Category: Tech news

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, we had a panel entitled “Does The iPad Change Everything For News, Or Is It Still All About The Web?” The New York Times’ David Carr moderated the panel which included angel investor Ron Conway, Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, and Bloomberg chief content officer Norm Pearlstine. The common theme? The only thing that can stop the iPad is Apple.

While that may sound confusing (since, of course, Apple makes the iPad), everyone seemed to agree that Apple’s restrictions could end up hurting the device in the long run. Apple is in control right now because they’re the first to market with a killer product, but others will emulate them, reasons Pearlstine. He believes a lot of the content on these type of tablets will eventually be web-based rather than app-based (similar to an argument Google co-founder Sergey Brin made last week).

Carr extended on that question, asking if maybe the iPad itself would just be a device where you consume content on the web rather than through apps?Hippeau says that’s up to Apple. Clearly they want to push people towards apps, behind their wall, he believes. The problem with this is that Apple doesn’t give back nearly as much data as having your own website would, Hippeau says. He thinks Apple will have to learn that media organizations live  off of this data. “They’ll have to open it up more,” he says.

Pearlstine agrees, saying that the key for traditional publishers is their lists of subscribers. More importantly, they have their payment information. With iPad apps, Apple has that information, and that will be a problem for a lot of media companies. “There will be other providers that won’t do it the Apple way,” he says. That, again, is implying that while Apple may have jump-started the industry, if they don’t open up a bit more, a competitor will beat them.

Of course, that hasn’t happened with the iPhone yet. But Android is charging fast.

Conway believes that Apple has a good lead for now though thanks to its “fantastic user interface.” He sees publishers flocking to it just like the music business did to the iPod/iTunes combo. “It’s a better model than free,” he says.

Product: Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 Polizia

Manufacturer: Lego

Wired Rating: 0

If only the two Lamborghini Gallardos owned by the Italian State Police were made of Legos. Sigh. Then it wouldn’t have been a big deal when a cop disassembled one in a smackdown with a car pulling out of a gas station. Fortunatamente, you can reenact this scene over and over again with the 1/17-scale Lego Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 Polizia. What this Lego-ghini lacks in horsepower it makes up for in detail — 801 pieces of it. Starting with a miniature replica of the Gallardo’s 5.2-liter V-10 engine, it has everything you need to play polizia, including a radio, a radar gun, and a cooler for high-speed donor-organ deliveries. There’s even an onboard defibrillator, presumably for restarting the tickers of bad guys who get cardiac-arrested when the 5-0 appears behind them in a $225,000 road rocket.

Product: Face Savers

Manufacturer: Roundup:

Wired Rating: 0

Strapping on a Bluetooth headset doesn’t have to mean casting off dignity. We put 4 to the test to find which skew more cool than tool (you know, relatively speaking).

1. Aliph Jawbone Icon
Headsets don’t have to be hideous. Just ask Yves Béhar, whose handsome design for the original Jawbone has been further refined in the Icon. It sounds great, too: Noise filters eliminate virtually all external racket—wind, gunfire, loquacious hobos. The folks at Aliph are also apparently BFFs with Apple; a separate battery indicator for the headset appears onscreen when you pair an Icon with an iPhone.

WIRED Syncing requires zero thinking. Got a BlackBerry and a Nexus One? Icon can be paired with both simultaneously. Four solid days of battery life. Fits perfectly in ear despite lack of pinna-anchoring loops.

TIRED Sticky rubber earpiece gets dirtier than ODB’s debut album.

$100, jawbone.com

2. Plantronics Explorer 395
Plantronics has serious geek cred. Neil Armstrong wore one of its headsets during the 1969 moon landing. Too bad the Explorer 395 has all the visual panache of the crew in Mission Control—you know, short-sleeved shirts, black glasses, and pocket protectors. But solid audio quality makes up for the weak design. In addition to the usual digital tricks, Plantronics’ engineers created a specially shaped mic port to mask outside noise. It picks up voices perfectly while ignoring anything short of a hurricane-force gust.

WIRED More lightweight than Heidi Montag’s summer reading list. The price is right, Bob.

TIRED Houston, we have a fashion problem—makes you look like a pre-bubble I-banker.

$50, plantronics.com

3. Motorola Endeavor HX1
This whopping, tanklike hunk of plastic requires Paganini-level fiddling to position correctly in your ear. But once inserted, it operates like a sonic sponge, soaking up every sound within 40 yards. It offers some cool features, too. Passing on trade secrets at work? Just hit a button to activate stealth mode, which captures vocal vibrations and translates whispers into (somewhat garbled) speech.

WIRED Stealth mode makes you slightly less annoying on public transit. Low on juice? The HX1 gently chirps a reminder in your ear.

TIRED Flimsy ear loop barely supports the headset’s bulk. Burns through battery life: Even Emperor Palpatine didn’t have this much appetite for power.

