Category: Tech news

Sometimes our commenters are a little insane — but we love them anyway. And other companies do too. And here’s proof.

Twitter has tweaked the Fail Whale page (you know, the page you see all the time when Twitter is down) based on a comment one TechCrunch reader left on a post about Twitter’s downtime earlier this week. Okay, it’s not a huge change, but it’s a very useful one. On the Twitter Fail Whale page from now on, you’ll see a link to the Twitter Status blog below the headline: “Twitter is over capacity.”

Twitter wrote to us to let us know about the change and that it was based on the comment from one TechCrunch reader, Stepshep (Stephen Shepherd). That person left a comment saying:

One would assume that the link to the Status blog would be bigger on the Fail Whale pages. New users don’t read the fine print/have the status blog on RSS. As a side note I use Twitter to login with intensedebate, not anymore.

“It was a good question and a great suggestion, and our team made the change this week,” a Twitter representative wrote to us. “We’re listening,” they continued.

This is a good idea, because previously when Twitter would go down, people would often come to sites like TechCrunch to find out why. To be clear, we hope you still do that. But it’s good for those who don’t, to have a link to the Status Blog (which resides on a different server from Twitter itself, so it stays up during downtime) for updates from Twitter on the situation.

So there you go TechCrunch readers, leave a useful comment, and it just may make a difference.

Online analytics firm comScore has released its latest batch of data, and this month’s results show that Twitter is still exhibiting strong growth. According to comScore’s numbers Twitter grew from 83.8M unique vistors in April to 90.2M in May worldwide — an increase of 7.6%. By comparison, there was 5.5% growth between March, when Twitter had 79.4M, and April’s 83.8M. To give some perspective, a year ago comScore showed that Twitter had 37.3M million uniques.

It’s important to note that these numbers aren’t necessarily a good measure of the total number of people people using Twitter’s platform (it only includes data for people who have been to Twitter.com, and not any applications that access Twitter through the API). And last week Twitter COO Dick Costolo shared the company’s internal stats, which show that Twitter gets 190 million visitors per month, and 65 million tweets a day. One other caveat: not everyone who visits Twitter.com is actually tweeting (some people are just using the service passively).

Still, while there’s obviously a discrepancy between the numbers, comScore data can be used to track the growth trend. And after a lull in the winter, it’s clear that Twitter is back on track.

Twitter has been seeing record numbers of engagement thanks to the World Cup games in South Africa and as a result the network has been going through significant downtime. Today Twitter is giving us some insight into the numbers of Tweets taking place through the platform and the most Tweeted “goals” from the tournament and last night’s Lakers-Celtics championship game.

These goals had the highest Tweets-per-second (TPS) count in the 30 seconds after a goal was scored: Japan scores against Cameroon on June 14 in their 1-0 victory (2,940 TPS), Brazil scores their first goal against North Korea in their 2-1 June 14 victory (2,928 TPS) and Mexico ties South Africa in their June 11 game (2,704 TPS).

These numbers from the World Cup were all time records until last night. It appears that basketball fans may be the most voracious Tweets of all because last night’s Lakers win in the deciding game of the NBA Championship set an Twitter all-time record. The Lakers victory generated 3,085 TPS as the game ended. On an average day, Twitter sees about 750 TPS and 65 million total Tweets a day.

The recent downtime is affecting Twitter in more ways than one. The network just rescheduled its ‘oauthcalypse’ for August because of the heavy usage during the World Cup. And while sports events are helping Twitter reach these records, comScore numbers just released today that show the microblogging network is back on the growth track.

Unsurprisingly, real time search engine OneRiot is now tapping into Facebook’s recently launched Open Graph API. So now, actions made by Facebook users who publicly share links on their profiles or like stories across the web will now be indexed in realtime search results available through OneRiot’s API and the the third party developers who build apps on top of the search engine’s API.

To date, OneRiot, which just revamped its search engine, has been indexing and ranking links shared by users on Twitter, Digg and MySpace. Last month, OneRiot rolled out a small bucket test on its site to test the addition of Facebook shares/likes and now the startup is opening this data stream via the API for the developer ecosystem to innovate with.

