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Look, I’m all
for privacy, liberty, rights, etc. But this video (embedded below) is pretty ridiculous.
Listening to this, you’d think Google was born of a desire to trick everyone on the planet.
Does Google make almost all of its money off of ad revenues? Yes. But does that mean
they’re out to screw you by
any means necessary? No.
The video even delves into Google Buzz and its privacy debacle. But it implies that
the issue stems from Google’s desire to control you. Really, it’s just that Google
can’t seem to comprehend
social, and was rushed
into rolling out Buzz, and handled it very poorly.
The bottom line is that if you really think Google is out to get you, you shouldn’t be
using it — at all. In fact, they have a new analytics opt-out feature
that is probably right up your alley. But you also probably shouldn’t be using the Internet
at all, because all of these companies are doing basically the same thing to varying degrees.
Maybe Google wants to murder you, but I don’t know, I’d bet that they’re not
going to.
Google may have hired Plaxo’s Chief Technology Officer
Joseph Smarr late last year, but
it’s Yahoo that’s finally adding the 8-year old idea of turning the address book
model upside down and letting people subscribe to it rather than keep their own quickly outdated
lists. They’ve launched a new feature called “Share my
info” in Yahoo Contacts that is, like the old Plaxo product, a way to subscribe to
contact information and have it automatically updated.
Instead of updating your friends’ contact information when it changes, your friends just do
it for themselves and then everyone with permission to get that information automatically has
their address book updated.
It saves a lot of hassle and it was brilliant when Plaxo launched it in 2002.
But it never really caught on with the masses and most people today are stuck with address books
that are little better than they had a decade ago. Plaxo’s spamming problem
probably didn’t help gain user trust, which was part of the problem. But Plaxo also lacked
other features like email to make it a really useful place hold your address book.
Syncing products bring the promise of contacts Shangri La, but they never quite seem to work. I
still maintain a desktop address book synced with Mobile Me as well as Google Contacts synced
with my phone, and it’s a huge mess of duplicate contacts and outdated information.
There’s also a bunch of independent contact information for some of my friends over on
Facebook. And in fact that’s often the most reliable data for older contacts because they
keep it updated themselves. It’s very similar, in fact, to the Plaxo model. I’m
“subscribed” to them via mutual friendship and it can be turned off at any time.
I hope Google starts doing this soon as well, simply because that’s the closest thing to a
master contact list that I have in the cloud. And at some point someone has to solve the problem
of syncing contact information and other data across company platforms. Yes, I know a ton of
startups have tried this, but no one has quite gotten it dead simple and right.
We’re still going through these recently released YouTube/Viacom
litigation documents,
and it’s becoming clear that we can’t take everything that’s being said by
either party at face value (as if we didn’t know that already). We’ve come across a
good example. In Viacom’s document Statement of Undisputed Facts, it presented the
following seemingly damning passage that indicates that YouTube co-founder Steve Chen was advocating pirating movies (a
quote that’s now appearing in quite a few news articles). But Viacom may be misrepresenting
the evidence. Here’s their version:
In a July 29,2005 email about competing video websites, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen wrote to
YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, “steal it!”, and Chad Hurley
responded: “hmm, steal the movies?”
Steve Chen replìed: “we have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic.
how much traffic will we get from personal videos? remember, the only reason why our traffic
surged was due to a video of this type. . . . viral videos will tend to be THOSE type of
videos.”
The quote seems to be referring to full-length movies, though viral videos are mentioned
(it’s unclear in this context whether they’re saying movies will go viral, or if
they’re talking about traditionally more viral video clips). As it turns out, it’s
the latter. And they were probably joking about it. Here’s the actual Email thread, in
chronological order:
SUBJECT: Re:http://www.filecabi.net/
Jul 29, 2005 Â 1:05 AM, Steve Chen wrote:
steal it!
Jul 29, 2005 1 :25 AM, Chad Hurley wrote:
hmm, steal the movies?
Jul 29, 2005 1 :33 AM, Steve Chen wrote:
haha ya.
or something.
just something to watch out for. check out their alexa ranking.
-s
Jul 29, 2005 7:45 AM, Chad Hurley wrote:
hmm, i know they are getting a lot of traffic… but it’s because they are a
stupidvideos.com-type of site. they might make enough money to pay hosing bills, but sites like
this and big-boys.com will never go public. I would really like to build something more valuable
and more useful. actually build something that people will talk about and changes the way people
use video on the internet.
Jul 29 2005 6:51 AM, Steve Chen wrote:
right, i understand those goals but, at the same time, we have to keep in mind that we need to
attract traffic. how much traffic will we get from the personal videos? remember, the only reason
why our traffic surged was due to a video of this type.
i’m not really disagreeing with you but i also think we shouldn’t be so high &
mighty and think we’re better than these guys. viral videos will tend to be THOSE type of
videos.
-s
Jul 29 2005 6:56 AM, Steve Chen Wrote:
another thing. still a fundamental difference between us and most of those other sites. we do
have a community and it’s ALL user generated content.
-s
It’s worth pointing out that the subject of the Email thread was
‘http://www.filecabi.net’, and that big-boys.com is now Break.com — it’s pretty clear
that Chen and Hurley are referring to the brief, dumb sort of videos that often go viral as
opposed to full length movies. And, based on the ‘haha’ comment (which is ommitted
from Viacom’s document), Chen and Hurley may have just been joking about stealing any
content at all.
This doesn’t clear YouTube by any means (there are still plenty of other suspect quotes).
