Chatroulette, the service that lets strangers meet over video, has been taken down. A message reads “The experiment #1 is over for now. Thanks for participating – Redesigned and updated version of the website will be launched tomorrow.”
The title of this post kind of says it all. As pointed out by blockzuck.com, you can block anyone on Facebook except CEO Mark Zuckerberg. If you try to do it (we did), you’ll get a message saying “General Block failed error: Block failed.”
This kind of thing is funny, and adds a little personality to the site. But Facebook is getting way too big and culturally important for things like this to continue. In 2005 it was cool for Zuckerberg to have a business card that said “I’m CEO…Bitch.” And we can forgive early Facebook engineers from perusing confidential user data in their leisure time. But it’s time for this company to go through puberty and start acting more like a teenager than a fifth grader. If you want to block Zuckerberg, you should be able to block Zuckerberg.
If you were just about to rock and roll with some leaked FroYo on your Motorola DROID X, you’re going to have to search a little harder. We’ve updated our units, but Motorola just shut down the fun by sending MyDroidWorld, the site that leaked and hosted the update, a nice warm cease and desist email. No reasoning behind the move — whether our phones are going to instantly crumble into pieces or just because there are unfinished components in the leaked ROM — but we’re not too far away from a official release at this point anyway. Did you guys get your update on before the takedown?
Flash sales sites like Gilt Groupe have proven to not only be a popular e-commerce experience, but also a profitable business model. In fact, Gilt is on track to hit $450 million in revenue this year, with rumors of an IPO swirling. But while Gilt pioneered clothing and accessory-focused flash sales, One Kings Lane entered the space last year as one of the first sites to go after the home goods market.
Launched in April of 2009, One Kings Lane runs brand- and theme-specific sales, at least two to three per day, five days a week. During the 72-hour window that items are on sale, members have can move to purchase limited quantity of hand-selected home goods products at significantly reduced prices. Luxury items range from Ralph Lauren home accessories, to Missoni towels to Frette sheets.
Founded by Alison Gelb Pincus (the wife of Zynga’s founder Mark Pincus) and Susan Feldman, One Kings Lane raised an undisclosed amount of funding from led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, First Round Capital and angel investor Reid Hoffman last December.
However, as other flash sales site, such as Gilt and Ideeli; have entered the luxury home goods vertical, One Kings Lane is now facing a considerable amount of competition to the space. But Pincus doesn’t seem to be to worried about the added players in the arena and tells me that she welcomes the challenge of competing with Gilt in the home goods space.
Pincus and Feldman just brought on a new CEO Doug Mack, a seasoned e-commerce exec. Mack co-founded Scene7, a rich media platform provider for the e-commerce industry, which was eventually sold to Adobe. The site has also added Tastemaker Tag Sales, which allows renown interior designers to create curated sales of items that reflect their style. Mack tells me that these sales are meant to give users fresh content and design inspiration from professionals. And for designers, Tastemaker Tag sales are an opportunity to draw attention to their brand and style.
And One Kings Lane is seeing significant growth. Q3 sales are up 561 percent year over year and the site is seeing high loyalty from consumers, with more than 50% of customers as repeat purchasers. One Kings Lane is now getting into other verticals and will be launching food category in the near future.
It should be interesting to see how One Kings Lane continues to compete with challengers like Gilt. One way the startup could drive traffic is via partnerships with retail stores. Gilt just launched a sale with Target to feature the store’s designer-created home goods and fashions. While One Kings Lane would want to retain its focus on the luxury home goods market, a deal with stores like Restoration Hardware or Design Within Reach could be a good fit.
Regardless, the flash sales model for e-commerce is here to stay and One Kings Lane is proving that vertical-focused sites can grow in the crowded space.
Wikileaks caused a huge stir when it posted thousands of classified American documents from the Afghan war, despite warnings that it could endanger American lives. So it’s intersting that the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, was hit with a rape and molestation charge by Swedish prosecutors as he was seeking legal protection for his web site in Sweden.
A prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange on late Friday. Then, a day later, a higher-ranking prosecutor rescinded the warrant, saying there was no grounds to suspect Assange of rape. The prosecutor who took over the case yesterday had more information and that was why the earlier prosecutor was over-ruled, according to a spokeswoman for the Swedish Prosecution Authority.
This may be a simple case of an alleged crime in Sweden. But it reeks of politics. Wikileaks is preparing to release a new set of documents from the Afghan war. Assange called the allegations “without basis” in a Twitter post and questioned the motive behind the original allegation. He remains under suspicion for a lesser charge of molestation.
“I don’t know who’s behind this but we have been warned that for example the Pentagon plans to use dirty tricks to spoil things for us,” he told a Swedish publication. “I have also been warned about sex traps.” In the age of digital evidence, and the ability to manipulate it, it wouldn’t be that hard to pull off such dirty tricks against enemies. Assange built his reputation for complete honesty in publishing classified documents on the web. Could he be brought down by the web as well?
