Archive for: November 17, 2009
November 17, 2009
Last week we reported on Shakira’s decision to use Ustream and Facebook to live stream the debut of her latest music video, Give It Up To Me — a move that’s a fairly huge departure from the standard MTV route we probably would have seen a few years ago. Ustream has just given us the stats of yesterday’s launch, and it’s clear that it drew quite a crowd: over the course of the ten minute live stream, Shakira’s video had 95,000 unique viewers during the initial broadcast. And over the course of the last 24 hours, the video has seen a total of over 500,000 views. Ustream says that Shakira video wasn’t its most popular of all time — the streams for Michael Jackson’s memorial service and President Obama’s Inauguration saw much more traffic, with 4.6MM and 3.8MM total streams respectivly. But those streams were both hours long, while Shakira’s stream lasted a mere ten minutes. It’s also important to note that these viewers were likely more engaged than they would be if they were just staring at the tube. By integrating Ustream into Facebook, Shakira was likely able to gain quite a few new Fans on her Facebook account, which means she’s established a long term way to reach out to them. It’s worth pointing out that Shakira was’t the first artist to stream her video — that title appears to be held by Chamillionaire who debuted his video for Good Morning a few days prior. Given Shakira’s success don’t be surprised if more artists start following suit. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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Shakira’s Stats Don’t Lie: Facebook/Ustream Music Video Debut Is A Hit
Before there was an iPhone, Android and App Store, there was Yahoo! Go. Launched in 2006, Yahoo! Go was an application offered news, mail, weather, traffic, and Yahoo! search from a mobile device. Today, Yahoo is announcing that Yahoo! Go will be shutdown on January 12, 2010. The app seemed to be ahead of it’s time when it launched but now is useless thanks to Yahoo creating prettier, more powerful, personal content-focused apps that specialize in products, such as Flickr, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Messenger. Yahoo released three versions of Yahoo! Go but hasn’t released a new version in the past year. The last iteration of the app included a mobile widget platform and was available on select Nokia and Windows Mobile devices The reasoning behind shutting down Go is simple, says Yahoo. As Yahoo unrolls individual apps in verticals and boosts its mobile site, Go was becoming obsolete. The team that was working on Go! will now be relocated to working on the mobile site product and various apps. Yahoo recently launched mobile apps for Flickr, and Yahoo Finance. Earlier this year, Yahoo announced a revamped Yahoo Mobile, and rolled it out in April with a new iPhone app and browser support for more than 300 devices. Now Yahoo!’s mobile homepage is now available across more than 1,900 mobile devices in 32 countries. Yahoo Mobile combines mobile search, your email, IM, and social messaging streams, and personalized Yahoo content such as news, sports, stocks, and RSS feeds, which basically replaces Go. Below is the email that will be sent to Yahoo Go users tomorrow: Dear Yahoo! Go user, Yahoo! Go will be discontinued on January 12, 2010, at 12:00 a.m. PST, so that we may focus on simplifying and enhancing your future mobile Web experiences. After this date, ...
Old habits die hard. Rupert Murdoch believes that the future of the newspaper business is subscriptions—electronic subscriptions. He’s done with giving away his news for free on the Web and to search engines like Google. Instead thinks that Kindle-like tablet computers can save the media industry. It’s a notion that’s been floated before: an entire newsstand in a color tablet which delivers electronic versions of any newspaper or magazine you want for a monthly subscription of $15 to $19 a month. It’s got to work, otherwise, he warns from his soapbox, “Newspapers will go out of business. All newspapers.” In an interview on his own Fox Business (embedded below), he explains his thinking: ALEXIS GLICK: ARE YOU CONVINCED IT IS GOING TO WORK? RUPERT MURDOCH: SURE. ALEXIS GLICK: WHY? RUPERT MURDOCH: WE TEST MARKETED IT AND PEOPLE I THINK UNDERSTAND THAT IT’S PERFECTLY FAIR THAT THEY ARE GOING TO PAY FOR IT. IF IT DOESN’T, THE NEWSPAPERS WILL GO OUT OF BUSINESS. ALL NEWSPAPERS. THERE IS JUST NOT ENOUGH ADVERTISING TO GO AROUND FOR ALL THE SITES ON THE INTERNET. THE NUMBER OF SITES AND AVAILABILITY OF ADVERTISING ON THE INTERNET, THE AVAILABILITY DOUBLES AND TRIPLES EVERY YEAR BUT THE AMOUNT OF REAL MONEY GOES UP 10 OR 15% A YEAR. THE PRICE OF IT KEEPS COMING DOWN. Forget for a moment that news websites will be perfectly readable on these newfangled tablets everyone keeps talking about. So Murdoch still has the problem of “> ”leading” all of his media competitors into the promised land of subscription tablets by walling off their websites from readers. And also set aside the fact that newspapers and magazines are already available for paid download on Amazon’s Kindle, and that those subscription revenues are still miniscule. A full-color tablet with access to an ...
