The next gPhone has arrived, and surprisingly, it looks pretty nice. Although we were all very excited about China’s Sciphone (not really), the Kogan Agora and its upgraded twin, the Agora Pro, are probably a much better bet. It looks rather like a Blackjack, but it fits all the capabilities of a G1 or iPhone into that thinner form factor. I’m a bit jealous, although I think I’ll much prefer the keyboard on my handset. It’s being sold for 300 and 400 Australian dollars for the Agora and Pro respectively, which translates to about $200 or $260 in American dollars. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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I posted to google.com
Next Major Android Handset Revealed: the Kogan Agora
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/uM12Ai9LNls/
December 4 2008, 12:13pm | Comments »
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I posted to google.com
Twitter Acquires ‘Values of n’, Adds Rael Dornfest To The Team
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Nf1GeoX5bjU/
Hot on the heels of news that it rejected an acquisition offer from Facebook, Twitter has announced that it has acquired Values of n, a startup that produced information management applications including Stikkit, a post-it note application and I Want Sandy, an Email assistant. The primary goal of the acquisition appears to have been to bring Rael Dornfest to the Twitter team. Dornfest is the founder of Values of n and former CTO at O’Reilly Media, whose responsibilities also included editing the O’Reilly Hacks series. He was also the head of the RSS-DEV group, which created the RSS 1.0 standard. Values of n’s products will be shut down on December 8, but that they may eventually reappear as part of Twitter’s service or as open sourced libraries. For more on the shutdown of Stikkit and I Want Sandy, read the Value of n blogpost here. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
November 24 2008, 6:43pm | Comments »
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I posted to google.com
CrunchDrinks in Stockholm on November 12
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/qBxWGSNkwDU/
CrunchGear will be in Stockholm, Sweden this week and would love to meet some CG/TC fans out there. Drop me a line at john@crunchgear.com if you’re in town and would like to share a bit of “bloort” or “flargloa,” the Swedish national drinks. I think we’ll meet at about 7pm on Weds, November 12 for dinner at Imperiet. Please contact me if you’d like to come along so I can make reservations if I need to. Thanks to Wille for helping find a place. This is a very informal meeting - just some meatballs and drinks - but there will be a more formal and fun TechCrunch meeting in Stockholm before the end of the year led by Mike Butcher. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
November 10 2008, 10:21pm | Comments »
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I posted to google.com
The Fourth YouTuber
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/vAqLPvh1KpU/
Most venture capitalists will tell you that a good idea isn’t worth much - the value is in execution, which is very hard. But that doesn’t stop people from coming forward to take credit when someone hits a home run. We saw it with Google and countless others. Someone gets rich, and someone else says they stole the idea. This time it’s YouTube. Herbert Elwood Gilliland III emails us to say that YouTube’s name and idea were his, and that he told Chad Hurley about it years ago. After a different conversation he says he had with Sergey Brin in 2007, more of his ideas appeared in YouTube: I’m writing you because I am looking for some media outlet to cover my situation. I invented the YouTube brand and worked at a company where I was developing a similar product in 1998. I inverted several key elements of the product “Synthetic Interview” to create YouTube, and shared this idea with my friends. I also tried to create a company called YouTube several times between 1998-2004, when in November, I talked to Chad Hurley on the phone when he was still working at PayPal. I explained the idea behind YouTube, the brand name, and challenged him to start the company since he had close ties to Peter Theil, a well known billionaire venture capitalist. I asked for 1% of the proceeds of the sale of the company in exchange for this great idea. Years later, I am still trying to get Chad to recognize me with fiscal compensation and/or credit for creating the brand, basic concepts (video uploading, video commenting, agnostic video format, layout of the main video screen, awards and top listings “most watched”, star ratings, viewers, DMCA automation, video and audio fingerprinting).
After a phone call with Sergey Brin in August of 2007, several other of my ideas became a part of YouTube (thumbs-up and thumbs-down, video annotation). Since they seem to depend so much on my ideas to make their billions, why can’t then see the benefit in enabling me to start my own firm? Why do these “altruistic” billionaires not see the benefit in sharing some of their wealth?
