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10 Technologies That Will Rock 2010

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

TechCrunch - By Erick Schonfeld - Jan. 02 (Opinion) - Now that the aughts are behind us, we can start the new decade with a bang. So many new technologies are ready to make a big impact this year. Some of them will be brand new, but many have been gestating and are now ready to hatch. Below is my list of the ten technologies that will leave the biggest marks on 2010.

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How to Profit off the Poor… and Keep Your Soul

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

TechCrunch - By Sarah Lacy - Nov. 16 (Special Report) - Even non-profits I’ve met over the last two weeks run themselves to rely on revenues not donors. An example is LabourNet, a company that seeks to move India’s huge informal workforce into a formal channel. The company organizes phalanxes of construction crews, drivers, cooks and retail clerks and matches them with the best employers. How does it reach them? Word of mouth and SMS. So far 7,000 workers are in the system.

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Facebook Responds To MySpace With Facebook Connect

Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Michael Arrington - May. 09 (News Report) - Facebook will announce later today Facebook Connect, which has similar functionality to MySpace Data Availability, announced just yesterday. The actual product won't be released for at least a few weeks, so the timing on this, coming immediately after MySpace, is somewhat suspicious. It is essentially a new version of their API for third party websites, which was first launched in August 2006. It will allow users to "connect" their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any website. Third party websites will be able to implement and offer more features of the Facebook Platform off of Facebook - the same features available to third party applications today on Facebook. To make data portable, Facebook believes it's about giving users the ability to take their identity and friends with them around the Web, while being able to trust that their information is always up to date and always protected by their privacy settings. The next iteration will be available publicly within the next several weeks. One of their initial launch partners will be Digg. I spoke with Ben Ling, Director Platform Product Marketing, and Ruchi Sanghai, Product Manager for Facebook Platform, this afternoon about the upcoming changes.

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Widgets: The Marketer's Recession Survival Tool

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Mark Hendrickson - Apr. 26 (Opinion) - While the recession-proofness of social media is a case study in the making, the idea that social applications can thrive in tight economic times because they are a cost-effective, precise way for companies to interact with customers and prospective customers, is right on the money - quite literally.

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Google, Microsoft Bidding For Digg

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

TechCrunch - By Michael Arrington - Mar. 07 (Opinion) - User-generated news site Digg has been working with influential investment bank Allen & Co. (the ones that recently got Slide a half billion dollar valuation) for a few months now, and pitching big tech and media companies on a sale. And despite a number of false starts, this time a sale looks likely, and soon. We hear from a source very close to the deal that four companies are in heavy due diligence with Digg - two media/news companies, and two big Internet companies - Google and Microsoft. And Google and Microsoft are on the verge of making their bids. Digg is prepared to take less than the $300 million Allen & Co. were floating late last year. Google, our source says, will likely bid $200-$225 million, which Digg would likely accept. Microsoft is looking at a somewhat lower price. That makes sense, since most of Digg's revenue today comes from a three year advertising deal that Digg signed with Microsoft last year. That deal has revenue guarantees - and Microsoft may be hesitant to value Digg based on revenue that they supply. Any sale is likely to give Microsoft an option to terminate that advertising deal, which means Google isn't valuing Digg based on revenue, either. But it is a big slap in the face to Microsoft to steal Digg away, and Google can certainly generate revenue on all those page views. More as this develops, but we may be looking at a bidding war between Microsoft and Google over Digg. Plus any late comers to the table. Digg was founded in late 2005 and has raised $11.3 million in funding.

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Google's Response to Facebook: "Maka-Maka"

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 23:45:30 -0700

TechCrunch - By Erick Schonfeld - Oct. 30 (Opinion) - Google may have lost the bidding war to invest in Facebook, but it is preparing its own major assault on the social networking scene. It goes by the codename "Maka-Maka" inside the Googleplex (or, perhaps, "Makamaka"). Maka-Maka encompasses Google's grand plan to build a social layer across all of its applications. Some details about Maka-Maka have already leaked out, particularly how Google plans to use the feed engine that powers Google Reader (known internally as Reactor) to create "activity streams" for other applications akin to Facebook's news and mini feeds. But Maka-Maka goes well beyond that. Maka-Maka will be unveiled in stages. The first peek will come in early November. As we reported previously, Google is planning to "out open" Facebook with a new set of APIs that developers can use to build apps for its social network Orkut, iGoogle, and eventually other applications as well. To recap what we wrote earlier: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google's social graph data. They'll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google's personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time. On November 5 we'll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut's social graph information - the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. . . . Google is also considering allowing third parties to join the party at the other end of the platform - meaning other social networks (think Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and thousands of others) to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.

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The FCC Needs To Listen To Google

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 11:05:04 -0700

TechCrunch - By Michael Arrington - Jul. 22 (Opinion) - I was very pleased to see Google publicly wade into the upcoming FCC auctions for the 700MHz spectrum that will occur early next year. Should all go well, the new spectrum could be used to create a new open-access wireless broadband "pipe" into people's homes and devices. If things go less well, the existing wireless giants would buy the spectrum and impose similar usage restrictions that exist on cellular networks in the U.S. today, putting us further behind Europe and Asia.

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Google News: The End of News Indexing As We Know It?

Mon, 21 May 2007 14:21:21 -0700

TechCrunch - By Duncan Riley - May. 21 (News Report) - Scotland's Sunday Herald is running a story reporting that Google has secretly reached deals with several large UK news groups to formally license content for Google News. The report notes that the deals are being kept secret to prevent other media sites asking for a similar deal from Google. I've always bought Google's defense that Google News drives traffic to other news sites and that linking to external headlines and providing a snippet of the news story constitute fair use. Google lost that argument in Belgium and it would appear now that it no longer believes its previous position is sustainable in the United Kingdom, possibly even worldwide. Google has argued that as they do not run ads on Google News, they don't profit from it and morally this holds them in a superior position. Yet if Google is forced to sign deals to provide links and traffic to media outlets, is Google News sustainable in its current format?

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2007: Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn't Live Without

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 23:05:00 -0800

TechCrunch - By Michael Arrington - Jan. 02 (Opinion) - I enjoyed sorting through the hundreds of startups that we had written about, and picking just a handful that made a real impact on my life. It was so much fun, actually, that I'm updating the list this year. Seven of the companies are still on the list. Six have dropped off to make room for new products, and I've added two more to round out the list to fifteen total products. Here's the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn't live without

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Google's Tipping Point

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 07:12:04 -0800

TechCrunch - By Michael Arrington - Dec. 31 (Opinion) - Taken in a vacuum, a fairly trivial thing happened a few days ago. The co-founder of Firefox, Blake Ross, wrote a post criticizing Google called "Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose". He takes issue with a new Google search feature that promotes certain ...

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