Category: Tech news

Over the past several months I’ve moderated or been on a number of panels with many of the top players in the location space. A common theme keeps recurring. When someone brings up rivalries between any of the companies, it is always downplayed in favor of an “everyone wins” message. I’ve been skeptical of that since day one, but as the space has exploded, there have been signs that a lot of companies are winning (as evidenced by both usage and fundraising). But now, as the space matures and larger rivals enter, things are starting to get more testy.

The most obvious rivalry is between Foursquare and Gowalla. Even as the two battled for supremacy at the SXSW conference this year, both sides downplayed the rivalry. But the fact is, there is a rivalry (and they even play it up for next month’s UK edition of Wired magazine — see: pic above). Foursquare and Gowalla don’t talk to one another — in fact, their two leaders, Dennis Crowley and Josh Williams, had never met until a panel I moderated at Where 2.0 after SXSW this year. That’s not to say they hate one another, but they’re also not out there holding location potlucks to discuss how they can work together for the betterment of everyone.

On Monday, another competitor in the space, Loopt, released its latest location app, Loopt Star, which asks users to check-in places to engage with brands. Crowley wasn’t a big fan of this (to say the least), and let it be known on his blog. “Check out Loopt’s foursquare knock-off. Points for checkins and “boss” instead of “mayor,”” he wrote. He continued:

Not to be a hater, but if I was going to create a foursquare knockoff, I’d use game mechanics and create something *totally different* (e.g. the “Points 2.0” stuff we’re cooking up now @ foursquare HQ).

Why would you ever just clone someone else’s work? Learn from it and innovate on top! That’s how we all push this space forward!

Earlier today, Loopt CEO Sam Altman tweeted out that he thought Foursquare was blocking the IP address of his office. Crowley responded on Twitter that it wasn’t intentional as far as he knew. But the block is still in place.

Crowley’s criticism of Loopt Star is very similar to a post he did back in January in response to Yelp entering the check-in space. At the time, Crowley wrote:

Shameless. At least innovate on top of it!:

Most any foursquare user will tell you our leaderboard is flawed. It tracks the wrong metrics; it encourages fake checks & cheating; etc. We’ve been hustling these past few months to build the infrastruture that allow us to tweak the game mechanics on our end (think: Leaderboard 2.0)

Poor guys, you copied the wrong stuff! 🙂

Of course, nearly 6 months later, we have yet to see this Leaderboard 2.0 stuff that he keeps referring to (Foursquare has undoubtedly been distracted by scaling issues and Yahoo acquisition offers).

As the company generally seen as the frontrunner in this space right now, of course Foursquare is going to have others gunning for it. But they’re hardly the only ones getting testy with rivals. Behind the scenes, a number of these companies seem to have a growing dislike (or at least, distrust) for one another. They may say the right things when they’re on stage or on panels, but it’s a different story when the spotlight is off.

All of this is to be expected. As the location space continues to be validated, each company is out to prove that it’s the one that will be the next big thing — the one people will remember. And as more people are beginning to understand that they can’t use all of these services all the time, some are going to be forced out.

And there’s a larger concern for many of these companies: it’s still far from proven that each can survive as their own businesses. Some are starting to make revenues, but those can quickly dry up if larger networks like Facebook or Google start to copy features and entice brands to sign up with them instead. And plenty of the larger companies out there still view the location startups as features rather than stand-alone products. If that thought starts panning out, many of these locations startups will be fighting to position themselves for quick exits.

Indications right now are that Facebook won’t enter the space in a major way (but will have simple check-ins), and instead will federate other location services’ data. But that will cause tensions too as each location service tries to become the preferred method that Facebook’s nearly 500 million users choose.

The next time you’re at an event and your hear one of these guys say that in the location space “everybody wins,” don’t believe them, because they don’t believe it either. That may have been the case in the early days, but we’re beyond that now. And all of these companies know it and are starting to act like it.

