Web 2.0 Summit went down in SF this week and, with the exception of a few speakers who ducked out because of pre-IPO jitters, a good portion of the upper echelon Internet ecosystem was there, including final speaker and Web 3.0 proponent Reid Hoffman.
Since Hoffman says we’ve already surpassed an era defined by social sharing straight into an era defined by the implementation of the data… → Read More
We’re at the Palace Hotel for day two of for the 2011 Web 2.0 Summit, where the lineup for the next three days consists of almost everyone on the entire Internet. The. entire. Internet. In case you didn’t get to be a part of the in-person action, you and your friends at home can follow along from the Livestream above, starting at 1130 a.m. PST.
Today’s speaker highlights include the… → Read More
And it really doesn’t matter if I’m wrong I’m right where I belong, sings Paul McCartney on his latest album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Facebook Band, which sits high on the iTunes charts. Boy, is he not kidding. He’s taking the time for a number of things that weren’t important yesterday. So should we.
On the surface it seems like business as usual, with the heads of big Internet companies… → Read More
Every year at the Web 2.0 Summit, Mary Meeker gives a ten-minute slideshow packed with great data showing the monetum and direction of different Internet trends. This year, a big focus of her presentation was on mobile. Specifically, she put up the slide above showing a Morgan Stanley estimate that global smartphone shipments will eclipse PC shipments in 2012, with more than 400 million… → Read More
Dow Jones is releasing its third quarter venture capital numbers today, and the amount of money raised was down sharply from last quarter’s heady $7.7 billion distributed across 740 deals.
In the third quarter of this year, 662 companies raised just $5.4 billion. It’s not uncommon to see a muted third quarter in the venture business due to summer vacations, but this was the smallest amount raised… → Read More
There were two surreal moments for me at Disrupt last week. The first was during the SV Angels Party when Hammer was dancing. It wasn’t just because MC-Freaking-Hammer was doing the Hammer dance in a tux and nerd glasses in front of me. It was because the CEO and founder of the media company I work for were on stage looking awkward and white, but dancing none the less. It was because… → Read More
What do you do if you are an obscure language group in Austin, Texas looking for attention? You declare “Web 2.0″ the one millionth word in the English language. So says the Global Language Monitor, which looks at usage of words on the Web and adds them to its online dictionaries. “Web 2.0″ has been in common usage for a long time, even though Merriam-Webster does not yet recognize it. But… → Read More
http://pixton.com/widget/1 Howdy, y’all. John and I are still at SXSW, taking in all the sights and sounds. One of the cooler companies here is Pixton, a site that lets you easily create comic strips. As a budding artist, I appreciate the site quite a bit. This comic, hopefully the first of many, pretty much summarizes our experience thus far. (I’m the funky guy, John is the chef and… → Read More
So there’s this site Out There called TwitterValue. It allegedly measures how much your Tweets are worth, based on a super-secret “Ph.D algorithm.” Our guess is that it takes into account the number of followers you have, how frequently you tweet, how many @replies you get, etc. Being the vainglorious nerds that we are here at CG, we decided to see how much our Tweets are worth. You’re in for… → Read More
Well, it seems Facebook is wildly insecure and none of those third-party applications should ever be trusted. Who would have guessed it? Specifically, there’s an app out there called Photo of the Day that ostensibly displays photos of the day ::cough:: from National Geographic. It does more than that, though, and sends unwanted traffic to a chosen Web site. Then that chosen Web site is… → Read More
This is a great editorial. The author takes shots at Amazon’s EC2, Google’s App Engine, and “green” tech in general. I’m not convinced of the utter shamelessness and opportunism he accuses the companies of, but it’s nice to hear a little venom about these bleeding-edge products that claim such high ground. I do like this bit, though: I do have to give both… → Read More
The first shots of Snow Leopard, Apple’s new operating system that should be here in about a year, are now starting to appear online. On a German site, of all crazy things! Anyhow, the biggest news from the released screen shots is the existence of a mysterious “Save as Web Application” menu item in Safari. What this does is save the Web site—let’s say Gmail, for… → Read More
Seriously, I’m about to move to Japan. I think they should stop calling their phones “phones” (or the Japanese equivalent) and call them “Tricorders” (or the Japanese equivalent). Because where else in the world can you point your phone at someone else’s shirt and have one just like it sent to you? I’d love to use Nota’s intriguing service here in… → Read More
Charming It looks like Time mag didn’t get the memo that says nothing negative is to be written about Facebook. Funny (well) thing is, it’s the same thing I complained about nearly a year ago: too many stupid application requests. Yup, Facebook users, it seems, are fed up with the myriad application requests they get each and every day. A zombie has bitten you, do you want to bite… → Read More