Joyent , the Californian provider of cloud computing solutions – although they like to refer to that as delivering “web application hosting Infrastructure as a Service” – today announced that it raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Intel Capital . The news comes only a few weeks after Intel helped the 5-year old company launch a cloud computing service in mainland China, reportedly the first ever to launch over there. Joyent says it will use the extra cash to accelerate its product development and expand its sales & marketing efforts around the world. The investment by Intel Capital in Joyent was announced today at the investment organization’s 10th Annual CEO Summit, where seven investments were made public (for approximately $25 million in total). The other six capital infusions went to Korea-based Crucialtec, Taiwan-based Gudeng Precision Industrial Co, Japan-based V-cube, China-based Phoenix New Media, United Arab Emirates-based NeuString and US-based Active Storage. In a blog post about the reasons for accepting institutional financing for the first time since its inception in 2004, Joyent founder and CEO David Young disclosed that the company earlier raised a small seed funding round from Peter Thiel and the good old “myself, friends and family” and turned profitable quickly. So why raise extra funding? Young explains : Joyent has been able to grow to thousands of customers globally by force of hard work, a lot of luck, and an extraordinary time when the costs of developing and delivering software products have dropped practically to zero. While Joyent has been profitable for much of the company’s existence, we raised money because Joyent has a revenue model, and a product model and roadmap, that we believe can benefit from immensely increased scale. Joyent counts some noteworthy companies among its customers, including social network LinkedIn, social gaming ...
Google is planning to hold a special Chrome OS event at its headquarters in Mountain View, CA this Thursday morning, we’ve just been notified. The plan is to give some technical background information as well as show off some demos, we’re told. More notably, they will be giving a “complete overview” of the new OS, which they say will launch next year. Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Google Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS will be speaking at the event. And there will be a Q&A session afterwards. As we reported a few days ago , Google had been planning to release at least part of Chrome OS this week. That still may be the case at this event, but it looks for now that the more complete launch will in fact take place next year. And if they are holding this event now with a “complete overview,” progress is clearly being made, so you can probably expect that launch to be early next year. Google first announced Chrome OS in July, but gave very few details about it. It seemed the idea there was more to drop a nuclear bomb on Microsoft , which was just about to announce its online free version of Office. In the subsequent months, interest has remained high for Chrome OS, but about all we’ve seen is what the OS’s browser may look like . Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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Google Holding Chrome OS Event Thursday. Complete Overview And Launch Plans To Be Revealed.
The problem: users have complained about the autofocus feature on the Droid since day one. As in, it didn’t work ( video ). Last night I wrote that some users found a fix – clean the lens . It turns out that probably didn’t do a darn thing. But there were even better conspiracy theories out there, such as Engadget’s idea of a secret software update, which quickly spread around the Internet. It turns out that wasn’t true, either. And we’ve confirmed that there’s no such thing as a secret software update on Android phones anyway, at least according to people at Google. Updates, even security updates, must be approved for installation by the user. So what was the real reason for the problem, and the fix? Well, it fixed itself. The problem, as MobileCrunch duly noted , was an issue with the phone’s timestamp: “ According to Google Engineer Dan Morrill, there is an unfortunate bug in the Droid’s autofocus routine. It improperly rounds a timestamp used in the calculations, which somehow throws the entire focusing process off. Today it works, and tomorrow it will work…but 24.5 days from now, the bug will be back.” But by the time the problem cycles back again, Verizon will have pushed out a fix for the problem. As we say around the office, Android is freedom from the iPhone. But sometimes that freedom feels a little bit like this: Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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Mystery Of Droid Autofocus Conspiracy Solved (For Reals This Time)
This had better be a bug (I assume it is though other TC staffers aren’t so sure). If not, this is perhaps the worst UI change I’ve ever seen. I refuse to believe that Twitter is really trying to add your DM inbox/sent messages, and all those new retweet categories to the main stream like that. Unless they read my post the other day and decided to do the opposite. And what on Earth is up with those numbers? Why the hell do I need numbered tweets in my stream, this is not Sesame Street. Twitter is scheduled to undergo maintenance today, but that’s not until 11 PM PT tonight. What is going on? Update : Order has been restored, it was in fact a bug and not a completely awful new UI. Thank God. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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Twitter Just UI Puked On My Timeline
ShopSavvy was one of the best early Android applications. It launched in October of last year after winning one of the initial Android Developer Challenge top prizes (when it was still known as GoCart). But despite the success it has seen on Android, one question remained: When would it be available for the iPhone. Today, it finally is. Developed by the guys at Big In Japan , ShopSavvy is an app that allows you to use your device as a portable barcode scanner. You point your phone’s camera at any barcode and it will read it, do a product look up, and give you information about the product, as well as where you can find it online or at nearby stores and for how much. Obviously, something like this is a window shopper’s dream. And while you might think retailers may hate something like this, because it gives shoppers all of their competitors’ information, increasingly, they’ve been working with ShopSavvy to come up with ways to allow you to make buying in their stores even easier. And honestly, what are the retailers going to do anyway? All of this information is out there on the web, ShopSavvy just gives you easy access to it. Are they going to ban mobile phones in their stores? That’d be a great story for us if that were to happen. So what took so long? Well, for a while, the iPhone lacked a key feature needed for the barcode scanner: A camera that had auto-focus. The iPhone 3GS gained that, and so the team should have been good to go. The plan was originally to release the app this summer, but a internal mix up involving a team member who had since departed registering the app to his iTunes account caused a delay ...
