On Friday, I caught up with Carly Fiorina by phone for 30 minutes while she was in between stump speeches in her campaign for U.S. Senate for the state of California. We covered a lot of ground, including the new competition in the Republican primary from Tom Campbell who recently bowed out of the governor’s race, the need to cut spending, grow the economy, rethink government contracting, China, H1B visas, the burdens of Sarbanes-Oxley on small companies, and how technology can help women in the workforce. “In this day and age where it’s all about brain power,” says Fiorina, “the nation with the best brain power wins.”
The last time we interviewed her, she was John McCain’s “Victory Chairman” (a prematurely presumptuous title). Even though she is behind in the polls right now, she is very confident she can win the primary and ultimately knock Democrat Barbara Boxer out of the Senate. She talks a lot about cutting government spending. One good idea she proposes: “Let’s put every agency budget up on the internet for everybody to see. People would be outraged at how their money is being spent.”
Fiorina also thinks the Sarbanes-Oxley financial rules for publicly traded companies need to be revisited: “I think Sarbanes-Oxley is an example of the dangers of a rush to legislation in an emotional moment. . . . I absolutely believe that new businesses, smaller businesses shouldn’t have to comply with the full scope of Sarbanes-Oxley, and I think there’s no question that Sarbanes-Oxley has had a chilling effect on companies’ decisions to list here as opposed to perhaps listing on other exchanges around the world
You can listen to the entire interview or read the transcript below: → Read More
With Foursquare seeing fast growth and starting to be embraced by elements of the mainstream (like their new deal with Bravo), it might be decision time.
A popular part of the gaming element of the service is gaining badges, virtual tokens that show you’ve done a certain task on the service. Most of these are clever, like the Photogenic badge when you check-in to three different places with photobooths. But some are a bit more risqué, like the Douchebag badge. As Foursquare keeps growing, will there be pressure to get rid of these? → Read More
Apparently all is not well in e-book land. In an unusual move, publisher Macmillan took out an ad in the Publishers Marketplace magazine protesting the tactics being used by Amazon regarding pricing. The issue is Macmillan is trying to raise prices to $15.00 and up, and Amazon is trying to lock the prices at $9.99 and up per title. → Read More
A new development in the Amazon vs. Macmillan fiasco. Amazon just posted an announcement indicating that it will be “capitulating” to Macmillan by selling the publishers’ books for their desired prices.
Macmillan is trying to price their e-books at $15, while Amazon prices e-books at $9.99. Macmillan’s CEO John Sargent said that unless Amazon sets the price of new e-books to $15, the publisher will not distribute new books to Amazon when they are released. On Friday, Amazon basically banned titles, both paper and digital, published by Macmillan by refusing to directly sell them. And Macmillan took out an ad in the Publishers Marketplace magazine protesting the tactics being used by Amazon regarding pricing. → Read More
I sat down with Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week to talk about his business.
Brightcove isn’t the sexiest startup out there. They’re a video platform – giving websites the tools they need to host and stream video, for a fee ranging from $100/month to “six figures per year” for the largest customers. For the most part users never see the Brightcove brand. And Allaire is just fine with that. He just wants happy customers.
The company launched in 2005, has raised just over $90 million in venture capital, and is approaching profitability, he says. Allaire says he wants to build a public company, and is happy being based in Boston.
The full video is below. → Read More
Back in October, Google changed the mobile navigation space when it launched Google Maps Navigation for Android. While the product itself is solid it also has one killer feature: it’s free. This has forced the makers of other non-free navigation tools to scramble to convince users their products are still worth paying for. Verizon is the latest to do so with its VZ Navigator 5, launching tomorrow.
So what would make it worth paying for? Verizon has a few new features in this latest update, but one of the ones they are touting the most is social media integration. Specifically, you can now update your Facebook status by way of VZ Navigator. This in and of itself isn’t that interesting, but you can also send out your location to Facebook with this feature, apparently. → Read More
Ahh Steve. You can always be depended on to serve up a healthy dose of crazy. It’s just fortunate that people put up with your own special brand of crazy that no other CEO could put up with. For example, at a company wide Town Hall, Steve Jobs had some very special things to say about Adobe and Google and their business practices. → Read More
Last September, YourVersion took the stage at TechCrunch50 as the DemoPit People’s Choice winner, after receiving the most votes from conference attendees. The startup’s goal is fairly simple: to help you find content that you’re interested in, in real time. And now it’s bringing its application to the iPhone. You can download the free app here.