$130, motorola.com

4. Jabra Stone
Most Bluetooth headsets are Frankenstein monstrosities of rubber and plastic. Not the Stone. This little shaving of sheer elegance has no moving parts and nestles into your auditory canal rather than violating your ear. But awesome design is where the good stuff ends. The Stone choked on nearly every task we set for it. Syncing stinks, battery life is anemic, and audio is as mellifluous as a blender filled with tenpenny nails.

WIRED Superb packaging. Egg-shaped charging base is as pretty as the headset.

TIRED Most of the outward-facing side of the Stone is one big End Call button. Press it by accident and you’ll cease transmission. No charging port on headset—you have to plug into the base station to juice up.

$130, jabrastone.com

Product: Boulder Dash

Manufacturer: Roundup:

Wired Rating: 0

With high-torque electric motors, low gear ratios, and wildly articulating suspensions, radio-controlled rock crawlers venture where no toys have gone before.

1. RC4WD Killer Krawler

This 1/5-scale truck should be called the Overkill Krawler. Its CNC-milled aluminum chassis provides 5 inches of ground clearance and a rigid frame to support its contortionist suspension, dual electric motors, and twin computerized speed controls. Weighted pendulums inside the wheels boost traction by keeping pressure on the rocks below. But you need serious skill to make this beast behave; reprogramming your brain to steer front and rear wheels is tricky.

WIRED So well engineered and built it could be drafted into military service. When you’re not duking it out with rocks, mount this machined beauty on the wall—it’s that gorgeous.

TIRED All that pretty metal jacks up the weight, which weighs down battery life. Krazy expensive.

$1,500, rc4wdstore.com

2. Losi Night Crawler
To tackle jagged rocks and steep slopes, you think ahead and go slow. That means you may have to park in a precarious spot while you sort out your strategy. The 1/10-scale Night Crawler encourages this strategic approach with a worm-gear drive that can apply just enough torque to hold the truck steady. Once you’ve chosen a path, the 45-degree steering angle and 4-inch aluminum shocks let you take the route you want, not just the path of least resistance.

WIRED Accepts powerful, long-lasting lithium polymer cells for extended missions. Or you can keep it cheap and go with standard NiMHs.

TIRED LED lights, intended to help you crawl around at night (hence the name), aren’t quite bright enough to make that possible. Worse, they only point downward.

$500, losi.com

3. Axial SCX10 TR
Realism runs high in Axial’s 1/10-scale Trail Ready crawler: Its tunable suspension, solid rear axle, and bead-lock wheels—which cinch the tires onto the rims so they don’t slip while you’re grinding up a steep rock face—faithfully replicate a real-life crawler. And its smoother tires and less extreme gear ratios help you squeeze more meters out of each battery charge. Just don’t go trying to scale the woodpile.

WIRED When the sun drops below the horizon, LED headlights brightly illuminate the trail ahead of you. It’s also faster on flat surfaces than the rest of this convoy.

TIRED Doesn’t scoff at gravity like the Krawler or the, uh, Crawler. Abundance of plastic components might add up to dubious durability—even in miniature, this sport is brutal.

$299, axialracing.com

4. Traxxas Summit
The Summit’s waterproof electronics open up oceans of new challenges: Rocky streams and snowy slopes will no longer be off-limits for fear of damaging your $500 toy. But the fan-cooled motor drinks a lot of juice—two sets of seven-cell NiMHs. On the plus side, that amplitude of amps, combined with a smart transmission, lets this 1/10-scale truck wear two hats: deft climber one minute and flat-out trail runner the next.

WIRED Transitions from high-speed bashing to methodical ascents at the flick of a switch. (Well, two switches, actually: One changes your gearing and the other locks or unlocks your differentials.)

TIRED Plastic wheels have fake bead-locks—a deadly sin to purists. Suspension articulation not on a par with the other crawlers here.

$569, traxxas.com

BREAKING: Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is joining Khosla Ventures, the VC firm. He will join as a senior adviser. Khosla is putting about $1.1 billion into clean technology companies and and tech companies right now.

One of the companies is Calera, a UK company which has a process to sequestrate carbon emissions in cement, while another, Kior, turns wood chips into biofuels.

Mr Blair said: “I am increasingly and crucially aware of the fact that the answer to these twin challenges — climate change and energy security — lies in developing the technological solutions of the future.”

It’s clearly a win for Khosla which will now get access to his significant global network.

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, Michael Arrington is sitting down with MySpace’s co-Presidents Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Jones to talk about the status of the evolving site and what it will look like in the future. My notes on the talk are below.

Mike: MySpace is in such a transformative stage it’s important for everyone to question it. We have 120 million unique visitors worldwide. US numbers have been fairly flat. Page views are down… substantially by design. MySpace used to have processes that took 10 page views that should have taken 1.

Arrington: Let’s talk about product. What is MS better at than anyone else?
Jason: Discovery. You go to meet people that are interested in the things you’re interested in. It’s about who you are through the things that you’re into. You till have basic social network functions.

