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Yahoo is backing a cycling team. I don't know why — but they're doing it. And today their passion got a little boost: from Google.
Google is announcing tomorrow at the National Bike Summit in Washington, DC that Google Maps will now include biking directions in the U.S. Apparently, this was the most-requested feature for the service, as some 57 million Americans ride bikes.
Posted on 10 March 2010 | 8:44 am
Jon [Miller] came to us and said, `Would you like to be co-presidents?' We said, `Hell yeah.' We didn't have to move our desks,"-- Former MySpace Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn's reaction to the abrupt firing of his boss and his promotion to co-president of MySpace.
Posted on 10 March 2010 | 8:18 am
More bad news for an already bullet-riddled MySpace: three key employees have left the company to join Gravity, a cross-town startup founded by former MySpace COO Amit Kapur, SVP Steve Pearman and SVP Jim Benedetto.
We covered Gravity's launch in December 2009.
The three MySpacer's are Chief Software Architect Chris Bissell (we previously reported Bissell's resignation), Chief Systems Architect Dan Farino and Development Manager Robbie Coleman.
Posted on 10 March 2010 | 7:11 am
A new study by Comscore will be released on Wednesday that may give hope to social gaming startups trying to monetize users. 35% of the survey respondents said that they engage in "marketing actions" to earn virtual currency (such as watching a video, filling out a survey, etc.), and 53% said they be willing to consider marketing action for currency if given the choice.
The study was conducted by Comscore, sponsored by Offerpal, and included responses from 799 Comscore panelists who play games on social networks at least once per month. 54% of panelists play games at least daily.
This is good news for game developers who've had their monetization choices somewhat fenced in over the last few months. Gamers 25-34 are the most likely to earn virtual currency for marketing actions, according to the study - 71% of panelists in that age group said they are "very likely" to consider this.
Posted on 10 March 2010 | 6:44 am
With SXSW starting Friday in Austin, Texas, every location-based service out there is right now finalizing updates that they hope will be the one that gets them used more than all the others. Loopt, is betting on events integration.
The latest version of the app, due to hit the App Store tomorrow will feature a new Pulse tab. Here you'll find events populated from a ton of sources including the live music tracker SonicLiving (SXSW is first and foremost a music event, after all) and most notably, Facebook. This pre-population is important, because it means the events will already be in the system so users won't have to do anything other than share it with friends, or check-in if they're going. The feature also uses you current location to show which events are happening around you at any given moment that a lot of people are at.
Posted on 10 March 2010 | 5:11 am
Business to business software can be a tough sell. Online B2B can be even a harder sell. While there is certainly money to be made, unless you're one of the big players, the likelihood you're going to succeed is pretty small. Starting today, Google is taking their roll as one of the big players and extending a platform to boost some smaller players.
Tonight, Google has unveiled their Google Apps Marketplace. This is an app store for enterprise apps in the cloud. Using a set of APIs, these third-party apps can deeply integrate their products within Google Apps, which already some 25 million people are using. And that also includes over 2 million businesses ranging from startups, to small businesses, to Fortune 500 companies.
For customers, this means a one-stop shop for a variety of applications that their business or organization can use. And it's extremely simple to get started with apps in the marketplace — it just takes 4 clicks, Google says (though that initial click will have to come from your domain admin to approve the use of the app). For developers, particularly small startup developers, it means instant access to more users than they can likely imagine. It also potentially means something more important: money.
Posted on 10 March 2010 | 3:00 am
Zoho, a web-based productivity suite that was called a "fake Office" by a Microsoft VP, is announcing a significant partnership with Google today. The startup will be a launch partner for Google's recently launched Google Apps Marketplace, which allows vendors to sell applications that compliment Google Apps. Here are our notes from the announcement. Zoho will be integrating two of its over 20 business applications - Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects with Google Apps.
