Podcast: Behind the Story
2010-03-15 00:48:32


Google Product Manager RJ Pittman Defects To Apple
2010-03-14 23:20:16
The battle between Google and Apple continues. RJ Pittman, a prominent product manager at Google, has left the company to join Apple. We've been tipped off to a tweet he sent out two days ago that said 'My last day at Google. Incredible experience. Amazing people. Moved mountains. Next chapter. Hello Apple.' Pittman has since removed the tweet from his Twitter feed, but judging by the tweets still visible in Twitter search, it's true. We've also received an email that Pittman sent to his coworkers and friends about the move (we've redacted a paragraph about hanging out with his family during his time off):

Web Publishing Startup DocStoc Now Offers Branded Viewers To Users
2010-03-14 23:00:57
Web publishing startup DocStoc is launching a customized document viewer today, allowing anyone to create easily embeddable, branded document viewers. The new feature is open to all DocStoc users and offers the ability to customize the logo, buttons, links, and color of the viewer. The viewer itself is fairly sleek and resembles DocStoc's normal document viewers. Users can directly download documents from the viewer and DocStoc will automatically convert any convert historical embeds with Docstoc. For example, all of the documents we've embedded with our TechCrunch DocStoc account will now include our branded viewer.

SpotRank Is Skyhook’s Intelligent Location Firehose. SimpleGeo Is The First To Wield.
2010-03-14 22:26:14
In terms of location data, few get more than Skyhook Wireless. The positioning technology is in use in tens of millions of devices around the globe, including, notably, on every iPhone. And now the company has a simple way for third-parties to tap into that data in a useful way. SpotRank gives developers access to hundreds of million of anonymous location entry points put into the Skyhook system. In fact, there are some 500 million points (100 meter 'spots') at the service's launch. With this massive amount of data, developers can do things such as predict what locations will be hot on which nights, or predict traffic patterns. They have so much data because it's not based around things like check-ins, which are hot right now on the consumer side of location, but rather everytime a device needs location for anything.

Readers Are Devouring Apple Book Apps
2010-03-14 21:43:00
Demand for digital book applications on Apple devices gives developers and publishers fresh ways to make money—a mixed blessing for Amazon

Scamville Marches Onto The iPhone, Sneaks Back Into Facebook
2010-03-14 21:01:41
In our Scamville series of posts last October we exposed the massive user fraud occurring Facebook and MySpace social games. Fake quizzes tied to long term mobile subscriptions, malware-laden toolbar downloads and other scams were the center of the controversy. The industry did a lot of talking in the wake of those posts and some long term changes have been made. For the most part, for example, Fake quizzes and the Video Professor scam are off Facebook (but see below on what's still there). But now we're seeing the same old scams hit the iPhone. And the same players, particularly OfferPal Media and SuperRewards and now Google, are powering those scams. Specifically we're seeing SMS-subscription offers, which trick users into putting long term subscriptions on their mobile phones (or their parent's mobile phones). New Offerpal CEO George Garrick promised to take a leadership position in cleaning up scammy ads. He said 'It will be a fundamental part of the Offerpal culture that any offers we distribute meet stringent standards of integrity and quality, as specified by our partners, credible industry experts, and good old common sense.'

Foursquare And Gowalla In A Dead Heat In The Location War
2010-03-14 20:37:11
The SXSW festival in Austin, Texas is currently ground zero for a war, the location war. While over a dozen services have launched new products or features around location, two still seem to stand above all others in terms of use here: Foursquare and Gowalla. Earlier today, Business Insider ran a report suggesting that Foursquare was dominating the battle — unfortunately, that's simply not true. In fact, Foursquare and Gowalla are basically in a statistical dead heat, at least in Austin. Multiple sources confirmed this information, and one actually showed me proof (which I was asked not to share). In other words, the war is still raging.

Google Is Working On Letting Users Link Their Gmail And Google Apps Accounts
2010-03-14 20:02:34
Many people (including myself) have come to the conclusion that Gmail, with its threaded messages, spam filtering, and vast storage space, is one of the web's best webmail providers. In fact, we like it so much that we use it for both our personal accounts and work accounts using Google Apps. But that also poses a problem: many of us wind up having to maintain two separate Google accounts, which means we have to swap logins whenever our Gmail, Reader, or other data is stored under the other account. Fortunately, there may be an end in sight for this juggling act. As today's SXSW panel on Gmail came to a close, the panelists revealed one last juicy tidbit: they're working to resolve the problems with multiple namespaces that users have to deal with. The team didn't get specific — they simply repeated that they have to deal with the same problems, as they have '@google.com' accounts for work and standard Gmail accounts for personal use. And they know it's a pain.