[photo: flickr/dpstyles]

Fresh on the heels of the launch of Yext Rep last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, Yext just signed up its first major distribution partner. Superpages will make an online, co-branded Dashboard which includes Yext Rep available to its 300,000 local business advertisers across the country. The Superpages Dashboard will roll out in the coming weeks.

Yext Rep is a way for local merchants to manage their reputations online. In one central place, it shows them how to claim their business on sites like Yelp, Citysearch, Foursquare, Twitter, or Facebook, and what consumers are saying about them on the Web. All of this gets shown in a feed, along with local advertising data from Yext’s main pay-per-call advertising product, Yext Listings. With the new Dashboard, Yext Rep and Yext Listings are treated as enterprise apps for small businesses, and Superpages now also has an app in the Dashboard for managing Superpages ads, which can also be added to the main feed.

“Our vision is to ultimately be the UI for all local businesses,” says Yext CEO Howard Lerman. In fact, one of the tabs on the Dashboard is a Store where businesses can add different apps. Yext Rep is free, but Yext Listings, Superpages, and email marketing tool iContact are available for a monthly subscription. Yext wants to create a platform for simple business apps targeted at local merchants. It is pursuing very much a Salesforce model, where business owners can pick and choose whichever apps they want to use, and then the resulting data gets published as events to their feed, much in the way Salesforce Chatter is attempting to mix CRM and other enterprise data along with Twitter streams for mid-tier and larger businesses. Salesforce Chatter has its own Chatter Exchange for third-party apps, but Yext is going after smaller, local businesses which a much simpler product. Lerman is modeling his store more after iTunes: a central place where local business can find and buy all of their online business apps.

Yext is working on other apps as well, such as a Yext Sites, all targeted at local businesses. Yext Rep is the free anchor app which Lerman hopes will entice small businesses to sign up and expose them to all the other apps in the Dashboard. “We woud allow a competitive reputation management product into the platform,” he says. Yext collects a commission on every paid app sold, and distribution partners such as Superpages also get a cut of the revenues for apps purchased by their customers through the co-branded sites.

Below is a video of the Yext Rep launch demo at Disrupt

Twitter Annotations are the next big feature a lot of people are excited about. With them, both users and clients will be able to add more context to tweets, which should make for a richer experience (and more useful data). A new post today in the Twitter API Announcement Google Group indicates that testing of Annotations will beging as early as next week.

To be clear, this is just a test of the feature through the API, and it will not yet be available to users. On June 7 through June 11, Twitter plans to flip the switch on some sample Annotation-enabled tweets in the Streaming API. Clients using this API should start to see tweets with these payloads appear. Some will be populated with sample Annotation data, some won’t be, Twitter’s John Kalucki writes.

“Assuming general stability, on our end and yours, we’ll eventually leave annotation delivery turned permanently on,” Kalucki notes.

Twitter recently updated that Annotations Overview wiki page with some more information about what you can expect from the feature. Of note, Twitter has listed 11 “recommended” types of Annotations so that people can get started using them. Those are:

• webpage
• review
• song
• movie
• tvshow
• book
• product
• stock
• offer
• topic
• event

Also worth noting is that Annotations will be limited to 512 bytes initially (though Twitter hopes to increase that limit over time).

This past weekend, Twitter held a Annotations Hackfest at their headquarters. Here’s one account of the event.

Facebook has a new chief technology officer, Bret Taylor. The FriendFeed co-founder and initial product manager of Google Maps came to Facebook with the $50 million acquisition of FriendFeed last year. He took on the role of director of platform at Facebook, and led the recent rollout of Facebook’s Open Graph and Open Graph API, which attempts to make social connections on the Web as important as hyperlinks. He played a key role in making the Facebook platform much simpler to build on.

Increasingly, Facebook is looking more and more like FriendFeed, with like buttons sprouting everywhere and a stronger emphasis on the central stream. Taylor brought a lot of the engineering and design sensibilities from FriendFeed and started to instill them in Facebook. Now he is being promoted to the vacant CTO role, where he will oversee other projects beyond the Facebook platform including search and the News Feed/homepage. The CTO position at Facebook has remained unfilled since Adam D’Angelo left in 2008 to start social Q&A service Quora.