The app is pretty straightforward. First, you enter some topics that you’re interested in. Every time you launch the app, you’ll be presented with a list of these topics. Clicking on one will bring you to a list of recent blog posts, tweets, and other content that contains those topic keywords. You can also filter through this content by source, allowing you to see only content from Twitter, news sites, and so on. If you’ve already set up an account on the YourVersion website, you can sync that with the app (any items you bookmark or share from the app will be reflected on the site as well). → Read More
Orli Yakuel noticed that Google has quietly added a new icon in the ‘Compose Mail’ window of its free webmail service Gmail, enabling users to run search queries from within the interface and insert results and URLs straight into drafted e-mails or open chat conversations.
This is an expansion of a Google Labs feature, simply dubbed ‘Google Search’, that was introduced back in April 2009 as an optional setting in Gmail. → Read More
It used to be that Twitter followers were worth something, or at least people thought they were worth something, which is the same thing. It was only about a year ago when Jason Calacanis was offering $250,000 to buy a spot on Twitter’s Suggested User List, which would have guaranteed him perhaps a million followers before Twitter ended up revamping the SUL to be less monolithic. He never got on the list, but if his offer would have come to roughly $0.25 per follower.
Today, you can “buy” followers on eBay for less than a penny each. Some of the Buy-It-Now listings include 5,000 followers for $20 (which comes to 0.4 penny/follower), $5,500 for $40 (0.7 penny/follower), $1,100 for $10 (0.9 penny/follower). You are not actually buying followers outright (Twitter doesn’t allow people to transfer their followers), but rather services which “guarantee” getting your account up to the promised number of followers through “proven and safe methods.” Some even only count reciprocal followers (followers who follow back). → Read More
Columnist’s Note: In a little under 24 hours, I have to submit the final manuscript of my next book. My original deadline – January 1st – sailed past weeks ago, as did the one-week extension I awarded myself on the basis that no-one does any work in the first week of the year. This last deadline, though, is immovable: lawyers and editors and typesetters and proof-readers are standing by; the thing has to be printed at some point. I haven’t slept for days, my blood is an 80:20 Caffeine:Provigil blend and I can’t feel my fingers. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t have time to write this week’s column.
And yet, I still have a contract with TechCrunch – one that’s no less binding or legally enforceable than the one I have with my publisher. By hook or by crook, 1000 words have to appear in this space. I briefly considered outsourcing this week’s column to India – or maybe employing some Indians on H1Bs here; I gather that’s the future. But then I remembered that employing people costs money. Next I considered asking one of my journalist friends to take over for the week; but there’s always the danger that they’ll be better at the job than I am and I’ll find myself unemployed. Again. I needed a solution which a) fills space, b) is free and c) is unlikely to put me out of a job.
And that’s when it hit me – I should commission a Guest Post. → Read More
A WebOS port of the popular GB/CGA emulator is pretty rocking’, even though it only runs at 90% speed on a good day. The hackers who figured all this out will get it back up to speed shortly but don’t expect to download this at the Apps Market or whatever Palm is calling it. This is pure homebrew. Click through for Zelda. → Read More
Editor’s note: This is a guest post penned by Ethan Nicholas, developer of the million-dollar iPhone game iShoot and the newly released Kim Rhode’s Outdoor Shooting. Before the iPad was even announced, Nicholas was already conceiving his next game with the tablet device in mind.
The Internet is a funny place. After Apple announced its new iPad, I cringed at the hate being directed its way on sites such as Slashdot and Digg. Even the guys at Penny Arcade, whom I normally agree with, said “that iPad presentation had to be the worst thing I’ve even seen on on the Apple stage” and that Apple had failed to make a case for the device.
If you believe them, the iPad is going to be a massive flop.
Well, the unwashed masses on the Internet also predicted that the iPod would be a failure. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now. → Read More
Calvin Chin is an American entrepreneur who lives in Shanghai. He founded Qifang, a P2P lending site for Chinese student loans. You can read more about Qifang here. He attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this last week, where China was the center of attention. We asked him to write this guest post and share his unique perspective as an American building a startup in the heart of China.