For Power Users, Gmail Set To Get Up To Speed
2010-03-14 19:34:50
During the Behind the Scenes of Gmail panel today at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, team member Jonathan Perlow made a revelation that will be a huge relief to power Gmail users: things will soon get a lot faster. When addressing the question, 'why is Gmail slow?,' Perlow asked the audience to raise their hands if they thought Gmail was too slow. A solid number of people raised their hands. Perlow said that the reason everyone didn't is because slowness is really only an issue for power users of the service — those with hundreds of thousands or even millions of messages. As someone approaching 100% usage of my Gmail inbox, I know this problem well.

Google May Start Pre-Testing New Buzz Features With Users
2010-03-14 19:08:06
This afternoon at SXSW, a panel of Gmail and Google Buzz team members took part in a panel where they discussed what goes on behind the scenes at Gmail. The panel covered a smattering of topics, ranging from everything from Gmail stickers to its site speed, but eventually the discussion turned to the elephant in the room: Google Buzz's privacy shortcomings when it launched last month. Google Product Manager Todd Jackson said that Google had learned a lot from the incident, acknowledging that Google was in error when it made the assumption that users wanted to move their email and chat contacts over to their Buzz social graph, and auto-followed them. To make sure that kind of blunder doesn't happen again, he revealed that Google may start pre-releasing new Buzz features to small subsets of users.

The Key To Gmail: Sh*t Umbrellas
2010-03-14 19:07:28
Today at the Gmail Behind The Scenes panel at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, key team members of the Gmail team revealed the true secret of the service: Shit umbrellas. Product manager Todd Jackson made the humorous revelation when explaining how the Gmail team works as a group of about 100 people, the vast majority of which are engineers. 'You can either be a shit funnel or a shit umbrella,' Jackson says.

Go Try It On Will Be Your Wardrobe Consultant And Personal Stylist In One
2010-03-14 19:00:25
I'm a big fan of sites that aim to socialize fashion and shopping decisions. Weardrobe, Polyvore and others are taking fashion and style to a new level with the ability to socialize looks and designers. A new fashion-focused site, Go Try It On aims to to add a social element to both figuring out what to wear and getting feedback on a particular outfit. A finalist at the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, Go Try It On allows users to share photos of themselves and get honest opinions on their look before they go out. Once you upload a photo of yourself, you can add descriptions of the brands you are wearing and include context around the choice of the oufit (i.e. first date, black-tie gala). The site's community can then comment on the site and provide feedback on fellow members' outfits.

Facebook May Begin Allowing Developers To Store User Data For More Than 24 Hours
2010-03-14 17:30:36
Facebook's f8 conference is shaping up to have quite a few improvements in store for developers, and we think we've come across another one: a change to Facebook's data retention policy. Yesterday, Facebook employee Monica Keller (who left MySpace to join the company last month), took part in a conversation on Twitter that seemed to indicate that developers may no longer have to delete user data. The possible change came to light after Gnip CEO Eric Marcoullier gently chided Keller about developers being unable to store any user data, to which she responded, 'come to f8!'. Since that tweet, we've heard further whispers about a change to Facebook's 24 hour policy retention, and that Facebook is already briefing developers on the upcoming changes.

Eko: Mobile Banking for India’s “Dial-Up” Internet
2010-03-14 15:33:53
I mentioned in my last post that mobile is bridging the digital—not to mention analog— divide in India, with almost half as many new mobile accounts being opened just last January as there are Internet users in the entire country. And there are a host of interesting companies seeking to leverage that network as some kind of rudimentary, literally “dial-up,” Internet that extends far beyond the country’s 50 million or so Web users. One of the most ambitious companies I met with during my last trip to India in November was Eko, a mobile banking company. There are a few SMS-based bank applications in India, but Eko differs because the phone isn’t just another channel for the account—it is the account. You make payments and transfer money simply by dialing numbers. It’s so simple, you don’t even need to understand SMS to use it. It’s an ingenious offering that doesn’t try to be everything to everyone. It aims squarely at the unbanked—some 60% of India’s huge population.

Notes on Leadership: Be Like Steve Jobs, . . . And Bill Campbell, And Andy Grove
2010-03-14 12:29:14
Editor's note: When venture capitalists invest in early stage startups, more than anything else they are investing in the founders of the company and their ability to lead their employees through the most improbable set of circumstances to take an idea from a germ to a real and profitable business. In this guest post, Ben Horowitz of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz explains the leadership traits he and his co-founder Marc Andreessen look for before they invest in a startup. Some of their investments include Skype, Zynga, Factual, and RockMelt. Before becoming investing partners, Horowitz and Andreessen co-founded Opsware, which they sold to HP for .6 billion, and prior to that Horowitz was an executive at Netscape. At Andreessen Horowitz, we favor founders running the company. The reasons are many (and will be the topic of a future blog post). As a result, we spend a great deal of time thinking about the characteristics required to be a founding CEO. Perhaps the most important attribute required to be a successful founding CEO is leadership. So what is leadership and how do we think about it in the context of the CEO job? Are great leaders born or made? Most people define leadership in the same way that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously defined pornography when he said: “I know it when I see it.” A better definition comes from former Secretary of State Colin Powell who said: “You have achieved excellence as a leader when people will follow you anywhere if only out of curiosity.” For our purposes, we can generalize this to be the measure of the quality of a leader: the quantity, quality and diversity of people who want to follow her.

