Geek News and Musings

DiggBar Keeps All Digg Homepage Traffic On Digg

DiggBar, the new shortURL and toolbar service from Digg, is certainly useful. I expect it to become my default short URL service on Twitter since it is so easy to create a short URL by simply adding Digg.com/ in front of any URL. It will redirect to a short Digg URL like digg.com/d1npNz, which is this story rendered with the DiggBar (click that Digg button!).

The Twitter crowd already loves this based on all the chatter I saw on the site today. This will also expose a lot of new people to Digg since anyone that clicks on the link will see the toolbar wrapper with the view count, Digg comments and other information on the top. And it will also increase Digg’s overall traffic substantially - unlike other short URL services, Digg doesn’t simply redirect to the longer URL. It keeps you on Digg and shows the site being pointed to in an iframe wrapper. You can get to the underlying URL by clicking on the X button on the top right.

But Digg didn’t stop there. They’re also using DiggBar for all stories on Digg as well. So all those home page stories that send massive amounts of traffic around the web are now redirecting right back to Digg, too. That keeps all that traffic in the Digg ecosystem, to the detriment of the sites being linked to.

For most purposes those sites won’t care. The page is still rendered and includes the advertising. The way most internal analytics software works means that page views will still be counted. But some services, like Comscore, won’t necessarily see the visit to the site, and will penalize the domain name.

I’d expect Digg to add text advertising to the DiggBar over time, sooner rather than later. It should be a material revenue source for them.

Overall it’s a brilliant move by Digg. I’m surprised no one has complained yet though about Digg home page traffic no longer going to the sites being listed.

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520 Tesla S Sedans Reserved In One Week: Company Gets $2.6 Million In Fees

Tesla says that 520 S Model all electric sedans have been reserved by customers in first week since it was announced. Each customer must pay a $5,000 reservation fee, which is refundable if they choose not to buy the car. The base price for the Model S, which will be available starting in 2010, is $49,900 after a federal tax credit of $7,500. A limited editon of the Model S is available for a $40,000 reservation fee.

The Model S is the second car unveiled by Tesla after the sportier Roadster, and it’s half the price. But it’s no slouch on performance. The car will do 0-60 in 5.6 seconds (the Roadster is 3.9 seconds) and has an electronically limited top speed of 130 mph. The car should go up to 300 miles between charges. Best of all, I believe I may actually fit in the Model S. The Roadster isn’t fully compatible with people my size.

If you want one, you can reserve it here. You should get it by late 2011.

Tesla says they delivered 104 Roadsters in March and about 320 all time. The company has raised $186 million in capital to date, and has applied for $350 million in federal loans.

Here is the Model S and Roadster side by side:

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Comcast’s OnDemand Reaches 11 Billion Views, Nearly Twice The Number Of iTunes Music Downloads

Comcast has reached the 11-billion views milestone for its On Demand video services since the launch of the feature 6 years ago. The cable operator threw out some interesting factoids to help measure the magnitude of its milestone.

Comcast points out that 11 billion views is nearly two times the total number of music downloads (6 billion) sold on iTunes since its launch six years ago. The company adds that 11 billion views is four times the total number of Big Macs sold in the US (3 billion) over the same time period and 30 times the total number of Harry Potter books sold around the world (375 million copies). Yeah, it’s a lot. But it’s less than how many videos are watched on the Web in a single month (that number reached 11 billion last April). And it is still a fraction of how many movies and TV shows Comcast cable customers watch on the other 300 channels they get with their monthly subscription.

The cable company also announced that PBS will now be available On Demand in HD. (Don’t knock anything over rushing for that remote). OnDemand gives consumers instantaneous access to more than 10,000 programs each month. Some are free, some cost $3.99. But unlike iTunes songs, you don’t get to keep them.

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Adrollo Launches Dynamic Ad Network Platform For The iPhone

Since Apple’s App Store launched last July, a number of ad networks have emerged that allow iPhone developers to place advertising in their apps so that they can generate revenue, even when an application was initially sold for free. But as the number of ad networks available has increased, developers are being faced with a new problem: once they’ve deployed an application with a certain ad network, it’s tough to switch to a new one. Typically developers have to issue updates to their apps, which can take days or weeks to make it through Apple’s approval process.

Adrollo, a new service that launches today, is looking to help developers make this process more efficient, allowing them to switch between different ad networks on the fly without having to submit a new application to Apple. At launch the service has support for five different ad networks, with more on the way shortly.