Below is the email Mark Zuckerberg sent out to all Facebook employees moments ago announcing Taylor’s promotion, which Facebook provided to TechCrunch:

=======================
Internal Email from Mark Zuckerberg
=======================

Hey everyone,

I have some good news to share with all of you. I’ve created a new role and have asked Bret Taylor to become our CTO.

Bret joined us almost a year ago as our director of platform products. Since then, he has played a key role in building many parts of our new platform, including social plugins, our new graph API and the Open Graph. Since f8, already more than 100,000 sites use social plugins and our new API has received lots of praise for its elegance and simplicity. In addition, Bret has helped shape my thinking on products, engineering and strategy in many ways.

Today, Bret has just a couple of direct reports and gets things done by being a helpful source of advice and positively influencing decisions on a number of products. I’ve been talking with him recently about how he could play a similar role working with a few other areas to help shape our direction as well. Since Bret engages both in technical and product issues, I decided that creating a new CTO position outside of both engineering and product was the best way to formalize this new role.

In this role, Bret will report to me and will not manage anyone else. The CTO role is not a management role. The roles of building and running the product, engineering and operations organizations aren’t changing at all here. If you would have gone to Schrep, Chris Cox or Heiliger for something in the past, you should still go to them now. (Although, to be honest, Schrep, Cox, Bret and I all sit in the same pod so you can pretty much grab any of us at the same time.)

Bret will stay focused on Platform, but this new role sets him up to help out more in other areas as well. The platform product management work Bret has been doing will continue to report to Cox and the product organization as he does this. One of the reasons we can make this change is because of the great work Mike Vernal has been doing to lead the engineering team. I’m highly confident in him to continue building out this organization.

When I look around product and engineering, there are so many unique things we’re building with very leveraged small teams right now. Platform is the foundation for an entire industry, and our team has about 30 engineers. News Feed is the home page for more than 250 million people every day, and our team has fewer than 15 engineers. Our search type ahead serves the same order of magnitude of queries as Google, and our team has fewer than 15 engineers. These are examples of transformative products that we’re going to build out over the next few years and I’m focused on making sure we build them out the right way.

If you have a moment, please join me in congratulating Bret on his new role. If you have questions about this or anything else, feel free to shoot me a note or come ask it at our next Open Q&A.

Mark

We all know that with the rise of smartphone platforms like the iPhone and Android, mobile browsing and app usage is skyrocketing. But what are people actually doing when they whip out their phones (other than playing Doodle Jump)? Internet analytics firm comScore has just released a new report detailing just that. The conclusions aren’t terribly surprising: on both smartphones and featurephones, social networking dominates. Other popular categories include news and online banking, but these trends diverge a bit depending on whether you’re looking at native applications or browser-based websites.

According to the study, native application and browser usage have seen strong growth on smartphones in the last year (with increases of 111% and 112%, respectively). In April, 80% of smartphone users fired up native applications, while 78% used their phone’s browser. These figures are important — during a presentation announcing iAds, Steve Jobs stated that people weren’t using search on their smartphones, but were trending more toward applications (note that not everyone who used their browser was using it to search).

In the same time span, a mere 19% of users on feature-phones used their browser, and only 17% used applications. But despite those relatively meager proportions, the ubiquity of feature-phones means that they still account for almost half of all mobile browser and app usage.

As for what activities users are engaging in from their phones, social networking is king, especially on native apps. Usage of native social networking applications grew 240% in the last year, with 90% growth in browser-based social networking. The other leading categories for native applications are news apps, sports, and banking. For browser-based sites and webapps, the most popular use-cases after social networking are banking, general reference, sports, and search.

One other thing to note: comScore is apparently omitting games from its analysis, which is almost certainly the most popular category for native applications.

Remember when Pandora was on its deathbed? Yeah, those days are long gone. The service has just raised yet another round of funding, we’ve confirmed. The round was led GGV Capital and participated in by Allen & Company, They’re not disclosing the amount raised, but you can bet it’s fairly substantial considering that they’re last round in July of last year was $35 million. Up until now, Pandora has raised just about $57 million in total.

