You Californians sure seem obsessed with this “Oscar” thing. As I write these words, every one of my friends with a 9x zip code is dressed to the nines, snarking their way through one of the forty three billion Academy Awards parties taking place across the state.
I am not amongst them: partly because I am unforgivably late with this column, partly because I haven’t seen any of the movies nominated for the major categories, and partly because watching Anne Hathaway and James Franco (pictured left) being funny is like watching a Chuck Lorre remake of Joanie Loves Chachi.
But that’s not to say I don’t love the Oscars. In fact I adore them. As an unabashed old media snob, nothing pleases me more than an annual reminder that Hollywood still exists. That, for all the ways Internet piracy has chipped away at the bottom line, billions of dollars still churn annually through an area of roughly 24 square miles. And that – forget Zuckerberg and Williams and Pincus – there is still an army of bona fide celebrities earning a crust simply from being glamourous and wonderful and radiant. You wouldn’t catch Natalie Portman dead in an Addidas hoodie and a pair of flip flops. → Read More
Despite losing Best Picture to The King’s Speech, Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher’s epic Facebook creation myth The Social Network did pick up three Oscars tonight, more than any film about nerds has ever garnered, unless you count A Beautiful Mind. The Social Network won Best Film Editing (Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter), Best Original Score (Trent Reznor) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Aaron Sorkin) at tonight’s 83rd Academy Awards Ceremony.
The film, which picked up four awards including Best Picture at the Golden Globes and was nominated for eight Oscars, was definitely the Twitter and tech crowd favorite but apparently not the Academy’s. → Read More
AT&T is betting big on location-based shopping alerts through a partnership with Placecast. AT&T is debuting a branded ShopAlerts service, which will deliver special offers and discounts to consumers via their mobile phones when they are near a participating store or brand (initial brands include HP, KMart, and JetBlue).
The program is currently available to AT&T customers in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco who have opted-in to receive Shop Alerts, but AT&T plans to roll the program out nationally by summertime and increase the number of participating brands. → Read More
Lots and lots of buzz today in all the major newspapers about how J.P. Morgan is trying to buy 10% or so of Twitter for $450 million.
As far as I can tell, all of the stories are wrong. In particular, say my sources, Twitter isn’t negotiating with anyone – J.P. Morgan or otherwise – about a new funding round. The last round with Kleiner Perkins seems to have more than satisfied their near term capital appetite. Also, J.P. Morgan isn’t currently trying to buy Twitter shares through the secondary market, either, say my sources. That’s because they already indirectly own 10% of Twitter.
Here’s what’s really going on, as far as I can tell from sources: → Read More
Founded by Rich Morrison and Jud Gardner, Y-Combinator backed Comprehend Systems is launching the first iteration of its comprehensible data analysis platform today, Comprehend Clinical. Comprehend Clinical’s browser friendly interface allows its clients to analyze the results of clinical drug trials across multiple data sources, combining that stored in diverse data structures and databases.
In the same space as Sas Institute and Pitco, Comprehend Clinical attempts to empower people bringing drugs to market to “ask as the questions they need to ask.” When you’re dealing with lengthly drug studies you need to know whether the drug is safe and effective, and whether people are dying as a soon as possible. “A clinical study lasts four years, who uses software that’s seven years old. By default you’re going to have to interface a lot of stuff,” says founder Rich Morrison. → Read More
The folks over at online analysis service Meltwater, who Wired’s Epicenter hilariously called out for not doing so hot at predicting the “The Grammys,” have once again tried to use “chatter in social media” or whatever the hell that means to predict who will win the 83rd Annual Academy Awards tonight. Their call? The King’s Speech, followed by Inception for Best Picture, James Franco followed by Colin Firth for Best Actor and Natalie Portman by a landslide for Best Actress, trailed by Nicole Kidman.
Meanwhile over at Mashable we’ve got another infographic bet on Inception winning for Best Picture, followed by The Social Network, James Franco as Best Actor, followed by Colin Firth, Natalie Portman (our only consensus) as leading actress followed by Nicole Kidman, Christian Bale as Supporting Actor, followed by Geoffry Rush, Helena Bonham Carter as Supporting Actress and David Fincher as Best Director for The Social Network, followed by Tom Hooper from The King’s Speech. → Read More
In February of 2007, 83.24 percent of users visiting TechCrunch did so from a Windows machine. One year later, in February 2008, the stranglehold remained firm at 80.44 percent. In February 2009, the number was at 74.04 percent. Last year, it was 61.59 percent. And this year? The number of people visiting our site from Windows machines dipped to 53.84 percent.
The writing is on the wall.
Look at those numbers again for a second. In four years, Windows share among TechCrunch readers has fallen 30 percentage points. That’s incredible. → Read More
I was in the air an average of 30 hours a month for the last two years, so I watched a lot of movies — typically semi-delirious on Ambien– that I wouldn’t ordinarily. One of those was the star-studded rom-com “He’s Just Not That Into You.” Note: You won’t see this movie at the Oscars tonight, or any night, and that’s not because it was cruelly overlooked. But as a plane movie, it sufficed.