Facebook likes and shares from users who have made their actions completely public will now contribute to the ranking of realtime search results available through OneRiot’s API. For example, a search for “World Cup” on OneRiot will reveal the most popular links about the soccer tournament being shared by Facebook users right now.

The API, which powers over 100 realtime web and mobile applications, has also been updated with improved monetization algorithms to optimize revenue for every individual third party developer. One Riot has added self-optimizing algorithms to determine which ads will be displayed to different third party applications, based on the behavior of their users, helping to increase click-through rates and engagement.

It’s not surprising that that OneRiot is now tapping into the Open Graph API for its own API. The startup’s API, which is used by over 100 applications, drives close to 97 percent of OneRiot’s search volume.

OneRiot has also ventured into the advertising world with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. The search engine also launched a pilot program of RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web, that has since been integrated into the search engine’s API. And the startup recently launched self-refreshing realtime trending ads and a self-service version of RiotWise.

We don’t do many movie reviews here at CrunchGear, mostly because we’re into gadgets and movies are, in a way, the anti-thesis of the physical. Semantics aside, Toy Story 3 was great.

The story is simple: Andy, the toys’ owner, is leaving for college. His toys, resigning themselves to a life in the attic, prep themselves for the coming change but, instead of the must and heat of the rafters, they end up in a garbage truck. Only Woody is going with Andy to college, and when he sees his friends in danger he runs to save them.

The tale winds through a day care center overrun by misfit toys, the home of a little girl who owns a gruff toy unicorn and a sad clown, and then to the very maw of heck itself – the incinerator at the city dump. All of this is tinged with the sadness of growing up and leaving behind things that you loved as well as hope for better things to come.

Read more…

Mobile ad network Millennial Media, which claims that its network reaches 82 percent of 72 million mobile web users in the U.S., is reporting that iPad ad requests grew 160 percent from April to May with global Apple ad requests dropping 33 percent in May. Apple OS U.S. ad requests dropped by nearly 14 percent month-over-month after an 8 percent decrease in requests in April.

That being said, the Apple OS is still the leading mobile operating system in Millennial’s U.S. network, with a 48 percent share of Smartphone impressions. RIM’s BlackBerry remained the second largest OS on Millennial’s network for the tenth consecutive month with a 3% increase month-over-month and a 19 percent share of impressions. Android’s share rose by 5 percent to a 15 percent share of impressions for the month of May.

Android total ad requests grew by 15 percent in May, which is slower growth than the OS has seen. Last month, Android saw a 77 percent jump in impressions, and a 72 percent jump in May. But the jump in impressions for Android over the past six months is staggering, with requests having grown by 338 percent since January.

Android Smartphone manufacturer, HTC received the largest share increase month-over month for the second month in a row with a 2.5% impression share increase in May, rising to the fourth spot of the Top 15 Manufacturers. Apple leads the manufacturing list but dropped by 10 percent in terms of device impressions. In terms of type of device, the majority of ad impressions took place on smart phones (46 percent), with Feature Phones seeing 35 percent of ad impressions, and Connected Devices, like the iPad, seeing 20% of impressions.

Millennial added a new measurement this month, focusing on mobile developer channels and trends. For May, Gaming apps placed in the number one spot and accounted for 58 percent of app revenue on devices. Social Networking claimed the number two spot and experienced a 124 percent growth on Millennial’s network since the beginning of 2010. The Entertainment channel, which placed in the number four position, has experienced the largest percentage of growth in 2010 – a 648 percent increase since January and is expected to grow with the summer blockbuster movie season. In May, of the developers who focused on a single platform, 56% were focused on Apple and 29% were focused on Android.

If Millennial’s numbers are accurate, Android impressions may be slowing down in terms of growth. Of course, we need to see another few months of slow growth before determining making any definitive judgements but it should be interesting to see if Android’s growth plateaus. The significant growth in iPad impressions is also significant as the device is growing in usage.

As one of the largest mobile ad networks in the arena, Millennial has been seeing strong growth, just launching an iPad SDK, and is now one of the largest mobile ad networks in the space. The Baltimore-based startup is growing; in February Millennial Media acquired mobile metrics and analytics firm TapMetrics. Additionally, the ad network raised $16 million in Series C funding last November.

