Category: Tech news

Safari on the iPhone is by no means a bad mobile browser — in fact, it’s arguably the best one out there. Just because people have something good doesn’t mean they don’t want to peek at what else is out there, though. Even if someone’s dating the finest supermodel in all the lands, they’ll still sneak casual glances at other potential mates. Its just human nature. People like having options.

For quite some time, Apple blocked third-party apps that challenged those that came on the handset out of the box, citing “duplication of functionality”. When Opera submitted the Opera Mini browser to the App Store, much ado was made over whether or not it would be approved. It was — and naturally, people looked. 2.6 million of them, in just 2 weeks.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Facebook is not evil, despite the disproportionately loud grumblings of its critics — which (as Mark Zuckerberg recently pointed out) is a small fraction of its 400-million-plus user base. But Facebook is also not a non-profit despite Zuckerberg’s claim that they’re not in “this for the money.”

On Wednesday’s press conference, Zuckerberg said: “It might seem weird, we’re not doing this to make more money. For all the people inside the company, that could not be more true. It’s such a big disconnect that we’re doing this for the money.”

Methinks the Zuckerberg doth protest too much.

Zuckerberg is not a saint and he’s also not the same 19-year old who allegedly mocked his users for trusting him with their information, but somewhere in between lies reality. He’s a CEO and he runs the world’s most powerful social network. Following Wednesday’s announcement, he spoke with NPR, and acknowledged that Facebook needs money from advertisers to operate, “to run a service like this that serves more than 400 million users.” However, no one believes that Facebook is trying to make just enough money to keep the lights on, nor should we expect them to. But we can expect a higher level of honesty and transparency. Mark, it’s OK to want to make money (and heaps of it), just don’t pretend that every action is designed to augment the user experience.

You could argue that Zuckerberg’s comment (“we’re not doing this to make money”) was just a throwaway line, that I’m reading too much into it. However, it seems to be an emerging tagline for the entire company, on par with Google’s “don’t be evil.” His comment echoes a similar statement from Facebook’s VP of product, Chris Cox, during a backstage interview on Tuesday:

Cox says, “Anybody who knows Mark knows that he’s not doing this to make money…none of the changes we’re making are fundamentally about making money. That’s just not how the company rolls, that’s not how we’ve ever rolled.” Cox acknowledged that Facebook is trying to build “a great ads product,” but he immediately reiterated the idea that money is “not the motivating force behind a lot of the stuff that we’re rolling out.” When I pressed him on the issue of Facebook credits and the rich 30/70 breakdown (Facebook effectively gets 30% of a developer’s proceeds), he said it helps developers by establishing an official currency, similar to the Euro. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t justify Facebook’s 30% commission nor does it dovetail nicely with a company trying to project an indifference to profits. Will the real Facebook please stand up?

Zuckerberg seems to be genuinely interested in changing the world, after all he did reject significant buyout offers, but he also seems to be genuinely interested in turning Facebook into a multi-billion-dollar machine. As I said earlier, I have no problem with a profitable Facebook making obscene amounts of cash, I’m just imploring Zuckerberg to portray his mission honestly.

The Sony Vaio Z-Series is a thin and light with a mission: to prove that a tiny – but expensive – laptop can run Windows 7 and almost anything you throw at it like a champ.

When I opened the Sony Z-Series’ plain brown box, my heart fell. “Another ultra-portable,” I thought, “another sad-making thin-and-light without power or verve.” But I fired it up, used it for a solid week, and came out on the other end convinced that Sony still has what it takes to make a nice laptop.

In two weeks on June 11, TechCrunch will celebrate its fifth birthday. We want to celebrate it with as many people as we can all around the world. So we are using the new Meetup Everywhere platform that Scott Heiferman announced on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Wednesday to organize TechCrunch Meetups on June 11 all around the world. Already there are almost 150 meetups planned in places including New York City, San Francisco, London, Hyderabad, Seoul, Tel Aviv, Jakarta, and Sophia.