Mike: When MySpace was a communication tool people may come back 30-40 times a month. We expect consumption mode for discovery to be less. Over 30% of audience comes in mobile. We expect mobile to continue growth. It’s a change in product, usage patterns, and way people actually use them.

Jason: Specially to the younger audience we focus on. Mobile is the focal point of their lives.

Arrington: How important is music to these goals?
Jason: It’s incredibly important. The pedigree of MySpace is around musicians. Fre streaming access from record labels. We’re building out all sorts of tools for musicians. Dashboards, presence management. It’s a big part of our brand. We are a very big social network.

Arrington: How much offer will you be able to offer music for fee?
Mike: We’re in consistent talks with labels. As of now we believe for a while. We’re creating a whole level of discovery around artists.
Arrington: Jon Miller has said that decision is still being made but if you do move away from free it will be this year.
Mike: At the end of the day it’s very much in the hands of the labels. MySpace allows this level of discovery. I think consumption is important.. I think it’s sustainable.
Arrington: Report is that you lose 10 million a month on music.
Hirshhorn: That’s not correct. The model works for us. At some point, we look at all different kinds of models. There will always bee free music on MySpace. Where we came from majority of music came from indy bands. Record labels control those rights. The Music experience isn’t predicated on just free streaming.

Mike: There’s two ways that I look at the music deal. We work with artists to monetize. We want to work with creative leads, express and monetize. Second, we pay for content. We pay to stream free music.

Arrington: In your view, you talk about turnaround. Is it possible to do that under any corporate parent let alone News Corp. Or do you think you’d be better as an independent entity.

Jason: Code advisors was not shopping for us. I’ve worked in a couple media corp. before and they had their issues. But News Corp has been so good to us. There hasn’t been anything we asked for that we said no to.. Because of Murdoch it truly is a small big company. He really is engaged. We don’t feel like they don’t get it if we went and asked for something. When people ask if we would spin out. What does that do for us?
Arrington: Provides incentive system because they can get stock options.
Mike: We’ve talked about that. We’re looking into it. I think there are other ways we can do that.
Jason: It’s a fair point. When you have that equity it is a shot at the dream.
Arrington: Co-president is a unique and interesting thing. Is it possible in the long term?
Jason: Normally it doesn’t work. Warner had co-pres. for 25 years. We had disagreements when we got there. It was never personal. You also have to get over ego, it’s for the betterment of the company. Am I going to be at MySpace in 5-10 years? Probably not, I’m an entrepreneur.
Arrington: How would you grade your performance?
Jason: I’d give myself a B+. In early days of MS the traffic grew fast so it wouldn’t go fast .They built something that would scale but made it hard to develop new things… MySpace always had a great functionality but the way they put it together… We’re going to take a look at changing the logo.

We told you Comcast was introducing something fresh and exciting at TechCrunch Disrupt this year. Say hello to Tunerfish, incubated by the Plaxo team (Comcast acquired Plaxo in 2008) and led by former Plaxo VP of Marketing John McCrea.

Tunerfish is driven by people’s passion for TV shows, and revolves around the ability for people to share what they are watching in real time. Launching in the near future, McCrea billed Tunerfish as a ‘social discovery engine’ for video content.

Essentially, the product enables people to share with a single click what they are watching, on their social network(s) of choice in real time. Much like Twitter does for tweets, Tunerfish also displays which TV shows are trending among your friends (in the last hour, 24 hours, etc.), which gives users a way to discover shows they are not yet familiar with.

McCrea says Tunerfish isn’t limited to television, as you can also use the product to share what you’re watching on YouTube, Vimeo and other video sharing platforms.

Interestingly, Tunerfish also rewards people who share what they are watching. This rewards system, based on game mechanics, is key to the Tunerfish experience, but unfortunately McCrea decided not to share the details of the system today.

He did add that Tunerfish will not only be a website, but also a native iPhone and iPad application, and that the service is also aimed to surface directly on TV screens.

The public beta of the service will be live in the next two weeks.

Well, that just happened.

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz took the stage for a fireside chat with our own Michael Arrington. It took about 15 minutes, but Mike got her to tell him to “fuck off.”

That’s not all she had to say. When Mike pressed her about Yahoo outsourcing the social graph to Facebook. Bartz admitted that if she could own it (as Facebook does), she’d love to. “Oh, I’d love to own it — shit, why not?,” she said. She said also that “I’d love to be Queen Poobah – but I’m not.”

I highly suggest you read the notes below. She had plenty of interesting things to say. Not just about the new Nokia and Match.com deals, but about Apple, Google, Facebook, and yes, even TechCrunch.

Just wow.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

MA: So how the fuck are you?

CB: Is that all you got?

MA: So my last two posts were critical.

CB: Were they?

MA: You don’t read TechCrunch? I can show you how. It’s weird, I talked to you backstage, you’re a human being. You took the time to talk to us.

Okay let’s go. What is Yahoo?