DocuSign, an e-signature service, has raised $2 million from Second Century Ventures. The venture firm is the investment fund of the National Association of Realtors. This brings DocuSign’s total funding up to $30 million. DocuSign, which was founded in 2003, allows companies to get legally binding signatures quickly over the internet instead of over the fax or mail. DocuSign certifies digital signatures over the web, acting as a intermediary who holds the documents and verifies the identity of the signature. The digital signature business was really opened up during the turn of the century with that passing of the UETA and ESIGN acts, which clarified the legal grounds for electronic signatures nationwide. To date, more than 48 million signature events have been executed using DocuSign and service currently has 2.5 million users. DocuSign is seeing increased traction of its technology in the commercial and residential real estate spaces. Rather than driving across town to get a signature or forcing their clients to find a fax machine, real estate professionals use DocuSign to execute agreements with buyers and sellers electronically, eliminating the old process of printing, faxing, and waiting for the return fax. In an age where deals are increasingly made remotely, it makes sense for e-signature technology to be adapted in the real estate world. DocuSign is now the exclusive e-signature provider to the National Association of Realtors. The new funding will be used for further development of DocuSign’s technology for the real estate space. Competitors include EchoSign, and VeriSign. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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DocuSign Raises $2 Million For E-Signature Software
Most startups have about a billion things to worry about. For many of them, this includes execution of their business model. With online ad networks depressed, increasingly, a number of those companies are starting to explore subscription-based models. But there are a dozen reasons why that can be a pain. Enter Recurly . Recurly, which is a startup itself, is entering private beta today. The core idea behind the service is simple: To make it simple for startups to be able to offer subscription-based services as an option. They provide an easy-to-use system with a nice user interace and good analytics that lays on top of the dealings that must be done between a payment gateway (such as Authorize.NET) and the startup. There are a number of other services that offer such functionality but Recurly believes it can differentiate itself in two key ways. First, they do not get paid until you get paid. There are no hidden or monthly fees here. Recurly takes a percentage of each transaction. These total anywhere from 1 to 3 percent depending on volume. But it also doesn’t take the money each time you make a sale, instead it collects the money at the end of each month when the sales are done. Recurly’s other big selling point is the ability to offer customers a way to easily upgrade or downgrade service plans. What this means is that if an end user decides they want to switch to a lower-tier pricing structure for a service, Recurly can handle that seamlessly. While we may not think that is that big of a deal, it’s a huge headache on the backend for most companies to deal with, according to co-founder Isaac Hall . And “seamless’ is probably the key word for everything Recurly is trying ...
The last couple of years have been rough for The Pirate Bay. The BitTorrent tracker has been at the epicenter of a copyright battle in a manner the world hasn't seen since the heyday of Napster, a fight that lead to one year jail terms for its four founders. And now The Pirate Bay is finally shutting down for good, but according to the site, it's doing so on its own terms.
"Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed," representatives for the site wrote on its official blog, "TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It's the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well."
The site is also reportedly working with other torrent trackers in this attempt to decentralize. "We're talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT+PEX for all sites," a rep from the site told TorrentFreak. "Moving away from torrents and trackers totally--like pick a date and all agree 'from this date, we'll not support torrents anymore.' "
    
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A year after launching the first version of Earth for the iPhone, Google is rolling out 2.0, offering a number of improvements and feature enhancements. The latest version of the app (currently the second most popular in the App Store) features new languages, improved icon performance, and the ability to view maps created on your desktop.