After integrating Adrollo into their application, developers can view their current ad setup from the service’s web panel. From there they can specify which ad networks they’d like to rotate between and how often they’d like their ads to appear in their application. Developers can also set up Adrollo to automatically switch between all available ad networks, optimizing CPM rates to ensure that their apps are generating as much revenue as possible (it can also fill an ad unit when the current network runs out of inventory, which can be a problem on popular applications).

AdRollo - Free Your Ads from iPhone Developers on Vimeo.

Adrollo co-founder Sam Yam says that developers can make as much as twice as much money using the optimizations available on the platform. Yam acknowledges that there are a few other options for developers to pull ads from multiple ad networks, but that they come with their own issues. Some services aggregate ads from various networks on the server-side, then send them to the iPhone applications, but Yam says that these typically only support basic ads. Adrollo supports all ads served up by the networks, and also allows developers to include their own ads in their applications (for example, you could place an add for your premium app in the free ‘lite’ version).

Adrollo is going to be available to developers for free. Yam says that the company’s monetization plan is to eventually begin offering its own ad inventory, which will also be deployed through the platform.

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Risk Aversion And The Perils Of Selling Too Early (Israeli Startups, Part II)

Right now I’m at an un-conference called KinnerNet. It’s hosted by famed Israel entrepreneur Yossi Vardi and set near the Sea of Galilee. Funny thing: There are a few hundred entrepreneurs here, mostly Israeli. And only one has said something negative to me about my post earlier this week about the poor venture returns for Israeli startups that incited such passionate feelings everywhere else in the world.

No one is arguing that the returns have been good for Israeli companies in the last eight years. But there are some legitimate questions about how Dow Jones (whose numbers I used) slices its data and how the numbers could be quite so low. Since 2001, according to Dow Jones, $10 billion in venture investments have yielded only $860 million in IPO and M&A exits. The study of venture economics is at best imperfect, so it’s quite likely there are several big Israeli exits the numbers are missing. It’s like measuring Web traffic. Most Internet companies will tell you their traffic logs report higher numbers than measurement agencies like Hitwise or comScore.

But the Dow Jones numbers aren’t likely to be off by, say, a factor of 50 or 100. And since the same sources—usually venture firms—give firms like Dow Jones the investment data and the liquidity data, the relationship between the money going in and the money going out is pretty reliable, even if the absolute numbers are not. Put another way, if Dow Jones is missing some exits, they’re likely also missing some investments going into the country. In any case, the returns are down dramatically from the 1990s—period. Be mad at me all you want; those are still the numbers.

The more interesting question—and I think what’s creating such passion around the topic—is why the numbers are down? We’re actually going to do a session on this tomorrow at KinnerNet. It’s also the one question I’ve been asking Israelis pretty much non-stop for the week I’ve been in the country. Two interesting cultural answers have emerged that I wouldn’t have imagined. Both have to do with a phenomenon that’s hurt venture returns in the United States too: Entrepreneurs selling companies too early.

Both Roi Carthy (who occasionally writes for TechCrunch from Israel) and Matthew Hertz, who’s starting a deep-web people search company called Pipl.com, said many Israelis live in the “temporary.” Put another way, when Matt heard I was filling in for Michael Arrington “temporarily” in February, he laughed and said, “We Israelis know temporary is the most permanent state there is. Short-term is a way of thinking here.” (True enough, it’s March, and I’m still here writing on TechCrunch.)

That “temporary” mindset drives the same unabashed courage that makes quitting a job and starting a company so natural for Isreali entrepreneurs. But both Carthy, Hertz and a dozen or so other entrepreneurs I spoke with said there’s a flip side to that: When you live for the short term, and you get a $30 million acquisition offer; you’re more likely to take it. In other words, several entrepreneurs here have described themselves as having a huge appetite for taking risk on the front end; but being risk-adverse when it comes to turning down a huge chunk of money for a $1 billion IPO dream.

In my last book, David Sachs, an American entrepreneur who was the COO of PayPal and has started Geni and Yammer since, put the same feeling another way: Most people in the world would take the certainty of $1 million over a chance they could make $30 million. I’m not knocking that. I’ll sell SarahLacy right now for $1 million. (Takers?) But I tend to think of people who make that decision as being risk-adverse. What was surprising to me, is that people who have a huge tolerance for risk on the front end– literally creating something out of nothing—become risk-adverse when they’ve proven that it’s actually worth something.