We will be throwing our own party in the Bay Area (more details on that coming soon), but for those who can’t fly to California, these meetups are a great way to gather with other people who obsess about technology and startups near where you live. We really think of this as a celebration of the last five years of technology and all that has happened on the Web since then. So join one of the 150 meetups already organized or start your own. To get some regional rivalries going, we will offer 50 free tickets to the next TechCrunch Disrupt (airfare and hotel not included) to each of the 50 largest meetups so that one person from each meetup will win a ticket. Winners will have to check in via a geo mobile service to qualify. We will be in touch with the organizers of each of the 50 largest meetups with more details.

Our own TechCrunch Europe editor Mike Butcher will be at the London Meetup, and I will attend the one in New York City. I have a feeling some of these meetups will get quite large, so if anyone has space they can offer up or a venue wants to donate a local TechCrunch Meetup, go to the relevant Meetup page and offer it up. In New York City, Yext CEO Howard Lerman, who also launched a new product at Disrupt, is graciously opening up his office space in Chelsea for the meetup. Okay, who is bringing the food and booze? (Don’t worry, Howard, we promise not to trash the place too much).

Either you lead or follow and Chinese manufacturing houses have been chasing Apple’s designs for years. The iPad is just their latest victim. You can’t blame them, really. It’s the hottest device since the rotary phone.

We’ve seen a steady stream of clones flowing onto the web for months. Here’s the seven best starting with the just-found iPed.

Have you ever tried to check into a place on Foursquare or some other geo service only to find that there are 10 names for the same location? For instance, Foursquare has tons of different “places” that are all inside Grand Central Terminal in New York City. There is Grand Central Terminal itself, but there is also Track 32, 34, 108, and so on. You can also check into the Blimpies or Hudson News inside the terminal, or the “5:22 Express To Grand Central Terminal” which is not a single place so much as it is a moving train (literally). While there are times you want to have the granularity of being able to say, “I am in front of the central ticket booth with the clock,” nine times out of ten simply checking into Grand Central Terminal is sufficient for most people.

The Grand Central problem is replicated across many popular places in Foursquare and other places databases. According to mobile marketing startup Placecast, location datasets show similar mismatches up to 40 percent of the time. Placecast launched a MatchAPI two months ago for geo developers which helps resolve place duplication in their location database. Since then, 200 location services have signed up to tap into the free API, pushing 20 million locations through the API, of which 1.5 million were incorrect or duplicative. The mismatch rate ranges from 8 percent to 40 percent. Services which rely on their users to upload and identify places not surprisingly have the higher fault rate.

Normalizing everything down to a single place per location isn’t necessarily the answer. Sometimes I want to tell my friends that I am on Track 32 in Grand Central Terminal, but most of the time I travel alone and simply want to check into Grand Central, the place. The overarching location should be the default, and it should be the same matches across different geo services. As I’ve argued in the past, ultimately an open database of places is going to be needed so that we can all collectively map the world once and various geo services can then tap into that universal places database and spend their efforts building their services on top of it.

The idea of putting iPhone apps on the Apple TV has been something some of us have been thinking about since at least 2008, when the original App Store launched. When rumors were swirling about Google TV, it became an even better idea as the living room was likely to be a new battleground for Apple/Google. And with the unveiling of Google TV last week, it became clear that this would be a next major fight — provided Apple started taking it seriously. Soon, they will be, if Engadget’s sources are correct.

The gadget blog says that a tip they’ve since confirmed with “a source very close to Apple” suggests that Apple has been working on the next version of the Apple TV. The goods according to them: it will be a very small box (smaller than the current one) with perhaps only outputs for power and TV-out cables. It will run on Apple’s new A4 chip (the one found in the iPad and soon the new iPhone). It will still do 1080p video, but may have as little as 16GB of flash memory. That’s because the thing will be based around streaming over the cloud (or from other computers in your home) rather than local storage. Most significantly, it will run the iPhone OS.

Basically, it’s an “iPhone without a screen,” is how Engadget hears it. Oh — and it will cost only $99, supposedly.

