Ajax Girl

Woah, this is weird. Twitter has apparently starting promoting Firefox 3.5, which was released last week, to some of its users. Judging by Twitter Search, the banner began popping up around eight hours ago, and given how few people have tweeted about them it seems like they’re not being very widely distributed.

The amusing thing about the banner is that Twitter’s site may not be properly detecting which browser their visitors are currently using — Chris Saad, who tipped us off to the annoucement, says he was using Firefox 3.5 already. That said, most of the other tweets about the banner do appear to be showing up to users who aren’t using the latest version of the browser.

At this point it isn’t clear if this is a sponsored ad or more of a public service announcement. If it’s the former, it would be a significant departure from the more subtle advertising Twitter has been toying with over the last few months, which has primarily consisted of small text blurbs in the right sidebar of the site. Twitter only recently began charging for some of these ads (or at least presenting them as sponsored links), and most of them are still free promotions for apps and services in the Twitter ecosystem.

Even if this is a public service announcement, you can be sure that Twitter is closely monitoring the banner’s performance in anticipation of placing full fledged paid advertising there. They really wouldn’t be any more intrusive than the vast majority of banner ads on the web, but after years of going without any advertising at all, they’re going to take some getting used to.

Update: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has gotten back to us with details on the company’s motivation for placing the banner:

We’ve optimized Twitter.com for older browsers but we thought it would be worthwhile to let folks know that they could have a better Web experience on Twitter and in general if they upgrade to a newer version of whatever browser it is that they are using.

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Source: TechCrunch
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We at CrunchGear have been sitting things today out as our brothers at TC pant over ChromeOS, the latest OS based on Linux to impress, however lightly, upon the synapses of our country’s journalistic elite. ChromeOS can’t beat anything. In fact suggesting that ChromeOS will beat Windows or even OS X is like expecting Coby to come up behind Sony and Samsung next year in Blu-Ray player popularity. It just can’t happen. As a wise man once said “Ain’t the same ** ballpark. It ain’t the same league, it ain’t even the same ** sport.”

ChromeOS is a specialized version of Linux designed for netbooks. It is more like Android than anything else and, as Fake Steve notes, no one will use it. Oh, manufacturers will pay lip service to it and maybe someone will install it on a few million machines but it will be a drop in the bucket compared to the powerful web OSes called Windows 7 and OS X.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/4cBdzkN1owQ/

Last summer, I wrote a lengthy rant against business cards, calling them “virtually useless as one of the last bits of information that we pass non-digitally”. Ten months later, I couldn’t agree with myself more. Just like the handshake, the business card is an annoying relic of the past. Each card I get joins a ridiculously large pile on my dresser that has become effectively useless (the only exception are the cards made out of beef jerky). Sure, I could get a business card scanner and digitize them, but the point is that I shouldn’t have to.

Bump Technologies is a mobile application developer that’s looking to offer a solution, allowing users to transfer their contact information simply by tapping their phones together. And things are looking bright for the small startup — the company has just raised a seed funding round from Y Combinator, and is quickly building up a sizable user base.

Bump currently offers an application on the iPhone, with plans to release apps for Android and other mobile smart phones in the near future. Using the app is fairly straightforward: you launch Bump (as does the person who you’d like to swap information with) and tap your phones together. Once their accelerometers are activated, the phones both relay their current location data to the cloud, and Bump’s servers determine when there’s a match. Finally, a photo of the contact you’re pairing with shows up on your screen, and you confirm that you’d like to exchange data. It may sound a bit complicated, but it only takes a few seconds. Bump isn’t the first application to do this (Tapulous’s Friend Book has been doing this since soon after the App Store’s launch), but it’s a good idea nonetheless.

At this point there are some obvious flaws — if you don’t have a cellular connection, it won’t work, though Bump plans to fix this is an upcoming version by also allowing users to transfer data using the iPhone’s Peer-to-Peer Bluetooth functionality. And for the time being you can only share data with users that have an iPhone and have the Bump app installed, which leads to a classic chicken-and-the-egg problem.