Google is developing a new kind of search capability that delivers the results instantly as you type the letters.
The new experiment was discovered by search engine optimization (SEO) consultant Rob Ousbey, who noticed the results being delivered instantly and then recorded a video to show it. Google confirmed to TechCrunch that the video is real. It will be interesting to see if the new capability is launched as a standard part of Google’s search engine. It could save us all time as we type familiar searches where we know that the instantly-delivered search result is most likely the one we want to click upon.
You’ll notice in the video that the search results change as more letters are added and the terms of the search become different. But it may not be for everyone, as limited CPU power or bandwidth is likely to slow live updates down for searches such as this kind.
Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman, told Techcrunch, “At any given time we are running between 50-200 search experiments. You can learn more on our blog.”
Ever wish you could strike up a conversation with that cute redhead on the commuter train? Well, a startup called Bumped.in may finally give you the courage.
The service is a social network for daily commuters and travelers that shares similar features to the other social networks for travelers, like Dopplr, WorldMate and TripIt. It is especially similar to a service called SubMate, which is a social network for people taking the subway in various cities around the world. But Bumped.in specifically targets people who take the same ride often, ie. on a daily or a weekly basis.
When users sign up for Bumped.in and upload their profile (or hook up their Facebook profile, as the service uses Facebook Connect,) they can find other people who share similar interests on their journey, or at the destination.
Kiran Patel, CEO of Bumped.in, says the service was born out of personal experience. He commutes daily to New York City’s Penn Station from New Jersey and sees the same people on the train every day. “These people are familiar strangers to me, and I’m always eager to know more about them and interact with them. And I’ve seen many times two people sitting next to one another, reading a book by the same author, sharing the same interest but not talking to each other because they lack a medium which would allow them to connect,” Patel explained. Right now the service is intended for people taking train rides and flights, the idea being that there’s plenty of time to kill.
It seems the obvious thing would be to put down the book and actually talk to a person instead of fiddling with a phone or a laptop, but the service has many more use cases than just hooking up on the Caltrain, according to Patel. The service could be used to find people to assist passengers who are not used to traveling or don’t speak the language of their destination, or to help business travelers connect while on their way to a conference. In addition, the service provides a means for users to share media like photos while they’re traveling, get information on their travel destination, browse hotels and so on.
Patel has bootstrapped his one-man startup to date. He founded the company in New Jersey in December of 2009 and is now launching the service as a web application. An iPhone app is in the works, he says. Patel plans to make money through advertising, tie-ins with brands and sponsorships from the travel industry, such as airlines.
This week’s episode of Speaking Of… is the CEO and founder of deviantART.
One of the greatest things about TechCrunch is that they celebrate and reward each writer’s own voice rather than forcing every writer to sing from the same hymn-sheet. They encourage differences of opinion. While deviantART isn’t Erick Schonfeld’s cup of tea, I’m definitely a huge fan. I have five pictures up on my wall that I’ve purchased from the site, and they’re absolutely beautiful.
Deviant recently passed the milestone of their 100 millionth submission or “Deviation” as they’re called. I think that’s pretty cool, but what I think is even cooler, is that they just celebrated their 10th year of being in business. I don’t know how old Angelo is, but I imagine that’s about 1/3rd of his life. For a startup entrepreneur, that’s a very long time.
DeviantArt was bootstrapped with 15k in cash, was profitable immediately and the company ran without any additional investment for 7 years. That too is pretty damn cool. Today on Alexa it has a US traffic rank of 104, making it one of the country’s highest trafficked sites. And yet what’s interesting is that people think of them as being small. Maybe that’s the charm and what’s so special about their site for artists – it doesn’t feel large.
During my interview with Sotira, we traveled back to the site’s roots. DevaintART was originally formed during an era where there was no such thing as a social network. Their artist profile pages, ability to add friendships and commenting system was new and filled an amazing market need for people to connect, share and sell their works. Sotira’s inspiration came from the early days of creating a site for Winamp skins. Their artists made other forms of art such as paintings and were looking for a digital home. Ten years later, you have one of the largest and most vibrant community-driven art sites online.
What advice does Sotira have for new entrepreneurs? For one thing, don’t be weak. He feels that the new crop of entrepreneurs has it a lot easier than he did and needs to do more with very little. He also feels that his generation built platforms while the new generation will be all about marketing, creating the most powerful generation of marketers the world has ever seen.
The title of the episode is Speaking Of… Flying, because of Angelo’s love for flying RC helicopters and the fact that our interview takes place in a cockpit of a plane. How cool is that?
What I like about Skype is that you can use it for chat, or audio, or video. It’s an extremely versatile tool and most people in the startup world use it as their primary instant messenger application. It’s nowhere near as popular as Windows Live Messenger with 303 million worldwide monthly users, or Yahoo with 79 million. But it’s in a solid fourth place with 18 million users per month, according to Comscore (just the IM feature). The real number is probably far higher than that.