A product update may seem obvious from Apple, considering the steady pace at which they iterate devices. But the Apple TV hasn’t received a major hardware upgrade in its entire lifespan — almost exactly 3 years. The reason is that Apple still considered the device a “hobby.” The likely reason for that is because they haven’t figured out a way to make money from it yet.

But Google’s announcement of Google TV — a platform which will run on the mobile Android OS — changes everything. Apple needs to take the Apple TV seriously now, or it runs the risk of losing what should be an important battle with Google. While Engadget notes this product has been in development before Google’s announcement, you can probably bet that the announcement put it on the fast-track.

Still, it seems hopeful at best that we’ll hear about it at Apple’s WWDC event next week in San Francisco. The new iPhone is expected to be the centerpiece there. But, if this new device really does run iPhone OS, might Apple hint at it considering the event will be iPhone-centric? Remember, Apple first showed off the original Apple TV a full 6 months before it launched (when it was still tentatively called “iTV”).

Also consider that getting the iPhone OS on to the Apple TV will require some work as developers will yet again (just as with the iPad) have to work on scaling apps to correct resolutions. And that may be a big issue since people have all kinds of different TVs with all kinds of different resolutions.

It’s possible that Apple could pull an iPhone and release the device as a closed system first (maybe in the Fall), and then later open it up to third-party apps. It all depends on how threatened they feel by Google TV — which will also be out in the Fall. But, again, Google TV will run Android apps out of the box, so if Apple released an Apple TV that doesn’t, it will disappoint a lot of people.

Engadget notes that there’s no word on if apps will be included with the product or not. But it makes little sense to use the iPhone OS for this device and not includes apps (at least eventually). As I noted, the reason Apple hasn’t been taking the Apple TV seriously up until now is because they hadn’t figured out the best way to make money from it. That’s largely because Apple makes money off of hardware sales, and for devices like the iPod, those are driven by the availability of content at a good price. That’s the reason the Apple TV has failed to catch on: not enough content at a good price.

The reason there’s not enough content is likely because Hollywood is giving Apple much more push-back than the music industry did. For example, they won’t yet agree to Apple’s idea of subscription-based iTunes TV show packages. But apps could change all of that. Apps are content, and they would immediately vault the Apple TV into must-own status. Imagine playing all those thousands of cheap games on your TV. Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony must be shitting themselves.

And if something like the Netflix app or the ABC app for the iPad worked on the Apple TV, the bitching about a lack of content would simmer down quickly.

Of course, there’s the issue of how you would control those apps — since you’re not about to walk up and touch your giant screen TV anytime soon. But there’s an easy solution for that: make iPhone, iPod touches, and iPads the controllers for the apps on the TV. They already have a Remote app you can use on your iPhone to control the Apple TV.

The $99 price is interesting to me because it suggests that Apple may not make a lot of money off of the device. It’s not clear if that price is just wrong, or if Apple would do something like that because it’s that concerned about Google owning the space. With no glass touch screen needed, it is possible that Apple could produce these things cheaply, but that cheaply?

Assuming these details are right, this Apple TV/Google TV battle should be a good one. Yes, it’s iPhone OS vs. Android in a new battlefield, but the devices would also have their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, Apple TV would have access to all of your existing iTunes content (and possibly over the cloud). Google TV, meanwhile, would work with your existing cable television, and would simply overlay the Android OS on top of it.

My only hope is that this battle will lead to a transformation of the existing cable television ecosystem in the U.S. For too long it has absolutely sucked.

Cloud storage and document sharing startup Box.net is the latest startup to adopt HTML5. The startup is announcing today that it is incorporating a broad implementation of HTML5 drag and drop functionality that supports native interaction with desktop. So basically, you can drag and drop files from the desktop right into your Box.net web application.