That said, Bump is off to a good start. The app currently has 940k users, and 140k of them have already upgraded to the new update in the two days since its release, which means a significant number of them are very active. The latest version adds the ability to transfer photos along with contact info, and Bump will eventually allow you to transfer any kind of data — eventually, it will even allow you to transfer money, which could be huge.

I’m glad Bump, as well a few other companies like Nameo and Me2, are seriously trying to solve this problem. But frankly it’s ridiculous that phone manufacturers can’t agree on a wireless standard for quick data transfer that just works, without any extra applications or an annoying pairing process (seriously, Palm worked this technology out ten years ago). It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon though, so Bump may well have a bright future ahead of it.

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Source: TechCrunch
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Update on the tech gurus at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. We were tracking four players: Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya, Mahalo CEO Jason Calcanis, Geni/Yammer CEO David Sacks and former Yahoo exec David Goldberg. At least two are now out of the game.

Jason Calacanis and Chamath Palihapitiya busted out on day 2 (apparently Calacanis’ ridiculous gangster costumer only took him so far). David Sacks is going strong into the third day with $116,000 in chips. We have no information at all on Goldberg (please let us know).

Sacks, who won $25k in prize money last year, will need to stay in the game another day or two to match that previous performance. The total pot being split by the top 10% or so of players is likely around $50 million.

Sacks let us know today that he would not be speaking at our sold out Real-Time Stream CrunchUp on Friday because, well, he’ll be playing poker. He requested that co-founder Adam Pisoni take his place on stage.

We’re going to let our readers decide whether Yammer gets to send in a substitute in the poll below.

Yammer, In Or Out of the CrunchUp?(trends)

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Cc:Betty, a free service that helps organize group email threads, is the latest startup to catch the Twitter bug. The email collaboration service is integrating with Twitter, so that users of the service can tweet in and out of a of the collaboration platform, as well as see each other’s latest tweets.

Cc:Betty routes, parses, and organizes email conversations in a simple at-a-glance dashboard so you never have to scour your inbox to find the bits and pieces of a long thread. If you cc “betty@ccbetty.com” on any email, “she” will create a mailspace, which is a webpage, for your entire email thread and will divide important things such as dates, times, people, places, and files and will format them all in one place. It basically maps out your communications for you in an easy-to-see format.

CEO Michael Cerda says that Twitter integration was another way to help users organize all of their communications, including Tweets. Cc:Betty also recently upgraded its service with several useful features, including the ability to see maps, images and documents as large thumbnails in email threads, and a list of people in an email conversation. You can also filter content of the thread by participant. Cc:Betty has raised $1.5 million in seed funding, which was announced in June.

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Source: TechCrunch
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Image licensing network GumGum has raised $2.6 million in and extended Series A funding round led by GRP Venture Partners with First Round Capital participating. This brings GumGum’s total funding to close to $4 million.

GumGum has been seeing fast growth since its launch last year. Measured as an advertising network (but for images), GumGum became a Quantcast Top 100 site, reaching 13.7 million people in the U.S. and 23.5 million worldwide in February. Currently, GumGum reaches 29.8 million people in the U.S. and 50 million people worldwide, according to Quantcast’s lastest stats. More than 2,000 Web publishers license images through GumGum, which allows them to pay based on how many people see the image or use them for free with embedded advertising.

GumGum current clients include B5Media, gossip site DailyFill, Glam Media, MTV, TMZ, New York Post and Gawker. Sites contract directly with photo agencies, and GumGum keeps track of who is using what images and how many times they are viewed. That is what those Quantcast numbers are counting, thus GumGum acts like an ad network for images. GumGum’s founder Ophir Tanz says the new round of funding will be used to develop additional solutions around image licensing as well as drive new revenue opportunities to publishing partners.

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Source: TechCrunch
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I distinctly remember reading this Business 2.0 Magazine piece published back in May 2007 about Kevin Ham, ‘the most powerful dotcom mogul you’ve never heard of’. If you’re interested in the domain name business (lovingly called the nasty cybersquatter rat nest by some), I suggest you read it in full.

