We are pleased to announce that we will hold a TechCrunch party that will close LeWeb conference next month in Paris. LeWeb is probably one of the most important web event in the industry and certainly the most important in Europe with more than 1500 participants coming from all over the world. TechCrunch has a been a media partner for a couple of years but this year we will do a little more and we’ll hold a special event december 10th at night. → Read More
Trying to push through their search advertising deal, Google and Yahoo have revised the terms of the deal to satisfy antitrust objections by the Department of Justice, reports the WSJ (article behind the pay wall). The main concessions are putting 25 percent cap on the revenues that Yahoo can generate from the partnership and making it a two-year deal instead of a ten-year deal.
Putting a revenue cap on the deal goes a long way towards limiting the monopoly factor because Google will only be able to take a quarter of Yahoo’s search-advertising business instead of all of it. → Read More
The only thing that surprises me about this holographic storage medium being delayed is that it’s being delayed till 2009 and not 2029. I remember reading about the idea some time ago in some rag like SciAm or New Scientist and it was being trumped as a major breakthrough, but I figured it was one of those breakthroughs that never takes off. That remains to be seen, but I’m impressed that they’re going to have a product out in my lifetime (if I can be allowed to hope to live till next year). The technology is interesting, but unfortunately, the prognosis is a bit grim: at $18,000 for a writer and $180 per 300GB disc, even for high-end storage it’s a bit much for an unproven technology. Still, it seems that the investors behind it have faith in it, so maybe by the time they roll out their 800GB and 1.6TB discs there will be a real market for it. → Read More
Live video streaming seemed to be all the rage for a while, popularized by startups like Justin.tv, Ustream, Qik, Mogulus and Flixwagon.
Yahoo jumped on the hype wagon back in February 2008 by launching Y!Live, an ambitious effort put forward by internal incubator Yahoo! Brickhouse. Yahoo Live was supposed to tap into the troubled internet juggernaut’s vast online video audience by getting them to broadcast their lives in real-time.
Now Yahoo software engineer Keith Thornill has published a blog post announcing that Y!Live, which never really passed the idea stage, will effectively stop broadcasting December 3. → Read More
PerfSpot is a MySpace-line social network which has rarely merited much mention, other than by TechCrunch UK last year when it was ranked as one of the UK’s fastest-growing social networking sites, beating Facebook at the time. Now the site, which claims 24 million members, is launching a word-of-mouth marketing service called Friendvouch. One can understand the desire to quickly monetise a social network in these tougher times. But is PerSpot poised to sow the seeds of its own demise? Here’s the rub: social networks grew fast because they were effecively user generated, and trust oriented. The networks with few unique features just built as fast as they could. Perfspot – supposedly reminiscent of “Perfect Spot” – has built itself in that aggressive manner (see here or here). Others I’ve talked to say it’s really the kind of network where the aim is just to get an many ‘friends’ as possible. An why did PerfSpot grow – in the UK a least – quite so fast? A PerfSpot’s spokeman tells me they have never spammed users, just that they offer the option to import users from Gmail, etc and they even have a customer phone number that is staffed live 24×7. “In a few instances, customers have inadvertently imported contacts and decided later to change their minds. In cases where people have contacted us with their decision, we have of course manually changed their account to prevent future emails from being sent,” he says. Now PerfSpot plans to unveil a scheme called Friendvouch which essentially amounts to this: A Perfspot user subscribes to advertising offers, passes these on to their friends (pimp may be too strong a word, although it feels right), then sells… sorry, sends the details of those friends who are interested back to the advertisers. In return they get rewarded under the scheme. Friendvouch makes contact and vets the details and verifies the interest. This sounds all very well in theory. My view is that it will start off innocently enough – but gradually you will realise that your ‘friend’ just keeps sending you these offers, not because you wanted them but because they will benefit if you respond. This is when the trust will break down in the network. What’s PerfSot’s answer to this possibility of friend spam? They say Friendvouch makes contact to vet the details, but also verify interest and they’ve “capped” the number → Read More
Is the MacBook Air overpriced at $2,499 fully loaded? Seventy percent of us here at CrunchGear think so—Apple worshiper Biggs calls it a “great machine,” however—but what do we know? Nothing, apparently, if we’re to believe CNet, which comes to the conclusion that the MacBook Air, compared to other ultraportables, isn’t overpriced at all. The argument goes: ultraportables writ large are expensive, so to single out the MacBook Air is unfair. The similarly spec’d Dell Latitude E4200, for example, costs $2,495. Same thing with the Toshiba Portege R600, which is even more expensive at $2,999. → Read More
We’re going to extend the deadline to 9PM EDT, so send in those pictures, folks. Contest details can be found here. → Read More
PMA is a good five months away but that doesn’t mean the rumor mill won’t start churning its filth this early. According to Chinese forum DCHome.net, the specs for the Pentax K20D successor have been leaked. They seem pretty generic and nothing we wouldn’t expect. → Read More
As the entry fee for smartphones drops lower and lower, the wallet friendly price point found with most feature phones (or, as some might say, “dumbphones”) is beginning to lose its luster. In a day when obtaining a smartphone requires little more than 50 bucks and a 2-year promise, what’s the point of going for anything less? According to the “Mobile Market View” study released today by The Kelsey Group, 18.9% of mobile consumers in the United States are now toting smartphones, with 49.2% planning to pick one up within the next two years. Mobile search activity is also up across the board. When they surveyed mobile consumers on how they’d been using their handsets, they found the following: Downloaded or looked at maps or directions: 17.6 percent, up from 10.8 percent in 2007 Searched the Internet for products or services in their local area: 15.6 percent, up from 9.8 percent in 2007 Searched the Internet for products or services outside their local area: 14.3 percent, up from 6.4 percent in 2007 Obtained information about movies or other entertainment: 13.7 percent, up from 8.2 percent in 2007 Connected with a social network, such as MySpace or Facebook: 9.6 percent, up from 3.4 percent in 2007 To state the obvious, it’s quite apparent that consumers are more ready than ever to embrace mobile devices into their daily lives. What isn’t as apparent, however, is the responsibility the mobile industry has to get their act together and make use of this. Unless they’re damn sure they can come up with something worthwhile, it’s time to adopt open and royalty-free platforms. Drop the horribly misguided efforts to create new, proprietary platforms which do nothing but increase segmentation and confuse users. With only 19% of US mobile users owning smartphones and nearly 50% looking to jump on board, we’re going to see a whole lot of new smartphone owners soon – so lets make it as easy as possible for them to enjoy it. (Image via Jacob Bøtter) → Read More
A Flickr user named Garrett Ryan Smith uploaded the 3 billionth photo to the site today. The last big milestone was 2 billion photos, a year ago.
