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.
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).
My, how quickly things change. It wasn’t much more than a year ago that Apple and Google were happy partners — at least from the public’s perspective — working in tandem to push technology forward at a clipping pace. Google’s search and various apps complemented the iPhone perfectly, and the existing Android phones merely affirmed how much better the iPhone was than everything else on the market. And then everything went to hell.
Late last July, we broke the news that Apple blocked Google’s official Voice application and removed any third-party applications that supported the service, sparking an FCC inquiry into why Google Voice was banned from the iPhone.
Today marks the one year anniversary of Apple’s response to the FCC, in which it gave a remarkably disingenuous explanation as to why Google Voice wasn’t on the iPhone: Apple was still “pondering” the matter. A year later, it apparently still is.
Google Voice is nowhere to be found on the App Store, and while Google has developed an impressive web version for the iPhone, it can’t provide the same performance or ‘native feel’ of a native app and it can’t access the phone’s local contacts directory (at least, not yet). In light of today’s milestone I reached out to both Apple and Google to see if there’s been any progress. Both declined to comment.
Of course, Google Voice itself was never the key issue at play — the service was only available in a private beta when it was blocked from the iPhone. Indeed, most of the outcry stemmed from the fact that Apple was blatantly using its control over the App Store’s walled garden for anti-competitive reasons. Before the Voice fiasco Apple had drawn plenty of heat over its inconsistent App Store approval policies, but most of these removals could be ascribed to the notion that Apple was censoring apps to help maintain the quality and safety of the App Store. That clearly wasn’t the case here: Apple saw Google’s increasing presence on the iPhone as a threat, so it killed it.
Soon after the Google Voice fiasco, I abandoned my iPhone for Android (TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington quit his iPhone too). My rationale had little to do with wanting to use Google Voice more frequently. Rather, it had a lot to do with the knot I got in the pit of my stomach as I imagined just how important Apple’s stranglehold over the iOS platform will become in the next five years and beyond.
The runaway success of the iPhone and the iPad have made it clear that the App Store and iOS are only going to become more ubiquitous. The new Apple TV will soon feature them. In all likelihood Apple will find ways to integrate iOS into form factors that are more competitive with desktop and laptops. Simply put, iOS will be synonymous with computing for a lot of people.
Tim O’Reilly believes that Apple is trying to build a fundamental challenge to the web. A web controlled by a single company. Apple may have intended to use the App Store’s approval system to protect customers and the user experience, but it has the convenient side effect of enabling it to stifle anything that could compete with its own products on the iOS platform. Remember, we are still very early in this game, and the App Store had existed for just one year before Apple gave Google the boot. Is there any doubt it will do the same the next time someone tries to encroach on its turf?
Most of Apple’s ardent defenders will simply tell people like me to go use another, more open platform if they have a problem with the App Store and Apple’s policies. Fair enough. But the time and uncertainty involved in having to switch to a new computer platform are far from trivial, and eventually we may have kids who are raised on iOS — getting them to switch platforms so they can use an innovative new browser or FaceTime competitor or whatever else Apple is quietly blocking from the App Store will be no easy task. It is this inertia, which is only going to become more difficult to overcome as iOS becomes more successful, that troubles me most. Apple will be able to get away with even more egregious behavior, because its users will want to stick with what they know.
Disclosure: Months after the Google Voice/Apple story broke I had my number ported over to the service (just as Michael did). All users will be getting access to this feature soon.
On Thursday July 8, 2010, residents of Oakland took to the streets after a jury convicted police officer Johannes Mehserle of involuntary manslaughter of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old unarmed black youth. Race-related riots are not new to California. But this time, the first people to learn about violent incidents tied to the protests weren’t riot cops — they were the Oakland residents behind OscarGrantProtests.com, a website that allowed people near the action to map incidents of violence and view reports from others. Established in a few days, OscarGrantProtests employs crisis mapping technology from a group of open-source developers called Ushahidi, who built the software to report violence in the aftermath of the 2008 disputed Kenyan presidential election.
Ushahidi has radically altered the way we respond to disasters by placing reporting power in the hands of people who might otherwise be victims. Virtually every disaster affecting large groups of people presents the same problem: in the absence of real-time data, emergency responders don’t know where to go and when. Technology can solve this problem quickly and cheaply, but governments and relief agencies don’t often use it.
Telecommunications infrastructure is now ubiquitous — even in sub-Saharan Africa, eight out of 10 adults have access to a mobile phone. The four billion cell phones in use around the world create massive amounts of data and demand for crowdsourcing technology to aggregate, categorize, and otherwise make sense of it.
Mission 4636 provides a good example of how we can use data from mobile phones to make relief efforts more effective. In the aftermath of the January earthquake that shook the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, millions of Haitians lacked food, water and shelter. Aid workers flooded the capital, but lacked information about who needed help, and where. Voila and Digicel, Haiti’s two major telecommunications carriers, had their cell towers up and running immediately following the quake, but huge call volumes exceeded their capacity and resulted in service outages. Text messages offered a solution — texts take up less bandwidth than calls, and are much less affected by network delays.
