Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing, is back on his one-man crusade to defend the App Store from the latest wave of criticism pointed in its direction.
This time, Apple is having to battle the news of Facebook’s all-star developer Joe Hewitt quitting the platform, more high profile app rejections, and the rise of Android as an increasingly viable alternative to the iPhone. Schiller has granted BusinessWeek’s Arik Hesseldahl what the publication says is his first “wide-ranging interview on the matter”. Unfortunately, Schiller doesn’t really say anything to quell the growing unrest in the developer community — instead, he’s offered some finely-tuned PR-speak that will placate the vast majority of iPhone users, who are only vaguely aware of the App Store controversies and just need a reminder that Apple is still one of the good guys. But it may only make developers angrier. → Read More
Earlier this month college textbook rental company Chegg raised $112M as part of a combined Series D and debt round, bringing the total raised by the company to a massive $144M. Competitor BookRenter will tomorrow announce a Series A round of $6M, raised from Storm Ventures and Adams Capital Management. BookRenter has only raised a fraction of the capital of their competitor Chegg, but the company claims that it is growing at over 300 percent, year-over-year. The companies are loading their war-chests to fight over a fiercely competitive college textbook rental market.
Both Chegg and BookRenter work on a similar principal – students are able to save money by loaning textbooks for a fixed duration, usually a semester, and end up spending only the fraction of the cost of outright purchases. Textbooks are expensive, and often have a limited lifespan – these attributes, combined with a market of poor students looking to save a few dollars, have resulted in the textbook rental market exploding in recent years. → Read More
Rupert Murdoch is pointing a gun to Google’s head, and Microsoft is helping him pull back the trigger. For the past few weeks, Murdoch and his officers at News Corp. have been very vocal about their distaste for Google and their desire to lead other media companies in a boycott of sorts.
Murdoch keeps threatening to stop letting Google index the WSJ.com and his other media sites, and wants other news sites to join him in this self-imposed silence. The folks at Microsoft’s Bing think this is a great idea. Not only that, but the FT reports that Microsoft is in fact in discussions with News Corp. and other publishers about the possibility of paying them to remove their sites from Google’s search index. → Read More
Your Roku box just got a whole lot more interesting. Roku, if you remember, makes the Roku player, a small device that sits next to your TV and plays Netflix, Amazon Video, and MLB selections. Roku has just added ten new channels to that line-up and built a fascinating platform for adding more down the line. The current channels will include: blip.tv, Facebook Photos, Flickr, FrameChannel, Mediafly, MobileTribe, Motionbox, Pandora, Revision3 and TWiT. More channels will be available here shortly. → Read More
We had a great interview with Twitter COO Dick Costolo at the Real-Time CrunchUp on Friday. Costolo always gives the audience a few good nuggets of news and handles the more difficult questions with ease. He’s a pro.
After the conference I reviewed some of the backstage footage we shot of Costolo before he went on stage for the formal interview. We ask lots of great questions – about Twitter’s revenue, business model, details of the search deals, chances of getting bought next year, and the lovely bathrooms they have at the office. He manages to entertain the entire TechCrunch editorial staff while revealing absolutely nothing. We even slip in a question about Feedburner (Costolo cofounded the company and sold it to Google in 2007) at the end, but sadly we ran out of tape before he answered.
One thing Costolo does clear up – even though I’ve known him for five years now, I apparently have been mispronouncing his name the whole time.
The video is below: → Read More
I’d advise against following the directions given in this guide to defraggling, but it’s an interesting read. [via Reddit] → Read More
It seems that a few Apple warranties have been deemed void due to the fact that the owner was a a smoker, and consequently their Macs were contaminated. The Applecare contract says nothing about this, and the list of toxic materials includes other such dangerous household items as talcum powder and isopropyl alcohol. There’s a long discussion of consumer rights and nanny laws and all that sort of thing just waiting to be pulled out of this story, but let’s not and say we did. → Read More
If you ever sit next to me on a plane you will notice that I have a small ritual that I prepare every time I reach cruising altitude. I begin by pulling out my iPod touch and then my Movie Wedge. The Movie Wedge is a little bean bag with a lip for holding up MP3 and video players. That’s it. It’s amazingly great. We talked about the Movie Wedge a while back and we’re happy to report that they’ve decided to give us 10 to give away to all and sundry. → Read More
Yesterday I spent the day at TechCrunch’s ‘Real Time Crunch-up’. This despite having no idea what a ‘Crunch-up’ actually is.
The important thing is that Erick had asked me to help moderate his panel about marketing within ‘real-time streams’, which is a subject close to my heart. So close in fact, that had he asked me to help moderate a panel about child rape and it’s place in the public school system I couldn’t have been keener to weigh in.
I’ll get back to my own contribution in a moment, but first, as a courtesy to my paymasters, I should probably relate a few of my ‘key learnings’ from the event.
1) There is such a thing as a ‘key learning’, a phrase which I heard at least three times during the day, and which I gather is what an ‘opinion’ becomes when spoken by an idiot. → Read More
Porn is all about instant gratification. A business reliant on bringing its customers the goods fast, this industry has always had a history of being on the forefront of new technologies as they emerge for better products and faster distribution. Revolutionizing porn and how its enjoyed with the adoption of the VHS home video, the porn industry grew from a seedy underground sex scene into a $10 billion dollar a year business. Nowadays, the very same industry that once helped mainstream VHS win the battle against Betamax in the 70s and 80s, is facing the problem of staying relevant in today’s “I need it NOW” society. Porn, one of the earliest adopters of e-commerce and Internet broadcasting, is being threatened by the very instant gratification that has made it so profitable. Torrents and free video sites have seriously threatened the porn industry’s business model. Now anyone with a web cam and computer can be a porn star on the Internet. Are people willing to pay for porn anymore? What is the porn industry doing to set themselves apart from all the amateur porn makers out there? Looking towards future tech like mobile streaming, smart phone apps, and instant downloads to VOD systems, porn leaders are changing their business model in an attempt to stay relevant and profitable.
