Ajax Girl

Twitter is quickly turning into the media sharing platform of choice for many people, despite the fact that it, uh, doesn’t have any actual media sharing functionality. But a variety of services are popping up to fill the need, including countless Twitter-specific sites for sharing images, music, and video.

Today TwitDoc is launching what appears to be the first service for sharing documents over Twitter, bringing support for PDFs, Microsoft Office Documents, and a bunch of other file formats. The site has integrated with popular document sharing hub Scribd to make the process as painless as possible - it only takes around 20 seconds to send a document, and you don’t have to sign up to get started. To use the service, you enter your Twitter user name and password, choose the document or photo you’d like to send out, and add any text you’d like to include alongside the document’s link. Hit upload and you’re done.

It’s a handy tool, but I doubt it will reach the same level of popularity as TwitPic and its ilk - most people simply don’t have as many documents that they’d like to share with all of their Twitter followers. Still, it will definitely be helpful for sharing reports you find interesting, or scanned images that wouldn’t be readable if they were shrunk and compressed (which some image services do).

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Zhw0KhugQHI/

Almost immediately following Twitter coming back from a planned downtime this afternoon, co-founder and current chairman Jack Dorsey sent out a tweet letting his followers know that he was, “Getting ready to embark on something new and entirely different. Excited!” Dorsey is getting ready to launch his next startup, he’s confirmed to us. As the guy who actually invented Twitter, this is notable.

Though Dorsey declined to comment on what his new startup is right now, we hear from a source knowledgeable about the new company that it’s code-named Squirrel. Here’s what else we know so far: It’s a service that allows anyone with an iPhone to become a merchant. Just like the wireless credit card swipers you see at certain shops and restaurants, you can carry around your iPhone and take payments. Apparently, the idea is that this will allow any individual to take credit card payments on a mobile device, kind of like what PayPal does for the web.

Squirrel is both a physical device add-on to the iPhone as well as an iPhone app. Ingeniously, the device derives enough power from the physical swiping of the credit card to then read the card, so it requires no external power from the iPhone or anywhere else. The physical device apparently looks something like an acorn, thus the code name Squirrel.

But Dorsey is not leaving Twitter. He told me just now, “I’ll never leave Twitter, it’s my life’s work and baby and I’ll always be a major part of the endeavor, strategically and operationally.  But, I do have some other ideas I’m pursuing and yes, we’re going to launch soon.”

Twitter was Dorsey’s idea when he was an engineer at the company Odeo, a podcasting company which current Twitter CEO Evan Williams ran at the time. Odeo ran Twitter as a side project for a while, before realizing that it had more potential than Odeo itself did. Twitter became the company, and Dorsey became the CEO. But there was always some question as to whether or not that role was a good fit for Dorsey, and so a few months ago, Williams and he swapped roles, with Dorsey taking the role of Chairman.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/jhqW43N03ws/

Earlier today, I wrote a post wondering whether music-search engine Seeqpod had finally sold itself to Microsoft because of a suggestive link on its homepage linking to Microsoft Search. Some other bloggers noticed also. Since then, I’ve been able to confirm that no acquisition has closed and that talks continue. Seeqpod is indeed speaking with Microsoft, but not about an outright acquisition. Rather, it is trying to negotiate a piecemeal sale of its technology assets and find new jobs for its core technology team.

And while Microsoft seems to be interested in the largest chunk of Seeqpod’s assets, the company is speaking with other large search companies in hopes of finding a home for the other pieces. These assets include its targeted crawling system for finding playable media on the Web, its search index of 14 million playable search results and 500 million associated text pages, its recommendation and discovery system, five related patents, and the teams associated with each of these technologies. The fact that Seeqpod is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy makes this sort of fire sale easier to pull off. As far as the pending lawsuit with the music industry which forced it to seek protection under bankruptcy in the first place, there is no plan to settle at this point in time and “become an ATM machine” for the dying music industry, says my source.

