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Yelp's CEO Jeremy Stoppelman deserves credit for trying to play nice with Google, even appearing onstage at the Social Currency CrunchUp with John Hanke, a Google VP of Product Management. As expected the tension was palpable, as Hanke and Stoppelman discussed Google Places and the goliath's heavy reliance on Yelp's content.
Beyond the professional veneer, there's no question that Stoppelman feels burned. The recent developments, he says, were unexpected:
"Well I think we were surprised because we hadn't participated in Place Pages over the years. Like we were in sort of the precursor to Place Pages back in something like 2006 and then we left because we weren't really happy in the direction it was going ... And then yeah, we found our content was showing up there and it is ranked dead last right now. I don't think that's sort of a permanent situation from what we gather from talking to Google, they are sort of headed in a new direction that which hopefully will be more positive."Full video ahead, along with Stoppelman's thoughts on taking on Foursquare and Groupon.
Posted on 1 August 2010 | 12:43 am
Well this is interesting. One of the key points at Apple's recent press conference to discuss the iPhone 4's antenna, was that the problem (called "attenuation") is not unique to the iPhone 4. To highlight this, Apple showed videos of the problem on smartphones by rival companies. Those videos were then posted to a special antenna page on Apple's website. Those videos are now gone.
As you can see on this page, the videos are nowhere to be found. Instead, the page now only shows the overview of the antenna design and test labs. A search of Apple's website brings up a few of the landing pages where the videos used to be -- here's the Droid X one, for example -- but now those just redirect to the antenna design page as well. Odd.
Posted on 1 August 2010 | 12:08 am
Let's call this a single source rumor. But the source is Paul Carr's camera, so we feel pretty good about it. The picture was taken last night at the TechCrunch summer party at August Capital.
Tello, says our source (the camera), has raised $100,000 from angel investor Dave McClure, who's checks appear to have an imprint of the Twitter fail whale in the background. This is one of his first investments from his shiny new 500 Startups fund.
What's Tello? We don't actually know. Founder and CEO Joe Beninato was previously the CEO of Presto. We had a lot of fun with that one. Cofounder and CTO John Cwikla has experience at GameLayers, Doostang, Xoom and other startups.
Posted on 31 July 2010 | 11:43 pm
The Magic Trackpad (if I must call it that) has generated some controversy on the TC network. MG thinks it signals the end of the mouse era. I think it's a great tool but is being lauded by a group of people unfamiliar with decent mice (read: Mac users). I happen to love both Apple's trackpads and great mice at the same time, but it seems to me that we're overlooking the real conflict here. And as it turns out, mice and trackpads (magic or otherwise) are on the same side.
The next generation of input is already here; chances are you have it in your pocket. Yet, advanced as it is, there are fundamental shortcomings that will prevent it from completely supplanting the interfaces we've grown up with.
Posted on 31 July 2010 | 7:57 pm
You Americans have all the good stuff. Stuff like BP pumping oil in the Ocean and guns, lots of guns. And then you have Netflix and we people outside the U.S. are wondering what could it feel like to have a service like that. Now I know.
In Europe we also have online movie services. They are completely useless unless you are prepared to pay 3€ ($5) for a single movie for 24 hours. The content of these services is not very satisfying either. This is of course not an option for people who know that such things as Netflix exist. In Germany for example there are lawyers who make a living off scouting torrent trackers to see if you download a single MP3 or a movie. If they get you they will try to get your name and address from your ISP. First your ISP will refuse to hand your data to the rats. This leads to a pile up of legal costs. Finally 3-4 months later you will find a letter in the postbox saying that you have to pay a 1000€-5000€ + penalty because you downloaded something plus the legal fee that they spent on suing your ISP to give them your personal data.
Posted on 31 July 2010 | 5:31 pm
Earlier this month, I attended OpenWebAsia – South East Asia in Kuala Lumpur/Malaysia, a two-day tech and web industry event that attracted over 350 international attendees. The event shined a spotlight on a market that's still largely overlooked: a whopping 600 million people live in South East Asia, which boasts a rapidly growing web and mobile population.
What follows is a short summary of just a few presentations, panel discussions, and startup demos I witnessed at OpenWebAsia (those with a focus on Asia only).
Posted on 31 July 2010 | 4:23 pm
One thing you can say about the Flickr team - there's some fight in 'em. They apparently were not super pleased with our coverage of their annual (and unofficial) Grant-Pattishall Award given each year to the Yahoo engineer who “who breaks Flickr in the most spectacular way.” I'm not sure why, I think the award is fun.
So now they have a new award, called the Bogan-Martin Award: "The Bogan-Martin Award is given yearly to the Flickr staff member who inadvertently generates the most spectacular media overreaction to a personal comment or inside joke."
Posted on 31 July 2010 | 9:08 am
With more than 200 deals since 2005, Y Combinator's Paul Graham knows how to size up a young team of entrepreneurs. However, he didn't get it right from day one.
On Friday, we got a chance to talk to Graham after his morning panel with SV Angel's Ron Conway. He discussed how his strategy has evolved over the past five years and why the balance of power is shifting in Silicon Valley. See videos ahead.
