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Tech News |
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TechCrunch
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TechCrunch is a group-edited blog that profiles the companies, products and events defining and transforming the new web.
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InDinero Closes $1.2 Million Seed Round: An Investor Roster
 inDinero, like a Mint for Quickbooks, finalized their highly sought after $1.2 million seed round this week. Shunning institutional financing, the small business banking startup was funded by a syndicate of twenty angel investors, including Intuit's David Wu, Slide's Keith Rabois, Yelp's Jeremy Stoppelman, Microsoft's Fritz Lanman, 500Startups'Dave McClure, YouTube's Christina Brodbeck, Stanford's Steve Blank, YouTube's Jawed Karim and more!
inDinero founders Andy Su and Jessica Mah initially set out to raise $500K but reportedly received so much interest that the round could have topped out at $2 million. Su and Mah had to eventually turn people away. A illustrated list of those that made the cut below.
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The Case For The Dedicated E-Reader: When It?s Time To Go Off The Grid
 With the advent of the iPad and the plethora of cheaper Android tablets that are due to flood the market over the coming months, there's an increasingly popular theory in the tech industry: the days of the dedicated e-reader are numbered.
Last week we published the latest forecasts from Informa Telecoms & Media analysts that said as much. Sales of 'smartbooks' (a loosely defined term) are expected to grow from 3.65 million in 2010 to nearly 50 million in 2014, or over 50% of all embedded device sales. The losers will be dedicated e-readers, such as the Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader, and the winners, multifunctional portable devices like the iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab.
The reasoning - and it's convincing - is that e-book content is now available on most multifunctional devices like mobiles and tablets that work well enough as book readers, while having other functions.
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The Nexus One Was Google?s Dream. The Carriers Were Freddy Krueger.
 "Your mobile phone should be free."
That was Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking to Reuters in November of 2006. It was just about a year before the Android project was first unveiled. It was also just a few months before the iPhone was introduced (Schmidt was a member of Apple's Board at the time). At that point, Schmidt had to know that both Google and Apple were on the verge of changing the mobile industry. Or, at least, that's what he thought was going to happen.
There's no question that the situation in the mobile industry (particularly in the U.S.) is better than it was in 2006 from a consumer perspective. And yes, that's largely thanks to Apple and Google. But free phones? We're nowhere close to that. But last year we were. And then Google's dream turned into a nightmare.
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With 40+ Customizable Plugins, Seesmic Desktop 2 Aggregates The Realtime Web
 After a year's worth of work, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur just announced the launch of Seesmic Desktop 2 (SD2), a desktop client that goes beyond Twitter; "We want to be the first platform for platforms," says Le Meur.
Running on Silverlight (to install go here), the desktop app now has plugin architecture that supports a multitude of content streams including but not limited to, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Foursquare, Flicker, Klout, Formspring, Myspace, Google Reader (!) Salesforce Chatter, E-Bay, Last.fm and so on and so forth.
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Adobe To Resume ?Dev Work? On Flash-to-iPhone Tool
 Hot on the heels of Apple's decision to increase, ever so slightly, the opportunities for devs to use different frameworks for iPhone app creation, Adobe announced that its resuming work on its Flash-to-iPhone system for Flash Professional CS5.
Here is the relevant quote:
Apple?s announcement today that it has lifted restrictions on its third-party developer guidelines has direct implications for Adobe?s Packager for iPhone, a feature in the Flash Professional CS5 authoring tool. This feature was created to enable Flash developers to quickly and easily deliver applications for iOS devices. The feature is available for developers to use today in Flash Professional CS5, and we will now resume development work on this feature for future releases. 
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Mobile Video Streaming Service Qik Has 3.5M Users, Projects 75M Installs In Next Year
 We've been tracking the progress of Qik, a service that lets you broadcast movies from your mobile phone directly to the web, for years now. But until now we haven't been able to get an especially accurate grasp of just how well the service has been doing. Today, that's changing: Qik is releasing some user stats, for what cofounder Bhaskar Roy says is the first time.
Roy says that Qik curently has 3.5 million users, and is adding nearly 500,000 users each month. The application's userbase has grown sixfold in the last year, and Roy expects that growth to continue. Much of it will stem from the fact that Qik is included as a default application on millions of devices, including the HTC EVO 4G and Nokia N97. Roy says based on current and upcoming partnerships, Qik will be preloaded on a whopping 75 million devices in the next year.