 But it casts some doubt on the rest of Viacom’s ‘facts’. CrunchBase InformationYouTubeViacomInformation provided by CrunchBase
There are good things about conferences and there are bad things about conferences. One of the
bad things is how little the audience gets to participate directly in the content being created.
Sometimes there’s a question and answer period at the end of a panel where people line up
at a microphone to ask questions. But that’s usually it. Other than booing and applause,
and of course the back channel on Twitter, there’s not much of a feedback loop.
That’s partially a good thing, of course. A room full of 2,000 people all shouting their
opinions on a topic isn’t much of anything except chaos. But sometimes there are people in
the audience who have a really interesting perspective on a topic, or even know more about the
topic than the people on stage.
The idea of an unconference has evolved over the years with Foo Camp and BAR Camp (and others)
where the audience and the speakers are one. Those types of events are really rewarding, but they
don’t work on a large scale single track event. Again, it would just be chaos.
A couple of years ago Dave Winer had the idea of putting people from the audience, literally, on
stage (there’s a link out there somewhere but I can’t find it). As far as I know no
one has ever really experimented with this yet. But we’re going to try it out at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York on May 24-26.
We’re going to leave an empty seat on stage for many of the group panels at TechCrunch
Disrupt and invite someone from the audience to come up and participate. I’m not sure how
exactly we’re going to do this yet. We could just ask for a volunteer from the audience
right before the panel, for example. But a better way might be to take volunteers for the panels
early on in the event and pre-screen them for interestingness, passion for the topic, knowledge,
etc.
I particularly like the idea of including audience members in the group of experts who judge and
comment on new startups launching.
I’m guessing some of the smartest things on stage will be said by these audience members.
And it will certainly freshen the format. And I really like the idea of a
panel of top experts in a field along with someone who may not have the resume, but certainly
has the knowledge and opinions, to be up there too.
We’ll expand the discussion of this on the Disrupt blog over the coming weeks, and announce firmer
plans closer to the event.
I’m hopelessly addicted to Push Notifications on the iPhone. Unfortunately,
the
system is flawed, in that the more notifications you get, the worse the experience is because
it can be hard to manage them all. And one reason I always have the iPhone on me, even when
taking around an Android phone, is that there’s no good way to get my notifications on
another device. A new startup may offer a solution for both of those problems.
Notifo is a Y
Combinator-backed company launching today. While it’s currently only available as an
iPhone app, the plan is to eventually roll out to all the major mobile platforms, starting with
Android and BlackBerry soon. And while the current app may seem pretty barebones, the power
resides underneath; it’s a platform.
Notifo’s API makes it very, very simple for any site
to insert a few lines of code in their site and offer Push Notifications very quickly. There is
no approval process, you simply insert the code and you’re good to go; your site is now
notification-ready.
What’s great about this solution is that it’s creating a way to get all the
notifications in one place, rather than having to manage a dozen (or in my case, more) apps all
with their own notifications. This way, when you load up the Notifo app, you get a stream of all
the notifications you’ve chosen to subscribe to. You could get notifications about new
TechCrunch posts, or even when someone responds to a comment you made on TechCrunch, for example.
The idea is similar to
one of my favorite iPhone apps, Boxcar, but again, this is more about the underlying idea of
notification syndication. Boxcar is more about setting up and managing notifications across a
range of services they choose — and it’s iPhone-only. Notifo should let
you fairly easily set up notifications for just about anything, on any device.
While they wait for others to adopt the idea (so far, Listia
has), Notifo set up a few services so people can use it with the iPhone right now. For example,
Push.ly allows you to get notifications for all Twitter
mentions of your name. And there is a simple March Madness final score notifier that has been
giving me updates all day as tournament games end, with their final scores. You can also set
alerts for when individual stocks hit certain prices.
And the service also allows you to send yourself timed alerts, which are easily set up from the
Notifo website.
Notifo is the work of Chad Etzel, a developer who was
formerly doing some work for Twitter.
Plastic Jungle lets you buy, sell and exchange gift cards online. Instead of receiving cash for
your gift card, Plastic Jungle also lets you trade the value in for an Amazon gift card or give
your money to charity. Users can receive cash for unwanted gift cards for up to 92% of the unused
balance and buy gift cards at up to a 30% discount. The company says that it will use the funds
to accelerate product development and work on other ways to create supply and demand for gift
cards on the site.
While Plastic Jungle didn’t reveal revenue numbers, the company’s CEO Garry Briggs
says that its revenue is eight times more that what it was a year ago. Briggs also said that
“millions” of dollars have flown through the marketplace since the company’s
launch two years ago. Plastic Jungle faces competition from CardPool
and others.
I’m at the NewsMorphosis Conference in Hawaii today locked in
a day of debates about the state of news quality and how the hell we find a business model to
keep paying for it. It’s a big issue locally– earlier this year three of
Hawaii’s five largest TV news stations merged
operations and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin isÂ
merging with the other daily paper the Honolulu Advertiser, resulting in plenty of layoffs
and general civic concern.
So it’s fitting that the conference ended with a talk by John Temple, the editor of eBay
founder Pierre Omidyar’s new Peer News
site, a test case in how the future of local news could work. And thankfully, we finally got
a few more details on the site and the approach.
Temple was clear to say “there is no silver bullet” when it comes to fixing the media
business, but also sees a great deal of hope in the volatility– this from the guy who was
head of the now shuttered Rocky Mountain News, a paper that’s already gone through what so
many dailies are dreading.
“We’re not trying to reinvent a local newspaper and put it on the Web,” he
said. Indeed, the mission of Peer News doesn’t even contain the words “news” or
“media” or “paper.” It’s simply “to create a new civic
square.” Core to the development of Peer were three questions:
-What is the role of a free press in a democracy?