Boy, if only these guys had "user-created" somewhere in their mission statement. It’s already a Web 2.0 smorgasbord. If I understand it correctly, the idea is that you and your friends all sign up and register your phones with the site. Then, when you want to call someone in jolly old England or jolly old Moscow, Jaxtr acts as a middle man, calling you both from local numbers where… → Read More
Did you hear the awesome news? Facebook Chat launched at the weekend for some folks, myself included. Apparently the rollout is on a network-by-network basis, and one of mine, NYU, was a big winner. You can read how great it is on Facebook itself or any one of the fan sites, but I’ll tell you what about it annoyed me. First, the implementation, on a UI level, bothers me. The app, which… → Read More
Not good enough~! How do you feel about online apps aka “cloud computing”? You know, Google Docs, Photoshop Express, Meebo, etc. Love them? Hate them? Couldn’t give a toss? Well one angry journalist, Paul Boutin, hates them… now! See, he used to be all about network-dependent apps, thinking, in his crazy youth spent at an MIT computer lab, that such applications simply made… → Read More
[photopress:flickrrrrr.jpg,full,center] Me either Didn’t people complain when Yahoo! bought Flickr in 2005? These same folks are at it again, claiming the sale of Yahoo! to Microsoft will destroy their favorite photo sharing service. Some users are apparently at odds with Microsoft’s online ethos as it were—trying to come up with a service to mach another, already existing… → Read More
[photopress:gssss.jpg,full,center] German chemical corp BASF had (has?) a slogan, “We don’t make many of the products you use; we make them better.” Something to that effect. The recently launched Gamestrata has a similar slogan. “We don’t make the games you are playing; we just want to make the games you are playing better!” It’s a pretty bold claim, but… → Read More
Drop me a line @ john at crunchgear dot com if you really, really like web 2.0 apps as in “I erased Office so I could use Google Docs.” → Read More
Hate opening Photoshop, that resource hog, just to resize an image? Me, too! That’s why I use Picnik, an online photo editor that uses the magic of Web 2.0 to—get this—edit photos. It can grab photos from your Flickr, Facebook, Picassa, Photobucket and Webshots account, or edit photos you have on your computer. There’s a premium version, too, that, for $25 a year, gets you… → Read More
Readers will have noticed that I’m a big fan of the Drudge Report. Well now—NOW!—I’ll be able to read the Web site on-the-go. Mr. Drudge just launched idrudgereport.com, which is a mobile version of the Report. It’s just headlines: no pictures, no sirens, no zaniness. It must be Mobile Optimization Wednesday. I bet the code for iDrudge must have taken months to… → Read More
Now this is what I call a Halloween costume. Leave your unoriginal iPhone costumes at home people, ’cause Awesome Party Guy is on a roll this year as a YouTube video. He even has a comments section, where people can write dirty jokes and draw dicks after slamming back a couple Jello shots. Dress up as a YouTube clip and let people comment on you directly [MAKE] → Read More
With Microsoft recently purchasing a 1.6-percent stake in Facebook for a whopping $240 million, many are questioning if Facebook is truly worth $15 billion. While many pundits are calling $15 billion crazy, the BBC takes a look at why Facebook could actually be worth the big bucks. For instance, did you know that over 200,000 new users join Facebook each day? Talk about astronomical growth! Other… → Read More
Mozilla Labs has created a really easy way to run any web site in its own separate window. Some people may find this useful and some may ask "what’s the point?". Well, for instance, I’m currently running Prism on a multiple monitor setup that allows me to keep Google Reader, Gmail, and our super-secret CrunchGear web-based chatting app open in three separate windows, all the… → Read More
Facebook will accept an offer from either Microsoft or Google within the next 24 to 48 hours, according to the New York Post. Both companies are looking to sink between $750 million and $1.5 billion dollars into the site. The Post didn’t give odds or anything, but said that if Google wins it’ll look to undo the ad deal that Facebook struck with Microsoft earlier in the year. If… → Read More
I love people who criticize Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, as if he and the rest of the Facebook crew need any outside input from anyone. I’m pretty sure they know what they’re doing over there. Take this guy’s suggestions. Alexander Wolfe, in his “Wolfe’s Den” column (I was actually going to start a column called “Deleon’s Den;” too late… → Read More
Let me rephrase that title in the form of a statement instead of a question. We better see a browser-based Joost in the near future. With the impending release of the H.264 codec into Flash Player 9 and its ability to do high quality, full screen video inside a web browser, downloading and installing an external program like Joost is going to become an inconvenient extra step. → Read More
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