CB: (her mic cuts off) What is Yahoo? Yahoo is a company that is very strong in content. It’s moving towards the web of one. We have 32,000 variations on our front page module. We serve a million of those a day. It’s all customized. Our click-through rate went up twice since we started customizing this. People come to check the things they like. “You can just get it together.” Yahoo is one site people always stop at.

MA: You had two pieces of news. One is a partnership with Match.com. Why abandon personals?

CB: It wasn’t in the sweet spot of what we do. It was the same with HotJobs. It’s just not about in line with we do anymore. I was trying to think about if I should fly with the volcano cloud, I checked the AP, it was 17 hours old info. We need live content feeds.

MA: Are there any other of the big Yahoo properties you’re killing?

CB: No. We’re focused now.

MA: What was the other one?

CB: We had an announcement with Nokia. Co-branded.

MA: How important is mobile to Yahoo going forward?

CB: We’re on 37 million of the 82 million mobile devices in the US. We have half the US market. People don’t think that’s true, but it is. And we’re huge in the emerging world. It was important to get to the dominant partner outside the market.

MA: So is the focus not on the smartphones?

CB: We still do them too. We have an iPhone app, for example. We have alliances with 100 OEMs. We’re on 2,300 different handsets. I have a BlackBerry and an iPhone.

MA: No Android?

CB: No.

MA: Let’s talk about the product perspective. You’ve made some changes and there have been departures. The new blood is Blake Irving. Does he run product at Yahoo now?

CB: Absolutely.

MA: Is there a product Czar? Does he answer to you? Think about how Steve Jobs acts, he’s in charge. Is that Blake?

CB: You can’t find anyone like a VP that compares to Steve Jobs so that’s not fair. Blake reports to me — under him there are three segments. We have one of the largest private clouds in the world. We serve 10 billion ads a day — that’s a huge technical effort. There’s no one strategy at Yahoo. We do a lot of things.

CB: We know that men have banner blindness but will look at them in certain areas. Women will look at them in other areas. Men are odd.

MA: What about the iPad?

CB: With the iPad, Apple is a hardware and software company. It’s an evolution — not revolution. These days if you’re not coming out with some device, you’re not innovating, apparently. But that’s not true. There’s a soul to our product. Absent Steve Jobs, who’s the product soul in big companies? It’s a lot of people who have to do it.

MA: You ever hear the saying, “a camel is a horse designed by committee”?

CB: That’s true but you implement with several people. I can imagine that a lot of concepts are brought to Jobs too — there are people involved. It’s naive to think there’s not.

MA: Why Blake? He was a professor at Pepperdine. Before that he was at Microsoft.

CB: Well he was taking a two year break from Microsoft.

MA: Fair enough. How important is social to Yahoo?

CB: Back when social had a broad definition, you could almost say that Yahoo Finance chat was the first social product. We have a million comments a day now. We had 85,000 comments on day one at Yahoo News. And we’re merging in some of the big products like Twitter, etc. We’re doing some new cool things with Mail next month too. It’s about finding out the new things about people.

MA: Facebook would say the social graph is key. Is that important to you? Are you comfortable not owning that?

CB: I don’t know if anyone really owns it. They share it with partners. It’s just about getting the information. Building a better user experience.
“Oh, I’d love to own it — shit, why not?” “I’d love to be Queen Bubah — but I’m not.”

MA: In 2008 you said Jerry Yang first approached you about the job. You said you weren’t the right person for the job. Are you now?

CB: I’m one of many. Many people could do this job. There’s no one special person for any job. That’s the beauty of it.

MA: You’ve asked bloggers to tone down some of the critiques and advice. But you made a statement earlier this year that Google has some problems.

CB: Did you see the interview? I said Google needs to grow a Yahoo every year — just go into a lot of businesses. They have to be a 20% grower. It’s not so bad to say.

MA: You said they were so reliant on search advertising.

CB: Is that wrong?

MA: No but you said it’s not a good trick to have.

CB: I would love to have that! Like the social graph. What I said has to be true. I’m just saying they need to grow a company the size of us every year. They have to do other things.

MA: Are you being a hypocrite by giving them advice when you say you don’t want advice?

CB: I gave them my opinion. You do that all the time. “I’ve never had a bong in my life if that means anything to you.”

MA: Is your pitch kind of BS though?

CB: Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997 — the iPod came out 4 years later. 3 years after that is the first time his market cap grew. It took 7 years. I’ve been here a few months. Give me a break. You are involved in a very tiny company.

MA: Very tiny.

CB: It probably takes you a long time just to convince yourself what to do. “So fuck off!”

MA: Are you a search company or not?

CB: Half of our revenue is from search. The fact that you can crawl the web is a commodity. We’re about search, but we’re not a search company. We do a lot of things.

Google has (finally) released its revenue share breakdown for AdSense.

For your background: AdSense has two products: one is AdSense for Content, which allows publishers to generate revenue from ads placed alongside their content.

