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February 11 2012
Moshi Tattoo
It's February, which means Toy Fair in New York City. Every year, Mind Candy CEO Michael Acton Smith comes to town to peddle his little monsters. Those would be Moshi Monsters, one of the largest social game sites for kids 6 to 11, with 10 million monthly visitors. It's huge in the UK, and this year Smith is going to make a major push into the U.S. And it's not just online. Moshi Monsters are finding their way into all sorts of kids merchandise, including collectible toy figurines (more than 20 million sold in the UK alone last year), plush dolls, games, the No. 1 kids magazine in the UK, mobile apps, and even temporary tattoos.
Gillmor Gang test pattern
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — took a leisurely stroll on a late winter Friday afternoon. The subjects: Path and the Address Book, SuperBowl dynamics, and 21st Century Fox, aka the new television/social media hybrid model. It may seem like all stories are self-referential in this time of trending to zero barrier to entry, but as with many realtime transitions, it's hard to see the forest for the trees until you get enough altitude. With 98 million simulsharing social media out of 119 million in realtime, the uber address book that's being built will absorb all the big players including Facebook and Twitter.
Motorola Droid 4 Review: Initial Impressions (Video)
Before we chat out the Droid 4 there’s a bit of other news we need to address right quick. As you’ll surely notice, we’re doing smartphone reviews a little differently now. That said, this video and my basic hands-on impressions are just the first in a three-part series reviewing the phone. Stay tuned for what comes next!
Alright then, back to business…
The Motorola Droid 4 has spent exactly 24 hours on shelves, and from the time I’ve spent with the phone I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it’s doing quite well there.
If you keep up with phones you know that the Droid 4 is a big deal, the fourth in Motorola’s Droid brand (which happens to be one of the most successful Android brands we’ve seen to date), and a QWERTY-packing beast if I may say so. The thing about it, however, is that the keyboard (any physical keyboard) is becoming less and less necessary.
To be clear, I think that the Droid 4 keyboard is possibly one of the best I’ve ever used. It gives a solid tactile feedback and is fairly easy to navigate. The fact that it’s backlit only adds to my infatuation. But… a combination of great auto-correct and Swype nearly makes that keyboard useless.
I understand that back in the day typing on a touchscreen was super annoying, since the auto-correct wasn’t quite up to snuff. That’s not really the case anymore, and I almost feel like anyone who insists on a physical QWERTY is doing so simply because they’re so used to it.
Truth be told the transition can be tough from QWERTY to soft keys, but Swype can make that transition a lot easier and you’ll ultimately be much faster in the typing department.
Still, for those of you who demand QWERTY-style satisfaction, I can’t recommend a better handset than the Droid 4. The 4-inch screen compliments the size and weight of the phone perfectly, and it honestly doesn’t feel that much smaller than the 4.3-inch Razr display.
Watching movies and playing games is still just as great, in terms of size, but it only made me feel “eh” in terms of quality. Sure, it’s plenty bright and pixel-dense, but it doesn’t have the wow factor of these 720p displays we’re seeing lately.
I didn’t experience any serious issues with the phone in terms of performance, and it would seem that 1GB of RAM combined with that 1.2GHz dual-core processor can handle basic tasks and multitasking just fine. At the same time, I’ve only spent about 24 hours with it, so things may change with heavier testing.
As you can see in the video, the Droid 4 looks much more like the Razr or Razr Maxx than it does its other Droid family members. I almost wish that Kevlar fiber casing was along for the ride, too, but that might ruin one of the best things about the Droid 4: its $199.99 price tag from Verizon.
We’ll be hitting you with more on the Droid 4 as the week progresses, so stay tuned for the rest of our review.
Note: I mistakenly stated in the video that the Droid 4 runs Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread, when it in fact runs Android 2.3.6. My apologies.
February 10 2012
Screen Shot 2012-02-09 at 3.54.26 PM
The pioneer of vertical media, they call themselves. And Glam Media, the publishing network with more than 220 monthly million uniques, announced today their "logical next play" - a vertical food network called Foodie that will offer a social, interactive network (Portal 2.0?) for food bloggers, critics, chefs and, of course, eaters. But, as Glam's co-founder and CEO Samir Arora told me when he came into our San Francisco studio today, Foodie isn't just another of Glam's vertical plays.
February 09 2012
Screen shot 2012-02-08 at 11.15.28 PM
“In the Studio” at TechCrunch TV this week welcomes a former California resident and current investor back to the west coast, where he and his partners have embarked on a new journey to build out a physical presence in Silicon Valley and San Francisco for one of the most dynamic business groups in the world. Ajay Agarwal, a managing director with Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), is leading the charge of building his firm's west coast offices and unveiling a brand new $600m fund, announced a few weeks ago in The New York Times. That's a whole lot of money to invest in new consumer, enterprise, and mobile opportunities. This is sort of a personal homecoming for Agarwal, who went to Stanford years ago as a undergraduate computer science student and founded a company while he was in school. Now, after nearly ten years with Bain Capital in Boston, he's leading his team here in California, comprised of Sahil Gupta, Indy Guha, and Adam Marchick, as it it were a startup, too.