However, with Apple’s iAd platform entering the mix, the mobile ad network space may be facing some significant changes. At the moment Millennial seems to be in a good place with Apple’s new iAd policies on outside networks advertising on the iPhone. But Millennial’s future may be in question if the network is looking to be acquired by a major tech giant, like Microsoft. But the FTC is reportedly looking into Apple’s iAd policies to determine if they are anti-competitive, so an big exit for Millennial could still be a possibility.

Last August we broke the news that angel investor Chris Sacca was expanding his operation and bringing in outside capital to leverage his investments. This has been a bit of a trend recently – successful angels like Ron Conway, Jeff Clavier and Mike Maples have all transitioned from pure angel investors to raising funds.

Sacca’s fund, called Lowercase Capital, was meant to be a $6 million fund. But he’s closed on a total of $8.5 million based on heavy demand, he says. Part of that demand is surely due to the fact that Sacca has transferred some of his earlier angel investments – including Twitter – to the new fund. His investments include SimpleGeo, Fanbridge, DailyBooth, Posterous and Stickybits.

Sacca’s investment philosophy is fairly simple – It’s cheap to create new companies relative to ten years ago, and there are lots of investors to choose from. He promises to invest more than money, though. Like other hyper-successful angels, Sacca says he’ll go to work for you, too:

We dive in to work with teams that obsess over user experiences, customer happiness, and that, to quote Paul Graham, “make something people want.” Along with relatively small amounts of money, we give them the time, attention, and the empathy that catalyze winning outcomes for all involved. Rolling up our sleeves, we help design front pages, invent new services, prioritize product features, negotiate partnerships, and deal with the everyday professional and personal challenges of startup life.

A sign of the times, although many may find it distasteful, or much worse: Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff used a mobile Twitter client to send out a tweet announcing the impending execution by firing squad of convicted murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner.

As the BBC notes, quite a modern way to announce a very old-fashioned death.

In total, the AG sent out 3 tweets about the event from his iPhone only a couple of hours ago, the most recent one an all-too-familiar (on Twitter) self-promoting one.

1) A solemn day. Barring a stay by Sup Ct, & with my final nod, Utah will use most extreme power & execute a killer. Mourn his victims. Justice

2) I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims.

3) We will be streaming live my press conference as soon as I’m told Gardner is dead. Watch it at www.attorneygeneral.Utah.gov/live.html

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this in comments.

We’ve fiercely debated the merits of the iPad (here and here and here and here) and whether Apple’s “magical” device will transform the mass market. The question, of course, is not whether the iPad is the leader in the tablet market but whether the iPad will become the iPod of its market. And if the iPad is indeed the iPod, how does that shape the digital strategy of publishers?

At the Big Money Untethered conference in New York this Thursday, a cluster of top publishers including Donald Graham (CEO, Washington Post), Carolyn Reidy (CEO, Simon Schuster), Vivian Schiller (CEO, NPR) and Sarah Chubb (President, Conde Nast Digital), gathered to answer those questions and evaluate the explosive tablet market (according to Forrester Research, there will be 59 million tablets in use by 2015). We pitched a simple question to the panelists, does the iPad change everything and how is it transforming their business? Their answers in the video above.

Excerpts :

Vivian Schiller, CEO, NPR

It’s definitely a transformative device…[iPad] is the most distributed, well known tablet, there’s no question other manufacturers will come in with other variations of the tablet but the idea of this new form factor is a really exciting one.

And for us, the way that it’s transforming our business is we have created an application for the iPhone, excuse me for the iPad, there’s too many i’s out there! That is really designed specifically for the form factor of the tablet…and it is designed for the size and scale of the iPad…it’s been tremedously popular we’ve had over 350,000 downloads so far and there are only 2 million iPads in circulation. So what is that 1 in 6?

I would never bet against Apple.

Carolyn Reidy, CEO Simon & Schuster

I would say that it has transformed our industry because it is the first reader that has enabled us to combine text with video…It’s the first thing that will enable us to do children books, to make digital children books, to make enhanced e-books, and to actually make a combination of video and reading book that is not an app. In our world it’s very difficult to do an app it gets lost…the audience for a book is not the size for most of these apps that sell hundreds of thousands.