The other is AdSense for Search, which allows publishers to place a custom Google search engine on their site and generate revenue from ads shown next to search results.

The majority of AdSense publishers are using the content product, says Google. Publishers apparently earn a 68% revenue share worldwide, meaning Google pays 68% of the revenue that they collect from advertisers.

Since launching AdSense for Content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed. For Search, partners see a 51% revenue share for the search ads that appear through their site. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when Google increased it.

While Google says it has no plans to change the rev share for now, it can’t guarantee that the revenue share will never change in the future.

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, there was a panel with the video comedy house Funny Or Die. Mark Kvamme, a partner at Sequoia Capital (which invested in Funny Or Die) moderated a panel with Funny Or Die’s Dick Glover, Chris Henchy, and Andrew Steele. The topic was the disruption of old media with this new model of short, cheap videos. All seemed confident they would not only be able to compete with the old guard but would change the business growing forward.

Funny Or Die is already doing “tens of millions of dollars in revenue,” according to Kvamme. When he tells that to people, they don’t believe him. But advertisers are starting to come with million-dollar deals as the site grows in popularity. And while the revenues still may be nothing compared to what traditional Hollywood gets, the key is that the overhead costs are a fraction of the costs of what they are in Hollywood. Kvamme says that when he recently showed off a video to Fox, they thought it cost them tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to make. It actually only cost them $2,200.

So why would anyone want to work when they’re not getting paid as much? “We offer something that traditional companies don’t have. We offer freedom, more than money,” Steele says. That’s appealing to some big Hollywood stars because they’re vain, Steele half-jokes. But it’s also appealing to the up-and-coming generation of actors, actresses, writers, and directors, because it’s a platform that gives them a faster route to opportunity than they’re going to get in the traditional Hollywood system.

When Kvamme asked if this would kill the system in which a show like Mad Men (an expensive show to make) gets made. Steele said he thinks they can make their own Mad Men in the future. It’s all about the advertising. That’s what makes Mad Men possible on AMC, and that’s what will make it possible on the web, he says. It’s not there, yet, but it’s coming. Currently some 90% of FunnyOrDie’s revenues come from ads.

Kvamme also brought up what he thinks is the key to a successful online video company: the library. He notes that MGM is being sold for something like $2 billion even though they rarely make movies anymore. The value of the company is entirely its library. Web content houses are still too new to have large libraries, but over time that will grow. And that will make these companies’ value continue to grow.

TechCrunch Disrupt kicked off this morning, with interviews with Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr and DST’s Yuri Milner. Next up, we’re discussing the future of music, TV, games and publishing. Michael Wolf, Founder and Managing Director, Activate is leading the discussion with Sarah Chubb, President, Conde Nast Digital; Fred Davis, Founding Partner, CODE Advisors; John Hagel, Co-Chairman, Center for the Edge, Deloitte; and Avner Ronen, CEO, Boxee.

Wolf highlighted the newly announced Google TV as being disruptive to the media space. Ronen’s Boxee, which also streams media from your computer to a TV, says that he thinks the Android-based platform could be complimentary to his application.

The iPad is also a disruptive application for media, but companies are quick to show that they are evolving their content with the new device and seeing positive results Epicurious is seeing 75 percent of users on the iPad, with a million downloads of the new iPad app, says Chubbs. “We see the iPad as an additive experience,” she says, adding that GQ and Vanity Fair have also seen considerable traffic on their apps. Media and entertainment generally is moving towards “an access model vs. an ownership model.”

Wolf also addressed the issue of music and the evolution of the way music is being consumed on the web. Davis expressed his strong concern for piracy on the web, including music and movies. See our paraphrased notes of the conversation below:

Wolf: Media and technology is reshaping content, from the iPad to Google TV to Avatar.
Ronen:Wolf: Does Google TV change Boxee’s outlook or enhance it?
Ronen: We’re not sure yet. Bottom line if Android finds its way into the living room, that’s great. It could be complimentary but it could be dangerous if they start to do what we do. In most cases, the TV screen is not a great browsing device. Also, the TV is a social space, you watch it with friends and family Browsing is more of a personal action.
Wolf: Sarah, what do you see is happening with user engagement?
Chubb: With the ipad, what we’re seeing is incredibly exciting. Epicurious is on the iPad and we’re seeing browsing of the site, which gets 7 million women a month, is seeing 75 percent of users on the iPad. A million downloads of the iPad app.
Chubb: We think the iPad is an additive experience. On GQ we’ve had 250,000 sessions since iPad launched. 65 percent were coming from the iPad And Vanity Fair, we’ve seen 10,000 sessions, 90 percent on the iPad.
Wolf: Fred, you’ve represented digital companies and artists, What do entertainment companies think in terms of the role of these services?
Davis: Music is not about owning, it’s about accessing. Spotify seems to have unlocked a key to accessing music. Artists and Labels and entertainment companies need to migrate, similar to Netflix with DVDs and movies.
Wolf: John, how do you look at this?
Hagel: Companies have assets to deploy in terms of relationships and creative talent. Changes are so fundamental, its about basic assumptions about what is required for success. Key transitions for media companies is that they have to move from product business mindsets. Who has the power-the creatives or the business people in an organization? How do measure profitability, via product or audience? Most media companies still measure via audience. That’s the shift that makes this essential.
Davis: A lot of media companies never had a training to engage with third party developers.
Wolf: When you think about social conversations, a lot of them are taking place on Facebook and Twitter. How do media companies take advantage of this?
Ronen: It gives them free traffic. I think that the transition towards apps, may be harmful. It may cause the conversation to stay on the app versus going to the content owners.
Chubb: Moving from a product centric point of view to a customer centric is important. We are in the audience business. Social is critical to that-the conversation that is going on is more important than your point of view.
Davis: A movie comes out, now everyone is Tweeting about it. Its changing marketing and ad campaigns.
Ronen: the same goes for TV shows.
Hagel: There is a concern about who is the orchestrator of the social relationships,
Chubb: Who owns the conversation on social media within a conversation, is it pr marketing? if you try to control the conversation, it may backfire.
Wolf: Where do you see the crossover in terms of profitability?
Hagel: There are three different type of businesses-product, infrastructure and customer. The world is more fragmented. Its a challenge, how do you cope with this?
Chubb: You have profitable businesses trying to make that transition, as a large media company, we have to be ruthless about past feelings. We have to be much faster, we’ve learned so much from Wired, Epicurious, Reddit. You’ll see more things from us that are faster turnaround.

Davis: Piracy needs to be part of the conversation. Why it’s not okay to go steal a DVD off of a shelf at Walmart but it is OK to download a movie off the internet. The cultural mindset has changed about paying for content.
Ronen: The psychology of consumers is different now.
Davis: The ease of stealing shouldn’t make a difference.
Ronen: I don’t know if there is a full solution to this – I think there will be some people who always will steal.
Hagel: Part of the answer is to expand content beyond the platform, like virtual goods in gaming
Wolf: Do you believe the existence of pirated content help the entertainment sector?
Davis: I’m not sure piracy helps. I think it helps the conversation.

Wolf: How will media companies profit from this?
Chubb: People are willing to pay for things in mobile-the trick is making it an attractive offering.
Davis: Portability makes content more valuable.
Wolf: How will media business change with gaming?
Ronen: I think the intro of game mechanics and interactions around content will change the way the content is formed and engagement. The merging of content with games is exciting. I think most valuable franchises will be built on combination of games and content.
Davis: Music-oriented games have huge potential.
Wolf: What will happen with the editorial point of view vs. the wisdom of crowds?
Chubb: There’s a need for big media companies to embrace other kinds of talent and thinking, such as Reddit. It’s a different way
Wolf: What kind of deals are going to be taking place? Are these going to be big companies buying small ones or big companies getting together.

Davis: There will be two strategies. How do we monetize content in new ways?
Wolf: This conversation will be an important part of media. I want to thank the panelists.

Match.com and Yahoo are going steady now. Yahoo Personals is out. This morning, Yahoo announced that Match.com will become the exclusive online dating site on Yahoo. Yahoo’s current online dating site, Personals, will be folded into a new co-branded site called “Match.com on Yahoo.” Match already powers Yahoo Personals in a number of European markets.

Yahoo Personals users will be encouraged to migrate to Match.com on Yahoo and given the opportunity to seamlessly migrate their Yahoo Personals accounts over to the new site. Match.com on Yahoo will offer users mobile access, daily personalized matches and more advanced search tools.

Match was rumored to be interested in acquiring Yahoo Personals, but this partnership makes sense considering Yahoo can retain part of the brand. And perhaps gain advertising dollars.

Match just bought online dating site SinglesNet, and scooped up highly-targeted dating site network People Media last year for a whopping $80 million.

Twitter just put up a blog post talking up its platform approach and long-term strategy. In that same post, however, the company has made some decisions that are sure to irk a couple of third-party developers and startups.

Here’s the big news: aside from (its own) Promoted Tweets, Twitter says it will not be allowing any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. The changes will be reflected in an updated set of Terms & Conditions, which is due to be released ‘shortly’.

Update: here it is (details below)

This is not so good news for Twitter-focused advertising startups like Ad.ly and Twad.ly (and others). It also definitely perked the ears of TweetUp, who had just launched its live beta at TechCrunch Disrupt.

You can see their initial reaction to the news below.

Here are the reasons Twitter says it decided not to allow third-parties to advertise in the stream:

First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created. They may optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform. For example, a third party ad network may seek to maximize ad impressions and click through rates even if it leads to a net decrease in Twitter use due to user dissatisfaction.