I was discussing this idea last night with Nimrod Lev, who sold kSolo to MySpace and has worked in the Israeli Internet scene since its earliest days. He had a different cultural take on the same phenomenon. He said the fun part for Israelis, or at least for him, is solving a hard, technical problem. In other words, “the art of the hack.” Once it’s solved, managing the company, growing revenues, taking on HR problems—all of that is the boring part. He loves starting companies and has been successful at it, but he has zero desire to build one into the next Google. There are a lot of guys like that in the Valley, too, but they’ve also got a huge pool of experienced managers to hand the company off to.

I’ll give Israel another reason that returns have fallen so hard on a percentage-basis. And it has nothing to do with Israeli culture. In fact, it’s something the United States screwed up: Sarbanes Oxley. SarbOx put a chill on small-but-growing companies’ ability to go public on the Nasdaq. The costs of being SarbOx-compliant are so high, that unless you have more than $40 million or so in annual revenues and strong growth, it’s just not cost effective. And other regulations surrounding the Chinese Walls between research and trading mean that small companies get little research coverage and are too thinly traded to really be considered liquid stocks.

This has hurt the Valley, when it comes to returns, for sure. But the Valley also is replete with large companies that buy each other for enough money that investors can eke out enough to keep going. Geographic proximity does help in working these kinds of things out. (You think YouTube didn’t benefit from sharing an investor with Google? VCs actually count this as one of their so-called “value adds.”) A good number of European companies have gotten around the SarbOx problem by going public on the London exchange over the last few years, to the extent where several articles were written about the London Stock Exchange becoming a bigger financial force than the Nasdaq.

So if it was a problem for all startups, why do I bring it up in relation to Israel? Because pre-Sarbanes Oxley, Israel had more Nasdaq-traded companies than any other country. Outside the Valley, they were, by definition, the most vulnerable to the change. Perhaps in the intervening years, it’s not the entrepreneurs that have lost their mojo; there’s just no good financial system for their investors to profit off of said mojo. That’s certainly a hack I’d like to see a smart Israeli pull off because its not just hurting the Israeli startup ecosystem—it’s dragging down returns for investors everywhere.

(Photo by Hans Splinter).

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Game Developers Conference 2009 Round-Up

The CrunchGear mobile newswagon is parked in downtown San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference, and although this is a more industry-orientated show, we’ve managed to find some pretty interesting stuff — and of course, a few of the latest games.

The news on everybody’s minds is OnLive, a games service which is roughly comparable to a streaming movie service like Netflix On Demand or what have you. The hardware is to be free, and it will support any USB- or Bluetooth-compatible controllers. Purchased games are run in datacenters (on state of the art hardware, we hope), which then push the content out to you. But they’re not sending game assets — they send a video image of the game as you play it on their machine. It sounds ridiculous, but with good, local servers they can get the ping under 10-20ms, at which point it is almost unnoticeable that the game you’re playing is actually a few cities away. Not everyone is so optimistic.

We gave it a shot, and (my driving skills notwithstanding) had no trouble in the form of video artifacts, skipped frames, or lag. Impressive, but the proof of the pudding is in the launching, and when they can provide this level of latency and reliability to thousands of people scattered around the country simultaneously, then we’ll talk. After the demo, we spoke with a more technically-orientated booth guy, who said that between 3 and 4Mbit/s is what they’re aiming for with their 720p60 stream, and when I asked about tension with ISPs, he hinted cryptically that they had that under control. I just hope Comcast and the like haven’t “overbooked” their cable and fiber the way airlines do flights.

Both Microsoft and Sony gave developers a boost, Microsoft in the form of a sleek new developer console and kit tools, Sony by dropping its devkit’s price significantly. Nintendo, as at E3, told us how well they were doing, revealed a couple new games, and demonstrated something ridiculous. Adding the capability to use SDHC cards is a welcome change, however.

The 360 will be receiving a motion-based controller soon, bringing it up to speed nominally with the other consoles in that area. The Gametrak Freedom relies on a sort of ultrasonic sonar, with stereo detectors attached to the display. We gave it a try and it seemed to work decently; keep your eye on CG for video of yours truly flailing grotesquely at virtual tennis balls.