The new money will be used to further fuel growth and invest in new resources, the company says. Back in April, the company passed the 50 million user mark (up from 40 million the previous December) just as they launched their new iPad app. Mobile growth has been a key for the company, and it’s likely to explode even further with the launch of the iPhone 4.0 OS which will allow Pandora to run in the background for the first time. Despite the restraint, Pandora has been one of the top downloaded apps of all time in the App Store.

But the new iPhone ability may bring with it some issues as well. Since it’s undoubtedly going to be used a lot more, Pandora is going to be streaming a lot more music for free (currently, music is served for free until you hit 40 hours in a month, then you’re asked to pay $1 to get unlimited access). The more music Pandora streams, the more it has to pay to the labels and artists. Of course, more music also means the more ads it can serve up (most of Pandora’s money comes from advertising).

Pandora has also been signing deals left and right with other device makers, and even car companies to extend the service’s reach.

Pandora’s last round of funding came right after it was officially saved following a comprise reached between webcasters, artists, and record labels on Internet streaming music rates. Thanks to that deal, its new freemium model, and the improving ad market, Pandora was able to go from a near-death experience to profitability in the course of  just a few months.

Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that Pandora had hired Steve Cakebread to be its new CFO. Cakebread was the CFO at Salesforce.com when it went public, so that was seen as a possibility the company was looking at. But with this new money, that seems to be off the table, for now at least.

Stock analysis startup Trefis has raised $1.6 million on funding from Village Ventures. The startup had previously raised $550K in angel funding in 2008 led by Timothy Weller, CFO of Enernoc and former CFO of Akamai, Bob Johnson of the MIT corporation, and Semyon Dukach, former president of the MIT Blackjack team.

Launched last fall, Trefis breaks down a stock price by the contribution of a company’s major products and businesses. The site lets you tweak your stock predictions by adjusting variables in a company’s business model, depending on how you think different segments of the company will perform. These predictions are plotted out on attractive interactive charts, which can also be embedded as widgets and shared.

The company is also launching a pro version of Trefis, which includes access to in-depth financial content for about 25 companies in the consumer sector (Example: Walmart, Coca Cola, P&G, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Ford etc.). Trefis Pro includes daily insights across both consumer and technology sector companies, as-well-as advanced privacy features for price estimates (i.e. you can hide your estimates from the community, which you were not able to do previusly). Subscribers to Trefis Pro, which will cost $50 per month, will also get free access to additional consumer sector companies as Trefis rolls them out. Trefis is also planning to launch pro planning content for other sectors like financial services, and healthcare.

Google is known for its spare, clean search homepage. A single search box, two buttons, and 28 words or less. Contrast that to Bing, which features a beautiful new background photo every day. Well, now you can add your own background wallpaper image to Google search.

Google is starting to roll out a new feature today which allows users to upload images from their computers or a Picasa Web album to personalize the search homepage. Call it Bing-envy, or just a case of Google loosening up its design strictures. But Google is going from spare minimalism to anything-goes design. Actually, opening up the design palette to users is more MySpace than Bing. But it is not the first time Google introduced user-controlled design option to one of its products. Gmail, iGoogle, and Chrome both have their own selection of themes, for instance.

People live in these products, and cosmetic features like this one perhaps make some users feel more at home. So go ahead and put up a crazy frog photo or a picture of your favorite beach at sunset. Ooh, I’m getting the warm and fuzzies already!

The EVO 4G is a great phone with the notable drawback of its short battery life. But apparently a lot of you don’t care judging by the comments on my full review. Fine by me. Even though it doesn’t have the battery strength to make it through a day of moderate to heavy usage, there are still some serious advantages to this phone over others. Enough so that some buyers are probably going to camp out their Sprint Store this Friday. Here’s my top five favorite features so far, including a few I didn’t touch on at all in my review.

