Honestly, it's impossible to work in these conditions. I'm writing this from the TechCrunch Real-Time CrunchUp ; a one-day event in San Francisco celebrating the joys of the 'real-time' web. Sounds awesome, right? It is. I've been on stage, heckling participants on the marketing panel, I've been Tweeting from the audience, I've been following the live-blogging of the panels. Generally I've been living...
When pitching to VC’s, entrepreneurs hype the heck out of their ideas, years of experience and management teams. But I’ve never heard of anyone touting their luck or connection to God. After reading the posts on TechCrunch, one could easily get the impression that God doesn’t play much of role in Silicon Valley. But ask [...]
In a new disclosure, Zynga tells us it makes 90% of its revenues from gamers putting their own money into the system to buy virtual goods. Zynga says 10% of its revenues come from "offers" marketing, where sponsors agree to buy virtual goods for gamers, so long as those gamers agree to try a product. The company also says a marginal amount of dollars come in from traditional advertising....
For our last discussion at the RealTime CrunchUp, we've got a panel on actually generating revenue from these services. Participating in the discussion are some of the Valley's top VCs and veterans of the space. Brian Singerman — Founders Fund Ron Conway — Angel Investor Dan'l Lewin — Corporate VP for Strategic and Emerging Business Development at Microsoft George Zachary —...
" Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all. " - Paul Buchheit , creator of Gmail, co-founder of FriendFeed, currently doing vague infrastructure things at Facebook. Today, at our RealTime CrunchUp event in San Francisco, Buchheit and Threadsy founder Rob Goldman sat down for a chat with our own Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld. The topic was: Can We Kill...
Do a search for Google Wave on the App Store from your iPhone or desktop client, and you'll see an application called just that pop up, ready to be installed as soon as you fork over $0.99 (or €0.79 in my case). One caveat: it's not built, authorized or in any way endorsed by Google. Spotted by Stuart Dredge over at Mobile Entertainment , the unofficial Google Wave iPhone app seemingly slipped...
The Google phone is all over the Internet, thanks to a fresh wave of new leaks and speculations. It looks like the Google phone is ‘very real’ and it is being developed by Google as you read this. This news, brought to us by the good folks at TechCrunch, has created quite a sensation everywhere. [...]
Last week, it was reported that AOL - amid restructuring efforts in the lead-up to the imminent Time Warner spin-off and IPO - was putting its instant messaging service unit ICQ on the block and had hired bankers Allen & Co. and Morgan Stanley to assist in the sales process. According to the reports, AOL was looking to offload the asset for $300 million and talking to a pair of non-US companies...
Peripherals, they say, are the spice of life. Well, maybe they don't say that, but they do say it about variety, and peripherals add variety to your computing life. If you're reading this on a stock HP desktop, clicking on links with the mouse that came with it, and trusting your data to that 512MB USB stick they gave you at work, then you should consider accessorizing.
Keith Teare was hanging around the Real-Time CrunchUp today showing off his newest project - Speedi.ly . What does Speedi.ly do? One thing, very well and at scale. Speedi.ly takes a piece of content, or grabs the content from a URL, and analyzes it. It does this very fast and it outputs some key data. Speedi.ly tells you the language of the content, categorizes it (topics, keywords), and additional...
Extracting meaning from the Web is a difficult undertaking. Keyword search skims the surface of contextual meaning that is locked in Web pages, Tweets and feeds. That's where semantic search comes in. The semantic web deals with looking beyond simple links that make up the web to understand a deeper meaning and context behind that content. The Ellerdale Project, which launched in alpha this past week,...
Today at the RealTime CrunchUp , representatives from some of the top companies involved in location based services came together to talk about the current state and future of geo-based services. Participating in the panel were: Matt Galligan, co-Founder of SimpleGeo Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform at Twitter Tristan Walker, VP of Business Development at Foursquare Steve Lee, Group Product Manager...
Rippol , the video discovery site that combines both complex algorithms with user suggestions to surface interesting content, has launched to the public at today's RealTime CrunchUp . We recently took an in-depth look at the service, but for those who haven't seen it yet, here's a recap: Rippol looks at your video watching activity on the site, as well as that of your friends and people in your demographic....
At our Real-Time CrunchUp today in San Francisco, we are hosting a panel titles "Media Streams: Are These The Utlimate Marketing Vehicle?" Panelists include Sean Rad, CEO of Ad.ly ; Ryan Amos, co-founder of DailyBooth ; Jesse Engle, CEO of CoTweet ; Robin Bechtel, a celebrity agent and Philip Nelson, SVP of strategic development for NewTek. Below find my live notes (paraphrased):
Today at the RealTime CrunchUp we saw the launch of VideoLobby , a new service founded by Peter Urban that's looking to make it easier to create professional-looking webcasts, complete with custom branding. The service is an extension of Urban's "sales software for real people" service Smibs . Urban says that while some other services offer embeds, you're generally responsible for building...