Ajax Girl

Many within the United States might not have noticed the trend yet, but the rest of the world has: the US dollar is in serious decline. Americans have long made fun of their friends North of the border, but today the Canadian dollar buys $1.02 US dollars making it worth more than the Greenback. It wasn’t that long ago that the US Dollar was at parity with the Euro (December 02), but today it buys 70 Euro cents.Even the Australian Dollar is nearing parity, buying 90cents USD vs 55c in December 2002.

It’s not all doom and gloom however, and there are winners along with losers as the dollar declines.

Winners

Google
(and to a lesser extent Yahoo and Microsoft)

Google is a big winner from the declining US dollar, with its 2nd Quarter financial results indicating that 48% of Google’s income now comes from outside of the United States (3rd qtr results are due this week). Google operates in US dollars so 48% of its income (even if growth was completely static) is now worth more today than it was at the end of the second quarter. Of course it would be a surprising result if Google didn’t grow its overseas business in the 3rd quarter so expect that foreign income will tip over 50% of Google’s earnings for the 3rd quarter.

The flip side of course is that the declining US dollar is actually representative of issues within the US market itself so Google does face the real risk that either now or in the immediate future of seeing ad revenue decline if there is a broader downturn in the US economy. Its international exposure though should outweigh any such decline, and the market knows this, in part its why Google hit $600 a share.

Yahoo and Microsoft will benefit in terms of foreign revenue as well, although neither has the online presence (or marketshare) that Google does.

Non-US Startups

The cost of doing business in the United States continues to slide, helping break down the cost barrier that makes it difficult for non-US startups to compete with the Valley. Everything from travel, branch offices, and even more favorable lending markets helps level the playing field.

There are also ample opportunities for non-US affiliate style programs to strive ahead; a decent program that competes with Google Adsense but pays in Euros would certainly have a much broader appeal than it once would have.

Losers

US Startups

Although many are focused on the US market alone, smart startups know that there are markets beyond the US-Canadian border that provide growth opportunities that may not be available domestically in the highly competitive US market. The cost of opening foreign offices is becoming expensive as the dollar dives, and even basic stuff like outsourcing coding (which many startups do to India) is now becoming more expensive.

Anyone with a US Dollar exposure

Affiliates, bloggers and even coders are seeing income reduced as the value of the US Dollar drops. Much (or most) of the content and coding marketplace is run in US Dollars, which exposes bloggers who rely on programs such as Adsense, through to people writing for blog networks and similar writing positions.

with thanks to Paul Montgomery for the post idea.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/169963597/

While Digg seems hard pressed to break out of its geek-infested niche, other sites are using Digg-like voting mechanisms to attack a much larger and much less tech savvy crowd: celebrity gossip aficionados.

This evening the newest, Showhype, launches, joining a number of existing sites. More on each below:

Lipstick: A Conde Naste site powered by Reddit, which Conde Naste acquired in late 2006.

Dotspotter: Launched June 2006, and just acquired by CBS for $10 million.

SugarLoving: Described by Sugar Inc. CEO as “Digg for Chicks.” It launched last month and already has massive page views, thanks to the affiliated blogs that link into it. It covers everything from tech to fashion, from a woman’s point of view.

ShowHype: The newest of the bunch - it launches this evening. This is from the same Silicon Valley- based startup that launched BallHype in April. Users can see top news on the home page or drill down to keep track of specific movies, television shows or celebrities, all based on tagging.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/169956483/

The latest Moniker domain auction was held last week, and along with the usual multi-million dollar domain buys that we’ve come to expect from these domain auctions (computer.com went for $2.2 million), another domain many people might not have heard of, let alone used saw six figure sales.

Dot.mobi domains we released for sale in September 2006 and are aimed at providing mobile phone specific websites. The dotMobi TLD registrar is financially backed by Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefónica Móviles, Telecom Italia Mobile, Orascom Telecom, GSM Association , Hutchison Whampoa, Syniverse Technologies, and VISA.

The Moniker auction saw three 6 figure Dot.mobi sales Poker.mobi for $150,000, Ringtones.mobi for $145,000 and News.mobi for $110,000. These join previous Dot.mobi sales of Flowers.mobi for $200,000, Sportsbook.mobi for $129,800, and Fun.mobi for $100,000. Other Dot.mobi domains to sell at Moniker were Email.mobi ($50,000), Podcast.mobi ($25,000) and PDA.mobi and Zipcodes.mobi ($8,000 each).

Whilst domain speculation is hot at the moment, it’s not unreasonable to question this sort of money going into obscure domains at a time that new mobile phones (in particular the iPhone, but with many more soon following) display full web pages as opposed to a cut down mobile versions only.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/169946626/

International environmental group Greenpeace has launched an attack on Steve Jobs’ claims that Apple is a company with green credentials by releasing an analysis of the iPhone that finds toxic chemicals that have or are in the process of being eliminated by other mobile phone manufacturers.

According to Greenpeace, the iPhone contains toxic brominated compounds (indicating the prescence of brominated flame retardants (BFRs)) and hazardous PVCs.

Two of the “phthalate plasticisers” found at high levels in the iPhone headphone cable are classified in Europe as ‘toxic to reproduction, category 2′ and are banned from use in all toys or childcare articles sold in Europe.The report noted that Nokia is totally PVC free and that Motorola and Sony Ericsson already have products on the market with BFR free components.

Greenpeace called upon Apple to truly revolutionize the mobile phone by producing an environmentally friendly handset for the iPhone’s European launch.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/169937711/

So Google recently made it fairly easy to determine the number of Google Reader subscribers around a particular blog. Gabe Rivera at Techmeme did a little work on excel and came up with an unofficial list of the top blogs and the number of subscribers each blog has on Google Reader. He sent the list around to people for comments - with his permission we’ve published it below.

This isn’t perfect because you have to think of the blog and then do a search for the stats; so some blogs may be left off. Also, some of these stats are aggregate numbers from different feeds for the same blog.

If you see errors or blogs that should be added, please point them out and we’ll correct them. It would also be good to round this out to a top 100 list and compare it to Technorati and TechMeme Leaderboard. Hopefully, Google will just publish this data themselves at some point.

The blog or other news site is listed on the left. Total Google Reader subscribers is listed in the second column.

 

Update: Robert Scoble posts subscriber numbers based on the TechMeme Leaderboard rankings. Someone should aggregate all of this data into a single Top 100 list.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/169896203/