When Diaspora set out to raise money to build an open Facebook alternative site, they had a pretty modest goal: $10,000. Of course, they were raising the funds through a less than traditional means — using Kickstarter, an online fundraising site. Still, they shot past that goal in 12 days. And within 20 days, they had raised over $100,000. Yesterday, the fundraising closed, the final tally: just over $200,000.

Obviously, the Facebook privacy fiasco played a huge role in the fundraising success. Diaspora pulled in money from a number of prominent people on the web — and, humorously, apparently even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself. All told, nearly 6,500 people contributed money to the project — making it the largest Kickstarter project ever.

Now for the hard part.

While Diaspora has plenty of money, they have yet to make the actual Facebook alternative site. The four NYU students will now begin that process over the course of the Summer. As they wrote yesterday, “You may not hear too much from us in the coming months and we will try our best to provide regular updates, but our silence means we are hard at work.”

By September 2010, the team says it will release the first iteration of the project, fully open-sourced under the AGPL. Here’s the feature they say we’ll see:

• Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances)
• End to end GPG
• External Service Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data)
• Version 1 of Diaspora’s API with documentation
• Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code

After that, the project will move back to New York City where they will begin work on building out their secondary ideas for the service.

When Diaspora started getting a lot of press, many critics were quick to point out that this group of kids didn’t actually have one line of code written yet and were trying to take on a site with nearly 500 million users. And the truth is that many of these open alternative sites fail against their bigger rivals. Still, it will be interesting to see what these guys come up with with the $200,000 now in their pockets. If nothing else, they have a great sense of timing.

I’m one of the worst ‘task managers’ you’ll ever meet. There are thousands of services out there that would make my life way easier, that I either don’t know about or that are too complex or too simple for my taste and needs.

So when I got pitched by an entrepreneur in between sessions at the recent TechCrunch Disrupt conference about a “new breakthrough cross-platform task management product”, I was skeptical. Five minutes later, I was sold.

Enter Producteev, which is launching said new product – dubbed Producteev Two – today.

Here’s what I love about it: Producteev Two lets users capture tasks, email-based action items or schedule deadlines using whatever communication channel they prefer. The product, which is free for up to 3 individual users, connects to a myriad of popular communication tools, including IM services like Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger as well as Twitter and Facebook.

No longer need I feel forced to visit a web application to save and manage tasks, unless I choose to do so. I can simply send a custom message to a dedicated email address, or quickly open a Gtalk IM window inside my Gmail account to create or assign tasks, and get notifications back through the channels of my choosing.

Better yet, a proper Gmail Gadget plugs directly into Producteev Two so I can now quickly check and manage important tasks straight from my Gmail interface, which I tend to have open at all times anyway. There’s also one for iGoogle. Just great.

There’s even some sort of social gaming aspect to the product. One feature, Producteev Academy, enables users to win badges for different activities, such as completing the most tasks. Don’t worry: it can be turned off.

In addition, the company this morning announced the launch of Producteev Two for the iPhone, which is also free. The mobile app works offline, syncs in the background when the user goes back online and supports push notifications. It’s currently being reviewed by Apple’s team of app scrutinizers, but should be available soon (screenshots below).

On Producteev’s roadmap: a desktop client for Mac, which will be available later this month, and an API. Amazing stuff for a company that’s raised less than $1 million in early-stage funding.

Bing Maps is now helping you find the healthiest cities in the U.S. with a new app, Bing Health Maps. Microsoft is mashing up data from the Department of Health and Human Services to visualize what parts of the country are healthy or not so healthy by state and county.

You can select a state and a Community Health Indicator, which includes Birth Indicators (low birth weight, premature births, births to women under 18); Death Measures (homicide, lung cancer, stroke) or Health Risk Factors (obesity, smokers, high blood pressure). You can also see what percentage of the population of a given county are reporting the answers to the questions to give you an accurate view of the statistics.

The data visualization of the app is really compelling if accurate. For example, in Cook County, IL, you’ll find that 22 percent of the population is reporting obesity as a health issues, that 13.3 percent of births in the county are premature, and that there is an average of 28.1 cases of breast cancer per 100,000 people.