Secondly, the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization. Twitter is uniquely dependent on and responsible for the long-term health and value of the platform. Accordingly, a necessary focus of Promoted Tweets is to explore ways to create value for our users. Third party ad networks may be optimized for near-term monetization at the expense of innovating or creating the best user experience. We believe it is our responsibility to encourage creative product development and to curb practices that compromise innovation.

It is important to keep in mind that Twitter bears all the costs of maintaining the network, protecting the Tweet stream against spam, supporting user requests, and scaling the service. Indeed, Twitter will bear many of the support costs associated with any third-party paid Tweets, as Twitter receives support emails related to anything a user sees in a tweet stream. The third-party bears few of these costs by comparison.

Twitter adds that when its new Annotations feature launches, there are going to be many new business opportunities on the Twitter platform in addition to those currently available. The three guiding principles the company touts it abides by are:

1) no control or ownership over what users tweet

2) other companies have enough opportunities to sell ads, build vertical apps, offer analytics, etc. aside from injecting paid tweets into the stream. Twitter explicitly says it’s perfectly fine with display ads and other mobile advertisements around the timelines of Twitter clients.

3) the company says it doesn’t always need to participate in the ways in which other companies monetize the network

The company does recognize that for a few companies, the new Terms of Service prohibit activities in which some have invested resources. It will be interesting to see how those companies will respond to the news.

TweetUp CEO Bill Gross, for one, says they never planned to advertise in-stream anyway, so this won’t affect them as much as you would think – and we thought – at first.

Nevertheless, it shows that certain decisions Twitter makes along the way as it moves forward with its platform and how to monetize it most efficiently should keep startups that base their entire business model on the Twitter platform on high alert.

Update: here is the relevant part in the updated T&C:

IV. COMMERCIAL USE

It is our goal to provide you, our ecosystem partner, with a policy that is clear and transparent about what you can do to monetize your Service. This is best summed up in two principles:

respect user content — Tweets may be used in advertisements, not as advertisements.
respect user experience — build your service around the timeline, not in the timeline.

And now, for the details:

1. Twitter Ads.

Twitter reserves the right to serve advertising via its APIs (“Twitter Ads”). If you decide to serve Twitter Ads once we start delivering them, we will share a portion of advertising revenue with you per our then-current terms and conditions.

2. Advertising Around Twitter Content

(a) We encourage you to create advertising opportunities around Twitter content that are compliant with these Rules. In cases where Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) of the advertising sale, we require you to compensate us (recoupable against any fees payable to Twitter for data licensing). For example, you may sell sponsorships or branding around gadgets or iframes that include Tweets and other customized visualizations of Twitter. Please contact us for questions and information at [email protected], or to notify us of an advertising opportunity.

(b) You may generally advertise around and on applications or sites that display Tweets, but you may not place any advertisements within the Twitter timeline on your Service other than Twitter Ads.

(c) Your advertisements cannot resemble or reasonably be confused by users as a Tweet.

(d) You may advertise in close proximity to the Twitter timeline (e.g., banner ads above or below timeline), but there must be a clear separation between Twitter content and your advertisements.

3. Using Twitter Content. You must get permission from the user that created the Tweet if You:

o want to use their Tweet on a commercial durable good or product (for example, using a Tweet on a t-shirt or a poster or making a book based on someone’s Tweets); or

o create an advertisement that implies the sponsorship or endorsement on behalf of the user.

TweetUp, the Twitter-focused search and advertising startup that was incubated by idealab – the original Overture founders – is launching today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City.

Serial entrepreneur Bill Gross took the stage for the event’s first ‘for show launch’ and publicly debuted TweetUp’s core service – the startup had earlier opened the gates for early-adopting advertisers only (their blog post is up too).

TweetUp’s destination site ranks Twitter search results by time and via an algorithm to determine if a result should go higher than other more recent tweets containing the keyword queried. Users will also see targeted (paid) advertiser results within that stream.

Gross explained that advertisers paying for ranking for specific keywords will also tend to be good results, since bad ads will be bid out of the system. TweetUp’s business model is based on a 50/50 revenue share system, which is a pretty compelling offer for advertisers.

TweetUp also offers any publisher embeddable widgets and other contextual layers filled with relevant live tweets based on given keywords – you can see an example in the TechCrunch.com sidebar on the right-hand side.

Additional benefit: analytics. Advertisers can use the TweetUp system to track in which Twitter clients their advertisements appear, the number of impressions served, aggregate of followers reached, and more.

The elephant in the room is of course that Twitter is experimenting with an ad platform of its own – not to mention other bidders such as Ad.ly and Twad.ly – and if TweetUp is going to be able to compete with that.

Time will tell, but Gross’ pedigree and some of the (at least for now) unique features of TweetUp might make a bigger impact than you would think at first glance.

Investors seems to agree: TweetUp has recently closed a $3.5 million first round of funding led by Index Ventures, and have taken investments from SV Angel (Ron Conway), First Round Capital, Betaworks, Steve Case, Jason Calacanis and Jeff Jarvis.