Here at Davos it seems China keeps coming up in two ways – neither of them positive. One, with the worst of the crisis behind us, people are turning from last year’s hopes of China as economic savior to China as free-rider keeping its currency cheap, bullying its minorities and shirking its responsibilities in Copenhagen. Two, in the tech community, seems everyone is talking about Google, Chinese government hackers and censorship.
My view, and I think it’s one that many in China would probably share, is that while free access to information and the rest of the world is inherently a good thing, so is political stability. The Chinese government has earned a lot of slack for raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and if things did go out of control a heck of a lot of people would get hurt. So even if they want China to be plugged in to the rest of the world to encourage innovation and Chinese tech entrepreneurship (which I think they do), they’d put that priority after getting most Chinese people better lives. → Read More
Electric car company Tesla Motors has filed for a $100 million IPO. There were rumors recently floating around that the company, which is led by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, would go public “soon.” One interesting tidbit from the filing: Musk only takes $1 in yearly salary. → Read More
Sharp eyed reader Mike noticed a little humor in the Nexus One manual screen shots. It looks like the the writers weren’t content with the name “Jane Doe” for a change. Hubris –noun excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance. (thanks to Mike for the tip) → Read More
Sometimes tips come in that seem too good to be true. Take today, for example. I got a tip that Bill Gates’ new site, The Gates Notes, was running on a Linux-powered server. This would be ironic since Gates is of course the founder of Microsoft, which is Linux’s biggest competitor in the server market. It would be the equivalent of catching Gates or CEO Steve Ballmer being caught using (and not just signing) a MacBook at a conference. So is it true?
A quick search on Netcraft shows that thegatesreport.com sure enough looks to be running on the Linux OS. But wait. The results also say that web server is Microsoft-IIS/7.0. That doesn’t sound right, so what gives? Well, it turns out that because Gates is using Akamai to mirror his sites’ content in the event of massive traffic (or more specifically, something like a DDoS attack), this data is being filtered through there. Akamai uses Linux for its servers, so that’s what OS is being passed back to Netcraft. But at the same time, to make things more confusing, the Akamai servers are still passing back the correct server header for Gates’ site: Microsoft-IIS/7.0. → Read More
Every year men and women feel the same anxiety over Valentine’s Day. Will he ask me out on my dream date? Will she like the jewelry I picked out for her? Will I be sitting at home alone? But all any of us really want to do is snuggle and say that we actually have someone to hang out with that day. So why not eliminate the anxiety and buy yourself a girlfriend. No, I’m not talking about a prostitute, and I’m not talking about a blow up doll. I’m talking about 100 pounds of silicone lady love. The idea of a robot companion → Read More
Looking at the iPad SDK, programmers are starting to say that the new version of the iPhone OS will support video calls, file downloads, and some sort of multitasking. There’s also several other features in the SDK that won’t work with the iPad, but would be applicable to the iPhone in it’s current configuration. → Read More
The following guest post was written by Edo Segal (@edosegal).
Earlier last week, as the day was coming to an end and I was speaking with my 5 year old at bedtime we shared the highlights of our day. I started by telling him the company that created the iPhone is about to come out with . . . I paused—how do I describe it?—well, a “big iPhone” I said. About this big, I gestured holding my hands about 10 inches apart. “Wow, Amazing!” was his instant reaction as his eyes lit up. Even my 5-year-old knows that bigger is better, especially when it comes to tactile interfaces. In fact, the advantages are probably more obvious to his generation than it is to ours.
For this first generation born into a world of the iPhone, Wii and soon the Xbox’s Project Natal, the distance between the metaphor created by these devices and the reality of their interaction is constantly shrinking. My wife is currently doing her PhD research on the merits of tangible interfaces for young children in education and the data is telling. There is no doubt that there is great potential to enhance learning with tactile computing. Through that lens the “Bigger iPhone” is akin to a bigger yard to play in or a bigger room. This insight is telling. For these kids the iPhone’s primary function is by no means a phone. It is first and formost a gaming device, followed by a networked camera, followed by everything else. Through this lens one can see the importance of the iPad in the historical trajectory of our human-computer interaction. What’s lost in all the complaints about what the iPad is lacking (multitasking, camera, etc.) is that people need to view the iPad on more than its merits as a first-generation product. Rather, they need to understand it in context of the evolutionary arc of computing. → Read More