They’re well behind Facebook, with 10 billion. And they’re falling further behind – a year ago Facebook had just 4.1 billion photos.
Still, it’s a staggering number of photos for a site that launched in 2004. → Read More
The layoffs at Spot Runner are a lot worse than we expected. Instead of 50 to 75 people, Spot Runner is cutting much deeper—eliminating 115 jobs. Co-founder and CEO Nick Grouf characterizes this as “under 30 percent” of the company’s total headcount (which he declines to specify, but must be at least 384 people). We’ve added them to our Layoff Tracker. The majority of these cuts, he tells me, will come from the company’s local-search advertising business, which came out of the acquisition of Weblistic back in March.
That acquisition turns out to have been ill-conceived. Just because Spot Runner sells TV ads to local merchants does not mean those same businesses want to buy search marketing ads from Spot Runner as well. Grouf is now looking for “strategic alternatives” for the business, meaning he wants to dump it on another buyer. → Read More
Remember Adonomics (formerly Appaholic), the fishy analytics directory website for Facebook applications that we uncovered was used to pimp a service (the UADA, dead and buried now) from the same people who backed them (Altura Ventures), by ranking them as the biggest Facebook app creator before they ever launched? Well, we sure do.
According to AllFacebook, Adonomics has now been acquired by Adknowledge, which has made acquisitions in this space before (social ad network Cubics in December 2007). We have a feeling this was a very small deal, given the fact that Google Trends shows zero traffic for Adonomics since last April. → Read More
It’s hard out there for a VOIP solution. Skype rules the desktop and Vonage rules the den so where does an upstart like VoxOx belong? The product, founded by a group of voice networking ninjas who wanted to create a desktop-based VOIP and chat solution with full IM and social network integration. Think of it, then as a cross between Adium/Digsby and Skype with a little Grand Central thrown in. → Read More
The attendees to Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference all got to take home a build of Windows 7 to get a feel for and dig into a little bit. Unfortunately, some of the features talked up by MS at the event weren’t exactly… well, present in that build. One big one that appeared to be missing was the new task bar. While poking around looking for other new features, this intrepid developer found that there was a series of restrictions placed on enabling the new taskbar. It turns out that the build checks if you’re in an allowed domain and you’re not a temporary employee or vendor. So essentially the taskbar is supposed to be insiders only. The guy made a workaround which you can find at the page, but he warns that the reason the taskbar is locked is probably because it’s not finished: it’s a mishmash of old, new, and incomplete features. Instead of branching a PDC build and stressing the compile times, they just added in these pretty serious protections so that people wouldn’t have easy access to something that wasn’t ready to go. → Read More
Dell-owned Alienware has released another gaming laptop that might interest some of you. It’s the M17, and it has that quad-core mobile processor, the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9300. It also has CrossFireX, which is AMD’s fancy name for dual GPUs. As such, with two Mobility Radeons HD 3870, video memory goes up to 1GB. That’s quite a bit, and maybe just enough to get Crysis running at full speed. As the name implies, it’s got a 17-inch display whose resolution tops out at 1920×1200. → Read More
Regularly priced at a gravity-defying $2,649.99, you can get the Sony VAIO VGN-TZ390 for “only” $2,299.99 by using coupon code TZ340SAVE350 during checkout from SonyStyle.com. It’s a configure-to-order system, so you can add extra stuff to it if you’ve got some money burning a hole in your tailored-pants pocket. The base configuration includes: Intel Core 2 Duo U7700 at 1.33GHz, Vista Home Premium, carbon fiber casing, 1GB of RAM, DVD burner, 64GB SSD, 11.1-inch WXGA screen, 2.7-pound weight, and integrated Sprint mobile broadband connection. VAIO VGN-TZ390 Configure-to-Order [SonyStyle.com via dealnews] → Read More
Lost in a flurry of caramel and processed sugar this weekend was news that the New Xbox Experience, also known as a user interface, has leaked online. The fancy, I guess, UI for the Xbox 360 can be found at the usual places—you know what they are. Keep in mind that it’s merely a beta, the same one that was handed out to a lucky few in recent days. Gee, I wonder where the leak came from? → Read More
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