The feature works on Firefox 3.6 and Chrome for PC (with support for Safari and Chrome on all platforms coming in the next few weeks). Box’s CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie says that Flash didn’t allow this at all due to security issues. While this is a small addition in terms of functionality, he believes that HTML5 provides a much richer user experience when it comes to enterprise applications and the interaction between the browser and the operating system . “HTML5 is the nail on the coffin of desktop applications because we can create this rich interactive experience that acts like a native app.” Levie adds that HTML5 is also appealing because it works on every device.

Product: HTC EVO

Manufacturer: Sprint

Wired Rating: 7

The new Sprint HTC EVO sports some of the nicest hardware you can find on any mobile device on the market and boasts some of the burliest specs we’ve ever seen in a phone (4G finally!). What’s more, it’s just drop-dead gorgeous; the kind of thing that compels others to ask about it when you take it out of your pocket.

So the EVO’s greatest draw is its 4G WiMax compatibility. How did it work? Uh … we don’t know. We tested the phone in San Francisco, which is not currently wired for 4G. If you’re considering the EVO for its data-processing chops, take a look at where 4G is currently deployed.

However, it did do far better with 3G than our iPhone. We took the phone to three different locations in San Francisco where AT&T has coverage holes, and in every case, had a 3G data connection (sometimes slow) while our iPhone wouldn’t even make calls. While this may be less of an issue in areas where AT&T delivers the coverage it advertises, those who suffer its inadequate network will be happy to know there’s a robust alternative.

On the hardware front, the giant 4.3-inch display makes the iPhone and Nexus One feel dinky in comparison, yet it remains small and light enough to slip easily into a pocket. It flaunts an 8-megapixel camera (with flash) on the back, along with a 1.3-megapixel sensor adorning the front. This dual-screen action allows you to preview pics in order to take well-framed self portraits of yourself and your pals.

The camera also shoots 720p video — it won’t replace your HD camcorder, but it’s a fantastic shooter to have in your pocket. A kickstand in the back lets you stand it up like a television, while an HDMI port lets you connect it to a TV. The 1-GHZ Snapdragon processor feels faster than the Indy 500 while the phone seemingly has more antennas than your average police car, with 3G, 4G (WiMax), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, FM and GPS connectivity.

All those antennas are put to good use. The navigation system is on par with or better than most standalone GPS units. Moreover, the phone feels designed for the internet from the get-go. On launch, it walks you through setting up your Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts. It imported our Facebook and Google contacts into the phone in seconds, and thanks to Google Voice integration, we were able to use an existing number. We also loved the ability to tether the phone. In just three clicks, you can set up a Wi-Fi connection to send internet to your computer.

Our only real hardware complaint is that the OLED display could bit brighter and crisper — it looks slightly fuzzy next to an iPhone — and we noticed some odd cyclical dimming effects when reading long blocks of text on web pages.

The overall interface is excellent, easily one of the most user-friendly of all the Android phones we’ve laid hands on. When we handed the phone off to a user who had never before tried Android, she was immersed in seconds and able to do e-mail, surf the internet and tweet without instruction. It’s worth noting that the phone does not ship with the newly announced Froyo (2.2) version of Android, however HTC has announced that it intends to update phones released in 2010 with that version of the OS.

Our major quibble is that the battery on the EVO is shorter-lived than a plotline in a Seth McFarland show. A typical use situation gave us about 6 hours of battery life. After driving around town to test the GPS and 3G signals we ran out of juice in just over 4 hours. The situation was even worse when we flipped on the 4G antenna. In short, it won’t make it through the day without a recharge. While the battery on the EVO is replaceable, so you can carry a spare, we look forward to a day when smartphone battery life is reasonably matched to power consumption.

Overall, we loved this phone. The hardware is smart and well-appointed, the interface is pleasant and straightforward, and it just plain worked. In short, it felt like a call from the future; one not dropped by AT&T.

WIRED Fantastic camera. Blazing fast internet. More connection options than Grand Central Station. Slick user interface easy for novices, yet allows power users to get their nerd on. Dead-simple tethering. Touchscreen keyboard offers ample space, even for fat-fingered types. Seamless connection with social networks gives it an old-friend feel right out of box.