A group of companies, including Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, CrowdFlower and Samasource, collaborated to set up a text message hotline – “Mission 4636” – supported by the U.S. Department of State. The Haitian government collaborated with radio stations to advertise the hotline, and a few days after the disaster, anyone in Port-au-Prince could send an SMS to a toll-free number, 4636, to request help. The messages were routed to relief crews at the U.S. Coast Guard and the International Red Cross on the ground.
In the first month, Haitians sent more than 40,000 texts to 4636. But Mission 4636 ran into a problem: the messages were in Haitian Creole, but the aid workers designated to respond spoke English. Worse still, many of the texts contained location information that only Haitians familiar with the geography of Port-au-Prince could comprehend, such as references to neighborhoods or popular landmarks. Without a translation service that could operate in real-time, Mission 4636 provided little value to victims of the earthquake.
Traditionally, governments solve problems like these by hiring contractors — after major disasters, it’s not uncommon for relief agencies to spend millions of dollars building temporary call centers to handle the flood of new calls. Outsourced translation firms abound, but charge large premiums to deliver translation on a 24/7 basis. In Haiti, crowdsourcing provided an answer: we customized Ushahidi and CrowdFlower’s technology to allow hundreds of thousands of Haitians living outside the country to translate texts from Port-au-Prince in real time, and for free, via a public website. News of the site spread quickly through the Haitian Diaspora living abroad, who heard of our efforts through a grassroots media campaign The results were immediate. In the first day, Mission 4636 got a message from an overcrowded hospital that was running out of fuel. Within minutes the message was translated and desperately needed fuel was deployed.
Mass collaboration accomplished more than Creole-English translations — armchair disaster relief agents around the world also collaboratively edited maps and information about Haiti to assist aid workers. A few days after the disaster, Openstreetmap.com, a Wikipedia-like site for amateur map makers, had more accurate maps of Haiti than the U.S. Department of Defense.
Perhaps most critically, crowdsourcing provided hundreds of thousands of data points on what Haitians most needed after the earthquake. Surprisingly, after immediate needs were met, text messages sent to 4636expressed unprompted demand for something other food, water or shelter — people started asking for travay, or work. It became clear that short-form translation could create needed jobs in parts of Haiti flooded with refugees from the disaster. Samasource trained 50 people in Mirebalais, a small rural community in Haiti’s Central Plateau, to translate the 4636 messages on the web after Ushahidi volunteers categorized them by priority level. Using netbooks (small, cheap laptops) powered by a generator and a satellite Internet connection, these workers translated tens of thousands of messages, forming a kind of “virtual assembly line” with the Ushahidi volunteers.
The rapid proliferation of broadband, wireless and cell phones, coupled with new crowdsourcing technology, is completely changing the face of disaster relief. Everyone with a computer can provide crucial assistance, sifting through satellite photos, translating messages or updating maps, and most people are happy to do this free of charge — contributing to life-saving relief efforts is a powerful motivator. Mission 4636 cost less than $500,000 to design, build and deploy. At a fraction of the cost of most relief budgets, crowdsourcing can solve coordination problems on the ground. Governments and aid agencies should make it a central part of future disaster response efforts.
While Nicholas Negroponte earlier this month claimed that the physical book would be dead in five years, the more generous folks at Newsweek still think that the book has some fight left.
Putting forth such vague statements such as “quality hardcover books (in direct light) are still easiest on the eye,” and the frightening because it’s true “$249.2 million vs. $29.3 million in publishers sales totals,” the infographic seems really unsure about the future.
Let me help you out here Newsweek. No matter what the numbers say right now, in 2010, I can pretty much guarantee that in 2020 the advantage will lean heavy towards the E-book side of the graph.
Much ink has been spilled, and many a pixel lit, on objects to which people feel an unreasonable loyalty. Blood, too, depending on whether you’re willing to classify the likes of Crusaders and soccer hooligans as fanboys. And why not? These rivalries, from the biblical to the forum-bound, all have a certain distinctive unreason to them. Yet there is nothing more reasonable than sticking by your choices, your judgments, your perceptions — your brands.
So how do things get so venomous? It seems like pitchforks are issued with every browser these days. Let’s see if we can make sense of why so many of us end up escalating to such absurd heights something so clearly trivial.
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.
My, how quickly things change. It wasn’t much more than a year ago that Apple and Google were happy partners — at least from the public’s perspective — working in tandem to push technology forward at a clipping pace. Google’s search and various apps complemented the iPhone perfectly, and the existing Android phones merely affirmed how much better the iPhone was than everything else on the market. And then everything went to hell.
This article was written by 