-How would you best fulfill that on a local level using all the tools available today?
-How do you do that in a sustainable way?
On content, the most interesting thing Temple talked about was doing away with
“articles” as we know them. He criticized the static, episodic nature by which
journalists have traditional covered news, challenging readers to hunt through archives for the
information they want. Instead, Peer’s “building block” will be a page
that’s always updated almost like Wikipedia, or as he put it, “something closer to a
living history on a topic that changes as it develops.” There will no longer be a sense of
“missing” an article, because the “articles” will be living things. That
also addresses the critique that local news swarms around one issue, then moves on.
“We’re not going to be hot topic driven,” Temple says. Going back to those
questions, Temple says the role of a free press is to inform citizens so they can make
intelligent decisions. “Let’s stop making it so difficult,” he said.
The other hallmark of Peer’s approach is what has made blogs popular– a sense of
community. But it’s certainly a different approach. For one thing, Peer won’t have
“reporters” in the classical sense, it will have “hosts” who help
facilitate this civic square answering questions for the community. “In this
era, the fact that newspapers still rewrite press releases is an embarrassment,” Temple
said. “We’re not going to be stenographers. I think that’s a downfall of
journalism.”
But for a site that intends to be very community oriented, there was one big shocker: Peer will
not have comments. “(Comments) descend into racism, hate, ugliness and reflect badly on
news organizations that have them,” said Temple. Why? Because people do not have to show
their faces when they comment so there’s no sense of responsibility, he argued. “We
think anonymity is a huge problem when it comes to comments,” he said.
Temple also emphasized that the coverage would not pull punches: “We’re going to call
things like we see them. We think there’s real value in taking a stand.”
So what about that business model? As Temple noted, there aren’t that many
business models out there to chose from. Unlike most media sites, this will be a member site that
people “value and will pay for.” He added “advertising would not be a key focus
for us.”
Peer should be launching early next quarter, so we’ll be able to see more of these ideas in
action soon. But it’s clear that the site– or “news service” as it
prefers to call itself– is taking a markedly different approach from old and what we
consider “new” media right now.
And with the benefit of some of these details, it seems less out of step for Omidyar to be
starting this company. EBay, after all, was one of the first sites to powerfully leverage
community on the Web, pioneering a lot of the systems of trust and reputation we still use today.
There has
always been a vibrant ecosystem around financial data. Financial institutions, such as hedge
funds and investment banks, pay thousands of dollars for quantitative tabular data (financial
data in spreadsheets). But now, the web has provided a mechanism to distribute and publish large
amounts of data, but much of this data is raw (meaning, it’s not built into a spreadsheet
format) and hard to find in a Google search. An finding the data, and then putting the data into
a format that is easy to digest can be a laborious task. Y
Combinator’sData Marketplace is hoping to
change this by providing a platform where financial professionals can request data sets and then
data aggregators/consultants can then find and format the appropriate data.
Founded by two former analysts at investment banks, Data Marketplace is essentially the middleman
in helping financial organizations find quality data on the web. Users can submit requests to
Data Marketplace, and the site will send those requests to its database of 200,000 data
aggregators, programmers, and consultants who specialize in finding financial data and
essentially transferring it into a readable format.
Providers then post data resources to Data Marketplace, provide descriptive metadata, and also
set a price. The stored metadata is used to help consumers find relevant data through traditional
search engines and when browsing Data Marketplace. Data can also be posted on the site without a
request, that users can search for. For example, here’s a data set of a complete list of
Wal-Mart
Store Locations, which is priced at $30.
Prices range for data, and can be anywhere from $5 to several thousand dollars. Data Marketplace
co-founder Matt Hodan tells me he spent $10,000 in on year on data at one of the financial
organizations he worked for. Data Marketplace takes a 14% cut of each transaction on the site,
from the provider. Data Marketplace handles all of the payment processing and allows users to
directly purchase and download resources in an accessible format online.
Hodan says that current models for selling and distributing data online are inefficient and
expensive for financial organizations. Users only pay for what they need as opposed to plans or
buying bundles of information. And providers don’t have many platforms where they can sell
their data in a marketplace.
Data Marketplace is similar in some ways to Factual, which
is a Wikipedia-like site for open data, and InfoChimps,
which takes a more collaborative approach to open data.
Some people don’t like the idea of Google having any data about them.
Unfortunately, if you visit a site tracked by Google Analytics (and chances are you hit several
each day), you have no choice. But soon, you might.
Google is testing a browser-based opt-out solution for Google Analytics, they briefly
note today on the Google Analytics blog. Specifically, this would be a “global
browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics.”
They note that engineers are finalizing and testing the funtionality.
How exactly this will work globally across all browsers remains to be seen. While Firefox and
Chrome allow for easy use of plug-ins, Internet Exploerer and Safari are a bit more complicated.
Still, if you’re a user who really cares about Google not tracking this information about
you, it will probably be worth it to you to install this thing.
Of course, the other question is what this means for site owners. While it’s unlikely that
a lot of users would install something like this, what if they did? That could drastically
cripple the entire point of Google Analytics.
So in 2008, a company called Integra Communications filed
for a “Nexus” trademark having something to do with voice and data
telecommunications. Along comes Google a year later and files for “Nexus One.”
Trademark office says
no go. I’m not really surprised at this; it’s not really their job to determine
which is the better or more popular product, but rather whether it is possible for the two
trademarks to be mistaken for one another. Oh god! Will you have to scribble out the name of your
phone now and write something else?