I’m assuming most TechCrunch readers are far to Y-chromosomey to have seen it or even admit they’ve seen it, so I’ll fill you in on the thrust of the film. Like most things in life, the simplest explanation is usually the right one: If a guy doesn’t call, he didn’t lose your number, he isn’t away on business in Yemin, he wasn’t kidnapped and held at gunpoint– he just didn’t want to call you. All these fairy-tale stories that lonely girls thrive on about how the jerky guy one day woke up and realized how great you are may have happened to somebody, sometime, but that person was the exception, not the rule.
The somewhat cold message of the film is that you shouldn’t live your life assuming you are the exception. (Of course as rom-coms go, the main character does end up being the exception, undercutting the wisdom of the point. But for the purposes of real life, let’s pretend she didn’t and moved on to someone else.)
Believe it or not, this movie came up in conversation at a dinner party in Silicon Valley the other night. → Read More
For any retailer that is selling goods online, it is incredibly important to be able to retain customers and identify when purchasers are about to leave a site. While many online retailers and companies develop these analytics in house, there is a need for a simple application that smaller shops can use to determine behavior of visitors. Today, Y Combinator-backed Custora is launching a SaaS that tells online retailers and web apps which of their customers are most valuable, and suggests actions to keep them.
The startup is best described by its tagline: “Google brings you customers. We keep them around.” For retailers, the software can analyze order logs and distinguish between customers that simply haven’t ordered anything for a while, and customers who have left the site. The application also manages and optimizes email campaigns to keep customers engaged. → Read More
What is your real name? That’s my new favorite comment on TechCrunch, where many of its readers hide behind phony names and email addresses. Apparently it’s not considered appropriate to challenge such geniuses about their real identity. Could be similar to talking about “open” and “Web” as though they have magical properties of goodness and well-being. Or not.
Nasty comments and identity baiting are in and of themselves minor irritations, best left to swift deletes or just plain not caring. Facebook and even Twitter mostly get around this problem by requiring a registration to play along, but the earlier generation of blog posts and even RSS encourage anonymity in reading mode. No reason why we should be forced to identify ourselves in order to consume a page; the problem comes if we want to respond on a level playing field in comments.
But take “what is your real name?” and apply it to other things besides blog posts. Say you’re in a meeting and the guy to your right has been verbose but unintelligible for over an hour. You ask: “What is your real name?” This will be viewed as a hostile interruption if taken literally, so it’s important to smile broadly and giggle in an “I’m laughing with you, not at you” posture. If the question is treated as a non sequitur, you need to drop the smile and look earnest with a hint of stupidity. After all, adopting comment dynamics to the real world is a complicated strategy. → Read More
Y Combinator-incubated SwipeGood, a startup that allows you to donate to charity each time you buy, is using its Start Fund money to benefit others. In case you didn’t catch this bit of news, DST’s Yuri Milner and SV Angel have teamed up to launch the Start Fund, which gives all Y Combinator startups a $150,000 investment in the form of a convertible note with no cap and no discount. Launched in November, SwipeGood is giving the $150,000 to charity.
Here’s how SwipeGood works. Once you enroll your credit/debit card with SwipeGood, every purchase you make gets rounded up to the nearest dollar. So for a $50.50 purchase of groceries, $0.50 will be given to charity. At the end of the month, SwipeGood will send your total donation amount to the charity or cause of your choice. To participate in SwipeGood, consumers have to enroll their credit card and the service will track your purchases, similar to the way Blippy works. → Read More
I was determined never to write another negative post about TED. Really. I feel like my views on the conference’s smug-tendencies have been well-stated. And, as I said in this article in Fast Company, I think the TED Fellows program and the TEDx program have gone a long way towards fulfilling the stated mission of TED, doing actual outreach into places the conference long professed to care about. Beyond that, I’m just hearing of a lot of Valley people who aren’t going anymore after the move to Long Beach, making the conference less of an annual to-do for the tech community.
But then I got this email below, and all the reasons I wrote the original BusinessWeek column came flooding back. If TED would just own up to being about making the wealthy, famous and powerful feel comfortable–like other clubby, high level affairs like Sun Valley or the World Economic Forum– I wouldn’t have an issue with it. Business conferences have good reasons to be elitist; deals are getting done and high-level conversations need to be private sometimes.
But when credentials are revoked at the last minute based purely on the whim of a more important member of the TED community, the inner workings are just too much like a country club for an organization whose stellar content is all about pluralism and uplift. It’s the Sarah Silverman incident all over again. Oh you made one of the more important people feel uncomfortable? Then you’re out of here. → Read More
On January 7, 2010 I was ushered into a small private dinner with Secretary Hillary Clinton at the State Department along with the inventor of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and a few others. We were there to talk about technology and 21st Century Diplomacy. As we mingled I noticed next to me the small table that Thomas Jefferson wrote the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence. I was inspired by the history around us as we discussed the unfolding history before us. I was sitting in front of Secretary Clinton and when she asked me a question I said, “Secretary Clinton, the last bastion of dictatorship is the router.” That night seeded some of the ideas that were core to Secretary Clinton’s important Internet Freedoms Speech on January 21, 2010.
