In the post-iPhone era, a lot of things changed in Japan, once the most admired country in the mobile world. The number of cell phone manufacturers, for example, has fallen from 13 to five after massive consolidation and re-organization, and all of the remaining players fight with a shrinking and rapidly greying domestic market.
That’s one of the reasons why Nippon’s cell phone makers have been talking about going international for a long time (years after basically all of them gave up on the world market), but now Panasonic seems to be ready to get serious. → Read More
Twitter photo sharing service YFrog has deleted the account of Grace Dent, an influential UK Twitterer and writer with over 94,000 followers. There appears to be no explanation for the blunder at the moment but we’ve reached out to YFrog for comment.
Twitter recently became the number one photo sharing service on its platform, handling 36% of shares, and YFrog is down to 21% from 29.3% five months ago, indicating a slow death.
So it seems a massive blunder for YFrog to lose such an influential user. She has now switched to European startup MobyPicture.
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Here are some of the past week’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
Displayed in the Dieter Rams exhibit at SF MOMA is a hand-held Braun television. Yes, an old-fashioned television with a handle on it that never saw the light of day because the Braun marketing team determined there wasn’t a market for hand-held televisions. IN THE SIXTIES.
Inspired by the work of Rams and Braun, Apple’s Steve Jobs went on to build hardware that incorporated many of the elements of Rams’ philosophy. In fact, today’s iPad seems like a streamlined descendant of that handheld television. But, unlike what happened at Braun, it doesn’t seem like many Apple products are held back from production by the Apple marketing team, at least if you look at how many Apple products are total failures initially. → Read More
The good news is that Wikipedia has finally switched up that image of Jimmy Wales begging for money on its homepage. The bad news is that they’ve replaced it with another unfortunately left aligned image of some random guy (Wikipedia programmer Brandon Harris to be precise) who, according to my email inbox, looks like everything from Jesus, to Nickelback lead singer Chad Kroger to a member of the Hell’s Angels. → Read More
As we heard on Saturday, IBM reported a 24 percent increase in online sales for Black Friday this year. ComScore is announcing even stronger results for e-commerce, with Black Friday seeing $816 million in online sales, making it the heaviest online spending day to date in 2011 and representing a 26 percent increase versus Black Friday 2010 ($648 million spent).
That’s an impressive jump considering the 2009 to 2010 increase in Black Friday spending was only 9 percent. Thanksgiving Day saw an 18 percent increase in online spending to $479 million. U.S. consumers have spent $12.7 billion already in the first 25 days of the November to December 2011 holiday season, up 15 percent from the corresponding days last year.
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When someone you haven’t seen in a while asks you “What’s up?” or “How are you?”, you probably give them a high-level summary of the major life events from the months since you last spoke. When you speak to someone you see frequently, you probably respond to the same questions with close-up, specific descriptions of your activities over past few days. Humans are aware of when and what we last communicated with someone, and we dynamically alter what information we provide to avoid repetition.
While most of the discussion about Facebook’s latest changes has centered around the real-time Ticker, the switch to a news feed that displays different content depending on when you last visited will also profoundly change how we use the social network. Eventually, I think the “return visit-aware” concept will also change how we consume content across the web. → Read More
Something about the juxtaposition of things reminds me of the politics of disruption, the emotional spring of the social generation. By themselves, interesting, intellectual perhaps, but not of the parallel land of hope and acceptance.
I read an interview with Noel Gallagher, the supposedly sane one of the Oasis brothers. Something about Oasis being in the Top 10 of bands. He ducked the statement briefly, attributing it to alcohol and passing it off as Top 20 straight. → Read More
Amazon’s extra-large Kindle DX is available this weekend (which is to say for the next few hours) for the low, low price of $259, down from its normal $379. It’s telling that even the lowered price still seems ridiculously high, considering that smaller but more advanced models are selling for under $100. How long can this outlier live in a world dominated by cheap, pocketable, touchscreen e-readers?
In its current form, the fact is it’s likely on its way out. The Kindle Keyboard and indeed the graphite look in general are on their way out, to be replaced by the lighter, thinner, more touchable new generation. But there’s a problem: the DX is one of the very few e-readers that doesn’t use the same 6″ E-Ink screen as everyone else. Amazon probably knows there’s demand there, but perhaps the time is not yet right to strike. → Read More
Most folks spent their Thanksgiving weekend ensuring that every inch of their intestinal track was thoroughly covered in gravy. Others spent it trying to get just drunk enough that their relative’s worst habits were bearable.
Some, however, spent the weekend doing something pretty much only they can do: hacking the heck out of the iPhone. As a result, everyone waitin’ and wishin’ for an iPhone 4S carrier unlock has something to be thankful for. → Read More
As I’ve written about before, we’re in an amazing period of the consumer Internet. Despite a shaky economy, many web companies are in hypergrowth. This is reminiscent of the five-year period over a decade ago when companies like Amazon, Netscape, eBay, Yahoo, Google and PayPal were built.
One challenge, which isn’t new, is the battle for consumer attention. If you’re looking to grow your user base, is there a best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users? I’m increasingly convinced the best way is by harnessing a concept called social proof, a relatively untapped gold mine in the age of the social web.