We’re still poring over the hundreds of pages of
documents that were just released in the YouTube/Viacom litigation. One document that offers
extensive insight into YouTube’s early operations is Viacom’s Statement of
Undisputed Facts, which contains quite a few emails from the site’s three founders:
Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim (sometimes referred to as YouTube’s
‘forgotten’ founder). For what it’s worth, YouTube dispels the notion that
these were really undisputed; a YouTube spokesperson said “This statement of undisputed
facts is a statement of undisputed fiction.”
One of YouTube’s defenses in this case is that it has virtually no way to tell if a piece
of content has been uploaded with the authorization of its owner. Which is true
— Viacom has even admitted that it requested that YouTube remove
many of the videos that its own personnel had uploaded. Because of the DMCA, YouTube was allowed
to keep this potentially infringing content online provided it responded in a timely manner to
takedown requests.
But these Emails, at least as presented by Viacom, don’t make it sound like YouTube’s
founders and employees were necessarily worried about depriving content owners of videos they may
have rightfully uploaded. Sometimes, it sounds like they’re pretty sure that they
weren’t authorized, and were just relying on the fact that they didn’t have
to do anything until they received a takedown notice. Instead, they were worried about
prematurely cutting off the bulk of their traffic.
There’s some talk of creating the perception that YouTube was concerned with
patrolling such content. In one memorandum, Jawed Karim told YouTube’s Board of Directors
that the 10-minute length restriction the site was imposing would “reinforce the official
line that YouTube is not in the business of hosting full-length television shows”, but that
it “probably won’t cut down the actual amount of illegal content uploaded”
because users could easily split shows in half or upload the “Juiciest bits of television
shows”. Which begs the question, what was the point? Also, note that he refers to it as
“the official line”.
Of course, YouTube says this is all “undisputed fiction”, and they’ll probably
argue that the quotes were taken out of context (and they may well have been). If YouTube did
follow the DMCA to the letter of the law (regardless of their underlying motivation), they may
not have much bearing on the case. Â And there’s also the fact that Viacom is
being hypocritical with all of this, because it too offered user-generated video sites that
relied on the DMCA, and it uploaded many videos to YouTube itself.
But it makes for some very interesting reading.
Here are from some of those early Emails and IM conversations (you can find the full document
here:
On July 4,2005, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley sent an email to YouTube co-founders
Steve Chen and Jawed Karim titled “budlight commercials,” stating “we need to
reject these
too”; Steve Chen responded by asking to “leave these in a bit longer? another week or
two can’t hurt;” Jawed Karim subsequently stated that he “added back all 28 bud
videos. stupid. . .,” and Steve Chen replìed: “okay the video they
upload, first, regardless of people are going to be telling people about the site, therefore
making it viral. they’re going to drive traffic. second, it adds more content to the site.
third, we’re going to be adding advertisements in the future so this gets them
used to it. I’m asking for a couple more weeks.”
In a July 10, 2005 email to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen,YouTube co-founder
Jawed Karim reported that he had found a “copyright video” and stated:
“Ordinarily I’d say reject it, but I agree with Steve, let’s ease up on our
strict policies for now. So let’s just leave copyrighted stuff there if it’ s news
clips. I still think we should reject some other (C) things tho. . .”; Chad Hurley replied,
“ok man, save your meal money for some lawsuits! no
really, I guess we’ll just see what happens.”
In a July 19, 2005 email to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, YouTube co founder
Steve Chen wrote: “jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site. We’re going
to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for the copyrighted material
on the site because we the co-founders is didn’t put it up when one of blatantly stealing
content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it.”
In a July 23, 2005 email to YouTube co- founders Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, YouTube cofounder
Chad Hurley responded to a YouTube link sent by Jawed Karim by saying: “if we reject this,
we need to reject all the other copyrighted ones. . . . should we just develop a flagging system
for a future push?”; Karim responded: “I say we reject this one, but not the other
ones. This one is totally blatant.”
In an August 9, 2005 email to YouTube co-founders Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, YouTube co-founder
Chad Hurley stated: “we need to start being diligent about rejecting
copyrighted/inappropriate content. we are getting serious traffic and attention now, I
don’t want this to be killed by a potentially bad experience of a network exec or someone
visiting us. like there is a cnn clip of the shuttle clip on the site today, if the boys from
Turner would come to the site, they might be pissed? these guys are the ones that will buy us for
big money, so lets make them happy. we can then roll a lot of this work into a flagging system
soon.”
On August 10,2005, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim responded to YouTube co-
founder Chad Hurley (see SUF i1 (previous para)): “lets remove stuff like movies/tv shows.
lets keep short news clips for now. we can become stricter over time, just not overnight. like
the CNN space shuttle clip, I like. we can remove it once we’re bigger and better known,
but for now that clip is fine.” Steve Chen replied, “sounds good.”
In response to YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley’s August 9, 2005 email (see SUF i146) YouTube
co-founder Steve Chen stated: “but we should just keep that stuff on the site. I really
don’t see what wì1 happen. what? someone from cnn sees it? he happens to be
someone with power? he happens to want to take it down right away. he get in touch with cnn
legal. 2 weeks later, we get a cease & desist letter. we take the video down”; Chad
Hurley replied: I just don’t want to create a bad vibe… and perhaps give the users
or the press something bad to write about.”
In a September 1, 2005 email to YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and all YouTube
employees, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim stated, “well, we SHOULD take down any: 1)movies
2) TV shows. we should KEEP: 1)news clips 2) comedy clips (Conan, Leno, etc) 3) music videos. In
the future, I’d also reject these last three but not yet.”