So why would Microsoft want to touch Seeqpod, even with a ten-foot pole? It’s underlying search technology can be applied to many other areas besides music search. Seeqpod actually got its start at Lawrence Livermore Lab and genomic search (matching genomic sequences to diseases, symptoms, and even foods), so there are health search applications. But more broadly Seeqpod’s technology is around “playable search.” It can bring back playable media results (audio and video, primarily) for practically any search term. That is the kind of technology and team that could help Microsoft’s general search engine.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/cob3LwPyPoc/

We all know about Twitter’s downtime today. It was a scheduled maintenance service that was supposed to last for about an hour. Sure enough, after about an hour, Twitter came back — but only partially. Over the past hour since it’s been back, it’s been up and down, but mostly down. And now there’s another problem, FriendFeed is down too.

FriendFeed, aka, the first alternative to talk about Twitter when Twitter is down, has completely lost contact with its data center, co-founder Bret Taylor tells me. They’re investigating the problem right now. But where are we supposed to turn? Facebook? LinkedIn? Orkut? Scoble must being going crazy right now.

It was probably only a matter of time before Twitter, which has a long history of downtime, was down on the same day as another site that houses people’s social graphs. When one of these sites going down, people can usually deal with it. But two? I think I hear people screaming outside of my window. If Gmail goes down right now, I’m packing up some bottled water and heading for the hills. (With my iPhone just in case they all come back up in time.)

Update: FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit lets everyone know (appropriately on Twitter), “The entire svcolo datacenter lost power. They expect to have it restored in 10min, but it will take at bit to bring up all systems.”

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Source: TechCrunch
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In celebration of Mother’s Day, Facebook now lets you list and connect to your family members in the “Basic Information” part of your profile. Starting later today and through this weekend, you will see a new “Family Members” section within the Information tab on your profile. You can enter your parents, children, sisters and brothers and can list family members even if they aren’t Facebook users. If you include their birthdays, Facebook will show their ages too.

This is a good idea in theory and I think many users would have no problem listing and connecting siblings on their profiles. But I feel that a lot of people may not use this feature because they don’t want to list their parents on their profiles. I can see parents wanting to list their children but I’m not so sure that the feeling would be mutual, especially amongst younger users who may not want their parents to be connected to their lives via Facebook.

Facebook also said it is considering an extended family section for the future.

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Source: TechCrunch
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It’s sort of funny when Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg takes her frustration out on a club bouncer by saying (it has now been removed) it would be “a huge bummer if their facebook pages “accidentally” went down.” But it’s also terrible messaging for the fast growing company. Randi is founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, an executive of the company and also their unofficial spokesperson. Her statements carry weight, can be intimidating and considered an abuse of power.

It’s also a recurring theme with Zuckerberg, who was in the news a couple of weeks ago for facilitating a minor but annoying violation of the Facebook terms of service to help out a friend.

I’m not trying to paint this picture as something that it isn’t. Randi was clearly joking around and venting frustration. But it illustrates an underlying way of thinking that needs to be nipped in the bud. Facebook has long referred to user data as “our data,” ignoring the fact that in reality it’s the users’ data, not theirs to do with as they please. Likewise, Facebook is a community of people. This community will accept a benign dictatorship. Even a police state, perhaps, if the benefits are clear. But too many vendettas and shows of favoritism and that community could turn.

I don’t believe that Randi would actually take action at Facebook to get back at this bouncer. But the message this sends is terrible, and it shows that she may not fully understand the weight of her words. It’s time for Facebook’s executive team to step things up a notch and realize that as fun as Facebook is, this isn’t a game.

We’ve reached out to both Randi and Facebook for comment.

Update: Facebook’s official statement is “This comment was clearly intended as a light-hearted joke. It goes without saying that there is no intended consequence beyond voicing a personal opinion.” The twitter message has been removed.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/YsTBaBx2vBg/

April proved to be a dismal month for technology sector jobs and overall employment, but there may be a light at the end of the tunnel. This morning brought sobering news of the U.S. unemployment rate hitting its highest mark, 8.9%, since 1983. In the past month, the total number of U.S. jobs lost since December 2007 rose from 5 million in March to 5.7 million in April. But while the economy continued to suffer from recessionary conditions over the past month, the pace of layoffs in the tech sector may be decelerating.

