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Back in February we wrote about a new startup called FanPulse that takes the check-in gaming mechanic popularized by Foursquare and applies it exclusively to sporting events. The premise is simple — checking in at a game lets you quickly connect with other sports fans, and also makes it easy to get real-time stat updates and even sports-related discounts (you can check it from your living room or the stadium itself). Today, just in time for the World Cup, FanPulse has some news to share: it’s forged deals with major professional sports organizations including the NHL and Golden State Warrors, it’s launched a new website to compliment its iPhone application, and it’s disclosing that it is part of the latest batch of companies to come out of the the Y Combinator program.

When FanPulse, which is headquartered at San Francisco’s Dogpatch Labs, launched in February, it was available only as a free iPhone application. Now it has a web presence that includes the same functionality available on the iPhone; co-founder Vishwas Prabhakara says that both a mobile webapp and support for Android are on the way this summer. The FanPulse homepage features a stream of current sports events that lets you quickly catch up on scores from whatever league you’re interested in (in light of the World Cup you’ll notice that soccer matches are currently most prominently displayed, but the site also features today’s MLB games).

Clicking on a current game gives you an option to ‘Check-in’ there, which immediately lets you start interacting with other fans that are watching or attending the same event. As with Foursquare, you can earn badges and points by checking into these games, and there’s a leaderboard that is reset once a week. You can engage with other fans using the ‘shout’ feature (which is effectively a forum created for each game) and by making predictions. So far, the site has been drawing strong engagement numbers, with each registered user spending 18 minutes on an average visit.

FanPulse also recently launched a new ‘Pro Account’ option that will appeal to quite a few sports fans. The biggest draw is an alerts system that will send you an iPhone push notification whenever there’s a in an-game event that you’ve deemed to be especially interesting (for example, a baseball game in the bottom of the 9th with the bases loaded, or a soccer game that’s gone to a shootout). ‘Pro’ users also have access to special badges and animated emoticons that they can use in their ‘Shouts’ (the messages users post in a game’s chat room).

Finally, the company has been busy at work signing partnerships with various professional sports teams and leagues. It signed a deal with the National Hockey League last season that would reward fans checking into a hockey game with a special badge that would give them discounts at NHL shops. It also did a deal with the Golden State Warriors that would offer any fan to check into a game a discount code for tickets to a Warriors homegame. This turned out to be very effective, drawing a 8.3% conversion rate. Prabhakara says that the company is currently in talks with several organizations and is hoping to further expand their partnerships next season.

There are quite a few other companies looking to combine social networking with sports. In fact, Y Combinator has invested in at least two of them: FanChatter, which helps sports teams boost engagement during and after games, and 140bets, which is a platform used for interacting with sports and other events in real-time.

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This morning, we got a tip that despite all the hubbub about Jason Calacanis deleting his Facebook profile, it was still active. Sure enough, it was. So what gives?

We emailed Calacanis to find out what the deal was — was he just bluffing about deleting his account? It’s hard to believe that was the case considering just how vocal he’s been against Facebook, and he even has video proof of him deleting the account. But as the video shows, there’s actually a 14-day wait period before you can actually delete your account. In those 14-days, your profile is simply “deactivated.” But as of this morning (way more than 14 days after that video was shot), Calacanis’ account wasn’t deleted, nor was it even inactive, it was there in full glory (complete with a cute “Facebook Ghost” picture).

It turns out that a few third party sites may have been keeping his profile alive without him realizing it. For example, his YouTube favorites were getting imported into his stream automatically, and he had to sever that connection to make sure his account remained inactive over the 14 days so Facebook could delete it. We’ve come out in support of Facebook during some of this press backlash, but this is pretty ridiculous if true.

Flat out: it should not be this hard and complicated to delete your account if you want to. If you hit the “delete” button (after making sure you really want to do that, of course), it should automatically sever any ties third-party sites have into your profile and delete the account.

Update: Calacanis writes to us to clarify one bit: “the third party sites didn’t turn it back on… i needed to login to a 3rd party site that i used FB connect on (i think last week)… might have been an iphone app, i can’t remember. so then my account goes back on and all the connected services start flooding it.” He then continues, “but who knows… the stuff is so confusing!“

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on this and will update when we hear back. Meanwhile, below find an email Calacanis sent to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg (his wink & smile partner), and TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington (who emailed him about why his account was still active). He’s given us permission to print this email in full. Obviously, he’s pissed off. And Facebook just a few minutes ago did actually remove his account.

Subject: Re: did you ever actually delete your fb page?

(cc zuck/sandberg)

Seems my personal Facebook got turned back on by a 3rd party service
that logged into it… which shows the lock in Facebook has. you
signup for a 3rd party service with Facebook connect, then delete your
facebook page and then can’t get into that service! Then when it goes
back on, Youtube starts posting your youtube favorites again… so i
have to go to youtube and turn that feature off.

There is no way to delete your page from the Facebook global
navigation–you have to do a google search to find Facebook’s hidden
delete page! insane.

Then if you want to delete your page it takes a half-dozen steps AND
they still don’t delete it… they leave it on for ANOTHER TWO weeks
in case you change your mind.

Zuck/Sheryl: you should have one click delete from the Account
settings page. This is the kind of little details that makes Facebook
look heavy handed.

Zuck2/Sheryl2: Would it kill you to put an “export all” feature on
Facebook? Just doing that would make Facebook look so magnanemous and
it would get the Government to stop looking at you guys as their big
target. You could then say “you can delete everything with one click
and you can export everything with one click.”

