Microsoft had one hell of a year. Their best ever, in fact, from a revenue perspective. They’re no Apple, but hey, who is? Nearly $70 billion in revenue for what is primarily a software company is amazing. But the great numbers continue to mask one thing: the gaping, blood-soaked wound that is the Online Services Division.
Reading Microsoft’s press release on their earnings, you’d think everything is fantastic in the division. “Online Services Division revenue grew 17% for the fourth quarter and 15% for the full year, primarily driven by increases in search revenue.” Big growth! Awesome!
Wait a minute… → Read More
Rick: “How can you close me up? On what grounds?”
Captain Renault: “I’m shocked – shocked! – to find that gambling is going on in here!”
Croupier: “Your winnings, sir.”
Captain Renault: “Oh, thank you very much.”
One has to mourn such a collective loss of innocence. The innocence of the British parliament tearfully quizzing News Corp executives over revelations that phone hacking was used in the pursuit of tabloid scoops. The innocence of those same executives who were “shocked, appalled and ashamed” at the means used by their staff to keep delivering front page gold. The innocence of senior Metropolitan Police officers on learning that underpaid colleagues routinely sold information to tabloid reporters.
And most of all the innocence of the Great British Public — the same public who made books like Evelyn Waugh’s novel ‘Scoop‘ into a 1938 best-seller, and did the same to Piers Morgan’s The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade two generations later. How shocked — shocked! — they all are to learn that tabloid journalists are, at heart, scumbags. → Read More
No, the heat isn’t playing tricks on you: it’s time for another new episode of OMG/JK!
In this episode we take a look at Mac OS X Lion, the latest release of Apple’s operating system that introduces some key new features: Mission Control, Launchpad, and inverted scrolling. Tune in to hear how often MG attempts to touch the screen of his Macbook because he’s so used to the iPad. Yup.
Next, we turn to Spotify, the all-you-can-eat music streaming startup that finally launched in the United States after scoring record deals with the major US labels (there had been rumors about an impending US launch for well over a year). Was it worth the wait?
We also revisit Google+, Google’s promising social network that keeps making headlines (both good and bad). → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Andrew Keen, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — convened for yet another G+ conversation. This one, however, was noted for its evenhandedness as @ajkeen and @scobleizer traded social blows over the new Google service. As someone in the Friendfeed chat on the livecast noted, @stevegillmor seems surprisingly positive about the new service. As Keen observed, that’s because I think the new service is Friendfeed revisited.
Of course, it is. But it’s also Twitter without the 140 character limit, Facebook without the unseen authority algorithm, and the Gillmor Gang without a human director (Hangouts). @kevinmarks says it a little differently, seeing G+ growth gaining on Club Penguin. And that’s the fundamental reason Google has a winner, by underlining the best parts of each of these services and floating all boats on a rising tide. → Read More
While it is difficult to say no to money, especially when someone is giving it to you without even listening to what it is that you are doing, I felt insulted and unhappy. I felt that I was competent enough to raise money and build a successful business regardless of my gender, not because of it.
In all fairness, this angel and many other supporters of women in technology have good intentions. However, they don’t realize that by calling out someone’s gender they make the system less meritocratic.
Editor’s note: Yoav Shoham is professor of computer science at Stanford University and co-founder of Katango, which organizes Facebook friends into groups
The recent introduction of Google+ has been fodder for much Google-versus-Facebook discussion. At the center of the discussion has been the Circles component of Google+, which allows users to arrange their contacts in meaningful clusters (for example, “family” and “work”) and share different content with different clusters. Circles play a role that’s almost entirely analogous to Facebook’s lists, which have been around (if somewhat buried in the Facebook UI) for a long time. Facebook of course also has the notion of groups, separate from (and more recent than) lists. Here are some basic observations on lists, groups and circles that seem to have been glossed over in the various recent articles. → Read More
Here are some recent stories from TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
Editor’s note: The following guest post is written by Victor Wong, the CEO of PaperG, a local advertising technology company.
Conquering “local” remains one of the largest opportunities on the Internet today, and it seems as
though Twitter’s unique position has gone largely unnoticed. Today, Twitter is an amazing tool for
connecting people to the world, but it hasn’t yet successfully connected people to places they care
about. If Twitter chose to bridge that gap, though, higher user engagement and even monetization
would likely follow. → Read More
Over the last week, there’s been quite a bit of news swirling around Rupert Murdoch’s empire, including, most recently, the now infamous LulzSec’s pwnage of The Sun, News Corp’s daily tabloid newspaper.
On Monday, the loose network of merry hacktivists hacked into The Sun, pinned a fake news story about Murdoch’s supposed death on the homepage, redirected the site to its Twitter page, and brought down a number of other News Corp and News International websites — all in one fell swoop. → Read More
It’s been pretty fascinating to watch Netflix’s growth from a company that Blockbuster laughed at in 2000 (when Founder and CEO Reed Hastings and former CFO Barry McCarthy proposed to Blockbuster management that they run its online brand) to the single largest source of web traffic in North America in 2011.
