Earlier today, we were tipped about this thread in the Chromium Google Groups area. Gregor Hochmuth, the Product Manager for the Chrome Web Store, responded to a question wondering if Google would be giving developers advanced notice before the store goes live. Hochmuth said that yes, there would be reminders sent out before the launch to let developers get edits and updates in before it rolls live. Well, the first such message was sent out today.
Specifically, Google is starting to notify current Chrome extension developers about the upcoming Chrome Web Store launch. The reason is that extensions (and themes) will be wrapped into the Web Store alongside apps. In the email, Google will only say that the store is launching “later this year”, but this email seems to be the first indications that it’s coming sooner rather than later. → Read More
One of the most successful mobile games right now is Angry Birds, which has been downloaded more than 30 million times across different mobile platforms, with 12 million of those being paid downloads on iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. But on Android, the game is free, and is supported by advertising. Angry Birds has been downloaded more than 5 million times on Android since that version launched in October. “By end of year, we project earnings of over $1 million per month with the ad-supported version of Angry Birds,” says Peter Vesterbacka, the “Mighty Eagle” behind the game at Rovio Mobile. (Video after the jump). → Read More
Last time we checked in Former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin was using Twitter to contest Gawker over the leaks of her book “America By Heart” bypassing the “lamestream” media. And she’s managed to catapult herself into the Internet spotlight yet again by using 140 characters to glom off all the attention heaped onto the Wikileaks story, see below.
The Daily Show’s John Stewart calls her out on this, her tweeting and the media’s extensive coverage of her tweeting in general in the video above, “Like a teenage boy with a crush on the stuck up girl who hates him, the media is fascinated by everything Sarah Palin tweets.” → Read More
If you want to feel lazy, spend about ten minutes with Travis Kiefer.
He’ll start out by telling you how he spent every waking moment of his teenage years in low-income South Dakota, studying and scheming over how he could be the first one in his family to go to college, and the first kid in his highschool’s history to go to an elite university. His dream school: Stanford. As a kid from a low-income family, he knew the biggest way to change his family’s economic reality was a Silicon Valley startup.
Ok, so he’s an impressive kid. But that sounds like a lot of Silicon Valley rags-to-riches stories, right? → Read More
Yesterday brought the news that eBay acquired in-store product inventory search startup Milo for $75 million. eBay said that it plans to integrate Milo into both its online marketplace and its mobile applications, including barcode scanning app RedLaser. But tucked away in the press release eBay issued about the acquisition were a few surprising stats about the number of product searches eBay and its competitors are handling.
According to comScore, eBay handled more than 2 billion U.S. product searches in the third quarter. For the same time period, Amazon saw 847 million searches, while Google handled only 226 million product searches. → Read More
No, Google hasn’t acquired Groupon (yet). But it does have a smaller, though very interesting acquisition to announce: it’s just acquired Phonetic Arts, a company based in the UK that works on speech synthesis in games.
Phonetic Arts makes technology that can convert lines of recorded dialog into a ‘speech library’ — feed it a few hundred lines of recordings using your voice, and it can then piece together those sounds to generate new sentences that sound surprisingly realistic. Up until now the company has primarily been focused on using this technology for games, but Google intends to use it to make its own automated voices sound more fluid and human. → Read More
Tinychat‘s super simple messaging service lives on the Web (and then some), but the fledgling company’s Facebook video chat application is clearly seeing some solid growth of its own. The app is now the single most used video chat application on the Facebook Platform, with roughly 2.4 million monthly active users according to the application page. → Read More
comScore released its monthly smartphone mobile report today, which continues to show that the Android OS is eating away at smartphone market share reach from Apple’s iOS and RIM’s BlackBerry OS. The data, which measured smartphone usage from July until October of this year, showed that 60.7 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during period, up 14 percent from the preceding three month period. comScore says that the 1 out of every 4 mobile subscribers are using a smartphone.
Similar to the data from last month, RIM took the top spot as the leading mobile smartphone platform in the U.S. with 35.8 percent share of U.S. smartphone subscribers, which is down 3.5 percent from the last period. Apple followed with 24.6 percent share (up 0.8 percentage points). Google’s Android OS saw the strongest growth, rising 6.5 percentage points to capture 23.5 percent of smartphone subscribers. Microsoft accounted for 9.7 percent of smartphone subscribers, while Palm accounts for 3.9 percent. → Read More
LinkedIn has scored a big talent win today, as Google Scientist and Tech Lead Daniel Tunkelang joins the professional social network to work on data initiatives (you can access Tunkelang’s LinkedIn profile here.)
According to Tunkelang’s blog post announcing the new job opportunity, he will be joining the data scientist team at LinkedIn, working under Chief Scientist DJ Patil. Tunkelang writes that he will be working on “products and discover insights from a data collection,” tackling the issues of “information extraction, matching, recommendation, social network analysis, and network visualization.” → Read More
On the heels of Milo’s $75 million acquisition by eBay; a similar product inventory site, called Wishpond, is throwing its hat into the ring. Like Milo, Wishpond lists the real-time inventory of brick and mortar retail stores and is building its product listings platform around large chains like Target or BestBuy as well as from mom and pop shops in small towns.