Posted on 31 July 2010 | 4:00 am
Grammy award winning artist Chamillionaire (a.k.a Hakeem Seriki) has become a regular at tech conferences, perhaps because the hustle and flow culture of the rap business and the hustle and flow culture of the tech business are surprisingly similar. His stories of struggles between artists and music labels are resonant to anyone who's experienced the relationship intricacies of startups and VCs.
Posted on 31 July 2010 | 2:32 am
Perhaps you've heard: social games maker Playdom was acquired by Disney a few days ago for a deal potentially worth north of $750 million. Playdom CEO John Pleasants took the stage today at our Social Currency CrunchUp in Palo Alto, to talk a bit about the deal and the future.
Pleasants says that he's not exactly sure what his title at Disney will be yet, but he thinks he'll be the General Manager of Playdom. He's also not sure if Tapulous (another gaming company just acquired by Disney) will be under his department, but he doesn't think so. And he made sure to clarify that the deal was for $563.2 million plus an earn-out of up to $200 million -- so he's not super super super rich, he's just super super rich.
Posted on 31 July 2010 | 12:49 am
Smart window startup Soladigm announced today its plans to build a factory in Olive Branch, Mississippi. The Khosla Ventures and Sigma Partners backed company makes dynamic glass windows that can be tinted on demand to block excess light and heat.
Founded in 2007, Soladigm has been operating in stealth until now. The company employs about 50 people in its Milpitas, California headquarters, and plans to hire about 300 employees over the next few years for the Mississippi plant.
Posted on 31 July 2010 | 12:47 am
Criticising Valleywag in 2010 is something of a pointless exercise, like offering diplomatic counsel to the Ottoman Empire ten years after the Treaty of Lausanne. More pointless still, attacking the site’s titular editor Ryan Tate is like appealing to the guy responsible for writing parking tickets in Constantinople.
I mean, I get that.
And yet despite the irrelevance of Gawker’s saddest sub-domain and the tragic impotence of its editor, the influence of its parent means that when a Valleywag story oozes its way on to the front page of Gawker.com, it’s important to take notice. And to mop it up so that no-one slips.
Here goes then.
Posted on 31 July 2010 | 12:38 am
Online monetization platform gWallet, which offers social gaming developers a variety of ways to monetize their apps and boost engagement, is looking to put its money where its mouth is: the company is launching a $20,000 cash guarantee to any social gaming publishers that don't generate more revenue when they switch from their current monetization platform to gWallet.
To participate, publishers are being asked to implement a simultaneous, head-to-head test over the span of thirty days (you can sign up starting today, with the 30 day window beginning August 1). At the end of that time period, if your revenues from gWallet aren't higher than they are on you original implementation, then the service will pay out the guarantee. But you'll have to be a pretty sizable game to participate: to qualify, gWallet says that publishers need to be new to the platform, and need to have at least 250,000 daily active users. That said, it sounds like the the company is willing to discuss a guarantee to apps with a smaller user base if you email their partner@gwallet.com address.
Posted on 31 July 2010 | 12:02 am
Tomorrow night, July 31, Twitter has announced they are having some planned downtime. Beginning at 11 PM PT, Twitter will likely be down on and off for up to 5 hours, Twitter warns.
The reason for the downtime? NTT America, Twitter's hosting provider is upgrading a part of the internal network. This is interesting because Twitter is in the process of opening their own data center in Utah later this year. Despite the new tweet digs, they've said they'll keep working with NTT America, so this maintenance is clearly necessary.
Posted on 31 July 2010 | 12:01 am
It’s takes a certain type of person to get excited about a work productivity tool. Mark Nielsen and Patrick Carmitchel, unsatisfied with 37Signals' Basecamp, have decided to disrupt the productivity software industry, says Nielsen “We decided we’d rather not see the light of day for awhile than have to live with knowing that with just a little bit of creative, a pinch of logic and a dash of sexy, we could revive the productivity software world with a tool that would even make Apple cry.”
Posted on 30 July 2010 | 11:52 pm
Today at our Social Currency CrunchUp in Palo Alto, CA, James Lamberti, VP of Global Research and Marketing for InMobi, sat down with our Michael Arrington to tell us a bit about mobile advertising.
InMobi is the largest independent mobile ad network in the world. Overall, they're number two behind Google's AdMob. That earned them an $8 million investment from Kleiner Perkins and Sherpalo Ventures a couple weeks ago. But what's particularly interesting about InMobi is how well they're doing outside the U.S.
Posted on 30 July 2010 | 11:34 pm
Today during our Social Currency CrunchUp, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and John Hanke, a Google VP of Product Management, took the stage. Given that the two companies seem to be at odds with one another recently (following a failed acquisition), it was a little tense.
Specifically, Google's strong moves into local with their new Places push seem to be going right at Yelp's core. Sure's it's potentially about more than just local venue reviews, but that's a huge part of it. And that's what Yelp is all about.