If you hadn’t heard of Russian Internet holding company Digital Sky Technologies one year ago, you probably weren’t alone. But last May — almost exactly one year ago — DST took the tech industry by storm with a $200 million investment in Facebook. It followed that up with a huge investment in Zynga, one in Groupon (and another in Facebook). Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, renowned interviewer Charlie Rose is sitting down with DST co-founder and CEO Yuri Milner to talk about Facebook’s dominance, social gaming, and more.

Rose: You were on your way to becoming a physicist, then you ended up at Wharton, then the World Bank. Where did you think your life was heading.
Milner: Back to Russia.
Rose: You put together the company in 99? What was the idea?
Milner: Internet was becoming big everywhere in the world. Russia is the place I thought it would thrive. There are only 4 countries in the world other than US: China, Russia, Japan, South Korea. There were a couple of exceptions. In Russia, the main reason is engineering talent. Backstage I looked at ACM championship (Olympics for programmers). Russia got six out of ten top places in the last decade.
Rose: When you put together the company. You wanted to create a company, DST , that would invest in Internet Companies, what is the model? How does it differ from traditional VC firms?
Milner: 10 years ago it was no different. In the last few years, it evolved toward late stage investment. This is valuation of around a billion, avg. investment of something like $100 million.
Rose; In other words, you want to see an established business. And you make this investment looking for, a payout from an IPO?
Milner: Yes. Either IPO or acquisition. I think the kind of investments we’re doing in the last 12 months are helping companies to delay IPO. Get another 1, 2 years to run to focus on the product.
Rose: Why Facebook?
Milner: It was the most fascinating company we had ever met. We’ve made investments in 5 social networks before Facebook. We thought we knew a few things about social networks. Facebook was a logical step.
Rose: Backstage you told me about an article in the NYT that spoke to you when we think about why social networking has become such a phenomenon.
Milner: Story was that human civilization started to develop with first social network. Emerged where population concentration was high. Helped propel to where we are now. Facebook is next step of creating a huge human brain to embrace hundreds of million, possibly billions of people. Facilitate exchange of information never seen in history of civilization. 10,000 pieces of information exchanged every day. In one year Facebook grew 3x. Three fold increase in information sharing per person.
Rose: You think FB will be one of most valuable companies on the internet. what would prevent it from doing that.
Milner: I think FB is important globally because it’s going to be one social graph that is unifying all civilization, maybe with a few exceptions. The company that creates one global social graph will be very important going forward. It will be Facebook, with maybe 2-3 local social networks able to sustain competition long term.

Rose: You believe in Russia they’ll skip email and go right to social networks.
Milner: Russia is one of the places where significant presence of social networks are driven by domestic players right now.
Rose: If Facebook is not dominant, where will it be?
Milner: THere are certain places in the world where the answer is out there whether FB will dominate — the four countries I already mentioned. Other places where there will be a tough battle.
Rose: What did you get out of the John Doerr Interview?
Milner: I agree that this will really change the way… When my wife bought the iPad her pattern of using the internet changed dramatically. She’s using it 10x more than before because it so useful and convenient.
Rose:Some people look at the iPad, there will be competitors. Does having the early start.. does that mean that this has not only the headstart but likelihood of gaining majority share?
Milner: I think so. I think the pace of change is really accelerating. You can become very big very fast.
Milner: I have this ration that if you divide age of entrepreneur by market cap of company. For Facebook it’s one. Every year of his life Zuckerberg has been making $1 billion for investors.
Rose: What advice to you give to people like Mark Pincus?
Milner: I’m not in business of influencing them… I’m influencing by them. I can bring some global perspective. Because we’re global we can potential bring global perspective to the table.
Rose: Where are the opportunities on the Internet?
Milner: A lot of it will be driving by US, picked up elsewhere..
Rose: Are there restrictions in terms of international? Will we see some kind of loosening of who has access to the market? Or does access present a problem?
Milner: I think China is going to go its own way. Russia is completely open as far as competition is concerned. Facebook is competing with a whole bunch of local networks. FB is blocked in China.
Rose: Do you think that will change?
Milner: I don’t know. It’s a tough question. In Russia, I don’t see any signs of it changing.
Rose: Finally, Facebook privacy. Where are we.
Milner: I think the definition of privacy is changing as everything else. People view privacy now different as opposed to five years ago. There’s something called Zuckerberg law. Similar to Moore’s law. Every 12-18 months the amount of information being shared between people is doubling. Basically means that people at large don’t really see that as a huge concern. But when they do I think Facebook is providing the tools to limit the information. I think the WP article today talks about making them more visible.
Rose: You want to be in this for a long time, how do you define a long time?
Milner: I think the companies we are investing in are in 5-10-15 year trend. I do want to stick around and watch them grow..
Rose: What is it about these goldman sachs people, you’re 75% Goldman Sachs.
Milner: They didn’t give me a job 10 years ago so I’m taking their people *laughs*.