On the merchant side, Wishpond’s platform integrates with point-of-sale systems and allows retailers to upload their inventory onto the site. Wishpond will not only list the in-stock inventory on its platform, but will also help the merchant create a storefront on their Facebook page (similar to what Payvment does). The startup says that it will populate the page with new products and promotions when applicable. → Read More
Last.fm, the UK-based music startup acquired by media giant CBS in 2007 for $280m (£140m), made a loss for 2009 of just under $4.45 million (£2.84 million), reveal new accounts for the company. The loss posted in 2008 was £17.11 million, reflecting the high costs of streaming music, which the company has now cut. It just goes to show how expensive streaming can be…
Financials published on the UK’s Companies House show the company ended last year with net liabilities of £22.24 million, but parent company CBS is still effectively subsidising the company and will “make available such funds as are needed”. We’re hoping that CBS is getting some value out of this relationship.
Over 54% of Last.fm’s revenues in 2009 were from the UK, 33.5% from the US, 9.4% from EU countries, and 2.3% from the rest of the world.
That’s a gain on US users but the question is, is it enough to sustain CBS as a sugar daddy? → Read More
Intuit-owned Mint.com is beginning its international expansion today with the launch of its personal finance platform in Canada.
Canadians can access Mint at Mint.com/Canada. The main difference between the Canadian version of Mint.com is that it connects to both Canadian banking financial institutions and U.S. banks and credit unions. Canadian users will still be able to aggregate financial accounts and transaction information, categorize spending, access personal financial data and more. Mint.com’s mobile apps for iPhone and Android will also be available on the iTunes Canada app store and Android Market. → Read More
Of those of you who aren’t diligently blocking the ads on this page, 63 percent are apparently ignoring them anyway. In fact, a majority of Americans say they ignore Internet advertising the most, compared to television, radio and newspaper ads.
Results of a new Adweek Media/Harris Interactive survey of about 2,100 U.S. adults show that over six in ten respondents say they tend to ignore or disregard Internet ads. Among those who ignore online ads, two in five say they ignore banner ads (43 percent) the most, and one in five say they ignore search engine ads (20 percent) the most. → Read More
Q&A site Quora is officially reticent about sharing usage metrics which leads Quora fans to make some interesting calculations and guestimations. In fact there’s a fascinating topic section on Quora called “Quora usage and statistics” that attempts to parse all Quora related minutae from “Who has the most edits?, to “How much time does it take for a question to come in” to “What’s the longest Quora answer?” → Read More
There was a good crowd at the TechFellows event tonight in San Francisco. I ran into a lot of people I don’t see all that often. Among them were two entrepreneurs that have made a ton of money by selling their companies in the last couple of years. They’re both working on a slew of new projects, and the way they’re doing it is fascinating.
What does a person do after becoming fabulously wealthy?
Sometimes the type A pirate personality that got them to where they are just doesn’t stop. They move on to a new challenge, and try for an even bigger win. They keep working, keep creating.
Sometimes they just retire out of tech. Maybe do some angel investing. Or buy a basketball team. Or a formula 1 racing team. Occasionally they go into politics, which never ends well. Brute force of personality doesn’t get stuff done in politics, these people usually fail at it. → Read More
Tonight in San Francisco, many of the Valley’s stars are coming together for the second annual TechFellow Awards, a fellowship designed to help recognize some of the most accomplished leaders in technology — and to help foster further innovation by granting them $100,000 to invest in startups.
The awards program, which TechCrunch co-hosts along with Founders Fund, has been expanded this year to include New Enterprise Associates. Together, Founders Fund and NEA will grant each TechFellow $100,000 to invest in a start-up of their choice, which more than doubles how much each winner is being granted. The fund structure has also been adjusted to allow each TechFellow to share in the success of all 2010 TechFellow companies. Last year’s TechFellows helped fund and found fFlick, Bidfire, Quora, Flipboard, HipChat and others (you can see a list of last year’s winners here). → Read More
Once again TechCrunch has partnered with Founders Fund and newcomer New Enterprise Associates to present Silicon Valley’s best and brightest with TechFellow Awards, which recognize the top high tech entrepreneurs in four categories, Disruptive Innovation, Engineering Leadership, Product Design and Marketing, General Management. → Read More
What is Google Cloud Picker? According to these Blogger Forums, Sites Forums, and others, Google has been testing a new online storage tool called, you guessed it, Cloud Picker.
From these accounts, it appears that the tool is connected somehow to Google Apps, Docs, and Sites, and was presented to users when they tried to insert a file or image into a Google site. When they tried to embed the file, a “Google Cloud Picker” window opened and asked users to log-in to their Google Accounts. → Read More
It’s been my experience that Google Maps has always been the most legible of the online map services, though even the worst have come a long way since the early days. I figured it was just the same magical Google power that returned search results so fast and pushed email to my phone in seconds. But while the juice that makes those things go is largely behind the scenes, the optimizations Google has made to the Maps interface are staring you right in the face every time you use it. But you might not have noticed them.
This blog post is a minute examination of those optimizations, and what competitors might look like if they did the same thing. It sounds dry, but I found it an interesting read, and it’s also one of those things that you can’t un-see. → Read More
Yesterday, after some digging, we were able to confirm that the internal codename for Google’s upcoming social project is “Emerald Sea“. Despite some confusion that it may be called “Emerald City“, it is definitely “Sea”, we’ve confirmed with several sources. But there’s more.
As one of our sources told us yesterday, these codenames quickly evolve. And in fact, it now looks like Emerald Sea may already be a slightly older name. And Google may be close to picking the final name for the product. As of right now, we’re hearing it’s being called “Google +1″ or “Google Plus One”. → Read More