According to the TechCrunch Layoff Tracker, tech layoffs reached 330,000 in April, due to layoffs announced by Microsoft (3,000), Yahoo (675), Sony Ericsson (2,000), Toshiba (3,900), and Nokia (450) over the past month. Media companies were also hit with layoffs this month with NPR, The Tribune Company, and Conde Nast Digital all forced to implement job cuts. However, according to pace of the numbers, job losses may be slowing down. It only took three weeks for tech layoffs to hit 300,000 (increasing by 100,000 jobs) in February and five weeks for layoffs to hit the 200,000 mark in January. Its taken 11 weeks for layoffs to rise by 30,000, with the layoff tracker hitting 330,515 layoffs today.

We reported last month of effects of the recession on tech jobs site, Dice.com, and it appears that available tech job listings have dropped even further in April. Dice.com is reporting a 47% year over year drop in available technology jobs for April, increasing from a 45% year over year drop in March. April’s drop, as reported by Thomas Weisel Partners, is the highest annual drop Dice has seen so far this year, with February’s listings down 40.4% and January’s jobs down 39.3% (all year over year). Once again, Dice said that of the ten reported metropolitan areas, Silicon Valley was hit worst, with available tech jobs in the Valley down 54.2% year over year. Chicago (down 54.2%) and Boston (down 52.6%) also posted large declines.

Our own smaller job site, CrunchBoard, has saw a sharp decline in available tech jobs in the past month. A little over year ago 100 - 120 job listings were added to CrunchBoard each month. The number of new listings gradually declined with the onset of the recession and then fell significantly in November 2008, dropping from 68 to 37 listings from the month before. The listings rose slightly over the next few months, with February’s listings hovering around 60. In April, the listings dropped to a low of 35 job postings.

But the Conference Board’s Online Help-wanted Index may show signs of an uptick in the economy, reporting that monthly job demand dropped 131,000 in April, down 28% year over year, compared to the 31% year over year decline in March. And Challenger, Gray & Christmas released a report yesterday that indicated that planned layoff announcements eased in April to 133,000, from 150,000 in March.

Strangely, it looks like the fishing, farming and hunting industry has been able to weather the storm better than any other area. According to analyst Christa Quarles from Thomas Weisel, the agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting industry was the only industry that showed an increase in job vacancies in April.

We’ve consistently claimed the resilience of the tech industry, especially given the industry’s past experience with economic downturns. Hopefully, the ease in layoffs is sign that the tech industry is slowly but surely rebounding in the wake of the economic crisis.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/OjfMc82Wrps/

Twitter just went down. Don’t worry, it was planned. It should only be offline for about an hour today but there’s another downtime planned for Monday as well. I’m sitting here not quite sure what do with myself, as I’m sure many of you are. So I’ll go ahead a prepare a list of alternative activities for today and Monday, in order of importance/likelihood:

1. Talk about Twitter being down on FriendFeed
2. Talk about Twitter being down on Facebook
3. Talk about Twitter being down over IM
4. Leave a comment on a blog post about Twitter being down (preferably this one)
5. Talk about Twitter being down via text message
6. Talk about Twitter being down over email
7. Tip TechCrunch that Twitter is down
8. Write your own blog post about Twitter being down (for an example, see this blog post)
9. Talk about Twitter being down on Pownce Plurk
10. Talk about Twitter being down on Identi.ca
11. Talk about Twitter being down internally on Yammer
12. Think about Twitter being down
13. Call an actual friend to talk about Twitter being down
14. Invite an actual friend over to talk about Twitter being down
15. Go outside

And here are some other alternatives inspired by commenters:

1. Compost a tweet using Birdhouse to send out when Twitter comes back [thanks Josiah]
2. Bitch about the Twitter coverage on TechCrunch [thanks Austinite]
3. Question the timing of the planned maintenance [thanks Carl]
4. Accuse TechCrunch of being paid to promote Twitter [thanks what? (and Scoble and Winer)]
5. Find a homeing pigeon [thanks courtney benson]
6. Talk at a conference about Twitter being down [thanks Scoble]
7. Talk to Walt Mossberg and Jimmy Wales about Twitter being down [again, Scoble, who loses a point on the leaderboard for name-dropping]
   

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/2pIP0Kq3uVQ/

Federated Media has been our advertising partner since December 2005. The first checks they sent us allowed TechCrunch to become something more than a guy sitting in a spare bedroom talking about startups to a small audience. Revenue from Federated Media let me hire our first few writers and helped accelerate our growth to the point where we are today.