The lock in on Facebook is absurd….

If you guys made these two simple changes the folks upset at Facebook
could say “wow… facebook is changing their ways and listening to
users!”

Would it kill you guys to have an export feature like every other
major service on the planet?!?! 🙂

best j

And here’s the follow-up email he sent to us:

You have my permission to print entire email….

my only goal is to see Facebook treat users better. to use your metaphor, they are pissing in our flowerbed. the flowerbed being internet users.

i don’t have anything personal against mark… in fact, after the D conference i feel sympathy for him. he obviously doesn’t feel good about the reaction to his service.

paradoxically, they are the most talented product team in the internet space and yet they don’t add export features or data portability or open standards for things like Like. they could build them in a day or two–certainly a week or two–and the world would love them EVEN MORE.

Update: And now Facebook is effectively saying Calacanis is lying.

“Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service. Get it now.”

When Hotmail launched in 1996 it grew fast. Very fast. It was one of the first free webmail providers, and they had a killer marketing idea – add a tagline at the end of every single email sent from hotmail to promote the service. Every time you sent an email you were spreading a marketing message virally.

That led to a $400 million acquisition by Microsoft and the beginning of the “viral” age on the Internet. There wasn’t a business plan put in front of a venture capitalist for years that didn’t have a slide or two on how their product would spread virally via its users.

Today Hotmail will finally kill off the tagline. “We want to start respecting the inbox” Brian Hall, Microsoft’s general manager of the Windows Live Business Group, told me yesterday. He says it’s still a great way to get new users. “But some people don’t think it’s professional,” he says.

Hall also says that Microsoft will cut back on the number of marketing messages they send to Hotmail users. In fact, if users aren’t opening those emails, Hall says they’ll stop sending them entirely. Users can also choose to have all emails stopped as well. When asked why they send them at all, he said that some users actually seem to like them and use them to discover new products and services at Microsoft

It is over. The SCO’s long-running lawsuit against Novell over a number of patents involved around Unix copyright. In short, SCO claimed to own Unix even after Novell bought it back near the turn of the century. SCO’s patent-trolling has been shameless. The once great company reduced itself to a lawsuit machine and essentially attacked IBM and Novell for years. You can read all about the mess here, but trust me, this has been one of the nastiest patent wars in recent history.

The judge’s final decision was based on a number of false claims by SCO as well as “financial interest in the litigation.”

Read more…

A look at Apple’s new developer licensing agreement a few days ago revealed that the Cupertino-based company may have just completely blocked Google’s AdMob from serving ads on the iPhone and iPad. According to the new terms of the agreement, only “independent” ad-serving companies will be able to serve ads. AdMob, because it’s “an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple” (i.e. Google), would be restricted from serving ads on apps for the iPhone. AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui confirmed this on Wednesday in an official response from AdMob. Apple has yet to issue a public statement on this issue, but the true winners in terms of ad networks appear to be independent ad networks such as Millennial Media, Greystripe, Medialets and others who can all continue to serve ads on the immensely popular mobile platform.

Some independent networks have been quick to commend Apple. Yesterday, Greystripe issued a statement on its blog expressing its pleasure at the turn of events. “We are pleased that Apple’s new terms and conditions explicitly allow independent ad networks, like Greystripe, to operate on the iPhone and iPad platforms,” writes marketing director Dane Holewinski. “It confirms the value of 3rd party ad networks that enable developers to earn great revenue with their applications.” Greystripe CEO Michael Chang commented to us, “the new terms and conditions provide an advantage for independent mobile ad networks to secure their share of the rapidly expanding market.”

In the long run, however, the picture may not be all rosy for these independent ad networks. Following Google’s whopping $750 million acquisition of competitor AdMob and Apple’s $275 million pickup of Quattro Wireless, Greystripe, Millennial, Jumptap and others must have been salivating at the thought of similarly huge exits.

But the new terms put these networks in an awkward position. If they are acquired by a company, the acquirer can’t be a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple. So that rules out Microsoft, any telecommunications company (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon), Nokia, HP (because of the Palm acquisition), and RIM. So what does this leave? Yahoo, AOL and media companies, including News Corp, Comcast and others. The clause essentially limits the pool of giants who can actually buy one of the remaining mobile ad networks and still serve ads on iPhones, iPods, and iPads.

This is all assuming that Apple enforces the rules uniformly and makes no exceptions. Ultimately Apple can decide to let whoever they want serve ads on their devices. But if they do make an exception, the likelihood that Apple would allow a Microsoft-owned company to serve ads is small if Google isn’t allowed to do the same.

Microsoft could very well buy an independent network, and sacrifice the ability to advertise on the iPhone. Similar to Google, Microsoft has their own OS, and can work to build up that product and serve ads. But Ad networks also have to consider the financial risk of being excluded from the ad ecosystem for iPhone apps. In terms of usage, Apple has about 28 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, according to recent stats from Nielsen. While Android ad impressions are on the rise, the Apple OS is the dominant platform. According to Millennial’s April stats, the Apple OS took a 62% share of Smartphone impressions. And the mobile advertising market is a billion dollar market and is only expected to grow by leaps and bounds over the next few years.

The other twist to this is the FTC’s rumored interest in the debacle. Apple’s policy seems to block specifically Google-AdMob, but of course the excluded list could grow longer if Microsoft or another tech company bought an independent ad network.

In the end, it looks like Apple’s policy could hurt both Google and the independent ad networks at the same time.

Photo credit/Flickr/Brian Hillegras