– H. E. Gilliland III “Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.” — Plato I haven’t emailed YouTube founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim to get their side of the story, but I’m guessing they aren’t going to credit Gilliland with as much as a comment on this, let alone sending him a check. Gilliland has says his specialties are “Security, networking, interface, process consulting, medical devices (and requirements), graphic design, advertising, web design, product development” on his LinkedIn profile. More information about him is available on his web site. Back in 2002 he was looking for funding for a life perpetuating device - “Please help me save this information by designing and marketing brain perpetuation devices for post-mordem cultivation of valuable neurologically stored information.” What does he want exactly? $1 million dollars. To become a doctor. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0November 9 2008, 5:20am | Comments »
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I posted to google.com
(The) Startup Depression
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/1jWsuL67S9I/
Jason Calacanis’ latest post to his email mailing list takes a look at the dark times many involved in the startup world have to struggle through at one point or another. Startup news is often dominated by success stories - multimillion dollar acquisitions and overnight successes are more glamorous than the countless entrepreneurs trudging in the trenches as they try to build userbases and raise funding. Calacanis’s post offers some valuable insight into the realities of building a startup, and making it out in one piece. The full text of Jason’s email is below. You can request to join the mailing list here. (The) Startup Depression ———————————— Since stock market gyrations and the elections seem to be making everyone rightfully nauseous and depressed, I thought I would take this email to discuss the biggest ramifications of these challenging times: depression. It’s my believe that the economic downturn will be much worse than it is today, and that 50-80% of the venture-backed startups currently operating will shut down or go on life-support (i.e. 3-4 folks working on them) within the next 18 months. Make a list of every Web 2.0 startup to raise an A or B round and cross 80% of them off the list, because they will not make it to their next round of funding or profitability. Now, I could be totally wrong. No one can guess or time the markets perfectly. However, planning for the worst is a virtuous idea, so I encourage you to read on. Everyone I talk to is feeling confused, paralyzed and anxious–many are in full-blown depression. People are scared, and they should be. This could be the start of a very difficult time for our country and the rest of the world. In this email, we’ll focus on the entrepreneurial and startup depression and economic downturns/depressions–and how you can deal with them. Some background to get us started ———————————— Few things in the world are as exhilarating as starting a new company. Metaphors abound, and we’ve all heard them: starting a company is like having a baby, falling in love, and running a marathon. Few folks, however, want to continue the metaphor when things go bad at a startup. If they did, we would be having discussions about running a startup being like divorcing your spouse, collapsing from exhaustion in the 20th mile of the marathon, or–God forbid–losing a child. Metaphors swing both ways. Anxiety and depression from a failed, or failing, startup can be intense–even debilitating. When outside factors such as markets or buildings collapsing are added to the mix, I’ve seen great entrepreneurs just fold. Now, I’ve never folded, and I don’t say that as some badge of courage. No, sometimes it’s really, really stupid to keep fighting. Most consider it especially stupid to fight when you know you’re going to lose. I don’t. The result of never folding is that I’ve had my ass kicked pretty bad. Multiple times. Depending on your DNA, getting your ass kicked is either complete torture or deviantly rewarding. Truth be told, I like getting my ass kicked because it makes me angry, motivated and focused. If I look back on the couple of moments of success I’ve been lucky enough to have in my life, they all seem to come after a good ass-kicking. The darkest hour is–in fact–right before the dawn. Brief Disclaimer ———————————— I’d be lying if I said I understood the complexities of depression or depressions. I’m not a psychologist nor am I an economist. I’ve never suffered from clinical depression and I didn’t live through the last depression. However, I do have a BA in Psychology, have read many books about the psychology of happiness, and I’ve felt the sting of the last huge correction (2000-2002). Consider these one (hu)man’s notes on “entrepreneurial depression and anxiety.” They are worth the price you’ve paid for them, but I hope they are helpful to you–especially if you’re suffering right now. If you are suffering from depression or anxiety, go see a professional. Really, it’s the best thing to do. Feel free to print this out and bring it with you and ask your newfound therapist what they think of my observations and advice. Then email me back what they said… I’m curious where my thoughts rank. Kurnit’s Three Reasons Why Companies Fail ———————————— Scott Kurnit of the Mining Company (aka About.com) told me there are three reasons why a business will fail: it’s a bad idea, bad execution or outside factors. If you examine your business with these three filters right now, you can baseline