On September 2,2005, in response to an email from YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley reporting that
he had taken down clips of the TV show “Family Guy,” YouTube co-founder Steve Chen
stated: “should we just assume that a user uploading content really owns the content and is
agreeing to all the terms of use? so we don’t take down anything other than obscene
stuff?”
In a September 3,2005 email responding to YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley’s concern
that “the site is starting to get out of control with copyrighted material” (see SUF
i154),
YouTube co-founder Steve Chen stated to the other two YouTube co- founders that,
“what’s
the difference between big-boys/stupidvideos vs youtube? . . . if you look at the top videos
on the site, it’s all from this type of content. in a way, if you remove the potential
copyright infringements, wouldn’t you still say these are ‘personal’ videos? if
you define
‘personal’ to be videos on your personal harddrive that you want to upload and share
with
people? anyway, if site traffic and viralìty will drop to maybe what it is. . .
i’d hate to prematurely 20% of attack a problem and end up just losing growth due to
it.”
In response (see SUF i155), YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim wrote: “well I’d just
remove the obviously copyright infringing stuff. movies and tv shows, I’d get rid of. . .
.leave music videos, news clips, and clips we’ll of comedy shows for now. I think thats a
pretty good policy for now, no?”
In a September 3,2005 email to the two other YouTube co- founders, YouTube co-founder
Steve Chen responded to Jawed Karim’s suggestion that YouTube remove “obviously
copyright infringing stuff’ (see SUF i156) by stating that “i know that if (we remove
all that content. we go from 100,000 views a day down to about 20,000 views or maybe even lower.
the copyright infringement stuff. i mean, we can presumably claim that we don’t know who
owns the rights to that video and by uploading, the user is claiming they own that video.
we’re protected by DMCA for that.we’ll take it down if we get a ‘cease and
desist”‘; Jawed Karim replied: “my suggested polìcy is really lax
though. . . . if we keep that polìcy I don’t think our views will decrease at
alL. “
In a September 7, 2005 email, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen wrote to YouTube cofounders Chad
Hurley and Jawed Karim, and Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital (and later a
YouTube board member) that YouTube had “implemented a flagging system so you can flag a
video as being inappropriate or copyrighted. That way, the perception is that we are concerned
about this type of material and we’re actively monitoring it. The actual removal of this
content will be in varying degrees. We may want to keep some of the borderline content on the
site but just remove it from the browse/search pages. that way, you can’t find the content
easily. Again, similar to Flickr, . . . you can find truckloads of adult and copyrighted content.
It’s just that you can’t stumble upon it, you have to be actively searching for
it.”
In a January 25,2006 instant message exchange, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen
(IM user name tunawarrior) told his colleague YouTube product manager Maryrose Dunton
(IM user name maryrosedunton) that he wanted to “concentrate all of our efforts in
building up (YouTube’sJ numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however
evil,” including “user metrics” and “views,” and “then 3
months, sell it with 20m views per day and like 2m users or something. . . I think we can sell
for somewhere between $250m – $500m . . . in the next 3 months. . . and there *is* a
potential to get to $1 b or something.”
In a February 17,2006 instant message conversation, YouTube systems administrator Bradley
Heilbrun (IM user name nurblìeh) asked YouTube product manager Maryrose Dunton (IM
user name maryrosedunton), “was it me, or was the lawyer thing today a cover- your-ass
thing from the company?” Dunton responded, “oh totally. . . did you hear what they
were saying? it was really hardcore . . . if we even see copyrighted material on the site, as
employees we’re supopsed (sic to report it”; Heilbrun replied, “sure,
whatever,” and Dunton said “I guess the fact that I started like 5 groups based on
copyrighted material probably isn’t so great”; in response Heilbrun said “right
exactly. . . but it’s a cover your ass . . . so the board can say we told maryrose not to
do this.”
In the same instant message conversation,YouTube product manager Maryrose Dunton
(IM user name maryrosedunton) reported the results of a “lìttle exercise”
she performed
wherein she “went through all the most viewed/most discussed/top favorites/top rated to try
and figure out what percentage is or has copyrighted materiaL. it was over 70%.” She added,
“what I meant to say is after I found that 70%, I went and flagged it all for
review.” When deposed, YouTube product manager Maryrose Dunton confirmed in reference to
the February 28,2006 instant message exchange with YouTube co-founder Steve Chen (see SUF i195)
that she was being sarcastic and did not actually flag any of the copyrighted videos for review.
Blippy is always fun to write about because so many people
are enraged by its very existence. But all that rage apparently hasn’t stopped the company
from getting lots of investor attention. In addition to landing a bevy of top tier angels and
venture capitalists in their first
round of financing, we’ve now heard that Blippy is preparing to close on a new round.
August Capital
partner David Hornik is leading the
round. And the valuation is “totally absurd” says one source. Another puts it at $50
million, although that may be a little on the high side. Regardless, that’s not bad for a
site which only launched publicly two months ago. Update: Yet another source
says “high 30s” on valuation, and we think that’s about right.
Blippy wouldn’t comment on this story. I reached David Hornik (he seemed to regret having
answered the phone). All that he’d say is that he loves Blippy, but he would neither
confirm nor deny an investment.
If you’re not already familiar with it, Blippy is a Twitter-like service where users post
everything they purchase. You can hook up your credit cards and various online services (Amazon,
iTunes, Zappos, etc.), and details about everything you buy are posted. You can see my account
here – I’ve linked it to my iTunes. See our
Blippy launch post for more details.
Lots of people love posting and discussing their purchases on Blippy. But lots of other people
just hate the idea of the service as an insane invasion of privacy (albeit one that people
voluntarily enter into). Read the comments on any of our Blippy posts to see examples of that
indignation.