We’ve had our very vocal dustups with Federated Media over the years, but the fact is that we owe FM a lot, and I’m somewhat sad to announce today that our relationship with them is coming to an end. We’ll no longer be working with them on ad sales. We’ve long sold many of our ads directly, and as of now we’ll be taking control of 100% of TechCrunch network ad inventory.

In some ways this is a rite of passage for our still-young blog network. TechCrunch is starting to grow up. We now have six full-time writers on TechCrunch, and our total writing staff across our network is 20 bloggers strong. The TechCrunch Network now reaches more than 5.5 million unique visitors per month and 15 million page views (TechCrunch proper is more than 3 million uniques and 10 million page views / month.) In short, we’re finally getting big enough to matter directly to advertisers and agencies.

I’m personally excited about our new direction. Heather Harde, our CEO, has deep experience in sales and has acquired advertising technology companies in her previous job at News Corp. She’s got a lot of ideas on where online advertising is going. And as our CrunchCam shows, she can get an ad unit on just about anything.

One of the things we’re going to pilot with our expanded go-to-market sales strategy is a self-serve platform hosted by isocket. As the largest independent media property covering technology, TechCrunch is in the fortunate position to have a lot of advertising prospects reach out to us with interest in running on our network. Offering a self-serve platform will enable us to sell smaller units of TechCrunch inventory to be more timely and affordable to marketers. For example, we used to sell month-long sponsorships exclusively, and now have weekly, and in some cases, daily buyout opportunities. Inventory on all TechCrunch properties is available, including CrunchGear, MobileCrunch, TechCrunchIT, CrunchBase, TechCrunchEurope, TechCrunchFrance and TechCrunchJapan.

The isocket service is brand new. One of the things that makes working at TechCrunch so much fun is discovering new start-ups and getting to test them out first. TechCrunch is the first pilot client for isocket, a new, yet-to-be-funded startup by John Ramey and Zak Hassanein. The isocket self-serve ad platform sits on top of OpenAds, our ad-serving partner, and will help us offer more transparent and flexible pricing options to advertisers. We’re launching with a modest set of variables, all time-based buyout by the day, week or month. In the coming weeks, we’ll add the ability to purchase CPM-based advertising. We’ll also be launching new targeting channels. For example, marketers who want to reach a mobile audience, can focus a package that includes MobileCrunch, as well as the relevant pages of CrunchGear and TechCrunch and on matching company profiles on CrunchBase.

One of the practices that we will discontinue, at least for the short time, is running ad inventory from multiple third-party networks. Since we haven’t been selling all our own inventory, we need time to get a clean read of the demand for premium advertising on our network. Google AdSense will provide backfill for remnant impressions for the immediate future.

We’d like to acknowledge Federated Media for the contributing role they’ve played to help TechCrunch get to where it is today. Notwithstanding our differences of opinion about the role of conversational marketing, we part friends. Unlike others, we’re not leaving to move to competitive selling networks, we’re just leaving to chart our own course. John, Neil and Chas have contributed to the TechCrunch business in important ways over the last three years. Federated’s commitment to represent aspiring authors is still an important role in the publishing ecosystem.

As part of our kick-off, we’re offering a 20% discount on all advertising purchased through isocket during the month of May (discounted inventory based on availability through 12/31/09.) Our traditional rates resume June 1, so please use this opportunity to test us out and save.

Of course, we welcome advertisers to contact us directly to purchase advertising on either a sponsorship or CPM basis. Please email heather [at] techcrunch [dot] com or visit techcrunch.com/advertise.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/2lQex0xReA4/

DocuSign, an e-signature service, closed $5 million in Series D funding from Frazier Technology Ventures, Ignition Partners, Sigma Partners, and West River Capital LLC. The funding follows a Series C investment of $12.4 million in 2007 from the same investors.

DocuSign, which was founded in 2003, allows companies to get legally binding signatures quickly over the internet instead of over the fax or mail. DocuSign certifies digital signatures over the web, acting as a intermediary who holds the documents and verifies the identity of the signature. The digital signature business was really opened up during the turn of the century with that passing of the UETA and ESIGN acts, which clarified the legal grounds for electronic signatures nationwide. To date, more than 25 million signature events have been executed using DocuSign. Competitors include EchoSign, and VeriSign.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/ym0l_hFzBGQ/