So starting today, Google Apps users will be able to add on-demand CRM app Zoho CRM and project management software Zoho Projects into Google Apps. While Zoho has previously rolled out the ability log-in to its applications via your Google Apps IDs, the two applications have been specially formatted for further immersion into Google Apps with App's extended APIs. IT admins will now have an option to add Zoho Apps to their domains through Google Apps Marketplace. Once the IT admin adds a Zoho application to their domain, all users within the domain will have access to the Zoho Application through Google universal navigation. main will have access to the Zoho Application through Google universal navigation. 
Posted on 10 March 2010 | 2:59 am
Tonight, Google launched its Google Apps Marketplace, an online storefront for Apps products and services. Here are our notes from the announcement. And of course, the marketplace is launching with a number of pilot partners (50 to be exact). One of those partners happens to be recently launched Socialwok, a product that ads a social layer to Gmail and other Google products. At last year's TechCrunch50 conference, Socialwok made a big splash, winning the award for best demopit startup and launching its enterprise-friendly, FriendFeed-like layer for Google Apps. The web-based application was praised for launching a social network that wrapped around the very unsocial Google Apps. And the startup just launched a gadget to allow users access all the features of Socialwok without leaving Gmail.
Socialwok in the the Google Apps Marketplace allows organizations to use their existing Google Apps accounts to login into Socialwok and create a social network for their domains to share within Google Docs, Google Calendars, Google Spreadsheets and other Google objects in feeds. For example, with the Socialwok Gmail gadget, users can view, post and comment on various feeds in their organization right from Gmail.
Posted on 10 March 2010 | 2:59 am
Andrew Wilkinson of MetaLab has just written a blog post accusing Mozilla of plagiarizing the design of its FlightDeck editor. To make matters worse, Wilkinson says that MetaLab actually bid on creating the design for FlightDeck months ago, but was turned down by Mozilla.
While Wilkinson is understandably upset, at this point,it looks like the plagiarized image is just a mockup on the Mozilla wiki — not the actual product (though it's obviously still in bad taste). We've reached out to Mozilla for a comment. You can see a screenshot comparison from Wilkinson's blog post below.
Update: Here's a comment from Mozilla, stating that the copy-and-paste design was a proof of concept:
Posted on 10 March 2010 | 2:39 am
Tonight, Google is hosting one of their Campfire One events at their headquarters in Mountain View, CA. They're using the event to launch their new Google Apps Marketplace. This is the app store that business applications can use to reach the more than 25 million people and 2 million business that use Google Apps for their domains.
Here are the links to our extended coverage on the Google Apps Marketplace:
Posted on 10 March 2010 | 2:04 am
Over the last few days, a strange situation has been brewing between Amazon and a sizable number of comic book fans. On March 7, Bleeding Cool broke the news of an apparent Amazon sale featuring high quality hardcover Marvel graphic novels at bargain-basement prices of $14.99, when their retail prices were more along the lines of $125. Alas, it turned out to be a pricing error. Amazon could have simply canceled the orders (which is common practice for online retailers), but instead, it tried to do right by its users and said it would honor some of the orders. Except it didn't actually have enough books in stock to do what it promised, leading to another wave of frustration from the comics fans. Now Amazon is looking to smooth things over with some $25 dollar gift certificates.
The tale is a bit complicated. After word of the apparent sale began to spread, plenty of comics fans began to snatch up the books as quickly as they could, causing some of the graphic novels to climb toward the top of Amazon's best seller lists. 
Posted on 10 March 2010 | 1:36 am
Later this week, thousands of ironic t-shirts will be arriving in Austin for the 16th annual South By Southwest Interactive festival.
At about this time, it's traditional for tech publications to publish handy guides to "surviving SXSWi" - packed with useful advice that's basically interchangeable with that for any other festival since the beginning of time.
"Drink plenty of water!" "Prepare for some late nights!" "Plan ahead to make sure you don't miss anything!" "Pack sturdy shoes!" "Always use a condom!". Useful advice for SXSWi, certainly, but also applicable for Oktoberfest, Glastonbury, Woodstock and the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia (although for the latter, replace 'shoes' with 'sandals' and 'condom' with 'sprig of silphium').