Fast forward almost exactly one year later to January 25, 2011—a day that shall live in history in the company of dates like July 4, 1776. Egypt’s decision to block the entire Internet and mobile telecommunications network was one of the first salvos in a war of electronic munitions. In this new frontier humans are the routers and armed with new technologies they can never be blocked or silenced again.
I was staying up for days sharing and tweeting information as they happened. I had two close personal friends of mine in Egypt who were passing me information when they could. The day Egypt blocked the internet and mobile networks my mind went back to what I had said to Secretary Clinton. The only line of defense against government filtering and blocking their citizens from freely communicating and coordinating via communication networks was to create a new line of communications technologies that governments would find hard to block: Ad hoc wireless mesh networks. I called the idea OpenMesh and tweeted it. Within hours through crowdsourced volunteer efforts the OpenMesh Project was alive complete with domain name, website and forum. → Read More
“A good player goes where the puck is. A great player goes where the puck is going to be”—The Great One
Google made a few interesting announcements this week. First, Google Docs Viewer support for a sheaf of new document types, including Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop and PostScript. Second, Chrome’s new ability to run background apps that run seamlessly and invisibly behind the browser. Third, they released Google Cloud Connect, which lets Windows users sync Office documents to Google Docs. They also announced the Android 3.0 SDK – but despite the ongoing tablet hysteria, in the long run, the first three are more important.
Little by little, iteration by iteration, the Chrome browser is quietly morphing into a full-fledged multitasking operating system in its own right. Oh, sure, technically it’s actually running on another OS, but you increasingly never need to launch anything else. View and edit documents in Google Docs, watch and listen to HTML5 video and audio, communicate via Gmail and its Google Voice plugin, use Google Docs as a file system – and the line between “Chrome OS” and “Chrome on any other OS” suddenly grows very fine. → Read More
Move over, Chronicles of Narnia, there’s a new dreamworld of magic in town. That’s right. Andrew Fischer, CEO of Colorado-based marketing company NURV, has recruited a stellar cast of Meme-lebrities, including Antoine Dodson of Hide Yo Wife, Hide Yo Kids fame, Double Rainbow videographer Paul Vasquez, Brian Collins (the “Boom goes the dynamite” kid), and “Numa Numa” vocalist Gary Brolsma, for a feature-length film entitled “The Chronicles of Rick Roll”.
The title, as you probably know, is derived from the meme to rule them all: the music video for Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”, which became the source of a viral prank, called “Rick Rolling”. Thanks to Rick Rolling, never again will you be able to say to your friend, “hey, you should check out this amazing video of Steve Jobs singing karaoke,” without being suspected of collusion with Rick Astley. → Read More
Zynga made a small but fascinating change to its young-yet-ubiquitous game CityVille over the weekend. Players could previously buy “Wedding Chapels,” which looked like small country churches but without a cross or other religious symbols, to add to their city. But the virtual item has been removed and replaced with the more secular and nondescript “Wedding Hall.” With two gold ring things that somehow makes me think only of McDonalds.
Err, ok.
I asked Zynga if this was in response to complaints, or otherwise why they did this. No comment from them so far. They could, of course, simply add other icons for other religions, and let people choose.
But perhaps even that would be too insensitive. Players who had previously purchased the Wedding Chapel still have it, but it’s also been renamed to “Wedding Hall.” Presumably friends visiting the city might get offended. → Read More
This one has something for everyone: Android. Apple. Appropriately colored lightsabers. Oh, and it’s friggin’ high-resolution (download link). Oh, and to pull a late-night host and totally steal a joke from Reddit: Man, why they gotta make Apple General Grievous? Happy Saturday, folks. Update: Hurrah! Someone found the original artist. Be sure to give them some love. → Read More
Do you carry an HTC Desire Z, Desire HD, Desire, or the brand-friggin’ new Incredible S? Are you wondering when you’ll get a bite of that sweet, sweet Gingerbread (or, in non-mega-geek-speak, when your handset will be updated to Android v2.3)? While HTC isn’t naming any specific dates (that just tends to make people rage when the unavoidable delays occur), they’ve confirmed to Slashgear that the four aforementioned devices will get Gingerbread, and they’ve offered up a pretty big window for when those updates will come: Q2. That means we probably won’t see any of them by March, but all of them should be floatin’ over the airwaves by the end of June. → Read More
Editor’s Note: Jim Dalrymple has been writing about Apple for more than 15 years. You can follow him on Twitter @jdalrymple and on his Web site at The Loop.
It’s been almost a year since Apple released the iPad and we’re less than a week away from the unveiling of the iPad 2, and still there’s no competition.
There are a few very good reasons for Apple’s success and why its competitors are finding it difficult to gain any traction against the king of digital devices. There’s the infrastructure, the combination of hardware and software, and the fact that its competitors are content to settle for second best. → Read More