February 08 2012
Gumroad Gets $1.1 Million From Chris Sacca, Max Levchin And Others To Turn Any Link Into A Payment System
Gumroad, the buzzy one-man startup launched by Pinterest and Turntable app designer (and 19-year-old college dropout) Sahil Lavingia, officially launches today with over $1.1 million in seed funding from investors Accel Partners, Chris Sacca, Max Levchin, SV Angel, Josh Kopelman, Seth Goldstein, Naval Ravikrant, Collaborative Fund and Danny Rimer.
To use the Gumroad, sign in with Facebook or Twitter Auth and submit any link in the entry form, whether it be to a blogpost, Spotify playlist, Instagram, invite for an iPhone app, research paper or whatever you can come up with you crazy character!
The service asks you to set a price and gives you the option of whether or not you want to require an email for purchase and/or upload a photo.
Like a Bit.ly with payments built in, Gumroad makes it very very easy to share your payment engine/link on Facebook and Twitter, as well as track views and purchases with its Bit.ly-like analytics and a simple interface.
Lavingia thinks that Facebook and Twitter can become the new marketplace/store-front and thus, in his view, Gumroad has the potential to be a huge sustainable (even billion dollar) company. Gumroad obviously disrupts the traditional and current online distribution systems, allowing artists with massive Twitter followings like Kanye and Gaga to sell directly to their followers, for example.
“The store model is kind of broken,” he told me in an interview for TCTV, “Every one talks to their fans and followers on Twitter and Facebook. But there’s a disconnect in the way people talk to their fans and the way people sell to their fans.”
In the same space as Kout, the startup protects its transactions through strict PCI compliance, to the point where Lavingia has physical auditors come in to make sure security is up to snuff. Of course, as a payments company, preventing fraud is his biggest challenge.
Gumroad monetizes by taking a 5% cut and 30 cents out of every transaction and Lavingia’s eventual goal is to have it “become a thing” i.e. when people see a Gumroad link on a social network, to know what it is and click on it.
“I don’t think five years ago this could have existed,” he says, “Just like Twitter has granted anyone the ability to talk to people, Gumroad could potentially grant everyone the ability to sell stuff, online or offline.”
February 04 2012
Gillmor Gang test pattern
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — trembled in the face of Facebook's IPO and all-out war on the open Web, also known as Google. Me, I go back to Bill Gates during the DOJ deposition when he basically said we don't need no steenkin' breakup when Google will come along and be invented. @kevinmarks makes a good college (fitting) try of defending the open schmopen set, while none of us seem to notice Social Spring just keeps on rolling over conventional wisdom. Me, I'm pretty jacked up waiting for what this means for Twitter. Go Giants!
February 03 2012
Gillmore Gang test pattern
The Gillmor Gang - Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor – are recording live at 1pm PT.
Keen On…. Dane Jasper_ Why High Speed Broadband Is The Key To US Innovation (TCTV) | TechCrunch
There are few more articulate supporters of high speed broadband access than Sonic.net CEO Dane Jasper. Not only does he think Americans should have the right to high quality broadband, but he also thinks that it is the key to innovation in the broader economy. Home video is, of course, increasingly dependent on broadband and so, Japser told me when he came into our San Francisco studio earlier this week, is innovation in our healthcare and education sectors.
February 02 2012
Screen shot 2012-01-21 at 12.37.18 AM
“In the Studio” at TechCrunch TV continues today with a guest who was once a Senior Scientist at Apple and CEO of Mozilla Corporation before eventually making the trek up Sand Hill Road, where today he's a partner at a leading venture capital firm. John Lilly, an investor with Greylock Partners, has kept himself busy. Having invested already in properties like Tumblr, Dropbox, and a series of others through his firm's early-stage "Discovery Fund," one of the new areas Lilly is investigating today is world of personal health data and systems. The sheer number of new companies and devices on the market offering consumer-level health solutions is simply staggering. We have an explosion in "computing devices" (phones and sensors), new hardware (like Fitbit), new software services (like Cake Health), and social systems and platforms that attempt to weave these all together to form some type of personalized representation of our current state of health and where we'd aspire to be. (Note: There are simply way to many companies in the health space to mention them all here. You can find more comprehensive lists on Quora and by poking around the website of Rock Health, an incubator designed to help launch health-focused startups.)
