I'm tired. Very tired. It's a little after 4am San Francisco time - noon GMT - and I'm sitting in the arrivals lounge Heathrow airport, thanking the lord for Boingo hotspots and trying to commit these few hundred words to cyberspace before the daylight finally penetrates my brain and my whole body goes into jet-lag meltdown.And to think I was so organised 24 hours ago. My column was written - 1000 words on a big subject of the week; a big subject that I now can't talk about, for reasons I also can't talk about. Don't ask.Still, I'm a professional and there's no use crying over spilt milk - I've spent five pounds on a coffee, opened a fresh Google Document and am all set to write am alternative column on how happy I am to be back in London, and how excited I am for the opportunity to catch up with all the amazing and inspiring start-ups my erstwhile home has to offer.But therein lies the problem. While I'm certainly happy to be here - it's my 30th birthday tomorrow, and there is a party planned - the truth is, I'm just not all that excited about London's current crop of dot com hopefuls.
Video Professor is trying to raise $10 million in convertible debt, according to an investor pitch document that was forwarded to us. The company "incurred substantial losses which depleted its cash reserves" in 2008, says the document, and is looking to use the new money to "retire its line of credit, purchase media, build strategic alliances, finalize the technical development and launch of the e-commerce platform and accelerate growth."The company's product offering was one of the scams we called on in our ScamVille posts. The company lures in potential customers by offering free learning CDs. But they are then billed up to $290 for products they never intended to buy. We outlined how the scam works here, and also point to a number of other sites with thousands of consumer complaints.According to a revenue chart, revenues for the company peaked in 2006 at around $135 million, but dropped to under $80 million in 2007 and were just $40 million in 2008. Projected 2009 revenues are nearly $100 million.
Whenever companies do something inexplicable, the nerd in me always comes back to that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when Richard Dreyfus keeps building models of a mountain, culminating in a huge, muddy mess in his kitchen. Throughout it all he keeps saying "This means something." Well, the latest molehill into a mountain is the move by Time Inc. and Conde Nast, among others, to build a tablet-based interface for their flagship titles. This means something, but what it means is that the homes of Time and Gourmet (oh, wait), aren't going to take the coming industrial disruption lying down.
A couple weeks ago, Google unveiled its Chrome Extensions site after clues began popping up that a full-on push for extension support in their browser was imminent. Unfortunately, that site was only meant for extension developers who were allowed to upload their creations to Google. On the page, Google promised that end users who were looking for these extensions would have a way to do so "soon." That will happen next week, we've learned.Two sources close to the situation say that Google plans to unveil its Extensions Gallery at some point next week, probably in the middle of the week. This makes sense since Add-on-Con 09, a conference devoted to browser add-ons, is taking place next Friday, and Google Chrome is a Gold Sponsor of the event. Obviously, Google will probably want to have something they can actually show off at the event, rather than just a developer dashboard.
It was bad enough when Bing put ads on Google and in AdSense during its launch to get people to come check it out. (In fact, it's still the top sponsored results when you search for "bing" on Google, even though Bing.com is also the top organic result at this point also). But now the shoe is on the other foot and Google is buying search ads on Bing for its fledgling Google Music Search.Sure, Google only launched its music search about a month ago and most people probably don't even know it exists unless they search for a song or artist like "Muse" on Google, and even then they wouldn't know there is a separate site because the playable song results appear right at the top of the regular search results. But try searching for "Muse songs" on some parts of Bing and you get a paid ad for Google Music search. The ads appear for other artists as well, such as Lady Gaga and Radiohead.
Digital video tech provider KIT digital spent about $21 million this year acquiring companies like The Feedroom (which previous investors had put over $60 million into) and Germany's Nunet. The publicly listed company now says it will be "retiring" both brands next week after successful consolidation and integration of their IP and resources, and concentrate all marketing efforts on the KIT digital brand.The company has also shared 2009 expectations and milestones, as well as its strategic objectives for next year.
This morning DARPA launched ten red balloons across the U.S. in a Network Challenge to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the precursor to the Internet, Arpanet. The first team to correctly locate all ten balloons will win a $40,000 prize.The idea is to see how people can self-organize on the Internet and how information disseminates through social and viral networks. There are thousands of people looking and teams set up on the Internet. They offer different incentives for participating. For instance, a group at M.I.T. is offering $2,000 for each correct balloon sighting submitted (you can join the TechCrunch team here). The 10 Red Balloons team claims to have already found pone balloon before the contest even started. And the Open Red Balloon Project is taking more of a, well, open approach. It wants everyone to report their sightings and guesses, make all of that data available to everyone, and then let the first person to make sense of the data win the entire $40,000. You drag ten balloons around on a map. Known locations turn red. It already shows ten reported balloon locations on its map (whether those are correct or not, only DARPA knows).