where you’re at: one, two or three strikes. His theory correlates well with the attribution theory in psychology. The theory concerns itself with how an individual attributes the things that happen to them (or others). For example, if you were pulled over by a cop for speeding, you can attribute that to number of factors, both internal and external. Some folks might internalize the event and curse themselves for being reckless: “I should have known better!” Others might blame an external source, such as the cop or the bankrupt city they work for: “Gosh darn Los Angeles cops! They’re just trying to balance the budget by harassing us!” Kurnit’s theory, as told to me, mentions two internal factors (bad idea and execution) and one external (outside factors). When faced with massive market uncertainty, like we are today, it’s a virtuous idea to assess each of these factors. Right now, every single one of us has HUGE outside factors we must consider. The market collapse is going to make the next couple of years impossible and frustrating for many entrepreneurs. Even the great companies - like Google, Microsoft and Apple - are going to hit hard times. One of the most important philosophical minds of our time summed it up best: “I never blame myself when I’m not hitting. I just blame the bat, and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn’t my fault that I’m not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?” — Yogi Berra. Viktor Frankl’s Search for Meaning ———————————— John Brockman, my dear friend and agent (if I ever get around to writing a book), handed me one of the most important books of my life: “Authentic Happiness” by Marty Seligman. That book led me to the most important book of my life: “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. Frankl was a psychologist and Holocaust survivor. He studied how people react to horrible circumstances that are beyond their control. He studied why some people give up and others carry on. While few of us can understand the level of suffering of people during the Holocaust, Nanking or the Killing Fields, Frankl put his theories forward so that we could carry them into our daily lives. Logotherapy was what Frankl called his theories, and their major tenants are that we choose how to find meaning in our circumstances and that our experiences all have meaning. My interpretation of Frankl is that you actually get to choose how you feel about your circumstances. The Worst Year of my life ———————————— It’s still hard for me to talk about it seven years later–and I’m not going to talk about it in too much detail right now. In the early months of 2001, I watched my first business, Silicon Alley Reporter, crash from 70 employees to 12. The $20m offer I’d received to buy the business was a distant memory, as was the $11.6m in revenue we had in 2000. Money was evaporating from the bank account, dotcoms were going bust and we–the dotcom kids–went from visionaries to charlatans overnight. I went from hosting multi-million dollar conferences, doing Charlie Rose guest spots and being featured in a 6,000 word article in the “New Yorker” to not being able to meet payroll. Many folks said I was lucky with Silicon Alley Reporter, while others said I was fraud who had finally been found out. I was broke, no one cared about my work, and my life really sucked. … and that was just the start. Then, the stock market crashed and the accounting scandals set in. Enron, Adelpia, Worldcom, and Arthur Andersen made the fallout from the dotcom bust look like nothing. … and that was still just the start. While lying in bed listening to the radio, I heard that a private pilot in a small plane had accidentally crashed into the World Trade Center. Then, I watched the second one hit. Then, I watched them come down. To say things went from bad to worse would be a gross understatement. As I started in disbelief with my fellow New Yorkers, I wondered where my brother, a NYC Firefighter, was. Then it hit me: he was probably dead. Due to a simple twist of fate, he wasn’t dead–but many of his friends were. It was at that time I really took a deep look inside and found meaning in what happened that day and what happened to me when my first business collapsed. In my mind, I was being tested. Horrible things happen in life and I was faced with several at the same time. From that point forward, my goal was to not only get back to the level I was at when I was at the top of my game, but to exceed it. My goal was to be truly happy every day doing what I loved: running a startup company. A year later, we started Weblogs, Inc., and 18 months after that, we sold it. The darkest hour became the dawn, and it was glorious. If you’re failing right now, and if you’re suffering, you need to take Kurnit’s test. You need to access where you’re at and you need to fight on. You can give up, sure, but the truth is that when you give up, you have to live with that fact for the rest of your life. For me, living with having given up in tough times is a much worse fate than certain failure. If you fail, then by definition you have tried. But if you give up, you didn’t. Step One: How are you executing ———————————— It’s fairly easy to tell how well you’re executing, so let’s tackle that up front. First, take a look at your plan and see where you are in executing against it. Are you ahead, behind or on schedule? Second, you can have everyone in your organization rank your product and its various features on a scale of one to ten. Third, you have an outsider rank your product and features. If you’re executing at an seven or eight or above, then you know you’re doing