Archive for: November 1, 2009

Last weekend I wrote about how the big social gaming companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on Facebook and MySpace through games like Farmville and Mobsters. Major media can’t stop applauding the companies long enough to understand what’s really going on with these games. The real story isn’t the business success of these startups. It’s the completely unethical way that they are going about achieving that success. In short, these games try to get people to pay cash for in game currency so they can level up faster and have a better overall experience. Which is fine. But for users who won’t pay cash, a wide variety of “offers” are available where they can get in-game currency in exchange for lead gen-type offers. Most of these offers are bad for consumers because it confusingly gets them to pay far more for in-game currency than if they just paid cash (there are notable exceptions, but the scammy stuff tends to crowd out the legitimate offers). And it’s also bad for legitimate advertisers. The reason why I call this an ecosystem is that it’s a self-reinforcing downward cycle. Users are tricked into these lead gen scams. The games get paid, and they plow that money back into Facebook and MySpace in advertising, getting more users. Who are then monetized via lead gen scams. That money is then plowed back into Facebook and MySpace in advertising to get more users… Here’s the really insidious part: game developers who monetize the best (and that’s Zynga) make the most money and can spend the most on advertising. Those that won’t touch this stuff (Slide and others) fall further and further behind. Other game developers have to either get in on the monetization or fall behind as well. Companies like Playdom ...

It’s Halloween,  and nowhere more obviously so than in San Francisco. This is my first 31st October as a resident of the United States and I have to say, the effort you yanks go to in celebrating the ancient Celts’ holy evening is truly astounding. Every corner store, diner, dry cleaners, police station, library and undertakers has embraced the – uh – spirit, adorning their windows with spray-on cobwebs and pumpkins and sparkly witches hats and coffins. (Although, to be fair to the undertakers, the coffins are sort of a year-round thing.) We celebrate All Hallows’ Eve in the UK too of course, and like most things on our side of the Atlantic it’s just as commercial, albeit with more irony and a better accent. But the real difference back home is that Halloween is an evening – just one evening, not a whole fucking month – aimed squarely at  kids. Here, by contrast, it seems to be something far more grown-up. Something far more – well – creepy. For the past two nights, the streets around my hotel have been swarming with drunken adults dressed as hookers. Witchy hookers, ghosty hookers, piratey hookers (Captain Hookers?) and even – I’m pretty sure – hookery hookers. And that’s just the men. My hotel is just a rock’s throw from the Tenderloin and for once it’s the actual working girls who are tutting with disapproval wondering what has happened to the neighbourhood. (I can just imagine the adult revellers leaving home and being given a stern lecture from their kids, reminding mom and dad not to take candy from anyone dressed as a slutty Care Bear, lest they wake up the next morning, hungover and bleeding in the back of a van decorated to look like the Mystery Machine.) But – ...

In case you didn’t yet realize it, tonight is Halloween. And if you didn’t yet realize it, maybe you don’t have plans yet. If not, as usual, the Internet comes to your rescue. If you’re stuck at home tonight for whatever reason, you’ll be able to load up Facebook and watch Heidi Klum’s Halloween party , streaming live. Sure, it’s not as good as being there, but it beats doing nothing. And it’s being done with the help of Modelinia , a site devoted to capturing the lives of super models. Enticed yet? You can find the live stream on Modelinia’s Facebook page starting at 9 PM PT tonight. The streaming itself is being handled by Livestream , who will run it through 11:30 PM, we’re told. Klum’s Facebook fan page along with Modelinia’s page have nearly 700,000 fans, so if you do watch this, you definitely won’t be alone. And there’s a chat widget running next to the stream to talk with others watching it. Modelinia’s goal with this wasn’t solely to stream beautiful people at parties, they also ran a costume contest with Klum to allow the best costume designers to win tickets to the actual event. Modelinia’s founder and CEO is Desiree Gruber, a producer to the Emmy-winning show Project Runway . I’ll go ahead and embed the live stream of Klum’s party here as well. Don’t say we never give you anything. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Originally posted here:
Don’t Have A Halloween Party To Go To Tonight? Watch Heidi Klum’s Live.