Putting all that aside, though, if enough people start using Blippy they are going to be able to
monetize the heck out of it. Advertisers will see exactly what users are buying and be able to
target them with ridiculous precision. In fact, the data is so deep and rich that Amazon is already threatened by
the young startup.
Despite criticism, and an overall frustrating experience, Google
is definitely not ready to give up on Buzz. The latest indication comes today by way of a new
Android
widget that makes it easier than ever to post updates to the service.
The new Google Buzz widget for Android allows you to post text or photos to the service without
having to launch any app on the device. And, if you choose, you can easily tag your location to
your buzz, as well as determine if it should be public or private. This widgets extends the
already solid support the Android platform is offering the young service. For example, Buzz is
built into Google Maps on Android, as well.
This new widget looks very slick — easily one of the best widgets for Android
yet. And it furthers my opinion that Buzz should have been
launched as a location-based service first. Of course, this simple functionality
wouldn’t be possible on the iPhone, which doesn’t allow for widgets (and who knows if
they’d even accept a Buzz native app at this point — or if Google would
even create one for them).
The VC firm thus joins Kipost and FS Ventures as investors of the crowd-sourced mobile app development
venture. The size of the round remains undisclosed, but we hear the amount of financing totaled
just south of a seven-figure sum, so we’ll peg it at in between $800,000 and $999,999.
Labotec offers a relatively unique way of mobile app publishing, based on crowd-sourcing ideas from third parties. Basically, people who have
ideas for mobile applications on any of the major platforms but lack the time, development skills
or resources to actually build them can submit their
ideas through the Labotec website.
The ideas are subsequently evaluated by Labotec, and if one gets thumbs up from a committee of
unnamed field experts associated with the company, Labotec funds the entire development,
distribution and marketing of the app. The IP is co-owned by whoever submitted the idea –
targeted are carriers and handset manufacturers – and Labotec.
The ‘Inspirer’ (the person or organization that brought forward the idea for the app)
doesn’t pay a cent, but if the app ends up generating revenue, the first $25,000 that it
makes goes to Labotec – no matter how long it took to get to that point. After that, the
Inspirer gets 50% of any revenue that may follow. Labotec notes that they’re still testing
this model and that it is subject to change in the future.
Labotec says that it has received hundreds of new project ideas from 27 countries since its
inception in May 2009. A total of 3 applications out of those ideas have launched (iSOS for
Android, iMove2Music and FakeSMS for iPhone) and 20 are slated for release by the end of this
year – which basically means a lot of the submitted ideas are junk.
The company says it plans to use part of the just-raised capital to hire 10 more developers of
mobile apps for platforms such as iPhone, Android, iPad and BlackBerry.
The only thing worse than company meetings is trying to schedule one. The more people who need to
be at that meeting, the harder it is to find a time slot that works with everyone’s
schedule. A new Google Calendar
Labs feature called the Smart Rescheduler brings some search smarts to the problem.
“Overnight, all the Google apps customers will get this,” says Google Calendar product manager Cyrus Mistry. “It is
like we are giving every employee their own administrative assistant.”
The person scheduling the meeting enters the names of the participants, how long the meeting will
be, and a date by when the meeting must take place. The Smart Rescheduler then goes out and looks
at everyone’s calendar to see when everyone is free, taking into account different time
zones and other commitments on their calendars (in order for this to work, all the meeting
attendees must share their calendars with Google Calendar).
All too often at this point in the process, someone has a conflict. What the Rescheduler does is
look at all the soft constraints and actually ranks the best meeting times. Different attendees
can be prioritized so the meeting is set around their schedule. Soft constraints are taken into
account like partial schedule overlaps, times blocked with no other attendees, meetings where
someone’s been invited but hasn’t yet accepted, or meetings organized by that person.
These factors often indicate a schedule that can be altered.
Google Calendar throws all of these factors together and comes up with a ranking for the best
possible meeting time. “We did look at algorithms for search to see how they solved which
doc should come to the top,” says Mistry. “We discover what meeting should come out
on top.” The Rescheduler can even book new conference rooms based on which one is closest
to the original one and the same size.
You can learn all sorts of interesting tidbits from legal documents. For instance, in one of the
legal briefs unsealed today in the YouTube-Viacom dispute, such as the amount of money
YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley made from the $1.65 billion sale of the
company to Google in 2006. His take: $334 million (based on the November, 13, 2006 closing price
of Google’s stock). In other words, the young CEO owned about 20 percent of YouTube at the
time of the sale.
YouTube’s other co-founder Steve Chen’s stake was worth $301 million at the time of
the sale, and the third co-founder Jawed Karim walked away with $66 million. Even YouTube
interface designer Christina Brodbeck “received Google shares worth $9.09 million.”
The VCs did even better. Sequoia Capital, YouTube’s venture backer, turned a $9 million
investment into $516 million (or about 31 percent of the total). And Artis Capital turned a $3
million investment into $85 million.
Another notable stat from the legal docs: in the past five years, more than 500 million videos
have been uploaded to YouTube overall.
December 1, 2008. That was the last day I got a Qwitter notification. I don’t
recall qwitting Qwitter, it simply stopped working for me. Until today. When it just puked in my
email inbox.
For those unaware, Qwitter is a service that
emails you every time someone unfollows you on Twitter. It tells you their name, and the last
tweet you sent that may have caused the unfollow. Naturally, when I saw the huge influx
of emails today, I decided to visit the site again — and guess what, it does
appear that they’re back. As they note, “We’re Back! How could we possibly
quit catching QWITTERS?!? Fear not… notification emails have returned, giving us all
something to look forward to during the day!“
Not only that, the service promises that “premium services” are coming soon. Agora
Technology, the group behind the app, promises faster email notifications without ads, and the
ability to become a featured Qwitter user if you sign up (more details are coming soon).