A lot of people know I like to use Skype for communicating, and I get a lot of inbound messages. And I’m starting to go a little crazy from the way people are using it. So it’s time for a friendly primer on appropriate Skype etiquette. Most of these helpful hints will also be useful for people using different IM applications.
It’s not a conversation until both sides are engaged. Just because I haven’t blocked you on Skype doesn’t mean that you have an open door into my brain. The best way to start a Skype conversation is to message something like “are you free?” If I respond then we’re all set. If not, don’t take it personally. And don’t start firing off whatever you want to say anyway. Too many of my Skype interactions look like this:
You: Hey Mike
You: Mike!
You: Are you
You: there?
You: Ok well I really want to talk to you about
You: [long message follows]
You: Hey! r u there?
You: hellooooooooo
You: yo!
You: Whatever. Thanks for ignoring me. Jerk.
Me (an hour later): Um, ok.
Instand messaging is both synchronous and asynchronous. Sometimes a conversation is both. I don’t take offense if someone bails out of a conversation on IM without warning only to reengage an hour or a day later. Neither should you.
Just start a conversation politely, and wait for the other person to say something before jumping in. If they don’t respond, say something like “Looks like you’re not online, I’ll send an email.” And then send an email.
Don’t abuse the Enter button. I know – your message is extremely time sensitive. So instead of typing full sentences you just
hit return in the middle of a sent
ence. Or a word.
That way the reader can know what you’re saying in the beginning of a sentence before you’re even done typing the end!
The default Skype settings are lots of notification messages all the time. Every time you hit enter it beeps my computer. That’s really annoying. Get whole sentences, paragraphs even, down in the box before you hit enter. People will appreciate it.
This is the number one thing that drives me crazy on Skype, as shown in the video above. Full screen it to watch the fun.
Don’t just jump right into a phone call. It’s polite to send a chat message first saying “online? time for a quick Skype call?” It’s annoying when the Skype phone starts ringing randomly. Sometimes in a rush to hit don’t accept I accidentally accept and then there’s some person talking full volume at me, most likely with their video going and demanding that I turn on video too. And all I wanted was a little bit of quiet.
Video calls are not a God given right. Just because you want to do video right now doesn’t mean I want to. I may be in my underwear, for example, which is when I do my best blogging. Feel free to hit video if you want. And if I want to I’ll hit video. If I don’t, why bring it up?
If you do turn on video, note that you have just become part of my informal psychology test. The default is for you to see yourself in the bottom left of the Skype app. Most people constantly check themselves and then change position slightly or whatever. I won’t mention it, but I do find it funny to see what percentage of the call you spend looking at yourself.
Don’t assume confidentiality. The worst thing I ever did was Skype message someone, in a rush, to confirm a story. And it turns out that poor person was using his laptop to give a presentation to a group of co-workers. And my skype message popped up on the screen for everyone to see. Bad stuff followed. Since then I always start off with something benign and wait for them to engage before jumping into anything sensitive. Other people are often looking at my computer screen, too. So be careful with throwing confidential information around until you know who’s reading it.
For more tips on human communication with touchy bloggers, read my post Greetings! And interesting side note, my favorite secret Skype emoticon is (mooning).
The company has applied for a patent that covers a variety of security measures to automatically protect iPhone users from thieves and other unauthorized users. But one of the uses of the patent would be to protect Apple’s interests, which may be in conflict with those of users.
The patent appears to cover technologies that would detect and circumvent “jailbreaking,” which refers to running software that lets a user gain access to wider capabilities than Apple allows. With jailbroken phones, users can unlock their phones so they can use carriers that are not authorized by Apple. Jailbreaking is often the only resort for users who want to use iPhones in countries where Apple doesn’t have an authorized carrier. Jailbreaking was recently deemed permissible in the U.S. as a fair use right for users.
The application was published Thursday. Apple filed it in February. It describes the identification of “hacking, jailbreaking, unlocking or removal of a SIM card” so that measures can be taken to counter the user. Responses to such actions could be to activate the iPhone’s camera, geotag the image, and then uploading it to a server. Or it could transmit sensitive data to a server and then wipe it from the device. This is effectively a kill switch, but Apple describes it as a way to protect users from unauthorized users.
The patent application suggests that Apple could detect unauthorized users by voice-printing the owner and activating an accelerometer to see if a phone thief is in transit. Essentially, the system allows Apple to wipe out the memory of a phone from afar if it deems a user is under attack. But the system may not be able to distinguish thefts from cases when a user is simply trying to escape from Apple’s rules about jailbreaking.
The title of this post kind of says it all. As pointed out by 
Flash sales sites like 
This week’s episode of Speaking Of… is the CEO and founder of 
The default Skype settings are lots of notification messages all the time. Every time you hit enter it beeps my computer. That’s really annoying. Get whole sentences, paragraphs even, down in the box before you hit enter. People will appreciate it.