Our favorite jingle guy is at it again. Jonathan Mann, who TechCrunch readers will best know as the guy behind the awful Bing jingle , has released another new video (as he does every day), this time to serenade the children of Keith Valley Middle School who recently performed his Bing jingle . “ It’s kind of creepy ,” Mann admitted at the time, but he was happy to see his work live on, so he came up with this gem. But this latest video almost had a very different tone. “ I thought about writing them an anti-corporate anthem, something they could raise their tiny, furious fists to, but ultimately decided on this, ” Mann tells us. Too bad, because that would be been awesome. It could have been “ Another Brick In The Wall [Part 2] ” for the 21st Century. Representatives for Bing also wrote us after our “torture” post to point out the backstory about the students singing the Bing jingle. Apparently, they decided to do it on their own — or rather, their teachers decided to make them do it. Still, it’s very creepy. And as a number of readers pointed out, a little bit too much like Jesus Camp (trailer below Mann’s new video and the students singing his song). Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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Meta: Bing Jingle Guy Writes Song For Students Who Sang Bing Jingle

Sample sales are an amazing resource for marked down goods for both mainstream and luxury brands. Online private sample sales are picking up serious speed. Here is how they work: big designers, such as Marc Jacobs or Versace, place excess inventory on a sale site at 50 to 70 percent discounts over a several day period. The sales are private, available only to members, with upcoming sales from brands announced via emails. Products include clothing for men, women and children as well as jewelry, handbags and home accessories. You can get invites from other members or request invites via the site. Startups in the online sample sales space like Gilt Groupe, Ideeli and Hautelook are all raising huge amounts of money, growing their user base at a rapid pace and turning a strong profit. The concept has even attracted retail giants like Saks and Nieman Marcus, which are now jumping on the bandwagon to offer their own private sales. Even GSI Commerce, which previously wasn’t directly involved with selling luxury goods, is getting into the private sale business with the recent acquisition of sale site RueLaLa. It’s worth noting how sample sales have evolved in the past decade. I attended my first sample sale in 1997 in a convention center in Baltimore, where women (and a few men) were scouring for deals on clothing from J.Crew. The items were placed in huge cardboard boxes in no particular order or size breakdown. It was utter chaos, but the deals were great. Flash forward four years to my shopping life in New York city, where sample sales are a bit of a religion. At Kate Spade, I fought intense lines (waited in an hour long line in the middle of December, nearly got frostbite in my toes), pushed my way into ...

Startups like Bump Technologies , which recently got some funding , and My Name is E are trying to kill the paper business card, but even in 2009, many of us, including myself, still use business cards. The biggest hassle with business cards is getting the contact information into your address book as fast as possible — that’s where Business Card Reader [ iTunes link ] for the iPhone comes in. Business Card Reader scans and “reads” the picture using ABBYY’s text recognition technology and enters the data into the iPhone or iPod touch address book. Basically, you open the application, and choose either to take a new picture of a business card, or if you’ve already taken a picture, you can upload that as well. After you take a picture, or upload a picture, the application scans the business card, and after about 15 seconds, you get the address book field to edit the scanned information if there are errors. Once that’s all done, it adds the new contact into your address book. It’s really that easy. After playing around with the application for a few days and testing out different types of business cards, the accuracy, in my opinion, is about 85%. The only errors I got where if the companies name was in a logo format, and their logo had a weird font, but other then that, the app worked pretty well. If your a mobile networker, this is an app you’ll definitely like. Business Card Reader is $5.99 from the App Store, where you can buy it today. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Scan Your Business Cards On The Go With Business ...

Guest author Edo Segal ( @edosegal ) has launched and sold several companies. In 2000 he founded eNow , which he sold to AOL in 2006 (after it was renamed Relegence). Today, he runs his Incubator/Investment vehicle Futurity Ventures, which recently launched a new search engine for wisdom . Media scarcity is dead. In the future my son will have a flash drive that he will pay $29 for that will have the capacity to hold all movies and music ever released by a major label, studio or tv/cable network. It will take 30 seconds to clone the data over the network to a friend who will pay $14.99 for a device with double capacity a year later. How does the media industry survive such a coming disruption? For many of us that have been in this game for a while, the word “convergence” harbors some shameful vibes. It conjures up many false hopes, dashed dreams and misfires. Nevertheless, I would contend that convergence is upon us and it has arrived from an unexpected delivery man: Steve Jobs. Apple has created a media consumption experience that has reduced friction to such a point that soon the consumer will not know if he is buying music, a movie or a game. The notion of App is changing. The lines between these different forms of media are quickly blurring and soon will be completely artificial. Already these distinctions are merely fossilized conventions that stem from consumers’ discovery habits. As those evolve, like learning that it is easier to go to Amazon and search to find a product than going to aisle 9 at the store. The coming confusion of the consumption experience where a user won’t care or know if what they are buying is a movie, a game or a ...