Jacob Weisberg, Chairman, The Slate Group

I think when the history of the era is written, it’s the Kindle that will be seen as the breakthrough device…even though it’s already been superseded in many ways by the iPad…It was really the Kindle that ushered in the post-Gutenberg and showed that a printed book was no longer necessarily the best way to read a book.

The iPad is a great toy…Everybody wants one, but the question is, is everyone going to need one?…In the short to medium term, I think the iPad is going to be very dominant…but long term I’m not sure I would bet on it as the dominant device because I think Apple does have the tendency to make the same mistake again and again, which is that it likes closed systems….It doesn’t like the messiness of the internet but unfortunately messiness is part of what makes the internet the internet.

Sarah Chubb, President, Conde Nast Digital

I think that the iPad is transformative because it’s changing how consumers think about the mobile web and how they think about content consumption…

To me it’s not really about the iPad itself, it’s about consumers seeing that they can do things differently and enjoying it which will make them do it more…Even just one year from now, we’re going to look back on it and many, many things will have changed as a result of that.

Tonight at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, Y Combinator invited dozens of programmers to a new event called Work at a Startup. The event, which was announced last month, is meant to help expose programmers to what they should expect when they go about joining a startup (YC’s Paul Graham thinks that a lot of them tend to join more established companies like Microsoft simply because startup life seems so nebulous). The event is complementary to Y Combinator’s Startup School, which is meant to help entrepreneurs start a company from scratch. My notes from the event are below, and you can watch an archived video of the event here.

The event kicked off with a talk from Graham, who detailed what programmers should think about when they’re debating whether or not to join a startup.

Graham says that the two main things that prospective employees should be gauging are fun and money. You obviously want to maximize both, and the startup end of the job market is the “bargain”, because you can have fun and make a lot of money. Assuming, of course, you pick the right startup.

The second thing you need to figure out, Graham says, is whether or not the startup lifestyle is really for you. In general, he’s found that startup founders who join a large company after being acquired aren’t as happy in their new home as they were when they were running the show. The reason? Bureaucracy. There are meetings and you have to ask for permission to get things done — things that aren’t issues at most startups.

Graham says that some people (and all founders) are like that. But others aren’t. The way to tell, he says, is to ask yourself if you like the prospect of having (and implementing) many ideas at work, in which case a startup is probably the place for you. If you don’t think having ideas are a part of the job, then he says you’re probably better suited for corporate culture.

The next step is figuring out which startup you want to work at. Graham says this is actually a lot like being an investor, the difference being that investors are giving startups their time and money, while you’re giving them your work. So how do you tell which startups are promising? The secret, Graham says, is to look at the founders — even if they have an unsexy company or domain, if you have great founders, the company is more likely to go on to great things.

Alright, so you’ve found a great startup — can you expect to make a lot of money? This varies a lot, depending on how early you’re joining. Graham says that if you’ve found a startup that you want to join, you should do it quickly, because things can change fast (and the amount of equity you can expect can drop precipitously). He relayed an anecdote about a company Yahoo was thinking about acquiring for $1 billion a few years ago. After mulling it over for a few months, Yahoo agreed to pay $1 billion, at which point the company told them they’d grown and now wanted $2 billion (the unnamed company sounds a whole lot like Facebook). Moral of the story: don’t sit around thinking about things too long when startups are involved.

As for how much equity you can expect, Graham says that at the high-end, for a one-founder company with no employees, you may be able to get 50%. From there, things drop quickly — if you’re talking to a company with two founders and angel funding, you may be able to get 5-10%. Post series A, it’s hard to get more than 1%. The trade-off here is risk — most companies never get to their Series A.

Ultimately, Graham says that when you’re joining a startup, you’re looking for a company that is undervalued for the stage it is at, and that’s most likely to eventually IPO. Of course, that’s all easier said than done.

The event then switched to pitch mode, when over thirty startups gave a whirlwind series of presentations telling the audience why they should join them (it was like a speed dating job fair for startups).

Product: Office Web Apps

Manufacturer: Microsoft

Wired Rating: 7

With Office 2010, Microsoft has taken an important (and inevitable) step into internet-stored media. That’s right; MS is all up in the cloud now.