This year, though, I decided to use my experience of past SXSWi's to produce something more useful. A very specific and completely foolproof guide on surviving this year's event. And here it is...
Tip One: Don't go to South by Southwest Interactive.
Posted on 10 March 2010 | 1:34 am
Twitter has just announced that it is launching a new anti-phishing feature that allows Twitter's Trust and Safety team to monitor all links submitted through the service for potentially malicious attacks. Part of the new feature will involve the use of Twitter's link shortener twt.tl, which may now start popping up in some of your emails and direct messages.
At this point, it's not really clear which links are being converted to Twitter's twt.tl shortened links. We just ran a test at the TC office with two different links: one for an article on GigaOm, and another for a bit.ly link that pointed to a page on Google Buzz. The links I received on my Twitter client were both unchanged, but both were converted to twt.tl links in our Email notifications (obviously neither of them had malicious content).
Posted on 10 March 2010 | 1:14 am
SV Angel, the angel fund founded by super-angel Ron Conway, is losing one of its general partners to a portfolio company. Brian Pokorny is now the CEO of fast-growing Silicon Valley-based Dailybooth.
Dailybooth, the runner up in the "best social app" and winner of the "time sink" categories at this year's Crunchies Awards, is "your life in pictures." Some 6 million monthly visitors share pictures and status updates with eachother. "It's a community for self expression," says Pokorny.
A typical interaction: a users posts a photo, taken with their webcam, showing what they're eating, what they're feeling, or perhaps with friends in the background. Other user then respond via text or photos. Some strings go on for hundreds of responses. Here's an example.
Posted on 9 March 2010 | 10:17 pm
Earlier today, Google chief economist Hal Varian gave a presentation to an FTC workshop on the changing economics of the newspaper industry. We all know that newspaper ad revenues have been falling off a cliff for years. Many media companies blame Google and are trying to put the genie back in the bottle with partial metered models for online news.
Google is understandably on the defensive, trotting out Varian to paint an unemotional picture with as much data as he can muster. But the picture he paints is a dour one for print media. For instance, the chart above shows the decline of overall newspaper ad revenues. Newspapers have taken huge hits in classifieds advertising (in blue) and national brand advertising (in red). The online portion (green) is still too small to make much of a difference.
Posted on 9 March 2010 | 10:09 pm
While Loren Brichter may be hard at work on Tweetie Two for the Mac, he hasn't given on his baby: Tweetie 2 for the iPhone. While the app hasn't been updated since late November, a new build is due shortly with one big addition: native Foursquare support.
What this means is that anytime someone in your tweet stream sends out a tweet from Foursquare (which, to the annoyance of some users, happens automatically at times), that Foursquare link (shown as a 4sq.com URL) will be able to be opened in Tweetie in a way that displays the location information in a nice format. When a tweet is eligible for this feature, you'll see a purple square logo in the upper right hand corner of the tweet in Tweetie.
Posted on 9 March 2010 | 9:17 pm
When Chomp launched eight weeks ago in the iTunes store, it launched as an app for reviewing other iPhone apps. The app shows you a stream of realtime reviews, which you can filter by everyone or just your Facebook freinds. The app is showing some traction and should hit 300,000 active monthly users sometime tomorrow, according to co-founder Ben Keighran.
While it started out as an app, today Chomp launched a complimentary Website with full app search capabilities and links for each app. There, users can also see the stream of reviews, as well as dedicated pages for each app and vanity URLs for each reviewer. Developers can now link to the Chomp reviews directly from inside their apps using Chomp Connect, which also launched today in private beta. Chomp Connect lets developers add Chomp review buttons right inside their apps without forcing to go anywhere else. 