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For-Profit Automattic Gives WordPress Trademark To Non-Profit Foundation
 "It?s not often you see a for-profit company donate one of their most valuable core assets and give up control," Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg writes today in a post announcing that the WordPress trademark has been transfered from his company to the WordPress Foundation. "This is a really big deal," he continues.
What this means is that the key ingredient behind Automattic is now in the hands of the organization in charge of "promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity." So why do this? Mullenweg says it has been his goal since the beginning to blend a non-profit business, a for-profit one, and not-just-for-profit one under one banner. Now that he feels each of those aspects is stable enough, he wants that main banner, WordPress, to be "protected" as a "beacon for open source freedom."
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Fingers Crossed: Google Voice May Be Returning To The App Store
 On July 28 2009, a pair of iPhone applications that offered support for Google Voice were unceremoniously, and without warning, removed from Apple's App Store. We then learned that Apple had blocked the official Google Voice application as well, which eventually led to an FCC inquiry. A year later, Google Voice was still missing from the App Store. Now it looks like there may be a glimmer of hope for getting Google Voice on your iPhone.
This morning Apple released guidelines explicitly spelling out for the first time what it would reject from the App Store. Sean Kovacs, the developer of third party Google Voice application GV Mobile (which was removed from the App Store over a year ago), read through each of the 100+ rules, and he concluded that his app didn't seem to violate any of them. 
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Ex-MySpace Execs Quietly Building New Startup Called Namesake
 One good thing to come out of MySpace's slow demise: a bunch of former employees are creating startups left and right, mostly in Los Angeles and helping to grow the startup ecosystem there. We're tracking Gravity, Mindjolt, Gogobot and Beachmint. And we're adding one more to the list.
Namesake was founded by Dan Gould and Brian Norgard. The site is still in private beta and it's not 100% clear what it will be. From the about page:
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Students To Be Subject To Week-Long Social Media ?Detox? Experiment
 The Provost of Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, Eric Darr, has decided to perform what will certainly be an unpopular experiment on the students at his school. Following some chin-stroking related to the nature of social media and its relevance to etc. etc., Mr. Darr decided it would be interesting to block all use of social websites and applications on school networks for a full week.
The school is far from technophobic; in fact, like most modern universities, it is extremely well-wired, and a huge amount of collaboration and communication takes place online. So in addition to blocking Facebook, AIM, Twitter, and Myspace, HUST will also be blocking its internal networks and tools. There's a lot to like about this experiment, and a lot to discuss.
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Trying to Be Something You?re Not: Works for Drag Queens, not for Google
 Contrary to popular opinion, the reason Yahoo?s metrics have been stagnant and its stock has lost half its value in the last two-and-a-half years isn?t because Google did search better than Yahoo. It?s because Yahoo turned its back on what it did well: Building the first online mass media content superstore. In doing so, it let the younger, sexier, faster-growing Google define what Yahoo wasn?t. It?s precisely the mistake that Jeff Bezos and Amazon didn?t make when eBay was the ecommerce, monkeys-could-run-this-train darling.
Yahoo was never going to win at search, just like Amazon never would have won at auctions. It wasn?t in the company?s DNA. Which brings us to the point of this post: Google needs to stop trying to be Facebook and focus on extending and investing in what makes Google successful: The Algorithm.
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Ebyline: Why Is This A Business? (TCTV)
 Earlier this week, Erick wrote about Ebyline - a new site, founded by some former LA Times-ers that promised to make it easier for talented freelance journalists to get gigs with legitimate publications. Or to put it another way, if Associated Content makes you want to kill yourself, Ebyline is the site for you.
But will editors actually use it? We invited Giga Om founder Om Malik to join us in the studio for this week's 'Why Is This News' to tell us whether he'll be finding his next crop of writers from amongst Ebyline's vetted and verified ranks.
Spoiler alert: no.
Video below.
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Facebook Tweaks The Like Button: Like Things In Apps, Link To Pages, And Show Box Counts
 Ever since Facebook rolled out their Like button in April, it has been spreading over the web like wild fire. Since then, they've been tweaking it a bit here and there to improve the layout and functionality. Today brings more improvements.
As they note on their Developer Blog, the new Like button gains three things: the ability to like items within apps, the ability to link the Like button to Pages, and a new option to have a "box count" layout for the button that shows the number of likes above it.