→ Read More
We’ve seen in the past year that Hulu gets testy about their video content being used on other sites or platforms, with Boxee and TV.com both forced to remove Hulu content from their sites and applications. Now startup Rippol is facing the same fate.
Rippol just publicly launched their video discovery sites at yesterday’s Real-Time CrunchUp, which combines both complex algorithms with user suggestions to surface interesting video content.
Less than a few hours after Rippol launched, the startup’s co-founder Aaron Crayford received notice from Hulu that the video embeds on Rippol from Hulu were in violation of the terms of service which state that embeds are for personal, non-commercial use only. While Rippol says that they won’t place ads in the videos or around the videos, Hulu says that the simple fact that Rippol plans to make money from the entire content service violates the TOS. Instead, Hulu offered Rippol the ability to us its site map, which is a feed that links back to Hulu for video playback. Don’t embed, says Hulu. Link instead. Here’s the email notice: → Read More
Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Because you’re not going anywhere for a while. Wired has a great article up right now that reminds me of Wired magazine content in their glory days in the early 2000s. The object of the piece is to examine the feasibility of disappearing completely in the digital age. They gave writer Evan Ratcliff a month’s head start to plan his means of vanishing, then set the entire internet on him once he’d executed his plan.
I’m only about halfway through it right now but it’s an easy recommendation if, like me, you’re lolling on the couch, sipping coffee and browsing the net. → Read More
Skype CEO Josh Silverman can’t stop smiling in this video interview we recorded in Menlo Park this morning. And no wonder – despite serious legal and spinoff drama, Silverman has managed to close his multi-billion dollar spinoff of Skype from eBay. His legal troubles have evaporated. Skype is growing like a weed. And he’s managed to keep his job running the business. Life is good.
All he has to do now is manage board meetings with two of the more forceful personalities on the planet – new investor Marc Andreessen and cofounder/new investor Niklas Zennstrom.
Well, that and keep this train on the tracks. Skype has exploded to over half a billion users, and is adding 300,000 new ones every day, Silverman says in the interview. 1/3 of usage is video, despite the fact that video calls can only be 1-1. Voice calls are multi-party. And revenue is cruising along at $185 million/quarter with 24.2% margins. Up to 20 million people are using Skype at any one time.
Full video is below: → Read More
Google Calendar is testing out a new feature that should make scheduling events a tad easier than it used to be by allowing you to see at a glance if the event you’re creating will conflict with the schedules of the people you’re inviting. Dubbed “Sneak Preview”, the feature’s name is perhaps more exciting than its actual function, but it should prove to be quite useful. The feature is apparently in a limited rollout right now, so don’t be surprised if you don’t have access to it.
Once you’ve activated Sneak Preview (assuming you have access to it), whenever you create a new event you’ll see a new viewing mode that displays a calendar alongside your event details. This calendar will show the schedules of each of the people you’ve invited to the event (provided you’re a friend or coworker with access to that information), and the proposed time for your event will appear as a semi-transparent blue box so you can quickly see where you might have conflicts. You can click each guest’s name to show/hide them on the calendar if some are more important than others. → Read More
Most TechCrunch readers have never heard of Tracking202. But affiliate advertisers love the service, which manages advertising campaigns on Facebook, MySpace and other platforms. In fact, Tracking202 was at the center of the Facebook click-fraud issue that we reported on earlier this year. Tracking202 users saw a certain number of clicks on ads via the Tracking202 interface, and far more on their Facebook admin pages.
The company is self funded and has a number of customers who pay for the premium hosted version of the service. Today they’ve announced they’re selling the business to Bloosky, an affiliate ad network. Here’s the email sent out to users this morning: → Read More
Editor’s note: More and more mobile app developers are deciding to make apps for Android, even though it still doesn’t have the same reach as the iPhone. In this guest post Kevin Nakao, the VP of Mobile for Whitepages, makes the argument for taking the Android plunge now (as he is preparing to with a new Whitepages Android app launching next week). Follow him on Twitter @knakao
Mobile games publisher Gameloft might have thrown in the towel on Android, but that is a mistake. I certainly understand why they gave up on Android. Since launching in February of this year, our own Whitepages Caller ID app has become a top ten grossing Android application, and yet we’ve seen less than $54,000 in revenue. While our iPhone app download counts are in the millions, our Android app downloads are a mere 17 percent of this volume.
Despite our meager return on investment this year, I believe that the real potential for Android app developers lies in the New Year. Here’s why: → Read More
Good afternoon, readers! What does Santa have in his bag for you today? Interestingly enough, he was unable to bring his bag because this printer is far too big for it. We present, for your inspection, the Kodak 5250 all-in-one: a scanning, printing, faxing, photofinishing machine that can best the big boys in the printer race. Best of all, the 5250 has built-in WiFi so you can stick the printer on your network and print from any computer in the house. Take a look at Kodak’s 5250 product page and then click through to figure out how to win. → Read More
Although only a few Wii games support the light gun interface, if you’re a heavy player you may want to look into getting the $39.99 Wand Action Pack if you’re planning on adding a controller to your line-up.
This kit includes Nyko’s Wand Wiimote – essentially an exact clone of Nintendo’s product – along with a sleeve and gun attachment for light gun games. → Read More
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