When HP CEO Leo Apotheker announced that the company was seeking options for its consumer PC business and abandoning the hardware mobile business its stock dropped 20%. When Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, after a 12 hour pullback, the stock rose to go above the previous close within 48 hours.
These two stories of corporate change are widely discussed, often in terms that assume the men at the center of each company are the story. However, something far bigger is in play, and it will transform the entire software ecosystem over the next 5 years. The changes will be so dramatic that the current discussions of a bubble will appear silly. Huge companies will fail and even bigger new companies will be formed.
The fundamentals of the era we are at the birth of have the following characteristics. → Read More
This past Thursday, Google decided they had had enough of their Slide experiment. Even though it had only been a year since they spent $200 million+ on the social apps startup, they brought the hammer down, killing all but one Slide product (Prizes.org). The casualty list included Slide projects both new and old. And that sucks for apps like Photovine which just launched last week. But one Slide app termination above all others has people really up in arms: SuperPoke! Pets. How do I know? The comment section on TechCrunch.
If you look at our post about the Google killing Slide from Thursday, you’ll find 230+ comments right now. In the Facebook comments era of TechCrunch, this is a ton. In our pre-Facebook comments era this would probably equate to over 1,000 comments. And nearly every single one of these comments is in response to the killing of SuperPoke! Pets. → Read More
A lot of Americans desperately want to believe that China is full of poor people who can’t innovate, and the only goods they make are cheap, toxic rip-offs our Western brands. They want to believe the only reason the Chinese economy is surging is because the West wants cheap goods and China knows how to make them that way.
These people will hate this post because it’s about a company called Greenbox that flies in the face of those preconceived notions. → Read More
We’ve known that mobile ad network Millennial Media more than tripled revenue in 2010 from 2009 and achieved profitability. But we didn’t know how much the mobile ad network brought in, until now. In the recent 2011 Inc 500 list, Millennial revealed that it saw $47.8 million in 2010 revenue, up over 3,000 percent from 2007 revenue of $1.5 million. And while we don’t know what Millennial’s net income is, we know the company is profitable.
Millennial is one of the largest remaining independent ad networks after AdMob was bought by Google and Apple acquired Quattro. There’s no doubt that many technology companies have eyed Millennial as an acquisition target, but the company has managed to remain independent despite the increased consolidation taking place in the mobile ad space.
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“They have Internet in Europe?” my friend in the US joked via Facebook Messenger, as I checked into Foursquare from the Athens airport.
Yes Virginia, they do have Internet in Europe, or Greece specifically. In my case I had to buy an expensive worldwide data plan for my iPhone before I left the US, and then watch it like a hawk so I don’t go over my allotted 340 MB of data. $99 to stay connected. → Read More
A Year In The Life Of An Entrepeneur
1. July 2010: Ready: Set: Delaware, the state with the lowest highest point. David Argentar, a biochemist by training and bioinformaticist by trade, has launched a startup. Of sorts. Well – more of a hobby, he’d be the first to admit. He has no business plan, no investors, no employees. All he really has, in fact, is an idea and a pending patent. And as everyone is eager to tell you these days, ideas are a dime a dozen, and patents are practically a scam.
It gets worse. Much. His idea is hardware. A new kind of solar concentrator, to be exact, made mostly of water. His first version was too heavy; but he thinks his redesign could conceivably, in his wildest dreams, drive down the cost of solar power by quite a lot. But—come on, now, really—a hardware startup? With only one founder?
Hardware is hard. It allows for no binary abstractions, no digitized purity to protect you from the real world. It is the real world, in all in its vicious and unforgiving glory, perpetually at the mercy of a hundred unexpected environmental factors. And almost by definition it is incredibly expensive to develop. I should know: I myself have a degree in electrical engineering – but I fled to the warm embrace of software as soon as I graduated. Hardware was much too temperamental for me.
Argentar, fortunately, is made of sterner stuff.
Good thing, too. Over the next year he’s going to need everything he’s got. → Read More
Who doesn’t get excited about the consumer web? Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare. Billions in revenue, Hollywood movies, overturning indistries, and curing boredom. So it is natural then as a startup entrepreneur that you’d first think about doing a consumer web product. But as someone who’s been a tech entrepreneur for a decade outside the Valley, the one thing we’re not told is that unless you’re in one of four or five places on the planet, you’re almost certainly doomed to fail in the consumer web.
Why? Because consumer web plays, for all their allure, require two ingredients you’re not going to find in Sydney, Vancouver, London, Johannesburg, or pretty much anywhere else: they need big markets and big money. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — explored the legacy and impact of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. @dsearls called him the Beethoven of Business, and we spent the hour and 15 minutes matching that to what I called Jobs’ ability to listen to the future. In recent years, Jobs has turned his focus on perfecting the microcomputing experience toward inventing a mobile platform that will last for decades to come.
For those of us who saw the tech revolution as a child of the space program and the music of the ’60s, living in the time of Steve Jobs has been the same kind of rare gift, swimming in real time with the giants of our history books. It’s hard to predict what will come next, for Apple or any of us, but something tells us Jobs will be there in spirit as we build on his vision. Imagine…
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We’re back with another episode of TechCrunched, a whirlwind recap of the week’s top tech news in 90 seconds (or so).
This week’s stories include HP’s TouchPad liquidation firesale, the latest tweaks to Facebook privacy, and, in sad news, Steve Jobs’ resignation as Apple’s CEO. Tune in for the details.