The map will include all the counties within a state and your can click on each country to get information for a specific community. It’s similar in theory to Google’s Flu Maps feature, which maps flu levels across 121 cities in the U.S.

Fresh off the closure of its acquisition by Google, mobile ad network AdMob is officially launching an iPad-specific SDK to allow app developers to use the network’s ads within their apps. The SDK was previously in beta but is now available to the public.

AdMob says that the SDK is unified across all devices running the iPhone OS, which makes it much easier for developers, who can can download one binary for development across all Apple iPhone OS devices – iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. The new also SDK supports two ad formats in native iPad applications: text & tile ads and image ads. Both of these ad formats are available in the three IAB standard ad sizes: 300×250, 728×90, and 468×60.

AdMob has already signed on advertisers to create advertising campaigns for the iPad; currently Amazon.com is currently running a campaign promoting their Kindle for iPad app. AdMob is relatively late to roll out a iPad-specific SDK, competitors Millennial Media, Medialets, Mobclix, and Greystripe have all created ad formats for the device.

The network is also praising the “creative potential of iPad ads using HTML5,” even building demos of ads using HTML5 technology, which rivals Flash, to show off the innovative formats.

This is interesting considering the whole Apple-Flash war, tablet battles and where AdMob’s parent company Google falls into this. At Google I/O conference a few weeks ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt seemed to position the search giant as Flash’s friend. Of course, it should also be interesting to see if the rumored Google tablet will support Flash and if AdMob will change its tune if this is the case.

OExchange, a simple specification for URL-based content sharing on the Web, was introduced today by a number of online service providers and social networks. The open link-sharing protocol has gained support from Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Digg, Instapaper, StumbleUpon, Clearspring Technologies and a handful more.

So what’s it all about?

OExchange essentially establishes a common way for services like Posterous and Google Buzz to receive content. The protocol defines how third-party tools, e.g. Clearspring’s bookmarking and sharing service AddThis, can dynamically discover and share content to these services, as well as how sharing tools can read and set a user’s sharing preferences.

A number of these services, like Google Buzz and Instapaper, have already implemented the protocol, which together with others such as OpenID and OAuth intends to making sharing content on the Web completely open. OExchange is licensed under the Open Web Foundation Agreement – you can get the specs here.

Chris Messina, Open Web Advocate at Google, has this to say about the new protocol:

“The key to increasing the amount and quality of sharing online is smoothing out the user interaction. By simplifying the underlying mechanism for cross-site sharing with OExchange, people can focus on what they’re sharing, rather than how.”

Do you agree that there’s a need for an open URL sharing protocol (which companies like Twitter and Facebook seem to doubt, since they’re not supporting it)?

TechCrunch50 demopit company Image Space Media (formerly Picad Media) is launching AdStart, a self-service product that allows marketers to create targeted in-image ads. The ads can then be served on Image Space Media’s in-image ad network of more than 4,000 publishers.

ISM’s ad network, which recently launched an analytics offering, helps publishers monetize images on their websites with ad overlays. Its proprietary technology allows for audience targeting and matches ads to the most appropriate images available. With AdStart, advertisers can now create text based ads on both a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand (CPM) impression level. Once the advertiser creates their text-based ad campaign, they set their bid price and fund their account using a credit card or PayPal with a minimum of $5.00 for prepaid accounts. The ads immediately begin running as overlays on contextually relevant images across the Image Space Media Network.

ISM says that beta testing results have been relatively successful. The CTR on the ISM AdStart campaign for The Intuitive Learning Company was more than 7 times higher than a Google Adwords campaign for the same product. COO Kevin Tung has told us that CTRs for in-image ads are higher than average rates for normal display ads, which he says range from .2 % to .3%. He adds that CTRs depend on size and dimensions of the ad itself.

The startup also recently raised $2.9 million in funding from New Atlantic Ventures, Ridgeline Capital, and Michael Gordon and brought on a new CEO last year, Jesse Chenard, who Tung actually met at TechCrunch50 in 2008. Image Space Media faces competition from GumGum and others.