well, but could be doing a little bit better. If you’re executing under a seven, your problems could be execution-based. You just may not be delivering the goods. If you were a restaurant, the analogy would be that you’ve got the right ingredients and product, but you’re just not preparing them well. This means you need to focus on making the product better. Another way to get a handle on how you’re executing is to take your product and put it up against your two top competitors and do the one-to-ten rating process. Rate yourself and your competitors on the top 10 features of all three offerings. How many are you winning? If you’re winning more than three, you’re ahead of the game. If you’re three or behind, then you’re average or losing. Execution is the easiest thing to fix, and you can do it one of two ways: get the people in your organization to perform at a higher level, or get higher-level folks into your organization. It really is that simple: folks can either step up or step out. Step Two: How good is your idea ———————————— Determining if you have the right idea is a little more complicated since most great businesses do not finish where they start. Google started as a search engine but bought Applied Semantics in order to create their real business: text-based advertising. Microsoft started by building programming software (Altair Basic), but went on to make it’s business in operating systems, Microsoft Office and servers. If you’re idea is wrong, it really doesn’t matter. What matters is if the original ideas allows you to evolve into your big idea. In order to evolve, you must think like Darwin. Ask yourself: have you adapted to your market? Have your customers asked you for something different than you’re currently providing? Have you given it to them? After you give them what they want, can you anticipate what they’ll ask for next? Are those items following a theme? At Silicon Alley Reporter, we started with a magazine and people loved it. However, they wanted to get more frequent updates and asked us to make it weekly. We reflected on this “ask” and came back with something they didn’t even know they wanted: “the Silicon Alley Daily” email newsletter. 40,000 folks subscribed to it in the first year and it was a much more usable product than the magazine or the requested weekly print newsletter that we passed on doing. The market will tell you what it wants. You just have to really listen. Clearly, there was a market for the DEMO conference since it’s being going on for years. However, they never listened to the “ask” of the market: let the companies be selected based on merit, not their ability to pay almost $20,000. Yes, I know it’s a self-serving example, but those are the best ones.
When Mike Arrington and I founded the TechCrunch50 event, we didn’t think it would grow to be 2-3x as large as DEMO after only one year–but it did. The market had MASSIVE pent up demand for a merit-based show and we tapped it. We evolved DEMO’s business model, not our own. Now, I’m left asking myself, “if I was trying to evolve TechCrunch50, what would I do?” Another example from personal experience with start up evolution has been with Mahalo. When we started, we were just doing hand-curated links. The pages had very little actual content on them. In our user lab, folks told us they loved the links, but they kept asking for more content. We studied the situation and realized that we could evolve and help our customers more by writing more content on each page. To do this, we studied what were the 10-15 things people wanted to know when they did a search–then we put them on the page. Doing this drove our traffic from 300k monthly users last year to 4.6m uniques in August (a record month). Bottom line: Your first idea is rarely your best. The first step in a journey is never the best either! Most folks hit their stride two hours into the marathon. Don’t be afraid to nuke your first idea and run with your second–or third, forth or fifth. Evolution is the revolution. Step Three: Outside Factors ———————————— Outside factors are the toughest to deal with because, by definition, they are outside of your control. Despite our deepest wishes, we can’t reverse the housing bubble, put the Towers back up or reverse the accounting scandals. All we can do is deal with outside factors, and knowing how to deal with them is critical. When the market is in the middle of correcting, as I believe it is currently doing, people tend to underestimate everything including: a) how bad it will be b) how quickly it will get worse c) how long it will take to recover Chances are the market will get worse and that will happen sooner rather than later. Watching folks on CNBC last month talking about a two or three quarters of down market was just sad. It takes just as long to clean up a mess as it does to make it–typically longer. The housing mess took two or three years to develop (2004-2006). It will take three years to unravel (2008-2010) from what I can see. We’re gonna be dealing with a bad market for at least two years. 10 Specific things you can do —————————————— Since the outside market is out of your control, the best you can do is focus your energy inward. Here are some things you can do after you’ve assessed where you company is at. 1. Execute better: This is fairly simple, as I describe above. Rank yourself and your performance and improve it. 2. Grow the talent you have: When the market is down, it’s a great time to get your team educated and to the next level. Invest in training and education of your top people, because they are the ones who will lead your company through this mess. 3. Firing the average people: Again, it’s totally politically incorrect, but I highly recommend firing anyone who is good or average. Startups are an Olympic sport and every slot on your team is critical. You wouldn’t put a “good” swimmer in a relay, would you? Don’t have one in your startup. Fire the good and replace them with the great. 