There’s just a few problems with the new Qwitter. First, they’re sending all of these
emails with a completely broken link. The “Visit Qwitter Therapy” link takes you to
the following URL: http://root_url/therapy. Clearly, that’s the result of some bad coding.
And I have about 60 emails today all with the same broken link. More importantly, I’m not
sure the all-important unsubscribe button is working. I clicked on it to unsubscribe earlier, and
I’m still getting the notifications. Others are noting that they qwit Qwitter a
long time ago, and have started getting the notifications today.
These Qwitter emails are also now promoting TweepML, a Twitter
grouping service, which
we’ve covered in the past. And interestingly, it appears that Qwitter may be under new
management. Previously it was a group called Contrast that ran the service (here’s
an interview we did with them), now it’s listed as being run by this Agora Technology group — which is the
same group behind TweepML (which just sold).
I’ve never been thrilled by the idea of Qwitter because it adds social pressure to Twitter.
Without it, if you unfollow someone, they’re unlikely to notice (as Twitter won’t
notify them). But with it, they’ll get an email and things may get, well, awkward.
Likewise, getting an email letting you know that you’ve been unfollowed probably makes you
feel a bit uneasy inside. Well, okay, unless it’s one of the thousands of spammy accounts
on Twitter. Still, at one point they cared, and now they don’t.
Earlier today, several previously sealed legal documents in the longstanding copyright
infringement lawsuit against YouTube by Viacom were
made public. In conjunction with the public release of those documents, YouTube’s chief
counsel Zahavah Levine wrote a blog post which reads
more like a summary of a legal brief.
In it, Levine outlines YouTube’s main defense against Viacom’s allegations, including
the fact that Viacom “secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly
complaining about its presence there.” Levine also notes that “Viacom tried
repeatedly to buy YouTube,” suggesting that the current $1 billion lawsuit is its attempt to cash in on
YouTube years after the fact.
Here is the key passage from the blog post:
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly
complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to
upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them
look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent
employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to
Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely
left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high
up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very
strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on
YouTube.
Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its
own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a
result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to
YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the
very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
In other words, while Viacom’s lawyers were issuing takedown notices, its marketers were
putting clips up on YouTube to promote Viacom movies and TV shows. You’ve got to wonder
what the judge will make of that evidence.
Today, YouTube and Viacom unsealed many of the documents related to their longstanding copyright
litigation, in which Viacom has sued Google
for $1 billion. We’re embedding the documents, which were released minutes ago, below (it
may take a few minutes to get them all posted).
Every year, we
come across dozens of new applications looking to capitalize on March Madness, when millions of
basketball fans across the country try to predict the outcome of the heated 65-team NCAA
tournament. One new app that’s launching today is called tweetBracket, which gives users an extremely easy way
to share their picks with their Twitter followers. The application, while basic, is notable
because it’s a preview of the technology being built by a Y Combinator startup called 140bets.
Using tweetBracket is simple. You sign in to Twitter using oAuth, and are presented with a random
matchup from today’s games. Click the team you think will win, optionally tweet your choice
to your followers, and repeat. The game keeps track of your picks throughout the tournament, and
prizes are being awarded to the people with the most correct predictions for each round.
tweetBracket is built off of the platform that 140bets is currently developing, which makes it
easy to build apps around a binary interface (the company has also put together a similar app for
American Idol fans called Tweet Idol). CEO Jason
Wilk says that the platform is still early in development, but that eventually it will be used
for more real-time interaction (for example, you might keep it open as you watch a game and
predict whether or not a player is going to make the free throw he’s about to take).
In a brief
statement, Apple has announced
that one of the company’s board members, Jerome B. York, has passed away. The veteran
auto-industry executive was hospitalized in serious condition after a burst brain aneurysm this
morning, according to the
WSJ, but he apparently died soon after.
York was chairman, president and CEO of Harwinton Capital. A former CFO of IBM and Chrysler, and
former vice chairman of Tracinda, he joined Apple’s Board of Directors in 1997.
He was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1938. He graduated from the United States Military Academy,
and received an MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from the University
of Michigan.
Trained as an engineer, York worked his way up through Chrysler to become CFO.
Jack Dorsey’sSquare was unveiled last December
as an innovative way to let people quickly and easily accept physical credit card payments from
their mobile phone.
Since then, Square, which has been in limited beta, has been used in a variety of use cases. E.g.
philanthopic organization charity:water recently used
Square at the SXSW festival to collect donations.
A local flower cart in San Francisco is using Square to take payments from customers. Denim, a
jeans store in New York is using Square to take payments from shoppers. We even used Square at
this year’s Crunchies
to raise money for the UCSF Foundation.
Here’s how Square works: A small device attaches to the phone via the headset/microphone
jack. The device gets the power it needs to send data to the phone from the swipe of the card,
and sends the information over the microphone connection. The device is compatible with both the
iPhone and Android. It’s similar in some ways to PayPal, but anyone can now accept physical
credit card payments, too. With no contracts or monthly fees. People are sent receipts by text
and email. If you haven’t seen Square in action, check out this video.
And now, a new use case has popped up for Square: political fundraising.
Square is currently being used in two campaigns. Silicon Valley VC Josh Becker, who is running for state assembly in
California’s 21st district, has been using Square at fundraising events. And lawyer
Reshma Saujani, who is running for Congress in New
York’s 14th district, is using Square at campaign fundraising events, including at an event
in San Francisco on Friday.
