FriendFeed is down right now. It has been down for the past 30 minutes or so. Sadly, that’s not news anymore. Not because, like Twitter of old, it’s down all the time, but rather, because it seems like no one really uses it anymore. Case in point, it’s been down for over 30 minutes and there are maybe 50 total tweets about it (and several are from the same users).
That means that of all the tens of millions of people around the world on Twitter, a full 50 of them care enough to tweet when FriendFeed is down. It’s hard to imagine any other service that got to the size FriendFeed did (which, granted, wasn’t huge), only getting 50 tweets if it goes down. → Read More
We’re two weeks away from the SXSW Interactive, a drinking festival with a side of tech that takes place each year in Austin, Texas (before the larger SXSW film and music portions). While the conference itself is interesting, more interesting is usually the “next big thing” that comes out of it. And I think I already know what it will be this year.
Three years ago, Twitter famously was the talk of the conference (it won the web award that year). While sure, it didn’t explode into mainstream popularity until sometime later, the writing was on the wall for the early-adopters who started using it there or shortly thereafter. Two years ago, it was arguably Twitter again that was the must-use service throughout the conference as it continued to mature. But last year saw some new entries rise. Both Foursquare and Gowalla launched at the conference, with Foursquare gaining much of the momentum coming out of the conference (as some of us predicted). And this year, I suspect it will be largely an extension of that, with location services in general being the talk of the show. → Read More
Get that wallet ready, Nikon’s annual instant rebate program is starting on the 28th. Pretty much always a good deal, Nikon loves to tempt the weak with their instant rebate offers on lenses and gear that they roll out on a yearly basis. Case in point – I bought my D300 back in 2008 (with the oh so popular 18-200 VR) and justified it to my wife as a “really great deal” because of the rebate. Luckily she’s a patient woman, and we’re still married. → Read More
To Canon shooters, all Nikon cameras are evil. But none are truly EVIL (Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens). That may change soon, if the current tease campaign underway in France is any indication.
These little cards, counting down to March 5th if we assume one per business day — coincidentally, Nikon has scheduled a press conference in the UK for that very day! So far, the only clue is “Je suis fun,” meaning “I am fun,” which really could mean anything. But Nikon, like most camera companies, releases its point-and-shoots in batches (“je” is singular), and its DSLRs aren’t really supposed to be “fun.” So the speculation is that it’s something in between. → Read More
From now on, you won’t even hear the black helicopters coming. Just a breath of wind rustling your blinds, and then — bag on the head! At least, that’ll be the case if the NSA gets hold of some of these Blue Edge rotor blades from Eurocopter. They’re not only shaped like a sword you might find in Final Fantasy XIII, but they have little mechanized flaps that are automatically adjusted in order to reduce the wup-wup-wup noise that results from the blade cutting through turbulent air.
Audio inside. I’d much rather have these things flying overhead than the usual. → Read More
Short Version: Samsung’s SyncMaster XL2370 is a 23-inch LED backlit monitor that retails for around $300. At under eight pounds and less than two inches thick, there’s a lot to like here. → Read More
There’s not much a humble blogger can do when faced with such a straightforward product. It’s work gloves, with LEDs that attach in a number of places so you can see what you’re doing. In the immortal words of Jay-Z, “What more can I say?” → Read More
A month ago, Jason Calacanis went on a rant about why everyone should boycott comScore. He felt they were using sketchy tactics to bully people into their pay-to-play model for measuring web analytics. He also noted that their free competitors like Quantcast, Google, and Compete would soon eat their lunch. Both Quantcast and Google (Analytics) offer direct counting of pageviews (but even these methods can be abused). But you may wonder how exactly Compete gets its numbers? It appears, that some sketchy tactics are (or at least were) employed, as well.
We were recently pointed to this post from last month by Ben Edelman, a Harvard privacy advocate. In it, he details the data the Upromise toolbar collects and sends out. This toolbar is used by college students looking for savings on various items across the web, and can be quite useful. But until a few weeks ago, it appears they were also sending web browsing (and more personal) data to Compete without anyone’s knowledge. Writes Edelman: → Read More
Do you like PC hardware? Do you like graphs? Well, tell the secretary to hold all your calls, because you’ve just booked yourself an afternoon of CPU feature inspection. Okay, it doesn’t sound that exciting, but if you’re at all interested in processors or PC hardware, you probably owe it to yourself to check out the real-world consequences of multiple cores, hyperthreading, and other things that most people would write off as technical gibberish. → Read More
On Tuesday we posted an internal MySpace product document presenting detailed recommendations on rebuilding the MySpace developer/apps platform. Included in that post was an embed of the document hosted on Scribd. MySpace has chosen to send a DMCA notice to Scribd to have that document removed, and Scribd complied. MySpace didn’t copy us on the notice, or send any other notice to us about the content.
So we’re putting it on our own servers. You can download it in all its glory here.
If you want to fight this, MySpace, you have to come through our lawyers. Now I’m all riled up. → Read More
As we reported last night, Yammer has just announced that it will begin allowing users to sign up for the microblogging service without requiring email addresses that are associated with their company domain names (e.g. jason@company.com). This new feature, called Communities, will open the service to less formal organizations, and even families. And it also opens the door to B2B collaboration, which is how Yammer seems to be primarily marketing the new feature Communities will launch on March 1.
This is a big move for the company. On a conference call this morning, Yammer CEO David Sacks said that one of the problems with Yammer so far has been that communication on the service has been restricted to internal use within a company. The issue many people ran into was that they’d want to collaborate with their clients or business partners as well, but didn’t have a way to do that without inviting them to their company’s internal network (which often wasn’t an option). → Read More
One of the most potentially disruptive startups of the last ten years is emerging into the light this week. And I honestly don’t say that lightly.
Christian Lanng, a former builder of deep e-commerce and security services for the Danish government is co-founder of TradeShift along with a very hard-core team which includes John Bosak who created XML, who is on the board.
But what is perhaps most startling is the re-emergence of early Skype investor Morten Lund on the project. Lund was made famous in tech circles both for his early Skype investment but also for going personally bankrupt two years ago.
TradeShift, which has been operating under the stealth name of Porta till now, is aiming at a very, very big target.
It wants to disrupt how banks and credit card companies process payments between any kind of business, and use the Internet to do it. → Read More
Google News is testing out a new design, as I reported earlier this month. It includes trending topics on the left and new personalization options. But today someone in the bucket test noticed something different. The sharing options changed. Each story can be shared via email, Google Reader, or Facebook.
Most people won’t see this. It is just in a limited test. But it does suggest that Google is starting to seriously think about ways to drive more sharing of content across the Web. But why push content to Facebook and not to Twitter? And for that matter where is the Google Buzz button? → Read More
Our constant rants on the PR Industry do not go unnoticed. In return our tips box is filled with humorous anecdotes, articles and now, a video. Here are two we’ve received in the last week. Which we’re posting in honor of Yahoo breaking its own embargo, and the AP sending the launch of CODE advisors completely sideways by breaking an embargo by nearly 24 hours. Outcast PR was on both stories.
First, the job description. Even a decade ago everyone thought PR was just about the worst job around. Forbes did a roundup called “Five Crappiest Tech Jobs,” and “PR account executive for a dot com startup” was on the list. Other winners included “porn sifter for filtering company” and “packer for dogdoo.com” (a site that actually sold dog excrement online): → Read More
When we split the atom, Einstein remarked that everything changed but our way of thinking. You could make the same argument about acquisitions and option pools.
As Mark Suster recently noted, employees will never see a big payday at most startups unless the company shoots for the moon. This is probably why investors’ case for a company to sell early focuses exclusively on the founder: in most early-stage acquisitions, the liquidation preferences and deal-sweeteners only work for investors and founders. → Read More
There are plenty of collaborative document editors out there, but when it comes to getting input about a new document or PowerPoint deck, many businesses still rely on the tried-and-true method of printing them out, handing them around the office, and asking people to scribble their notes directly onto their printed copies. If that situation sounds familiar, you’ll probably want to check out Crocodoc, a Y Combinator-funded startup that’s launching today. Crocodoc makes it easy to share and mark up virtual documents the same way you would on a piece of paper, and it only takes a few seconds to start using it.
Crocodoc is an extremely straightforward service, and you don’t even need to sign up for an account to use it — just upload a document, and a second later you’ll be in the Crocodoc editor. Markup tools include Sticky Notes, a highligher, text strikeout, and the ability to leave your own comments (a ‘pen’ tool is on the way). Editing a document should be very familiar to anyone who has used Adobe Acrobat or Apple’s Preview. If you’d like to try marking up a sample document, you can use this demo. → Read More
Virtualization giant VMware is set to acquire select technologies from parent company EMC. VMware will be buying up certain technologies from EMC’s Ionix IT management business, including solutions aimed at delivering improved management and deployment of servers and applications in a virtualized data center.
The transaction is valued at $200 million and is expected to close in the second calendar quarter of 2010. VMware will acquire all technology and intellectual property of FastScale, Application Discovery Manager, Server Configuration Manager and Service Manager. As part of the agreement, EMC will retain the Ionix brand and have full reseller rights to continue to offer customers the products acquired by VMware. → Read More
LBi International, the global marketing and technology agency, is to merge with SEO and Internet marketing specialist bigmouthmedia, creating “Europe’s largest digital agency”.
The deal is deal worth around £100m (roughly $150 million), reports Econsultancy, with the two companies combining “to offer clients digital marketing, consulting and technology services wherever they operate, all under one roof.” → Read More
Fundamentally, what I liked about FriendFeed was that it gave me a way to take all kinds of social data and create a tailored way to view it. And though the idea never took off in the mainstream before their acquisition by Facebook, the desire for a service that can do this, remains. Despite their efforts, Facebook hasn’t solved this yet. And despite all the hype, neither has the new Google Buzz. There are at least a dozen other startups working on this problem too, but no one has even come close to FriendFeed yet. But a new one, still in stealth, offers hope.
Knowmore, is a New York City-based startup founded by Julian Gutman (ex-Google) and Joseph West (ex-Akamai). They’ve already assembled a team that includes Jeremie Miller, the inventor of XMPP/Jabber, Wilson Bilkovich one of the core developers of Rubinius (a Ruby implementation), and Wes Augur, a former principal R&D engineer at Digg. It’s a wide range of talent across a bunch of different fields. The total team is already up to 20 people, according to their jobs page. → Read More
Short Version: Hey ladies! Your Droid is here. The Motorola Devour (it’s actually DEVOUR but I refuse to shout at you) is a social media Android phone with enough style to beat down a million Droids. But is it just one more brick in the Android wall? → Read More