What is social proof? Put simply, it’s the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something. It’s also known as informational social influence. → Read More
New Facebook game CastleVille is one of Zynga’s fastest-growing titles ever, as it announced a few days ago. That’s good news for the company, but maybe not good enough when you consider its overall traffic trajectory on Facebook, and its plans for an initial public offering as soon as next week.
After launching in the middle of November, the medieval role-playing simulation title has grown to 6.9 million daily active users today, currently the third-highest out of any Zynga game on Facebook.
Overall, the developer has a total of 49.5 million daily actives on Facebook, according to Inside Network’s AppData application tracking service. It’s still by far the largest of any Facebook developer, but it has been falling from its peaks in previous months and years. Up until CastleVille launched, its games had been drifting down over the last 30 days from 48.2 million DAU.
And bigger picture, the company’s Facebook DAU had been 59 million in the second quarter, and had already fallen to 54 million in the third. In previous amendments to its filing, Zynga had said these changes were due “to a decline in players of our more mature games and a limited number of new game launches in the first nine months of 2011.” → Read More
I get asked a lot why Instagram is so popular. It might be because we just threw the first iPhone photography conference, 1197, or because I allegedly run a company that studies and designs interfaces. It could also be the world of photography is changing so fast that lots of us nerds are talking about how a tool like Instagram can pass 10 million users in 355 days. The interface implications are fascinating, the company and technology dynamics of serving content to 10 million users with less than ten employees are fascinating, the artistic content is fascinating, and the reasons why people like me are so addicted to the damn thing are fascinating. Here’s a crack at why, since I think some other attempts haven’t quite captured it. → Read More
Editor’s Note: Guest contributor and early TechCrunch writer Steve Poland (@popo) currently is exploring raising a fund to join the “overcrowded” early stage investment market. His last contribution was The New Early-Adopter Addiction: Turntable.
Last week at David Kirkpatrick’s Techonomy conference, Sean Parker said “Little startups are ridiculously overfunded. The market is ridiculously overcrowded with early stage investors. This results in a talent drain, where the best talent gets diffused and work for their own startups.” VC Jim Breyer added, “And it will end very badly.” → Read More
Like putting a donk on it, it seems like every new website needs to have a daily deal. Take Curisma, for example. On the surface it’s sort of an Oink-like website dedicated to the curation of cool products. Underneath, like a the cowbell in Don’t Fear The Reaper, is a daily deals site. Luckily, the curation of Curisma is far more interesting than the daily deal, which just might save this start-up.
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Classify this as a rumor for now, but Israeli business press is reporting that Akamai is poised to take over one of its competitors, website and mobile acceleration technology vendor Cotendo, for $300 million to $350 million. Founded in 2008, Cotendo has raised over $36 million in funding from investors like Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Tenaya Capital.
A few months ago, Cotendo raised $17 million in new funding from its previous backers, with Citrix Systems and Juniper Networks stepping in as strategic investors as well. Other strategic partners include Google, AT&T and Sumitomo Corporation. → Read More
Remember, R.I.P Good Times, the Sequoia slide deck in 2008 warning its portfolio companies to batten down the hatches and “spend every dollar as if it were your last”? Things aren’t yet quite as dire as the last time the economy tailspinned into recession, but a number of factors are making some startup investors wary. “I think 2012 will look more like 2008 than 2011,” warns First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman. His pace of investing has not slowed down. He’s just being realistic.
Speaking to other early-stage investors recently, I get the same sense that the froth (dare I say “bubble“?) of the past 18 months is coming to an end. Many VCs (and founders) have been feasting, and now it might be time to take a breather. The number of seed-stage fundings is outpacing series A fundings. And whether you consider this a Series A Crunch or not, many more seed stage companies got funded over the past 18 months than previously and many more will subsequently not continue to get funded when it comes time for a series A. → Read More
It’s not hard to love Mario. He’s had his ups and downs – what, for example, was the deal with Paper Mario? And Super Mario Strikers was pretty hard to love – but darn it if the little guy doesn’t keep coming back for more and keeps you, at the very least, entertained.
Super Mario 3D Land is the latest in the Mario saga. The story is fairly typical – something was stolen (a lot of leaves) and Bowser took Princess Peach. Your mission is to find the leaves (which are special and give you the Tanooki suit) and then find Peach. What you go through to find her, however, is where all of the fun comes in.
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On Thanksgiving, Pinterest’s co-founder Ben Silbermann sent an email to his entire user base saying thanks. It was fitting, as Pinterest was born two years ago on Thanksgiving day 2009. Ben had been working on a website with a few friends, and his girlfriend came up with the name while they were watching TV. Pinterest officially launched to the world 4 months later.
Some startups go crazy with hype and users right after launch. And some don’t. I don’t know the founders, but I thought I’d take apart Pinterest’s story to discuss growth and virality in consumer web startups. Pinterest was not an overnight success. On the contrary, its growth was surprisingly modest after Turkey Day 2009.
Take a look at Pinterest’s one-year traffic on Compete from Oct 2010 to Oct 2011, which is the picture in this post, and shows Pinterest rising from 40,000 to 3.2 million monthly unique visitors. I took both ends of this chart and estimated monthly compounded growth over Pinterest’s lifetime, then interpolated the curve using constant growth and put the results in this Google Spreadsheet. → Read More