TIRED 4G coverage spottier than an oil-stained Louisiana beach. Odd dimness issues with display. Android cut/copy/paste so poor you’d do better rekeying. Battery life shorter than Verne Troyer.

A certain founder of a certain hot startup made the mistake this evening of posting two messages to Twitter that he clearly didn’t intend to. They were sent via text message – and my guess is they were meant for a friend, not public consumption.

Cleaning it up a little, it reads:

…But the investors are already rich so this doesn’t change their lives like it does mine…[It will] come down to [investors] getting a high enough offer than the investors can [say] let’s take it.

I haven’t been able to verify the messages, which were sent in via a tipster, as accurate and they were quickly taken down (I have contacted the company, no response yet).. It seems reasonable to remove the identifying information.

But oh, the angst. The interests of founders and investors so often diverge when a company starts to get acquisition offers – offers that don’t interest venture capitalists looking for billion dollar exits but that give founders enough money to change their lives forever. That’s why you see a lot of venture deals where founders and key employees take some money off the table, relieving their pressure to sell early. My guess is [company named removed] may want to consider that sometime soon.

The UK has been gripped by the launch of the iPad if the Twitpics are to be believed. As you can see from the below ( thanks jasonlan and joanikin) there was a large crowd queuing outside Apple’s flagship London store on Regent’s Street, in a line which literally snaked around the corner into Hanover Square. Believe me, that is a long line.

Some estimates have put the crowd at around 500 people outside, waiting to grab the iPad.

New online photo and location service Picplz, being developed by imeem execs Dalton Caldwell and Bryan Berg, is still far from being fully baked. But people who are determined to get an early look at the new service will soon have a way to do so – if they have an Android phone.

Think of picplz as a photo-based foursquare. You can use it as a simple publishing tool for a photo stream – think Twitpic or Posterous – but it really shines when you access the service via a mobile device. Picplz is integrated tightly with Foursquare to assign a location to your photo and then check in. Your photos are then published on the Picplz site and, optionally, Twitter. Facebook publishing is also coming soon.

The company has built an unpublished Android application as its first mobile app, which I tested earlier today. The app will be added to the Android marketplace sometime soon, and once it is anyone can download it and test the service. It will be the only way to actually create an active account on the service for now, but once you have an account you can use the picplz website as well.

It fills a huge hole in the Foursquare product, which doesn’t allow photo uploads.

The website has evolved significantly since we first wrote about picplz in April. One feature I like is the “infinite page” – which continues to load photos as you scroll down the page. There’s no concept of a “next” button, and you can scroll forever, or so I assume, when viewing the global feed of pictures.

The official launch of the company will be via an iPhone application later this year. The company is waiting for iPhone 4, says Caldwell. But until then, Android users welcome.

The company has a ridiculous amount of attention on it given the imeem background of the founders, and Caldwell is clearly trying to balance the need for people to test the service with the inevitable criticism that not-fully-baked services tend to receive. If you are a super early adopter type, understand that alpha software tends to have lots of bugs, and want to provide feature and interface feedback, you’ll want to try this out when it hits the Android Marketplace. The skeptics should wait a few months for the general release.

We’ll let you know as soon as the app is available.

(posted at 30,000 feet on Virgin America)

From Silicon Valley to New York, from India to South Africa one question keeps popping up in the mind of Web and mobile Web entrepreneurs: What the hell is going on in Indonesia?

Having matured from its early 2000s Internet obsession with Friendster, it seems Indonesia has become something of a Web force, embracing everything from Facebook to Foursquare catching people off guard with some uncommon swarms. We wrote about an obscure Indonesian awards show taking over Twitter back in March, and on May 6, Indonesians flocking to see Iron Man 2 won their first Super Swarm badge on FourSquare—something US Web addicts usually only earn at large events like SXSW.