Here’s an interesting passage just in case you’re a little time-stressed:

And what few people know is that he’s also the man behind the domain world’s latest scheme: profiting from traffic generated by the millions of people who mistakenly type “.cm” instead of “.com” at the end of a domain name. Try it with almost any name you can think of — Beer.cm, Newyorktimes.cm, even Anyname.cm — and you’ll land on a page called Agoga.com, a site filled with ads served up by Yahoo.

Ham makes money every time someone clicks on an ad — as does his partner in this venture, the West African country of Cameroon. Why Cameroon? It has the unforeseen good fortune of owning .cm as its country code — just as Germany runs all names that end with .de. The difference is that hardly any .cm names are registered, and the letters are just one keyboard slip away from .com, the mother lode of all domains. Ham landed connections to the Cameroon government and flew in his people to reroute the traffic.

Notably, this was after Cameroon set up its own scheme to make money off typo traffic: in August 2006, word got out that the operators of the domain name extension (state-owned Camnet) had wild-carded its ccTLD and was monetizing all the incoming traffic using ad-filled pages. Every single time someone accidentally typed in “.cm” instead of “.com”, Camnet was collecting.

That was then, and this is now: millions of people are, of course, still mistakenly typing “.cm” instead of “.com” at the end of a domain name, and they’ll probably keep doing that for a very long time, too. But beer.cm, newyorktimes.cm and anyname.cm don’t resolve any more, although you’ll notice google.cm, microsoft.cm, ebay.cm and amazon.cm don’t exactly lead you to where you’d assume they would.

And today someone pointed me to a page on eNomCentral stating that eNom and its partner, domain name aftermarket auction company NameJet, have exclusively started accepting pre-orders for .cm domains. From what I can gather, you can pre-order .cm domain names starting next week (July 15) until the end of the month (July 31st), free of charge. After this so-called land-rush period, the first auctions will start on Tuesday, August 4th and continue on a schedule that will be communicated via email with the participants in those auctions. Each auction will be 3 days in length.

They’re not even trying to hide the fact that you’ll likely register them for the type-in traffic:

The .CM registry has previously only allowed registrations under .CO.CM, .COM.CM and .NET.CM, meaning this is your chance to register a second level .CM domain name. Although best known for being just one letter and keystroke away from a few of the most highly recognizable domains, .CM provides many potential benefits.

Note that eNomCentral customers who see their domains successfully awarded through auction will be charged $350 (including a minimum 2 year registration), so even though the actual pre-ordering is free, the registration is not.

On the list of featured and popular .cm pre-orders, you’ll find recognizable (and trademarked) names like YellowPages.cm, Slide.cm, 37Signals.cm and Ask.cm. Very curious to find out what will happen to those after July 31st.

Also wondering what impact the public availability of the .cm domain name (starting August 1) will have, if any. If I’d have to venture a guess, I’d say people who dislike people who are in the ‘domain name real estate business’ will have one more thing to complain about real soon.

What’s your opinion about all of this?

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Source: TechCrunch
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Google is starting to respond to questions about the just announced Chrome operating system. In a short FAQ today they talked about cost and initial partners.

First of all, the software will be free, which was an easy assumption to make since it will be open source. Like Android, Google will not charge users or device manufacturers to use the Chrome OS.

Yesterday Google said they were already working with device manufacturers to roll out Chrome OS devices late next year. Today they announced at least some of those partners: Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments.

Acer and ASUS are the no. 1 and no. 2 netbook manufacturers worldwide. HP and Lenovo are also large netbook manufacturers. Freescale, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments are chip companies that Google is likely working with to ensure a good user experience. What I’d really like to know is if Google is working with these or any other partners to release products off the ARM or Atom processors. A desktop or even dual core laptop running Chrome OS would be a compelling device too.