Posted on 9 March 2010 | 7:57 pm
The Linux Foundation, the non-profit that supports the growth of the Linux kernel, has launched a merchandise store where people can purchase a newly launched line of original T-shirts, hats, mugs and other items that reflect “geek culture."
According a release sent out by the Foundation, merchandise available in the Linux.com store is "designed to reflect the unique and varied culture associated with Linux" and will support the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds. For example, t-shirts contain phrases like "Free The Code," "FSCK the Establishment," and "Fork You." All revenue generated from the store will go directly towards Linux Foundation activities, initiatives and events.
Posted on 9 March 2010 | 7:50 pm
Facebook is finally going to enter the location game at this April's f8 conference, according to a report this morning on the NYT's Bits blog. And they're looking to take Google head on.
We've been hearing rumors about Facebook's location features for a long time, but the buzz has picked up in the last few months. Those rumors got legs in October, when we noticed that the site had added language explicitly talking about location features to its rewritten privacy policy.
The question now is exactly what this location sharing will look like. I've heard that Facebook has tested simply attaching location data to user status updates, similar to the way Twitter does it. 
Posted on 9 March 2010 | 7:30 pm
When I wrote that location would be this year's Twitter at SXSW, I also meant that Twitter's geolocation would be this year's Twitter at SXSW. The service has just turned on geolocation on its website today for the first time.
While Twitter's geolocation feature has been live through its API since last November, there was no sign of integration into the main twitter.com site until now. As you can see in the screenshot above, for tweets tagged with location, right next to the source of the tweet there is a location placemarker. When you hover over it, it turns blue, and clicking on it brings up a little Google map showing the location that tweet was sent from.
Posted on 9 March 2010 | 7:17 pm
Twitter has quietly changed the wording on the button users need to press to update their statuses on the Twitter.com website. It took them 10 billion (or so) tweets to realize we don't 'Update', we 'Tweet'.
A lot of people are noticing the change, although I have to say I had to hit the refresh button of my browser a couple of times before I saw it too.
Posted on 9 March 2010 | 7:05 pm
200 students surveyed in a Stanford study were found to be "addicted" to their iPhones. "When asked to rank their dependence on the iPhone on a scale of one to five – five being addicted and one being not at all addicted – 10 percent of the students acknowledged full addiction to the device, 34 percent ranked themselves as a four on the scale, and only 6 percent said they weren't addicted at all."
Posted on 9 March 2010 | 6:45 pm
Team Europe Ventures, the Berlin-based VC firm, has launched a new €6 million fund for early stage startups in the Internet and mobile Internet space. The fund is mainly targeting companies in Germany and Europe, but also in the USA, and the focus will be on the seed stage, with 4-5 startups being invested in per-year for a maximum of €500K per company.
This is bound to be good news for startups in Europe, and particularly in Germany where seed funding is seen to be a problem for early stage companies in the Internet space. 
Posted on 9 March 2010 | 5:53 pm
Autoquake, an online used car retailer in the UK, has raised another £6 million round of venture capital and venture debt financing from existing investors Accel Partners and Highland Capital Partners. The debt is being provided by Kreos Capital. This is after raising £4m from Accel and Highland only last year. That takes its total funding so far to £20 million. The money will be used to expand internationally.
Autoquake's plan is to disrupt the car retail industry by selling quality used cars on behalf of large corporate fleets and leasing companies direct to consumers via virtual showrooms. High quality pictures of the actual cars on sale appear instead of the usual fuzzy pictures on the average second hand advert.
Posted on 9 March 2010 | 5:47 pm
I first learned of Allmyapps at Le Web '09 when the company's CEO Thibauld Favre, and co-Founder Aranaud Coulondre, grabbed my attention and enticed me into a demo. I nearly missed my flight. Allmyapps, a small but ambitious startup based in France, aims to become the "iTunes for software applications" as Thibauld puts it, bringing simple 1 click multi-application install to end-users.
Posted on 9 March 2010 | 5:44 pm