Aside from the relatively far-reaching news I’ve mentioned, GDC is primarily a developer’s paradise. Indie game developers rub elbows with greats like Hideo Kojima and there are more talks, panels, and tutorials than we thought possible, or practical. We’re looking forward to E3 to see how some of these new technologies pan out in a more consumer-orientated environment.

As for games themselves, we got to try out the DSi camera, Punch-Out!!! for the Wii, Fat Princess, and a few others.

Lastly, if you or your spouse or young one is in the market for a little more rhythm, we’re running a contest to win a pre-release copy of Rhythm Heaven for the DS.

For those of you reading this at or around GDC, we hope to see you at one of the many industry events that will be going on later.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Game Developers Conference 2009 Round-Up

The CrunchGear mobile newswagon is parked in downtown San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference, and although this is a more industry-orientated show, we’ve managed to find some pretty interesting stuff — and of course, a few of the latest games.

The news on everybody’s minds is OnLive, a games service which is roughly comparable to a streaming movie service like Netflix On Demand or what have you. The hardware is to be free, and it will support any USB- or Bluetooth-compatible controllers. Purchased games are run in datacenters (on state of the art hardware, we hope), which then push the content out to you. But they’re not sending game assets — they send a video image of the game as you play it on their machine. It sounds ridiculous, but with good, local servers they can get the ping under 10-20ms, at which point it is almost unnoticeable that the game you’re playing is actually a few cities away. Not everyone is so optimistic.

We gave it a shot, and (my driving skills notwithstanding) had no trouble in the form of video artifacts, skipped frames, or lag. Impressive, but the proof of the pudding is in the launching, and when they can provide this level of latency and reliability to thousands of people scattered around the country simultaneously, then we’ll talk. After the demo, we spoke with a more technically-orientated booth guy, who said that between 3 and 4Mbit/s is what they’re aiming for with their 720p60 stream, and when I asked about tension with ISPs, he hinted cryptically that they had that under control. I just hope Comcast and the like haven’t “overbooked” their cable and fiber the way airlines do flights.

Both Microsoft and Sony gave developers a boost, Microsoft in the form of a sleek new developer console and kit tools, Sony by dropping its devkit’s price significantly. Nintendo, as at E3, told us how well they were doing, revealed a couple new games, and demonstrated something ridiculous. Adding the capability to use SDHC cards is a welcome change, however.

The 360 will be receiving a motion-based controller soon, bringing it up to speed nominally with the other consoles in that area. The Gametrak Freedom relies on a sort of ultrasonic sonar, with stereo detectors attached to the display. We gave it a try and it seemed to work decently; keep your eye on CG for video of yours truly flailing grotesquely at virtual tennis balls.

Aside from the relatively far-reaching news I’ve mentioned, GDC is primarily a developer’s paradise. Indie game developers rub elbows with greats like Hideo Kojima and there are more talks, panels, and tutorials than we thought possible, or practical. We’re looking forward to E3 to see how some of these new technologies pan out in a more consumer-orientated environment.

As for games themselves, we got to try out the DSi camera, Punch-Out!!! for the Wii, Fat Princess, and a few others.

Lastly, if you or your spouse or young one is in the market for a little more rhythm, we’re running a contest to win a pre-release copy of Rhythm Heaven for the DS.

For those of you reading this at or around GDC, we hope to see you at one of the many industry events that will be going on later.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Out of Order 2.0
Microsoft’s Steven Martin has ironically blown the whistle on an attempt at an “open” coalition that freezes out certain companies. Ironic in that Microsoft and IBM played this game years ago with the WS-I, an industry standards group that pointedly stonewalled Sun Microsystems’ involvement before caving under media pressure. In a Google Groups post Introducing the Open Cloud Manifesto, Rueven Cohen describes an effort involving “several of the largest technology companies and organizations” to “draw a line in the sand.”

We are still working on the first version of the manifesto which will be published Monday, March 30th with a goal of being ratified by the greater cloud community. Given the nature of this document we have attempted to be as inclusive as possible inviting most of the major names in technology to participate in the initial draft. The intention of this first draft is to act as a line in the sand, a starting point for others to get involved. That being said this manifesto is not specifically targeting any one company or industry but instead is intended to engage a dialogue on the opportunities and benefits of fostering an open cloud ideology for everyone.