I’d like to say I hunted down some impressive Internet entrepreneurs during my current trip to Indonesia to ask them exactly what was going on here, but really they found me. (Just another sign of their Web savvy.) I had dinner with some of them in Jakarta last week, and they’re photographed above. They include (from left to right) Leontinus Alpha Edison of Tokopedia, an ecommerce platform; Eduardus Christmas of still-in-progress Evolitera; Rama Mamuaya, creator of the local blog DailySocial; Selina Limman of Urbanesia.com, a local review site; Satya Witoelar of Koprol.com, a location-based social network just acquired by Yahoo and Andrew Darwis of Kaskus, a forum and classifieds portal.

I grilled them on some basic questions to bring you a Web-in-Indonesia primer. But before we get to those, here’s what impressed me the most about this small-but-tightly-knit community: It’s incredibly collegial. Plenty of research has shown that the biggest reason Silicon Valley beat Boston as a venture capital and startup hot spot was because culturally it was open, trading employees, funding, mentorship and ideas among competitors. It’s not uncommon to see Web competitors in the Valley having dinner together and generally discussing business challenges, before they go back to the office for some late night coding to bury one another in the market.

This is something many emerging markets struggle with as they put up walls, try to enforce NDAs and are generally cagey about their ideas. But the Indonesian crew is so small that they’ve found each other—mostly via Twitter—and banded together, openly discussing challenges posed by uncertain waters of raising money and offers to get acquired.

Since Indonesia has had little hype, the community seems to have grown organically—like the early days of the Valley and very unlike Web communities in Israel, India and China. Friday night I had dinner with two leading companies Kaskus and Tokopedia—both essentially community sites that have elements of eBay and Craigslist. Edison of Tokopedia was talking about how many ideas they get from reading the forums on Kaskus. “Wait, do you guys consider yourselves direct competitors?” I asked. Both laughed and said yes, sort of, but Darwis explained, “The market is so small, we’re better off helping each other.”

This seems obvious if you’re in the Valley, but I can’t tell you how uncommon it is in most places I’ve been in the last few years. Well done, Jakarta. Don’t lose that—as Boston learned the hard way, it’s a formidable advantage.

Now, some answers to that title question, mostly courtesy of the entrepreneurs photographed above.

How Many Web Users Are in Indonesia? Reports vary from 38 million users to 8% of the population, which would equal more like 20 million. If the previous reports are true, that’s close to Internet usage totals in Brazil and India, far more hyped and targeted markets. But that’s just for accessing Internet over computers. Web mobile is huge and Blackberries are the default device. Data services and cheap and you can buy Blackberry data service by the day on prepaid phones, upping the accessibility even more. Access to Facebook and Twitter are advertised on mobile billboards around the country, which is why the audience seems even larger for these services—most people are only interacting with them on their Blackberries.

Why Is the Indonesian Web Swarmy? Part of this is answered above—it’s a huge market that few players are explicitly targeting, even larger when you factor in the mobile Web. That means that as many people may be logging onto your site from Indonesia as from India or Brazil, but you have probably heard so much about Brazil and India being big emerging markets that the swell doesn’t catch you off guard. Few people know anything about Indonesia—let alone that it has 240 million people, almost as much as the US. So the swells can be surprising.

How Many Web Entrepreneurs Are in Indonesia? This crew estimated between 300 and 1,000 in Jakarta. Mamuaya has personally written about more than 300, and upwards of 1,000 have attended different founder events. Unlike the Valley, most of the “startup people” are founders—most of these companies are still pretty small. (More on entrepreneurs outside Jakarta in a future post.)

Does Anyone Make Money on the Indonesian Web? Most of them do not. There are two problems, they tell me. Indonesians do not want to pay for the Web, so founders are loathe to follow the Chinese model of amassing a large number of micro-payments to build a big company. “There is a big difference between one penny and free here,” Edison of Tokopedia says. So most are following the Valley playbook of build-and-monetize later. That may be a risky strategy: Encouraging the idea that the Web is free, rather than setting expectations from the beginning. But the reticence is also practical: Few people have credit cards and banks don’t have a universal payment system that ecommerce can exploit.