In addition to releasing its new native Office suite, which gives you the option to save your files on the Intertubes, Microsoft has rolled out free, lightweight web versions of Office apps accessible through Windows Live.

We took several Office apps for a test ride: Word, PowerPoint and Excel. The verdict? For the most part, this is a decent web suite that works well with the native Office apps, though it’s still a little unrefined.

Word on the Web

In your Windows Live account, you can share and access Office web app media through your “SkyDrive.” Viewing a Word document looks fine in the browser, but when you choose to edit the doc, you lose some formatting. Paragraph indentations were lost, creating leaning towers of confusing text. Microsoft acknowledged this issue and said a fix is in the works.

Other formatting, such as bolded or italicized text remains, too. You also lose some graphics (we noticed several graphs were MIA) and some highlights are inaccurate. If there’s a missing element, the Word web app inserts a small symbol to represent it.

The Office web apps behave very differently from Google Docs, in which all writing and editing is done inside the browser with collaboration occurring in real time. Microsoft designed Office 2010, so most of the fancy formatting work is done inside the native app. The idea is you and your cohorts can apply light edits using the web apps in the browser.

Collaboration doesn’t occur in real time, either. Instead, you mark a document as ready for editing, or you restrict it to avoid interruptions. That’s basically an efficient way to take turns co-authoring a document online.

Both Microsoft Word 2010 and Windows Live are crammed with too many options, and getting the online-sharing option started took more steps than an AA meeting. Because of the lack of paragraph indentations, our preferred workflow for co-authoring a document is still to compose it in real time using Google Docs, then to format it inside Microsoft Word.

PowerPoint Online

The PowerPoint web app is actually pretty good at retaining fidelity of a presentation created with native PowerPoint. Graphics, formatting and various fonts remain the same when editing inside the browser.

The major element missing from the web version of PowerPoint is the ability to add multimedia elements, like audio or video files, inside a presentation. Still, most would do the majority of their presentation creation inside the native PowerPoint app, and the ability to edit slides in a browser should be very useful for road warriors.

The coolest online-sharing feature for PowerPoint — real-time broadcasting — lives inside the native app, not the browser version. In PowerPoint 2010, you can share your slideshow online just by sending someone a URL. And if there’s no projector in the room you can just send around a URL and everybody can view the presentation live on their laptop or smartphone

Excel Web App

Again, Excel loses some graphical elements compared to the spreadsheets made with the native app, but this seems less important when most of your editing should consist of lightweight number crunching, inserting new columns and so on — all of which work fine in the web app. When you’re saving to your Skydrive on the web, Excel notifies you about the elements that won’t be viewable in the internet version, which is quite helpful.

Excel web app spreadsheets look faithful compared to those created natively. Shaded boxes remained; rows and columns look proportionately correct. Like Word’s web app, Excel online can’t display rich 3-D graphs or other complex graphics, but it does denote missing elements with the aforementioned symbols.

Well, Should I Get This?

Given its price ($0), the Office web suite is compelling. Though purchasing Office 2010 ($500) would certainly complement the web suite, it’s not necessary if all you need are the basic functions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Many will feel tempted to compare the Office web apps with Google Docs head to head, but the two suites behave very differently. Office web apps are designed for those who need to make stylized edits to their documents — think students writing essays, or job seekers preparing résumés. Google Docs is for those who care only about accessing and sharing data, not about looks (cough, bloggers).

WIRED Free! Most basic functionality works fantastically. PowerPoint presentations and Excel documents look very faithful compared to their native counterparts.

TIRED Windows Live interface is inundating and boring. No paragraph indents in Word (yet).

Next week, the Commonwealth Club will be holding a special event that will include our own Michael Arrington interviewing David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, with an introduction by Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff. And it’s a double feature: following the Arrington/Kirkpatrick interview, there will be a second conversation asking if ‘Google is Making Us Stupid’, featuring Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, and author Nicholas Carr, with an introduction from Josh McHugh.

Want to go? We’ve got four free tickets to give away.

If you want a shot at one, click the handy ‘Like’ buttons below to become fans of TechCrunch and The Facebook Effect, then leave us a comment below saying why you want to go. Feel free to suggest questions for Michael to ask David (though obviously he’ll ultimately ask what he wants).