As inclusive as possible? Not targeted at any one company? Engage in a dialogue? What a load of crap that is. It’s the same back room cigar-smoke-filled scam of the good old days when Web Services first began its inexorable move to reshape computing.

End-of-Quarter Layoffs Hit Amazon, IBM, Google, and The New York Times

With the end of the first quarter of the 2009 almost here, even the strongest companies companies are making last-minute layoffs to shave costs. Today, layoffs were announced across the tech sector, from IBM to Google to Amazon. The biggest layoffs came from IBM, where 5,000 people are losing their jobs in the U.S.. Amazon cut 210 people at three distribution centers in Nevada, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Google also announced layoffs of 200 people from sales and marketing (so far, engineers have been spared). In all three cases, the job cuts amounted to roughly one percent of each company’s global workforce. The New York Times also announced a 5 percent cut of its newsroom business operations, or 100 people.

It is not as if the payroll reductions will help save the quarter or even have a material impact on it. But the companies can point to the measures during their conference calls with investors and analysts and project the savings going forward.

We’ve added the job cuts to our Layoff Tracker. To see who is hiring, check out our CrunchBoard.

• Total Layoffs Since August 27, 2008: 448
• Total Employees: 316,246

Company	Date	Location	#	%	Source
Amazon	March 26, 2009	Red Rock, Nev.; Munster, Ind.; and Chambersburg, Pa.	210	1%	NYT
The New York Times	March 26, 2009	New York, NY	100	5%	NYT
Google	March 26, 2009	Mountain View, CA	200	1%	NYT
IBM	March 26, 2009	USA	5,000	1%	LA Times
Imeem	March 25, 2009	San Francisco, CA	6	4%	TechCrunch

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Game Developers Conference 2009 Round-Up

The CrunchGear mobile newswagon is parked in downtown San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference, and although this is a more industry-orientated show, we’ve managed to find some pretty interesting stuff — and of course, a few of the latest games.

The news on everybody’s minds is OnLive, a games service which is roughly comparable to a streaming movie service like Netflix On Demand or what have you. The hardware is to be free, and it will support any USB- or Bluetooth-compatible controllers. Purchased games are run in datacenters (on state of the art hardware, we hope), which then push the content out to you. But they’re not sending game assets — they send a video image of the game as you play it on their machine. It sounds ridiculous, but with good, local servers they can get the ping under 10-20ms, at which point it is almost unnoticeable that the game you’re playing is actually a few cities away. Not everyone is so optimistic.

We gave it a shot, and (my driving skills notwithstanding) had no trouble in the form of video artifacts, skipped frames, or lag. Impressive, but the proof of the pudding is in the launching, and when they can provide this level of latency and reliability to thousands of people scattered around the country simultaneously, then we’ll talk. After the demo, we spoke with a more technically-orientated booth guy, who said that between 3 and 4Mbit/s is what they’re aiming for with their 720p60 stream, and when I asked about tension with ISPs, he hinted cryptically that they had that under control. I just hope Comcast and the like haven’t “overbooked” their cable and fiber the way airlines do flights.

Both Microsoft and Sony gave developers a boost, Microsoft in the form of a sleek new developer console and kit tools, Sony by dropping its devkit’s price significantly. Nintendo, as at E3, told us how well they were doing, revealed a couple new games, and demonstrated something ridiculous. Adding the capability to use SDHC cards is a welcome change, however.

The 360 will be receiving a motion-based controller soon, bringing it up to speed nominally with the other consoles in that area. The Gametrak Freedom relies on a sort of ultrasonic sonar, with stereo detectors attached to the display. We gave it a try and it seemed to work decently; keep your eye on CG for video of yours truly flailing grotesquely at virtual tennis balls.

Aside from the relatively far-reaching news I’ve mentioned, GDC is primarily a developer’s paradise. Indie game developers rub elbows with greats like Hideo Kojima and there are more talks, panels, and tutorials than we thought possible, or practical. We’re looking forward to E3 to see how some of these new technologies pan out in a more consumer-orientated environment.

As for games themselves, we got to try out the DSi camera, Punch-Out!!! for the Wii, Fat Princess, and a few others.

Lastly, if you or your spouse or young one is in the market for a little more rhythm, we’re running a contest to win a pre-release copy of Rhythm Heaven for the DS.

For those of you reading this at or around GDC, we hope to see you at one of the many industry events that will be going on later.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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