Craig Barrett Takes On Vivek Wadhwa In The Tech Education Debate
2010-03-14 10:17:43
Editor's note: The most valuable employees of any technology company are the engineers and scientists, which is why everyone in Silicon Valley does whatever they can to ensure the continuous supply to this talent pool. The size of the talent pool is ultimately determined by the number of people who graduate from colleges and universities with science, technology, engineering, or mathematics degrees. The U.S. is graduating fewer and fewer scientists and engineers, causing concern in many quarters. While many people agree this is a problem, not everyone agrees on what should be done about it. Former Intel chairman and CEO Craig Barrett is a strong proponent of priming the pump with more undergraduate science, engineering, and math students. Duke/UC-Berkeley professor (and regular TechCrunch columnist) Vivek Wadhwa thinks that better rewards for people who pursue engineering and science degrees is the right approach. So we asked Barrett and Wadhwa to debate the issue of how best to fix technology education in the U.S. Their exchange is below:

Famebook: Because You’ve Always Wanted To Have Your Facebook Feed On Paper
2010-03-14 07:53:04
Remember that time when a marketing agency's labs unit cooked up an application that allowed you to print your tweets in a custom notebook (aka, Tweetnotebook)? Ok, fair chance you don't - I sure do because I have one of those lying around here somewhere. Anyway, it was only a matter of time before they did the same for Facebook - and lo and behold, here's My Famebook.

Something Is Technically Wrong With Twitter.com
2010-03-14 07:36:12
OMGTwitterisdownagain. Or extremely flaky, at least. This time, the problems seem to occur only when trying to access the Twitter website, as the API seems to be fully functional and thus not causing any trouble for third-party clients. Search also seems to work fine, as you can tell from all the people tweeting that Twitter is down for them - go figure. We'll keep it short and sweet: use a third-party client for your tweeting needs or find something else to do (like blog about the fact that Twitterisdownagain).

“No Excuses” For European Startups And More Videos And Photos From Plugg 2010
2010-03-14 06:53:53
Last Thursday saw the third edition of Plugg, a conference I started in my home country Belgium back in 2008 that essentially aims to launch and inspire European tech entrepreneurs and advance the startup ecosystem in these parts. The event is closely tied to TechCrunch, with myself as lead organizer and TechCrunch Europe editor Mike Butcher running things on stage. We invited a host of speakers from all corners of Europe to deliver inspiring keynotes about a wide range of topics, and as every year had 20 (well actually, 19) startups vying for the top prize in an exhilarating pitching competition. All these startups were carefully selected and are some of Europe's most promising early-stage ventures, so I invite you to take a look at the full list of finalists in our previous post. In the end, Estonia's Fits.me won the main award of the show, with RazWar snatching the audience choice prize and Distimo and Inbox2 as runners-up. If you didn't attend the event but are interested in finding out what went on on stage, we've got you covered: the whole thing was captured on video and in pictures, and we also embedded a handy Nomadesk widget on the Plugg website where you can access a virtual folder carrying all the presentations. Here's a selection of videos I think will interest TechCrunch readers most (but please check out all of them):

India’s Rural Cell Movement: Can You Hear Me Now?
2010-03-14 03:04:25
Last time I was in India I wrote about the amazing business model innovation that had allowed telecom operators to make money on a paltry a month per average user. That compares to a desired average monthly payment of or more in the U.S. The results have been phenomenal—550 million people in India have phones, and it has transformed the poorer service economy by giving them an affordable way to be reached and arrange jobs. Just last month, nearly 20 million new mobile accounts were opened. That’s more than double the people than have high speed Internet in the entire country. Even in slums where people live on less than a day, everyone has a phone. If “Slumdog Millionaire” was more accurate, Jamal wouldn’t have had to go on TV to find Latika. He could have just called her, or worst case, called a few friends until he found her number. It’s unequivocally India’s most successful infrastructure achievement —despite some mounting concerns about the effects of all those towers dotting nearly any urban rooftop that can hold one. But amazingly, when Rajiv Mehrotra looked at the existing telecom penetration in India, he saw failure.