Moreover, Google is using Yelp data to bulk up their Places offering. Yelp can't like that too much. In fact, we've heard they're particularly unhappy because they used to have a deal with Google for this data, but they pulled out of that deal a couple years ago. But Google decided to use Yelp's data anyway simply by crawling it. Yelp can't stop them from doing that unless they want to delist themselves from Google -- a move which could kill them.
Posted on 30 July 2010 | 10:56 pm
Social gaming company Zynga is growing at a rapid clip. More importantly, their revenue is growing at a rapid clip. And they need a big gun to handle that. They believe they've just got him: Dave Wehner, formerly a managing director at Allen & Company LLC.
Wehner is stepping in for current CFO Mark Vranesh, who is becoming chief accountant of Zynga. While they obviously won't say it, it should be fairly clear what this shuffling is all about: it's not CFO, it's another three-letter acronym, IPO. While Zynga is still undoubtedly a ways away from such a move, they have to get their finances in order now. Especially since they're growing so quickly.
Posted on 30 July 2010 | 9:57 pm
Last month, we noted that Twitter was testing a "You both follow" feature, showing users you and another user both follow. That's interesting, but not particularly useful. Today, they've begun to roll out a new "Suggestions for You" feature which looks at who you follow, and who the people you follow follow, and suggests new people for you to follow. Yes, just like Facebook does. This is very useful.
In fact, this is arguably the most useful social graph feature that Twitter has rolled out yet. A few weeks ago, Twitter rolled out a new name results area for search -- which was incredibly helpful for finding celebrities or brands on Twitter. But this is better. This is all about finding people you may actually be interested in based on your current social graph, but for whatever reason, haven't connected with yet.
Posted on 30 July 2010 | 9:30 pm
Sorry, BlackBerry fanboys, the BlackPad -- or whatever it will be called -- is going to flop in a monumental way. Remember how RIM's last iDevice clone, the Storm, failed in such a public way? Yep, it's going to happen all over again. RIM has no business making a consumer tablet.
We all need to give major props to Research In Motion. They were really the first major player to make smartphones relevant by offering a nearly-bulletproof mobile emailing system to business. Eventually RIM started making consumer-orientated email devices that worked with personal email accounts. RIM really showed the world that you need email while you were away from your desk.
But that's where their claim to fame stops. Don't misunderstand the Canadian company's importance in consumer electronics’ history. RIM ranks up there with the best of them, but unless the so-called BlackPad is targeted solely at businesses and enterprise users — and all signs suggest otherwise — the BlackPad will fail.
Posted on 30 July 2010 | 9:12 pm
It's no secret that loyalty programs — like those hole-punch cards that give you a free Slurpee every ten visits — are a great, cheap way to keep customers coming back to your business. Thing is, running these programs isn't always as easy as it seems, especially if a business wants to do something more complex than the basic "buy ten get one free". PlacePop is a new startup looking to make these loyalty programs accessible to any business: the startup has built a self-serve platform based around its new iPhone application which companies can use to distribute virtual, custom-branded loyalty cards.
Today, the company is launching at our Social Currency CrunchUp, and it's also announcing that it has closed a $1.4 million round of funding. Participants in the round include Affinity Labs Founder Chris Michel, Bebo Founder Michael Birch, and James Currier and Stan Chudnovsky, both of whom cofounded Ooga Labs.
Posted on 30 July 2010 | 7:48 pm
Social search site OneRiot just announced layoffs and staff restructuring on its company blog, in a post entitled "Welcome to the future, it's coming fast."
Now, being agile also necessitates making some tough decisions too, if they are the right thing for the company right now. Unfortunately, today, we have had to let a handful of well respected colleagues go. This is a pragmatic decision based on a strategically focused go-forward plan for the company. It’s in no way a reflection of the talent of the people concerned.
Posted on 30 July 2010 | 7:11 pm
Today at our Social Currency CrunchUp (which is currently being livestreamed here), Blekko founder and CEO Rich Skrenta gave the first live demo of the startup's innovative search engine (be sure to check out our initial review). To mark the occasion, Blekko is giving out an invite to 500 lucky TechCrunch readers — just be one of the first people to email a message requesting an invite to techcrunch@blekko.com.
Posted on 30 July 2010 | 6:56 pm
GM is banking large on the Chevy Volt and apparently feels confident about its success. The auto maker just issued a statement, which conveniently coincides while President Obama is touring the assembly plant, detailing the increased production estimate for 2012. The Detroit-Hamtramck facility will now pump out 50% more than previously detailed, an increase to 45,000 from 30,000.
Chances are this production bump is dependent on a successful roll-out of the first 10,000 vehicles slated to hit dealers later this year. If the $41,000 Volt quickly flops, then GM will probably scale the production numbers back to the initial estimate or less.
Posted on 30 July 2010 | 6:52 pm
According to GroupOn CEO Andrew Mason who is on stage right now at Social Currency CrunchUp, GroupOn was originally a side project Mason started in order to make money, "We tried a zillion things" Mason said.
Including selling slippers with flashlights, which Mason describes as "act of desperation, pretty impressive considering that the company is currently making $365 million in revenues, a million a day according to our sources. Mason gave no thought whatsoever as to whether or not it would work.
Posted on 30 July 2010 | 6:14 pm