There have been quite a few hiccups and ups and downs along the way, as the on-demand video provider has struggled with Hollywood studios, succeeded as leadership has pushed its service onto TVs, game systems, and mobile devices — and more recently, re-focused on its streaming business. → Read More
To celebrate the fact that my vacation during the last two weeks of August has been officially confirmed, I am posting the most massive infographic I have ever seen: “The Social Travel Revolution” brought to you by the folks at still-in-beta travel startup Tripl … CLICK THROUGH FOR THE GRAPHIC. → Read More
We’ve come across the latest in Slide’s series of projects developed within Google, VideoInbox – a combination daily newsletter/Facebook app that basically centers around the viewing, sharing and cataloguing of viral videos (proof that it’s from Slide here). Sign up for VideoInbox with Facebook Connect and you’ll get a daily email with “hand selected” viral YouTube videos like “Slow Loris With a Tiny Umbrella,” ”Rubik’s Cube Robot Is Smarter Than You” or “Bollywood Pizza Hut”.
Back in January of 2009, we noted that a “superstar team” was about to launch in the MMO space, with a startup called Ohai. A few weeks ago, Ohai was sold, as VentureBeat’s Deak Takahashi first reported. And at least two of those rockstars have now moved on. Susan Wu and Don Neufeld are the newest members of The Obvious Corporation, the idea incubator that was just re-started by the former Twitter guys, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Jason Goldman.
Stone makes the announcement in a post today on the Obvious blog. “The most important part of creating this work culture and building these meaningful products is people — but not just any people. People that are often smarter than us, different from us, passionate like us, and dedicated to the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” he writes, stating that Wu and Neufeld, employees number four and five at Obvious, are those kind of people. → Read More
I’ve been meaning to address this Lytro thing since it hit a few weeks ago. I wrote about omnifocus cameras as far back as 2008, and more recently in 2010, and while at the time I was more interested in the science behind the systems, though it appears that Lytro uses a different method than either of those.
Lytro has been slightly close-lipped about their camera, to say the least, though that’s understandable when your entire business revolves around proprietary hardware and processes. Some of it can be derived from Lytro founder Ren Ng’s dissertation (which is both interesting and readable), but in the meantime it remains to be shown whether these “living pictures” are truly compelling or something which will be forgotten instantly by consumers. A recent fashion shoot with model Coco Rocha, the first in-vivo demonstration of the device, is dubious evidence at best. Read on for more detailed reservations about this admittedly exciting device. → Read More
Gotta love Tom Anderson. Newly reinvigorated by the launch of Google+, “MySpace Tom” has become a social power user (and regular TechCrunch contributor!). As a man at the forefront of the early days of the social wars, he’s obviously full of information. And today he decided to share a bit more. This time, it’s a fascinating story about the time Microsoft, not Google, was about to land the MySpace ad deal.
In a comment on (where else) Google+, Anderson tells the story in response to my most recent post about the Google/Facebook war before Google+. Based on a Quora thread, I noted that the 2006 search/ad deal Google signed with MySpace (Fox Interactive Media) may have been the true kick-off of hostilities between Google and Facebook. As a result, Microsoft signed Facebook — which later led to the famous investment. → Read More
Any new US Spotify users will be busy creating playlists and sharing them with their friends. This is an awesome part of the service which is really the central point of why Spotify can become so addictive compared to other services like Mog and Rdio. A while back a clever little startup realised there was gold in them there lists and created a site to allow users share their lists outside of Spotify more easily.
ShareMyPlaylists has now secured £250,000 in angel funding, this time from Angel investor Mark Pearson, chairman of Markco Media Ltd / MyVoucherCodes. Pearson has also invested in UGC media site Blottr. → Read More
Google has just acquired facial recognition software company PittPatt (Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition), according to an announcement on the startup’s site.
PittPatt, a project spawned from Carnegie Mellon University, develops a facial recognition technology that can match people across photos, videos, and more. The company has created a number of algorithms in face detection, face tracking and face recognition. PittPatt’s face detection and tracking SDK locates human faces in photographs and tracks the motion of human faces in video. → Read More
Google and Facebook are at war. We’ve known this for a while. Of course, neither side will admit to it, but they are. Winner takes the Internet.
After months of Facebook owning Google in just about every way imaginable (well, except search, of course — but the rise of social is slowly making search less important), Google has finally been able to strike back with Google+. And now a full-on social sharing race is getting underway. It may not be a winner-take-all race, but it will eventually be winner-take-most. We simply can’t share everything across 5 or even 3 networks. Google is fighting an uphill battle in this regard, but at least they finally have a weapon. → Read More
You may recall the SmartBird, a robot we saw back in March that mimics the flight of birds, flapping its wings like the real thing. The video we saw then was a bit too edited to get a feel for the bot, but luckily one of the inventors was invited to do a TED talk, and of course they had to set the thing free in the auditorium.
Check out the video. → Read More
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