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Blippy Founder: 40% Of Shared Purchases Are iTunes, But Ping?s No Threat (TCTV)
 Over the weekend Philip Kaplan, co-founder of social purchasing site Blippytweeted out a link to Steve Jobs demoing iTunes Ping, with the added sly comment "Looks like Blippy." Curious about what Jobs' movement into the social sharing space means for Blippy, we brought Kaplan into the TCTV studio and grilled him on what exactly Jobs did or did not copy, how often iTunes purchases were shared on Blippy, and whether or not the concept of social shopping has hit mainstream.
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Thou Shalt Not Chatroulette Or Russian Roulette: The Best Of The App Store Rules
 This morning, Apple finallyreleased a set of guidelines to iOS developers -- a move which should go a long way in making the process seem less arbitrary. We've already posted the basics of what you need to know -- those are, the high-level rules written in refreshingly non-corporate speak ("we don't need anymore Fart apps" and "if you run to the press and trash us, it never helps"). But I've also gone over all the individual sections with the more specific rules, and found a number of interesting ones worth pointing out.
Behold: the best of the App Store rules. (As Apple notes, this is a "living document" subject to change at any time.):
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Don?t Blame Media, Blame the Media-Audience Infinite Loop
 I?ve spent two days listening to and reading near-constant coverage of the wacko who's planning to burn Korans in Gainsville, Florida, and increasingly the stories have been about whether or not all the press attention has been irresponsible. Whether constantly covering the outrage has made it a global one, versus something that only his fifty parishioners would have known about. If the events put American soldiers in danger?that?s a pretty real issue.
The media has long wrestled with how much it should give the public what it wants versus what it thinks the public needs, and it became more pronounced as the readership of stories became immediately measurable and comparable. Mad about Lindsey Lohan?s jail time being covered by serious news outlets? Groaning at another TechCrunch post about the iPhone? Well, then stop reading, watching, and commenting on them. Like a kid throwing a tantrum, the easiest way to get media you don?t like or think is irresponsible to go away is to stop paying attention. If a blog posts in a forest and no one is there to comment does it really exist? Not according to most bloggers.
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Ping Gets Its Own ?The Social Network? Parody
 From the very same Internet that brought you The Twitter Movie, The YouTube Movie, The Auction Site Movie and The Other Social Network Movie comes today's Ping parody: Another Social Network Movie. Something tells me that people are just going to keep making these parodies of David Fincher's The Social Networkuntil they run out of websites. Can't wait to see what people come up with for Orkut.
While this trailer primarily focuses on the travails of the Ping user interface, you can help but sympathize as the beleaguered user checks for iTunes updates, dramatically agrees to the 36 page terms of service, restarts their computer, gets their login denied, tries to upload a photo, ends up following Keith Urban, etc ...
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GetGlue Brings Social Recommendations Goodness To The iPad; Lands Deal With Fox
 GetGlue, a social browsing assistant that shows ratings and recommendations of movies, books, restaurants, stocks, and more on the web, has been on a roll lately when it comes to the startup's mobile strategy. In less than three months, GetGlue has launched a mobile website, an Android app and an iPhone app. Today, GetGlue is completing the package with an iPad app and a new deal with Fox.
Similar to GetGlue's other mobile offers, the iPad app allows users can to check-in to their favorite shows, music, movies and books, and see what their friends are enjoying in real-time. With each check-in, users earn points and stickers from GetGlue and other major brands. The app also allows users to rate their favorite shows, movies, music and books and receive personalized suggestions. 
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NumberFire Gets Scientific About Fantasy Football Picks
 Football season is upon us and that means many of you are making your fantasy football picks. While ESPN, Yahoo and others provide data and statistics on players to help you make decisions, numberFire is hoping to be an additional useful resource for fantasy football picks.
Originally presented from the TechCrunch Disrupt DemoPit, numberFire is an application that applies quantitative analysis and statistical reasoning to the world of fantasy football. Not only does numberFire have recommendations of pics, but the site also provides contextual data supporting each decision. 
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Super Angel v. VC SMACKDOWN, Part 4: Is Silicon Valley Getting Disrupted? (TCTV)
 Ding, ding! It's round four of our Super Angel v. VC SMACKDOWN. Both of our pugilist Davids live and work in Silicon Valley. Given that today's topic is about whether or not the heft of East Coast Super Angels like Josh Kopelman, Chris Dixon and Fred Wilson is pulling the center of early stage funding gravity away from famed Sand Hill Road, you'd think it'd be nothing but agreement. "Oh, no, Silicon Valley is still the center of the universe."
But you'd be wrong. 
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