The event will take place in San Francisco on June 23, with check-in starting at 5:15 PM. For full details (or if you want to buy tickets), check out this page.

We’ll pick the winners tomorrow at 5 PM — make sure to use a valid Email address (or Facebook Connect) for your comment so we can contact you should you win.

Just when you thought it was safe to love AT&T again, we have another interesting tidbit about their famous 3G Micro-Cell, AKA the “rip-off box.”

As you recall, AT&T’s MicroCell is being marketed as a way to repair bad connectivity in areas with little or no AT&T reception including, but not limited to, basements, attics, Manhattan, and San Francisco. It essentially piggy backs on your own home network to provide data service and voice to your phone.

Read more…

According to a note posted to developers, Twitter is moving the oAuth switchover date to August, thanks to recent downtime and overload caused by the World Cup in South Africa.

Twitter Platform Team leader Raffi Krikorian writes:

We want to make sure that you all have calm waters to test your new codebases where you’re not dealing with whales, robots, and whatnot. with the world cup ending on july 11th, you will all have over a month’s time of calm waters and site stability to finish the switch over. also, with the vast majority of media providers already switched over to OAuth Echo, you now also have an additional month of time to work out your integrations with them.

Twitter developers were supposed to move over to OAuth by June 30. Twitter notified developers that it would be moving to oAuth and shutting off basic authorization. All third-party developers are need to to make the switch over to oAuth, as they won’t be able to use basic authentication, which allows users to hand over their username and password to a third party. oAuth is considered to be more secure because it allows you to connect to a third-party app without having to give out your password and username. As you can see the countdown to the oAuthcalypse has also been updated.

Twitter has been facing increased downtime over the past week thanks to increased usage of the network because of record usage numbers with the World Cup.

Wait a second, what’s this? I must not be reading this correctly. An executive for a major Hollywood studio is actually making sense and speaking logically when talking about DVD rental windows and the web? This is a joke, right? A bargaining tactic?

If I’m correctly reading what Paramount Home Entertainment President Dennis Maguire told the LA Times, I don’t think so.

After rival studios Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, and 20th Century Fox all signed deals with both Netflix and Redbox to put a 28-day window on new DVD releases before they could be available for rent, Paramount is going the other way. They have signed a deal with Redbox to make the films available to rent same day they come out for purchase — you know, the way things have always been done. Why is Paramount taking such an old school stance? Because they actually did some tests and realized these stupid windows will do nothing to help them sell more DVDs. Imagine that.

And it’s not just that — giving new releases to services like Redbox have actually helped Paramount make more money. Here’s the two key quotes from Maguire:

“There hasn’t been a cannibalization of DVD sales from Redbox, and Redbox was allowing us to expand our business and ultimately make more money.”

“Those people who want to rent are going to figure out ways to rent, and us restricting them from renting isn’t going to turn it into a purchase.”

Eureka!

Of course, I’ve been saying both of those things for months after I first heard about the idiotic 28-day window. But a few of the Hollywood studios reached out to essentially say that I was wrong. Or to try and explain their rationale by suggesting this wasn’t just about trying to regain the DVD sales figures they’re bleeding. Now I can just direct them to Paramount which actually did a test (for almost a year), and came to the same conclusion.

While Maguire doesn’t actually say the word “piracy,” we all know what he means by: “Those people who want to rent are going to figure out ways to rent.” At least part of that is addressing the “rent for free” crowd, as in, steal.

Further, the idea that restricting movie rentals for 28 days would lead to more sales (what this is really all about) is asinine. I’ll repeat my stance: the vast majority of people haven’t stopped buying DVDs because you can rent them — they’ve stopped buying them because most are simply not worth owning. The new methods of distribution have simply highlighted that fact. But it’s too late to put the cat back in the bag now.

Paramount, rather than attempting to drive backwards to take miles off the odometer, is actually thinking ahead. Why not strike a deal with Redbox that they will actually make them some money off of from new release films, rather than praying you can force people to start buying DVDs again? Ingenious.

Nice work, Paramount.

[image: Paramount Pictures]