4. Cut spending every where you can: Recurring costs like connectivity, phones, rent and insurance are things that you can easily cut. Go to each of your providers and ask for 20% relief immediately or you’re leaving. Most, not all, will give it to you. 5. Find a revenue stream and ride it: If you don’t have a revenue stream right now, you’d better find one on Monday. Seriously, by the end of the day. Once you find this revenue stream, ride it. Put at least 25% of your effort into bringing in revenue. 6. Focus on your profitable clients: If you have revenue, start focusing on which clients are most profitable. Take them to lunch and figure out how you can over-service them and sell them another product (or more of your current product). You’re gonna want to protect these accounts because the folks reading Point Five are going to be calling them! 7. Make your top ten 10% better: Look at the top ten aspects of your business and come up with a plan to make each 10% better in the next 30 days. Ask everyone in your company to make suggestions for the 10% better program and execute on the ones that will provide the most bang for the buck. Sometimes, there are things you can do today that will make something 10% better for free–you just haven’t brainstormed enough. 8. Hold an optional off-site breakfast meeting on a Sunday and see who shows up: If folks don’t show up for you to grow/save the company on a Sunday for a two hour breakfast, they probably aren’t going to step up when the sh#$%t really hits the fan. You need to know who the real killers on your team are and you need to get close with them now. Again, it’s fine to have 9-5ers on your team–if you’re the Post Office. You can’t have them at a startup company. Note: if you reading this and saying I’m anti-family, save it. Folks don’t have to work at startups and some of the hardest working folks I’ve met have families and figure out how to balance things. 9. Build marketshare: One of the best things to do in the down market is build marketshare. Look for competitors that are going out of business and buy them or just “steal” their clients and talent (i.e. pick them up). 10. Raise money: I know I said above most folks won’t be able to raise money in the down market, but that’s not because the money isn’t out there–clearly it is. The issue is that the big money out there doesn’t want to fund small ideas that are in the death spiral. Build a plan based on revenue and taking market share and folks will consider funding you. What ideas do you have for winning in a down market? How do you stay inspired in bad times? Send me your response and if you would like it quoted in a follow up email, attributed or not. all the best Jason@Mahalo.com Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
September 27 2008, 9:08pm | Comments »
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I posted to google.com
Palingate? - Agents Swoop On A Tennessee College Dorm Linked To Palin Hacker’s IP Address
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/VRrCo3uDLvw/
Hack into - and then publish - the email account of a major politician, especially one under Secret Service protection and currently running for Vice President, and you had better cover your tracks. Well. WBIR is among those reporting that FBI agents broke into a party at the Fort Sanders apartment of University of Tennessee student David Kernell early Sunday morning. A Department of Justice spokesperson confirmed there has been “investigatory activity” in Knoxville regarding the incident where Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account was hacked and information published online. According to a witness, several agents arrived at The Commons of Knoxville apartment block around midnight, took down the names of everyone at the party and then spent the next 1.5 to 2 hours taking pictures of everything inside the apartment. So far it looks like there are no publicly available search warrants, and no charges have been filed. Give it time. Witnesses say Kernell and his friends fled the apartment while his three roommates were subpoenaed. It turns out that David Kernell is the son of Mike Kernell, a Democratic state representative from Memphis, and the blogosphere - especially right wing bloggers - has been cock-a-hoop about the possibility that the hacker in question is Kernell and the action was engineered by the Democractic Party. That includes Knoxville blogger and WBIR contributor Terry Frank who is helpfully (but with no basis in fact) posting images of Kernell’s Facebook page, although she has removed his mobile phone number. Nice touch. As Wired reports, the blogosphere says someone going by the name “Rubico” on the 4chan forum admitted to hacking Palin’s email. Rubico’s handle was then connected to an e-mail address which tentatively identified the owner as a college student in Tennessee. It’s clear that the “hack” was simply created by reseting Palin’s password using her birthdate, ZIP code and information about where she met her spouse - all information freely available online. So who should be in court here? A college kid, or Yahoo’s email security people? Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
September 22 2008, 4:38am | Comments »
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