Square is ideal for taking money at political fundraisers for several reasons.
Currently, if you want to donate money at a fundraising event, you often have to fill out a form
and hand over a check or cash at the event. If you don’t have your checkbook or cash handy
(which, many of us don’t), credit cards are the only option. You can write down your credit
card number and info for fundraisers to charge at a later date, but you have to trust that the
fundraiser keeps track of that information and paper.
With Square, there is both a convenience added for both the payee and fundraiser. The donation is
instantly processed, and Square will send the receipt via SMS or email to the payee. Of course,
political contributions and donations are a little more complicated because of the reporting
requirements associated with donations.
For many types of donations, you need to take the donator’s name, occupation, address, and
other information. Currently Square doesn’t allow users to input all of this information
but Dorsey says that they are releasing Square’s API to allow fundraisers to build
additional applications on top of Square, where they could input all of the necessary data. Once
this is enabled, Square will allows fundraisers to eliminate paper collection and payments all
together.
Dorsey says he’s already getting significant interest from politicians and political
candidates across the country, but because Square is in limited beta, is being selective about
how the service is distributed. Dorsey expects Square to be open to the public sometime in the
next few months.
Valued at $40
million even before launch, Square is off to an impressive start. And technology’s most
notable investors and leaders seem to think so as well.
I'll let the video after
the jump do most of the talking on this one but RunKeeper has improved its sharing service by
building out a cool run sharing service that works like a social network for the preternaturally
skinny yet surprisingly hungry. The system allows you to share runs with friends and/or strangers.
You can turn off maps for privacy and selectively share runs with the world. For example, I have
one visible activity while RunKeeper founder
Jason has like 5,000 (actually 130). This means he is
better than me and, in fact, better than most of us.
According to
Opera Software, downloads of its
latest desktop browser (10.5) have increased in number significantly after Microsoft started
offering Windows users in Europe a choice in browser with a so-called ballot screen.
The Norwegian software maker says that on average, more than half of the European downloads of
Opera’s latest browser come directly from that Choice Screen.
The increase represents more than a
doubling from the normal download numbers. At the beginning of this month, Opera touted that
browser downloads actually tripled
at first, so maybe that growth rate won’t last forever.
According to plans Microsoft has agreed to with the European
Commission, the rollout of the Choice Screen will continue into May for existing Windows
computers and for five more years on new installations.
The following numbers are the percentages of country downloads of Opera’s latest desktop
browser that originate from the Choice Screen, as part of the total Opera 10.5 numbers:
Not an easy
thing to conceptualize indeed, but according to eMarketer
there will be more mobile Internet users in China than the entire population of the US by the end
of this year.
For your reference, the 2010 estimate of the size of the United States population stands at
roughly 310 million people according to Wikipedia, so that’s a shitload of people
browsing the Web from their phones right there.
The report, which you can purchase here, also says the number of
mobile Internet users in China will grow fast to reach a staggering 957 million, and
that the country will count approximately 1.3 billion mobile subscribers by 2014.
eMarketer points out that those mobile Internet users do not currently monetize as well as
smaller mobile audiences in, say, the States, which means that mobile advertising spending levels
in China are still low relative to the size of the mobile Web user base. Also, the company
highlights another key trend in China, which is that mobile subscriber growth is actually slowing
while mobile Internet user growth is accelerating.
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Find here the history of the stories you found interesting.
Show this to people who share the same interests as you,
and if they use Matoumba, their own votes will fine recommandations to you.
Look, I’m all
for privacy, liberty, rights, etc. But this video (embedded below) is pretty ridiculous.
Listening to this, you’d think Google was born of a desire to trick everyone on the planet.
Does Google make almost all of its money off of ad revenues? Yes. But does that mean
they’re out to 
Google may have hired Plaxo’s Chief Technology Officer
We’re still going through these recently released YouTube/Viacom
litigation 
There are good things about conferences and there are bad things about conferences. One of the
bad things is how little the audience gets to participate directly in the content being created.
Sometimes there’s a question and answer period at the end of a panel where people line up
at a microphone to ask questions. But that’s usually it. Other than booing and applause,
and of course the back channel on Twitter, there’s not much of a feedback loop.
I’m hopelessly addicted to Push Notifications on the iPhone. Unfortunately,
There has
always been a vibrant ecosystem around financial data. Financial institutions, such as hedge
funds and investment banks, pay thousands of dollars for quantitative tabular data (financial
data in spreadsheets). But now, the web has provided a mechanism to distribute and publish large
amounts of data, but much of this data is raw (meaning, it’s not built into a spreadsheet
format) and hard to find in a Google search. An finding the data, and then putting the data into
a format that is easy to digest can be a laborious task. 
Some people don’t like the idea of Google having any data about them.
Unfortunately, if you visit a site tracked by Google Analytics (and chances are you hit several
each day), you have no choice. But soon, you might.
So in 2008, a company called Integra Communications filed
for a “Nexus” trademark having something to do with voice and data
telecommunications. Along comes Google a year later and files for “Nexus One.”
Trademark office says 
We’re still poring over the hundreds of pages of 
no
really, I guess we’ll just see what happens.”
Despite 
December 1, 2008. That was the last day I got a Qwitter notification. I don’t
recall qwitting Qwitter, it simply stopped working for me. Until today. When it just puked in my
email inbox.
In a brief
statement, 
I'll let the video after
the jump do most of the talking on this one but 
According to
Not an easy
thing to conceptualize indeed, but according to 
Recommandations
)
and reject those that you are not interested in
(
)