Advertising can actually be lucrative, even at this nascent stage. Part of that is because a lot of big brands are waking up to the Indonesia’s large, untapped market and there aren’t a lot of mass media platforms to advertise over. Kaskus makes $50,000 (US) a month in advertising, more than double what it takes to run the business every month.

Are There Traditional, Early-Stage VCs in Indonesia? As far as I can tell, there is exactly one and it’s not a traditional firm. East Ventures—a Singapore-based angel fund set up by Batara Eto, the founder of mixi.jp, the Japanese social networking site and others. They’re not based here, but have spent time in Jakarta scouting deals and have recently funded Tokopedia and Urbanesia. (Mamuaya reports here that a few more firms are coming or at least considering the move.)

Is Anyone in the West Trying to Buy These Companies? Again, as far as I can tell, there is exactly one suitor, although this one is more traditional: Yahoo. This insight was a lot newsier when I first drafted this post a few days ago. But Koprol aside, Yahoo has approached half-a-dozen small, up-and-coming Indonesian Web startups, this crew said. So far no other deals have been reached. But Yahoo clearly sees something here and likely isn’t done.

What is the Biggest Challenge Indonesian Web Entrepreneurs Face? Surprisingly, no one I asked said capital or exits. The relative lack of big, lucrative coding jobs from the multinationals like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and the lack of venture capital have kept developer wages and costs of building a startup incredibly low. No one seems to feel a real pain for venture capital, because none of these companies are started with an expectation of it. This makes Indonesia absolutely unique among the 11 or so countries I’ve visited in the last two years. Instead, the pain point is finding developers. In Indonesia, developers are considered an entry level position, not a lucrative career path. Most companies have to invest six months or so in training the talent they need, making scaling up a challenge.

In July of last year, Twitter Search usage was exploding. As such, Twitter hired a new high-profile engineer, Doug Cook, to take over as the new “Director of Search.” Cook has now left the company, we’ve learned.

When reached for comment, Twitter confirmed the departure, but would not give a reason for the split. We had also heard that the reason Cook is out is that the search team is being split into at least two different groups now. Twitter’s comment on the matter seems to confirm that:

We are investing even more on search and have created new teams to focus our efforts on inference, discovery and real-time search infrastructure.

Twitter would not say if there will be a new Director of Search, but we hear the role may simply not exist anymore with this new multi-team approach.

Search is one of the most important aspects of Twitter these days. It’s not only useful, it’s tied directly into Twitter’s first big plan to make money: Sponsored Tweets. It also is the key to hashtag relevance and a number of other things Twitter is working on — undoubtedly things like analytics.

Search on Twitter began when Twitter bought Summize in the Summer of 2008. That service morphed into Twitter Search, a service that resided at search.twitter.com. By March of 2009, the product was so useful that we wrote it was time to start thinking of Twitter as a search engine. By April of that year, they rolled search into the main Twitter product, and it has been a core feature since.

This is one of the first fairly major shakeups at Twitter (aside from when Ev Williams took the CEO title from creator Jack Dorsey in 2008). This news follows the promotion of Greg Pass (a co-founder of Summize) to be Twitter’s first CTO, as we broke in April. That move was made to make room for Michael Abbott, Palm’s former head of software and services, to take over as VP of Engineering.

Cook came to Twitter from Yahoo, where was a VP of engineering. He took over the search responsibilities from Twitter Chief Scientist Abdur Chowdhury, another Summize co-founder. Cook also runs the wine search engine Able Grape. His LinkedIn profile lists this as his only current job. Recent tweets suggest his next move may be vacationing.

An anonymous tipster has confirmed the long-whispered rumors that Amazon will offer a Kindle that isn’t white. A mystery unit, described by our tipster as “exactly like a Kindle DX but black,” was being photographed at a Seattle coffee shop (with a 5D mk II, he or she notes) and Mr/Mrs Tipster had the presence of mind to snap a picture before they put it away.