Google is clearly aiming Chrome at Windows, and focusing less on battery management (Android’s strength) to focus on robust driver support. Users will not be happy unless they can plug any printer, camera, or other peripheral device into these computers and have them work properly.

The other focus is on speed, which is why Google is working so closely with the chip guys. This isn’t going to just be Linux with a browser bolted on. It will be (or should be) a compelling user experience with super fast boot and web surfing times.

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Source: TechCrunch
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Su.pr, StumbleUpon’s URL shortening service, has come out of closed beta. StumbleUpon, which was recently freed from eBay’s clutches, tossed its hat in the URL shortening ring earlier this year. We first heard about Su.pr in March when StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp Tweeted about it. Su.pr, like other shortening tools, lets you shorten a URL and share it across Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon.

The nifty part of Su.pr’s service is that it gives you a dashboard to help you keep track of how many times your su.pr links have been shared, across which services. You can see how many times each link has been clicked on and retweeted (along with the number of followers for each retweeter). It also lets you schedule shared links across those services for any time you want.

Su.pr’s analytics are similar to those that fellow UR shortening service bit.ly provides, except that Su.pr is connected to website discovery service Stumbleupon, which gives each link an extra distribution push. Links can be voted upon by the StumbleUpon community (which the platform estimates as 8 million users), and if it becomes popular the link can become viral. For StumbleUpon, Su.pr is a way to seed the service with links people are already pushing out to their real-time streams.

Of course, the URL shortening arena is almost over saturated with services. There’s the leader of the pack, bit.ly, TinyURL, Digg’s controversial Diggbar (which helped lift unique visitors by 20 percent), Awe.sm, Un.hub, Link.by, Owl.ly, Post.ly and many more. But Su.pr’s analytics could help the service to be a serious competitor in the URL shortening wars.

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Source: TechCrunch
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23andMe isn’t making too many headlines in tech circles any more, but there’s little doubt in my mind that it, or at least companies like it, will become incredibly important over the next decade or so. Affordable genetic testing will likely revolutionize the way we treat health care, and its effects on society will be profound. And well known celebrities like Sergey Brin (who happens to be married to 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki), are already beginning to publicly demonstrate some of the benefits of learning your genetic forecast.

Still, it’s hard to really call 23andMe “affordable” for most people at this point. The price has come down drastically from the $1000 Michael paid when he tried it out in late 2007 (it’s now only $399), but that’s still pretty steep for testing that most people probably have a hard time wrapping their heads around in the first place.

Today 23andMe has annouced that it’s launching a much cheaper $99 version of its product as part of a new Research Revolution, which is meant to help 23andMe initiate research studies on genetic diseases that would otherwise require major logistical hurdles and funding. The effort is part of the company’s 23andWe research arm, which has the goal of building grassroots studies from communities of members who are afflicted by various genetic diseases.

Here’s how it works: 23andMe has picked out ten different diseases that it’s looking to study first (the company plans to study more down the line — this is just a starter set). Users visit the site and “pledge” to one disease. The first disease to reach 1000 votes will be the first one studied by 23andMe researchers, though all ten will eventually be studied. Participants agree to complete a number of surveys, and users who have previously submitted their DNA to the service can opt-in and submit votes as well. Voting will run through September 2009.

Unfortunately, the cheaper price comes with some downsides: you’ll miss out on a lot of the analysis that makes 23andMe really cool, like the ability to see your ancestry data, some of the site’s community features, and the ability to download your raw genetic data (which you could theoretically have analyzed again at some point in the future). What you’re left with are the site’s research reports, a list of risks for 100 diseases, and “traits”, along with some basic sharing and community functionality. You can see a full list of differences here.

Finally, it’s not clear if this is going to work at all. This is a new approach to genetic research, and some science blogs believe that a 1,000 person sample size may not be enough to generate adequate data. Still, provided that 23andMe ensures that all patients are given adequate informed consent and the resulting data is considered valid by the scientific community, this could prove to be an efficient new way to conduct scientific research.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/CD2t40nngH0/