January 28 2012
Gillmore Gang test pattern
The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — debut the latest Google catchphrase to replace Do No Evil: We Really Don't Care! @stevegillmor, @dsearls, @dannysullivan, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks, @tinagillmor
January 27 2012
Screen Shot 2012-01-27 at 20.23.00
BraveNewTalent is a social recruitment platform operating in the UK and moving into the US. I caught up with CEO and founder Lucia Tarnowski at Davos. The startup is built around the idea that people want to follow companies they might want to work for in the future, and companies in turn want to educate potential hires about how they work. They recently introduced a few new features, which Tarnowski outlines, notably the new feature enabling a user to follow the key employees of a company.
Screen Shot 2012-01-27 at 20.11.37
At Davos I managed to catch Juliana Rotich, Co-Founder of Ushahidi, the incredible crowd sourcing platform which came out of Kenya. Starting with just a handful of countries in 2009, it's main product, Crowdmap, is now used in hundreds of countries for crisis mapping and even crowd sourcing information about nuclear weapons in Iran. I got an update from her about their latest moves. These include news that the Omidyar Network, which put $1.4m towards Ushahidi, and which late last year put in another $1.9m.
Gillmore Gang test pattern
The Gillmor Gang — Dennis Crowley, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — visit with the ghosts of Foursquare Past, Present, and Future. @dens is semi-bicoastal these days, trying to stay ahead of his growing business. He just moved in to a new office in NY, and the one in SF is expanding as rapidly as he can hire. We try to get him to say bad things about Google +, but he demurs. But he never escapes the Gang without leaving a bit more of his roadmap than he anticipates. Of course, you'll need gamification chops to uncover it.
Screen Shot 2012-01-24 at 2.46.31 AM
Earlier this week, Facebook announced changes to its Open Graph which have huge implications to the social ecommerce platform Payvment. The two year-old Palo Alto based start-up, which already manages 80% of the ecommerce transactions on Facebook, will now be able to be integrated into the Open Graph. What this means, according to Payvment's Founder and CEO Christian Taylor, is that we can now broadcast what we want on our Facebook pages. Such social one-click purchasing power is "big trouble" for Amazon and eBay, Taylor predicts. And even bigger trouble, I suspect, for parents who will now be inundated with gift ideas by their Facebook loving kids.
January 21 2012
SOPA Debate #2 Due Process-tc_upload.mp4
Before SOPA was pulled from the House yesterday, opponents of the bill argued (among other things) that sites accused of making copyrighted material available could be shut down without being given full, adverserial, due process. Was this an accurate assessment? Viacom’s General Counsel and EVP Michael Fricklas and David Sohn, General Counsel and Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology defend their respective positions in part II of TCTV's SOPA/PIPA debate.
January 20 2012
SOPA Debate Part 1.mov-2
The controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has been pulled and its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) is on hold. The Internet won this round, it seems. But don't celebrate just yet. The forces behind these acts are simply regrouping. Should SOPA and PIPA be killed, or can they be fixed? We invited Viacom's General Counsel and EVP Michael Fricklas and David Sohn, General Counsel and Director of the Center for Democracy And Technology, to debate the issue in the video above.
January 19 2012
Screen Shot 2012-01-17 at 10.41.43 PM
The more we know about Apple, it seems, the less we really know. According to the journalist and writer Adam Lashinsky, America's most admired company is also America's least understandable company. And that's why he wrote Inside Apple - to reveal to the world how, as the subtitle of his book says, the Company Really Works.
January 18 2012
Keen On…. Adam Lashinsky_ How Apple Really Works (TCTV) | TechCrunch
After Walter Isaacson's magnum opus, do we really need yet another book about Apple? Yes, I think we do. Whereas Isaacson wrote the authorized biography of Jobs, the journalist and author Adam Lashinsky has written a most unauthorized and, in some ways, unpalatable book about Jobs' company which gets Inside Apple and explains How America's Most Admired - and Secretive - Company Really works.
Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian On SOPA: “The Fight Isn’t Over”
Supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) may be on the run in the face of growing online protests, but SOPA and its Senate counterpart, PIPA, is not dead yet. “The fight isn’t over,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian tells me in the TCTV video interview above.
Ohanian was scheduled to testify before Congress on Wednesday before that hearing was cancelled. But Reddit, along with Wikipedia and other sites, will observe a self-imposed blackout in protest. In the video above, he explains why Reddit is going ahead with its blackout plans and speaks more broadly against the acts.
Just before he showed up to the TCTV studio today, Rupert Murdoch tweeted out:
Nonsense argument about danger to Internet. How about Google, others blocking porn, hate speech, etc? Internet hurt?—
Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) January 17, 2012
To which Ohanian commented: “This shows a serious misunderstanding of how the technology works.”
In New York City and San Francisco, anti-SOPA protestors (including Ron Conway) will take to the streets and protest outside their Senators’ offices. “I am just here in front of a camera because the whole Internet cannot fit in this room,” says Ohanian. “It has become an election issue.”
Read our full coverage of SOPA here.
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