It’s time to put on the Swami hat and predict just what we have in store for 2010 and beyond. Considering all of the movement in the gadget world in the past few months, I’m fairly sure most of this going to be accurate. Given the current status of some of these technologies, it’s hard to prognosticate very far out but there are a few things that have become apparent over the past year, especially the rise of Android and our expectations for the iPad. Without further ado… the envelope please: Apple TV -> 27-inch iMac -> Wall Mount for 27-inch iMac It’s sad but true: Apple doesn’t care about Apple TV. All the real brain power is going to the desktop and laptop and probably onto the iPad. They’ve made it clear with the 27-inch iMac that they can make a high-resolution screen and powerful computer inside of a case the thickness of a college textbook. Who needs a TV, let alone an Apple TV? The obvious conclusion here is that the 27-inch iMac becomes a real Apple TV. The Mac Mini already makes a great multi-media system and a quick update to FrontRow, now considered abandonware, may make it a great 10-foot interface.

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What’s Next For Some Of the Biggest Gadgets Of 2009?

No one disputes that Silicon Valley is the global capital of the tech world. But this wasn’t always so. It is the Valley’s dynamism and networks which have given it an unassailable advantage. Silicon Valley has simply left rivals like Boston’s Route 128 in the dust. I mentioned a little bit about my first Columbus Day in California in a previous column . But I didn’t tell you the whole story. I was invited to three amazing events on the night of October 12. Venture capital firm Alsop-Louie —known as one of the wackier and unconventional VC firms—invited me to their legendary Columbus Day party. On that same evening I had an invite from Henry Chesbrough, Executive Director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California-Berkeley to attend a dinner party for his forum. Down in Silicon Valley I also had an invite to speak at an event with India’s former Minister of Disinvestment, Arun Shorie —the guy who was once in charge of privatizing the country’s moribund nationalized firms and who is as close as you can get to financial royalty in India. It was a really hard decision which one to pick. And I found myself wondering, where else in the world would I have to face such a decision? The answer is nowhere. Silicon Valley, which has expanded to embrace the entire Bay Area as an engine of entrepreneurship and innovation, is a unique place of powerful and concurrent overlapping networks. As a new arrival to Silicon Valley and San Francisco, I had read about this and did believe it. But it was hard to understand to what degree these types of concentric circles of connections were pervasive in the Valley. I am now studying how some of these networks develop and their ...

By Andrew Liszewski Designed by Alyce Santoro and Julio Cesar, these rather dapper Sonic Fabric Neckties are made from 50% colored thread and 50% recorded audio cassette tape which means you can sacrifice an old Walkman to make a ’sonic fabric reader’ (see the video below) allowing you to hear remnants of what was originally on the tapes. The Sonic Fabric Neckties are available from Supermarket in black, dark brown and grey for $90 a pop, plus the cost of a Walkman if your curiosity gets the best of you. [ Supermarket - Sonic Fabric Neckties ] VIA [ Pocket-lint ]

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Recycled Cassette Tape Ties Are Actually Playable

Mozilla made Firefox 3.6 beta 1 available for download late on Friday. Mozilla has requested that Web sites link to the announcement page, rather than the actual download link, so we'll accede to their wishes.

Mozilla first began describing Firefox 3.6's features in August, and this version largely holds to that. The browser includes support for Personas, a light skinning of the browser interface. HTML 5 is more tightly integrated, and Mozilla has enabled full screen video (using the <video> tag).

Users should also enjoy a faster startup time, although exactly how fast that will be will have to wait for testing. Web-page rendering should also be faster as well with the new Gecko 1.9.2 rendering engine. One nice bonus: Firefox 3.6 will alert users to out-of-date plugins; this is probably most useful for elements like Flash, which can be attacked and can represent security risks.

Mozilla also said that it has implemented a change to the beta process: rather than requiring a tester download and install the latest beta, testers will be automatically upgraded to the new version, the same way Mozilla delivers security and stability updates to Firefox users.