Here are some articles related to this week’s episode: → Read More
It’s hard to imagine anything more perfect than Slate’s decision to lay off its respected media critic Jack Shafer. Not perfect in a good way — I count myself amongst Shafer’s legions of fans — but perfect in the way that Alanis Morissette not understanding the meaning of ‘Ironic’ is perfect, or the way that a safety inspector falling out of a tenth story window would be perfect.
“I tolllldddd yyoooouuu sooooooo…”
I mean, what better illustration could there be of online media’s woes than an ezine laying off its media critic because the economics of web content don’t support a writer of his stature and specialism? At least Shafer can take some satisfaction in the fact that his departure is in and of itself an absolutely perfect piece of media criticism: Jack Shafer as both medium and message. → Read More
Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
As far as Verizon devices are concerned, the Droid Bionic probably holds the crown for “Most Anticipated Handset,” but newly leaked shots of the HTC Vigor may steal a bit of that spotlight.
Rumored to be the newest addition to Verizon’s LTE line up, the Vigor sports a name that’s downright ancient in comparison: it was first spotted in a trademark application from 2009.
The Vigor made waves earlier this month when an ersatz version was spotted on a Dutch retailer’s website, but the real deal sports a less angular body that matches up nicely with HTC and Verizon’s design language. Specifically, with its funky textured back plate and red camera trim, the Vigor could easily pass for another entry in Verizon’s Incredible series. → Read More
It was widely reported that Best Buy was sitting on over 200,000 TouchPads before HP enacted their drastic price cut, but the fire sale has come and gone, and that would normally be that. Instead, a notice in Best Buy’s Employee Toolkit system shows that their contentious relationship with the TouchPad may not be over just yet. → Read More
About a month ago, Tom Anderson (or Myspace Tom, if you prefer) wrote a post on his new favorite social network, Google+, offering a few bits of advice for Twitter. While many of us enjoy a good Twittering now and again, Anderson pointed out that there are a few simple features Twitter might consider if it wants to boost the overall quality of its user experience. The main thrust being that the social experience of Twitter might be improved were the company to add a “discussion” or chat function that would, in Tom’s conception, give the viewer an input box by which to leave a comment and easily discuss tweets without flooding followers’ streams with one part of an on-going conversation.
Well, Tom might just be interested in a new startup launching today, called Joint, which turns Twitter into a virtual chat room, where users can group chat synchronously in realtime — and privately discuss any hashtag stream of their choice in realtime — bringing synchronous realworld-like interaction to social media (namely Twitter). → Read More
The web’s most popular photo sharing site is getting another update.
In a blog post this evening, Facebook — which is by far the biggest photo site on the web — has announced that it’s launching a new photo viewer that presents images that are 960 pixels wide, as opposed to the 720 pixels they’ve been since March 2010 (they were 620 pixels before that). The viewer itself is also getting an update that replaces the current black lightbox with an opaque white, which it says puts more of the focus on the photo itself. Facebook also says that photos now load twice as fast, though it doesn’t get into how it’s serving the content so much faster. → Read More
The recording industry doesn’t have the most respectable history when it comes to lawsuits. Between asking for millions for trivial acts of piracy, and asking potentially for trillions in more serious cases, they’ve shown that they’re not only completely disconnected from reality, but totally unheeding of the actual effects of their litigation. So it’s not surprising to see them tilting at yet another windmill.
Today’s target is TubeFire, a site that should be familiar to you, at least in principle. It allows you to download and convert YouTube videos to a format more easily watched offline (FLV files can be tricky). You give it the URL, it churns for a bit, and then you can download the video in MP4 or another format. Clearly this re-containering of free content is a grave threat to the recording industry, and must be stopped at all costs. So 25 of the world’s largest labels have gotten together and sued them. → Read More
There’s a simple fundamental reason why Grand Theft Auto exploded into a phenomenon. Everyone has criminal tendencies sometimes. And virtually indulging them is a hell of a lot better then actually indulging them and dealing with the moral consequences — or the physical consequences. Like prison.
But what if you could make the Grand Theft Auto concept even more immersive by tying it to the real world? That’s what Life Is Crime is all about.
The new mobile game by Red Robot Labs — a startup founded by Mike Ouye, Pete Hawley, and John Harris, former executives at Playdom, EA and SCEE — allows you to put a life of crime onto your phone. It’s a location-based game launching today for Android devices that’s likely to be highly addictive. → Read More
After quietly announcing they were killing off their nascent Deals product this afternoon, Facebook caused some confusion. You see, with the decision to kill off Facebook Places earlier in the week, everyone wondered what it meant for the location-based deals they launched alongside it? Those would remain alive, Facebook said at the time. But does today’s execution change anything?
No, says Facebook. Daily Deals are separate from Check-in Deals. The Check-in Deals will work a bit different with the end of Places, but the company will continue to support and enhance that product. Daily Deals are dead — and my email account thanks them for that. → Read More
Much has been made of supposed decline in the number of cable TV subscribers. But not everyone agrees that mass cord-cutting is reshaping the industry. Indeed, according to Kyle Dixon, Time Warner’s VP of Public Policy, we are seeing the “opposite” of cord-cutting with Time Warner seeing no “significant decrease” for its paid content.
I interviewed Dixon earlier this week at the Technology Policy Institute’s Aspen Forum where he spoke on a panel about the economic implications of online video. What Dixon stressed to me is that, for all the online videos of what he described as “kittens flushing toilets”, consumers still really want high-quality news and entertainment content from networks like HBO. And thus, while the Internet is obviously changing our viewing habits, it is yet to revolutionize the television industry. So is Dixon right – is cord-cutting an illusion?
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