Every time I publish a research paper on immigration or write an article for BusinessWeek or TechCrunch, the xenophobes rush out of their caves to launch mindless attacks. They fill the comment sections with bile, send me nasty emails and sometimes threaten to do me harm. I was convinced that my last BusinessWeek column on the Startup visa presented such a compelling argument that even these poor souls would support it. After all, this visa is about creating American jobs and moving innovation here which would otherwise happen in other countries. We can boost the economy without any cost to taxpayers. It’s not about admitting H-1B visa holders who sometimes make Americans compete for high-paying jobs, but bringing in entrepreneurs who expand the pie for everyone. Not only do the Democrats support this, but so do the Republicans (their thought leader, Newt Gingrich blogged about my previous TechCrunch post on immigration and his staff told me that he was a supporter of the startup visa). So this seems like a no-brainer.But, no, logic doesn’t prevail with this crowd. I got the same stream of hate mail that I’m used to, and the xenophobes hijacked the BusinessWeek reader feedback section again. Most of their statements are illogical and uneducated. But there are two potentially meaningful arguments which opponents of the startup visa make, which are worth discussing: that the founders we are bringing in aren’t always the “best and brightest” and that there is already a visa category for geniuses called the O-1 visa.
Google promised that Chrome would be fast to launch and fast to load web pages, but people predicted it would fail with the arrival of its extensions. Well, the extensions are here (at least for some of us) and surprisingly they do not effect the browser's performance. And not only that, but playing with Google Chrome Extensions is like child's play, whether you've added a new extension, or deleted one, you won't need to restart your browser. Extensions are so easy to manage and use that once you have access to them, I'm sure you'll be looking forward to testing everything in this Cromeextensions Directory.This is what I basically did. I tried most of the extensions, then realized I'm not ready yet to ditch my beloved Firefox, and I'm guessing that you won't be either. On the other hand, there are some plugins that are worthy of a mention and from that list I've culled some cool ones to get you started. If you already have extensions enabled (lucky you), you are welcome to try the ones in this list. If Chrome is not allowing extensions for you just yet, try to upgrade to the developer's version (don't worry, all of your Chrome settings will be saved).
Earlier today we covered rumors that Apple was in talks to acquire streaming music service Lala. Now New York Times tech reporter Brad Stone has tweeted that it's a done deal. He writes, "Apple has acquired digital music startup Lala. Now updating our story". You can find the NYT story here.This could be bad news for Lala users. It's unlikely that the innovative deals negotiated by Lala will survive through the acquisition. For over a year, Lala users have been purchasing the rights to stream their music an unlimited number of times for ten cents per song. If the deals with the music labels go up in smoke, Lala may lose the right to stream those songs. In other words, all the money users have been spending on web songs may go down the drain. If the deals are nullified, hopefully Apple will renegotiate them to at least cover existing purchases until it releases its own streaming music service. We've reached out to Lala but have yet to hear back.
It has been a busy week for our former partners on the CrunchPad. The company has deleted their corporate blog, taken the time to hire a PR firm and schedule an event Monday morning to "give their side of the story." They still have not returned our calls or emails. But they have spoken to press, and say that their side of the story has two key elements. First, that none of this was a surprise and we knew they were likely to break ties with us. And second that TechCrunch hasn't done anything to help build the CrunchPad and therefore has no rights to the device.Both statements are completely untrue. Among other things, emails from Fusion Garage illustrate it.We aren't going to restate every detail of the story here, mostly because it's not all that interesting. But I will give a few highlights. And I've embedded letters sent from our law firm below to Fusion Garage as well as the ODM manufacturer, Pegatron. There are lots more details included in those letters.
This week's big story - unless you count news that matters outside the world of TechCrunch - is the End the CrunchPad. Killed, says Arrington, by 'greed, jealousy and miscommunication'. Basically the same things that killed Jesus, New Coke and Haley Joel Osment at the end of Pay It Forward.
We've had a chance to play SGN's Skies Of Glory WWII person-to-person dogfighting game for the iPhone. But now they've released this trailer for the game to really show off what they've built. Look for a launch date shortly.Video is below.
Our last Friday Giveaway was a Sonos S5 Wireless Music System. This week Kodak was kind enough to hand us a Zi8 pocket video camera, and one of you is going to have it in your hands shortly.CrunchGear's overview of the Zi8 is here. This is a Flip-like picked video camera that records in 1080p high definition. The device includes a SD/SDHC card slot for expandable storage. And the best feature is this - the Zi8 has an external microphone jack to help get decent audio into the device. Poor audio has plagued the Flip cameras.Here's how you can get the device:
