Criticising Valleywag in 2010 is something of a pointless exercise, like offering diplomatic counsel to the Ottoman Empire ten years after the Treaty of Lausanne. More pointless still, attacking the site’s titular editor Ryan Tate is like appealing to the guy responsible for writing parking tickets in Constantinople.
I mean, I get that.
And yet despite the irrelevance of Gawker’s saddest sub-domain and the tragic impotence of its editor, the influence of its parent means that when a Valleywag story oozes its way on to the front page of Gawker.com, it’s important to take notice. And to mop it up so that no-one slips.
Here goes then. → Read More
You’ll soon be able to use your phone in the New York City subway system. It’s part of a $200 million renovation of the system, which, well, not to say that it’s falling apart, but it’s seen better days. There used to be a W train, for example. Memories. → Read More
Sorry, BlackBerry fanboys, the BlackPad — or whatever it will be called — is going to flop in a monumental way. Remember how RIM’s last iDevice clone, the Storm, failed in such a public way? Yep, it’s going to happen all over again. RIM has no business making a consumer tablet.
We all need to give major props to Research In Motion. They were really the first major player to make smartphones relevant by offering a nearly-bulletproof mobile emailing system to business. Eventually RIM started making consumer-orientated email devices that worked with personal email accounts. RIM really showed the world that you need email while you were away from your desk.
But that’s where their claim to fame stops. Don’t misunderstand the Canadian company’s importance in consumer electronics’ history. RIM ranks up there with the best of them, but unless the so-called BlackPad is targeted solely at businesses and enterprise users — and all signs suggest otherwise — the BlackPad will fail. → Read More
Online monetization platform gWallet, which offers social gaming developers a variety of ways to monetize their apps and boost engagement, is looking to put its money where its mouth is: the company is launching a $20,000 cash guarantee to any social gaming publishers that don’t generate more revenue when they switch from their current monetization platform to gWallet.
To participate, publishers are being asked to implement a simultaneous, head-to-head test over the span of thirty days (you can sign up starting today, with the 30 day window beginning August 1). At the end of that time period, if your revenues from gWallet aren’t higher than they are on you original implementation, then the service will pay out the guarantee. But you’ll have to be a pretty sizable game to participate: to qualify, gWallet says that publishers need to be new to the platform, and need to have at least 250,000 daily active users. That said, it sounds like the the company is willing to discuss a guarantee to apps with a smaller user base if you email their partner@gwallet.com address. → Read More
Tomorrow night, July 31, Twitter has announced they are having some planned downtime. Beginning at 11 PM PT, Twitter will likely be down on and off for up to 5 hours, Twitter warns.
The reason for the downtime? NTT America, Twitter’s hosting provider is upgrading a part of the internal network. This is interesting because Twitter is in the process of opening their own data center in Utah later this year. Despite the new tweet digs, they’ve said they’ll keep working with NTT America, so this maintenance is clearly necessary. → Read More
According to an FCC filing, the folks at Keurig (they basically make a single serving coffee machine) could be adding RFID tags to their pods in order to allow the machine to sense the type of coffee being placed into the device. This would, in turn, allow the machine to change temperature, milk type, and whatever else the coffee requires. → Read More
It’s takes a certain type of person to get excited about a work productivity tool. Mark Nielsen and Patrick Carmitchel, unsatisfied with 37Signals‘ Basecamp, have decided to disrupt the productivity software industry, says Nielsen “We decided we’d rather not see the light of day for awhile than have to live with knowing that with just a little bit of creative, a pinch of logic and a dash of sexy, we could revive the productivity software world with a tool that would even make Apple cry.” → Read More
Not a headline I was expecting to write today. A program at the University Of Central Florida is putting together a video game aimed at promoting abstinence among middle-school-age girls. It utilizes a full-body motion-capture studio to put girls in situations where they need to reject their pawing suitors. Right. Well. Couple things. → Read More
Today at our Social Currency CrunchUp in Palo Alto, CA, James Lamberti, VP of Global Research and Marketing for InMobi, sat down with our Michael Arrington to tell us a bit about mobile advertising.
InMobi is the largest independent mobile ad network in the world. Overall, they’re number two behind Google’s AdMob. That earned them an $8 million investment from Kleiner Perkins and Sherpalo Ventures a couple weeks ago. But what’s particularly interesting about InMobi is how well they’re doing outside the U.S. → Read More
Today during our Social Currency CrunchUp, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and John Hanke, a Google VP of Product Management, took the stage. Given that the two companies seem to be at odds with one another recently (following a failed acquisition), it was a little tense.
Specifically, Google’s strong moves into local with their new Places push seem to be going right at Yelp’s core. Sure’s it’s potentially about more than just local venue reviews, but that’s a huge part of it. And that’s what Yelp is all about.
Moreover, Google is using Yelp data to bulk up their Places offering. Yelp can’t like that too much. In fact, we’ve heard they’re particularly unhappy because they used to have a deal with Google for this data, but they pulled out of that deal a couple years ago. But Google decided to use Yelp’s data anyway simply by crawling it. Yelp can’t stop them from doing that unless they want to delist themselves from Google — a move which could kill them. → Read More
Get your funny hats and noise makers ready, Droid owners: it’s party time! As long as the note that Verizon just sent over to our buddies over at Engadget holds true, the Droid should be seeing Android 2.2 grace its screen as early as next week. It won’t be the first Android handset getting the update treatment, but you’ve gotta commend Verizon for staying on top of these updates even as they prepare to make the handset obsolete. → Read More
Conventional wisdom says that it’d be a better idea to build a ladder to the moon than it would be to start a magazine in 2010. Apparently Best Buy disagrees. The retailer announced, some months back, that it would be starting a new video game magazine called @Gamer. (Pronounced “gamer”—ignore the @.) It hooked up with the good folks at Future, the same people who publish the World of Warcraft magazine, as well as Edge, PC Gamer, and Nintendo Power, to produce it. → Read More
PeerIndex, which was previously known as Viewsflow while it was in alpha, has now re-launched and gone into Beta.
As it was billed as a sort of high-brow filtering mechanism for Twitter users. It’s now moving in the direction of a platform for “ranking authority on the social web.” It plain English it looks at your social and “reputation capital” to work out if you really do know what you are talking about.
Of course many have tried such a feat and failed, or at least had limited success. Some obvious competitors to PeerIndex are Klout, twittergrader and twitalyzer. But Twitter influence monitors like Klout look mainly at followers. PeerIndex will look at how a particular person is part of a diffusion network for interesting content. Founder Azeem Azhar calls it a way to “identify from millions of users the opinion leaders from the merely opinionated.” → Read More
Social gaming company Zynga is growing at a rapid clip. More importantly, their revenue is growing at a rapid clip. And they need a big gun to handle that. They believe they’ve just got him: Dave Wehner, formerly a managing director at Allen & Company LLC.
Wehner is stepping in for current CFO Mark Vranesh, who is becoming chief accountant of Zynga. While they obviously won’t say it, it should be fairly clear what this shuffling is all about: it’s not CFO, it’s another three-letter acronym, IPO. While Zynga is still undoubtedly a ways away from such a move, they have to get their finances in order now. Especially since they’re growing so quickly. → Read More
GM is banking large on the Chevy Volt and apparently feels confident about its success. The auto maker just issued a statement, which conveniently coincides while President Obama is touring the assembly plant, detailing the increased production estimate for 2012. The Detroit-Hamtramck facility will now pump out 50% more than previously detailed, an increase to 45,000 from 30,000.
Chances are this production bump is dependent on a successful roll-out of the first 10,000 vehicles slated to hit dealers later this year. If the $41,000 Volt quickly flops, then GM will probably scale the production numbers back to the initial estimate or less. → Read More
Last month, we noted that Twitter was testing a “You both follow” feature, showing users you and another user both follow. That’s interesting, but not particularly useful. Today, they’ve begun to roll out a new “Suggestions for You” feature which looks at who you follow, and who the people you follow follow, and suggests new people for you to follow. Yes, just like Facebook does. This is very useful.
In fact, this is arguably the most useful social graph feature that Twitter has rolled out yet. A few weeks ago, Twitter rolled out a new name results area for search — which was incredibly helpful for finding celebrities or brands on Twitter. But this is better. This is all about finding people you may actually be interested in based on your current social graph, but for whatever reason, haven’t connected with yet. → Read More
Back in the old days, when hackers were men, Blue Boxing was all the rage. If you’re not in the know, Blue Boxing is basically a process of sending tones down old telephone lines to enable free calls around the world. The boxes were the skeleton keys of their day and made a lot of people a lot of money. This article from Esquire in 1971 described a world of phone phreaks, hackers, and two boys named Jobs and Wozniak who basically paved the way for hackers woldwide. Here’s one of the best quotes in any computer story anywhere, and it was uttered four years before the first personal computer hit the streets. → Read More
Lord British, now in space. The Ultima creator has spent $30 million hitching a ride aboard the commercial spacecraft Space Adventures. Bonus: he just won a $28 million settlement. Must be nice. → Read More
It’s all pretty formulaic. “Company in China releases [knockoff product] that looks so much like the real thing.” See: iPed. Now: some Sony Vaio. → Read More
It’s no secret that loyalty programs — like those hole-punch cards that give you a free Slurpee every ten visits — are a great, cheap way to keep customers coming back to your business. Thing is, running these programs isn’t always as easy as it seems, especially if a business wants to do something more complex than the basic “buy ten get one free”. PlacePop is a new startup looking to make these loyalty programs accessible to any business: the startup has built a self-serve platform based around its new iPhone application which companies can use to distribute virtual, custom-branded loyalty cards.
Today, the company is launching at our Social Currency CrunchUp, and it’s also announcing that it has closed a $1.4 million round of funding. Participants in the round include Affinity Labs Founder Chris Michel, Bebo Founder Michael Birch, and James Currier and Stan Chudnovsky, both of whom cofounded Ooga Labs. → Read More
