. And if a team member isn’t responding, the system can automatically escalate the alerts — for example, if an email isn’t answered quickly, an SMS could be sent a few minutes later, and so on. Another option is to start alerting other team members if someone isn’t responding. The service also lets you set up on-duty calendars, allowing you to alternate who you want to alert first depending on the date.

PagerDuty isn’t the only solution for receiving alerts about your server status — just about all server status software offers email alerts; some offer SMS as well. And there are also plugins available for some open-source software that add some of these features. That said, the PagerDuty team says that it’s a pretty involved process to implement these features, and they have a few that the others dont.

For one, they offer two-way SMS (you can respond to an SMS alert with a message saying you’re on the case). And it’s also SaaS, whereas other solutions generally involve uploading and installing the software yourself. Another SaaS service that offers some similar features is Wormly.

The process for getting PagerDuty working with your system varies a bit depending on your setup. If you’re using Nagios (which is quite popular), PagerDuty offers a plugin that should work seamlessly. The service also recently launched an API feature that lets you use any service that can make an API call. And if that isn’t an option, you can just have your monitoring system send alert emails to PagerDuty, which can in turn send SMS/Voice alerts according to the rules you’ve set up.

Pricing for PagerDuty runs $12 a month for a single user, and runs $300/month for a bigger team (there are also custom plans for large organizations).

PagerDuty was founded by ex-Amazon employees, who say that as engineers they were using a similar system that was built in-house (they say that other large companies like Google have also built similar systems). They’re hoping to serve the large number of smaller businesses who could also benefit from less downtime, but don’t have the resources to build tools of their own.

A few weeks ago Microsoft sent us the new Xbox 360. No note or explanation, just a another random box delivered to our address. It’s been sitting here unopened and no one in the office seems to want it. So, we’re going to give it away. This is the new slim version that’s Kinect-ready.

There’s also a bunch of additional stuff that came with it, we’ll send all that to you, too (see photo below).

Here’s how you can win: Just “like” (fan) the TechCrunch Facebook page and/or the TechCrunch Google Buzz page and then do one of two things: either retweet this post, and make sure to include the #crunch hashtag, or leave a comment below telling us why this device must be yours.

Anyone in the world is eligible, as long as you can receive delivered packages. And we’ll throw in a TechCrunch tshirt. The contest ends at noon California time tomorrow (Saturday). Please only tweet the message once, anyone tweeting repeatedly will be disqualified. We’ll randomly select a winner tomorrow afternoon and contact you for more details.

On July 13, three days ago, France launched France.fr to give the world a multilingual website with information about the country. It shortly went down. And stayed down. Today we checked back in to see how the little site was doing. Not so well, it turns out.

This is more than a mild embarrassment for France’s senior government official overseeing the Internet, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet. When the site launched she tweeted out “Lancement aujourd’hui du portail officiel de la France dans le monde” (“Today’s launch of official website of France in the world”). She’s been rather quiet since then.

We’ll let you know if/when the French government is able to make the site live. If the country’s experience with building aircraft carriers is any indication of their ability to build websites, we should see it limping along sometime in 2013.

Bonus link: click the flag.

Update: Huh. they did manage to change the site is down message though. It used to say it was a victim of its own success, or something similar. Now it says, roughly “The team France.fr regret not being able to help you find the gate of France. We are currently facing a problem configuring our servers. We have undertaken an audit of all systems to allow us to reopen as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience and very quick!”

This is odd. Skype, which has offered an iPhone application for quite a while and recently released a version that gives users the ability to make calls over 3G, has vanished from the App Store. This is especially strange because Skype was recently featured on stage during the debut of iPhone’s OS 4.0, which will allow for the application to run in the background. We reached out to Skype about this and were told that they’re currently investigating:

We’re not seeing the Skype app in the App store. We’re very eager to get to the bottom of this, and I can tell you this has nothing to do with our Verizon deal. The Skype for iPhone app and the Skype Mobile app on Verizon Wireless phones have co-existed.

Update: Skype says that this is due to the fact that they just uploaded a new version of Skype for iPhone 4.0 which had “some difficulties” and that they’re working to fix it:

Today, Skype just submitted a new version of its iOS4 build to Apple. In the process we encountered some difficulties. Skype will work quickly to get its current Skype for iPhone app back up as soon as possible.”

Update 2: Alright, looks like it’s back.
There’s still a page on Skype’s official site that details the application’s features and doesn’t give any indication that the application is being killed off. But Skype’s mobile site oddly omits any mention of it — it only talks about BlackBerry and Android devices from Verizon. We’ll update as we learn more.

Thanks to Will Shanklin for the tip

Yelp has one of the most popular apps on the iPhone, but its Android app is catching on too. Launched last December, the app is approaching one million downloads and activity on the app is picking up like crazy due to a recent upgrade that adds the ability to check into Yelp locations and Tweet them out or share them on Facebook. The number of active users is growing 50 percent week over week, according to Yelp.

Across all mobile phones (iPhone, Blackberry, Android), Yelp has 2.5 million active users a month. The vast majority of those are still on the iPhone. And while, this is only a small fraction (7 percent) of the 34 million monthly unique visitors going to the Website, mobile users account for 27 percent of Yelp’s local searches. CEO Jeremy Stoppleman tells me that mobile is Yelps’ “fastest area of growth.”

With 2.5 million active mobile app users, Yelp has slightly more active mobile users than Foursquare has total registered users, and it is definitely moving into Foursquare’s territory with its check-ins and recent addition of badges, dukedoms, and kingdoms. And while you can broadcast your check-ins to Twitter or Facebook, Yelp does not let you check into Foursquare from its apps.

The game mechanics are definitely driving usage, but one thing you can’t do on Yelp’s mobile apps is post reviews! “It would just be annoying if the average review had punctuation errors and was obviously written on the phone,” explains Stoppleman, “so we added quick tips instead.” I predict he will have to bend and let mobile reviews take over. I’ll be sure to ask him about his stance at our Social Currency Crunchup on July 30, where Stoppleman will be speaking along with Google VP John Hanke (who heads up Google Places, Maps, earth, and local search).